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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:71:"WPTavern: Convesio Raises $5M to Expand Docker-Powered Hosting Platform";s: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:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=129645";s: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:185:"https://wptavern.com/convesio-raises-5m-to-expand-docker-powered-hosting-platform?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=convesio-raises-5m-to-expand-docker-powered-hosting-platform";s: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:2166:"<p>WordPress hosting company Convesio has <a href="https://convesio.com/convesio-5m-funding/">raised $5 million</a> from private investors. This funding round includes some of the company&#8217;s original investors who participated in <a href="https://wefunder.com/convesio/">Convesio&#8217;s 2019 Wefunder crowdfunding campaign</a>, which brought in more than $1 million from 800+ investors.</p>



<p>“I started Convesio because legacy hosting providers have not evolved their technology, struggled to provide high uptime, and lacked the capability to scale WordPress on demand,&#8221; Fenelli said. </p>



<p>Convesio aims to make enterprise level hosting more accessible to customers with smaller budgets. Its Docker-powered platform allows sites to auto-scale up and down as necessary. It will automatically deploy multiple containers to handle higher loads and bills additional containers at an hourly rate. </p>



<p>&#8220;Traditional hosts put you on a plan to handle the highest level of resources your website needs, even if you only need them 5 hours a month,&#8221; Fanelli said. &#8220;It’s like leasing a Ferrari to use it for your daily commuting because you also take it to the track for a few laps once a month.&#8221; </p>



<p>Convesio is aiming to take on the larger, more established hosting companies by ‘productizing’ scalability in order to keep costs down. The company boasts that customers can deploy a WordPress site with load balancers, a database cluster, and redundant file system in under a minute, without hiring a SysAdmin. Convesio&#8217;s target market is agencies, designers, and developers. </p>



<p>&#8220;Agencies are a one-to-many sale, easier to support, and early adopters of technology,&#8221; Fanelli said when launching their first funding campaign. &#8220;All these reasons make them a really good fit for what we do. They also have to manage a lot of WordPress sites, so issues like speed, performance, scaling etc are all compounded when you have 100 sites.&#8221;</p>



<p>With this second round of funding, Convesio plans to hire more staff, boost sales and marketing, and accelerate development.</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, 08 Feb 2022 04:31:51 +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:13:"Sarah Gooding";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:73:"WPTavern: Creating Slides With the Carousel Slider Block WordPress Plugin";s: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:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=129633";s: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:191:"https://wptavern.com/creating-slides-with-the-carousel-slider-block-wordpress-plugin?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=creating-slides-with-the-carousel-slider-block-wordpress-plugin";s: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:5049:"<p class="has-drop-cap">Over the weekend, Virgiliu Diaconu asked me to check out his <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/carousel-block/">Carousel Slider Block</a> plugin, a project he has maintained for three years. It has slowly garnered more than 5,000 active installs since its release.</p>



<p>I get emails like this every day. More often than not, the projects are fundamentally broken or are a bit too spammy for my taste. Like so many others, I ask myself, <em>Could this be one of those diamonds in the rough?</em> I am always optimistic enough to hold out the tiniest sliver of hope.</p>



<p>I should preface this review by saying that I have a general dislike of sliders and carousels. They are often used to hide away content, forcing site visitors to take additional action to find it. Or, they begin to automatically slide before users finish reading the first panel. I tolerate them on some sites if used to tidy inconsequential content.</p>



<p>However, I know a lot of people like them. The question I needed to answer was whether this was a solid implementation. The TLDR version is it handles far better than others I have seen.</p>



<p>What makes Block Slider Carousel a solid plugin is that it is, <em>mostly</em>, WYSIWYG. It also does not complicate the experience more than it has to. There is one fixable problem, which I will get to. Overall, creating a carousel full of slides was straightforward.</p>



<p>Users merely need to insert the Carousel Slider block in the editor to create a new carousel. The UI is similar to the core Row block when inserting slides &#8212; click the &#8220;+&#8221; icon. From there, users can add any other block within each:</p>



<img />Initial carousel insertion.



<p>I added a screenshot of this default setup to show that the plugin feels almost native to WordPress. There is no management via a separate custom post type screen. The slides do not all stack atop one another, looking nothing like their final output on the front end. And it does not have a dizzying array of configuration settings.</p>



<p>The primary difference between the editor and front end is the horizontal scrollbar shown on the post-editing screen, used for navigating the carousel. Once a few slides are added, it appears below the outer Slider Carousel block:</p>



<img />Slider Carousel with simple image slides.



<p>I would love to see that replaced with the previous/next arrows and dots navigation in the editor view if either of them is enabled. The plugin allows users to toggle both on and off.</p>



<p>The block&#8217;s options are the baseline controls expected from such a plugin. Users can control the number of shown slides, how many to show on scroll, and the animation speed. It includes toggles to loop back around at the end of the carousel and an auto-play option.</p>



<p>There is an RTL mode, which was not immediately clear was working correctly. Switching it on did not seem to make any changes in the editor. However, the slides are shown in reverse order on the front end.</p>



<p>The block has a separate panel for controlling the number of slides on smaller screens. Users can manually set the breakpoint or leave it to the default of <code>768px</code>.</p>



<p>The biggest problem I ran into with the plugin was that it overwrote block margins within the slides. As shown in the following screenshot, the Heading, Paragraph, and Buttons blocks have no space between them:</p>



<img />No spacing between blocks.



<p>The theme I am testing uses the new &#8220;block gap&#8221; feature in WordPress 5.9 to handle vertical spacing. However, with the way the CSS is written in the plugin, it was likely an issue in previous versions. Carousel Slider Block&#8217;s styles zero out block margins with a high level of specificity.</p>



<p>This issue is only in the editor. If you can get past not knowing exactly how each slide will look until previewing or publishing, it is not too rough of an experience. But, this should be an easy fix for the plugin author. I removed the offending code without issue.</p>



<img />Corrected spacing between blocks.



<p>And my sanity was restored &#8212; <em>I am a stickler for decent spacing.</em></p>



<p>A welcome addition would be color options for the arrow and dot navigation and features like padding, border, background, and block spacing. This would make it easier for end-users to customize the carousel container.</p>



<p><em>Would I use this plugin?</em> Knowing myself, I would likely build a custom block, overengineering it when there is a perfectly acceptable solution at hand. Of course, I do not use sliders. However, I would be comfortable handing it over to a client if I still did such work. Plus, the plugin&#8217;s front-end CSS is lightweight enough to overwrite for custom designs.</p>



<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="wp-embedded-content"><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/carousel-block/">Carousel Slider Block for Gutenberg</a></blockquote>
</div>";s: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, 08 Feb 2022 02:06:11 +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:"Justin Tadlock";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:64:"WordPress.org blog: WP Briefing: Episode 24: Three Goals in 2022";s: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=12176";s: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:66:"https://wordpress.org/news/2022/02/episode-24-three-goals-in-2022/";s: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:9158:"<p>In episode 24 of the WordPress Briefing, the Project&#8217;s Executive Director reviews three big-picture goals for the year: Increased Gutenberg adoption, support of all open source alternatives, and stewarding the open source ethos.</p>



<p><em><strong>Have a question you&#8217;d like answered? You can submit them to <a href="mailto:wpbriefing@wordpress.org">wpbriefing@wordpress.org</a>, either written or as a voice recording.</strong></em></p>



<h2 id="credits">Credits</h2>



<ul><li>Editor:&nbsp;<a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/dustinhartzler/">Dustin Hartzler</a></li><li>Logo:&nbsp;<a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/beafialho/">Beatriz Fialho</a></li><li>Production:&nbsp;<a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/cbringmann/">Chloé Bringmann</a></li><li>Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod</li></ul>



<h2 id="references">References</h2>



<ul><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/project/2022/01/21/big-picture-goals-2022/">Big Picture Goals 2022</a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/01/26/preliminary-roadmap-for-6-0/">Preliminary Roadmap for 6.0</a> (Gutenberg Phase 2)</li><li><a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2021/06/a-new-design-is-coming-to-wordpress-news/">A New News Design</a></li><li><a href="https://wpmake.tumblr.com/">Making WordPress</a>: Unofficial aggregator for all&nbsp;<a href="https://make.wordpress.org/">Making WordPress blogs</a></li></ul>



<h2 id="transcript">Transcript</h2>



<span id="more-12176"></span>



<h2 id="episode-24">Episode 24</h2>



<p><strong>Josepha Haden Chomphosy&nbsp; </strong>00:00</p>



<p>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><strong>Josepha Haden Chomphosy&nbsp; </strong>01:07</p>



<p>A couple of weeks ago, I published a post about the big picture goals for the WordPress project in 2022. As I was thinking through our planned releases for the year and looking out toward what would spell success for WordPress over the next three years, three things really lined up in both sets of answers for me.</p>



<p><strong>Josepha Haden Chomphosy&nbsp; </strong>01:23</p>



<p>I provided some detail on how we can work toward these goals in the post, which I will link for you in the show notes, but I also wanted to take some time to explain why I feel we have to work toward these goals this year. So these all build on one another. To refresh your memory of the three big focuses, they are one to drive adoption of the new editor in WordPress, support open source alternatives for site building necessities, and three, open source stewardship.&nbsp;</p>



<p><strong>Josepha Haden Chomphosy&nbsp; </strong>01:52</p>



<p>So the first one; is driving the adoption of the new WordPress editor. Early on in the start of the Gutenberg Project, folks could not go two days without hearing me talk about the phases of adoption and how those line up with the phases of Gutenberg, and who would need our support the most in each of those phases.</p>



<p><strong>Josepha Haden Chomphosy&nbsp; </strong>02:09</p>



<p>I have always believed that what we would be shipping at this point in our project would prove the plausible promise of what we were doing in phase one. That&#8217;s definitely what I&#8217;m seeing from what was shipped in 5.9, as well as what we plan to ship in May with 6.0. And the people who need the most support right now are absolutely our users, your clients, no matter whether they were not keeping up with WordPress developments or simply were waiting to see what all the fuss was about.&nbsp;</p>



<p><strong>Josepha Haden Chomphosy&nbsp; </strong>02:37</p>



<p>There will be people who look to you as someone who has been here a while to help them make sense of what they&#8217;re seeing. And what I find so exciting about this adoption, sort of, work in the WordPress project is that this is the time when we as practitioners of WordPress, no matter whether you are a designer or a developer or builder, business coach. This is the time when we get to guide others through the hardest parts of our learning processes.&nbsp;</p>



<p><strong>Josepha Haden Chomphosy&nbsp; </strong>03:07</p>



<p>The process of helping people to learn new technologies relies not only on your hard-won expertise but also on the belief that the future is worth fighting for. Enabling someone’s success is an investment in the future and investment for that person or for WordPress or your community. All investments are welcome here.&nbsp;</p>



<p><strong>Josepha Haden Chomphosy&nbsp; </strong>03:28</p>



<p>Fortunately, table stakes are just that you care. And speaking of future investments, the second focus is open source alternatives for site building necessities. So things like images, forms, stores, themes, etc. It literally just things you need to build a site. I would like to start by saying that I am completely aware of the fact that 99% of WordPress users will never care about open source freedoms and philosophies in the same way that WordPress maintainers and contributors care about open source freedoms and philosophies.&nbsp;</p>



<p><strong>Josepha Haden Chomphosy&nbsp; </strong>04:04</p>



<p>You could substitute the name of any other open source project right there, and the statement would still be true. And yet, I will always believe that people should have the rights and freedoms that open source brings to them even if they do not know they are there. And so it makes all the sense in the world to me that as a project and open source community, we should strive to make choosing Open Source as easy as possible.&nbsp;</p>



<p><strong>Josepha Haden Chomphosy&nbsp; </strong>04:33</p>



<p>And finally, open source stewardship is one of the focuses for this year. This one is obviously about supporting open source as a concept and maintaining WordPress as a project. But I also think that it is relevant to our current global circumstances. Open Source suddenly became very visible to the public eye last year following the Log4J vulnerability, and ever since then, I&#8217;ve been hearing consistent concern over how We make sure that WordPress is sustainable moving into the future. Fortunately, this is a topic that&#8217;s near and dear to my heart. And I have been delighted to see so many community members bringing that conversation to the forefront.&nbsp;</p>



<p><strong>Josepha Haden Chomphosy&nbsp; </strong>05:14</p>



<p>There is a lot that is done in the WordPress project to keep us from the tragedy of the commons. But that work honestly never ends. Not only does it not end, but as we get bigger, there is more and more that we can and should be doing to keep us around for the long term. And, of course, for the keen readers of my posts, there&#8217;s a bonus focus.&nbsp;</p>



<p><strong>Josepha Haden Chomphosy&nbsp; </strong>05:39</p>



<p>The bonus focus is, of course, that WordPress turns 20 years old next year. This year, we will also be seeing some preparatory work for that major milestone as well.</p>



<p><strong>Josepha Haden Chomphosy&nbsp; </strong>05:56</p>



<p>So that brings us today to our small list of big things. There is a redesign of the News Page coming. We&#8217;ve been talking about this over on make.wordpress.org/design for a bit since like June of last year or something. But it&#8217;s coming in the next few weeks. I&#8217;ll share a link to the GitHub repo in case anyone has any specific things that they see as they are reading through all of our many news stories that come out on that particular page. I think it&#8217;s beautiful, and I&#8217;m very excited to take a look at it.&nbsp;</p>



<p><strong>Josepha Haden Chomphosy&nbsp; </strong>06:30</p>



<p>The second thing is that planning is underway for WordPress 6.0; that release that we&#8217;re doing in May. I&#8217;ll add the project page link to the show notes. I&#8217;ve had a few raised hands for that release squad. But if you&#8217;re interested in participating in the release, I encourage you to keep an eye out on make.wordpress.org/core for updates and any news about how to get involved.&nbsp;</p>



<p><strong>Josepha Haden Chomphosy&nbsp; </strong>06:53</p>



<p>And my third thing is actually that, in general, there are a lot of opportunities to contribute right now. There are discussions about projects, goals, and dreams happening all over the place. I&#8217;ll link in the show notes below the unofficial project “firehose” where you can see all the headlines and quickly find discussions that might be interesting to you.&nbsp;</p>



<p><strong>Josepha Haden Chomphosy&nbsp; </strong>07:18</p>



<p>And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Thank you for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. I&#8217;m your host Josepha Haden Chomphosy, and I&#8217;ll see you again in a couple of weeks.</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, 07 Feb 2022 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:15:"Chloe Bringmann";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:145:"Gutenberg Times: Gutenberg Changelog #60 – Restricting Customization in a Full-Site Editing World, Gutenberg 12.5 and Roadmap for WordPress 6.0";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:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:53:"https://gutenbergtimes.com/?post_type=podcast&p=20378";s: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:113:"https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-60-restricting-customization-in-a-full-site-editing-world/";s: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:92476:"<p>Birgit Pauli-Haack and Grzegorz Ziolkowski discuss with their guest Matias Ventura restricting customization in a full-site editing world, Gutenberg 12.5 and Gutenberg changes coming with WordPress 6.0. </p>



<ul><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://paulisystems.net/wordpress-consulting">Pauli Systems</a></li></ul>



<span id="more-20378"></span>



<p><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-60-restricting-customization-in-a-full-site-editing-world#shownotes">Show Notes </a>/ <a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-60-restricting-customization-in-a-full-site-editing-world#transcript">Transcript</a></p>



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



<p><a href="https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1285533518">Twitch Stream session</a> with <strong>Ryan Welcher</strong></p>



<p><a href="https://github.com/ryanwelcher/gutenberg-block-level-locking">Demo Code on GitHub</a></p>



<p><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/how-to-disable-theme-features-and-lock-block-templates-for-full-site-editing-in-wordpress/">How to disable theme features and Lock Block Templates for Full-Site Editing in WordPress</a></p>



<ul><li>Dev Note: <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/01/08/locking-blocks-in-wordpress-5-9/">Locking Blocks in WordPress 5.9</a></li><li><a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/29864">Tracking issue: On Locking and TemplateLocking</a> (#29864) March 2021&nbsp;</li><li><a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/26128">Add template lock attribute to column and group</a> (#26128) October 2020</li><li><a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/27597">Proposal: robust permissions system for FSE theme templates </a>(27597)</li><li><a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/37489">Exploration around multi-entity permission management</a> (#37489)&nbsp;</li></ul>



<p><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/01/26/preliminary-roadmap-for-6-0/">Preliminary Roadmap for 6.0 (Gutenberg Phase 2)</a> by Matias Ventura</p>



<p><strong>Gutenberg 12.5</strong></p>



<p><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/02/03/whats-new-in-gutenberg-12-5-february-2nd/">What’s new in Gutenberg 12.5? (February 2nd)</a> by Fabian Kägy</p>



<p><a href="https://wptavern.com/gutenberg-12-5-introduces-global-styles-variations-preserves-adjacent-button-styling-and-adds-alpha-transparency-to-color-pickers">Gutenberg 12.5 Introduces Global Styles Variations, Preserves Adjacent Button Styling, and Adds Alpha Transparency to Color Pickers</a></p>



<p><a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/27075">Consider a standardized way to modify hover/focus/active states for blocks</a> (Issue 27075)</p>



<p><a href="https://www.meetup.com/wordpress-social-learning/events/283720638/">Gutenberg Developer Hours </a>Feb 22 at 11am  ET / 16:00 UTC</p>



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



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Hello and welcome to our 60th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog Podcast. In today&#8217;s episode, we will talk about Restricting Customization in our full-site editing world. Gutenberg 12.5 and what&#8217;s on the plate for Gutenberg&#8217;s Phase 2, coming to WordPress 6.0. I am Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at the Gutenberg Times and WordPress developer advocate. And I&#8217;m here with my co-host Grzegorz Ziolkowski, JavaScript developer at Automattic and WordPress core contributor. Howdy Grzegorz, how are you today?</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: Hello! I&#8217;m good. Thank you. So last week we celebrated WordPress 5.9 release. That&#8217;s a huge one, yeah, we did it. So it took five years to bring blocks everywhere on the WordPress site. And everyone now can switch themes and play with the new kit on the block, which is a block theme concept. So I&#8217;m really excited about that and I see also a lot of excitement in social media and people are trying that out and yeah, it&#8217;s mind blowing how everything changed.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. And I&#8217;m so thrilled to welcome our guest today, Matias Ventura sometimes called the spark of Gutenberg, well he is its principal architect. So last time we had Matias on the Gutenberg Times Show was November 30th, 2018. Just before we all headed out to Nashville for WordCamp US, and just before the release of 5.0, so thank you for joining us today at this one, after this wonderful release for full-site editing in core.</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: Hello, hello. Thank you for having me back. Like before 5.0, that&#8217;s a while back. It feels both like yesterday and forever ago.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. I feel the same way, so many years and then we had a pandemic in between which kind of made the years even longer. So it&#8217;s a great pleasure to have you and the project has grown and matured so much. So it&#8217;s really mind-boggling how far it has come. And so the first version, minimal viable product MVP, the beta version or whatever you call it, of the full-site editing experience has been released. How are you feeling about it and what are the first insights from users?</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: Yeah, I feel really relieved that we got to this point, is being one of the main promises of the project to, like Greg said, like to bring blocks everywhere essentially. And this is the release that marks, I think will mark like a historical milestone where we finally were able to bring everything out to people. So, it&#8217;s a huge celebratory milestone for me, the work from so many people over so many years is finally, in a way it also just the beginning, because once you put things out there is when you really start seeing how people interact with it, the feedback, the things to change. So in a way it&#8217;s just the first step, but it&#8217;s also the culmination of a lot of work. So it has that both elements to it, I guess.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. I feel that too. And I&#8217;m delighted, there&#8217;s so much chat around full-site editing. And listeners, long time listeners here on the Changelog know that we have been talking about it for at least two years. So, but people care greatly about it and they definitely see the potential and also, the theme developers are excited. So, but before we talk what comes to WordPress 6.0, and I just realized we have the 60th episode and we&#8217;re talking about WordPress 6.0 so that&#8217;s a coincidence. So shall we briefly go over the locking mechanism for block themes, the site editor and the blocks. It was part of a question on Twitter Matias and you had some great examples of what a developer already can use to lock down the parts.</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: I think it also speaks to both the ambition and expanse of the project, that we&#8217;re just celebrating all these new tools, all these extensibility tools, all these design elements that people have to play with our site. And now we&#8217;re focusing on locking them down, but there&#8217;s a reason to that. It&#8217;s like the WordPress project is really about all of these use cases. And while it&#8217;s been important to bring a lot of these tools to end users, people that are just starting their site on their own and be able to modify things that before were really locked down to them. That&#8217;s really important to really democratize access to all of these stuff. But at the same time, WordPress is used for very different kinds of sites and people that maintain sites for others like site builders, or agencies or freelancers are also users of WordPress, and these release also has tools for them.</p>



<p>And some of those tools are precisely about restricting and locking down and controlling what these tools are, when and how these tools are exposed to users. There&#8217;s many, I think it&#8217;s like from my perspective, this is the first time that WordPress has so much control and granular control over this when it comes to themes. So I&#8217;m quite excited, but I think we haven&#8217;t done a proper job at bringing that into focus, because we have something like the theme.json tool that was introduced in 5.8 and improve a lot for 5.9, that really allows a site maintainer, a theme developer to have a lot of control over what appearance tools are exposed in the interface, not just in terms of registering color palettes and the presets that people are used to, but also in really saying, &#8220;Okay, I don&#8217;t want the paragraph block to have any of these typography tools.&#8221;</p>



<p>You cannot control the line height, you cannot control the font size, you can only change the color and pick them on this presets. You can do all sorts of combinations there, and I think that, that really gives a lot of power to the site maintainer to really control that experience. But the cool thing is that since all the blocks are using these same APIs, it just works with every block, not just core blocks, but also third-party blocks that use these APIs. So that&#8217;s a way to really scale the ability to control essentially how all blocks work, without the developer needing to do anything specific for like a third-party block from, I don&#8217;t know, WooCommerce or anything, it should just work. And that&#8217;s just one part of it, we also have the other API that you mentioned locking, which works at a block level.</p>



<p>You can really restrict when a block can be moved, removed, or inserted in any area of the&#8230; like in a block theme essentially anywhere you can have a side bar that&#8217;s entirely locked down to editors, and you can imagine all the combinations that you can have with that. And these lock in mechanisms essentially turn the editor instead of being like blocks that you can move all around, the blocks are sort of set in there and you&#8217;re just editing the text or manipulating some of the attributes, essentially what is exposed. And if you combine this with a theme.json, you can say, okay, now you&#8217;re just modifying the attributes that the theme allowed to modify, like only choosing presets for a heading for example, or stuff like that. And I think it&#8217;s a really cool set of features that work really well together. And I don&#8217;t think we’ve done a lot of outreach around how they can be combined. We talk a bit about theme.json, and I think there&#8217;s some content out there about locking, but the combination of the two with specific use cases I think can be pretty powerful.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: Yeah. This is also a year that needs further research because I can envision some use cases. People would like to put some parts of the site in their read only mode, so you can&#8217;t even change attributes like you could right now. And all of those features are hidden for now because it&#8217;s not something that for the default use case on the site are necessarily like individual block locking could be, if you would block that during designing your template, how would you change it inside? So it&#8217;s something that needs further thinking, but it&#8217;s there, it&#8217;s just, you need to know how to get to it. And we will talk about that today. That&#8217;s why we also introduce some features to look at the codes so people can just be more familiar and change like they do surgery of the HTML, just to ensure that you can add also today.</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: Yeah, exactly. Right now that works essentially with a code editor, you need to modify the attribute in the code editor. Eventually there will be a UI for this and this UI can also be, the idea is that this will be controlled by user roles. So maybe if you&#8217;re a site administrator, you can just using the UI itself, you can go and lock the different things that you unlocked, and you will have direct UI to do that. But an editor or an author, when they get there, they wouldn&#8217;t see the UI itself. They would just get the&#8230; whatever is locked, is locked and they cannot change it.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. There also had been a, from the beginning actually, or very early in the project, the concept of a block template where you can say, &#8220;Okay, for a custom post type, I have only a certain amount of blocks that come into the page for it.&#8221; And you only can use certain blocks and you only can change the content for instance, that locking API has been in the site already, or in the product already, but it was not exposed to non-developers. Yeah. And I think getting that a little bit higher on the user interface, instead of having to write code about it, I think that&#8217;s a great development for later. I&#8217;m not sure actually we&#8217;ll make it in 6.0, but because that&#8217;s a huge undertaking by itself I would think, because you need to go through all those concepts.</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: Yeah. I think it can be like, it&#8217;s very close because it&#8217;s also how the whole project evolves. Some of these tools are added just through code initially, you mentioned, the templates have had locking mechanisms since 5.0, this new tool really expands it to block so, and since blocks can be edited in the code editor, now this becomes available for more people. And the next step is really just to expose it in the UI. There&#8217;s really, there needs to be some work there to really finalize the design, but in terms of effort is not too much to just have it there. We also want to have it on the list view, the panel on the side where you can see all the list of locks, and there it would be very easy for a site administrator to just click on a lock icon and just determine exactly what needs to be locked.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, that sounds excellent. So I just want to also know dear listeners that Ryan Welcher actually walked through some of the demos of that in his Twitch Stream on February 3rd. And he also shared the code for his demo on a GitHub repository. So we&#8217;ll show the link in the show notes. That is definitely for developers of course, but we also will share some of the links and documentation for the things that Matias and Grzegorz just mentioned.&nbsp;</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: And I just want to add that also, since this works at the block level, patterns themselves can be locked down in different ways, so you can create patterns where certain elements are locked. So it really expands that initial set of locking that we had for templates to essentially anything, like anything can be manipulated that way now.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: All right. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: That is to summarize the options then that you will see in the show notes in the links. So it&#8217;s possible to lock in usual block, but also the template of inner block. So if you, when you have a group, so you can lock down what&#8217;s inside the group and there is also some work to bring some more robust permission systems for all of that. So, when you have navigation block, which is in some entity, reusable block and all those concepts, so they can have different permission levels. And in general, it needs to be laid out in a nice way so we have a coherent system.</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: It&#8217;s cool that you mentioned reusable blocks, because there&#8217;s been some feedback, I think ever since 5.8, that it&#8217;s too easy to modify reusable blocks in a way. And for some people that&#8217;s great, that&#8217;s what the experience they want, for many others that&#8217;s not. And the ability to lock things down, like you can just lock a reusable block down and the UI would honor that experience. So it&#8217;s also something that addresses those issues because everything is blocks ultimately.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yes. And I think it&#8217;s really important to emphasize that you need to first have it all wide open before you actually know what you need to lock down. And if the features are not in the system yet, it&#8217;s hard to make those locks work. So it&#8217;s kind of the chicken and egg thing, and we know what the chicken is and we know what the egg is, but yeah, what comes first is actually it needs to be open before we can lock it down.</p>



<h3 id="phase-2-for-wordpress-6-0"><strong>Phase 2 for WordPress 6.0</strong></h3>



<p>And now I&#8217;m really happy to go to the preliminary roadmap of Gutenberg phase 2 for 6.0. But just because we were on the topic of Adoption and all that, can we take that section first for those who want to see if I want, do I want to really adopt it yet? And what are the possibilities? So one thing was that the theme.json file is actually not only for block themes, it&#8217;s really also a great feature to use for non-block themes or as we sometimes call them plastic themes. And that&#8217;s already in 5.8, but I really found it a much easier way to switch off gradients, disable custom colors, orphans, disable Duotones with just a few lines of codes. What do you see here for 6.0 for the classic themes?</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: Yeah. Well, there&#8217;s a lot of refinements still to be done on theme.json, it&#8217;s an ongoing process, more things to control, more things to configure like we discussed. There&#8217;s some work going on Duotone, that still needs to be done like theme.json works, but the UI doesn&#8217;t necessarily work. There&#8217;s still the chance of making some of the&#8230; exposing some of the theme.json interface in, like the Customizer for classic themes or some other view, that&#8217;s something that would need to be explored because right now the UI for theme.json is global styles, which you get in the site editor, so there&#8217;s some work there to be done.</p>



<p>I think the thing that I&#8217;m most interested about for gradual adoption is, we managed to learn like this, we&#8217;ve been calling it the focus template part on the&#8230; sort of to refer to it somehow, which is essentially a view in the site editor that allows you to focus on a single template part, like a header part, or a side bar, or a footer or anything really that you can create. This view works with like the&#8230; it has responsive handles and so on. And it&#8217;s a nice experience just to deal with a specific part of the site, and there&#8217;s no reason why this cannot be open. In fact, we actually shipped some functions, some PHP functions to call one of the header template part or the footer, or some other template part in PHP. So you can use them in your PHP template files just fine. But what we don&#8217;t have yet is that if you do that, but you don&#8217;t get access to the site editor, there&#8217;s really no way for the user to edit the content of the template part.</p>



<p>So that&#8217;s something that would be nice to open up in 6.0. So essentially, if you have a normal PHP theme, you can use these functions and then somewhere in the UI, the user can go and just get this focus template part mode. So they wouldn&#8217;t go into the full-site editor, because that&#8217;s not how these things work. They would go into this focus areas to just handle blocks there. So it&#8217;s essentially a different kind of widget area where it&#8217;s visually rich and it&#8217;s visually more like what you see is what you get essentially.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. It&#8217;s yeah, I understand that. So another item on your roadmap are the explorations on dynamic templates for blocks. That&#8217;s sounds really interesting. So what do you envision there?</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: Yeah, so this is like the other part is if say a theme wants to start adding some block templates, I don&#8217;t know. Do you want to turn your archive into something that&#8217;s editable or even vice versa? You have a block theme and you&#8217;re using it for a site, but you say you have like a, I don&#8217;t know, you&#8217;re running the New York Times and you have a specific page that is really dynamic and you don&#8217;t want it to be editing the site editors, so you end up using a PHP template for that, that sort of combinations. Because I think we&#8217;ve talked a lot about block themes and classic themes, that&#8217;s not really, it&#8217;s a very primitive split, like in reality, things are just very flexible and they will be more flexible. And that&#8217;s part of this gradual adoption sort of bucket, is that you can have some templates that are entirely dynamic like PHP driven, others that are configurable in the site editor and any mix in between.</p>



<p>It&#8217;s interesting to see some of the work that the WooCommerce team is doing, but I think there are some plugins as well that they, when these plugins that have a lot of templates that historically they were added as PHP templates that you could customize in a theme, but otherwise the plugin also ship some of them, that what they are doing is that they are wrapping some of the dynamic parts of these templates in essentially server render blocks. So you get like, you can edit the product template of a WooCommerce site, but maybe the templates, the part that displays products, that&#8217;s just driven by PHP. So you get a place called the render site editor, but you can customize around it. And once WooCommerce has the necessary blocks to represent that template just with blocks, maybe they update that. But it&#8217;s like, it shows sort of the flexibility of you don&#8217;t need to turn everything into blocks.</p>



<p>In some cases you might say, &#8220;Oh, like here, this is going to render a chart based on, I don&#8217;t know, the weather forecast or whatever it is, I don&#8217;t care about users interacting with this in any way in the site editor.&#8221; And that&#8217;s where you can let just regular PHP templates handle that part, but maybe the user can customize around that or the text above and below using the editor. All of those combinations I think are really going to become more prominent, because I think that cases where you just have a purely one theme in one site or the other are going to be, for some sites are going to be rare because you have different kinds of combinations.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Well, that&#8217;s good to hear that there&#8217;s still a place for classic PHP themes, especially when you have complex sites because you, well, WordPress runs on PHP, but there are the hooks in to get the block part of it, and part of the template. That&#8217;s really interesting. Thank you.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: Can you say that, like working in a similar way, how block patterns work? So, for the block themes, like the other way around, you can want, to port some of the functionality and then you would just wrap that into a pattern or whatever new we add. And then just take this snippet that&#8217;s generated on the fly with whatever you need and just get embedded into the template.</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: Yeah, exactly. It&#8217;s sort of like PHP Mbits in a way. And it&#8217;s like that the only traders is that you don&#8217;t get editing capabilities, which will be totally fine for many use cases. So it&#8217;s sort of like exactly the opposite of patterns in a way, it&#8217;s like a PHP Mbit that you don&#8217;t get the block interface for it because it doesn&#8217;t need to. It&#8217;s just like a single block that you can move around because it&#8217;s part of the block system, but you cannot introspect or edit its specific details. And I think that&#8217;s going to be like, again it&#8217;s very easy to create one of these PHP Mbits because that&#8217;s how WordPress works. So it&#8217;s just going to be there, it can be previewed, or you can show a placeholder, like that&#8217;s going to be, the options there are really wide open I think.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: So to bring it a little bit to the point of the controversy out there, or fear out there, the block themes actually are not getting rid of PHP developers. They actually give the PHP developers now so much more tools at the hand for flexibility, so they can really mix and match all the block parts into their theme. So I really love that idea and I&#8217;m glad that you&#8217;re here in the show to, going to set me straight and all my ideas and that, it goes really further. So then a lot of new features and enhancement in your preliminary roadmap, what are the highlights for site editor, layouts and blocks? And are there features you are particularly excited about the tiers?</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: Yeah. So in a way this release, I think I mentioned it, to me it&#8217;s more like the culmination of the phase 2. This is where we get to do at least the things that we set out to do. It doesn&#8217;t mean that it will be finished by any means or like that, we will continue to work on this for many years, but what I&#8217;m particularly interested about is going back to patterns and the things we can do around patterns, which we haven&#8217;t paid a lot of attention to in the&#8230; Like there&#8217;s been some work in the last couple releases, but since we introduced patterns there haven&#8217;t been like big major iterations on them.</p>



<p>And one of the key things for me is bringing patterns more into the template creation flow because blocks are sometimes a bit too granular for that experience. Like if you&#8217;re laying out a page or a template, you want to say, &#8220;Okay, I want to first define this header section, then this main section. Maybe with a sidebar, like this footer section or whatever is in the middle and so on when you&#8217;re creating a homepage.</p>



<p>So you&#8217;re really dealing with patterns first. And then maybe you&#8217;re tweaking the pattern with its blocks and so on. But you&#8217;re not creating from scratch like, &#8220;Oh, this is a group. And then this other group. And then this cover, and then this&#8230;&#8221; Like, that&#8217;s a bit too granular. Which can be fine for a theme developer, but for a user it&#8217;s really more about the patterns. Maybe even the patterns that the theme registers so you can very quickly piece together this sort of page.</p>



<p>And we don&#8217;t have&#8230; Right now, like patterns are there in Inserter, but the discovery is not super sophisticated. And from the canvas itself, you need to search for a pattern and so on. So it&#8217;d be nice if&#8230; And some of the proposals are that, if you&#8217;re in the root of a template, what opens when you click on the Inserter are just patterns. Like the quick Inserter that you get in between the pages, but focus on patterns and on sections that are&#8230; If you&#8217;re starting blank, the first thing is probably going to be a header. So we can connect that with a sort of semantic template parts, there are already headers and you can choose among these headers.</p>



<p>And if this is connected with a patterns directory, you can see among all the headers that are available in the directory as a starting point. And this could even expand to, you might be able to say, &#8220;Oh, I really like the header from this theme. And I want to use that.&#8221; And since everything is compatible, everything is just blocks, you&#8217;ll be able to say, &#8220;To explore and only see the headers from all the themes in the directory.&#8221; So you can pick one of those and then sort of assemble your site through those pieces.</p>



<p>So that experience is really what I&#8217;m interested about in exploring more. This sort of like section based building of site. And patterns are a key ingredient to that.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Indeed, yes. There wasn&#8217;t a discussion of&#8230; That sounds really fabulous. There was also a discussion out there, is there ever going to be a way to actually save block patterns from the editor? So you design a certain way&#8230; Like you do with reusable blocks, that you can just highlight it, make reusable block, and then it&#8217;s available for every other editor. Can you also do this for block patterns? Is that on the roadmap?</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: Yeah, we actually had it in one of the plugin releases. I don&#8217;t know if you remember, but I think Ryad had done it, I think, right around the time of 5.0. You were able to both save reusable blocks and save patterns. You used the same mechanism, it was just, when you inserted them it would just do different things. Because it&#8217;s essentially the same, like you can insert a reusable blog and detach it from that sort of reusable instance and you get the pattern. So that was just the shortcut for that.</p>



<p>I think the tricky thing was that it was not clear when were you saving one thing or the other. And so it was more of a UX problem than a technical one. And I think that&#8217;s still the case. Now, that we have a proper&#8230; Because I think at the time we didn&#8217;t have patterns as a dedicated UI. So now that we have a dedicated UI for patterns, those concepts can make more sense. So it&#8217;s something to explore.</p>



<p>But I think we still need to do some work on this. Again, what does a pattern represent for sections? If you can say that a pattern has sort of like a semantic value, that it belongs to a header or a footer and so on. How does the directory react to that? Because we don&#8217;t have that layer of categorization in the directory right now that represents areas of the site. I think we need to do some work there to surface exactly what are the needs, what are the details? But yeah, it&#8217;s definitely on the table.</p>



<p>I think another sort of connected piece to this is that patterns can also be super useful for creating pages. So that&#8217;s something, like an additional&#8230; Like pages can sit between the regular post editor and the site editor, in the sense that sometimes when you&#8217;re building a page, especially like a landing page or something, patterns can be better than just blocks. In some other cases you might want just like, I don&#8217;t know, a blank page, I just want to write. But it&#8217;s an interesting&#8230; Pages, I think, provide an interesting place to sort of connect the two experiences. Like an experience more focused on pattern or an experience more focused on blocks.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. And there has been almost immediately since the block editor came out, some of the plugins already provide kind of full page layouts that they have into it. So there&#8217;s quite a few things that will make it into core in a different way, probably. But&#8230; Yeah.</p>



<p>But I also see on the roadmap, there&#8217;s one thing, that is to use patterns also for transformations. So right now, when you add a pattern to a post, well, a page and it&#8217;s detached from it&#8217;s being a pattern. Yeah, kind of all the blocks are&#8230; Yeah. But if you want to replace a block pattern, you need to have it be together so you can replace the content immediately and all kind of things. Yeah.&nbsp;</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: Yeah. And this is also crucial for this. Like when we&#8217;re talking about the header area, that&#8217;s a very clear case where it should be possible to say, &#8220;Oh, I like this theme, but I want to choose a different pattern for the header.&#8221; And that pattern might come from the theme itself, or it might from the directory, or it might be something that a user created. But that experience needs to be possible.</p>



<p>For headers, it&#8217;s somewhat easier because the blocks, even the inner blocks are semantics. You might have a site title, navigation block, tagline, and so on, site logo. And these blocks are transferable between any&#8230; Like they just deal with data outside a content.</p>



<p>For generic patterns that are just like a combination of blocks, we had some explorations and we need to continue around like how can you map certain&#8230; Like, say you have a pattern with an image and you have&#8230; You could have multiple patterns that combine text and images, so you can transfer some of the content and see how it looks on different places. But the fact that you don&#8217;t have necessarily a container for the pattern makes it, in some cases, more difficult. You need patterns that are either already by default used in a group or stuff like that, so that you can manipulate them that way.</p>



<p>But I think it&#8217;d be interesting to consider this addition of like sections. So that you can treat the section and say, &#8220;Okay, transform all these blocks on this section to this other pattern.&#8221; And sometimes it might not be a one-to-one mapping. Like maybe there are more blocks in one pattern than another. And those things need to be accounted for. But at the very least we should&#8230; We have some stuff there that already works for headers and footers, but we need to really expand these and connect it with the directory and then see how that can of work on&#8230; Because eventually it&#8217;d be nice if you can just lay a couple paragraph, add an image, and then you say, &#8220;Oh, I really want to display this in a more interesting way.&#8221; That you can just multi-select the paragraphs and the image, and you will get options of patterns that use, at the very least, these amount of elements. Like these different part of an image but laid out in a different way. And that is where patterns can also be a transform utility.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. It could also open up a lot of possibilities for plugins and themes, to actually offer all these different variations of things. At the fly, a user doesn&#8217;t have to know what they want.</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: Yeah, exactly.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: &#8230; before they scroll the patterns. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: Which is really the limitation. If you think about it, that&#8217;s the limitation right now with pattern, is that you need to think about before you added your content. You need to say, &#8220;Okay, I want to try this layout.&#8221; And then you write your content. Which is fine in some cases, but in others you would be like, &#8220;Oh, I just want to get this content out, this image out. And now I want this to be a pattern.&#8221; So that should also be a possibility.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. That&#8217;s how I produce my pages, that&#8230; So this is my content, how can I make it snazzy and all that? Yeah. Excellent.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: It&#8217;s interesting that we are talking all those ideas. Like they are crazy comparing to classic themes, wherein you go to the theme directory and you check some tags. Like I want to have one sidebar, like one column, and the content inside and maybe some other characteristic, but that&#8217;s it.</p>



<p>And basically you just get a huge list of themes and you need to go one-by-one and like activate, check how it works. And here, it&#8217;s there. And on every template you can have like parts of different themes combined which have&#8230; Because of style variations, you can have unified look and feel. It&#8217;s like there are so many possibilities that that opens, which is like the work I think for the next 10 years, at least, just to explore all that.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: Yeah. I think, in&#8230;</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Oh, sorry. Go ahead.</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: No. Go ahead. Go ahead.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. So if your listeners kind of&#8230; The mind is blown. Let&#8217;s hear what Matias has to say about the decoupling of templates from specific themes. That opens it up really wide.</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: Yeah. I think it&#8217;s really the, sort of in a way, I think the topic of 6.0 is going to be to unleash some of these restrictions that for now are like self-imposed. Right now when you switch a block themes, your template parts and all of those things don&#8217;t carry over, your global styles don&#8217;t carry over. This is just like an artificial restriction. Like there&#8217;s no&#8230; Like it&#8217;s completely viable. And it&#8217;s part of the goal that those things do transfer, if you want them to. Like if you want to switch things but retain your header, like switch things but keep your global styles, or like try different layouts but keep your styles, or just change your styles. Like there&#8217;s many combinations there that should be possible.</p>



<p>So it&#8217;s really about unrestricting these things and decoupling the templates from the theme. Like you can combine from different themes. You can create your own and transfer. Maybe you really like how the block archives from a theme look and you want to just install that and keep everything the same. All of those possibilities are really there. Like right there.</p>



<p>We need to formalize the user experience around it and remove these restrictions that are really, right now, are keeping things more familiar to how things used to work. But part of the cool thing is that, now&#8230; The way I see it is that, all of these themes, all of these types of themes are compatible with each other. Like the theme JSON, just works in any of these themes. The templates are just blocks, they can be combined, they can be composed. So that part of compatibility is really what I think is going to be the biggest area of exploration that we have ahead.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: And always keep in mind, don&#8217;t get scared that all will be locked down again after it&#8217;s all over.</p>



<p>Yeah. So you had also quite a few things that you envision for the editor in 6.0. What stands out for you? Some of them are really pushing the experience further, but are there any, I say, new things? Or what stands out for you?</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: Well, I think like for the&#8230; There&#8217;s a lot of work that needs to be done to improve the template browsing experience. Even there, there are some restrictions that we impose that are artificial. Like when you create a new template, you can choose from an archive, single page. You have a few options. But you don&#8217;t have all of the options that WordPress should allow. You should be able to create, I don&#8217;t know, a specific category page for a specific category that you publish, like your travel category.</p>



<p>All of those things are, again, at the tip, it&#8217;s right there to do, we just are not exposing it properly. And we need to work on that to make that more viable, because that&#8217;s also something that unleashes a lot of that kind of power. Like maybe, you just install a theme and you say, &#8220;I want to modify a bit like my category page for this specific category.&#8221; You can do that right in the interface, or for a specific post type or for whatever it is. That&#8217;s something that needs to happen at the editor UI level.</p>



<p>There&#8217;s also some work around the three main ingredients of the site editor, like the global styles, the templates and the navigation. Those three elements, there&#8217;s some design explorations about how to better communicate this sort of hierarchy. That these are important and you can access these in this way.</p>



<p>For the navigation it&#8217;s important because you might have like a collapse navigation behind like a hamburger menu or whatever. And you shouldn&#8217;t need all these clicks to get to your navigation. There should be a way to just see the site structure without having to interact with a template that has a visible site structure. You might even have a site that has a hidden site structure. Like it doesn&#8217;t render a menu, but it has subpages and permalinks and so on. So you still need access to those kind of things. So that&#8217;s part of the editor work that needs to happen.</p>



<p>There&#8217;s also some that didn&#8217;t quite make it to 5.9, but it&#8217;s already in the plugin now, the style variations. Being able to switch style variations on the fly, that&#8217;s going to be really powerful. Especially right now, again, we&#8217;re restricting what you see to what is bundled with a theme. But there&#8217;s no need to do that. You could just go there and open like a style directory, where you see styles from all of the themes and you pick whatever you like. And it doesn&#8217;t have to be bundled with the theme, you can just access that from the directories.</p>



<p>So a lot of that work on the editor itself is essentially like managing how we open up some of these options and how we manage the access to them.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Excellent. Excellent. Now, in your roadmap document, there are also a few things that are&#8230; Regarding for blocks. Blocks were, it&#8217;s kind of the first phase of things, but they always have been evolving. Are there anything that you like to point out and where you want to talk about?</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: Yeah. Yeah. I think in a way, I think we got to a point&#8230; The cool thing about, also, the 5.9 release is that now blocks are everywhere. So any improvements we do to blocks are just improving things everywhere. So any improvements we do to the UI, to the interactions, to all the things that&#8230; Some of them are still not quite there, we need better interactions across the board, but those benefits just compound because they just affect everything now. The investment we do on blocks it really scales really well, I think to the&#8230;</p>



<p>So I&#8217;m interested in the&#8230; Obviously, we need to continue to improve the navigation block, which is one of the most complex in terms of interactions. And we&#8217;re going to get a lot of feedback now that it&#8217;s out there, on the things that are confusing or too hard or tricky to do. We need to improve how plugins interact and extend this.</p>



<p>Again, to use the example of WooCommerce, if you want to add a cart, how does that interact with the block? How do you show it there? Like WooCommerce is already doing stuff, but it&#8217;s a bit idiosyncratic. We don&#8217;t have proper APIs really exposed for people. Like we have the APIs, but they might not be the most ergonomic. So we need to think about those things. How can a plugin target a specific area of a template to add a specific block?</p>



<p>And then what happens if the user moves it elsewhere? Which is part of the interesting thing, like now users are not constrained to where a plugin decided to show. Like sharing buttons. Maybe the user wants to move sharing buttons to the top, or to the bottom, or below the comment stream or wherever it is, they are able to do that. But the plugin also needs to be able to give like default specific location. All of those things are related to the blocks and the block&#8217;s APIs that we need to explore.</p>



<p>And then I&#8217;m also interested in like some basics. Like we have some restrictions on quotes, on lists where you cannot nest like more than paragraph blocks inside. But it would be nice to just get rid of those, like improve them. We have the signs for the table block also that are really nice that we need to get through. We have a bunch of blocks being developed for handling comments, as well like in themes, like how to lay out the comment stream and so on.</p>



<p>So it&#8217;s really continuing to improve everything around blocks. I think, maybe one really important highlight is probably allowing the feature image to be used in like covers.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yes.</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: That&#8217;s one that we really need to get to. Like we wanted to do it in a way that was very&#8230; That allow not just the cover block, but essentially like media and text or groups or anything else that you could deal with. And also third-party blocks. If a third-party block wants to say, &#8220;I want the user to be able to use the feature image here.&#8221;</p>



<p>But trying to solve that in a very generic way, I think is also blocking. Not having it on covers, which is really, like it would be really powerful today. So maybe we should just need to make it available on covers while we figure out how to make it available everywhere.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. The hero image kind of design for a post and pages is certainly something that had a great majority of themes and that is still not available. Yeah, I also like the media and text for post query loops, yeah, where you have the featured image on the left side and then the text, the headline or something on the right side. I know that, for instance, the New York Times actually has that pattern. Yeah.&nbsp;</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: Yeah. I think yeah. I think that one in a way is a little less pressing, because you can achieve essentially a similar layout to media and text with columns, so you can just use the feature image block there. But it&#8217;d be nice if it just worked with, it&#8217;s simpler to get the media and text.</p>



<p>You can also replicate media and text with patterns. So there can be a lot of like post query loop patterns that are just about that, so it&#8217;s a bit more flexible. But the cover is really like, you cannot replicate it without….</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: That&#8217;s right.</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: So that&#8217;s probably like the biggest quality of life improvement if we can do that.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. What&#8217;s still missing in 5.9 is&#8230; And there were some attempts to get it in, but then taking out as the typography for blocks and selections. Was that kind of stifled when the release team kind of decided to take the webphone’s API out from getting into core?</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: Yeah. So there are a few pieces. Like the typography tools did make it into 5.9. The typography tools are all there and they&#8217;re connected within JSON and so on.</p>



<p>We don&#8217;t have the Webphone&#8217;s API. So to add like new phone, families and local files and so on, that&#8217;s going to be a big part of 6.0. And also the other thing that we didn&#8217;t quite get to is, like better handling for responsive phones, essentially. Being able to pick a size, but allow it to be modified properly in the different context. A theme can do that with functions and so on, but the end user cannot. So integrating that better into the interface is part of the exploration.</p>



<p>The tricky thing there is to not be overwhelming again. They can be really&#8230; A lot of these concepts can really be difficult to process, to interpret them, to understand them. So the more we can just make it work by default. And then if you really know what you&#8217;re doing, you can dive into more specific options. But otherwise, just trying to make it work.</p>



<p>This is also super important for patterns because patterns can be inserted in different context. Maybe you insert a pattern in a narrow column. Like what happens there? We have some allowances there to say, what is the desired width of a pattern, so that we can filter them out. But still, a pattern might be the sign&#8230; It needs to be the sign in a flexible context because that&#8217;s the nature of the web. And a pattern cannot supply custom CSS, so it cannot supply media queries or anything to handle that.</p>



<p>Also, media queries wouldn&#8217;t work there because it doesn&#8217;t depend on the view. It going to depend on the container. Maybe content queries could work, but what we&#8217;re trying to do is to embrace more of these intrinsic web design principles, where you just define the properties of the container, how it should cascade, how it should be modified by the&#8230; And that also applies to phones. And now CSS has those tools so we just need to find ways to incorporate them in ways that make sense, like good defaults. All of that is going to be very important.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. Responsiveness is still something that&#8217;s kind of missing throughout the whole blog editor universe. But I see that that is definitely a focus also for 6.0.</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: Yeah. I wouldn&#8217;t say it&#8217;s missing. I would say that we have like the very early steps towards it.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Sorry.</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: &#8230; we do have like&#8230; No, because the column block does handle. Like when you collapse it, it collapses like the&#8230; I saw there was a video that a designer shared with like, just building a theme from scratch. And what they build just work by default on mobile.</p>



<p>What you don&#8217;t have is like really granular control over things. And that&#8217;s what we, it would be nice to expand. But at the very least, things flow generally well, if you&#8217;re using the row container. All of those flex containers just generally work. The same with the navigation and collapsing into the hamburger menu or giving you those kinds of options. I think there&#8217;s going to be a in part, little work of exploring when some of these tools need to exist on a specific block, like the navigation. And when it&#8217;s a property of the containers and more broadly that, those kind of cases. Yeah, and I think always, eventually you always have the route of just adding your own CSS and media queries. That&#8217;s also important to highlight. That&#8217;s not locked away. A thing can always add extra CSS if they need to.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, definitely. Definitely.</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: It&#8217;s always an option.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. But you have that not only the separation between users and developers now, you also have the separation between a user and a designer who wants to use the site editor without touching code. So there is that granular &#8230; So responsiveness needs to happen everywhere for the user, but when they change something, it needs to happen also. So there was one bug that exchanged or illustrates that, is the featured image and the query block is all responsive, but when you change the size of the feature image, it goes outside the narrow container. Yeah. So, but I can see a user just change the size of it. But it&#8217;s not, it needs to be caught, so it still is responsive when it&#8217;s even smaller.&nbsp;</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: Yeah, I think that&#8217;s a great example of how we need to make blocks really resilient to these changes and then sometimes wanting control over how these things flow, is because the blocks have bugs. And if we fix those bugs, the need goes away. So that&#8217;s a good way to say, &#8220;Okay, we don&#8217;t overwhelm people with options. We just fix the bugs.&#8221; And most of the time things should work. But it&#8217;s a great point that also, again, the audiences are really expanding. Now there&#8217;s this new &#8230; Designers can now design a full theme using the site editor. That&#8217;s a new use case for WordPress that we need to &#8230; And again, these are users, just as an end user that is just using a theme is a user. There are different levels of users and builders.</p>



<p>And I think that&#8217;s the beauty of WordPress as well, is that maybe you start as a user, but you start using the tool and you have a good eye and you develop and you have some design background. And then you start doing that for others. And so you become a designer of block themes because the tools allow you to ramp up slowly. I think there&#8217;s a lot of gaps there, because you can go from just a user that likes to write on their site, to someone that&#8217;s creating blocks. There&#8217;s a lot of things in between and a lot of ramps up that people can take. I think that was a cool thing about the query block, which is an advanced block into like &#8230; You need to understand again, what is a query, what is being queried, what are these objects and posts and so on? But it can also be a ramping point to understanding how the software works, which is also part of the mission of WordPress which is given not just the tools, but the access to the software, people.</p>



<p>And that means that understanding how things work, being exposed to some of these internals, sometimes just in the UI, like the query block, you don&#8217;t need to dive into code to start understanding that. But if you play with a query block and then you see a PHP query, there is going to be a degree of familiarity with how things work, what it does, that is going to connect some dots to people. And it can become a ramping point for someone that wants to become a developer or wants to become a designer and so on. So I&#8217;m really excited about those sort of gaps in between. I think we need to do a better job at providing, ensuring that there&#8217;s no &#8230; That there are actually ramps and not cliffs. So if you start, want to go from creating patterns in the UI to creating a block, right now, that gap is too big. You need to go from using an intuitive tool, just with a graphic UI, to now opening developer tools and installing packages and stuff that you don&#8217;t really &#8230; The gap is too big.</p>



<p>But I think we can think about ways that, &#8220;Okay, what happens if you start using the HTML editor first as a way to define how a block works? What happens if you can export that code that you&#8217;re editing into a bundle of files. And then you can see your JavaScript files for the first time from what you did, and you start connecting some of the dots?&#8221; I think there&#8217;s a lot of possibilities there even for education and learning and teaching.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. Same thing applies to theme JSON. How easy can you change just one thing? And you see it immediately. There is no build, there&#8217;s a build step, nothing. But you just add the text point in the text editor of the theme, JSON, and you see it immediately, if you change your color or an underline or a font. Yeah. So I really like that as well. All right.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: So in fact, there is a build step, but it&#8217;s invisible for the end user, because it happens on the server. But that&#8217;s the goal. This is what Matias is talking about. So, that&#8217;s the thing that needs to happen. It&#8217;s still there, but it&#8217;s hidden and you can unwrap it as soon as you progress with your learning of programming concepts.</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: Yeah. And that&#8217;s also why the exporting is also so important. You should be able to export your global style settings and see that theme, JSON. Maybe it feels a bit alien or you don&#8217;t understand what&#8217;s going on, but it&#8217;s there. You can do that. You can introspect the internals of how the software is working. And I think that&#8217;s important to give that visibility. So ore ways to export and also to import, transfer things to other sites and so on. All of that I think is important.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. And some of the things are already exportable and some of them will come in 6.0. And I think that&#8217;s one. So yeah, I&#8217;m really excited about the next version, which I see is scheduled for something like end of May?&nbsp;</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: I think so. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. Two months before is beta. So it&#8217;s going to be in April pretty much. Yeah. Beginning of April, we probably know what&#8217;s going to come in 6.0, and I&#8217;m really excited about that. I know that quite a few pieces have already been finished or are not finished by any &#8230; Nothing is ever finished. But it will be, the first version is already in the latest plugin. So if there&#8217;s anything else you want to add to 6.0 topic or you, Grzegorz, I would want to move to the plugin release so we can go through the change log. Do you have any &#8230; Yeah. Okay, so let&#8217;s get started.</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: Yeah. I think the only thing that I would add is that this now it&#8217;s an interesting part where we need to listen to a lot of the feedback. And that kind of feedback would come in many different ways like from hosts, from agencies. All of that needs to be &#8230; We&#8217;ve been developing this for a while, but the reach again, the Gutenberg plugin I think is around 300,000 installations, which pales in comparison to how many times was 5.9 downloaded, I don&#8217;t know, five minutes after the release. So now we should be getting a lot of feedback that we need to process and incorporate into 6.0. So I think that&#8217;s the other understated thing from the preliminary roadmap, is that it is going to be influenced a lot by this feedback.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. Is just looking at the stats? It looked like it.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: Oh, yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haac</em>k: First of all encounters.</p>



<p>Yes, 5.9 has been downloaded now 16 million times. Yeah. So it&#8217;s in a lot of people&#8217;s hands, if they want to explore it. Of course, nothing happens when they don&#8217;t have a block theme. Enable it right now. All right.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: For WordPress, just to give the reference for WordPress 5.8, it was over 100 million downloads.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yes.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: And it&#8217;s only for the use case, when someone goes to the website and clicks the download button, because you can also get installation from the host or whatever else, which isn&#8217;t counted.</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: I think it should count how to install. I think how to update.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Well, it counts to downloads. So if you have a client, if you have an update button on your website, 6.0 is out, click here to update, that&#8217;s the download. That&#8217;s also the WPCLI downloads that happen and updates, or when you have a manager like Main WP or Managed WP or Google, GoDaddy&#8217;s managed tools, they download it all to your site and those downloads are counted. Yeah. I don&#8217;t know what the hosts do if they just deploy it from their own sites, from their local CDNs. But yeah, we can find out.</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: I think it depends.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: 108 million downloads was really big. Yeah.&nbsp;</p>



<h3 id="what-s-released-gutenberg-12-5"><strong>What’s Released &#8211; Gutenberg 12.5</strong></h3>



<p>All right, so this week&#8217;s release was organized by Fabian Kagy and who was in our last episode as a guest. And he also prepared the release notes on the make blog. So Grzegorz, do you want to lead us into what&#8217;s new in Gutenberg 12.5?</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: 12.5. Yeah, so we already mentioned some of those things like Mattias talked about, switching global style variation. So that&#8217;s the new feature. So maybe Mattias, you could just explain was why it&#8217;s so huge.</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: I think it&#8217;s a pretty packed release in terms of features, going back into the pace of especially after a couple releases, being more about stabilizing things for 5.9. The style switcher is probably the most exciting, the ability to just on the fly, change theme, JSON. And again, if you think about all the things that theme JSON can do, because it&#8217;s not just colors and fonts, it&#8217;s also each aspect of how a blog is displayed. You can change how quotes look, how different blocks look and package that into these theme JSONs. So changing theme JSON can be as drastic is changing a full theme, but it&#8217;s just a quick click away. You don&#8217;t need to install or download anything. It&#8217;s just a theme JSON file. And this is just the initial UI. I think it&#8217;s important to get it there, but it&#8217;s going to be more exciting when we start sharing things between themes, because it will also force to establish some more, either conventions or good practices for how we name some presets or colors, which have been ongoing conversations. I think we need to start establishing some of those.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: So how would a theme developer enable his theme to switch out variations?</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: I think right now, you add a folder called Styles and you put your theme, JSON files inside that folder.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: So you have one theme, JSON, the main one in the root directory and then you have Styles folder and have multiple theme JSONs that you name differently, so they&#8217;re not already &#8230; Okay.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: Yeah, everything magically happens behind the scenes. The user goes to the editor site, editor page and then just goes to where the global stars are in the sidebar. And next to the currently selective variation, you will have link saying other variations. You could select that and you can just preview all other variations and pick with the one that fits better for you.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. Kael had this in some of his videos, he that, how 2022 changes dramatically when it just changed the style out.</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: Yeah. We have it in the main video for 5.9. It&#8217;s a tease towards the next &#8230; The variations exist. I think they are available somewhere, but you cannot switch between them with the UI right now. If you install the plugin, you will be able to do that. I think the aim is to have the bundle with 2022, these variations, so that you can &#8230; And in 6.0 just with the same theme, you can get these very different looks of it. And it&#8217;d be nice if as a community in general, we need to start thinking about how to bring this into the theme showcase and directory experience, because you should be able to browse the directory and say like, &#8220;Oh, this theme, but with these other styles&#8221;, or be able to browse that and get that dynamic impression of how everything can change. We need to really think about the experience around that.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: Yeah. You use, preview the theme inside the directory and just applies everything on the fly. So you see how this site looks with this theme active. That would be great.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: It&#8217;s also cool, even the other way, because you can imagine sending your theme JSON, so that you can preview patterns with your styles. You can browse the pattern directory using your own site styles so that you already know how it&#8217;s going to look, because the theme JSON is really easy to transport. You&#8217;re not installing or executing any code.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. The theme directory, Munir Kumal actually, has a few different ways to showcase the theme directory on his Gutenberg hub. And I think there&#8217;s a lot more discussion to be happening to actually enable that what you had just said, about the styles to the changing. So yeah, what&#8217;s also now in 12.5 is that the code editor is now also available for the site editor. So if you want to tweak something on the code or some attribute or something like that, you could now use the code editor in the site editor as well. That also is in the &#8230; We also mentioned the featured image in the query loop, but the vision that we had with the cover block, it&#8217;s not yet there, but it&#8217;s now, at least the size, the actual, so the controls are now the same for the placeholder, as well as the featured image. And there&#8217;s also now a size selector in the sidebar that was missing before.</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: Yeah. I think that exposes a lot of the generated thumbnails that you might have for a feature image, which was again, another feature gap that is being overcome. And this is really the spirit of the focus on blocks, is that again, we can improve shows the feature image, and it&#8217;s going to improve all the themes, that are using this block. And so that&#8217;s really when you start seeing these compound effects, of just improving these block, just improves all the themes.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, also has the danger that it also breaks themes.</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: Oh yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>:&nbsp; But yeah, so I don&#8217;t want to belabor that right now.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: In general media, it was very tricky in context of the query loop, also how there&#8217;s authors, because there also could be something missing, so we need to have a fault for that. So I&#8217;m great that this is worked on, and finally there is a workaround when there&#8217;s no data. Yeah. I guess for features that&#8217;s basically that, and we also have a list of 14 enhancements.</p>



<h3 id="enhancements"><strong>Enhancements</strong></h3>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Well, there are more. They&#8217;re only block library.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Grzegorz Ziolkowski: Only block library as usual. For the query loop, there were multiple other changes. So now this is really exciting that you have better filtering options. So before we could also pick one author, now we can select a few of them, which gives you more options. And the other thing is you can use taxonomy. So that&#8217;s even powerful because taxonomy is that everyone has a lot of them on their site, and they just can narrow down the results to some of them and combination of them now.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. You can have multiple sections on your website and just show particular categories, and then style those images. Yeah. We mentioned that two weeks ago that it&#8217;s in the works. So I&#8217;m thrilled that these enhancements now are in the plugin and there were also some transform &#8230; Now you can transform the core site logo and the core site title, transform it. So if you have in a header, you use either one of them and then you can just transform the other one. You don&#8217;t have to delete them.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: This one is a bit controversial because it&#8217;s not a real transfer, because there are separate blocks and they have different data inside. However, the use case is pretty valid, because it helps you much quicker to craft your header.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, it&#8217;s easier because there&#8217;s only one click away. If you want to do it just with blocks, you have to remove the older block and then you need to add another block. So it&#8217;s a lot more steps. So that&#8217;s why I think it&#8217;s a good thing. And now you also can have text labels on your hamburger menu or as the techies call it, the overlay menu. So you can point people to the hamburger menu and say, &#8220;Here is my menu&#8221;, because it seems to be still after, I don&#8217;t know, 15 years of mobile website, still a handicap, that people don&#8217;t know how to find the navigation of a site on a phone. All right, then the next thing that I see is the and selected states for the palette editor. And I tried to test this, but I think there is a need that the themes actually need to switch in, as opt into that, and also offer the switch between the two and the colors for that. Well, how does that work?</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: I think this is just about the UI elements. They didn&#8217;t show you when you were hovering, more focusing. It&#8217;s not about changing the hover and focus.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Okay.</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: I think it can be a bit misleading if you read the entry.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: Yeah. So the use case, when you have a blog that has not only text color balance, or background color, lean color, and there is &#8230; Can be now even more of them. And when you hover over it and there is this model or overlay popover maybe, and which allows you to change the color, in the past you have an indicator, which one you are editing, so you could get lost easily. And now it&#8217;s fixed and you have this hover effect and you know what you are doing.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: All right. Yeah. I totally got it mixed up with the other feature that a lot of designers actually need hover space for the buttons and that&#8217;s not working it.</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: All right. But that&#8217;s coming. Yeah. I saw a PR for that, I think. Yeah. All right. Well, I&#8217;m glad that this was changed. So we have the post block modal for the site on the post editor?</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: Yeah. I think this is just improving a bit the display of the &#8230; When you open the editor and someone else is editing there and you get this, the takeover screen, it can now show you who is actually with the Gravatar and so on. It&#8217;s a nicer design of that.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah and the message also has changed. It actually tells you, &#8220;You&#8217;re not kicking them out and all their work is destroyed. Now telling you, &#8220;Yes, their content will be saved when you kick them out.&#8221;</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: Yeah. That&#8217;s a temporary measure until we go to the phase three of modern work, which is collaborate everything.</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: Yes.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: That a bit of way though. So I&#8217;m glad for the current fix or &#8230;</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: We&#8217;re all looking forward to that, like you said.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: It&#8217;d be nice to wrap up the phase two and start getting into those.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. But you&#8217;re not done. Nothing is ever done. So there were some changes to the buttons block? It preserves the styling of the adjacent button when you add a new one. This is actually a nice interface to….</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: Yeah that&#8217;s really nice. Before, if you had these, I don&#8217;t know, a list of buttons and you had customized them all with gradients and border raise or whatever it is, and you would insert, wanted to add a new item, it would just look like the default, so you need to do that work all over again. Now it just inherits from the neighbor. So it really speeds up. And it&#8217;s a nice again, quality of life improvement there. It&#8217;d be nice I think, if it also points out that we need better tools for modifying how all the buttons look at the same time, in a group of buttons. You can, maybe it&#8217;s through multi selection or by selecting the wrapper, or even by selecting a single button and having an apply to all thing. We need to explore some options there too.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. Good thinking. Yes, and what I consider a quality of life change as well is the identifying the side, front page, in the link UI search results for the navigation block. So you see which one is the homepage because not all the pages are &#8230; Yeah, from general settings, we can switch to a page as a front page, but in the list, they might have a different name. You don&#8217;t recognize that. So this is really nice to have.</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: Yeah, and the cool thing is that it just works on all the link UI. So it should work on buttons, on inline links, on the navigation block and so on.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: Yeah. And there&#8217;s also, in addition to the site editor&#8230; Actually, this feature existed before, for the post editor, which is copy all content, which is added to the menu that can be opened in the header on the top right side. It just takes all the content and you can apply, paste it to another&#8230; Tap, just copy to other site or whatever. You can also save it to HTML file and just start creating your own template and theme-based on templates. Some of those features that we discussed, they are possible. You just need to use low-level tools that are out there. In fact, you could do that, also by using select all keyboard shortcut and selecting all blocks and just using copy shortcut, which is common-c. That would also work. It&#8217;s just more convenient way of doing that.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. But for that, what you said with the control + a, and control + c and b, wouldn&#8217;t you be in the code editor to actually do this?</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: No, not necessarily. No, yeah. But you just need to have one of the blocks selected, so the selection can be expanded on that.</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: The first common-a selects the whole block. And multiple common-as expand the selection.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: Yeah, good point.&nbsp;</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: But it&#8217;s a good point that the discoverability of these things is not always great. So I think there&#8217;s, it would be nice if the first time you press control + a, there was a snack bar notification or something at the bottom that says, you can select all, even an actual link that allows you to select all by clicking the UI, or that tells you if you press more common-a it will select all. The same with copy, we have the&#8230; If you just have the cursor on a block and you press control + c, it will show up, the entire block has been copied, but there could be also an action there in that notification that says, I want to copy all. Because that&#8217;s, it can be a more contextual way to surface that copy all tool that otherwise people might not ever discover in the ellipsis menu.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Good point.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: We need some sort of gamification system. Once you unlock all of those features, you just get some badges or something like that. So you know that there are some hidden gems you still need to discover.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Absolutely. If I don&#8217;t know that there was a copy all content, I think there are a few people out there who also didn&#8217;t know that, but I can&#8230; That&#8217;s a good point with&#8230; Gamification sounds a little buzzword-y, but it&#8217;s have context sensitive additional ideas presented. I think having a standardized way to do this before anything happens in that way would be really helpful because as soon as is extensible, some other plugin developer might get some idea to put some notes in there and they definitely need to be&#8230;</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: It&#8217;s also related to the tips system that we have. We had this rotating set of tips that used to show in the inserter. Now I think we have the&#8230; Because the site editor now has a loading stage and it takes a bit of time. It&#8217;s a good place to show some of these tips, while you&#8217;re waiting for it to load it can tell you, did you know that you can copy all content on this? Because you&#8217;re forced to be staring at that screen in a way, and it can be a good place to rotate some of these tips.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: And I&#8217;m also convinced that it&#8217;s a good moment to teach people how to use software because they&#8217;re frustrated, right?</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: That&#8217;s what games do. And it seems to be working pretty well.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: But that&#8217;s also some software does. When there&#8217;s something going on, it&#8217;s like, do this, do this, so you can do this.&nbsp;</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: We have the tip for the slash inserter, because otherwise it&#8217;s very, also, hard to discover, but that&#8217;s also a good one. And there were many more like that you can press space to indent, a list if you have the cursor at the beginning, those kind of things that are not necessarily obvious.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: I get a lot of&#8230; I do this on Twitter, I think every two months or something like that, somebody tweets, oh, I hate it that I can&#8217;t do control + h2 or something like that to get a header in. It&#8217;s that, and recently there was one person who has a process where they have to change, coming over from Google Docs, they have to change all the headers, 60 of them into h + 3s. And he was going in there and doing that with the toolbar, and I showed him that it just put the cursor on the front of the line and hit three pound signs and space, and then it&#8217;s already a&#8230; So he doesn&#8217;t have to select anything, so these are really cool tools. Yeah, Greg, you could have used some of that teaching moments for the create block scripts when they were waiting to download the node modules, but you took it away because now it&#8217;s only one minute and 30 seconds to get your block created without downloading all the scripts and files. It&#8217;s really cool. Just pointing that out. All right. What&#8217;s next?</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: So there is one interesting feature, for the color and the panel that has it. Now when you pick a color, you can also apply, it&#8217;s very technical name, alpha channel, which translates to that you can make parts of your blocks transparent. Which is pretty exciting because in the past, every block you would have to apply separate feature, like the cover block, for instance, you could make the background transparent, but now it&#8217;s just next to the color we are picking. So this one is really cool.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, that&#8217;s exciting. Especially when you have something on top of the cover block and you want it a different color, but just to let it stand out a bit, with borders. That is really cool, I like that. There is also something for REST API? Grzegorz, can you explain that a bit?</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: Yeah. There&#8217;s an API that runs behind the scenes for the new style variation features. So it&#8217;s nothing fast. It&#8217;s just something to make it work.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: But that would also be something that a plugin could tap into later on if they wanted to change, here I have a plugin where you can make everything that you have in yellow, change all the variations. Okay. And the next one is that you now can tell the local environment wp-env the installed path, on the command line. That&#8217;s cool, otherwise, before, you had to navigate to that directory where you wanted to do that. I find that it&#8217;s really important that there is now the classic menus into the menu switcher, because that should probably be put back to 5.9 because that&#8217;s a missing piece for the navigation block in 5.9. And also they always allow accessing the post type for the navigation page, so they can actually change some of the navigation.&nbsp;</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: But I guess you need to know the URL for the post type to get there, right? Because it&#8217;s not something that is exposed by default. I mean, you can do it yourself with a plugin.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Right. This wasn&#8217;t so much about the post type getting to the page. It was more like when you are an administrator, it would show you are not allowed to access that page. So it didn&#8217;t consider the administrator&#8217;s high privilege. Overlord position. So, even if you wanted to go there, you couldn&#8217;t do anything there.</p>



<h3 id="bug-fixes"><strong>Bug Fixes</strong></h3>



<p>Grzegorz Ziolkowski: I just wanted to mention that we are now in the bug fixes section. The last two items.</p>



<p>Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right. I skipped over that. But, yes?</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: These are part of that gradual adoption, as well, is how does&#8230; Which, we still have work to do. How does a classic theme get some of these new benefits from the navigation editor, UI, and screens and so on. And this one is one of those, I think it&#8217;s related to accessing this page from a classic theme as well. Again, these are going fast in 5.9.1, but otherwise, bigger improvements are going to be landing on the plugin.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Of course. But because it&#8217;s a bug fixing section, those are things that were surfaced very early last&#8230; Between the release and now, and the fixed merge, so this is definitely going to be in 5.9.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: And, speaking of classic themes, there is also fixed dual-tone feature. So it works properly in those scenarios like we discussed when you just embed, for instance, header and footer, which is blog based. And then you can use those features and now everything should be correct.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Now that works again in classic theme. These were the bug fixes that stood out to me. Anything else you wanted to discuss there that needs to go into 5.9 or something else?</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: No.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: If you&#8217;re interested in all the bug fixes, definitely go to the release notes and the changelog and look through, if you find yours. There is also a project board and a Gutenberg repo on GitHub about what goes into WordPress 5.9. So you can see what is actually slated for the next release. Then we go and skip over the performance section and land at the documentation section.&nbsp;</p>



<h3 id="documentation"><strong>Documentation</strong></h3>



<p>And there have been quite a few updates especially to the glossary. Now there are a few new terms come with FSE. So we definitely need to update that. There&#8217;s also a new documentation page for the use look edit context hook. What is that about?</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: I would have to check because there are so many hooks that are in a very similar way.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: But if I look at that, it only adds a short description of what that hook actually does. So it&#8217;s in the documentation a little bit clearer.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: Yes. It wasn&#8217;t documented before. But it&#8217;s something that, you can use this hook when you are writing, edit implementation of your block. So you are a block developer, then you might want to use that hook when you have a nested component and you want to use the same properties that I exposed to the added function. So it&#8217;s basically nice shortcut.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Excellent. Thank you. And there&#8217;s also documentation now for the version 1 versus version 2 theme JSON documentation. There were multiple questions, the people that use the theme JSON version one after 5.8. What has changed for version 2? And now we have an answer to that. There is a document that experimental selector requires server side block registration.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: This one is tricky because, like everything that is prefaced by __experimental in general, shouldn&#8217;t be used or is discouraged for usage with third-party plugins. However, we know that people are doing that, so this is just clarification so people know what they&#8217;re doing. I know that people use very nice patterns that they just guard those features so they&#8217;re prepared for the case when this is renamed in the future, which is fine. And if someone wants to use it this way, it&#8217;s okay. But it is very important that many features for global size need to be required for the block to be registered on the server, because the processing requires many of those characteristics of the block. And for the theme.JSON, I want to just make it clear that it&#8217;s not that you necessarily need to be on version 2 already. It&#8217;s just, this documentation helps you to move if you or were adopting very early and you have version 1, it&#8217;s just all the names that you need to change to be on the latest one and to also take advantage of new features that are there.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Thank you. Yes. Just a little caveat that __experimental means no documentation, no backwards compatibility, use at your own risk. And it might break.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: And here we are, it&#8217;s documented.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Well, it&#8217;s only that if you use it, but yeah. It can change any moment now.</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: It&#8217;s an interesting dynamic because we also want to get feedback on this, so it&#8217;s a dynamic of not encouraged to use, but also, the feedback is needed, otherwise it would never become a stable API.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Exactly. But I think we need to be much better in documenting things like that if you want it to be used. You get really into the trouble when you are not making them backwards compatible, but that is also, it&#8217;s a new feature, or a new thing. You don&#8217;t want the technical legacy of backwards compatibility attached to it before it&#8217;s even released to the user. So, it&#8217;s a conundrum. Yes. I agree with that. What&#8217;s next on our list is code quality.</p>



<h3 id="code-quality"><strong>Code Quality</strong></h3>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: Yes. There were a couple of changes that&#8230; Escape, some of the properties it&#8217;s just for, more the hygiene, than there rather is something that was wrong. Some of them led to unexpected bugs. Some things were double escaped because of that. We always take care of this type of work and making sure that there&#8217;s, sometimes you prefer to be more secure than you need to be, just to ensure that we don&#8217;t have to patch that later.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, but one I want to point out was allow for HTML in the title, I think. That is from the beginning of WordPress. Some people put additional HTML wire plugin into the title and that was temporarily removed. So it&#8217;s coming back. So don&#8217;t fret, but I need to see if that&#8217;s going back into 5.9. 5.9.1, sorry.</p>



<p>All right. I don&#8217;t have anything else that I see there. We seem to be on the end of going through the changelog.&nbsp;</p>



<h3 id="what-s-in-active-development-or-discussed"><strong>What’s in Active Development or Discussed</strong></h3>



<p>In the section of what&#8217;s in active development, or discussed, I only have one thing that I want to point out, that is, I heard from a few designers that they&#8217;re missing the hover, focus, active states. And we talked about it. I have in the show notes, then the issue that Kjell Reigstad who is the designer on 2022 has created an issue where the discussion happens. So if you are really interested in that and you have some time go and chime in on the discussion, because that&#8217;s the next stage, how that is going to be handled. All right? Yeah.&nbsp;</p>



<p>So I think with that, we all have a wonderful show today with new things, back things, old things, new things. It&#8217;s really cool. And thank you so much for joining us Matias. I had a wonderful time with you discussing all the things. Is there anything that you wanted to say, a last word that you didn&#8217;t get in because we were all talking?</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: No, not really. Just thank you very much for having me back after all these years, it&#8217;s fun to discuss these things, to both celebrate the work done so far and to look into the future, what&#8217;s coming. Just really happy that 5.9 shipped and that the work continues with 6.0.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Wonderful. And if people want to get in contact with you, what is the best way to do that?</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: I&#8217;m usually hanging around slack. You could also find me on Twitter. I think it&#8217;s matias_ventura.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: That&#8217;s right. That&#8217;s correct. Yeah. All right. Okay.</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: Oh, and my website is just matiasventura.com.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: That&#8217;s a good one.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: That&#8217;s a good one.</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: Highly recommend it.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yes. And if you always wondered, what is this Gutenberg thingy? There&#8217;s a wonderful post there. What&#8217;s the title of it? The Ship of Theseus?</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: The Ship of Theseus.</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: Oh, yeah. Yeah. The Ship of Theseus. Gutenberg or the Ship of Theseus, yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Exactly. If you want to start there, you get a lot of ideas about the vision of it. All right. Before the end of the show, I wanted to point out that there is on Tuesday, the first Gutenberg developer hours on Meetup. And we have an expert panel that will answer all your development questions or know where to find them. So Fabian Kägy is going to be there. Nick Diego&#8217;s there as well as Tammie Lister to meet with the participants, we had to close it down a bit with 66 people are registered. We are not getting to all the questions, but we will. So there is a waiting list if you want to be registered there, but I also want to point out there&#8217;s a next one coming February 22nd. Also Tuesday 11:00 AM Eastern 1600 UTC. Put that on your calendar if you didn&#8217;t get in the Tuesday event.</p>



<p>As always, the show notes will be published on gutenbergtimes.com/podcast. And this is episode 60, six 0. 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@guttenbergtimes.com">changelog@guttenbergtimes.com</a>. Thank you, Greg. Thank you, Matias. It was a great pleasure. Again, I&#8217;m so thrilled.</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: Likewise.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: It&#8217;s goodbye for me, dear listeners. And I&#8217;ll see you in two weeks, or I&#8217;ll hear with you, talk to you in two weeks.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: Thank you very much. That was a great show.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Thank you. Bye bye.</p>



<p><em>Matias Ventura</em>: Bye bye.</p>



<p> </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, 06 Feb 2022 02:05:01 +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: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:104:"Gutenberg Times: Locking down design and blocks, Gutenberg 12.5, Learn.WordPress – Weekend Edition 202";s: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=20308";s: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:109:"https://gutenbergtimes.com/locking-down-design-and-blocks-gutenberg-12-5-learn-wordpress-weekend-edition-202/";s: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:23561:"<p>Howdy, </p>



<p>How have you been after the WordPress 5.9 release? Are you waiting for things to to calm done and 5.9.1 comes out? Yeah, me, too. </p>



<p>When I was working with customers and their sites, I would always wait for the next point release before I upgraded theirs sites to the new version. Yes, even after I tested the Beta and RC candidates on test or staging sites. </p>



<p>With so many new features coming in, not all bugs can be caught in time. Behind the scenes, everyone is working already on 5.9.1 with plenty of fixes, and they aim for a Feb 16 release. We&#8217;ll have further details next week. </p>



<p>The contributors appreciated the time and the work of those who report the bugs.  To quote Linus&#8217; Law: &#8220;Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow&#8221;. </p>



<p>Below you&#8217;ll find a ton of links to articles, additional tools and updates.  You don&#8217;t have to consume it all in one sitting. It&#8217;ll be in your inbox all week. Grab your favorite beverage and enjoy. </p>



<p>Yours, 💕<br />Birgit</p>



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<div class="wp-container-62028adbaa5c1 wp-block-group has-light-background-background-color has-background"><div class="wp-block-group__inner-container">
<p><strong>Table of Contents</strong></p>



<div class="wp-block-sortabrilliant-guidepost"><ul><li><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/feed/#gutenberg-12-5">Gutenberg 12.5 </a></li><li><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/feed/#building-themes-custom-blocks-and-extending-the-block-editor">Building Themes, Custom Blocks and extending the block editor</a></li><li><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/feed/#using-the-block-editor-with-our-without-the-site-editor">Using the Block Editor with our without the Site Editor </a></li><li><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/feed/#wordpress-social-learning-events-and-meetups">WordPress Social Learning Events (and Meetups)</a></li></ul></div>
</div></div>




<p>The last few days, I was hearing and reading about developers&#8217; needs to disable block editor features and make sure blocks in block templates are not removed or altered by content creators. I found quite a few resources and instead of sharing them here I put them in a separate post. </p>



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							<div class="ngl-article-featured"><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/how-to-disable-theme-features-and-lock-block-templates-for-full-site-editing-in-wordpress/" target="_blank" rel=""><img src="https://i0.wp.com/gutenbergtimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/LoveLocks-BridgeinParis-Matthew-Benton-web.jpg?w=652&ssl=1" /></a></div><div class="ngl-article-title"><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/how-to-disable-theme-features-and-lock-block-templates-for-full-site-editing-in-wordpress/" target="_blank" rel=""><span>How to disable theme features and Lock Block Templates for Full-Site Editing in WordPress</span></a></div><div class="ngl-article-excerpt">After the release of WordPress 5.9, quite a few people aired their concern that too much freedom for users editing the site design, select colors or to modify blocks might&hellip; <a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/how-to-disable-theme-features-and-lock-block-templates-for-full-site-editing-in-wordpress/" class="ngl-article-read-more">Read more.</a></div><div class="ngl-article-date">5 Feb 2022</div>							</div>
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<h2 id="gutenberg-12-5">Gutenberg 12.5 </h2>



<p><strong>Fabian Kägy</strong> volunteered to run this week&#8217;s Gutenberg plugin release. He also wrote the release notes: <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/02/03/whats-new-in-gutenberg-12-5-february-2nd/">What’s new in Gutenberg 12.5? (February 2nd)</a>. And Kudos to first time contributor who joined during the last release cycle:&nbsp;Alan Jacob Mathew,&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/iman82gm">Iman GM</a> <a href="https://github.com/imangm" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">@imangm</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/jorcontreras23">Jorge Contreras</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/knilkantha">Nil Koirala</a></p>



<p><strong>Justin Tadlock</strong> gave is a whirl is well and here is his review: <a href="https://wptavern.com/gutenberg-12-5-introduces-global-styles-variations-preserves-adjacent-button-styling-and-adds-alpha-transparency-to-color-pickers"><strong>Gutenberg 12.5 Introduces Global Styles Variations, Preserves Adjacent Button Styling, and Adds Alpha Transparency to Color Pickers</strong></a></p>



<p>Yesterday, Grzegorz Ziolkowski and I welcomed Matias Ventura on our <strong><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-60-restricting-customization-in-a-full-site-editing-world/">Gutenberg Changelog episode 60.</a></strong> We discussed restricting customization in a full-site editing world, Gutenberg 12.5 and what’s to come in WordPress 6.0 for the block editor. We had a great time and I learned a lot. </p>



<a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-60-restricting-customization-in-a-full-site-editing-world/"><img /></a>




<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 2022&#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. 2021 on. Updated by yours truly.  <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/references/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index-2020/"><em>The index 2020 is here</em></a></p>




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<p>Now that WordPress 5.9 is released it is time to look into the future. <strong>Anne McCarthy</strong> published a new call for exploration for the FSE-outreach program: <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/test/2022/02/02/fse-program-exploration-all-things-media/"><strong>FSE Program Exploration: All Things Media</strong></a>. McCarthy had again a set on instructions to go through and listen to your comfort level and report back on bugs. Then she asked you to imagine how the new WordPress Images directory could be integrated into the Media library and the Site editor. </p>



<p><strong>Justin Tadlock</strong> heeded the call, dove right in and shared his experience in his post on the WPTavern: <a href="https://wptavern.com/fse-program-the-media-experience-and-its-future-in-wordpress"><strong>FSE Program: The Media Experience and Its Future in WordPress</strong></a></p>



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<h2 id="building-themes-custom-blocks-and-extending-the-block-editor">Building Themes, Custom Blocks and extending the block editor</h2>



<p><strong>Luis Felipe Zuguini</strong> wrote a very detailed technical walk through how block themes work. You&#8217;ll find it on the Gutenberg Times. </p>



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							<div class="ngl-article-featured"><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/how-theme-blocks-work-with-full-site-editing/" target="_self" rel=""><img src="https://i0.wp.com/gutenbergtimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Screen-Shot-2022-02-03-at-14.52.08.png?w=652&ssl=1" /></a></div><div class="ngl-article-labels">gutenbergtimes.com</div><div class="ngl-article-title"><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/how-theme-blocks-work-with-full-site-editing/" target="_self" rel=""><span>How Block Themes work with Full-Site Editing</span></a></div><div class="ngl-article-excerpt">In this post, you&#8217;ll learn more about how block themes are built. I&#8217;ll share what I learned about building a block theme while I was testing Twenty Twenty-Two, the new&hellip;</div><div class="ngl-article-date">4 Feb 2022</div>							</div>
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<p><strong>Ganesh Dahal</strong> posted <strong><a href="https://css-tricks.com/a-deep-introduction-to-wordpress-block-themes/">A Deep Introduction to WordPress Block&nbsp;Themes</a></strong> on the CSS-Tricks. Their social media team <a href="https://twitter.com/css/status/1489616561010794503">tweeted</a> &#8220;Block themes? Full-site editing? WordPress 5.9 was a huuuuge release and <strong>Ganesh</strong> <strong>Dahal</strong> did a bang-up job explaining what it means for WordPress developers moving forward.&#8221;</p>



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<p>We have mentioned the create-block scaffolding tool, available in the Gutenberg repo to get started on your first single block plugin. <strong>Ryan Welcher</strong> just published <a href="https://www.npmjs.com/package/@ryanwelcher/dynamic-block-template"><strong>The Dynamic template</strong></a> on npm to scaffold a dynamic block. </p>



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<p><strong><a href="https://twitter.com/salcode">Sal Ferrarello</a></strong>&#8216;s new plugin <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/block-xray-attributes/"><strong>Block x-Ray Attributes</strong></a> adds a section to the Document sidebar of the editor and displays the attributes for the currently selected block. This is very helpful during development.</p>



<p>Here is Justin Tadlock&#8217;s <strong><a href="https://wptavern.com/look-under-the-hood-with-the-block-x-ray-wordpress-plugin">Look Under the Hood With the Block X-Ray WordPress Plugin</a> </strong></p>



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<p>More Theme Generator Goodies: <strong><a href="https://twitter.com/herb_miller">Herb Miller</a></strong> published an app to <a href="https://blocks.wp-a2z.org/about/fse-themes-summary/generate-fse-child-theme/"><strong>Generate Child Themes for any of the Block theme </strong></a>in the repository. Check it out! </p>



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<p>The Gutenberg Components are available for developers that write plugins for all areas of the site. They provide a standardized interface and lower significantly the cognitive load for the user to have to learn new interfaces with every additional plugin in the Admin section. This documentation page covers <a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/block-editor/how-to-guides/platform/custom-block-editor/">Building a Custom block editor</a> and you also find a <a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/block-editor/how-to-guides/platform/custom-block-editor/tutorial/">Tutorial Building a Custom Block Editor</a></p>



<p><strong>Converting Widgets to Block</strong> is a series of Videos, <strong>Ryan Welcher</strong> Twitchstreamed and then uploaded to YouTube</p>



<ul><li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ls1_XTfQJmg">Converting a widget to a block. Part 1</a></li><li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E4pcubPkEo">Converting a widget to a block. Part 2</a></li></ul>



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<p><a href="https://senseilms.com/wordpress-course-theme/"><strong>Sensei 4.0 &#8211; the learning management system (LMS) by the makers of WooCommerce and Jetpack,</strong></a> has been released. In his post, <strong><a href="https://twitter.com/ronnieburt">Ronnie Burt </a></strong>announce the arrival of a block-based theme ready for full-site editing. &#8220;You can use the Site Editor added in&nbsp;WordPress 5.9&nbsp;to edit the Lesson and Quiz templates, giving you endless flexibility.&#8221; Burt wrote. </p>



<p>Justin Tadlock picked up the story<strong><a href="https://wptavern.com/sensei-lms-4-0-includes-new-block-based-learning-mode-course-theme"> Sensei LMS 4.0 Introduces New Block-Based Learning Mode Course Theme</a></strong>. He wrote: &#8220;Sensei is one of the first plugins to offer this kind of separate, in-app FSE-enabled theme.&#8221;. The plugin is available for free, and you can study the source-code, if you want. </p>



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<p><strong><a href="https://twitter.com/kjellr">Kjell Reigstad</a></strong>, lead designer of the Twenty-Twenty-Two theme, built a theme that makes your site look like Twitter. In his post <strong><a href="https://kjellr.com/2022/01/28/building-twitter-with-wordpress-5-9/">Building Twitter with WordPress 5.9</a></strong> he tells us how. </p>




<p><strong><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/need-a-zip-from-master/">Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg&#8217;s main (trunk) branch?</a></strong><br />Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review. <br />Have you been using it? Hit reply and let me know.</p>



<p><img alt="GitHub all releases" src="https://img.shields.io/github/downloads/bph/gutenberg/total" /></p>




<h2 id="using-the-block-editor-with-our-without-the-site-editor">Using the Block Editor with our without the Site Editor </h2>



<p><strong>Jamie Marsland</strong> tasked two of his daughters, Meg and Lily, both WordPress beginners, to build the same page &#8211; one with Elementor and one with the block editor. It&#8217;s fun to watch, and also painful. No matter which editor you use, getting started &#8216;intuitively&#8217; is hard. </p>



<p>The video <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ng_wFkMd95c"><strong>WordPress Gutenberg versus Elementor &#8211; The £20 Prize Beginners Challenge!</strong> </a>is available on YouTube. </p>



<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ng_wFkMd95c"><img /></a>



<p><strong>Learn.WordPress Resources to help you get started! <a href="https://twitter.com/courtneyr_dev">Courtney Robertson</a></strong> shared these links on Twitter the day of the WordPress 5.9 release. </p>



<ul><li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/course/simple-site-design-with-full-site-editing/">Simple Site Design with Full Site Editing</a> a self-pace online course</li><li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/workshop/how-to-use-the-list-view/">How to use the List View</a> </li><li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/workshop/how-to-style-your-site-with-global-styles/">How to Style Your Site with Global Styles</a></li><li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/workshop/how-to-create-a-menu-with-the-navigation-block/">How to Create a Menu with the Navigation Block</a></li><li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/workshop/using-block-patterns/">Using Block Patterns</a></li><li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/workshop/finding-new-blocks-with-the-block-directory/">Finding New Blocks with the Block Directory</a></li><li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/workshop/using-the-block-widget-editor/">Using the Block Widget Editor</a></li></ul>



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<p><strong><a href="https://twitter.com/get_dave">Dave Smith</a></strong>, developer at Automattic and contributor to Gutenberg, posted two videos on YouTube to teach you more about the new <strong>Navigator Block</strong></p>



<ul><li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzDCCNjF9mg"><strong>Migrating classic menus to block based menus in WordPress 5.9</strong></a></li><li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dY3f8sHcAPA"><strong>Use a different menu on mobile with the Navigation block in WordPress 5.9</strong></a></li></ul>



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<p><strong>Anne McCarthy</strong> published the answer to so many questions by <a href="https://wordpress.org/support/article/comparing-patterns-template-parts-and-reusable-blocks/"><strong>Comparing Patterns, Template Parts, and Reusable Blocks</strong></a>. She explains the difference of the three entities a WordPress user has in the block editor toolbox to reuse content and designs in various contexts</p>



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<p><strong><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUklhzALumk">First Look: A WordPress 5 9 + Full Site Editing Demo</a> </strong>&#8211; Join GoDaddy Pro&#8217;s <strong>Courtney Robertson</strong> and <strong>Marcus Burnette</strong> as they chat about the new features of version 5.9 and set up a simple home page LIVE using the new FSE process.</p>



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<p>Do you want to know what WordPress Full Site Editing (FSE) and block themes are?<strong> Ellen Bauer </strong>posted a new video: <strong><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQAJPIsLMDY">WordPress Full Site Editing (FSE) &amp; Block Themes explained</a></strong>. She explained the concept of Full-Site Editing and the new features and block theme that arrived with WordPress 5.9.</p>



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<p>In his newest video <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AIuhvHCnlY"><strong>What’s New In WordPress 5.9</strong></a>, <strong><a href="https://twitter.com/joyofwp">Bud Kraus of JoyofWP</a></strong>,  walks you through the new Full -Site editing features. It&#8217;s a mix between demo and tutorial. He shows you how to get your site building tasks done.</p>



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<p><strong>Joe Casabona</strong> asks <a href="https://wpreview.io/who-is-full-site-editing-for/"><strong>&#8220;Who is Full-Site Editing for?&#8221;</strong></a> &#8211; I prefer not to spoil anything, he does have an answer. I did chuckle at the &#8220;It&#8217;s not a Bad Beta&#8221; sub header 3/4 in his post.</p>



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<p>If you know what to get going  with block themes, <strong><a href="https://twitter.com/MehtaTrishan">Trishan Mehta</a></strong> lists his choice of <a href="https://passionwp.com/wordpress-block-themes/"><strong>12 WordPress Block Themes for Full Site Editing</strong></a> on PassionWP&#8217;s website. </p>



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<p><a href="https://twitter.com/webtng"><strong>David McCan</strong></a> wrote a <a href="https://www.webtng.com/kadence-and-stackable-gutenberg-blocks-comparison/"><strong>Kadence and Stackable Gutenberg Blocks Comparison</strong></a>, and give in-depth view in two plugins that have been available since the first version of the Block Editor arrived at WordPress Core.  </p>



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<p>Joining Classic Widgets, Classic Editor, there is now the <a href="https://www.spacedmonkey.com/2022/01/31/announcing-the-classic-menu-block-plugin/"><strong>Classic Menu Block</strong></a> by <a href="https://twitter.com/thespacedmonkey"><strong>Jonny Harris</strong> </a>available to easy your site&#8217;s menus into the block-based era. &#8220;The classic menu block, allows you to embed all the existing menus you have set up on your site, using the existing core function, <code>wp_nav_menu</code> by rendering the block’s output in PHP,&#8221; Harris wrote.</p>



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<p>After giving you a sneak preview on the new <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/superlist-block/">Super List Block</a> plugin last week, developer <strong>Aurooba Ahmed</strong> share more details in her article <a href="https://aurooba.com/superlist-block/">&#8220;<strong>Nest blocks inside lists and easily create a grid of content with the Super List Block&#8221;</strong></a>. She explains how the Grid Block simplifies your content creation over multiple group block and gives you also responsiveness for small screens. </p>



<p><strong>Matt Medeiros</strong> posted his walkthrough using the plugin on YouTube <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6RX6r23u98"><strong>Superlist block | WordPress plugin overview</strong></a>.</p>



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<p>A new plugin arrived in the WordPress repository: <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/wavy-divider/"><strong>Wavy Divider Plugin</strong></a> by <strong>Kevin Batdorf</strong>, the Project Lead Developer at Extendify. With it, you can &#8220;generate and add a simple wavy divider to anywhere on your page, giving you the ability to separate blocks of content with an impressive, professional-looking design element.&#8221; Batdorf wrote.  <br /><br /><strong>Justin Tadlock</strong> posted a review on WPTavern: <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/wavy-divider/"><strong>Creating Content Dividers With the Wavy Divider WordPress Plugin</strong></a></p>



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<h2 id="wordpress-social-learning-events-and-meetups">WordPress Social Learning Events (and Meetups)</h2>



<p>Earlier this week, I had the great pleasure to participate in the <a href="https://thewpminute.com/wp-minute-live-learning-wordpress/"><strong>WPMinute Twitter Space on Learning WordPress</strong></a>, hosted by <a href="https://twitter.com/mattmedeiros"><strong>Matt Medeiros</strong></a> and <strong><a href="https://twitter.com/schutzsmith">Daniel Schutzsmith </a></strong>and with <a href="https://twitter.com/hauwazhiya"><strong>Hauwa Abashiya</strong></a> from the Learn.WordPress team and <a href="https://twitter.com/jcasabona"><strong>Joe Casabona</strong></a>, who coaches site builders. Listen to the show and follow the links in the post. </p>



<hr class="wp-block-separator is-style-wide" />



<p><strong>February 7, 2022, 12pm (noon) ET / 17:00 UTC </strong><br /><a href="https://www.meetup.com/wordpress-social-learning/events/283323367/"><strong>Taking Control Over the Editor for Client Builds</strong></a> with Fabian Kägy via WordPress Social Learning Spaces</p>



<p><strong>February 8th, 2022 11 am / 16:00 UTC (full)</strong><br /><a href="https://www.meetup.com/wordpress-social-learning/events/283412026/"><strong>Gutenberg Developer Hours</strong></a> with Birgit Pauli-Haack and expert panel via WordPress Social Learning Spaces: Tammie Lister, Nick Diego and Fabian Kägy </p>



<p><strong>February 9th, 2022 5pm ET / 22:00 UTC </strong><br /><a href="https://www.meetup.com/wordpress-social-learning/events/283371670/"><strong>Using Block Patterns</strong></a> with Wes Theron via WordPress Social Learning Spaces</p>



<p><strong>February 14, 2022 – 4 pm ET / 21:00 UTC </strong><br /><a href="https://www.meetup.com/wordpress-social-learning/events/283237147/"><strong>Exploring Theme Blocks</strong></a><strong> </strong>with Wes Theron via WordPress Social Learning Spaces</p>



<p><strong>February 21, 2022 &#8211; 12 pm (noon) ET / 17:00 UTC</strong><br /><a href="https://www.meetup.com/wordpress-social-learning/events/283644263/"><strong>Hello Blocks! Coding a custom block</strong></a> via WordPress Social Learning w/ Wes Theron and Ryan Welcher. </p>



<p>February 22, 2022 &#8211; 11 am ET / 16:00 UTC<br /><strong><a href="https://www.meetup.com/wordpress-social-learning/events/283720638/">Gutenberg Developer Hours</a></strong> with Birgit Pauli-Haack and expert panel via WordPress Social Learning Spaces</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, 05 Feb 2022 19:26:00 +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: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: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:106:"Gutenberg Times: How to disable theme features and Lock Block Templates for Full-Site Editing in WordPress";s: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=20336";s: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:117:"https://gutenbergtimes.com/how-to-disable-theme-features-and-lock-block-templates-for-full-site-editing-in-wordpress/";s: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:9414:"<p>After the release of WordPress 5.9, quite a few people aired their concern that too much freedom for users editing the site design, select colors or to modify blocks might be the opposite of what customers want.  Especially more complex websites with many editors and departments who produce content need guard rails to enforce publishing standards and adherence to brand color schemas and design systems. </p>



<p>Below I list of documentation links and code examples for the myriad of ways to restrict access or choices for users. As WordPress 5.9 is only a beta version of the Full-Site editing experience, you also can participate in linked discussion on GitHub for development still in progress. </p>



<h2 id="locking-block-templates-and-block-patterns">Locking Block Templates and Block Patterns</h2>



<p>Developers can register block templates (a collection of blocks, with lock attributes) for instance for custom posts types. More about it in the <a href="https://href.li/?https://developer.wordpress.org/block-editor/reference-guides/block-api/block-templates/">Block Editor Handbook</a>. This feature has been available for a few years now. It’s not directly related to FSE. The lock mechanism can also be applied to Block Patterns. </p>



<p>With WordPress 5.9 documentation you can find the DevNote: <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/01/08/locking-blocks-in-wordpress-5-9/">Locking Blocks in WordPress 5.9</a>. It describes the settings for the block attributes &#8220;lock&#8221; and how you can control, adding, inserting as well as moving or removing blocks. </p>



<p>There are discussion held on GitHub repository, that could use your input, if you are developing sites that need guard rails.</p>



<ul><li><a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/29864">On Locking and TemplateLocking (a Tracking Issue)</a></li><li><a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/26128">Learn more about the TemplateLock attribute to column and group</a></li></ul>



<h2 id="demo-on-locking-block-templates-patterns-and-via-theme-json-by-ryan-welcher">Demo on Locking Block Templates, Patterns and via theme.json by Ryan Welcher</h2>



<p><a href="https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1285533518">In this week&#8217;s Twitch Stream session</a>, <strong>Ryan Welcher</strong> demonstrated how Locking Blocks and block templates works. He also shared <a href="https://github.com/ryanwelcher/gutenberg-block-level-locking">the code for the plugin</a> he used in his livestream that has all the code for the examples he showed in this show</p>



<img />



<h2 id="permission-system-for-fse-theme-templates">Permission System for FSE theme templates.</h2>



<p>In discussions, contributors look at the relevant aspects on how to handle permission for various sections on themes, templates, and template parts. </p>



<ul><li><a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/37489">Multi-entity permission management</a></li><li><a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/27597">Proposal: robust permissions system for FSE theme templates</a></li></ul>



<h2 id="disable-user-design-controls-for-blocks-and-block-themes">Disable User design controls for blocks and block themes</h2>



<p>The theme.json file is the place where you can configure the user controls for gradient, color choices, font settings or background colors. </p>



<p>Here are a few, this might not a comprehensive yet. </p>



<p>If you want to use <strong>theme</strong>.<strong>json</strong> in a classic theme, but you don&#8217;t want to allow access to the template editor, add <code>remove_theme_support( 'block-templates' )</code> to your functions.php file. Hat tip to <a href="https://twitter.com/ryanwelcher/status/1489613396651786247"><strong>Ryan Welcher </strong>for this tweet.</a> </p>



<p><strong>Carolina Nymark</strong> wrote in her course on building theme for full-site Editing about <a href="https://fullsiteediting.com/lessons/global-styles/#h-enable-or-disable-features"><strong>Enabling and Disabling features in theme.json</strong></a></p>



<p>Thanks to <strong>David Gwyer</strong>&#8216;s  <a href="https://www.themegen.app/">block theme.json Generator</a>, I could to set all the settings to zero or false or to empty arrays to removing color, border, typography, and spacing controls. </p>



<p><em>I have not tested all settings below, so use at your own risk. </em></p>



<h3 id="colors">Colors</h3>


<pre class="wp-block-code"><div><code class="hljs language-javascript"><span class="hljs-string">"color"</span>: {
      <span class="hljs-string">"background"</span>: <span class="hljs-literal">false</span>,
      <span class="hljs-string">"custom"</span>: <span class="hljs-literal">false</span>,
      <span class="hljs-string">"customDuotone"</span>: <span class="hljs-literal">false</span>,
      <span class="hljs-string">"customGradient"</span>: <span class="hljs-literal">false</span>,
      <span class="hljs-string">"defaultGradients"</span>: <span class="hljs-literal">false</span>,
      <span class="hljs-string">"defaultPalette"</span>: <span class="hljs-literal">false</span>,
      <span class="hljs-string">"duotone"</span>: [],
      <span class="hljs-string">"gradients"</span>: [],
      <span class="hljs-string">"link"</span>: <span class="hljs-literal">false</span>,
      <span class="hljs-string">"palette"</span>: [],
      <span class="hljs-string">"text"</span>: <span class="hljs-literal">false</span>
}

</code></div><small class="shcb-language" id="shcb-language-1"><span class="shcb-language__label">Code language:</span> <span class="shcb-language__name">JavaScript</span> <span class="shcb-language__paren">(</span><span class="shcb-language__slug">javascript</span><span class="shcb-language__paren">)</span></small></pre>


<h3 id="border-controls">Border Controls</h3>


<pre class="wp-block-code"><div><code class="hljs language-javascript"><span class="hljs-string">"border"</span>: {
      <span class="hljs-string">"color"</span>: <span class="hljs-literal">false</span>,
      <span class="hljs-string">"radius"</span>: <span class="hljs-literal">false</span>,
      <span class="hljs-string">"style"</span>: <span class="hljs-literal">false</span>,
      <span class="hljs-string">"width"</span>: <span class="hljs-literal">false</span>
    },</code></div><small class="shcb-language" id="shcb-language-2"><span class="shcb-language__label">Code language:</span> <span class="shcb-language__name">JavaScript</span> <span class="shcb-language__paren">(</span><span class="shcb-language__slug">javascript</span><span class="shcb-language__paren">)</span></small></pre>


<h3 id="typography">Typography</h3>


<pre class="wp-block-code"><div><code class="hljs language-javascript"> <span class="hljs-string">"typography"</span>: {
      <span class="hljs-string">"customFontSize"</span>: <span class="hljs-literal">false</span>,
      <span class="hljs-string">"dropCap"</span>: <span class="hljs-literal">false</span>,
      <span class="hljs-string">"fontFamilies"</span>: [],
      <span class="hljs-string">"fontSizes"</span>: [],
      <span class="hljs-string">"fontStyle"</span>: <span class="hljs-literal">false</span>,
      <span class="hljs-string">"fontWeight"</span>: <span class="hljs-literal">false</span>,
      <span class="hljs-string">"letterSpacing"</span>: <span class="hljs-literal">false</span>,
      <span class="hljs-string">"lineHeight"</span>: <span class="hljs-literal">false</span>,
      <span class="hljs-string">"textDecoration"</span>: <span class="hljs-literal">false</span>,
      <span class="hljs-string">"textTransform"</span>: <span class="hljs-literal">false</span>
    }</code></div><small class="shcb-language" id="shcb-language-3"><span class="shcb-language__label">Code language:</span> <span class="shcb-language__name">JavaScript</span> <span class="shcb-language__paren">(</span><span class="shcb-language__slug">javascript</span><span class="shcb-language__paren">)</span></small></pre>


<h3 id="spacing">Spacing</h3>


<pre class="wp-block-code"><div><code class="hljs language-javascript"> <span class="hljs-string">"spacing"</span>: {
      <span class="hljs-string">"blockGap"</span>: <span class="hljs-literal">null</span>,
      <span class="hljs-string">"margin"</span>: <span class="hljs-literal">false</span>,
      <span class="hljs-string">"padding"</span>: <span class="hljs-literal">false</span>,
}</code></div><small class="shcb-language" id="shcb-language-4"><span class="shcb-language__label">Code language:</span> <span class="shcb-language__name">JavaScript</span> <span class="shcb-language__paren">(</span><span class="shcb-language__slug">javascript</span><span class="shcb-language__paren">)</span></small></pre>


<p><strong>Have you found additional tweaks you apply to keep design choices safe? </strong>Please share them in the comments.  </p>



<p><em>Featured Image: <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/83914470@N00/10481132656" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">&#8220;Locks on Bridge, Paris.&#8221;</a>&nbsp;by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/83914470@N00" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Matt Benton</a>&nbsp;is licensed under&nbsp;<a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/?ref=openverse&atype=rich" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">CC BY-NC-SA 2.0</a></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:"Sat, 05 Feb 2022 17:47:27 +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: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:74:"WPTavern: Creating Content Dividers With the Wavy Divider WordPress Plugin";s: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:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=129554";s: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:193:"https://wptavern.com/creating-content-dividers-with-the-wavy-divider-wordpress-plugin?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=creating-content-dividers-with-the-wavy-divider-wordpress-plugin";s: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:3681:"<p class="has-drop-cap">Kevin Batdorf, the Project Lead Developer at Extendify, released the <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/wavy-divider/">Wavy Divider plugin</a> earlier this week. It is described as &#8220;a colorful, fun, lightweight divider block to energize your website with character and pizazz.&#8221;</p>



<p>As someone who believes every Friday should be officially titled &#8220;Fun Friday,&#8221; how could I not install and activate it?</p>



<p>I have not seen many block plugins employ a random design option before, and Wavy Divider may be the first. Its foremost setting is a &#8220;shuffle waves&#8221; control. When a user clicks it, the divider is regenerated with new locations for its peaks and valleys.</p>



<img />Adding the first Wavy Divider.



<p>I have mixed feelings about the shuffling option. One side of me wants to know what I am getting before I hit the button, and the other is pleasantly enjoying the randomness of it all. Users who prefer tight control over each point where each wave rises or slopes down might want to look elsewhere.</p>



<p>The plugin is not entirely a jumble of unpredictability. It offers a handful of other options for users to exert some control over its output. There are toggles for the divider&#8217;s smoothness and direction. The former switches between the default wavy style and its straight-lined rigid counterpart. The latter moves the wave flow from the bottom to the top and vice versa.</p>



<p>Users can set the divider&#8217;s height, points, and opacity. There is also a color option.</p>



<p>If you really want to get creative, your best option is mixing and matching it with the core Group and Cover blocks. The plugin&#8217;s documentation walks users through <a href="https://github.com/KevinBatdorf/wavy-divider#gradients">creating a mirrored gradient</a> effect by using two dividers inside a Group. I followed the directions and built a gradient river that flowed across the screen:</p>



<img />Two dividers inside of a Group block with a gradient.



<p>In the right hands, it is entirely possible to buff out some of the roughness, putting a professional sheen on top of it all.</p>



<p>I threw together an intro section for a fitness or adventure blog. The goal was to create the appearance of a site owner with personality. However, better designers will use it to piece together something unique to their brands.</p>



<img />Adventure blog intro section with bottom divider.



<p>Half the fun of this plugin is trying out-of-the-ordinary combinations with other blocks. The other half is discovering new shapes via the shuffle option.</p>



<p>You can also use the plugin for your next low-budget horror film&#8217;s cover art (<em>this was absolutely an experiment <strong>gone weird</strong> when testing this plugin, but I figured I would share anyway</em> ):</p>



<img />



<p>There is a little something for anyone with an imagination or enough time to repeatedly click the &#8220;shuffle waves&#8221; button until they land on that perfect wave shape. As I said, it is Friday, and we should all let loose and have a little fun.</p>



<p>I tend to bookmark projects with well-structured code for my own edification, and Wavy Divider fits that mold. For developers who want relatively simple examples of block development to study, it would be hard to go wrong using it as a starting point. The code is <a href="https://github.com/KevinBatdorf/wavy-divider">available on GitHub</a>.</p>



<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="wp-embedded-content"><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/wavy-divider/">Wavy Divider</a></blockquote>
</div>";s: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, 05 Feb 2022 02:18:10 +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:"Justin Tadlock";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:61:"Gutenberg Times: How Block Themes work with Full-Site Editing";s: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=20216";s: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://gutenbergtimes.com/how-theme-blocks-work-with-full-site-editing/";s: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:23887:"<p>In this post, you&#8217;ll learn more about how block themes are built. I&#8217;ll share what I learned about building a block theme while I was testing Twenty Twenty-Two, the new default theme now shipped with WordPress 5.9, featuring the full-site editing experience. For this walk-through, I ran <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/twentytwentytwo">trunk Twenty-Twenty-Two</a>, with <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg">trunk Gutenberg</a> and WordPress 5.8.2.</p>



<p>You can just upgrade to WP 5.9, and the experience should be the same for you. The theme is now available in the <a href="https://wordpress.org/themes/twentytwentytwo/">WordPress.org Theme Repository for download</a>.</p>



<p>Activating Twenty-Twenty-Two gives us this:</p>



<img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/DbEalrK_a4anZSBUhSAD4F69W8EyPYb3LXbuIStrNlGKxZh_g1YH2CPBsxcaLCE7tLlYUsi-Gqx_Zo2XQWEBnXnlbtG-R2nwtE46h9G4Z0tkM_ftsERAhsQbXM5ik2JnrmMEIBou" alt="" />



<p>This looks about right. That’s the default Twenty-Twenty-Two home page.</p>



<h2 id="defining-a-block-theme"><strong>Defining a block theme</strong></h2>



<p>All the magic starts in the theme.json file. When this file is present in the active theme, the <a href="https://wordpress.org/support/article/template-editor/">template editor</a> becomes available. This was a feature added in WordPress 5.8.</p>



<p>Next, the presence of <code>templates/index.html</code> determines if the site editor interface should be made available in place of the Customizer. </p>



<p>One interesting bit of the <code>functions.php</code> file is that the developers call <code>add_theme_support( 'wp-block-styles' )</code>, <a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/block-editor/how-to-guides/themes/theme-support/">according to the handbook</a>, to “opt-in to slightly more opinionated styles for the front end”. This will include a couple of block-specific styles listed <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/blob/trunk/packages/block-library/src/theme.scss">here</a>. It’s mostly default styling that makes some blocks (e.g. Image) look better.</p>



<p>To demonstrate, I added one Image block and defined the caption. This is how it looks on the editor:</p>



<img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/CausjW9WHXgHvitsq5ypwQwznnfvdos4Iy8JJXJRuu-t_axkN6ABJhExdXXijYyQsJ1kK-P_neF6RNcZboVVTSEXfwB1H-S6okTglO2GyDo9LfSMEzhIQPT_-qYpIvVWiwZdAe_P" alt="" />



<p>Below you can see how it looks on the live site. Left is without <code>wp-block-styles</code>. Right is with it included. Notice how the caption is center-aligned, with smaller font size and gray-colored. Using <code>wp-block-styles</code> makes the end result look exactly like the preview.</p>




<img />



<img />




<p>The developers enqueued fonts inside the <code>twentytwentytwo_get_font_face_styles</code> function, which is called when the user opens the editor or the frontend of the site. But make no mistake: all of the styles need to be enqueued for the editor and front end – not just font-face ones. That&#8217;s what makes them look the same!</p>



<p>At the end of the <code>functions.php</code> file, there’s a required call to <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/twentytwentytwo/blob/trunk/inc/block-patterns.php">/inc/block-patterns.php</a> so we can get block patterns registered. More on that later.</p>



<h2 id="how-block-theming-works-theme-json"><strong>How block theming works theme.json</strong></h2>



<p>There’s a file called <code>theme.json</code> that defines some properties, most notably styles and settings. I’ll walk you through all the properties defined in Twenty-Twenty-Two, and there’s a <a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/block-editor/how-to-guides/themes/theme-json/">handbook page about it</a> if you want more information.</p>



<p>We’re using <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/twentytwentytwo/pull/217">version 2 of the specification</a>, which comes with some adjustments, like removing the custom prefix. Version 2 is officially supported on 5.9, matching the theme’s required version.</p>



<p>One of the most important parts of the theme lives inside settings. We define preset color pallette; typography presets (such as font families and sizes); spacing unit options, as well as custom CSS variables that can be used both inside and outside of <code>theme.json</code>. </p>



<p>All the entries defined in this property are exposed through CSS variables that are used inside stylesheets, block patterns, and blocks themselves.</p>



<p>Aside from presets defined in settings there are also &#8220;supports&#8221; options to enable or disable certain controls based on the theme developer&#8217;s preferences both at the global and individual block levels.&nbsp;</p>



<p>For example, it could be that the content creator should be limited to only selecting from the predefined theme colors and so the custom color control would be disabled in the theme.json settings file with something like this:</p>


<pre class="wp-block-code"><div><code class="hljs language-json shcb-code-table shcb-line-numbers"><span class="shcb-loc"><span>{
</span></span><span class="shcb-loc"><span>    <span class="hljs-attr">"version"</span>: <span class="hljs-number">2</span>,
</span></span><span class="shcb-loc"><span>    <span class="hljs-attr">"settings"</span>: {
</span></span><span class="shcb-loc"><span>        <span class="hljs-attr">"color"</span>: {
</span></span><span class="shcb-loc"><span>            <span class="hljs-attr">"custom"</span>: <span class="hljs-literal">false</span>
</span></span><span class="shcb-loc"><span>        }
</span></span><span class="shcb-loc"><span>    }
</span></span><span class="shcb-loc"><span>}
</span></span></code></div><small class="shcb-language" id="shcb-language-5"><span class="shcb-language__label">Code language:</span> <span class="shcb-language__name">JSON / JSON with Comments</span> <span class="shcb-language__paren">(</span><span class="shcb-language__slug">json</span><span class="shcb-language__paren">)</span></small></pre>


<p>The Twenty-Twenty-Two theme doesn’t have many restrictions as it’s meant for the general population. It does turn off DropCaps, though.&nbsp;</p>


<pre class="wp-block-code"><div><code class="hljs language-json shcb-code-table shcb-line-numbers"><span class="shcb-loc"><span>{
</span></span><span class="shcb-loc"><span>    <span class="hljs-attr">"version"</span>: <span class="hljs-number">2</span>,
</span></span><span class="shcb-loc"><span>    <span class="hljs-attr">"settings"</span>: {
</span></span><span class="shcb-loc"><span>       <span class="hljs-attr">"typography"</span>: {
</span></span><span class="shcb-loc"><span>          <span class="hljs-attr">"dropCap"</span>: <span class="hljs-literal">false</span>,
</span></span><span class="shcb-loc"><span>            …
</span></span><span class="shcb-loc"><span>        }
</span></span><span class="shcb-loc"><span>   }
</span></span><span class="shcb-loc"><span>}
</span></span></code></div><small class="shcb-language" id="shcb-language-6"><span class="shcb-language__label">Code language:</span> <span class="shcb-language__name">JSON / JSON with Comments</span> <span class="shcb-language__paren">(</span><span class="shcb-language__slug">json</span><span class="shcb-language__paren">)</span></small></pre>


<p>There are also many default design control settings inside the styles property. They’re applied to blocks, global color settings, HTML elements, global spacing, and global typography settings. This section gives Twenty-Twenty-Two its unique feeling because here the default design control settings are defined and are enqueued to the CSS that’s pushed to the browser.</p>



<p>Then, one can use all the properties defined in <code>theme.json</code> inside their style files by using the power of CSS variables, as Gutenberg will inject them into the file. The variable path is a reduction of the actual property path. Something like:</p>


<pre class="wp-block-code"><div><code class="hljs language-css shcb-code-table shcb-line-numbers"><span class="shcb-loc"><span><span class="hljs-selector-tag">body</span> {
</span></span><span class="shcb-loc"><span>
</span></span><span class="shcb-loc"><span>  <span class="hljs-attribute">color</span>: <span class="hljs-built_in">var</span>(–wp–preset–color–primary);
</span></span><span class="shcb-loc"><span>
</span></span><span class="shcb-loc"><span>}
</span></span></code></div><small class="shcb-language" id="shcb-language-7"><span class="shcb-language__label">Code language:</span> <span class="shcb-language__name">CSS</span> <span class="shcb-language__paren">(</span><span class="shcb-language__slug">css</span><span class="shcb-language__paren">)</span></small></pre>


<p>Enables a block to read theme configuration on the live site.</p>



<h2 id="templates-and-template-parts"><strong>Templates and template parts</strong></h2>



<p>The difference between Templates and Template Parts is that the former is a full-page template (be it custom or not), such as home. Both templates and parts can use — block patterns.</p>



<p>Templates are rendered when viewing specific sections of the site (404 pages or post archives are good examples), and obviously, you can define custom templates that might be picked for specific postTypes, such as post or page.</p>



<p>Template parts are almost the same, except that instead of defining a whole page, they are part of a specific section of the template. In Twenty-Twenty-Two’s case, header and footer.</p>



<p>Twenty-Twenty-Two includes a couple of templates and template parts. These are defined inside <code>theme.json</code>. The purpose of defining templates in theme.json is to determine which <code>post types</code> the template should be available for use on. For example, the Page (Large Header) template is limited only to pages whereas the Blank template is made available for use as the template for both posts and pages.</p>



<p>Similarly template parts can be defined as intended for use as a header or footer in <code>theme.json</code>.</p>



<p>Some specifics about the templates in Twenty Twenty-Two:</p>



<ul><li><strong>404</strong> uses the header and footer parts, along with a hidden pattern called hidden-404, which cannot be selected inside the Patterns selector;</li><li><strong>archive</strong>, is using the Query block just like the home and index templates uses it. The difference between the three is that home has a bigger header than index, and archive has an additional block indicating that the user is browsing the post archives;</li><li><strong>page and single</strong>, that have some variations (large header, no separators) but their purpose is to display a page or a single post. The difference between the two is that the page template does not display metadata, such as the date, author and terms;</li><li>There is also a <strong>blank template</strong> so one could create a page or post from scratch. It only has a post content block. This template allows users to define a single-page website. <a href="https://2022.wordpress.net/film/">Here’s an example</a> from the demo that uses it.</li></ul>



<p>The template parts are pretty basic:</p>



<ul><li><strong>footer,</strong> which is basically a Group block with padding and a theme pattern (footer-default) inside;</li><li><strong>header</strong>, with the Site Logo and Site Title blocks, and a Navigation block to the right;</li><li><strong>header-small-dark</strong> and <strong>header-large-dark</strong>, that include the header template part — a template part that uses a template part 🤯 — at the top and hidden-bird and hidden-heading-and-bird theme patterns, respectively.</li></ul>



<p><strong>Kjell Reigstad</strong>, designer of the Twenty-Twenty-Two theme explained the hidden-heading-and-bird pattern a bit more: <em>“This is a little trick we used to ensure that changes the user makes to the main header and navigation stay in sync throughout their entire site. I don’t think most other themes will need to do this, but it works well for Twenty Twenty-Two.”</em></p>



<h2 id="how-block-and-patterns-in-general-work"><strong>How block (and patterns in general) work</strong></h2>



<p>Twenty-Twenty-Two has 66 block patterns, so I’m not going to describe them here. Instead, let’s see <em>how</em> they work.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Inside <code><a href="https://github.com/WordPress/twentytwentytwo/blob/trunk/inc/block-patterns.php">inc/block-patterns.php</a></code>, Twenty-Twenty-Two registers block pattern categories using the <code>register_block_pattern_category</code> function. That function accepts an associative array with the slug of the category, along with its name. </p>



<img />



<p>After that, it registers each block pattern by calling <code>register_block_pattern</code>, passing the slug of the pattern and another associative array with a few properties:</p>



<ul><li>title;</li><li>categories (at least one of the defined above, except if it’s a hidden pattern);</li><li>blockTypes, that declare in what kind of blocks I can insert this pattern to;</li><li>content of the pattern, formed of one or more blocks.</li></ul>



<p>All that is wrapped into a function that is called after the init action. </p>



<p>One thing that caught my attention is that the contents of the pattern, essentially HTML, is defined inside the PHP file instead of a pure HTML file. I believe that’s for dynamic content (e.g. translations, dynamic URLs). There are <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/36751">plans to change how that works</a> and make it a better developer experience, though! Stay tuned. </p>



<p><em>The <a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/the-wordpress-block-patterns-resource-list/"><strong>WordPress Block Patterns Resource List</strong></a> has a lot more information about Block Patterns. </em></p>



<h2 id="putting-it-all-together"><strong>Putting it all together</strong></h2>



<p>Next Gutenberg kicks in. It is the glue that applies the theme definitions, its overrides, and injects the blocks into the used templates.</p>



<p>When you override a global style that is defined in theme.json or by WordPress core, a new post with the <code>wp_global_styles</code> type is created. The differences from the original global styles are&nbsp;saved as a custom post type. Here’s what happens when you modify global typography settings:</p>



<p class="has-secondary-color has-light-background-background-color has-text-color has-background has-normal-font-size">MariaDB [wordpress]&gt; <br /><code>select post_content </code><br /><code>from wp_posts </code><br /><code>where post_type = 'wp_global_styles';</code></p>



<table><thead><tr><th>post_content&nbsp;</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>{&#8220;styles&#8221;:{&#8220;typography&#8221;:{&#8220;fontSize&#8221;:&#8221;var:preset|font-size|huge&#8221;}},&#8221;isGlobalStylesUserThemeJSON&#8221;:true,&#8221;version&#8221;:2} </td></tr></tbody></table>Result set for above SQL statement



<p>Blocks are defined as HTML comments, such as:</p>


<pre class="wp-block-code"><div><code class="hljs language-htmlbars shcb-code-table shcb-line-numbers"><span class="shcb-loc"><span><span class="xml"><span class="hljs-comment">&lt;!-- wp:spacer {"height":112} --&gt;</span></span>
</span></span><span class="shcb-loc"><span><span class="xml"><span class="hljs-tag">&lt;<span class="hljs-name">div</span> <span class="hljs-attr">style</span>=<span class="hljs-string">"height:112px"</span> <span class="hljs-attr">aria-hidden</span>=<span class="hljs-string">"true"</span> <span class="hljs-attr">class</span>=<span class="hljs-string">"wp-block-spacer"</span>&gt;</span><span class="hljs-tag">&lt;/<span class="hljs-name">div</span>&gt;</span></span>
</span></span><span class="shcb-loc"><span><span class="xml"><span class="hljs-tag"><span class="hljs-tag"><span class="hljs-comment">&lt;!-- /wp:spacer --&gt;</span></span></span></span>
</span></span></code></div><small class="shcb-language" id="shcb-language-8"><span class="shcb-language__label">Code language:</span> <span class="shcb-language__name">HTMLBars</span> <span class="shcb-language__paren">(</span><span class="shcb-language__slug">htmlbars</span><span class="shcb-language__paren">)</span></small></pre>


<p>The first part defines the block name, and the object inside the comment stands for the block properties. From there, you can add, modify, and delete blocks inside the editor. The changes are saved within the chosen template. The contents that are “wrapped” by comments are the actual markup bits that are rendered on the live site. Of course, those comments are filtered away before the content hits the site&#8217;s front end.</p>



<p>When modifying the contents of a template (i.e. adding, removing, or modifying blocks), you get a full copy of the template as a new post with the wp_template type, along with all your changes. When changes are cleared, meaning the template is reverted to its original form, the post is deleted and the original template is used instead.</p>



<p>When a user modifies a block that also touches a WordPress General Setting options, like the for “Site Title” block, the site_title option is also updated in the options table.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>



<div><div class="wp-block-group__inner-container">
<p>MariaDB [wordpress]&gt; <br /><code>SELECT option_value </code><br /><code>FROM wp_options </code><br /><code>WHERE option_name = 'blogname';</code></p>
</div></div>



<table><thead><tr><th>option_value &nbsp; </th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>This is changed from the editor!</td></tr></tbody></table>



<p>The same thing happens for posts. When you change the contents of a Post Title block, the post itself is changed. Imagine the following post, inside the site editor:</p>



<img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/meKd3Z9QoH3Q8HeKepMyLqRfaXOsPKY-nNiyTCtPoJkXgw8bTn5nhopwcoY6yt4qFmR6zDXyP5FLb2aN1gChFRKS2SDzIL6j4MyVw8wnt4bARx4AVyV6sEiBrWq-pPkJBL-FZgin" alt="" />



<p>When you change “Hey there!” to “Something else”, that’s what you would get inside the tables:</p>



<div><div class="wp-block-group__inner-container">
<p>MariaDB [wordpress]&gt; <br /><code>SELECT post_title <br />FROM wp_posts <br />WHERE post_type = 'post';</code></p>
</div></div>



<table><thead><tr><th>post_title</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Something else</td></tr></tbody></table>



<p>Pretty magical ✨ </p>



<p><em>On a side note: I’m uncertain whether it is a good option to let such changes happen. People might mistakenly assume that this is part of the template and not part of the post itsel</em>f.</p>



<p>After the changes are saved and the site looks how the user wants, it’s rendering time!</p>



<p>The following paragraphs are an oversimplification of the process, but they should give you a nice overview.</p>



<p>First thing, the <code>gutenberg_maybe_inline_styles()</code> function is enqueued within <code>wp_head</code> and <code>wp_footer</code> actions so that styles are injected. This is where most of the styling, including block styles, global styles, and their overrides are applied. Something similar happens for scripts and external stylesheets. Note that, at this moment, CSS is not yet sent to the browser.</p>



<p>Then, <code>gutenberg_add_template_loader_filters</code> hooks into the <code>wp_loaded</code> action. Inside that function, a for-loop enqueues a filter that runs for every possible template:</p>



<p class="has-border-background-color has-background"><code>add_filter( str_replace( '-', '', $template_type ) . '_template', 'gutenberg_override_query_template', 20, 3 );</code></p>



<p>Note how it calls <code>gutenberg_override_query_template</code> as a target. Inside it, the corresponding template for the page the user is requesting is resolved and the <code>template-canvas.php</code> file is returned as the result of the filter. That file is the final bit:</p>


<pre class="wp-block-code"><div><code class="hljs language-php shcb-code-table shcb-line-numbers"><span class="shcb-loc"><span><span class="hljs-meta">&lt;?php</span> $template_html = gutenberg_get_the_template_html();<span class="hljs-meta">?&gt;</span>
</span></span><span class="shcb-loc"><span>&lt;!DOCTYPE html&gt;
</span></span><span class="shcb-loc"><span>&lt;html <span class="hljs-meta">&lt;?php</span> language_attributes(); <span class="hljs-meta">?&gt;</span>&gt;
</span></span><span class="shcb-loc"><span>    &lt;head&gt;
</span></span><span class="shcb-loc"><span>        &lt;meta charset=<span class="hljs-string">"&lt;?php bloginfo( 'charset' ); ?&gt;"</span> /&gt;    
</span></span><span class="shcb-loc"><span>        <span class="hljs-meta">&lt;?php</span> wp_head(); <span class="hljs-meta">?&gt;</span>
</span></span><span class="shcb-loc"><span>    &lt;/head&gt; 
</span></span><span class="shcb-loc"><span>    &lt;body <span class="hljs-meta">&lt;?php</span> body_class(); <span class="hljs-meta">?&gt;</span>&gt;
</span></span><span class="shcb-loc"><span>        <span class="hljs-meta">&lt;?php</span> wp_body_open(); <span class="hljs-meta">?&gt;</span> 
</span></span><span class="shcb-loc"><span>        <span class="hljs-meta">&lt;?php</span> <span class="hljs-keyword">echo</span> $template_html; <span class="hljs-meta">?&gt;</span> 
</span></span><span class="shcb-loc"><span>        <span class="hljs-meta">&lt;?php</span> wp_footer(); <span class="hljs-meta">?&gt;</span>
</span></span><span class="shcb-loc"><span>    &lt;/body&gt;
</span></span><span class="shcb-loc"><span>&lt;/html&gt;
</span></span></code></div><small class="shcb-language" id="shcb-language-9"><span class="shcb-language__label">Code language:</span> <span class="shcb-language__name">PHP</span> <span class="shcb-language__paren">(</span><span class="shcb-language__slug">php</span><span class="shcb-language__paren">)</span></small></pre>


<p>As shown inside the code, it calls <code>gutenberg_get_the_template_html</code>. That function does a few things, but most importantly:</p>



<ol><li><code>do_blocks</code>, which grabs all blocks, parses them and return their content;</li><li><code>wptexturize</code>`, to escape all special characters into their safe HTML entities.</li></ol>



<p>And that’s it! <code>gutenberg_get_the_template_html</code>‘s result gets echoed inside the &lt;body&gt; tag, wp_head and wp_footer functions render their respective content and voilà: your page gets loaded!</p>



<p>That’s how FSE with Gutenberg works, in an oversimplified way in January 2022.</p>



<h2 id="resources">Resources</h2>



<ul><li><a href="https://kinsta.com/blog/twenty-twenty-two-theme/">A Deep Dive into Twenty Twenty-Two and WordPress Block Themes</a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/01/07/theme-focused-changes-and-filters-in-wordpress-5-9/">Theme-focused changes and filters in WordPress 5.9</a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/01/07/state-of-the-customizer-with-block-themes-in-wordpress-5-9/">State of the Customizer with block themes in WordPress 5.9</a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/01/04/block-themes-a-new-way-to-build-themes-in-wordpress-5-9/">Block themes, a new way to build themes in WordPress 5.9</a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/01/08/updates-for-settings-styles-and-theme-json/">Updates for Settings, Styles, and theme.json</a></li><li><a href="https://fluffyandflakey.blog/2017/09/04/gutenberg-posts-arent-html/">Gutenberg Aren&#8217;t HTML by Dennis Snell</a> </li></ul>



<p><em>Big Thank you to Daisy Olsen, Kjell Reigstad, and Jeff Ong for their review of this post. </em>&nbsp;</p>



<p></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, 05 Feb 2022 02:05:00 +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:19:"Luis Felipe Zaguini";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:111:"WPTavern: CMS and E-Commerce Churn Data Shows WordPress Maintaining Market Lead, Shopify Gaining on 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:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=129527";s: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:265:"https://wptavern.com/cms-and-e-commerce-churn-data-shows-wordpress-maintaining-market-lead-shopify-gaining-on-woocommerce?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=cms-and-e-commerce-churn-data-shows-wordpress-maintaining-market-lead-shopify-gaining-on-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:3252:"<p>Rick Viscomi, one of the maintainers of the HTTP Archive, <a href="https://twitter.com/rick_viscomi/status/1486951830328389635">tweeted</a> some interesting data from a report he is working on that tracks churn for different JavaScript frameworks and CMS&#8217;s over a specified period of time. He detected  the changes using the open source <a href="https://www.wappalyzer.com/">Wappalyzer</a> project. The first graph he shared shows shows data from 8 million websites, 12 months apart for any that changed tech stacks, visualizing the movement to/from frameworks. </p>



<p>A large chunk of the 32K+ sites that migrated to React came from Handlebars.js, Mustache, and Ember.js.</p>



<div>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr"><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/13.1.0/72x72/1f440.png" alt="👀" class="wp-smiley" /> Working on a new thing with <a href="https://twitter.com/HTTPArchive?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@HTTPArchive</a> data.<br /><br />Checking 8M websites 12 months apart for any that switched tech stacks and visualizing where they're going to/from.<br /><br />React ate every other JS framework's lunch on over 32k sites. Mostly from Handlebars.<br /><br />(thread) <a href="https://t.co/iuKpzGcFs9">pic.twitter.com/iuKpzGcFs9</a></p>&mdash; Rick Viscomi (@rick_viscomi) <a href="https://twitter.com/rick_viscomi/status/1486951830328389635?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 28, 2022</a></blockquote>
</div>



<p>As the market leader, WordPress was also the recipient of quite a bit of churn from other CMS&#8217;s, primarily Drupal and Joomla, followed by Wix, Squarespace, and TYPO3. Viscomi found that WordPress picked off 9K sites from competitors but also lost ground to other CMS&#8217;s. </p>



<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s leaking quite a bit to other CMSs too, but not as much as it&#8217;s taking in,&#8221; he said.</p>



<div><img /><a href="https://twitter.com/rick_viscomi/status/1486951834732408832">CMS churn data</a> from Rick Viscomi</div>



<p>Where are sites migrating to away from WordPress? They are primarily going to Drupal, Wix, and Squarespace, followed by a wide array of smaller, less popular, but growing, website builders like Duda and Tilda. Viscomi found that WordPress is involved in 79% of these migrations, either being replaced or replacing another CMS.</p>



<p>Tracking e-commerce platform churn, Viscomi said, &#8220;WooCommerce is more or less breaking even in the trades, but Shopify is gaining a lot of ground, especially from WooCommerce.&#8221; The e-commerce space is much more competitive with Shopify right on heels of WooCommerce. </p>




<img />



<img />
<a href="https://twitter.com/rick_viscomi/status/1486951843825688580">E-commerce churn data</a> from Rick Viscomi



<p>It would be interesting to get an overview of the most popular sites that moved to a new platform and dig in deeper on why their engineering teams decided to make the move.</p>



<p>Viscomi said his data ignores any technologies that were not detectable in January 2021, as well as any site that removed a technology without a replacement from the same category. He plans to share all of the queries with an interactive version of the charts in an upcoming post on the HTTP Archive.</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, 04 Feb 2022 23:13:26 +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:13:"Sarah Gooding";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:59:"WordPress.org blog: The Month in WordPress – January 2022";s: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=12180";s: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/2022/02/the-month-in-wordpress-january-2022/";s: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:12504:"<p>There are a few significant moments in the history of the WordPress project. January 2022 is one of them, with the release of WordPress 5.9! But that’s not all. Read on to learn more about the latest updates and achievements from the community.</p>



<hr class="wp-block-separator" />



<h2 id="wordpress-5-9-josephine-is-here">WordPress 5.9 Joséphine is here</h2>



<p class="has-text-align-center"><img width="405" height="274" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/Iq09sZdu0Npal6XWBF6Bbfqb8AWizWVPCUtCqxgU4T-1E3uWM1bmZ7cDEHA0RJlEaFTPN5jAAXwHfx-x52rIC2Gac55j96fhUSdFlHyEmFtooRM9_NmuLyRJ-_ujotnKAAYzBEBh" /></p>



<p>Meet <a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2022/01/josephine/">WordPress 5.9 Joséphine</a>. Named in honor of the acclaimed jazz singer, Joséphine Baker, this is one of the much-awaited releases. Version 5.9 brings full site editing to WordPress, among other exciting updates!<strong> </strong><a href="https://wordpress.org/download/"><strong>Download WordPress 5.9</strong></a><strong> and try the new features! </strong><br /><br />Check out the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/01/10/wordpress-5-9-field-guide/">WordPress 5.9 Field Guide</a> to learn more. Lastly, everyone’s invited to participate in a retrospective of the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/01/27/wordpress-5-9-simone-retrospective/">WordPress 5.9 Joséphine</a> release!</p>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote has-text-align-center"><p><strong>Are you interested in contributing to WordPress core?</strong> Join the <a href="https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C02RQBWTW">#core</a> channel, follow the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/">Core Team blog</a>, and check out the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/">team handbook</a>. Also, don&#8217;t miss the Core Team’s weekly developer chat on Wednesdays at <a href="https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?hour=20&min=00&sec=0">8 PM</a> UTC.</p></blockquote>



<h2 id="gutenberg-releases-versions-12-3-12-4-and-12-5-are-here">Gutenberg releases: Versions 12.3, 12.4, and 12.5 are here</h2>



<p>The Core Team launched three new versions of Gutenberg since last month’s edition of the Month in WordPress.</p>



<ul><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/02/03/whats-new-in-gutenberg-12-5-february-2nd/">Gutenberg 12.5</a> brings global styles variations and Query Loop block enhancements, along with the Code Editor view to the Side Editor. Moreover, inserting new buttons is now easier than ever!</li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/01/19/whats-new-in-gutenberg-12-4-19-january/">Gutenberg 12.4</a> was released on January 19, 2022. This version includes accessibility improvements, suggestions for assigning categories, keyboard shortcuts for the Site Editor, and more.&nbsp;</li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/01/05/whats-new-in-gutenberg-12-3-5-january/">Gutenberg 12.3</a> was released on January 5, 2022. This release brings new blocks, like the Author Name, Comments Next Page, and Comments Previous Page blocks, and many other cool updates!</li></ul>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote has-text-align-center"><p><strong>Want to get involved in developing Gutenberg? </strong>Follow <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/">the Core Team blog</a>, contribute to Gutenberg on <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/">GitHub</a>, and join the <a href="https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C02QB2JS7">#core-editor</a> channel in the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/chat/">Make WordPress Slack</a>. Follow the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/tag/gutenberg-new/">#gutenberg-new</a> tag for details on the latest updates.</p></blockquote>



<h2 id="team-updates-proposals-announcements-and-more-for-2022">Team updates: Proposals, announcements, and more for 2022</h2>



<ul><li>Executive Director Josepha Haden<a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/01/27/proposal-2022-major-release-timing/"> shared a proposal</a> on 2022 major release timing. </li><li>In the <a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2022/02/episode-24-three-goals-in-2022/">latest episode of WP Briefing</a>, Josepha Haden Comphosy reviews the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/updates/2022/01/21/our-three-big-ideas-for-2022/">three major areas of focus</a> for the WordPress project in 2022. She also shared the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/project/2022/01/21/big-picture-goals-2022/">big-picture goals for 2022</a>.</li><li>The Core Team <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/01/31/ensuring-proper-attribution-for-contributions-to-wordpress-on-github/">made a proposal</a> regarding proper attributions for contributions to WordPress on GitHub. Although the proposal has since then been withdrawn, it&#8217;s still a discussion and comments are welcome.</li><li>Check out the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/01/26/preliminary-roadmap-for-6-0/">preliminary roadmap</a> for WordPress 6.0 (Gutenberg Phase Two). </li><li>Core Team members <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/01/26/proposed-improvements-to-the-core-editor-chat-agenda-and-format/">proposed improvements</a> to the Core Editor chat agenda and format. </li><li>The Accessibility Team made some <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/accessibility/2022/01/22/accessibility-team-meeting-notes-january-21-2022/">major goal proposals for WordPress 6.0</a>.</li><li>The Polyglots Team shared a proposal for a <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots/2022/02/01/proposal-milestone-template-for-polyglots-locale-teams/">milestone template for polyglots locale teams</a>.</li><li>The <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots/2022/01/20/polyglots-monthly-newsletter-january-2022/">January 2022 edition</a> of the Polyglots monthly newsletter is out!</li><li>The Community Team shared an <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/community/2022/02/03/open-invitation-diverse-speaker-training-group-wpdiversity-zoom-call/">open invitation for the Diverse Speaker Training group</a> Zoom call.</li><li>Although the WordPress Photo Directory hasn’t fully launched yet, you can now <a href="https://wordpress.org/photos/submit/">submit your images</a>. You can also contribute in other ways, as there’s <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/meta/2022/01/13/wordpress-photo-directory-call-for-volunteers/">currently a call for volunteers</a>.</li><li>Openverse has now a redesigned user interface and includes support for audio files. Check out <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/openverse/2022/01/25/everything-you-need-to-know-about-openverse-and-the-wordpress-photo-directory/">this post</a> to learn what&#8217;s new.</li><li>The Community Team will be hosting <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/community/2022/02/02/community-team-goals-2022-open-discussion-sessions/">open discussion sessions</a> to collaborate on its goals for 2022. </li><li>The January 2022 edition of the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/community/2022/01/14/meetup-organizer-newsletter-january-2022/">Meetup Organizer Newsletter</a> was published.</li><li>The Community Team shared a <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/community/2022/01/10/proposal-mandatory-safety-measures-for-in-person-wordpress-events-in-2022/">proposal for mandatory safety measures</a> for in-person WordPress events taking place this year.</li><li>The Training Team published its <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/training/2022/02/02/february-2022-team-sprint/">February 2022 Team Sprint</a>.</li></ul>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote has-text-align-center"><p><strong>Take the course on Learn WordPress to </strong><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/course/simple-site-design-with-full-site-editing/"><strong>learn about the full site editing features</strong></a><strong> in WordPress 5.9!&nbsp; Also, help spread the word about </strong><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/social-learning/"><strong>social learning spaces</strong></a><strong> on </strong><a href="https://twitter.com/WordPress/status/1487180438347128836"><strong>Twitter</strong></a><strong>!</strong></p></blockquote>



<h2 id="feedback-testing-requests-share-your-thoughts-on-wordpress-5-9-josephine">Feedback/Testing requests: Share your thoughts on WordPress 5.9 Joséphine</h2>



<ul><li>There’s currently a call for testing <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/mobile/2022/01/27/call-for-testing-wordpress-for-android-19-1/">WordPress for Android 19.1</a> and <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/mobile/2022/01/24/call-for-testing-wordpress-for-ios-19-1/">iOS 19.1</a>, along with <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/mobile/2022/01/10/call-for-testing-wordpress-for-android-19-0/">Android 19.0</a> and iOS 19.0.</li></ul>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote has-text-align-center"><p><a href="https://forms.gle/Hf7E2JJokfnNLprG7"><strong>Share your feedback</strong></a><strong> on the release of WordPress 5.9 Joséphine.</strong></p></blockquote>



<h2 id="wordcamp-europe-2022-wants-volunteers-photographers-and-media-partners">WordCamp Europe 2022 wants volunteers, photographers and media partners</h2>



<ul><li>WordCamp Birmingham, Alabama has been postponed until April or May.</li><li>The WordPress Foundation <a href="https://wordpressfoundation.org/news/2022/what-is-the-wordpress-foundation-and-why-does-it-exist/">published a post</a> explaining more about the nonprofit’s mission and why it exists.</li><li>Don’t miss the following upcoming WordCamps: <ul><li><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/13.1.0/72x72/1f1e8-1f1ff.png" alt="🇨🇿" class="wp-smiley" /> <a href="https://prague.wordcamp.org/2022/">WordCamp Prague</a>, Switzerland on February  26, 2022 (online)</li><li><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/13.1.0/72x72/1f1e8-1f1ed.png" alt="🇨🇭" class="wp-smiley" /><a href="https://geneve.wordcamp.org/2022/"> WordCamp Genève</a>, Switzerland on April 9, 2022 (in person)</li><li><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/13.1.0/72x72/1f1ec-1f1f7.png" alt="🇬🇷" class="wp-smiley" /> <a href="https://central.wordcamp.org/wordcamps/wordcamp-athens-attica-greece-2022/">WordCamp Athens</a>, Greece between April 9 and 10, 2022 (in person)</li><li><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/13.1.0/72x72/1f1e6-1f1f9.png" alt="🇦🇹" class="wp-smiley" /> <a href="https://vienna.wordcamp.org/2022/">WordCamp Vienna</a>, Austria from April 23 to 24, 2022 (in person)</li><li><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/13.1.0/72x72/1f1ea-1f1fa.png" alt="🇪🇺" class="wp-smiley" /> <a href="https://europe.wordcamp.org/2022/">WordCamp Europe</a> in Porto, Portugal from June 2 to 4, 2022 (in person)</li><li><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/13.1.0/72x72/1f1fa-1f1f8.png" alt="🇺🇸" class="wp-smiley" /> <a href="https://us.wordcamp.org/2022/">WordCamp US</a> in San Diego, CA USA from September 9-11, 2022 (in person)</li></ul></li></ul>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote has-text-align-center"><p><strong>WordCamp Europe 2022 opened a new call for </strong><a href="https://europe.wordcamp.org/2022/join-the-wceu-volunteers-team/"><strong>volunteers</strong></a><strong>, </strong><a href="https://europe.wordcamp.org/2022/capture-wceu-on-camera/"><strong>photographers</strong></a><strong>, and </strong><a href="https://europe.wordcamp.org/2022/join-us-as-a-media-partner/"><strong>media partners</strong></a><strong>!</strong></p></blockquote>



<hr class="wp-block-separator" />



<p><strong><em>Have a story that we could include in the next ‘Month in WordPress’ post? Let us know by filling out </em></strong><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/community/month-in-wordpress-submissions/"><strong><em>this form</em></strong></a><strong><em>.</em></strong></p>



<p><em>The following folks contributed to January 2022’s Month in WordPress: </em><a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/anjanavasan/" class="mention"><span class="mentions-prefix">@</span>anjanavasan</a><em> </em><a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/harishanker/" class="mention"><span class="mentions-prefix">@</span>harishanker</a><em> </em><a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/rmartinezduque/" class="mention"><span class="mentions-prefix">@</span>rmartinezduque</a><em> </em><a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/lmurillom/">@lmurillom</a> <em><a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/webcommsat/">@webcommsat</a> and <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/nalininonstopnewsuk/">@nalininonstopnewsuk</a></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:"Fri, 04 Feb 2022 19:41:03 +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:"Anjana Vasan";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:77:"WordPress Foundation: What is the WordPress Foundation and Why Does it Exist?";s: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:41:"https://wordpressfoundation.org/?p=217645";s: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:97:"https://wordpressfoundation.org/news/2022/what-is-the-wordpress-foundation-and-why-does-it-exist/";s: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:3006:"<p>The WordPress Foundation is a non-profit organization with the mission to democratize publishing through open source, General Public License (GPL) software. Established in January 2010, the Foundation strives to ensure free access, in perpetuity, to the software projects we support.</p>



<p>The WordPress Foundation has a <a href="https://milestonesbook.wordpress.com/2015/11/25/the-wordpress-foundation/">unique history</a>. While it’s true that the organization is eponymously named, our work extends beyond the WordPress project. In this article, we’ll cover just that: what the WordPress Foundation stands for and why our mission matters.</p>



<h2 id="the-heart-of-the-matter-open-source">The heart of the matter: open source</h2>



<p>“If you believe (as I do) that software constitutes at once some of the core tools and core rules for the future of how human beings work together to create wealth, beauty, new ideas, and solutions to problems, then understanding how open source can change those processes is very important,” says Steven Weber in <em>The Success of Open Source</em>.</p>



<p>Imagine if you couldn’t use the various software that is fundamental to technology right now, be it WordPress, Linux, Android, or something else. Many of the tools we use may not be as commonly available without open source, as intellectual property rights could restrict that access.</p>



<p>But open source challenges the idea of property, as Weber explains in his book:</p>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-style-plain"><p>“The conventional notion of property is, of course, the right to exclude you from using something that belongs to me. Property in open source is configured fundamentally around the right to distribute, not the right to exclude. If that sentence feels awkward on first reading, that is a testimony to just how deeply embedded in our intuitions and institutions the exclusion view of property really is.”</p></blockquote>



<p>At its core, open source is based on the power of community and collaboration. By bringing people together, these projects leverage the combined perspectives and knowledge to create something more remarkable—and available to <em>everyone</em>—than what we can achieve individually. </p>



<p>The WordPress Foundation is here to ensure that open source software is part of the future. Human beings may have limited life spans, but our efforts don’t have to. Our organization wants to ensure that the source code for projects like WordPress will survive beyond the current contributor base, so we may create a stable web publishing platform for generations to come.</p>



<div class="wp-container-6202ba3463104 wp-block-buttons">
<div class="wp-block-button"><a class="wp-block-button__link" href="https://wordpressfoundation.org/donate/"><strong>If you want a future where open source exists, you can help. </strong><strong>Donate</strong><strong> to the WordPress Foundation.</strong></a></div>
</div>



<p></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, 04 Feb 2022 17:07:20 +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:"Anjana Vasan";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:115:"WPTavern: WordPress Ramps Up Social Learning Events on Full Site Editing, Project Aims for 500 Block Themes in 2022";s: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:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=129465";s: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:273:"https://wptavern.com/wordpress-ramps-up-social-learning-events-on-full-site-editing-project-aims-for-500-block-themes-in-2022?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=wordpress-ramps-up-social-learning-events-on-full-site-editing-project-aims-for-500-block-themes-in-2022";s: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:3567:"<p>WordPress is hosting a live online event tomorrow called &#8220;<a href="https://www.meetup.com/wordpress-social-learning/events/283228078/">Beginner&#8217;s Guide to Full Site Editing</a>.&#8221; Within three minutes of WordPress&#8217; Twitter account <a href="https://twitter.com/WordPress/status/1489346729933737986">tweeting</a> about it, all 70 spaces were booked and the waiting list kicked in. </p>



<p>As part of the project&#8217;s <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/project/2022/01/21/big-picture-goals-2022/">big picture goals for 2022</a>, WordPress will be ramping up community efforts to help site builders learn how to use open source tools to get their sites up and running. One aspect of that goal involves publishing more educational content to <a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/">learn.wordpress.org</a>. Another part of that effort is hosting virtual social learning spaces through the project&#8217;s meetup group.</p>



<p>WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy identified specific metrics the community team is aiming for in 2022:</p>



<ol><li>Ship LearnWP learning opportunities (1 workshop/week, 6 courses/year)</li><li>Increase the number of social learning spaces (4 SLSs/week)</li><li>Block theme contribution drive (500 block themes in the repo).</li></ol>



<p>WordPress.org currently has <a href="https://wordpress.org/themes/tags/full-site-editing/">47 block themes</a> that support FSE and they continue to trickle into the official directory. <a href="https://wptavern.com/what-arent-more-wordpress-theme-authors-creating-block-themes">There doesn&#8217;t seem to be a mad rush to create block themes</a>, but this could be due to theme authors&#8217; lack of skills and reluctance to give up established, more efficient workflows. </p>



<p>During the 2021 State of the Word, Matt Mullenweg said he wanted the number of available block themes to be at 5,000. This figure seemed more aspirational after he pared it down to &#8220;300 or ideally 3,000 of these block themes” before the project enters the Collaboration phase.</p>



<p>Getting WordPress users up to speed with FSE goes hand-in-hand with growing a larger collection of free block themes. WordPress&#8217; Facebook and Twitter accounts have been more active than in previous years, with marketing posts advertising new features with images and videos. It is helping familiarize more people with the major changes introduced in 5.9.</p>



<p>Based on the response to tomorrow&#8217;s event, there seems to be a demand for beginner&#8217;s FSE content. The session will cover block themes vs. theme blocks, styles, block patterns, and templates/template parts. More than 40 people are still waiting for spots. (When spots open up people on the waiting list get a place automatically.) This is a session that would benefit from being run multiple times to accommodate the large number of people wanting to learn  the basics of how to use FSE.</p>



<p>If you want to learn more about creating block themes, you don&#8217;t have to wait for a WordCamp to get an interactive walkthrough. The &#8220;Zero to Block Theme&#8221; series is covering the basics for theme developers. It continues on with a <a href="https://www.meetup.com/wordpress-social-learning/events/283557865/">new session on Friday</a> (with spots still available) and previously recorded sessions linked in the notes. This is part of WordPress&#8217; big picture goals for the ecosystem in 2022, which prioritize providing tools and training for building block themes.</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, 04 Feb 2022 02:25:31 +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:13:"Sarah Gooding";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:71:"WPTavern: FSE Program: The Media Experience and Its Future in WordPress";s: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:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=129460";s: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:185:"https://wptavern.com/fse-program-the-media-experience-and-its-future-in-wordpress?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=fse-program-the-media-experience-and-its-future-in-wordpress";s: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:6187:"<p class="has-drop-cap">The FSE Outreach Program is back with another round of testing. Anne McCarthy asks for volunteers to test and <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/test/2022/02/02/fse-program-exploration-all-things-media/">provide feedback on media-related features in WordPress</a>. Anyone is welcome to contribute, and feedback is open until February 23.</p>



<p>This round of the program includes two tasks. The first has users explore today&#8217;s media-related experience. The second asks what they would like to see in the future.</p>



<p>&#8220;Like last time, the focus of this exploration is to think with a more long term, &#8216;wishful thinking&#8217; perspective in order to gather useful insights that will help inform the design of media related experiences going forward,&#8221; wrote McCarthy in the announcement.</p>



<p>As always, I dove right in with the hope that any discovery would make its way upstream to help mold the future experience.</p>



<h2 id="task-1-exploring-the-possibilities">Task #1: Exploring the Possibilities</h2>



<p>I altered this task slightly. The call for testing asks that volunteers explore what is currently possible with the core media-related blocks. However, I work with these every day, so I know most of the ins and outs of the system.</p>



<p>Instead, I explored the <a href="https://wordpress.org/photos/">WordPress photo directory</a> &#8212; my favorite place on the internet right now &#8212; and see what new images have landed. I visit Pexels, Pixabay, and Unsplash far less often these days, and I am sure that I can do away with them altogether as the directory gets more CC0-licensed media.</p>



<p>I downloaded a <a href="https://wordpress.org/photos/photo/4061fad192/">picture of a giraffe</a> by Marcus Burnette. Then, I attempted to add a couple of different Scotch-tape/Polaroid effects via custom block styles. The following is a screenshot of one of them:</p>



<img />&#8220;Scotch tape&#8221; effect via a custom block style.



<p>I am happy that I went off-path in this stage of the exploration. I learned a lot about the inner workings of blocks in the editor and that styling the <code>::after</code> pseudo-element is problematic. WordPress uses it to add a blue border around selected elements. So, I just wiped that out, at least for my custom styles. I am 100% sure that will come back to bite me at some point.</p>



<p>WordPress has come a long way in balancing the block-editing experience for users and allowing theme authors to style a WYSIWYG canvas. However, there will likely always be these edge cases where the two will be at odds.</p>



<p>Since I was already there tinkering around in the editor, I tested various combos of custom block styles and duotone filters:</p>



<img />Duotone filter used with custom block style.



<p>It is hard to remember that there was a time when this was impossible in WordPress.</p>



<h2 id="task-2-my-vision-for-media">Task #2: My Vision for Media</h2>



<p>The second task of the exploration calls for volunteers to think about the long-term picture. <em>What features do you want to see? How can the experience be improved?</em></p>



<p>Quickly moving up the ranks of my wish list is WordPress Photos integration. Now that the directory is nearing 1,000 images after less than two months into its soft launch, it is clear the community is backing the project. Finding images without ambiguous licensing terms goes hand in hand with WordPress&#8217;s vision of an open web. Users merely need easy access to them.</p>



<p>When laying out an idea for a theme design earlier this week, I realized how much I wanted to see more image filters. One of the patterns I was working on included a comic, watercolor-like background image. I grabbed a <a href="https://wordpress.org/photos/photo/7161f71a64/">photo by Patrick Boehner</a> &#8212; yes, once again, it was from WordPress photos. In a minute or so, I had imported it into <a href="https://www.gimp.org/">GIMP</a> and applied the &#8220;waterpixels&#8221; filter to it.</p>



<img />Applying a watercolor-like filter to image.



<p>There was a distinct style I was going for with the design, but users cannot easily recreate it from within WordPress. It may be possible to implement this filter via a custom block style, and I may very well attempt it if this particular theme idea ever comes to fruition.</p>



<p>However, I would like to see a range of filters available to users. If this is too much for core, perhaps a standard filter-registration system for developers might be in order. This is just me thinking out loud at the moment. I do not know what that system would look like, but it is on my mind. I have little doubt that some user out there is thinking the same.</p>



<p>The addition of existing block design controls would also help. Implementing the border options across the range of media-related blocks is low-hanging fruit. Captions should be a dedicated block with a range of typography and color controls. Padding and background color options for the <code>&lt;figure&gt;</code> wrapper around images would allow users to &#8220;frame&#8221; their photos:</p>



<img />Image block wrapper with padding and background color.



<p>Outside of the previous ideas, there is at least one obvious wish-list item. I want to use my post&#8217;s featured image in any image-related block. I have long requested the ability to drop them inside of a Cover, for example.</p>



<p>There are less-obvious ideas too. It may be time that we <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/27617">rethink the concept of a featured &#8220;image.&#8221;</a> In my previous life as a full-time theme designer, one of the scripts I had built and shaped over the years was a &#8220;media grabber.&#8221; Essentially, it allowed theme authors to get audio or video from the post content and display it in various places, such as alongside excerpts on the homepage.</p>



<p>There is no longer an easy way to use that PHP script in block-based HTML theme templates. It would require a third-party block plugin (none exist as far as I know) or a core feature.</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, 04 Feb 2022 01:39:26 +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:14:"Justin Tadlock";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:75:"Post Status: Post Status Excerpt (No. 44) — Small Wins With Small Plugins";s: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:61:"https://poststatus.com/?p=93133&preview=true&preview_id=93133";s: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:34:"https://poststatus.com/excerpt/44/";s: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:43428:"<p class="has-drop-cap">In this episode of Post Status Excerpt, David talks with <strong>Collins Agbonghama</strong>, the Founder of <strong>ProfilePress</strong> and the author of a few other WordPress plugins. Collins shares <a href="https://poststatus.slack.com/archives/C0413T6GD/p1641546394000700">what he called a &#8220;small&#8221; win in <strong>Post Status Slack</strong> early in January 2022</a>: he acquired a plugin (now <strong>LoginWP</strong>) for &#8220;5 figures&#8221; and was able to break even on a revamped, commercial &#8220;Pro&#8221; version after only four months. David and Collins talk about this accomplishment and consider how similar opportunities may exist for other WordPress entrepreneurs.</p>



<p><strong>Why This Is Important:</strong> Often you hear about large product acquisitions between relatively large companies in the WordPress space, but not so much the smaller ones — even though they can be just as impactful on people's livelihoods, especially for independent developers and freelancers.</p>







<p class="has-background">Every week <strong><a href="https://poststatus.com/podcast/the-excerpt/">Post Status Excerpt</a></strong> will brief you on important WordPress news — in about 15 minutes or less! Learn what's new in WordPress in a flash. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/13.1.0/72x72/26a1.png" alt="⚡" class="wp-smiley" /><br /><br />You can listen to <a href="https://poststatus.com/podcast/the-excerpt/">past episodes</a> of <strong>The Excerpt</strong>, <a href="https://poststatus.com/category/post-status-podcasts/">browse all our podcasts</a>, and don’t forget to subscribe on <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/1m3xwXbe0MG5BzFVPtB0A7">Spotify</a>, Amazon Music, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS8ySkU5c2M4UA">Google Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/post-status-draft-wordpress/id976403008">iTunes</a>, <a href="https://castro.fm/podcast/c53552c6-1ee0-4fc4-9de4-08ed6bf1ee4d">Castro</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/PostStatus">YouTube</a>, <a href="http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/krogsgard/post-status-draft-wordpress-podcast">Stitcher</a>, <a href="https://player.fm/series/wordpress-post-status-podcasts">Player.fm</a>, <a href="https://pca.st/05rR">Pocket Casts</a>, <a href="https://wordpress-post-status-draft-podcast.simplecast.com/">Simplecast</a>, or by <a href="https://feeds.simplecast.com/2JE9sc8P">RSS</a>. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/13.1.0/72x72/1f3a7.png" alt="🎧" class="wp-smiley" /></p>



<h3 id="h-mentioned-in-the-show"><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/13.1.0/72x72/1f517.png" alt="🔗" class="wp-smiley" /> Mentioned in the show:</h3>



<ul><li><a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2021/12/people-of-wordpress-collins-agbonghama/">People of WordPress: Collins Agbonghama</a></li><li><a href="https://heropress.com/essays/wordpress-saved-my-life/">WordPress Saved my Life</a></li><li><a href="https://thewpminute.com/interview-with-collins-agbonghama-of-profilepress-formerly-wp-user-avatar/">Interview with Collins Agbonghama of ProfilePress (Formerly WP User Avatar)</a></li><li><a href="https://twitter.com/w3guy">Collins Agbonghama</a></li><li><a href="https://twitter.com/dimensionmedia" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">David Bisset (Twitter)</a></li><li><a href="https://twitter.com/post_status" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Post Status (Twitter)</a></li></ul>



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<h3><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/13.1.0/72x72/1f64f.png" alt="🙏" class="wp-smiley" /> Sponsor: <a href="http://poststatus.com/wordfence">Wordfence</a></h3>



<p>Who can afford downtime, a black mark on their brand’s reputation, or the SEO impact of getting hacked? That’s why so many WordPress sites rely on the real-time protection provided by Wordfence Premium. Now, Wordfence Central offers Premium subscribers a powerful and efficient dashboard to manage security for all their sites from one central location. Try Wordfence today!</p>



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<h2 id="h-transcript"><strong>Transcript</strong></h2>



<p>EP 44</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong></p>



<p>So speaking with you today is a pleasure. Can you tell me, well, I am from I'm from the, as you probably already have figured out from our communication earlier.</p>



<p>I'm from the United States. I live in Florida. I'm from the east coast. Can you tell me where you are in terms of the current.</p>



<p><strong>Collins Agbonghama:</strong> I'm from Nigeria. I live in Nigeria, actually, Nigeria is in Africa. Then I live in new city called Legos. Yeah. I think it's actually one of the most popular city in Africa. Yeah.</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> Is there and how are the WordPress meetups in that area of Africa in Nigeria?</p>



<p><strong>Collins Agbonghama:</strong> Oh, my team, we have the biggest community or meetup in Africa. Yeah, we do have the, I think, a yearly WordPress conference or the meetup. So, although I haven't really attended the last one. They did. I wasn't really chance, I was actually out of the city.</p>



<p>So I could do that then. And it's supposed to do one last year, but because of the COVID situation, that got postponed. Other than that, we do . Little meetups here and there in NIGOs in Abuja and whatever, although I have not personally really attended them, but I do see the announcements on their post on stuff like that. And now local WordPress on slack.</p>



<p>We do have a WordPress slack community. Actually. I think it's utterly the biggest in Africa. Yeah. So.</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> Interviewed or spoke with Mary Jo a couple of weeks ago. I'm not sure if you know her. But okay, great. Cause it's a big continent and it's a big country, but I didn't want to make any assumptions, but we were talking about wpafrica.org.</p>



<p>And the websites she's put up in her hopes for getting WordCamp. Africa over there some day was a very encouraging I'll share that link in the show notes for people because I, where you're from and where she's from are close enough that I think it's worthwhile to make that connection to our readers.</p>



<p>Thank you for being a Post Status member. What I wanted to, what I wanted to talk to you about today was you shared what you called a small win last Friday on January 7th. And before we get into that, though, can you just briefly tell me I should say a little bit about your background, but how many WordPress plugins that you.</p>



<p>Currently, like have in your possession or what you like, give us an idea of what your WordPress plugin developer and business scope is. So we know that going in,</p>



<p><strong>Collins Agbonghama:</strong> so actually started off teaching WordPress on plug-in development on blogs, like on-site point. So to close on that invite, to. And then smashing magazine in that proceeded to digging my own WordPress and actually to solve my own problems, then accident accurate factors because I had wrote a tutorial on side point on our two DG custom log-in from then I had people, come into in comment session, stating the ones, the two out to be Tony to a plugin they could install on their WordPress site. That was our beautiful, perfect verse. And over the years I had this situation, actually use Sandy for Miami marketing as my immediate marketing software. For sure. One of the problems I encountered with it was Eastern morality wordPress posts are to good to the platform, you know, to craft the process in newsletter to central message bedbugs.</p>



<p>So I was not like hi by that auction mix, this whole process. Then I discovered the API has a the mentor or an end point for sending the may to a Butte, a plugin called sending of loopy. I try to Butte the plugin from start to finish in and realized I could actually extend this particular plugin to support or the email marketing platform. That was out in Optune was born too, which may love team who send</p>



<p>bob stone opt-in forms or lead capture forms that, you know, you put in your name you're email . And when you click on send it will synchronize to your platform, then another part of the plugin is actually for Sandy, automated newsletter. From your WordPress, as you form your WordPress sites to your email marketing subscribers, it's actually kind of similar to newsletter Bolivia.</p>



<p>We actually came into the market for newsletter glue and the likes that, or do we, we don't do just email automation. That can send you WordPress post stats on images. We also do lead capture. Yeah. So that's pretty much the two plug-ins and yeah. Yeah. And I think so our school beauty, a couple of adults.</p>



<p>During the early days of easy digital downloads, I did a couple of add-ons for them. And I think there was a time is the clothes or tech parts in plugins. And they decided to acquire one of my add-on in</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> what if your, one of your EDD plugins that you made was acquired?</p>



<p><strong>Collins Agbonghama:</strong> Yeah. Yes, it was not quite that.</p>



<p>I think it's called license free downloads. Yeah.</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> Who acquired? Also Pippin acquired a plugin that you wrote for EDD.</p>



<p><strong>Collins Agbonghama:</strong> Yeah. So they wanted all plugins to sit in their website to be unofficial. I don't know, created by them. I spoke them. And then, so they reached out to me and said, if I would be keen.</p>



<p>in selling the items to them to do takeover on the maintenance. And I said, yes. Yeah. Also you're smart. The option of deciding not to say to them on Austin, you're set on selling it. You're safe. Yeah. So that was that was one option, but I just paid for them to acquire it. Yeah. So I also made the plugin called nippy.</p>



<p>That's really sort of like an umbrella site for a couple of payment gateways. Then our selling on WooCommerce and payment gateways, like to check out stripes, paper, and the likes.But over time, actually phase out on the stripes Boone tree. And to check out because of lack of sales in living, Jocelyn WooCommerceus to check out blogging on the EDD paddle gateway plugin.</p>



<p>So. Two years ago. Yeah. Two years ago I sold the business to WP manage the JAG. The folks behind showing four months if you're in CRM and you are in support. So</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> you were quite busy.</p>



<p><strong>Collins Agbonghama:</strong> Yeah. So currently Monday. Oh, fabulous. logging WP, which was formerly known as Peter's Login Redirect</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> yeah. So yeah, log-in WP is actually what, we're, what we're here for today.</p>



<p>You made like, I, like I mentioned earlier, you made a post in Post Status slack business channel on the 7th of January, and I'll read it off here. So people don't have to go hunting for it. It says you're sharing a small win. You said three years ago, I acquired Peter's login. Redirect. Now renamed log-in WP plugin.</p>



<p>You said for five figures and continued to maintain it for free and then four months ago. So that was three years ago now, four months ago that would put this in September ish of last year. You revamped the code and UI and launched a pro version called LA. And then you gave the URL to logic, wp.com, which we'll put in the show notes then you're.</p>



<p>And then you said after that app, you're happy to announce that it broke even. And now in terms of now moving forward, looking for, to profit. And you had some doubts that it might either was the right investment at the time. And then you had a couple of great responses from the post status community in terms of.</p>



<p>I think the biggest surprise there was that you broke even on five figures in four months. I'm looking at the log-in wp.com right now. If no one is familiar with the plugin it, the tagline is on the website. It says redirect users to different URLs after they log in, log out and register.</p>



<p>And it has. According to your site here, it has over 100,000 active install. So I'm assuming that's the free version. Mostly. But the plugin offers log into redirection posts for, you know, after somebody has registered developer friendly placeholders, lots of integrations with commerce easy digital downloads profile press, and the list goes on and on.</p>



<p>So that's why we're here in a nutshell. And that's why I wanted to talk to you because that small win. First of all, I don't think it's that small. But it is a win and it's a wind that a lot of other people love to hear stories about. Yeah. And so I wanted to just pick your brain for a few minutes here, in terms of first of all, what attracted you to acquire this plugin three years ago in the first place?</p>



<p>Did you think three years ago that this was going to be something that you were going to be able to eventually turn into a revenue generator? Or did you just acquire the plugin just because you needed a sidebar.</p>



<p><strong>Collins Agbonghama:</strong> Actually we'll be, we've been getting requests of ideas and pro fact-based.</p>



<p>We get customers asking us. They want to conditionally redirect users after they login. Perhaps based on the user role or different criteria, but mostly based on the users look like we have a couple of users that using some lender, lenders as their lending management system, you know, which vendors there. Yeah. Their are teachers and their students too.</p>



<p>We get a lot of requests for asking if we could implement a feature that allows students to get you directed to a particular page. Then maybe the teachers get redirected to on that page, you know, based on the user</p>



<p>And I discovered the there's actually another plugin called Peter's Login Redirect that does exactly what I was actually going to build into WordPress. So I reach out to ??. And he was open to on our position. We agreed on the C and she probably plugged in to me. So I continue maintaining the plug-in with each time, we'll get a request for condition after logging, who will comment maybe direct.</p>



<p>And I think Alex had discovered community, which was even when we commented documentation or knowledge base on websites for people looking for without, so over time we started getting requests for, with devish on, based on the courses students have. Take, for example, if your students have completed or is enrolled into core state, they want to use us to be dedicated to a certain page.</p>



<p>And if they give me the ability to cause B once you, your user to do that, you'll be directed to another page to get us some of those feedbacks on improve plugging. Yeah. So I started off selling that in the feed function and I was actually surprised that. It was really new. I think it got quite a number of installs we got a, quite a number of SES forms, especially from the land. That's pretty much the gist of what we have. We have users using from one, our plugins that we integrate with bots, the users from negative blend that actually makes up a majority of the the customer base .</p>



<p>Yeah. So that's what I found.</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> Interesting too. So just to kind of summarize the story a little bit, if I understand this correctly you acquired. This was the free plugin you acquired from Peter, right? You, it was free at the time when you acquired it. So, but once you acquired it, you started because you had the free plugin, people were making requests, like feature requests or enhancement requests.</p>



<p>And you saw a lot of Learndash requests in there. And then is it those requests that kind of fueled what is going to go into the pro version of the plugin? That sounds like.</p>



<p><strong>Collins Agbonghama:</strong> Yeah, that's correct. And also Russell got requests for redirecting back to the previous pitch, say from a user, is visiting a setting page.</p>



<p>Then they click on the login link in the navigation menu also. And after logging the ones, they use that to be redirected back to the pages they are on. So I'll tell you it's that into the plugin to and that has also gotten quite a number from cs too. Yeah, right? Yeah.</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> So in slack, you don't use it in slack because the learn dash thing is very interesting to me.</p>



<p>The strategy here just seems to be, you had a free plugin, you're getting requests about LearnDash, which you said before, you didn't really have a lot of experience. It's not like you were a big learn dash user. You knew what yeah. You don't use LearnDash, but these people using this free redirect plugins says, Hey, could you, we would love to have this functionality and this functionality specifically for these things, including learn dash a lot of learn dash.</p>



<p>So that was kind of one of the big. One of the big features you wanted to put into the pro plugin, right? That's what I was reading out here in slack. So when it comes to other plugin developers I think there's a lesson to be learned here. Maybe it sounds like to me that for people trying to.</p>



<p>Find a way sometimes building the plugin is the easiest part for a developer. I think sometimes the hardest it feel free to agree or disagree, but sometimes it's coming up with something people want to use and eventually would probably want to pay for those ideas. And people start off with like the plugin like itself, but this plugin hooks into learn dash and A lot of other integrations as well.</p>



<p>So it kind of kind of enhances LearnDash, it's not really a, you know, you can use it for learn dash. You don't have to, it's not as much a standalone plugin as much a like a learn dash extra plugin or, you know, for people that just want it for LearnDash. Do you think that's a good strategy for plugin developers to kind of think less or just, or give more consideration to other WordPress platforms like LearnDash or.</p>



<p>Whatever else too, to see what's missing. And is, do you think that's a good market to go after, like you kind of did?</p>



<p><strong>Collins Agbonghama:</strong> I think like for my story, I stumbled upon the market accidentally. . Right. So if I'm to advise the plugin developer, how I advise them to actually stickly niche that has beginning of market.</p>



<p>The for those to run, you get, you know, quite in off season to maybe carve out your development cost or, you know, just assay probably as is site e-comm or something that was not necessarily something you want to focus on. Syntech.</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> So you, so it might be a good idea. I mean, you said you stumbled into it accidentally, but you, not everyone is, has the time or the patience or the free plugin already acquired to stumble into that accidentally.</p>



<p>So, what I w so if somebody is looking for a niche market and S so one of the places can you share with us, like one of the places that you got, I think you mentioned this in slack, one of the places that you got, some of your ideas from. I don't want to sh I don't want to steal your thunder, but but I do think you got with one of the places.</p>



<p><strong>Collins Agbonghama:</strong> Yeah. So basically see communities, for example, your Facebook group, Facebook. Yeah. You could look around your groups.</p>



<p>And significant blue dodgy or if they sell their positions that solved that problem. Yeah. You could also look around where this community lack on the WordPress community and also on twitter too, to get ideas from those places. Yeah. So you look for that. Yeah. I belong to quite a number of WordPress related groups. I try to see if I can the solutions to some of that problem</p>



<p>yeah. Although I normally don't do that often, but back in the days I used to, you know, look at problems users are facing through DAS solutions for those particular problems and see if it will flash on. And if at the end of the day, it doesn't really get any trash on it, and move onto the next thing.</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> W, you know, that's been, that's not the first time I've heard that, but I think it has to be repeatedly reminded that look for S look for something that's repeatedly being mentioned as an itch or, well, look for something that people are complaining about and see if you can fix it.</p>



<p>And that doesn't require creating a new plugin. But if somebody, like you said, you were in Facebook, was it a learn dash Facebook? Yeah. Okay. So it would Lauren dash Facebook group, for example, you see what people are either complaining about, or they keep asking the same questions over and over again, obviously LearnDash is probably looking at that too, but because you're, I'm guessing because you're a smaller, faster developer that you can create that kind of integration with the plugin that you have.</p>



<p>I think that's pretty smart. You said also not just Facebook boob groups, but Twitter and Reddit where your other places you were looking, but you, I should say Browns.</p>



<p><strong>Collins Agbonghama:</strong> Yeah. Yeah. So, I normally do community like Facebook group. Ready time to that in the evenings before I'm also at night before I go to bed, just to see what people are talking about. You know, was it the news over. Was actually happening in the community. And also I belong to because of belonging to the marketing software, Facebook group stream, and just look around and see what people are talking about. Yeah. So that physically. I get most of my exits</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> That's fantastic. And I think you kind of have to go with where the regular users go. Oftentimes I think a lot of developers kind of, I don't know, I think maybe they're looking in the too high up in terms of what problems to solve sometimes, you know, like these like monstrous integrations and sometimes it's the simple itches other.</p>



<p>Watch what the developers to scratch. I'm just going, I'm just simply, still amazed at that again in about a, what was it? You broke even on this plugin five figures and four months. And just for those who are going to look at the site later, I'll spoil it for you. There is a simple, log-in WPS simple pricing.</p>



<p>It looks like it's per site and it's $49 standard for one year, one license for one site. And the agency has unlimited sites for $99 per year. I'm just bringing these prices because these prices are actually very reasonable for like a particular plugin. So that in itself, if you've already made, if you've already broke, even in four months, And we're not talking, it's not like this plugin costs like a million dollars per purchase and that's oh yeah.</p>



<p>It's easy to make up money in four months. So you must be getting, and you don't have to reveal numbers here, but you must be getting some great you must be getting a lot of traction to be able to do it in that, that quickly. How do you advertise, how did you advertise the pro version of log-in WP?</p>



<p>Did you use the free plugin for that? Or did you go back to these Facebook groups and what I mean. What was your general marketing plan? Once you figured out these people, once you figured out this solution you made was going to be good for these people.</p>



<p><strong>Collins Agbonghama:</strong> So what I did was after bloody probation I anchored in to the???</p>



<p>That's been emotional ID. Then I also created a website for the product. And wrote a few documentation and actually started doing a little bit of content marketing, although that hasn't really brought seizing yet, yet, but majority of the, sales or marketing, although we see that from the free version. Yeah.</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> What do you think about the WordPress?</p>



<p>Plugin ecosystem today. I mean, you just like everyone else sees acquisitions by large companies. Large companies hosting companies are they're large companies. They take these big plugins, but they also take small developers to sometimes some developers have talked about. You know, there, there are these large companies putting lots of money and people toward these plugins and they feel like maybe their opportunities are reduced greatly because now, you know, five years ago, seven years ago, a lot of people were still small.</p>



<p>A lot of developers are small shops. And now if you decided to make a certain plugin, for example, That happens to be similar to a large, you know, plugin that's made by a larger company. That's a tough nut to crack. As I like to say, do you think there's still room in the WordPress plugin ecosystem for developers to have the kind of success that you said you accidentally fell into it?</p>



<p>So I'm going to use your words, but do you think developers can still have these happy accidents in the space.</p>



<p><strong>Collins Agbonghama:</strong> I'll be honest. Backing it is when you creative, a WordPress Plugin. Publishing to any one place repository and maybe sit out almost other stuff. Most many times, oftentimes the plugin will grow organically and you've already gotten up to 1000 or thousands of installation activities so that our child, but I told him the same, like before actually we really very hard to grow and stand out from the crowd. Yeah. So now these, you actually really need to have it big marketing budget. Yeah. Content marketing. Yeah. And also promote promoting the plugin.</p>



<p>And also if you breed it, plugin actually takes, I think our months for you to go from so. 500 active installation or a thousand active installation, unless maybe he gets people back. Some of the major WordPress, Blockstack, maybe WPTarvern, Post Status and the likes. Trying to grow in new plugin, actually be very difficult, have seen a lot of in about plugging out to struggle with it.</p>



<p>Typical example is actually the guy that, so that owns home Slice WP. Yeah, then also on a couple of other plugins plugging or touching it. So it's really very difficult, but so that's actually the states or the secretion of tips. When you work for some plugging markets, do you just need to have money to spend on marketing and even spending it on marketing and trying to trying to promote.</p>



<p>Many times max, even months need any results. So it's really incredibly to be the new WordPress plugin.</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> Do you think that you would have had the same kind of success if you started fresh or do you think you had to acquire Peter's log-in redirect plugin because it already was in the plugin repo.</p>



<p><strong>Collins Agbonghama:</strong> There is a number of plugins that does exactly what we were doing. Logging of loopy in the WordPress plugin repository, but many times if you search for, let's see you might not even see them in the first week because yeah, they're hating, we built down the paging. WordPress Search results. So it's, I really don't, it's actually very difficult.</p>



<p>Yeah. So that actually this decision of if you a new WordPress program, I'm not sure I would have had the same level of success. Yeah. Which I'm acquiring a new plugin. It's our basically was piggybacking on the already existing user base on trying to upset the probation. If I didn't acquire the plugin, I'm not sure I would have liked to seen such a success at all. So that's why they decided reality.</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> Yeah. Sad reality because yeah, it's very hard to get brand new plugin to have traction now in the WordPress plugin system. So a lot of strategies I've seen, not just yours. I have been to acquire a plugin that has a lot of installations. And also you also mentioned there was something very interesting was the plugin search, which I, that's not the first time I've heard that either. Where if you happen to rank high in a particular search word, for whatever reason you obviously tend to get more attention. So it's almost. There is an algorithm in the WordPress plugin, repo for searches that you enter. That's been, it's kind of being watched by a lot of people.</p>



<p>We, you know, the secret sauce that algorithm is only held by very relatively few people. So, to obviously not gain the system but yeah, if you appear at the top, for some reason, when someone types in a good keyword, they're more than likely to check out your plugin and then they're more than likely to install it.</p>



<p>And. More than likely to see your pro integrations and then upgrade. So that makes perfect sense. I</p>



<p><strong>Collins Agbonghama:</strong> okay. I have a suggestion for the WordPress plugin repo.</p>



<p>It should be really absolutely days if they go, they could add on like a filter for popular plugins, new plugins. Yeah. That would allow for a lot of now plugins to get more visibility .</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> Yeah, they do have a featured plugins area on their homepage, but that featured plugins is I think cherry picked because right now it's classic editor, it's kismet jet pack and classic widgets. I mean, it's all automatic. Or similar really related stuff.</p>



<p><strong>Collins Agbonghama:</strong> I would love the filter to be in the section. Lets say you are looking for a SEO plugin. After tapping in the ASU, in the search post, the results you'll get less. The feedback will be, less see, on the side bar. Well, this century is what's really cool. You know, sits out, back, open up plugins that new plugins. That will be really excellent.</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> Well, I know some people are probably getting this information, you know, I'm putting it into their spreadsheets.</p>



<p>I know that they're there. And I would like to, as you like to see that information come out in the public. And not keep it to some selves. Maybe we'll see that maybe assumed, but I agree with you what I wanted to tell people about, because I haven't heard you give a lot of interviews. I at least maybe I missed all these wonderful interviews you've given, because this is the first time I've heard your voice.</p>



<p>I do, however, have read your, this is your first one. Oh God man. I'm so sorry. I should not have been your first podcast. I re yeah. Believe me. Anybody who talks to you in the future. We'll is much, much better. I thought you did the WP minute, but we'll get to that in a second. I do want to point people though, when they're, when they finish listening to you want to learn more about you, you did an excellent hero press essay.</p>



<p>I'm not sure when it was this thing does not have a date on it, but it looks like it was probably early 2019. I'm guessing by the comments. You did w I'm going to put it in the show notes for this podcast. It's called WordPress saved my life. And I think if people want to learn more about your history with the net and with the web and then WordPress and in particular, I mean, you directly said in the post WordPress saved my life.</p>



<p>Apparently you were able to make enough revenue to live pretty comfortably in Nigeria things. Plugin works and your premium plugin profile press and all of that. So I encourage people if you like listening to Collins, first of all, ping him and post out of slack or on Twitter and tell him he should be doing more interviews because he's a smart man, but then also read the hero press as well to get some background on it.</p>



<p>One thing I did want to ask you about though, before time runs out for both of us For your w three w three guy handle. Is that, what, how did you come up with that? This isn't the last question. I'm just curious.</p>



<p><strong>Collins Agbonghama:</strong> Oh, okay. Oh, and back in the days while I was trying to learn web development, actually, learned, a lot of.</p>



<p>What I know, like HTML CSS from w three schools. Yeah. So we replace the schools with guys who have been using that that's been running for so long.</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> Yeah. It makes sense. Yeah. It makes sense. Then when you said w three schools, I'm like, oh yeah, of course. I remember w three schools. They're still around.</p>



<p>Yeah. But I remember early days when I was learning stuff like you, I would Google something and w three schools was notoriously, always the top. Ranks in Google and that caused some controversy in terms of they were, I don't know if they were gaming the system or whatever, but it, nevertheless, it didn't matter.</p>



<p>It didn't matter to me the information was there. And at the time it was really good. Was that in stack overflow for me were the two things that got me going way, way back. Yeah. So that's cool. The other link I do want to send you, I do want to ask you real quick about this. So we did mention, we did, I just mentioned now talked about profiles.</p>



<p>And I'm going to blink in the show notes here, and it was something that happened. Let's see. It's hasn't, it's like mid last year. All of that, and I'm not, I don't want to go into the story of the background. First of all, the link I'm going to share the WP minute article is going to ha is going to explain it.</p>



<p>It's sharing an interview with you and Matt, and we kind of covered it in post status as well, but there was some confusion in the community when you acquire this was another acquisition, correct. And then he made some changes to the. That didn't sit well with some people that didn't sit well with some people.</p>



<p>And I know that must've been a difficult it couldn't have been an easy experience to have that kind of feedback come at you especially since a lot of people probably didn't know you. I didn't know you honestly. And that's kind of the reason why I wanted. I always like to talk to people eventually that I, that are doing things in the community because you don't want to be the F you don't want to hear the first thing someone is doing, not knowing them.</p>



<p>And then you hear about this and then you don't know anything about them. So what do humans typically do? They typically think, oh, they just assume soon bad intentions. Right? And I know you didn't have any bad intentions, but now that we have a year. Almost a year has passed since then. And you've, you're continuing to update the plugin, I think.</p>



<p>Right? Yeah. Yeah. What would, what were the lessons that you would feel you took away from that experience and what could plugin developers potentially learn? What knowledge can you bestow going through that particular learning, learning experience with the profile press. Yeah.</p>



<p><strong>Collins Agbonghama:</strong> So I would like to put it out there that there isn't acquire the WP user avatar plugin, or basically the cost we've.</p>



<p>We genuinely, were requests for to create a feature that allows them to let start user upload custom profile data. And also for them to. You know, yeah. Basically to have a custom. user profile. So wanted to be the future into posts. Then I discovered there was a plugin that actually does that. And even more, it has incubation with job boards and stuff like that.</p>



<p>So, similar to what I did similar to map which w login VP pushed the auto and was willing to. To say the plugin on. Then I acquire the plugin. Then I revamped the plugin as I, or I rebranded the plugin as four factors. I really didn't know.</p>



<p>Oh, I did not remove any feature from the plugin. Yeah. What, in hindsight, I change most of the complaints or reports that I took. You release a simple plugin on, I needed to do really very complex plugin for that. I really apologize. I never really thought it was going to. So, you know, John's going to this situation will be that messy, but I think it's being over six months of sooner and at the heat of the moment, our, the peak of the situation we had we had the issue of the plugging drops from four point five to</p>



<p>Yeah.to eight point two, one or 1.5 on stock. Yeah. But over time, we'll start fixing many of the bugs then, you know, trying to do add back the bow. I use that time .We've gradually improve the review on about rating on the plugin from 1.5 to three. And we've continually I more on features that we get a lot of feature requests on with listened to many of those teacher requests and really to the plugin, you could check the plugin and see some of the recent reviews of cost of users.</p>



<p>So many of them, you didn't know what actual account that's done. Division-wide many users were really very upset. Yeah. For that. I really apologize.</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> These things happen, especially since things move so quickly in the WordPress ecosystem and plus, so plus once something catches on Twitter, sometimes it explodes. Yeah.</p>



<p><strong>Collins Agbonghama:</strong> I actually wanted to revert, but I told you want to do with artistic changes, but I spoke to a couple of friends and the advice, some advice there, you know, regard to that. In the heat of the more mental in that particular, during that time we had some genuine customer messaging telling us or us seeing more features to be included like adding a payment feature on improving on the member direction and stuff like that. So we already have people that have already upgraded and loved the plugins.</p>



<p>And so trying to revert back to 10 to really, you know, make the situation even more messier. So I'd said to, you know, live it contentfully, there was another plugin or two that for the old plugin on. So people that were disappointed or that didn't love the change, this most of the, actually the name of the plugin is one user avatar.</p>



<p>We'll talk about actually using any customization or actually losing any features in some, the old plugged into that was actually the plugin actually act a light immigration deck for all disciplines. Yeah. So I think that actually is the situation.</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> Yeah. And I understand here, and I'll just read the quote here from the WP minute here.</p>



<p>It says to, to kind of wrap things up on this, it says, because I think your situation, it, a lot of times people feel alone in some of the challenges that they face dealing with. Plug-ins especially if you work remotely. And especially, I'll be honest with you. I mean, you being in Africa, I wouldn't be surprised if you if someone working in Africa versus someone working.</p>



<p>New York New York. There's a lot of people they're writing plugins and writing software and so forth. And maybe in certain places in another country somewhere there, there isn't many. I mean, sometimes you feel a physical presence sometimes, you know, It does add to being lonely or being left out, or at least it looks that way on Twitter or something.</p>



<p>You know, it looks like, you know, you have all these or these comments or coming in the ratings and all that on wordpress.org, but you did make a good point here. And I just wanted to repeat what you said on the WP minute Lincoln. Of course, we'll include this in the show. Moats show notes. And you said maintaining free plugins.</p>



<p>Unpaid labor. And it's very demanding. You get droves of users demanding help, and then even if you do help them, you can get criticized for doing so. And as soon as you offer a paid version to help offset the cost of development and maintenance for the free version you get criticized. And that's true.</p>



<p>That's you're only as good as your last job and you own what's the expression I'm looking for. I'll think of this in a second. Cause I'm going to have to edit this part cause like, only, oh good things do not. Oh, good things. Don't go on punished. Is sometimes an expression that I use, so you're trying to do good, but sometimes people are just nasty regardless if you give them something for free or not, but I really appreciated the.</p>



<p>The story that you left in post status slack. I really appreciated it because it, the more developers share their stories, especially in places like post-data slack, which I believe is a great environment, especially in the business area to act and to actually share those wins. Because if you don't share those wins Collins, then especially, you know, some people like if I were you and I had this thing that happened to me last year, and I had a little egg on my face.</p>



<p>There I keep using the expressions that I don't know if I was a little embarrassed if I was a little embarrassed by something that that happened to me that I did that happened to me just by chance. I'm not sure if I would be so brave to stick my head out in a community, but fortunately you, you are, and post status is a great place for that and that this win about log-in WP about making a financial.</p>



<p>Success in terms of just breaking even and show in such a short period of time is fascinating. And I can't wait to share this win with the WordPress community where we'll make a mention of it in a newsletter. And whenever people hear this podcast I, this is your first one. I'm glad it's in this positive light because these plugin developers a lot of.</p>



<p>Are still unclear about where to find their ideas and using you as inspiration, I think is a really good thing they should be doing so kudos to you. And yeah. And I'm going to say you're brave too, because you decided to talk with me and I didn't I'm you and for your first podcast, and if you knew me at all, you probably would not have picked me as your first person to talk to you on a podcast, but.</p>



<p>I would like to have you back on though, maybe sometime later this year to talk more about some of the things that Mary and I were talking about, like, the WordPress community in Africa and how people are making such strides over there, what you have seen because you're physically there firsthand to see some of these things.</p>



<p>And I think it's important for the entire global community to be, to know each other better and to know what's going on and not be focused. Other places in the world. But thank you very much for speaking with me. Is there, what are the best places for people to follow your work on your comments on the web?</p>



<p><strong>Collins Agbonghama:</strong> I'm actually I'm actually active on twitter @w3guy then on Facebook or my Facebook.</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> that's okay. Yeah. I'm not going to pry into your Facebook life. I really don't.</p>



<p><strong>Collins Agbonghama:</strong> And I also own also on the best non blog@wtguide.com. And you're going to share down there my blog. Yeah.</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> Yeah. You're going to share that in the, and I'll put it in the show notes as well. Great. </p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> Thank you very much for your insight. Really appreciate it. And I'm going to look forward to seeing more of your small wins.</p>



<p></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:"Thu, 03 Feb 2022 18:22:23 +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:"David Bisset";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:94:"WPTavern: German Court Fines Website Owner for Violating the GDPR by Using Google-Hosted Fonts";s: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:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=129401";s: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:233:"https://wptavern.com/german-court-fines-website-owner-for-violating-the-gdpr-by-using-google-hosted-fonts?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=german-court-fines-website-owner-for-violating-the-gdpr-by-using-google-hosted-fonts";s: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:2835:"<p>In late January, a Munich regional court <a href="https://rewis.io/urteile/urteil/lhm-20-01-2022-3-o-1749320/">ruled</a> that a plaintiff was entitled to injunctive relief and damages of 100 € from an undisclosed website owner for passing on the visitor&#8217;s IP address to Google through the use of Google Fonts.</p>



<p>Since it is possible to use the fonts without connecting to Google, the court deemed this a violation of Europe&#8217;s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) because Google Fonts exposes the visitor&#8217;s IP address:</p>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>The defendant violated the plaintiff&#8217;s right to informational self-determination by forwarding the dynamic IP address to Google when the plaintiff accessed the defendant&#8217;s website.<a>7</a></p><p>The automatic transmission of the IP address by the defendant to Google was an inadmissible encroachment on the plaintiff&#8217;s general personality rights under data protection law, since the plaintiff in this encroachment was undisputedly not in accordance with&nbsp;<a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://rewis.io/gesetze/tmg/p/tmg-13/" target="_blank">Section 13 (2) TMG</a>&nbsp;old version, Art. 6 (1) a ) GDPR has consented.</p></blockquote>



<p><a href="https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#what_does_using_the_google_fonts_api_mean_for_the_privacy_of_my_users">Google Fonts FAQ</a> discloses the data collection under a section about user privacy and states that it caches responses to minimize requests and serve the fonts faster. It does not specify exactly what data is collected but seems to imply that the information it collects is necessary to serve the fonts: </p>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>The Google Fonts API is designed to limit the collection, storage, and use of end-user data to only what is needed to serve fonts efficiently.</p></blockquote>



<p>The German court&#8217;s ruling threatens a fine of €250,000.00 for each case of infringement or, alternatively, six months imprisonment, if the site owner does not comply and continues to provide Google with IP addresses through their use of Google Fonts.</p>



<p>More than <a href="https://trends.builtwith.com/websitelist/Google-Font-API">50 million</a> websites use the Google Fonts API. Many site owners may not even know they are using them. </p>



<p>In consideration of those who may be subject to European courts, WordPress plugins and themes that use Google Fonts should offer a user-friendly option to self-host the fonts. If you want to continue using Google Fonts in a more privacy respecting way, there are many <a href="https://gomakethings.com/how-to-self-host-google-fonts/">tutorials</a> for <a href="https://wplift.com/how-to-host-google-fonts-locally-on-wordpress">self-hosting the fonts </a> instead.</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:"Thu, 03 Feb 2022 05:34:00 +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:13:"Sarah Gooding";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:141:"WPTavern: Gutenberg 12.5 Introduces Global Styles Variations, Preserves Adjacent Button Styling, and Adds Alpha Transparency to Color Pickers";s: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:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=129378";s: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:323:"https://wptavern.com/gutenberg-12-5-introduces-global-styles-variations-preserves-adjacent-button-styling-and-adds-alpha-transparency-to-color-pickers?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=gutenberg-12-5-introduces-global-styles-variations-preserves-adjacent-button-styling-and-adds-alpha-transparency-to-color-pickers";s: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:8054:"<p class="has-drop-cap">Gutenberg 12.5 landed in the WordPress plugin directory earlier today. I have already been excited about at least one new enhancement, global styles variations. However, this is a beefy update with several developer and user-centric features.</p>



<p>With WordPress 5.9 now out into the wild, it looks like all hands are back on deck as we gear up for 6.0&#8217;s release in May. Last week, I covered <a href="https://wptavern.com/looking-ahead-to-wordpress-6-0-the-early-roadmap">the early roadmap</a>, and some of the items from that list are already in this latest Gutenberg update in some shape or fashion.</p>



<h2 id="global-styles-variations">Global Styles Variations</h2>




<img />



<img />
Switching between theme style variations.



<p>Theme authors can now create <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/35619">multiple <code>theme.json</code> variations</a> and place them into their theme&#8217;s <code>/styles</code> folder. Then, users can switch between the various presets to something that suits them best.</p>



<p>The new feature promises to be one of the highlights of the WordPress 6.0 release, and the default Twenty Twenty-Two theme will eventually ship multiple variations of its own.</p>



<p>I dove into the feature in <a href="https://wptavern.com/global-style-variations-skins-for-themes-have-landed-in-gutenberg">more detail in a post</a> last week. Gutenberg project lead Matías Ventura <a href="https://wptavern.com/global-style-variations-skins-for-themes-have-landed-in-gutenberg#comment-413989">expanded on this</a> in the comments:</p>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>Getting this early in the cycle so we can iron out the experience and mechanics. I expect it to be really good in a few iterations. I&#8217;m particularly looking forward to breach the theme-bundle wall, since all these variations are inherently compatible with every block theme out there!</p></blockquote>



<p>While I share Ventura&#8217;s enthusiasm about the feature, I am not sure we can break the theme barrier with 6.0. The idea here is that such variations would be interchangeable between themes. I do not see that happening, given the current state of the global styles system.</p>



<p>Most of <code>theme.json</code> is standardized, but many authors use the <code>settings.custom</code> property. This allows them to set any number of custom values, which are often referenced via the theme stylesheet.</p>



<p>There is also that little problem of <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/29568">not having a standard naming scheme</a> for features like colors and typography.</p>



<p>Because neither of these things will always be the same between any two themes, switching variations will not always be pretty. It is a lofty goal, and perhaps it is worth attempting to see what is possible. However, the concept feels like the pursuit of dropping the theme system altogether for one giant cookie-cutter default.</p>



<p>Variation-switching is best left to individual themes. Allow theme authors who build their custom systems on top of <code>theme.json</code> to manage the user experience and expectations. We should focus on building tools to help them execute their vision while not worrying about a user &#8220;installing&#8221; their JSON variation inside a wholly different project.</p>



<h2 id="new-buttons-preserve-adjacent-button-styling">New Buttons Preserve Adjacent Button Styling</h2>



<img />New Button block&#8217;s style matches the previous.



<p>WordPress makes it relatively easy to duplicate a Button, but it is hidden away under the options drop-down in the toolbar. That is a two-click action compared to simply hitting the &#8220;+&#8221; icon to insert a new Button block. Before Gutenberg 12.5, this would result in the new one getting the default style treatment. It is one of those minor annoyances until you start working with several buttons at once.</p>



<p>The latest release automatically <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/37905">duplicates the adjacent Button block&#8217;s style</a> when inserting the next one. This is a far better experience.</p>



<p>However, it does not take us as far as we need to go. <em>What happens if you decide to change the design for every Button later?</em> You have a lot of work ahead of you modifying each one. There is an open ticket to <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/38267">copy one style to all others</a> in the Buttons block group.</p>



<h2 id="users-can-add-transparent-colors">Users Can Add Transparent Colors</h2>



<img />Transparent color lets background show through.



<p>Users can finally <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/37731">control the alpha transparency</a> of custom colors at the block level. The feature works for text, background, link, and border color options. This enhancement <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/18095">closes a ticket</a> first opened in October 2019.</p>



<p>There are some color pickers where it is not enabled. This includes the custom palette section in the global styles panel and icon-related colors for the Social Links block. The same is true for the Cover block overlay color, but it has a separate opacity control altogether.</p>



<h2 id="post-featured-image-size-option">Post Featured Image Size Option</h2>



<img />Cropped and equal-sized featured images in a Query Loop block.



<p>Gutenberg 12.5 <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/38044">introduces a new option</a> that allows setting the Post Featured Image block to use a WordPress or theme-defined image size. It seems like a trivial change, but it is a hop forward for block theming.</p>



<p>Theme authors have been filtering the <code>post_thumbnail_size</code> hook to handle this. However, that method gets complicated when dealing with multiple post queries with varying image sizes.</p>



<p>I have only been <a href="https://wptavern.com/fse-outreach-round-2-building-a-custom-homepage-with-gutenbergs-site-editor">mentioning this for going on a year</a>. I have written about it over and over and over, trying to get anyone to listen. If we want more designers hopping aboard the block-based theme development train, they need control over featured images. Far too many layouts rely on specific sizing to look their best.</p>



<p><em>Now, if we could only use the featured image inside of Cover and Media &amp; Text blocks…</em></p>



<h2 id="copy-all-site-editor-content">Copy All Site Editor Content</h2>



<img />Copying all content from the site editor.



<p><em>Today I learned</em> that there is a &#8220;Copy all content&#8221; button in the post editor&#8217;s options menu. I do not know how long it has been there, but that is kind of neat. I have been needlessly trying to select all content &#8212; sometimes with a measure of success &#8212; via the content canvas. Even those of us who spend nearly every waking hour in the editor can learn a new trick once in a while.</p>



<p>That copy-content option has now been <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/37781">added to the site editor</a> as part of an initiative to bring feature <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/21245">parity between the two editors</a>.</p>



<h2 id="code-view-in-the-site-editor">Code View in the Site Editor</h2>



<img />Opening the code editor.



<p>Continuing with feature parity between the post and site editors, users can now <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/37765">switch to the code view</a> in the site editor.</p>



<p>Technically, this is called the &#8220;code editor,&#8221; but <em>there be dragons</em> ahead for anyone who attempts to edit anything. At least if they expect anything other than the dreaded &#8220;this block contains unexpected or invalid content&#8221; message. I would sail into calmer waters and avoid it for anything other than reading or copying.</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:"Thu, 03 Feb 2022 01:24:19 +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:14:"Justin Tadlock";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:58:"Post Status: This Week at WordPress.org (January 31, 2022)";s: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:61:"https://poststatus.com/?p=93112&preview=true&preview_id=93112";s: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:60:"https://poststatus.com/this-week-in-wporg-january-24-2022-2/";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:9497:"<p>Each week we are highlighting the news from WordPress.org that you don't want to miss.  If you or your company create products or services that use WordPress, we've got the news you need to know. Be sure to share this resource with your product and project managers.</p>



<h2 id="h-news"><a href="http://wordpress.org/news">News</a></h2>



<ul><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/01/26/preliminary-roadmap-for-6-0/">Preliminary Roadmap for WordPress 6.0</a> (Matias Ventura)</li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/project/2022/01/21/big-picture-goals-2022/">Big Picture Goals for 2022</a> (Josepha Haden Chomphosy)</li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/updates/2022/01/21/our-three-big-ideas-for-2022/">Our Three Big Ideas for 2022</a> (Josepha Haden Chomphosy)</li><li><a href="https://wordpress.org/themes/twentytwentytwo/">Twenty Twenty Two</a> (New Core Theme)</li></ul>



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<div class="wp-block-spacer"></div>



<div class="wp-block-columns">
<div class="wp-block-column">
<h2 id="h-accessibility"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/accessibility">Accessibility</a></h2>



<ul><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/accessibility/2022/01/08/accessibility-teams-goals-for-wordpress-6-0-and-beyond/">The Accessibility Team’s Goals for WordPress 6.0 and Beyond</a></li></ul>



<h2 id="h-community"><a href="http://make.wordpress.org/community">Community</a></h2>



<ul><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/community/2022/02/02/community-team-goals-2022-open-discussion-sessions/">Community Team Goals 2022: Open Discussion Sessions</a><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/community/2022/01/10/proposal-mandatory-safety-measures-for-in-person-wordpress-events-in-2022/"></a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/community/2022/01/24/updated-guidelines-for-in-person-wordcamps-and-meetups-2022/">Updated Guidelines for In-Person WordCamps and Meetups in 2022</a></li></ul>



<h2 id="h-hosting"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/hosting">Hosting</a></h2>



<ul><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/hosting/2022/01/10/wordpress-5-9-and-php-8-0-8-1/">WordPress 5.9 and PHP 8.0-8.1</a></li></ul>



<h2 id="h-marketing"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/marketing">Marketing</a></h2>



<ul><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/marketing/2021/12/01/help-contribute-to-social-media-materials-for-5-9-release/">Help contribute to social media materials for the 5.9 release</a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/marketing/2022/01/25/social-media-drafting-update-for-5-9/">Social media drafting update for 5.9</a></li></ul>



<h2 id="h-meta"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/meta">Meta</a></h2>



<ul><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/meta/2022/01/13/wordpress-photo-directory-call-for-volunteers/">WordPress Photo Directory: Call for Volunteers</a></li></ul>



<h2 id="h-plugins"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/plugins">Plugins</a></h2>



<ul><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/updates/2022/02/01/plugin-review-team-31-january-2022/">Plugin Review Team: 31 January 2022</a></li></ul>



<h2 id="h-mobile"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/mobile">Mobile</a></h2>



<ul><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/mobile/2022/01/24/call-for-testing-wordpress-for-ios-19-1/">Call for Testing: WordPress for iOS 19.1</a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/mobile/2022/01/27/call-for-testing-wordpress-for-android-19-1/">Call for Testing: WordPress for Android 19.1</a></li></ul>



<h2 id="h-test"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/test">Test</a></h2>



<ul><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/test/2022/02/02/fse-program-exploration-all-things-media/">FSE Program Exploration: All Things Media</a></li></ul>



<h2 id="h-themes"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/themes">Themes</a></h2>



<ul><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/themes/2021/12/10/gutenberg-themes-week-of-dec-5/"></a><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/themes/2022/01/31/gutenberg-themes-week-of-january-24th-2022/">Gutenberg + Themes: Week of January 24th, 2022</a></li></ul>



<h2 id="h-openverse"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/openverse">Openverse</a></h2>



<ul><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/openverse/2022/01/25/everything-you-need-to-know-about-openverse-and-the-wordpress-photo-directory/">Everything You Need to Know About Openverse and the WordPress Photo Directory</a></li></ul>
</div>



<div class="wp-block-column">
<h2 id="h-core"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core">Core</a> </h2>



<ul><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/02/03/whats-new-in-gutenberg-12-5-february-2nd/">What’s new in Gutenberg 12.5? (February 2nd)</a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/01/31/ensuring-proper-attribution-for-contributions-to-wordpress-on-github/">Ensuring Proper Attribution for Contributions to WordPress on GitHub</a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/01/28/developer-hours-now-scheduled-first-event-feb-8th-2022/">Developer Hours now scheduled, first event Feb 8th, 2022</a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/01/27/proposal-2022-major-release-timing/">Proposal: 2022 Major Release Timing</a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/02/01/a-week-in-core-january-31-2022/">A Week in Core – January 31, 2022</a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/01/26/proposed-improvements-to-the-core-editor-chat-agenda-and-format/">Proposed improvements to the Core Editor chat agenda and format</a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/02/01/wp-notify-status-update/"></a><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/02/01/wp-notify-status-update/">WP Notify Status Update</a></li></ul>



<h2 id="h-cli"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/cli">CLI</a></h2>



<ul><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/cli/2022/01/26/wp-cli-v2-6-0-release-notes/">WP-CLI v2.6.0 Release Notes</a></li></ul>



<h2 id="h-docs"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/docs">Docs</a></h2>



<h4>Articles:</h4>



<ul><li><a href="https://wordpress.org/support/article/comparing-patterns-template-parts-and-reusable-blocks/">Comparing Patterns, Template Parts, and Reusable Blocks</a></li><li><a href="https://wordpress.org/support/article/twenty-twenty-two/">Twenty Twenty-Two</a></li></ul>



<h4 id="h-developer">Developer </h4>



<ul><li><a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/block-editor/how-to-guides/block-tutorial/block-supports-in-dynamic-blocks/">Block Supports in dynamic blocks</a>&nbsp;</li><li><a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/cli/commands/user/application-password/list/">WP-CLI wp user application-password</a></li><li><a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/block-themes/internationalization/">Block Themes Internationalization</a></li><li><a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/block-themes/accessibility/">Block Themes Accessibility</a></li></ul>



<h2 id="h-training"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/training">Training</a></h2>



<ul><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/training/2022/01/31/faculty-program-structure-proposal/">Faculty Program: Structure Proposal</a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/training/2022/01/17/training-team-goals-for-2022">Training Team Goals 2022</a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/training/2022/01/04/january-2022-sprint/">January 2022 Sprint</a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/training/2022/01/07/social-learning-spaces-streaming-platforms/">Social Learning Spaces Streaming Platforms</a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/training/2022/01/07/learn-wordpress-version-taxonomy/">Learn WordPress Version Taxonomy</a></li></ul>



<h4 id="h-lesson-plans">Lesson Plans:</h4>



<ul><li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/lesson-plan/how-to-create-a-menu-with-the-navigation-block/">How to Create a Menu with the Navigation Block</a></li></ul>



<h4 id="h-social-learning-spaces">Social Learning Spaces:</h4>



<ul><li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/social-learning/">Calendar</a></li></ul>
</div>
</div>



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<div class="wp-block-media-text alignwide is-stacked-on-mobile has-background"><a href="https://poststatus.com/"><img src="https://cdn.poststatus.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/vertical-post-status-logo-250.png" alt="Post Status" class="wp-image-85823 size-full" /></a><div class="wp-block-media-text__content">
<p class="has-text-align-left has-normal-font-size" id="h-get-ready-for-remote-work">You — and <a href="https://poststatus.com/business-membership/">your whole team</a> can <a href="https://poststatus.com/post-status-membership-club/">Join Post Status</a> too!</p>



<p class="has-text-align-left has-small-font-size"><strong>Build your network. Learn with others. Find your next job — or your next hire.</strong> Read the <strong>Post Status</strong> <a href="https://poststatus.com/newsletter/">newsletter</a>. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/13.1.0/72x72/2709.png" alt="✉" class="wp-smiley" /> Listen to <a href="https://poststatus.com/podcasts/">podcasts</a>. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/13.1.0/72x72/1f399.png" alt="🎙" class="wp-smiley" /> Follow <a href="https://twitter.com/post_status/">@Post_Status</a>. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/13.1.0/72x72/1f426.png" alt="🐦" class="wp-smiley" /></p>
</div></div>



<div class="wp-block-spacer"></div>";s: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, 02 Feb 2022 16:19:12 +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:"Courtney Robertson";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:58:"WPTavern: #12 – Amber Hinds on Why Accessibility Matters";s: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=129309";s: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:159:"https://wptavern.com/podcast/12-amber-hinds-on-why-accessibility-matters?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=12-amber-hinds-on-why-accessibility-matters";s: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:47815:"<h2 id="about-this-episode">About this episode.</h2>



<p>On the podcast today we have Amber Hinds.</p>



<p>She works at <a href="https://equalizedigital.com/">Equalize Digital</a>, and became interested in online accessibility when she was given the job of creating a website for a public university. Given that the site was funded with public money, the finished site needed to be built with accessibility in mind.</p>



<p>Since then Amber has been learning about accessibility, and educating others in how to build accessible websites through projects like the <a href="https://equalizedigital.com/wordpress-accessibility-meetup/">WordPress Accessibility Meetup</a>.</p>



<p>Today we talk about what online accessibility means, and how it ought to influence any website build.</p>



<p>We consider the situations people who need an accessible website might find themselves in. What are they experiencing as they browse the web and what tools are they using?</p>



<p>Is there a legal / moral responsibility to build accessible websites, and is it enough to have a website which is partially accessible?</p>



<p>What tools can you use to help in this endeavour, and what tools you might want to avoid?</p>



<h2 id="useful-links">Useful links.</h2>



<p><a href="https://equalizedigital.com/wordpress-accessibility-meetup/">WordPress Accessibility Meetup</a></p>



<p><a href="https://equalizedigital.com/accessibility-checker/">Amber&#8217;s Accessibility Checker</a></p>



<p><a href="https://www.w3.org/WAI/policies/">Web Accessibility Laws &amp; Policies</a></p>



<p><a href="https://wave.webaim.org/">WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool</a></p>



<p><a href="https://www.deque.com/axe/">axe&nbsp;Accessibility Testing Tool</a></p>



<p><a href="https://www.nvaccess.org/">NV Access</a></p>



<p><a href="https://siteimprove.com/">Siteimprove</a></p>



<p><a href="https://monsido.com/">Monsido</a></p>



<p><a href="https://pope.tech/">Pope Tech</a></p>



<p><a href="https://overlayfactsheet.com/">Overlay Fact Sheet</a></p>



<p><a href="https://overlayfalseclaims.com/">Overlay False Claims</a></p>



<p><a href="https://www.accessibilityassociation.org/s/">IAAP (International Association of Accessibility Professionals)</a></p>



<p><a href="https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/">Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1</a></p>



<p><a href="https://webaim.org/">WebAIM</a></p>



Transcript<div>
<p>[00:00:00] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Welcome to the 12th edition of 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 themes, the blocks, and in this case, the need for accessible websites.</p>



<p>If you&#8217;ve listened to the podcast last week, you&#8217;d have heard me say that we&#8217;re going to move to a weekly schedule from now on. This means that there&#8217;ll be lots more podcast episodes, and I would encourage you to subscribe to the podcast, so that you can get all of those episodes automatically each and every week. You can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to WP Tavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast.</p>



<p>And you can also copy that URL into most podcasts. With so many more episodes, I&#8217;d really like to hear from anyone out there who wants to come on the podcast and talk about whatever it is that you do with WordPress. It might be that you&#8217;re a developer, a WordCamp organizer, a contributor, a designer. Honestly, if it&#8217;s about WordPress, I&#8217;m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you on the show. Head over to WP Tavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox and use the contact form.</p>



<p>Okay. So on the podcast today, we have Amber Hinds. She works at Equalize Digital and became interested in online accessibility when she was given the job of creating a website for a public university, given that the site was funded with public money, it needed to be built with accessibility in mind.</p>



<p>Since then Amber has been learning all about accessibility and educating others in how to build accessible websites through projects like the WordPress accessibility meet up. Today, we talk about what online accessibility means and how it ought to influence the websites that we build. We consider the situations, people who need accessible websites find themselves in .What are they experiencing as they browse the web, and what tools are they using? Is there a legal or moral responsibility here to build accessible websites? And is it enough to have a website which is partially accessible? What tools can you use to help in this endeavor? And what tools might you want to avoid?</p>



<p>If you&#8217;re interested in finding out more, you can find all the links in the show notes by heading over to WP Tavern.com forward slash podcast and search for episode number 12. And so without further delay, I bring you Amber Hinds.</p>



<p>I am joined on the podcast today by Amber Hinds. Hello Amber.</p>



<p>[00:03:17] <strong>Amber Hinds:</strong> Hi, Nathan. How are you?</p>



<p>[00:03:18] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> I&#8217;m very good. Thank you for joining us today on the podcast. Really appreciate it. We&#8217;re going to have a discussion today around the subject of accessibility. Accessibility seems to be a word which is cropping up more and more probably for very good reason, but it occurs to me, Amber, that it may well be the case that a lot of us either don&#8217;t have a clear picture of what web site accessibility is or we&#8217;ve got just a vague idea of what we&#8217;re trying to achieve when we want websites to be accessible. So the question is very broad. What is website accessiblity?</p>



<p>[00:03:55] <strong>Amber Hinds:</strong> Yeah. So the short answer to what website accessibility is, is it is a practice of making sure websites will work for everyone. People of all abilities. So we&#8217;re not all accessing the internet in the same way using the same devices, or even able to observe things in the same way with our senses. So some people for example, are blind or visually impaired.</p>



<p>Some people are hard of hearing. Some people can see in here perfectly well, but they have mobility limitations that make it challenging for them to use a mouse or a keyboard. And so they have to engage with the internet and websites in a different sort of way. And website accessibility is really about ensuring that websites can work for all people and not just those who are typically abled.</p>



<p>[00:04:46] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Thank you. It&#8217;s so it&#8217;s a very broad definition. There isn&#8217;t one specific definition. There&#8217;s a whole multitude of different things that come under the umbrella. I wanted to ask that question first. Typically I ask people about themselves and what their relationship is with WordPress at the beginning, but I thought it would be curious to get that first, because then that would lead me on to that question. Could you just tell us how it is that we&#8217;ve got you on the podcast today? You know, in other words, tell us a little bit about how you&#8217;ve come to take accessibility seriously. What have you done in the recent past that makes you interested in this?</p>



<p>[00:05:21] <strong>Amber Hinds:</strong> Sure. So I am the CEO of a company called Equalize Digital. We&#8217;re a certified B corporation, which is, if you&#8217;re not familiar with that, a process that we went through with an external body to have all of our business practices reviewed and to show that we, while we are a for-profit company, we&#8217;re doing more to try and benefit the community and world and our employees than the typical business, and we&#8217;re not just trying to line the owner&#8217;s pockets, if you will. And our focus really is on website accessibility. I got into it, really became aware of it in 2016. When I started working with a university here in the United States, Colorado State University. All universities and publicly funded institutions in the U S are required to have websites that meet certain accessibility standards under the web content accessibility guidelines.</p>



<p>There are laws requiring that. And so I got thrown into it a little bit, which was building a website for the university and it had to be accessible in order for us to launch it. And so initially it was a little bit of checking boxes, but as I started to learn more about it, and research it and then we&#8217;ve gotten to the point now where we have user testers, so people with disabilities who come in and we pay them to test websites for our clients or for us before we launched them, and really having had the ability to talk to them firsthand, watch them navigate the web and hear in their voices some of the challenges that they experienced led to the passion that I&#8217;ve had for trying to make it work for everyone. And so that&#8217;s what brought me to accessibility.</p>



<p>[00:07:02] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Thank you, that&#8217;s really interesting. When we talk about accessibility, it occurs to me that very often we&#8217;re talking about things which on a typical website might be missing. We failed to do something because we&#8217;ve failed to have the understanding that something needs to be done.</p>



<p>Now, forgive me and hopefully anybody listening to this, there are going to be bits in this podcast where probably I misstep and say something, which is not exactly correct, and I probably should have done my research a little bit better, but I would like to, I would like you to describe some of the scenarios, you mentioned just now that you have people who you get user testing done with. For the benefit of the audience, could you describe some of the things which those people are experiencing? So in other words, when I go to a website, I switched on a computer. I sit down. I use a mouse, I use a keyboard. I may very well use my finger if it&#8217;s on my phone. But I am looking through my own eyes and I&#8217;m consuming everything, either through my ears or through my eyes, basically. And that&#8217;s the way that I interact with the web. Now it occurs to me that in the scenarios that we&#8217;re going to be discussing today, much of that is not the case. So could you describe some of the different ways that people experience the web as they browse it?</p>



<p>[00:08:21] <strong>Amber Hinds:</strong> Yeah, the one that most commonly people think about when they think about website accessibility is people who are blind or very low vision. And those users, if they&#8217;re on the spectrum of just being low vision, they might still be able to see, but they might be zoomed in with their browser. So they might have it set where they&#8217;re always viewing a website at say 200%. Or if they have no vision at all, or very little vision then they may be using something called a screen reader, which basically reads out all of the content on the website to them, and it has different sorts of shortcuts that allow them to sort of try to skim in the same way that we would want to skim the content. You know, when you visit a website, you don&#8217;t read it word for word on every page. So there are features built into screen readers that help them jump around through the content so that it can be read aloud to them. Other things that is commonly thought of is people who can not hear. And in that instance, we want to see captions or transcripts provided for podcasts or video content.</p>



<p>But a thing that I think a lot of people don&#8217;t think about is colorblindness. Colorblindness is very prevalent. And if you have certain color palettes going on, or if you&#8217;re describing things by color The green dot means your microphone is on and the red dot means your microphone is off. If I can&#8217;t tell the difference between red and green, how do I know if my microphone is on or off? So that&#8217;s actually very common, but there&#8217;s also situations where I mentioned earlier, people who have mobility issues. There may be people that don&#8217;t have use of any of their limbs or very little use.</p>



<p>And so they might use eye tracking to move around. They might use a voice controller where they&#8217;re speaking and telling their computer or their phone to go to a certain element on a website. And if the actual HTML code behind it doesn&#8217;t match what they expect it to match or see, then the computer won&#8217;t be able to go where they&#8217;re telling it to go.</p>



<p>There&#8217;s also alternative keyboards and devices. So a good example of that is the Darcy USB keyboard, which is a morse code keyboard. So that allows people who may be only have use of one or two fingers to tap out in morse code and use that to interact with the web. So there&#8217;s really a very broad range of ways that people can engage with the web and, accessibility really impacts everyone. So there are people that we might obviously think of as identifying themselves as disabled. And there&#8217;s a lot of people who don&#8217;t identify as disabled, but who benefit from accessibility features. With my corrective lenses on I&#8217;m typically sighted, but I have been on websites on my phone outside where the color contrast is so poor that I can&#8217;t see it on a sunny day, and so that&#8217;s really something that I think a lot of people don&#8217;t realize is that accessibility features can help everyone.</p>



<p>[00:11:15] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> It&#8217;s really curious the sort of range and the depth there, it illustrates the spectrum of different things that we&#8217;re dealing with, and it does illustrate to me at least that when we talk about accessibility, we are definitely not talking about one thing. So we&#8217;ll try to tackle that in a minute.</p>



<p>But I was thinking to myself, as you were speaking in the physical world, a lot of this stuff has been mandated by law. So for example, if I was to go to a school or a shop in my local environment, it&#8217;s mandatory for the doors to be of a certain size and width and for there to be alternative arrangements to get people over steps and up ramps and things like that. So it&#8217;s been taken care of over many, many years because those things were identified and put into law. Now, especially in the year 2022, it feels like more and more things are going online, so take as an example, e-commerce it would be illegal, I think, in my country for a shop to have impediments in it, which would make unaccessible to everybody, but if they have their website online, in a sense, you&#8217;re trying to create the same shopping experience. You can see all of the products and examine them and get descriptions of them, and so on. The law hasn&#8217;t been able to catch up, and I&#8217;m curious about the law. I don&#8217;t really know what the position is. Is there a legal responsibility in the majority of countries, only a proportion of countries for things to be done in a certain way? Or are we just working on a kind of moral responsibility where this would be a desired outcome to have websites accessible, but it&#8217;s not mandated by law. What&#8217;s your thoughts on that?</p>



<p>[00:12:55] <strong>Amber Hinds:</strong> So the W3C has a page on it that is helpful if you&#8217;re trying to get a feel for laws worldwide. It hasn&#8217;t been updated for a while, I can&#8217;t remember how out of date it is. I know that there&#8217;s a stated goal that they&#8217;re going to try and update that sometime early in this year. But as far as, and I&#8217;ll say this I&#8217;m not a lawyer, or a solicitor, depending on where you are in the world. I have listened to a lot of them speak about it, and I feel like I have, comfortable understanding, but I&#8217;m not a legal professional. My understanding is though that there are at least 20 countries that have website accessibility laws that mandate websites have to be accessible.</p>



<p>The EU also does, so that would cover a lot of member countries in EU, and so there are in some places, laws that require it. Now, sometimes those laws don&#8217;t touch the private sector. They only touch the public sector Like here in the United States, there are laws that are specific for, as I mentioned, federally funded agencies or organizations that receive federal grants, which could be schools and universities, could be non-profits. Now we also are increasingly seeing here in the United States that there are laws that are being tried in the courts under the Americans with disabilities act against public businesses. And I think last year it was almost like 78% of those businesses were e-commerce stores.</p>



<p>So that&#8217;s really where people are coming in and law firms are coming in and suing businesses because their websites were not accessible. And in most cases they are winning or settlement is being made where the organization agrees to make their website accessible and they pay. So they not only have to pay for the improved development or content creation on that website, but they&#8217;re also paying a settlement to the plaintiff in the case</p>



<p>In Canada the strongest laws are actually more on the province level. So Ontario has a very strong website accessibility law. As of January of this year, all organizations that have more than, I believe it&#8217;s 25 employees, have to file an annual report with the government of Ontario, stating what the accessibility status of their website is annually. And if they have more than 50 employees, the fines could be as high as a hundred thousand Canadian dollars per half day that their website is inaccessible. So there can be some very large fines. My understanding from talking to people in Canada is it&#8217;s only just starting to be enforced. There&#8217;s not a huge amount of let&#8217;s say government officials going around checking websites of businesses in Canada and sending them fines, right. But they are working towards that. So it&#8217;s a shift that&#8217;s really been happening, I think especially we&#8217;re seeing it accelerate in the last three or four years.</p>



<p>[00:15:47] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> It&#8217;s obviously becoming much more important. It brings to mind some further questions about this and you may not have the answers, I don&#8217;t know. But, it&#8217;s a global marketplace. It could easily be that you or I would build a website for somebody in an entirely different jurisdiction. For example, I, in the UK could build something for somebody in Canada. And I wonder whose law may apply in that case? As I&#8217;m the person that&#8217;s taken on the responsibility of building all the things. Do you know if it&#8217;s incumbent upon me to work, in this case, with Canadian law or UK law?</p>



<p>[00:16:26] <strong>Amber Hinds:</strong> So I kind of tend to think that it&#8217;s going to move in the direction that privacy laws are going. Which is that, if they can prove nexus, which means you have some sort of business operations in an area, then you have to follow the laws in that particular area. This is something that we&#8217;re seeing here in the United States with the majority of the lawsuits are happening in the State of California, but, the businesses aren&#8217;t all located in California, but if they have an employee in California, they have a store in California, they store goods in California, they have a warehouse there, or they ship a vast majority or they run, let&#8217;s say paid Google ads in the State of California, well now they&#8217;ve established that they do a significant amount of business there, and so they have to meet the stricter website, there&#8217;s a state accessibility law called the Unruh Civil Rights Act. And so a lot of businesses that aren&#8217;t California businesses, because they do a certain amount of sales there or something else are falling under that law. And I think we see the same thing, with discussions around the GDPR laws and privacy, which is, I&#8217;m a small business in the United States. I don&#8217;t advertise in the EU. I don&#8217;t do a lot of sales there. I don&#8217;t have employees there. It&#8217;s unlikely I really have to worry about GDPR, but if I started really doing a shift in that direction then I would need to worry about that. And so I think really from a business standpoint or a developer standpoint, you really want to think about where is the business engaging with its customers and whether or not their headquarters or their main office is there. And then those laws might apply.</p>



<p>[00:18:09] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Yes, the point that you made earlier, I think we&#8217;ll come back, and we&#8217;ll reiterate it, the point being, if you are concerned about this, the law side of things is of concern, I think you should probably seek counsel from somebody who is in fact an expert in these areas and can give you the correct advice at the time of you publishing those things.</p>



<p>Just as an aside, and it&#8217;s a curious thing I dont know if this is the case. I&#8217;ve heard of things in the past where lawyers, forgive me if you&#8217;re a lawyer, this doesn&#8217;t come across the way it sounds, but where lawyers have gone chasing things which they know are going to be profitable for them, shall we say. In other words, they go and seek cases where person being accused is on the wrong side of the law, and they go and discover that fault. Do you see that happening much in this space? In other words, is the enforcement of law and lawyers in particular, are they going out finding these problems? Do we need to worry about this?</p>



<p>[00:19:05] <strong>Amber Hinds:</strong> In the United States, and I&#8217;ll say I&#8217;m not familiar with this in any other countries in the world, but in the United States, there&#8217;s a couple of organizations, usable net. They put out twice a year, sort of the status of lawsuits. And one of the really interesting things that they track is the number of law firms. So last year there were slightly over 4,000 lawsuits that were filed and the vast majority of them came out of six law firms. I&#8217;ll also say that when we were doing some research to make sure that we were paying our testers, I was looking at other accessibility testing job boards, just to make sure, are our hourly rates in line with others. And I came across. A tester job that was posted by a law firm, and it was very clear by reading it that they were seeking a blind individual to test websites for them, and then come on as a plaintiff, on websites that didn&#8217;t meet standards or weren&#8217;t usable. Which is definitely, I would say shady, and I think to some degree, that&#8217;s where, people have some major complaints about this because it feels a little bit like sharks out there, circling, trying to ask things of business that maybe aren&#8217;t realistic, in some cases, if they&#8217;re very small businesses. But the other side of that is that at least here in the United States, part of how we motivate laws to be made, or we legislate laws is by enacting things in the court. And right now there are enough cases happening that it might get to a point, and there is actually a bill up for consideration at our federal government level, that would say when can these lawsuits happen and what requirements are there of businesses? So what&#8217;s hard in the United States is people are guessing that the ADA applies to websites, but we don&#8217;t have any legislation that specifically states that.</p>



<p>And so these lawsuits, while they might seem frustrating on one hand to the business owner, on the other hand, this is how in the past people with disabilities, or even people of different colors have gotten more rights. And so, I have a hard time completely villainizing the plaintiffs in all cases, or the law firms in all cases, because it could be possible that they&#8217;re coming from it from a standpoint of, they legitimately want to enact change and this is the way that they see to do it.</p>



<p>[00:21:24] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Okay, thank you. That&#8217;s really interesting. Up until now, it feels like we&#8217;ve put the frighteners on everybody and we&#8217;ve described all of the ways that you can trip over and be caught out. Let&#8217;s flip the conversation. Let&#8217;s try to make it so that now we&#8217;re trying to figure out all the ways where we can do the right thing. Before we begin taking that apart a little bit. I&#8217;m just wondering. Imagine a website, a spectrum of websites. On the one hand, there&#8217;s a website where zero consideration has been given to website accessibility. It is appauling from your perspective. And on the other end of the spectrum is a website where every single box has been ticked. It&#8217;s exemplary. They&#8217;ve spent a vast amount of resource on getting it perfect. And so in between those two will be the vast majority of websites. Some, maybe 30% of the way along that journey, some 50, some 90. And I&#8217;m just wondering what the position is in terms of, is doing 30% okay? Is doing 50% okay? Are we trying to do this thing incrementally, or is this a case of no, no, no, you must achieve all of it. It&#8217;s a hundred percent or nothing.</p>



<p>[00:22:36] <strong>Amber Hinds:</strong> I think the reality of accessibility, especially accessibility remediation on a website that perhaps already exists, rather than a new build, is that it has to happen incrementally over time. Particularly if it&#8217;s a website that has thousands of pages, maybe even tens of thousands or it has a lot of PDFs. We just launched a website for an organization that has a ton of PDF documents. They&#8217;re government funded. They have to be accessible. But they have PDFs going back to, the early two thousands, in some cases, the nineties. I&#8217;ve seen organizations where they have PDFs from the eighties, where it&#8217;s more of a scan document, that&#8217;s been turned into a PDF. And so the thing is, the reality of going back and remediating all of those PDFs and making them work for someone doesn&#8217;t always make sense. And so you really want to think about a good place to start. The important points in a user&#8217;s journey. And this will vary depending upon what kind of website it is, but, common things are, can they contact you? Can they complete a checkout process, add a product to cart. Those sorts of things, you know, take the main actions that you really want them to take. Can they find really important information about your services. But maybe you have 5,000 blog posts that go way back into time. And if you look in Google analytics, they&#8217;re hardly getting any traffic, then that would not be where you would start, right? You want to start on the most important pages on the website and the most important components. And then yes, obviously we want to say let&#8217;s try and work towards being a hundred percent accessible, but we also have to take, you know, into account the reality of client budgets or internal organization&#8217;s budget. What time looks like, the size of the website and all those sorts of things. And there are definitely aspects of accessibility that can have much greater impact than other things. We commonly see alt tags being cited in lawsuits. We see captions on videos. And really they want to see accurate captions, not YouTube auto captions.</p>



<p>Another thing is headings. That&#8217;s one thing I&#8217;ve learned from observing some of our testers and hearing, seeing them navigate the web is headings are super important. Both that they exist on a page, but also that they&#8217;re used in the right order, because that is one of the fastest way for them to skip. So I could say, read me all the h2&#8217;s on a page, on a screen reader, and then I can say, oh great, I heard this third one, I&#8217;m going to jump here. But if I am missing headings or I have headings in a wrong order, then it can really make it hard for someone to move around the page.</p>



<p>That&#8217;s another really common thing, that is a good thing to fix that anyone can fix. You don&#8217;t have to be a developer, in most cases in WordPress to go in and add headings to your content or make sure your headings are using the correct numerical order. From a developer standpoint, I think, there should be a general baseline, especially if you&#8217;re building new websites, of ensuring that everything that should be actionable can be reached and used with a keyboard only.</p>



<p>This is one of my biggest pet peeves that I hope, plugin and theme developers can work on, is we&#8217;ll just start with a div, and a span is not a button. So following good HTML semantics goes a long way towards accessibility. So if you have a slider plugin or you have an accordion plugin or whatever that might be, making it so that the buttons to navigate through those things or the element that opens is actually a button and can actually be reached by a keyboard and then triggered with either the return or the space bar keys, that really will help a lot. And I think that&#8217;s a big thing for me is with WordPress, right, we build with components, and we&#8217;re using a lot of times someone else&#8217;s theme and we&#8217;re using maybe five, maybe 50 plugins in order to create the amazing websites that we build. And very few of us developers are building every single piece of that website from scratch.</p>



<p>And so really a big part of this and where this needs to come from in the WordPress world is that plugin and theme developers need to take this seriously because they&#8217;re not just impacting the accessibility of one website. If they have 500,000 installs, they&#8217;re impacting the accessibility of 500,000 websites, many of which might be owned by a DIY&#8217;er who has no idea about accessibility and has never heard of.</p>



<p>[00:27:01] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Yeah, again, a really good point, and you described there some of the of low hanging fruit. I guess it may be that you&#8217;re in a, an agency, for example that could simply farm this out to another agency who specializes in this, or it may very well be that your agency is big enough that somebody can be dedicated to the role of making the website, giving it the checks and making sure that everything&#8217;s as it should be. But, I&#8217;m guessing that a significant proportion of the people listening to this podcast are people that do this by themselves and the responsibility falls upon them. We&#8217;re all WordPress users, and that&#8217;s the tool that we&#8217;ve decided to build our websites with. Are there any WordPress standards, if you know what I mean? Is there some kind of badge of honor, as a plugin developer that you can wear. Some description that we might be able to see, when we&#8217;re going out finding plugins and themes and all of the different things, more recently blocks, that would indicate to us, okay, the person creating this has done their due diligence, and we can trust what they&#8217;re doing, or is it still a bit wild west?</p>



<p>[00:28:03] <strong>Amber Hinds:</strong> In the plugin world, it&#8217;s definitely still wild west. There&#8217;s no label or third party vetting for plugins. We&#8217;ve seen some where they say. I think if you look in the repo on.org, there&#8217;s around 40 plugins that use accessibility as a keyword, and I&#8217;ve tested some of them and they have major accessibility problems.</p>



<p>Now on the theme side, and this is good news if you&#8217;re someone who builds websites, but doesn&#8217;t make custom themes. There is an accessibility ready tag in the theme repository, and these are all themes that have gone through a basic level of testing for important basics that need to exist in a theme. Which means that it would be a good starting place for building a website from the is accessible.</p>



<p>So that&#8217;s a great way to go and they&#8217;re all free themes. There are also some paid themes, but again, you kind of have to get into the who&#8217;s vetting them, who&#8217;s not. The accessibility ready tag comes after a vetting from the themes team. So in WordPress land, that&#8217;s probably the best place to start, but on the plugin front, it&#8217;s a lot harder.</p>



<p>I think there are some tools that can be used to test plugins before you even install one. So, or some different practices. There are two great browser extensions a lot of people are familiar with. Wave is one, and the other one is Axe which is by Deque. That one I tend to prefer because it is a more thorough, but both of these, you can have them installed and if you go to a plugins demo, you can click the button and you can get a quick accessibility report. Now it&#8217;s a little hard, cause you have to look at it and assess are these actually coming from the plugin or some of these problems in the theme that happened to be used on the demo page. But another thing, like I mentioned, being able to use things like keyboards, you could also tab through, just use your tab key on a plugin demo and use that to assess. So there are some ways that you can assess and decide whether or not plugins or themes will work, even without being a full expert in accessibility.</p>



<p>[00:30:07] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Yeah. Okay. That&#8217;s really good to know. Speaking of tools, I&#8217;m wondering if somebody was listening to this podcast and they decided this was now something they wished to become more interested in and make some more explorations. What tools do you recommend? So this is not from the point of view of exploring WordPress products, but the website after it&#8217;s finished, just checking that everything is as it should be. You mentioned some browser extensions. I don&#8217;t know if it extends to, you know, Windows apps or Mac OS apps and things like that.</p>



<p>[00:30:38] <strong>Amber Hinds:</strong> Yes. So the two browser extensions are really great and you can use them when you&#8217;re building. I always recommend trying out a screen reader. If you&#8217;re on a Mac, you&#8217;re going to have voiceover on your screen reader already, or sorry on your computer already. So all you have to do is go into your Mac settings and you can go to accessibility and you can enable voiceover, and that will allow you to hear what the website you&#8217;ve built sounds like.</p>



<p>If you&#8217;re on a PC, I really like to recommend NVDA. It&#8217;s open source and free. So you can install that on your PC and use that, and it&#8217;s one of the most popular, free screen readers for Windows. So using a screen reader is very helpful. The other thing that you might want to do, particularly if you have a large website, is do some bulk scanning of the entire site, instead of the browser extensions, allow you to scan one page and get a picture of one page, which i s helpful, but also there are some things that scanning tools while they can&#8217;t get everything, there are things that they could get that it would be nice to just have a full picture of that. So there are third-party SaaS solutions for this. Site improve is one. Monsido is another one. Pope tech, which uses Wave API.</p>



<p>And then we also have a plugin called Accessibility Checker, Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker, which does the same thing, only it puts the reports right in WordPress dashboard. So you don&#8217;t have to connect with a third party API or pay per page. But the thing that&#8217;s useful about that is, I draw a lot of parallels between SEO and, you know, there are SEO plugins where you have it installed and as you&#8217;re writing your content on the page, it will score it and tell you, oh, maybe you need to add your keyword more, or maybe your reading level is too high or something like that. Our plugin does something similar. And I think the way you want to think about accessibility, whether you&#8217;re using ours or any other tool is really, what can you do to proactively build accessibility in from the beginning so that you&#8217;re not having to go back later and fix things. So think proactive accessibility, not reactive remediation, because that&#8217;s what will really save on the cost and the time, if you can do it right from the beginning.</p>



<p>And so it&#8217;s helpful to use any of these tools that I&#8217;ve mentioned as you&#8217;re creating content. Get that report on your post edit screen or, run an external report, if that makes more sense to you and do it right then rather than trying to go back and fix it later.</p>



<p>[00:33:12] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Now, regardless of the legal or moral responsibility to get this stuff right, there&#8217;s work required to do this. And whenever difficult work presents itself, people always come up with ingenious ways of making it seem like the work can be achieved in a much more straightforward and simple way. And, my understanding is that there are a variety of tools on the market, which purport to offer the solution to website accessibility in a more or less copy and paste of this code and you&#8217;re done kind of way. Perhaps snake oil is a bit too strong a term, but my understanding is also that there&#8217;s not necessarily too much truth in that. I wonder if you could go into some of the tools which perhaps you would steer people away from.</p>



<p>[00:33:56] <strong>Amber Hinds:</strong> So I think the thing that people most commonly ask about are accessibility overlays. These are typically they&#8217;re JavaScript implementations. They&#8217;re a SaaS solution, but in a lot of instances, but there are also a few just WordPress plugins that are out there on wordpress.org that don&#8217;t connect to a third party.</p>



<p>And what they do, you may have seen these on a website you&#8217;ve visited, they typically put a little icon in the bottom left or right corner that is an accessibility icon. It looks like a little person. It might be on blue or some other color. And when you click it, it can open this panel. It has all kinds of different things. Turn on colorblind mode or change the colors, increase the font, add alt tags, all sorts of different things. The thing about the technology with these is, there are some things that can be fixed automatically after the fact with JavaScript. But there are also a lot of things that can&#8217;t. Automated alt tags is a great example. Frequently it gets it wrong. And then also there are cases where these accessibility tools actually cause accessibility problems, even though they&#8217;re trying not to. And so really I caution people to be careful about using overlays, particularly if the marketing for the overlay sounds too good to be true.</p>



<p>So if any company says, sign up for our plan, $39 a month and install this line of JavaScript in your header, and in 24 hours, your website will be 100% accessible. And by the way, we&#8217;ll protect you from getting sued. That&#8217;s when you need to back up and say, hold on, is this real? Probably not, and those are the companies that, we say stay away from. If you really want to learn more about overlays, there are two really great websites. One is the overlay fact sheet, and the other one is, I think it&#8217;s overlay false claims dot com. But they are put out by Karl Groves who was of Tenon, he now works at Level Access. Tenon is who, by the way did the accessibility audit of Gutenberg a couple years ago. He has done a lot of research into overlays and what can they actually do? What can they not? And so those websites are very helpful cause they&#8217;re very like fact-based and they include voices from people on assistive technology.</p>



<p>A lot of whom say they don&#8217;t like the overlays. I&#8217;ve heard people say that they block the IP addresses for those companies so that it won&#8217;t load the overlay when they visit websites. Cause it may actually makes it more challenging.</p>



<p>As much as I wish there was an instant solution, unfortunately there are no shortcuts.</p>



<p>[00:36:36] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> You mentioned a name there, Karl Groves. I&#8217;m just wondering if you have any other resources, any other useful places where you turn for advice that you believe represent a good investment in time that will enable us to quickly get up to speed with this whole subject.</p>



<p>[00:36:53] <strong>Amber Hinds:</strong> So if I can pitch a little bit, I&#8217;m the lead organizer of the WordPress Accessibility Meetup, which is an official WordPress Meetup through the WordPress Foundation. And we meet twice a month. It&#8217;s the first Thursday of the month in the morning for me, and the third Monday of the month in the evening for me, but we kind of have them spaced out because we get people from all over the world, which is super cool. It&#8217;s permanently virtual. It&#8217;s actually one of the first, topic-based not city-based meetups in the meetup program. And we have a lot of different speakers who come, and we also keep all of the recordings. So you can get more information and watch things if you&#8217;ve missed a talk.</p>



<p>So That&#8217;s a great resource. Also the international association for accessibility professionals, which I&#8217;m going to call, and most of them call the I A A P is they have certification programs and training courses. If you want to become one of theirs is the website accessibility specialist. They have different certifications. And so those are really good well-known resources that are vetted. I always recommend, go read the web content accessibility guidelines. I think a lot of people feel nervous about that, but each individual guideline itself is like a sentence and it&#8217;s broken out. Sometimes you have to read through a few of them to be like wait a minute, what does this mean? And they have links with information that are like, how can I actually implement this? But really go read the guidelines, so that you know what those are. And then the other website that I like to recommend too is web aim, they also talk a lot about how can you actually implement the guidance?</p>



<p>[00:38:37] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> That&#8217;s really excellent. There was a whole ton of things. I will make sure Amber that all of those hit the show notes so that the URLs are easy to find so that you don&#8217;t have to go scrolling back through the podcast and write it all down. So, the show notes are always attached, as I might add is a fully corrected version of the transcript. You&#8217;ll be pleased to know. We make the effort of putting this out word for word accurate, hopefully. This all sounds very laudable. Just one thorn I&#8217;m about to throw in the side of this, and I&#8217;m imagining that I work for Evil Corp, and my boss is the chief of Evil Corp, and he doesn&#8217;t care about this. To him this is just a hassle, it&#8217;s a thorn in the side. He&#8217;s quite happy to put the websites out as they are, because it&#8217;s more profitable because there&#8217;s less time to be spent on these things. I&#8217;m just wondering if you&#8217;ve got any advice for people in that situation. People who know that they could do a better job, but are stymied by the situation that they&#8217;re in. Is there any generic advice that you could give or a place that you could go or just some general advice I guess.</p>



<p>[00:39:38] <strong>Amber Hinds:</strong> My general advice, if you&#8217;re trying to convince your boss or any sort of higher ups in your organization, is that you have to draw parallels between how accessibility will benefit the bottom line or the mission and goals of the organization. So a lot of larger companies have corporate values let&#8217;s say, or they have initiatives for giving back to the community or things like that.</p>



<p>So, it can sometimes be easy to draw a parallel between accessibility and that. Another thing is as I briefly mentioned about accessibility in a lot of ways is similar to SEO. Well there are actual items that when you improve the accessibility, it improves the SEO of the website.</p>



<p>So if bringing in more traffic is helpful, then you might be able to say, we&#8217;ll do this and it might increase our traffic. Or, it will help our conversions because we&#8217;re going to reduce our bounce rate because more people are going to be able to get where they need to go and complete the actions that we want them to do.</p>



<p>So I think there are ways that it can be sold that really show the benefits to the business. As much as I want to approach it from the whole like, I don&#8217;t care about the benefits of the business, I care about the greater good for the world and all human beings. The reality of business and budgets is that we have to talk about what the benefits of the business are.</p>



<p>The other thing I will say is there are a lot of things that can be done for accessibility that don&#8217;t take extra time. Really beyond what you do in the day-to-day practice of your job. And so whether you&#8217;re a marketing person who is writing blog posts, and you said, hey, I just learned about accessibility, maybe my boss doesn&#8217;t want me to go back through all these old blog posts, but every new blog post I put in, I&#8217;m going to make sure it has alt tags. I&#8217;m going to no longer use ambiguous anchor links. So instead of linking the words, click here, I&#8217;m actually going to link the words, contact us. I&#8217;m going to add those headings like we talked about. Those are all things that you can do moving forward.</p>



<p>Same thing from a developer standpoint. If you are coding things in your organization, it doesn&#8217;t take that much longer. Typically it doesn&#8217;t take that much longer to make sure that you&#8217;re using the proper HTML tags. Don&#8217;t just make a span class and use JavaScript to make it act like a button. Let&#8217;s use a button tag and those sorts of things can be done. Even if there&#8217;s not a lot of budget in your company to go back, decide now as an individual that you&#8217;re going to, take the extra, you know, what does it take extra two minutes to maybe make sure you have alt tags on your blog post, right? Whatever it might be. So that at least moving forward, you can meet some baseline to help improve things over time.</p>



<p>And then maybe you can continue to work on selling your boss so that it can be like, hey, we really do need to resolve this issue in the header of our website, which, hey, if we fix it one time, it fixes 555 pages.</p>



<p>[00:42:39] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> That&#8217;s really nice advice. Nice to end it on a positive note. The idea being that, although there is a mountain of things to consider here, perhaps the best advice is to take one step at a time, achieve the things that which are achievable to you. Go and explore the tools that Amber mentioned and go and explore the communities and documentation that was mentioned and begin the journey.</p>



<p>You don&#8217;t have to reach the pinnacle necessarily tomorrow, but taking the first few steps is probably a step in the right direction. Amber Hinds, thank you for talking to us.</p>



<p>[00:43:15] <strong>Amber Hinds:</strong> Thank you for having me.</p>
</div>";s: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, 02 Feb 2022 15:00:00 +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: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:78:"WPTavern: Sensei LMS 4.0 Introduces New Block-Based Learning Mode Course Theme";s: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:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=129313";s: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:197:"https://wptavern.com/sensei-lms-4-0-includes-new-block-based-learning-mode-course-theme?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=sensei-lms-4-0-includes-new-block-based-learning-mode-course-theme";s: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:2320:"<p>Full-site editing has come to Sensei LMS in the plugin&#8217;s latest <a href="https://senseilms.com/wordpress-course-theme/">4.0 release</a>. The headline feature of this update is Learning Mode &#8211; a new block-based theme that gives course authors the ability to customize the learning experience in ways that were not possible before. </p>



<p>This version also updates the nine-year-old plugin&#8217;s menus and admin screens to make things easier to find, reducing the number of top-level menus.</p>



<p>&#8220;Until now, all course content was displayed in your regular WordPress theme, like any post or page,&#8221; Sensei representative Ronnie Burt said. &#8220;However, this is not always the best learning experience for students, as the site header, sidebars, and other content can be distracting. We developed Learning Mode to solve this problem — so your courses are the students’ main focus.&#8221;&nbsp;</p>



<div class="wp-block-image"><img /></div>



<p>Learning Mode is bundled in the plugin and brings the full-site editing capabilities launched in WordPress 5.9 to lessons and quizzes. It does not apply to the whole site &#8211; only the LMS content URLs. The rest of the site uses the regular, active WordPress theme.</p>



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

</div>



<p>Learning Mode is free, not a paid add-on, and it is also optional. Sensei LMS users who update to 4.0 can continue having their course content displayed directly in their WordPress themes as they have been.</p>



<p>Sensei is one of the first plugins to offer this kind of separate, in-app FSE-enabled theme. It enables course authors to make their own customizations to courses and templates using blocks. Things like extra instructions, announcements, advertisements, links, are now much easier to insert. The colors and design can also be further customized to match the site&#8217;s branding.</p>



<p>This particular implementation highlights the potential of FSE where these kinds of template changes might have cost site owners hours in custom development before template editing was within reach. Many other types of plugins that introduce their own templates could benefit from a similar approach. It will be interesting to see how FSE opens up WordPress customization beyond just themes.</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, 02 Feb 2022 04:16:35 +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:13:"Sarah Gooding";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:67:"WPTavern: Look Under the Hood With the Block X-Ray WordPress Plugin";s: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:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=129206";s: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:179:"https://wptavern.com/look-under-the-hood-with-the-block-x-ray-wordpress-plugin?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=look-under-the-hood-with-the-block-x-ray-wordpress-plugin";s: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:4467:"<p class="has-drop-cap">One of my favorite tools in the past few days is the <a href="https://github.com/salcode/block-xray-attributes">Block X-ray Attributes</a> plugin by Sal Ferrarello. It is geared toward developers and shows block attributes in the WordPress editor.</p>



<p>After seeing his tweet on Friday, I immediately installed it.</p>



<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Thanks to <a href="https://twitter.com/webdevstudios?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@webdevstudios</a>, for today's <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/5FTF?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#5FTF</a> I got to create a WordPress plugin that displays the attributes of the currently selected block in the block editor.<a href="https://t.co/pW17NcwYEX">https://t.co/pW17NcwYEX</a> <a href="https://t.co/JvZff5anbR">pic.twitter.com/JvZff5anbR</a></p>&mdash; Sal Ferrarello (@salcode) <a href="https://twitter.com/salcode/status/1487176381234663424?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 28, 2022</a></blockquote>
</div>



<p>The plugin is currently only available via its GitHub repository, and anyone who wants to give it a spin can grab the latest build from the <a href="https://github.com/salcode/block-xray-attributes/releases/tag/1.0.0">1.0.0 release page</a>. (<strong>Update: </strong>it is <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/block-xray-attributes/">now on WordPress.org</a>.)</p>



<p>Ferrarello and his colleagues get a full day on company time to give back. WebDevStudios&#8217;s employees <a href="https://webdevstudios.com/?s=five+for+the+future">consistently devote</a> one day each month to <a href="https://wordpress.org/five-for-the-future/">Five for the Future</a>, an initiative that encourages organizations to contribute five percent of their resources to the WordPress project.</p>



<p>The company&#8217;s <a href="https://webdevstudios.com/2022/01/27/five-for-the-future-friday/">first Five for the Future day</a> of 2022 landed last Friday. Ferrarello opted to build a plugin that will likely be immensely helpful to other developers who are building blocks.</p>



<p>Block X-ray Attributes adds a new tab under the Post sidebar panel in the editor named &#8220;Block X-ray.&#8221; It simply shows a code field with the currently-selected block&#8217;s attributes in JSON format.</p>



<img />Viewing attributes of a Columns block.



<p>When I first installed the plugin, I expected the tab to be under the &#8220;Block&#8221; panel. Since the attributes are specific to the block, it made sense that it would be there. It is instead under the &#8220;Post&#8221; or &#8220;Page&#8221; panel, depending on what type of content you are editing.</p>



<p>One missing feature that I would like to see is a copy button. For nested blocks, the output can be lengthy to copy with a mouse, and having a quick way to grab and paste it in my code editor would save some effort on my part.</p>



<p>I imagine that other developers would find the plugin invaluable in taking a quick look at attributes while building new blocks. That would also be my primary use case for it, so I inserted a breadcrumbs plugin that I need to finish at some point:</p>



<img />Testing custom attributes for a block.



<p>Being able to quickly look at custom attributes for my blocks allows me to see everything I need to know about them. I can note if the values are being added and correct when I toggle options on and off.</p>



<p>Another use case is the wealth of information available when the dreaded invalid block error appears.</p>



<img />Diving into block validation issues.



<p>If there is one feature I want to put to the test, this is it. There are times when WordPress randomly gives me a block validation error within custom patterns for seemingly no reason. Maybe it is stray whitespace or some other invisible ghost poking around underneath it all. The block recovery options do not help. Therefore, I am leaving Block X-ray Attributes installed until I can finally catch one of those oddly-random cases. <em>Will it help?</em> We will see in time.</p>



<p>For now, I recommend anyone developing anything related to blocks to install and activate this plugin. It is a handy tool that could mitigate a headache or two.</p>



<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="wp-embedded-content"><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/block-xray-attributes/">Block X-ray Attributes</a></blockquote>
</div>";s: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, 02 Feb 2022 01:54:37 +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:"Justin Tadlock";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:77:"WPTavern: Nesting and Grids: Super List Block Supercharges Lists in WordPress";s: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:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=129167";s: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:197:"https://wptavern.com/nesting-and-grids-super-list-block-supercharges-lists-in-wordpress?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=nesting-and-grids-super-list-block-supercharges-lists-in-wordpress";s: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:5135:"<p class="has-drop-cap">Freelance WordPress developer Aurooba Ahmed released the <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/superlist-block/">Super List Block plugin</a> earlier today. Essentially, it is like the core WordPress List block &#8212; just supercharged. It is her first publicly-released extension on WordPress.org.</p>



<p>The primary use case for the plugin is adding other blocks within the list items. However, its options allow users to take it further by supporting grid-based layouts.</p>



<p>WordPress does not currently allow end-users to nest other blocks into list items via the editor. It is rich text or nothing, and it can be an irritating part of the editing experience when you need this seemingly run-of-the-mill feature. It is an issue that makes you wonder why we moved on to FSE before smoothing out the content experience. HTML list item elements are, after all, containers for other content.</p>



<p>For me, at least, it is not something I often need. When I do, I code it via the Custom HTML block. That works if the list&#8217;s content is simple but not when you want to nest more complex elements like other blocks.</p>



<p>The Super List block turns its nested Super List Item blocks into containers for pretty much anything. One typical use case would be to add multiple paragraphs or other text-based blocks like headings as single list items.</p>



<img />Headings and multiple paragraphs under single list items.



<p>However, the plugin does not limit users to text. They can stick whatever they want in, even nesting a Super List within a Super List Item block. Unfortunately, its indentation is zeroed out in that scenario, so its items do not appear nested.</p>



<p>The plugin&#8217;s claim to fame may be its grid feature. The closest things in WordPress are the Columns and Gallery blocks. However, Columns are limited to a single row, and Gallery only allows images.</p>



<p>This is also where the Super List block needs a little refinement. When selecting the horizontal (&#8220;grid&#8221;) orientation, a new box appears to allow users to set the maximum width of all sub-list items.</p>



<img />Four-by-four grid of quotes and images.



<p>Wanting to create a four-by-four grid (two rows of two columns), I immediately selected 50%. It made the most sense. However, I did not get any columns. The value was too large and did not account for the gutter space between the items. I then lowered it until I hit a number that worked: 47%. I could have looked at the page&#8217;s source code and simply <em>did the math</em>, but it would be a guessing game for the average end-user.</p>



<p>A more intuitive interface would be to switch the max-width option to a column-number setting. Technically, this would limit the flexibility of the block in a few scenarios. However, it would cover the vast majority of cases where users just want a grid of equal-width columns that span the width of their container.</p>



<p>This assumes that the plugin does not eventually allow users to micro-manage each list item in grid mode. There is an open ticket in the plugin&#8217;s repository to <a href="https://github.com/createwithrani/superlist/issues/9">add the option</a> to individual Super List Item blocks.</p>



<p>Whatever future direction the plugin goes, an easy-to-use block for quickly setting up a grid of items will likely land in many developer and site-owner toolboxes.</p>



<p>Three features make this plugin simpler to use than many core WordPress or third-party blocks. The first is when the user has the Super List selected in the editor. Instead of only the &#8220;+&#8221; icon to nest another block, it appends the text label &#8220;Add Super List Item.&#8221;</p>



<img />Add new Super List Item button.



<p>It is easy to get confused about where new blocks will be inserted after clicking the &#8220;+&#8221; editor icon. Super List Block&#8217;s text label makes it dead simple to understand. I would love to see WordPress and other third-party plugins take the same or a similar approach.</p>



<p>The other two nice-to-have features appear in the toolbar for the Super List Item block. The first is a &#8220;Settings&#8221; button for jumping back to the parent block. The second is a circular &#8220;+&#8221; icon for appending another item to the list.</p>



<img />Settings and append buttons in the toolbar.



<p>Both options seemed to reduce misclicks when selecting blocks or buttons in the editor. However, I prefer WordPress&#8217;s approach to making some parent block settings available in the child block&#8217;s toolbar. Social Links is a prime example of this, allowing users to change justification and alignment without jumping back and forth.</p>



<p>Overall, I am impressed with Super List Block as a first release. I will be keeping my eye on it to see how it matures. It is well worth deploying on any site that requires its features now.</p>



<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="wp-embedded-content"><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/superlist-block/">Super List Block</a></blockquote>
</div>";s: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, 01 Feb 2022 01:35:02 +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:"Justin Tadlock";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:80:"WPTavern: Essential Addons for Elementor Patches Critical Security Vulnerability";s: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:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=129255";s: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:205:"https://wptavern.com/essential-addons-for-elementor-patches-critical-security-vulnerability?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=essential-addons-for-elementor-patches-critical-security-vulnerability";s: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:2665:"<p><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/essential-addons-for-elementor-lite/">Essential Addons for Elementor,</a> a popular plugin with more than a million active installs, has <a href="https://patchstack.com/articles/critical-vulnerability-fixed-in-essential-addons-for-elementor-plugin/">patched a critical vulnerability</a> that would allow for a local file inclusion attack.</p>



<p>The vulnerability was discovered by security researcher Wai Yan Myo Thet and reported to Patchstack on January 25, 2022. Patchstack customers received a virtual patch the same day. The issue was already known to the plugin&#8217;s developers, WPDeveloper, who issued two insufficient patches before it was ultimately fixed in version 5.0.5.</p>



<p>Patchstack published a summary of the vulnerability and explained how WordPress sites using the plugin could be compromised:</p>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>This vulnerability allows any user, regardless of their authentication or authorization status, to perform a local file inclusion attack. This attack can be used to include local files on the filesystem of the website, such as /etc/passwd. This can also be used to perform RCE by including a file with malicious PHP code that normally cannot be executed.</p></blockquote>



<div class="wp-container-6201f4e9bb7ee wp-block-group">
<p>It&#8217;s important to note that the vulnerability primarily impacts users who have the dynamic gallery and product gallery widgets in use. </p>



<p>The plugin&#8217;s changelog makes the update seem more like an enhancement than a serious security concern, so users may not be fully aware that they need to update:</p>



<p> <strong>5.0.5 – 28/01/2022<br /></strong><em>Improved: Enhanced Security to prevent inclusion of unwanted file form remote server through ajax request</em><br /><strong>5.0.4 – 27/01/2022</strong><br /><em>Improved: Sanitized template file paths for Security Enhancement<br />Added: Support for new Capability Queries for WordPress 5.9<br />Fixed: Elementor Popups not being triggered<br />Few minor bug fixes &amp; improvements</em></p>
</div>



<p>All versions earlier than 5.0.5 are considered vulnerable. WordPress.org stats don&#8217;t break down active installs according to minor versions, but approximately 54% of the plugin&#8217;s users are running versions older than 5.0. </p>



<img />



<p>While this might seem like more than half a million users are still vulnerable, they would also need to be using the specific widgets in question. If you are not sure if you are using these widgets in combination, it&#8217;s best to simply update as soon as possible anyway.</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, 31 Jan 2022 21:26:27 +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:13:"Sarah Gooding";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:108:"Gutenberg Times: Preliminary Road Map for 6.0, Block Theme Creator, Developer Hours — Weekend Edition #201";s: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=20194";s: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:112:"https://gutenbergtimes.com/preliminary-road-map-for-6-0-block-theme-creator-developer-hours-weekend-edition-201/";s: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:22844:"<p>Howdy, </p>



<p>What a week this was! It was probably the biggest release for the project. Yes, even bigger than WordPress 5.0. Now all areas of a website can be handled by blocks. </p>



<p>I am awed by the massive accomplishments of all the contributors working on a major WordPress release that affects hundreds of million websites. I find these numbers mind-boggling: </p>



<ul><li>1900+ pull request merged for WordPress 5.9 </li><li>by over 600 contributors  </li><li>One hundred eighty of them contributed for the first time. </li><li>before WordPress 5.9 was released, WordPress 5.8 was downloaded more than 107 million times, </li><li>Today, four days after the release, WordPress 5.9 was downloaded already 12 million times. </li><li>87.6% of all WordPress sites are now on version 5.0 or higher</li><li>63.8% of all WordPress sites are on versions 5.7 and higher.  </li></ul>



<p>The transition to blocks for plugins and themes will take a few years for various reasons. The side editor and all Full-site editing capabilities are just the beginning. It&#8217;s important to give feedback from your experience, so the team can iterate and improve fast. </p>



<p>Nothing is perfect, especially not a release with so many code changes and contributors working on it. No amount of testing can surface everything. With so many configurations, settings, codebases and hosting offerings, not all the edge cases get caught. The release team is already preparing for a 5.9.1 version and is working fast to fix the bugs already reported, and those that didn&#8217;t make it into the release after code freeze. </p>





<p>And with that note, have a wonderful weekend ahead, hopefully away from the screens. </p>



<p>Yours, 💕<br /><em>Birgit</em></p>






<div class="wp-container-62028adbc781a wp-block-group has-light-background-background-color has-background"><div class="wp-block-group__inner-container">
<p><strong>Table of Contents</strong></p>



<div class="wp-block-sortabrilliant-guidepost"><ul><li><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/feed/#release-week-wordpress-open-source-project">Release Week WordPress open-source Project</a></li><li><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/feed/#blocks-blocks-blocks-they-are-everywhere">Blocks, Blocks, Blocks. They are everywhere. </a></li><li><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/feed/#gutenberg-updates">Gutenberg Updates </a></li><li><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/feed/#gutenberg-for-content-creators-and-site-builders">Gutenberg for  content creators and site builders</a><ul><li><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/feed/#themes">Themes</a></li><li><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/feed/#plugins">Plugins</a></li></ul></li><li><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/feed/#building-block-themes-for-full-site-editing">Building Block Themes for Full Site Editing</a></li><li><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/feed/#wordpress-social-learning-events-and-meetups">WordPress Social Learning Events (and Meetups)</a></li></ul></div>
</div></div>




<p>The <strong><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/01/28/developer-hours-now-scheduled-first-event-feb-8th-2022/">Gutenberg Developer Hours</a></strong> event series is now scheduled. The first event will take place on February 8th, 2022 at 11 am ET / 16:00 UTC with the panelist <strong>Tammie Lister</strong>, <strong>Nick Diego</strong> and <strong>Fabian Kägy</strong>. This event is geared towards developers to get their questions answered, discuss block development or get help with a bug.  <a href="https://www.meetup.com/wordpress-social-learning/events/283412026/">Register via the WordPress Social Learning Meetup.com space</a>. Looking forward to talking to you then! </p>



<a href="https://www.meetup.com/wordpress-social-learning/events/283412026/"><img /></a>



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-text-color has-background has-accent-background-color has-accent-color is-style-wide" />



<h2 id="release-week-wordpress-open-source-project">Release Week WordPress open-source Project</h2>



<p><a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2022/01/josephine/"><strong>WordPress 5.9 Josephine is out now!</strong></a>  </p>



<p>To catch-up on what&#8217;s new in WordPress 5.9, full-side editing and Block themes topics, the <a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/whats-new-in-wordpress-5-9-a-reading-list-on-full-site-editing-and-block-themes/">separate reading list </a> has all the information you need. The End User documentation, DevNotes, and also a few curated Block themes you can use to get acquainted with the new features. </p>



<p><strong>Sarah Gooding</strong> covered the release for the WPTavern: <a href="https://wptavern.com/wordpress-5-9-josephine-released-introduces-full-site-editing-and-new-twenty-twenty-two-default-theme"><strong>WordPress 5.9 “Josephine” Released, Introduces Full Site Editing and New Twenty Twenty-Two Default Theme</strong></a></p>



<hr class="wp-block-separator is-style-wide" />



<p>For folks curious about the impact of the Customizer, <strong>Anne McCarthy</strong> published this video on YouTube: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMoeYcYgrrE"><strong>All you need to know about the Customizer</strong></a></p>



<ul><li>If your current theme uses the Customizer, the Customizer will remain as is.</li><li>If you switch to a block theme, which is a theme that supports full site editing features, the Site Editor will replace the Customizer.</li><li>If you are using a block theme and you install a plugin that requires the Customizer (like WooCommerce), it will automatically return as a menu item under Appearance. This will happen without you or the plugin author needing to do anything.</li><li>While the menu item is hidden, you can always access it directly with&nbsp;<code>wp-admin/customize.php</code>&nbsp;direct link.</li></ul>



<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<div class="toolbelt-video-wrapper"></div>
</div><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMoeYcYgrrE"><strong>All you need to know about the Customizer</strong></a> video on YouTube by Anne McCarthy



<div class="wp-container-62028adbc7cbc wp-block-group has-light-background-background-color has-background"><div class="wp-block-group__inner-container">
<p><strong>🎙️ </strong> New episode: <a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-58-devnotes-for-full-site-editing/"><strong>Gutenberg Changelog #59 – Gutenberg 12.4, Developer Hours, Extensibility of the Block Editor and more</strong></a> with co-hosts Grzegorz Ziolkowski and Birgit Pauli-Haack. Special guest: Fabian Kägy</p>
</div></div>



<hr class="wp-block-separator is-style-wide" />



<h2 id="blocks-blocks-blocks-they-are-everywhere">Blocks, Blocks, Blocks. They are everywhere. </h2>



<p>In his post <a href="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2022/01/27/making-the-web-better-with-blocks/"><strong>Making the web better. With blocks!</strong></a>, <strong><a href="https://twitter.com/spolsky">Joel Spolsky</a>,</strong> author and creator of many things, like Stack Overflow, Trello, or Glitch, announced <a href="https://blockprotocol.org/">Block Protocol</a> as a new standard for sharing blocks. He wrote:&#8221;This kind of “insert block” user interface concept is showing up in almost every blogging tool, web editor, note-taking app, and content management system. People like it and it makes sense.&#8221;  and he continues &#8220;Our hope is that this will make life much easier for app developers to support a huge variety of block types. At the same time, anyone can develop a block once and have it work in any blog platform, note-taking app, or content management system.&#8221; </p>



<p><a href="https://twitter.com/photomatt/status/1486793646045216769">Matt Mullenweg</a> and Matias Ventura as well as Kevin Marks from <a href="https://indieweb.org/">IndieWeb</a> movement engaged with Spolsky via Twitter  </p>



<p>In her article, <a href="https://wptavern.com/block-protocol-project-aims-to-create-universal-block-system-may-collaborate-with-gutenberg"><strong>Block Protocol Project Aims to Create Universal Block System, May Collaborate with Gutenberg</strong></a>, <strong>Sarah Gooding</strong>, puts this new initiative into larger context. She cites two examples,  Drupal Gutenberg and Laraberg, where the block-editor is used outside of WordPress. She also dived deeper into the Block Protocol. </p>



<h2 id="gutenberg-updates">Gutenberg Updates </h2>



<p>The day after the WordPress 5.9 release, Matias Ventura, the architect of Gutenberg, posted the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/01/26/preliminary-roadmap-for-6-0/"><strong>Preliminary roadmap for 6.0 for the Gutenberg project</strong></a>. Ventura lists, by area the new features and refinements the team will be working on. </p>



<p>Justin Tadlock recounts the post in his article: <a href="https://wptavern.com/looking-ahead-to-wordpress-6-0-the-early-roadmap"><strong>Looking Ahead to WordPress 6.0: The Early Roadmap</strong></a></p>



<p>What is it that you want to see in WordPress 6.0 for the block editor? Share in the comments on either post.  </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 2022&#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. 2021 on. Updated by yours truly.  <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/references/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index-2020/"><em>The index 2020 is here</em></a></p>




<h2 id="gutenberg-for-content-creators-and-site-builders">Gutenberg for  content creators and site builders</h2>



<p><strong>Eric Karkovack</strong> explored <a href="https://speckyboy.com/scenarios-block-editor-replaces-custom-code/"><strong>Scenarios Where the WordPress Gutenberg Block Editor Replaces Custom Code</strong></a>. &#8220;Developers may not need to fire up that code editor quite as often these days. Slowly but surely, the Gutenberg block editor is changing how we go about website customization. The result is an increasingly&nbsp;code-free&nbsp;experience.&#8221; Karkovack wrote. </p>



<hr class="wp-block-separator is-style-wide" />



<p><a href="https://twitter.com/sandilyakafle"><strong>Ganga Kafle</strong></a> published a comprehensive guide on  <a href="https://sitenerdy.com/wordpress-full-site-editing/"><strong>What is WordPress Full Site Editing &amp; How to Use it?</strong></a> It covers all features, and discussed the advantage, how to use it and showcases the best block themes. It ends with a discussion FSE vs Page builders.</p>



<h3 id="themes">Themes</h3>



<p><strong>45</strong> is the current number of Block Themes, ready for Full-Site Editing in the WordPress repository. The newest one is the WordPress new default theme <a href="https://wordpress.org/themes/twentytwentytwo/"><strong>Twenty-Twenty-Two</strong></a> designed by Kjell Riegstad and Jeff Ong. </p>



<p><a href="https://wordpress.org/themes/stewart/"><strong>Stewart</strong></a> is also a fairly new theme by Automattic. It is very opinionated and probably the only one that sports a left sidebar. </p>



<img />



<p><strong>UXL </strong>Theme shop added another new Block Theme <a href="https://wordpress.org/themes/framboise/">Framboise</a>, offering style variations of Alara theme. Justin Tadlock took a closer look and shared his review in this article <strong><a href="https://wptavern.com/uxl-themes-releases-framboise-a-colorful-child-theme-variation-of-alara">UXL Themes Releases Framboise, a Colorful Child Theme Variation of Alara</a></strong> and introduced us to the developer of the themes Andrew Starr. Tadlock also noticed, &#8220;Framboise does not add its own set of block patterns. Instead, they all live in the parent, Alara. The same is true of&nbsp;<a href="https://wordpress.org/themes/ceres/">Ceres</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="https://wordpress.org/themes/zelia/">Zelia</a>, the other two child themes.&nbsp;&#8221; and concluded: &#8220;This is one of the most fascinating aspects of child theming with blocks.&nbsp;&#8221; </p>



<h3 id="plugins">Plugins</h3>



<p><strong><a href="https://twitter.com/chriscoyier">Chris Coyier</a></strong>, founder of CSS-Tricks, elaborated in his post: <strong><a href="https://css-tricks.com/table-of-contents-block-in-wordpress/">4 Quality Options for a Table of Contents Block in&nbsp;WordPress</a></strong> on what to look for when you search a Table of content solutions, checks each block plugin against these requirements.</p>



<hr class="wp-block-separator is-style-wide" />



<p><a href="https://twitter.com/aurooba"><strong>Aurooba Ahmed</strong></a> published her <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/superlist-block/"><strong>SuperList block </strong></a>in the WordPress repository. Use it to nest blocks inside list items, a feature many content creators have been looking for the core List block. You could also use the SuperList Block to create simple grid layouts,  like a properly responsive pricing table, or a wrapping icon list. Ahmed wrote: &#8220;It aims to provide you with as much flexibility as possible, so you can harness it to create the content structure and layout you like.&#8221; <strong>Dennis Snell</strong> started working on <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/35870">InnerBlocks for the Core List block</a>.</p>



<hr class="wp-block-separator is-style-wide" />



<p><strong>Nick Diego</strong> published the <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/block-pattern-explorer/"><strong>Block Pattern Exlorer plugin</strong></a> in the WordPress repo. The difference to the just released Pattern Explored in 5.9 is that it includes the ability to preview patterns at different sizes (mobile, tablet, and desktop) and displays patterns individually or in a grid view. Diego also experiments with category and types for better grouping in the modal. The Block Pattern Explorer plugin is a safe space to explore different ways to built in explorer can be enhanced. </p>



<h2 id="building-block-themes-for-full-site-editing">Building Block Themes for Full Site Editing</h2>



<p><strong>Daisy Olsen</strong> and <strong>Ryan Welcher </strong>continued their Video Series <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ky-bS4iUlDo"><strong>&#8220;Creating a Block Based Theme&#8221; Part 2 </strong></a>is now available on YouTube. They covered: </p>



<ul><li>Created a header.html and footer.html template parts</li><li>Discovered an issue with the Navigation block that has&nbsp;<a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/37718">already been fixed</a></li><li>Defined a custom gradient in theme.json</li></ul>



<p><a href="https://github.com/ryanwelcher/twitch/tree/stream/jan-13-2021">The code is available on GitHub</a></p>



<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NX_7P2lvuwU">Creating a block-based theme with Daisy Olsen. Part 1</a> </p>



<hr class="wp-block-separator is-style-wide" />



<p><a href="https://twitter.com/karks88"><strong>Eric Karkovack</strong></a> wrote an essay and explored <a href="https://thewpminute.com/what-does-wordpress-full-site-editing-mean-for-freelancers/"><strong>What Does WordPress Full Site Editing Mean for Freelancers?</strong></a> Karkocack started with &#8220;When we start digging into new features, there’s always a concern for any immediate impacts. But whatever comes from Full Site Editing will happen gradually.&#8221; </p>



<hr class="wp-block-separator is-style-wide" />



<p><strong>Justin Tadlock</strong> already looked ahead to next week&#8217;s Gutenberg plugin version 12.5, <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/releases/tag/v12.5.0-rc.1">now available as release candidate</a> and found <a href="https://wptavern.com/global-style-variations-skins-for-themes-have-landed-in-gutenberg"><strong>Global Style Variations, “Skins” for themes, Have Landed in Gutenberg</strong></a>. He explained &#8220;a global style variation is user-selectable skin for their currently active theme.&#8221; and called it his most-wanted component for Gutenberg. &#8220;From a theme developer’s viewpoint, they would drop custom&nbsp;<code>stylename.json</code>&nbsp;files under a&nbsp;<code>/styles</code>&nbsp;folder in their themes&#8221; he wrote. The <a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/block-editor/how-to-guides/themes/create-block-theme/#global-styles-presets">Create a Block Theme documentation</a> page already has more details for theme developers.  </p>




<p><strong><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/need-a-zip-from-master/">Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg&#8217;s main (trunk) branch?</a></strong><br />Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review. <br />Have you been using it? Hit reply and let me know.</p>



<p><img alt="GitHub all releases" src="https://img.shields.io/github/downloads/bph/gutenberg/total" /></p>




<hr class="wp-block-separator is-style-wide" />



<p id="block-theme-generator"><strong>Caroline Nymark</strong> created a <a href="https://fullsiteediting.com/block-theme-generator/"><strong>Block Theme Generator</strong></a> with three levels of Starter Theme. You can create an <strong>Empty theme</strong> with 6 templates (Index, single, page, archive, 404, and search), a theme.json file and not patterns or block styles. </p>



<p>Then you also could create a <strong>Basic Theme</strong>, that has an additional custom template, and Header &amp; footer template parts. It also creates examples for block patterns, selectable style variations, Block styles for specific blocks and HTML forms elements. You&#8217;ll find a more elaborated configuration via the Theme.json file in the downloadable Zip file.  </p>



<p>The <strong>Advanced Theme</strong> adds a Category template and additional post and page templates to the packages, accompanied by six block patterns, and examples for using Google Fonts, example variations to core blocks and unregisters styles and blocks patterns. Its theme.json is also quite opinionated with elaborate configuration for various blocks, and offers 8 gradients, 3 duotones. </p>



<p>If you want to take a deep dive into Block theme development, this is the tool for you to get started and learn from one of the leading full-side editing experts. </p>



<hr class="wp-block-separator is-style-wide" />



<p><strong>Justin Tadlock</strong> recounts his journey as a theme developer from Classic to block themes in his post <a href="https://wptavern.com/if-this-is-modern-wordpress-theme-development-sign-me-up"><strong>If This Is Modern WordPress Theme Development, Sign Me Up</strong></a>. He cherishes, the  &#8220;No build process, no php composer, no node_module folder&#8221;  approach to just build a WordPress Theme. </p>



<p><strong>Tammie Lister</strong> express similar enthusiasm when she phrased: &#8220;Let Themes be Themes again&#8221; during our <a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/theme-json-for-wordpress-theme-authors-demo-and-live-q-a-w-daisy-olson-tammie-lister-and-jeff-ong/"><em>Live Q &amp; A Theme.json for Theme Authors or Getting started building WordPress Themes for Full-site editing.</em></a></p>



<h2 id="wordpress-social-learning-events-and-meetups">WordPress Social Learning Events (and Meetups)</h2>



<p><strong>February 2, 2022, 12 pm (noon) ET / 15:00 UTC</strong><br /><a href="https://www.meetup.com/wordpress-social-learning/events/283490996/"><strong>Ride Along: How To Switch From a Classic To Block Theme</strong></a> with Sarah Snow</p>



<p><strong>February 4, 2022 1 pm ET / 18:00 UTC </strong><br /><strong><a href="https://www.meetup.com/wordpress-social-learning/events/283557865/">Zero to Block Theme Series #3: theme.json Continued &#8211; Styles</a></strong> with Daisy Olsen and Sarah Snow</p>



<p><strong>February 4, 2022, 3 pm ET / 20:00 UTC</strong> <br /><a href="https://www.meetup.com/wordpress-social-learning/events/283228078/"><strong>Beginner&#8217;s Guide to Full Site Editing</strong></a><strong> </strong>with Roxy Kohilakis via WordPress Social Learning Spaces</p>



<p><strong>February 7, 2022, 12pm (noon) ET / 17:00 UTC </strong><br /><a href="https://www.meetup.com/wordpress-social-learning/events/283323367/"><strong>Taking Control Over the Editor for Client Builds</strong></a> with Fabian Kägy via WordPress Social Learning Spaces</p>



<p><strong>February 8th, 2022 11 am / 16:00 UTC </strong><br /><a href="https://www.meetup.com/wordpress-social-learning/events/283412026/"><strong>Developer Hours</strong></a> with Birgit Pauli-Haack and expert panel via WordPress Social Learning Spaces</p>



<p><strong>February 9th, 2022 5pm ET / 22:00 UTC </strong><br /><a href="https://www.meetup.com/wordpress-social-learning/events/283371670/"><strong>Using Block Patterns</strong></a> with Wes Theron via WordPress Social Learning Spaces</p>



<p><strong>February 11, 2022 – 3 pm ET / 20:00 UTC</strong> <br /><a href="https://www.meetup.com/wordpress-social-learning/events/283228209/"><strong>Breaking it Down: Blocks, Patterns, And Templates with Full Site Editing</strong></a> with Roxy Kohilakis via WordPress Social Learning Spaces</p>



<p><strong>February 14, 2022 – 4 pm ET / 21:00 UTC </strong><br /><a href="https://www.meetup.com/wordpress-social-learning/events/283237147/"><strong>Exploring Theme Blocks</strong></a><strong> </strong>with Wes Theron via WordPress Social Learning Spaces</p>




<hr class="wp-block-separator is-style-wide" />



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



<form class="wp-block-newsletterglue-form ngl-form ngl-portrait" action="https://gutenbergtimes.com/feed/" method="post"><div class="ngl-form-container"><div class="ngl-form-field"><label class="ngl-form-label" for="ngl_email">Type in your Email address to subscribe.</label><div class="ngl-form-input"><input type="email" class="ngl-form-input-text" name="ngl_email" id="ngl_email" /></div></div><button class="ngl-form-button">Subscribe</button><p class="ngl-form-text">We hate spam, too and won&#8217;t give your email address to anyone except Mailchimp to send out our Weekend Edition</p></div><div class="ngl-message-overlay"><div class="ngl-message-svg-wrap"></div><div class="ngl-message-overlay-text">Thanks for subscribing.</div></div><input type="hidden" name="ngl_list_id" id="ngl_list_id" value="26f81bd8ae" /><input type="hidden" name="ngl_double_optin" id="ngl_double_optin" value="yes" /></form>



<hr class="wp-block-separator 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, 29 Jan 2022 16:02:00 +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: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: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:83:"WPTavern: Global Style Variations, “Skins” for Themes, Have Landed in Gutenberg";s: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:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=129174";s: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:195:"https://wptavern.com/global-style-variations-skins-for-themes-have-landed-in-gutenberg?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=global-style-variations-skins-for-themes-have-landed-in-gutenberg";s: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:4908:"<p class="has-drop-cap">It was a busy week, and I almost missed one of my most-wanted components landing in <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/releases/tag/v12.5.0-rc.1">Gutenberg 12.5 RC 1</a>. The <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/35619">global style variations feature</a> quietly snuck its way in as everyone else was getting acquainted with WordPress 5.9. The official release of version 12.5 is not expected until next week, but that did not stop me from giving it a test run.</p>



<p><em>What are global style variations?</em> I will assume you missed my post <a href="https://wptavern.com/skins-are-back-in-style-proposal-for-themes-to-bundle-user-selectable-design-variations">praising the idea last November</a>.</p>



<p>In essence, a global style variation is user-selectable skin for their currently-active theme. For example, a theme with a default blue color scheme might package green, purple, or red alternatives. The idea is not limited to colors. Anything possible to change through the global styles system is at play, such as typography, layout, borders, and more.</p>



<img />Style variations in the site editor.



<p>From a theme developer&#8217;s viewpoint, they would drop custom <code>stylename.json</code> files under a <code>/styles</code> folder in their themes. Gutenberg and, eventually, WordPress will automatically register these with the system.</p>



<p>The feature was intended to ship with WordPress 5.9, and the Twenty Twenty-Two theme was supposed to be its unveiling. However, it was not complete and is now on the slate for WordPress 6.0.</p>



<p>It did not take me long to build a couple of extra variations for my custom theme. I could change my color scheme and fonts at the click of a button.</p>




<img />



<img />




<p>If this feels eerily similar to another feature that already exists in WordPress, you are not alone in that feeling. Child theming was born out of this same idea of offering design variations for the same theme.</p>



<p>Child themes were not always possible in WordPress. They grew in popularity via a grassroots effort and a third-party plugin, and their first uses were to supply a different design via the standard <code>style.css</code> file. Users could keep everything about their site intact and add a new coat of paint whenever they wanted.</p>



<p>During the late 2000s, there was a stretch where the child theme industry was booming. The <a href="http://www.plaintxt.org/#sandbox">Sandbox theme</a> was among the first to use the feature, and others like Thematic continued pushing the idea forward. Genesis became one of the most well-known to employ child themes over time.</p>



<p>However, child theming became a beast of its own. It steered away from that initial idea of skinning a website into creating full-blown themes as big as &#8212; sometimes bigger than &#8212; their parents.</p>



<p>Global style variations take us back to that initial foundation. It returns us to something more akin to <a href="http://www.csszengarden.com/">CSS Zen Garden&#8217;s</a> beauty of designing with CSS, one of the foundational promises of child theming.</p>



<p>There is one difference. Variations are housed in a JSON file rather than <code>style.css</code>. The former is a standards-based configuration file that lets users further customize their design via the site editor.</p>



<p>Child themes will still have their place in the world of WordPress. There are times when developers and DIY end-users will need to customize beyond what is possible via the site editor. However, global style variations will offer an enticing alternative in many cases.</p>



<p>It is promising to see this land early in the WordPress 6.0 release cycle. The feature will still need some work before it is ready for core, such as figuring out how to best to <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/38333">save user customizations</a> of style variations.</p>



<h2 id="notes-for-theme-authors">Notes for Theme Authors</h2>



<p>The block editor handbook already has <a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/block-editor/how-to-guides/themes/create-block-theme/#global-styles-presets">documentation on global style variations</a>. It is short, but custom JSON files should follow the standard <code>theme.json</code> schema. Not mentioned in the docs is that you need to add the <code>version</code> key to each file:</p>



<pre class="wp-block-code"><code>{
        "verson": 2,
}</code></pre>



<p>If I did not add it, none of my variations worked in testing. I do not know if it is a bug or intentional. I expected it to fall back to the setting from the primary <code>theme.json</code> file.</p>



<p>You also cannot overwrite a single value in an array of items. For example, if adding a <code>settings.colors.palette</code> value, it replaces the entire palette.</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, 29 Jan 2022 01:58:30 +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:"Justin Tadlock";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:102:"WPTavern: Block Protocol Project Aims to Create Universal Block System, May Collaborate with Gutenberg";s: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:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=129129";s: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:247:"https://wptavern.com/block-protocol-project-aims-to-create-universal-block-system-may-collaborate-with-gutenberg?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=block-protocol-project-aims-to-create-universal-block-system-may-collaborate-with-gutenberg";s: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:8485:"<p><a href="https://blockprotocol.org/">Block Protocol</a> is a new project that aims to build a block system for embedding interactive blocks in any web application. The goal is to create a more interoperable and open web where these blocks can be shared through a standardized protocol. The initial draft of the Block Protocol spec is being incubated by the team at <a href="https://hash.ai/blog/announcing-the-block-protocol">HASH</a>, an open source data, modeling, and simulation platform.</p>



<p>When HASH founder Joel Spolsky shared the idea with the world yesterday, through a post on his <a href="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2022/01/27/making-the-web-better-with-blocks/">WordPress-powered blog</a>, it caught Matt Mullenweg&#8217;s attention.</p>



<p>&#8220;This is 100% what Gutenberg is trying to do, and it&#8217;s designed to not be WordPress-specific, with the idea that Gutenberg blocks become cross-CMS,&#8221; Mullenweg said. &#8220;We have open source Android and iOS versions.&#8221; He recommended the Block Protocol team link up with Gutenberg lead architect Matias Ventura to discuss combining efforts.</p>



<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Yes! We’d love to combine efforts and make something universal.</p>&mdash; Joel Spolsky (@spolsky) <a href="https://twitter.com/spolsky/status/1486884028443549697?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 28, 2022</a></blockquote>
</div>



<p>Mullenweg touched on this vision during the 2021 State of the Word address, saying this was one of the reasons the project<a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2021/03/05/dual-licensing-gutenberg-next-steps/"> pursued dual licensing</a> for Gutenberg.</p>



<p>&#8220;I just wanted to note that the WP apps don’t need the dual-licensing–they’re already&nbsp;GPL&nbsp;(<a href="https://github.com/wordpress-mobile/WordPress-Android/blob/develop/LICENSE.md">Android</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://github.com/wordpress-mobile/WordPress-iOS/blob/develop/LICENSE">iOS</a>),&#8221; mobile developer Matt Chowning <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2021/03/05/dual-licensing-gutenberg-next-steps/#comment-40965">said</a> during the dual licensing discussion with contributors in early 2021. &#8220;The motivation for the change is to broaden&nbsp;Gutenberg’s usage to the vast majority of apps that are not GPL like the WP apps and to grow the community using and contributing to Gutenberg.&#8221;</p>



<p>Mullenweg recast this vision during the State of the Word, saying he would like &#8220;Gutenberg blocks to become a standard that is larger than just WordPress.&#8221; He sees Gutenberg as &#8220;something even bigger than WordPress:&#8221;</p>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>There is a Drupal version of Gutenberg, et cetera. But I think part of that is that its blocks can become standard across every proprietary system. I make fun of Wix. I think it’s fair. They’ve earned it, but if they adopted Gutenberg, I would toast them and take them out to beers. I think that would be awesome.</p><p>Gutenberg is something even bigger than WordPress, which is basically saying how do we edit and create the web? And can we get as many people, both proprietary and open source collaborating on that as possible? So that is a bet we’ve made. Maybe it’s correct. Maybe it’s incorrect. I hope that you, as a contributor still are excited about being part of Gutenberg.</p></blockquote>



<p>Projects like <a href="https://www.drupal.org/project/gutenberg">Drupal Gutenberg</a> and the <a href="https://gutenbergcloud.org/">Gutenberg Cloud</a>, which shares CMS-agnostic blocks across both Drupal and WordPress, were among the first to demonstrate that this idea could work in the real world. The Drupal Gutenberg module received an <a href="https://wptavern.com/drupal-gutenberg-project-receives-enthusiastic-reception-at-drupal-europe">enthusiastic reception at Drupal Europe in 2018</a> after representatives of Frontkom, the Norwegian digital services agency that ported it over to Drupal, unveiled their work at the conference. </p>



<p>“It is key for us that Gutenberg stays decoupled from both CMSs as a library, and our hope is that Gutenberg core devs will catch onto the vision of Gutenberg as the ‘editor for the open web’ — not just for WordPress,” Frontkom CIO Per André Rønsen said after the event. Shortly after the launch of Gutenberg Cloud, Gutenberg engineers <a href="https://pento.net/2018/09/16/the-mission-democratise-publishing/">reaffirmed their commitment</a> to keeping the architecture platform agnostic.</p>



<p>In 2019,  <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="http://mauricewijnia.nl/" target="_blank">Maurice Wijnia</a>, a developer at <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.van-ons.nl/" target="_blank">Van Ons</a>, an agency based in Amsterdam, created <a href="https://wptavern.com/laraberg-a-gutenberg-implementation-for-laravel-is-now-in-beta">Laraberg</a> as an easy way for developers building applications with Laravel to integrate the Gutenberg editor. In many cases, Gutenberg usage outside the WordPress ecosystem is implemented to give clients a more friendly way to manage their sites.</p>



<p>The Block Protocol has its own technical objectives that go beyond getting cross-platform adoption of the same blocks. It also includes this idea of block data moving between apps:</p>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p><br />The protocol provides standardized, guaranteed methods of bidirectional communication between&nbsp;<em>blocks</em>&nbsp;(user-interactable components) and&nbsp;<em>embedding applications</em>&nbsp;such as web-based, desktop, or mobile apps – in a secure, permissioned fashion. By making it easy to extend functionality for different data types, it allows users to edit data in one block and have the update reflected in other blocks (or applications), each providing useful functionality.</p></blockquote>



<p>Practically speaking,  this means that a user could potentially create a block in a to-do list app and then move that data into a kanban board block on another application, without relying on an API integration. This frees up data from its application of origin and makes it far more portable and interoperable. </p>



<p>The Block Protocol also aims to give developers access to a global registry of reusable blocks so they can embed them in their own applications. The protocol enables developers to pass structured data between applications.</p>



<p>Block Protocol&#8217;s quick start guide recommends building blocks using React but it says the team will be releasing examples of how to write blocks using different frontend libraries in the near future. The <a href="https://blockprotocol.org/hub">Block Hub</a> has examples of blocks they have already built.</p>



<p>When WordPress was developing its <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/browse/block/">Block Directory</a>, the Gutenberg Cloud team <a href="https://wptavern.com/gutenberg-cloud-team-advocates-for-making-wordpress-orgs-new-block-directory-a-cms-agnostic-library">encouraged them to make it a CMS-agnostic library</a> of blocks, but the Block Directory is still strictly tied to WordPress&#8217; infrastructure. </p>



<p>“A more ideal approach however, would be to merge the two efforts,” Rønsen said in 2019. “The key for us, is to make the infrastructure open to other communities, not just WP developers. We are happy to put our project in the hands of the WP core team – given that they share the same open vision.” This didn&#8217;t end up happening, which is why Gutenberg Cloud is still the only place distributing cross-platform Gutenberg blocks.</p>



<p>&#8220;Because it’s all 100% open, we hope that the Block Protocol will become a web standard and commonly used across the Internet,&#8221; Spolsky said in his announcement.</p>



<p>Block Protocol may have more success with distributing blocks that can be used anywhere on the web, since interoperable blocks are the main thrust with this project. The project is open to <a href="https://blockprotocol.org/contact">working with existing block editors</a> whose creators want to contribute to the new standard. Gutenberg combining efforts with Block Protocol has the potential bring a better authoring experience to web apps around the world while also giving users the ability to easily move their data between apps.</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, 28 Jan 2022 23:27:00 +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:13:"Sarah Gooding";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:32:"Post Status: Who is Post Status?";s: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:31:"https://poststatus.com/?p=93014";s: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://poststatus.com/who-is-post-status/";s: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:9185:"<p>Back in December, we worked with Nicholas Petroski of <a href="https://prometheanresearch.com/">Promethean Research</a> to design <a href="https://prometheanresearch.typeform.com/to/MnSpRXLx">a survey</a> to help us take a fresh look at our members and larger audience. (<a href="https://prometheanresearch.typeform.com/to/MnSpRXLx">You can still take it if you missed it</a>.)</p>



<p>After a few weeks, we collected just over 90 responses. Here is a summary of the results followed by a sampling of the free responses to questions about what's exciting and concerning in the WordPress space today. </p>



<blockquote><p>It is definitely a pivotal moment of high uncertainty with some people seeing the glass half-full while others see it half-empty. One person's threat is another persons's opportunity&#8230;. The most common concerns touch the health and viability of the WordPress community and ecosystem.</p></blockquote>



<h2 id="h-where-do-you-live">“Where do you live?”</h2>



<img src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/7_XGY_oRJ0_-ykqO2OQYaHhU0ADEU9afG0LvT5hglxYsojzvVlwzUKLnwAa6h9HtaA8DgxV2umcdBefrjfPcoF5bvDQwq0cHBVS6OKoURF6JSWNxm5LJ3gyKp6K_F2ql5FYPvt2D" alt="Where our members are found." /><em>We have a lot of room for growth in the southern hemisphere.</em>



<p>Our survey included responses from people in 18 countries. Two-thirds of the respondents live in the United States while the next most-represented country was India with 7% of the respondents. Other than English, the most commonly spoken languages were German (5%), Hindi (5%), and Spanish (4%).&nbsp;</p>



<p>When asked about ethnicity, 78% of the respondents identified as White, 8% as Asian, 2% as Black or African American, 2% as Native American or Alaskan Native, and 10% indicated Other or didn’t wish to identify an ethnicity.</p>



<h2 id="h-what-is-your-highest-level-of-education">“What is your highest level of education?”</h2>



<img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/FCp1Abx58fPFXt8V8uVYo98z5zKAMNO_wcGdqB80ozowhj51Tp_yK-banblJFLoDRH7ZU-pYAX3KmhjLZ8CZrmLXpAcCYeJybTtVXNPj0lXuw0pCt4aLBXLBG4eQ3jpfimdHeGoL" alt="Members' education levels" /><em>We're a well-educated group.</em>



<p>84% of the respondents held a bachelor's degree or higher.&nbsp;</p>



<h2 id="h-which-of-the-following-best-describes-your-skill-set">“Which of the following best describes your skill set?”</h2>



<img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/85botHKP6Pi0uuqspbmbXgnam3sYvvBTLrKzNaQVeRRQXwVEKla32wh-coe-WPISjeWfOI_dxXubPCeYMov27qvY9o8FjNm3mdk0h2atCWdCTk6yCXsLBCOxFBUEm1JctfC4Dnvc" alt="Member skillsets" /><em>Developers are still the largest group.</em>



<p>The community is primarily comprised of developers, managers, and designers. Half of the respondents fell into the Developer skills category, followed by Management (16%), Designer (12%), and Marketer (8%).&nbsp;</p>



<h2 id="h-how-many-years-of-experience-do-you-have">“How many years of experience do you have?”</h2>



<img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/zUYzDehIt3bI6Oc4LNJf-mMe2HnYuE9e8jYYVhxUIOgxSA9Ry-SaKgm-NdzIg6DgBArmngOQc9vGACd5FmHma5hRY94OlCdMBm2RVqyXJSB485n5XUusAE76WjHMKhiaCbQ6TQH9" alt="Members' experience" /><em>We need more people who are in the early years of their career.</em>



<p>The community is heavily weighted towards senior-level talent. Two-thirds of respondents were senior-level and another 27% were mid-level. We only had a single respondent who was entry-level. There was a pretty even split between focusing on products vs. services and 16% said they worked on both equally.</p>



<h2 id="h-which-of-the-following-best-describes-your-role">“Which of the following best describes your role?”</h2>



<img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/gxSOUVYtdyrDiGyYKrSyFmPeJyr-yWaZgndKVphnb6oYU8ar6kD2k8MQTjVjAloQQITAY5bWyo31s080VBScoARdGcZIWF4BmZVfTCiR9YghGX55eyDkJomOZtyVMCQFZ_NZgveB" alt="Member roles" /><em>Most of us are owners, employees, and freelancers.</em>



<p>There was a pretty even split between respondents who identified as Owners, Employees, and Freelancers. Much less common were Executives, Managers, and Consultants.&nbsp;</p>



<h2>“How many full-time employees work at your company?”</h2>



<img src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/kZUSbi7jhK3II9yfK6DepORIYTM3p24et1lv-7QH0MgzLxZkhIPAzI0CXC6_gfWiKnJjbyt6i3F8hge3uYKbKH809WQ8O_OQLt0ScR4Rv8why7afc0wnxaxb2uwR-ZyZfvB8-fS_" alt="Company sizes by employees" /><em>Small and starting to get big — but not much in between.</em>



<p>Almost half of the respondents indicated that there are 50 or more full-time employees at their company. Of those who own their companies, the majority (64%) fell in the 1-9 FTE range.&nbsp;</p>



<h2 id="h-what-is-your-firm-s-approximate-revenue-for-2021">“What is your firm's approximate revenue for 2021?”</h2>



<img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/myPzs9MLm7crrnu0vMEWB1CEVOJ8kfI6oujVeRtnkBVD9SAE_pB5qhVHLqwk98VPLhfhEHTUWqL76fJfhnibqD-HoYzdOAzRAR-OzK3sgsY86CVqE5qvfpYj4Ci2yOFAY9YoGeyj" alt="Company sizes by revenue" /><em>Revenue and employee headcount appear linked.</em>



<p>A third of the respondents indicated that their company’s revenue fell in the $100-499K USD range while just under another third said theirs was $10M+. Of those who owned their companies, 56% fell in the $100-499K range and none fell into the $10M+ range.</p>



<h2 id="h-how-is-your-team-currently-structured-geographically-and-how-do-you-think-your-team-will-be-structured-geographically-in-3-5-years">“How is your team currently structured geographically?&#8221; and &#8220;How do you think your team will be structured geographically in 3-5 years?”</h2>



<img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/3Jp0vlCProGcG2e6CMIh_Yf-gcaLbFu4sAPEwJ2Bjcyz-OVOeAU_FDE-48pxOdQfxt-vu3XSUmrqCH2BYyjXu6JvIzL2wcuTdmmK47C2vC8O0Pv0sdkxCev6mqlJy_mwN_MAi1k5" alt="Company structures" /><em>We're happy working as we're working now.</em>



<p>Almost 2/3rds of respondents are working remotely or fully distributed while another 37% are hybrid. The distribution didn’t change when asked about the expected structure 3-5 years from now.</p>



<h2>What's causing excitement — and concern?</h2>



<p>The free response part of our community survey reveals many causes of positive excitement are also things that raise concern:</p>



<ul><li>Block Editor/FSE/Gutenberg</li><li>Headless WP</li><li>No code</li><li>Improved communication flows</li><li>Diversity and Inclusion</li><li>Opportunities and Threats to Devs and Builders</li></ul>



<p>The most common concerns all touch the health and viability of the WordPress community and ecosystem:</p>



<ul><li>Corporate consolidation, lack of diversity, loss of small players and easy entry into the ecosystem.</li><li>Inability to attract and retain talent.</li><li>The pandemic, culture, social and political divisions.</li></ul>



<p></p>



<h2 id="h-what-industry-theme-are-you-most-excited-about-in-the-next-2-3-years">“What industry theme are you most excited about in the next 2-3 years?”</h2>



<p><em>“&#8230;We're transitioning away from hard-tech development toward Strategy, Message, and Marketing.”</em></p>



<p><em>“More enablement of custom solutions through no-code/low-code tech; make things more accessible, greater opportunities.”</em></p>



<p><em>&#8220;Web3 + Decentralization + WordPress”</em></p>



<h2 id="h-how-do-you-think-the-industry-might-change-over-the-next-few-years">“How do you think the industry might change over the next few years?”</h2>



<p><em>“I think the WordPress project is at a make-or-break maturation point and the vast majority of it boils down to communication. I think the ability for WordPress to articulate next-generation Themes, provide more consistent and more transparent communication on timeline and roadmap are going to be why we succeed or why we fail.”</em></p>



<p><em>“A massive price increase of WordPress products is expected. Gutenberg forces developers to learn React. React developers cost 3-4x PHP developers. Using WordPress will become expensive, paying customers will decline as SaaS options will soon appear lucrative. AI in design and small developments will take over. A lot of freelancers will be out of business.”</em></p>



<p><em>“More distributed (OK, that's hopeful). More and more client-side based coding, less server-side as the device environment continues to move more and more to portable. Along with that could be more focus on AR/VR.”</em></p>



<h2>What is this information good for?</h2>



<p>It's great to be able to listen to our members and readers to learn who they are, how (and what) they're doing, as well as the things they are most excited and concerned by. This helps us validate, alter, or add to our our own sense of editorial priorities — the topics to follow, the questions to ask. </p>



<p>Does any of this surprise you — what was or wasn't included or represented? Let us know in the comments, or drop us a line. And <a href="https://prometheanresearch.typeform.com/to/MnSpRXLx">you can still take this survey if you haven't done so yet</a>.</p>



<p></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, 28 Jan 2022 06:16:01 +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:10:"Dan Knauss";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:66:"WPTavern: New Proposal Aims for 3 Major WordPress Releases in 2022";s: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:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=128298";s: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:177:"https://wptavern.com/new-proposal-aims-for-3-major-wordpress-releases-in-2022?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=new-proposal-aims-for-3-major-wordpress-releases-in-2022";s: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:2948:"<p><a href="https://wptavern.com/wordpress-5-9-josephine-released-introduces-full-site-editing-and-new-twenty-twenty-two-default-theme">WordPress 5.9</a> has already been downloaded nearly <a href="https://wordpress.org/download/counter/">12 million times</a> since its release earlier this week. Millions of WordPress users are discovering full-site editing (FSE) for the first time. What will they think? What struggles with they have that will need to be addressed? WordPress developers and power users have done an immense amount of testing on FSE features, but a flood of feedback from real world users is about to make its way back to the architects.</p>



<p>Planning for 6.0 and beyond is already underway with a special recognition of the unique support load that follows such a big, complex release.</p>



<p>&#8220;I believe that the relationship between WP5.9 and WP6.0 will be similar to the relationship between WP5.0 and WP5.1 in that there will be copious user feedback to process so that we can extend, refine, and in some cases even rework the user experience with the vast new feature set introduced in 5.9,&#8221; WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy said in an update published earlier this evening.</p>



<p>Haden Chomphosy is <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/01/27/proposal-2022-major-release-timing/">proposing</a> that WordPress aim for three major releases in 2022, with the next two coming in late May (6.0) and mid-October (6.1). This timeline will &#8220;let WP5.9 breathe a little,&#8221; Haden Chomphosy said. It will also allow contributors to tackle outstanding items on the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/01/26/preliminary-roadmap-for-6-0/">Phase 2 roadmap</a> before the project moves on to the third (Collaboration) phase.</p>



<p>Haden Chomphosy also put out a call for more project manager type contributors to wrangle some of the details moving forward, as those currently managing releases need more support. </p>



<p>Reports of <a href="https://twitter.com/thespacedmonkey/status/1483758890458222595">contributors getting burned out</a> during the 5.9 release cycle may indicate the packing so much into one release over a longer period of time isn&#8217;t optimal, though it may have been unavoidable given how interdependent many FSE features are that were set to launch.</p>



<p>The <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2021/12/17/discussion-2022-major-release-timing/">initial discussions</a> about possible release timing for 2022 brought a lot of feedback, as quarterly was being considered as one of the options. This discussion came fresh off a stressful year where WordPress aimed for four major releases but ended up delivering two. With the current shortage of contributors skilled in project management and operations, a well-spaced trio of releases in 2022 seems like a more realistic and healthy approach for retaining contributors.</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, 28 Jan 2022 03:12:17 +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:13:"Sarah Gooding";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:84:"Post Status: Post Status Excerpt (No. 43) — Accessibility Roundup with Amber Hinds";s: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:61:"https://poststatus.com/?p=93017&preview=true&preview_id=93017";s: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:34:"https://poststatus.com/excerpt/43/";s: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:33723:"<h3>&#8220;When it comes to accessibility lawsuits, we as developers should be proactive to ensure a site is as accessible as possible.&#8221; — Amber Hinds, Founder and CEO of <strong>Equalize Digital</strong></h3>



<p class="has-drop-cap">In this episode of Post Status Excerpt, David chats with <strong>Amber Hinds</strong>, the<strong> </strong>Founder and CEO of <strong>Equalize Digital</strong>. Amber outlines some of the things WordPress professionals should be paying attention to in accessibility. Their conversation covers recent trends and news in the accessibility space: meetups, lawsuits, overlays, and design.</p>



<p><strong>Why This Is Important: </strong>Accessibility is important to everyone, so it is critical for WordPress developers and designers to keep accessibility in mind. David and Amber only scratch the surface of this topic. Amber encourages developers to <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/accessibility/2022/01/08/accessibility-teams-goals-for-wordpress-6-0-and-beyond/">read this call from the Accessibility team</a> to share their ideas, take part in the discussion, and suggest what to prioritize for WordPress in the near future.</p>







<p class="has-background">Every week <strong><a href="https://poststatus.com/podcast/the-excerpt/">Post Status Excerpt</a></strong> will brief you on important WordPress news — in about 15 minutes or less! Learn what's new in WordPress in a flash. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/13.1.0/72x72/26a1.png" alt="⚡" class="wp-smiley" /><br /><br />You can listen to <a href="https://poststatus.com/podcast/the-excerpt/">past episodes</a> of <strong>The Excerpt</strong>, <a href="https://poststatus.com/category/post-status-podcasts/">browse all our podcasts</a>, and don’t forget to subscribe on <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/1m3xwXbe0MG5BzFVPtB0A7">Spotify</a>, Amazon Music, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS8ySkU5c2M4UA">Google Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/post-status-draft-wordpress/id976403008">iTunes</a>, <a href="https://castro.fm/podcast/c53552c6-1ee0-4fc4-9de4-08ed6bf1ee4d">Castro</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/PostStatus">YouTube</a>, <a href="http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/krogsgard/post-status-draft-wordpress-podcast">Stitcher</a>, <a href="https://player.fm/series/wordpress-post-status-podcasts">Player.fm</a>, <a href="https://pca.st/05rR">Pocket Casts</a>, <a href="https://wordpress-post-status-draft-podcast.simplecast.com/">Simplecast</a>, or by <a href="https://feeds.simplecast.com/2JE9sc8P">RSS</a>. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/13.1.0/72x72/1f3a7.png" alt="🎧" class="wp-smiley" /></p>



<h3 id="h-mentioned-in-the-show"><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/13.1.0/72x72/1f517.png" alt="🔗" class="wp-smiley" /> Mentioned in the show:</h3>



<ul><li><a href="https://blog.usablenet.com/2021-lawsuit-report-trends-and-findings">2021 Year End Report &#8211; App & Web Accessibility Lawsuits Break Records</a></li><li><a href="https://equalizedigital.com/wordpress-accessibility-meetup/">WordPress Accessibility Meetup</a></li><li><a href="https://equalizedigital.com/accessibility-checker">Accessibility Checker</a></li><li><a href="https://blog.usablenet.com/2021-lawsuit-report-trends-and-findings">2021 lawsuit report-trends-and findings</a></li><li><a href="https://www.accessibility.com/digital-lawsuits">Digital Lawsuits</a></li><li><a href="https://www.mhc.ie/latest/insights/overview-of-the-european-accessibility-act">Overview of the European Accessibility Act</a></li><li><a href="https://www.aoda.ca/a-guide-to-the-integrated-accessibility-standards-regulation/#sect14">A Guide to the Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation</a></li><li><a href="https://sheribyrnehaber.com/the-ada-lawsuit-settlement-involving-an-accessibility-overlay/">The ADA Lawsuit Selement Involving an Accessibility Overlay (Murphy v. Eyebobs)</a></li><li><a href="https://overlayfactsheet.com/">Overlay Fact Sheet</a></li><li><a href="hps://overlayfalseclaims.com/">Overlay False Claims</a></li><li><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-accessibility/">WP Accessibility Plugin</a></li><li><a href="https://bhmbizsites.com/accessibility-and-2022-13-design-trends-from-a-usability-perspective/">Accessibility and 2022: 13 Design Trends From a Usability Perspective</a></li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/accessibility/2022/01/08/accessibility-teams-goals-for-wordpress-6-0-and-beyond/">Accessibility Team’s goals for WordPress 6.0 and beyond</a></li><li><a href="https://twitter.com/dimensionmedia" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">David Bisset (Twitter)</a></li><li><a href="https://twitter.com/post_status" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Post Status (Twitter)</a></li></ul>



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<h3><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/13.1.0/72x72/1f64f.png" alt="🙏" class="wp-smiley" /> Sponsor: iThemes</h3>



<p>Take the guesswork out of building, maintaining, and securing WordPress websites. Professional plugins and training from iThemes help you create and manage your sites. Secure, back up, and manage them quickly and easily. Master leading-edge WordPress skills to grow your business and make more money. Learn and grow with the experts at iThemes.</p>



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<h2 id="h-transcript"><strong>Transcript</strong></h2>



<p><strong>Amber Hinds:</strong> I was using super cheap, like earbuds. And I think like something happened and, you know, well, you figured out later, cause I was on a zoom call with someone and they're like the same thing and I unplugged them and all the feedback went away</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> to throw them in the garbage.</p>



<p><strong>Amber Hinds:</strong> Yup. And I was like, huh, I will give these to my children.</p>



<p>Cause they don't ever talk</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> let's not let's let's not talk about that. Cause my kid's , it's like the island of misfit toys, but podcast equipment edition cherish this moment because when they get to be 13, 14, they know when you're giving them crap. Well, I've made some mistakes in my day with tech, but one mistake that hasn't been made today is getting to talk to you.</p>



<p>So it was good to have you on, thank you very much for deciding to talk with me. And this is not the first time we've been together on a podcast. Um, uh, we, you were recently on one of our, uh, news draft podcasts on Post Status comments. So if anybody wants to hear more of Amber, please feel free to look at that episode.</p>



<p>If you haven't had the chance to listen to Amber before Amber tell us briefly about yourself.</p>



<p><strong>Amber Hinds:</strong> Yeah. So I am the CEO of equalized digital. We're a certified B corporation and we specialize in WordPress accessibility. So we are WordPress, VIP partner. We do a lot of enterprise builds and we really got started in accessibility around 2016 when I started working for Colorado state university. And it was right around the same time that they were getting serious about accessibility. And the first website we did for them, there was like loosely did it, but there's no process. And then the second website, oh, this has to go to an accessibility committee.</p>



<p>And so I really got forced to learn accessibility cause it started getting audits. and so that was sort of when I started getting my feet wet with it. And then, um, since then we've had, you know, other government clients, large businesses where, you know, it's, it's a priority for them. And not just a checkbox in part of the launch process.</p>



<p>And, and I will say, I don't say that to imply that it is that way for CSU. Um, it's also a priority for them as well, around like 2017, 2018 is when I really started like diving into it and learning a lot more about it. And, um, Equalize Digital was a spinoff launched that in 2020, and we have a plugin called accessibility checker.</p>



<p>And I also organize the WordPress accessibility meetup, which is twice a month and super fun.</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> Oh, yeah, I hear that hassled good turnout. Is that, um, how many of those accessibility and meetups are.</p>



<p><strong>Amber Hinds:</strong> Yeah. So actually we are a permanently virtual meetup. We're actually one of two meetups in the official WordPress meetup program that are not city-based.</p>



<p>The other one is a hosting meetup. I'm pretty sure hosting insecurity. And so we are always virtual and we always will be even with COVID we meet twice a month. It's on the first Thursday. In the morning for us people. And then in third, Monday in the evening for us people. So we have kind of worldwide coverage, which is cool because we get people from all over the world who come to the meetups and we can have anywhere from 30 to 70 attendees, which is really cool.</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> And you talked about an accessibility checker too, that your company does. Um, think I've seen that before. There is a, there is a free and a paid model there, right?</p>



<p><strong>Amber Hinds:</strong> Yep. Um, so accessibility checker, you can find on wordpress.org, the free version, which scans unlimited posts and pages. It's not something that fixes your website, but what it does is it, it's almost like we use the analogy.</p>



<p>A lot of it's like the Yost for SEO</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> Now I am going to get copyright notices. Now</p>



<p><strong>Amber Hinds:</strong> I know maybe I shouldn't say that I should go right in Post Status and ask, can I say this about my tool, but it's a good analogy, right? It puts a box on your poster page edit screen that shows you the results of an accessibility scan. Not everything with accessibility can be identified with a scan, but we can get a lot of things and it will help you to figure out what can be fixed.</p>



<p>Uh, in your content, we're in the header, footer, sidebar of that page in order to, um, make it more accessible. And it's great because it can be helpful with even post-launch of websites. So we really started it because our clients, we would build these websites, they were accessible and then clients would start adding content and they would start.</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> Adding content</p>



<p><strong>Amber Hinds:</strong> over time, it would become less and less accessible, which, you know, if you're in an industry, especially here in the U S where there's a lot of lawsuits, you can't really risk that. And so we wanted to create something that would help to educate clients as they're adding content, but it's now become a tool that as we're building, we use it.</p>



<p>You can use it while you're developing locally, because it doesn't connect to an API. Your site doesn't have to be live anywhere for it to be scanned by a third-party tool. It can run right on your local server. Um, and you can use it to test while you're developing. Um, and it works really well for collaborative testing and then remediation also,</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> um, Amber and I are talking today because a lot of WordPress professionals have so much on their plate to think about accessibility should be one of those things that they think about.</p>



<p>But let's be honest. There's not enough hours in the day. Dig deep into some aspects or at least get the cliff notes of the highlights of what the accessibility trends are with what's going on in the community. Normally you would probably go to a WordPress meetup and hear a presentation about it. Amber, with her experience is going to share with us kind of like the cliff notes, I don't know if that's a good phrase, but at least the highlights in the next 20 minutes or so all of the links that we're about to share now, and probably even more are going to be in the show notes. So feel free to follow along if you can. But Amber, you said something about lawsuits and I know I've seen lawsuits in the news.</p>



<p>So when we hear about the, the lawsuits that are in the tech news now, what are the key things that we're taking away from those lawsuits?</p>



<p><strong>Amber Hinds:</strong> Yeah. So when we're talking lawsuits related to website accessibility, we're typically talking about the United States. It's very specific states in the US where we see most of it, like California, New York, Florida.</p>



<p>These are typically cases that are filed under the Americans with disabilities act we're in California. There's a law called the Unruh civil rights act. That references website accessibility. Basically it's an individual who is unable to use the website with assistive technology frequently. In these lawsuits, it is someone who is blind and they are using a screen reader to navigate the web.</p>



<p>Sometimes there have been some pretty high profile cases also for against, um, universities, for example, that have a lot of video content on the web that don't have captions or transcripts for podcasts, or they do have captions. But the captions are auto-generated and not corrected. And they have been sued because the auto-generated captions are so poor that no one can really understand what's happening in the video if they are deaf.</p>



<p>So those are, those are probably what we see as far as most lawsuits, but there are other ones where people have mobility issues, things like that. I was follow usable net and we can post the link, but they put out a report twice a year about the status of lawsuits in the United States. Um, they just released one at the end of December for what it looked like in 2021, a little bit over 4,000 lawsuits.</p>



<p>But as a web developer, I think the way you have to think about this is getting a lawsuit dismissed doesn't mean that your client got their money back from their lawyers who had to work to do that, to get it dismissed in the first place. Um, it also doesn't mean that there wasn't a headache with having to deal with that.</p>



<p>So really we want to be kind of proactive on the accessibility side. And then, and the other way I kind of look at lawsuits is I have a hard time completely being anti lawsuits or upset about them because for better, for worse than the U S this is part of how our laws are made. Right. We want. Bring a bunch of things to the courts and maybe that prompts our legislators to actually enact stricter laws.</p>



<p>And, and that's sort of a problem in the US for for-profit businesses is we don't have really specific guidelines about what counts as an accessible website and what doen't.</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> if you're not an expert in this, so you don't have the time to become an expert, what resources or what would you do as a WordPress professional building a site for someone to make.</p>



<p>Outside of probably hiring someone else. Cause it was probably a good idea. What would be some, maybe some initial homework that somebody could do or where they would go to?</p>



<p><strong>Amber Hinds:</strong> Yeah. So I think of course, going to the source is really important. Most laws around the world site the web content accessibility guidelines, the current version for that is 2.2.</p>



<p>Some laws are outdated and so they cite 2.1. But going there and I'm going to call this WCAG, W-C-A-G going through Wikipedia and actually reading the guidelines. It's like a long list, but each one is maybe a sentence, um, and sort of familiarizing yourself with what it is. And particularly what's at the AA level.</p>



<p>So there'll be labeled with either A, AA, or AAA and AA is generally what's considered the best practice. So other resources that I recommend a international association of accessibility professionals, and there are courses that you can take to prepare for. They have certifications. If you're interested in getting certified, which as a developer, if you have some certifications through them that can really help you on the job hunt.</p>



<p>So they have courses that will help you prep for that. And they also have ones that are focused on content creators, or designers or things that are not necessarily just coders. Um, of course our meetup is a great place to come and our meta actually counts as continuing ed credits for those certifications.</p>



<p>Uh, WP accessibility days, an annual conference that it should be in, uh, November of this year, we just set the dates. Actually earlier today, we had an organizer meeting. It's going to be November 2nd and third. It's a 24 hour conference.</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> I love hot breaking news. There you go.</p>



<p><strong>Amber Hinds:</strong> But I think like that's a good place to get started as far as learning, once you're building a website, my recommendation.</p>



<p>Um, of course you can use tools like ours, or there are browser-based tools. Ax by DQ is one that we like and recommend a lot. Um, wave is one that a lot of people have heard of. I don't think it says thorough, so I don't typically recommend it as a browser-based tool, but it's one that a lot of people use, um, go to the front end of the website, or if you're a theme developer or a plugin developer, whatever page you have your piece of code on.</p>



<p>Try to interact with it fully without using a mouse. So use your arrow keys and your tab keys and the enter key and the space bar and see if you can do everything that you would want to do on that way.</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> You know, what I do is eat something with my right hand while I'm trying to do something on a website or sometimes type something in your left hand.</p>



<p>So that's my own personal testing. It's not as easy on some sites as it is on others.</p>



<p><strong>Amber Hinds:</strong> I think the biggest thing too, if you're a developer is brush up on HTML, semantics</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> is HTML have accessibility built in into it if you do HTML correctly.</p>



<p><strong>Amber Hinds:</strong> Yeah. This is probably one of the most common things we fix in plugins that are actionable elements that should really be buttons, meaning using a button and HTML button tag are just like a div or a spin class.</p>



<p>And then the plugin developer has. Written scripts that applies to that div or that span class in order to let's say, move the sides in a carousel or open a modal in a chat window, right. Or submit a form. Sometimes it's the submit button rather than being an input or a button is just a div or span the result then is that dibs in space.</p>



<p>Are not focused, simple. So you can't even go to them with your keyboard. Like if you hit the tab key, it'll just jump right past that element. Sometimes they do an okay job of adding focus, but it doesn't, it can't actually. Uh, interacted with, with an inter or a space bar, which is what we expect the button to do.</p>



<p>Um, so really just like using a keyboard to test what you do is very helpful. And if you follow correct HTML, if you're like, well, if this is a button to go to the next slide, then I use a button tag that gets you. Very close to accessibility.</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> It's when you start getting creative is when things go wrong.</p>



<p>And then I don't mean</p>



<p><strong>Amber Hinds:</strong> And I don't want to say that, cause that makes it sound like you can't be creative.</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> Yeah. But yeah, there is a challenges in there between having these great designs. Elements or these design trends and then, you know, thinking to yourself, am I about to do something that's just going to affect you usability?</p>



<p>Should I, or excuse me, accessibility. Should I stick? You know, how far do you, do you kind of go out on a ledge a little bit and that's, it's a difficult path to walk? I think it sounds like,</p>



<p><strong>Amber Hinds:</strong> I think I will say I've been noticing just in general, like design trends over the last like year or two, at least on major brands.</p>



<p>I feel like there's been this shift. Away from some of the like crazy movement that we saw a ton of parallax or things like flying or fading in, I, I see a lot more like minimalism kind of happening, which can be helpful. Now. I wish that some of the, like if you go on some of the themes, demos that you, certain page builders, you see all this crazy stuff flying in and I'm like, man, I wish people would get on it.</p>



<p>But like, if you follow a major brands, like I think a lot of. You know, background videos were super hot several years ago and I hardly see those any more on major, right. And, and so I do feel like some of the design trends have moved back towards things that are more accessible, but you know, the plus side of that too, is they're better on first speed and performance, which is super important for the fact that most of us have a huge chunk of our traffic coming from mobile devices.</p>



<p>And then of course we all care about our search engine ranking. So that's, what's kind of neat about accessibility that a lot of people don't realize is that when you focus on accessibility, you can actually increase the traffic to your website and increase or decrease your load times, right. Which might decrease your bounce rate.</p>



<p>Like a lot of things can be really helpful on accessibility, beyond making it work for people of all abilities.</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> Does dark mode help accessibility?</p>



<p><strong>Amber Hinds:</strong> Dark mode can. Yes. I think the thing that is really interesting, we actually just had a talk, um, at our, one of our recent, um, accessibility meetups was on the use of overlays.</p>



<p>and one component of overlays, or sometimes you don't use a full. Powered like JavaScript overlay, but there's a lot of plugins in WordPress that are like add a dark mode toggle to the front end of the website. Um, and one of the conversation points there is that a lot of browsers and or operating systems themselves have dark mode options.</p>



<p>And typically those dark mode options function better than a dark mode option that has been added to a website. With a plugin or an overlay tool because the plugging in her overlay might not always catch everything. Uh, so unless you've very specifically coded your dark mode option for your theme and your plugins and everything that is on your site, it might like miss some headings or misplace holder texts or miss, you know, and then you have.</p>



<p>It's actually creates a readability problem for everyone. If it gets turned on and it's not catching everything.</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> So preferably, you want people to probably code that into their own theme directly rather than try to grab a plugin.</p>



<p><strong>Amber Hinds:</strong> Preferably yes. If you want it. But I think going back to the fact that it exists on operating systems, a lot of people who know they need dark mode.</p>



<p>Um, that have certain disabilities. Like if you have glaucoma, some people with glaucoma white, like the FFF white really bothers them. Um, they probably know that and they have a filter turned on on their computer to always add a color overlay right. To that. So it won't bother them. So the real question is, is do people actually use that beyond us developers for like, oh, it's so cool.</p>



<p>We go to a website, you know, like whitehouse.gov. We all turned it on. Right. When it launched and we're like, oh, they have a dark mode. Let's go turn it on. But. Do real users use that on a daily basis? I don't know because the people with accessibility is probably have some other tool that does it for everyone.</p>



<p>Right. Not just this one. So they don't really need a tool that does it just on this one website.</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> There's also, um, a way in CSS that you can, um, but respect the system wide preferences for dark mode as well. So you don't need a switch on the website.</p>



<p><strong>Amber Hinds:</strong> It'll it's just going to say on that mode, there's the same thing.</p>



<p>There's a system preference for. Um, decreasing movement. And if you do add movement, which I'm like, don't do it, don't make these fly in at all. But if you do, you want to make sure you code websites in a way that respects that as well.</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> So I, I don't, I literally just want to spend a minute or two on this because I think I would be kicked if I, we didn't, you mentioned overlays a minute ago, we're going to drop some links in the show notes.</p>



<p>So basically. If something says, um, we can fix your accessibility issues or add accessibility to your website with an overlay. That is a bad thing. No. And if so, what would you say for someone who has an existing site that might be tempted to use something like that?</p>



<p><strong>Amber Hinds:</strong> The biggest thing I think that website owners or developers need to be aware of is that having an overlaid does not protect you from getting sued.</p>



<p>Or even having to settle or losing your lawsuit? Um, the number that I saw was I want to say, uh, between like 12 and 15% of the lawsuits last year were websites that already had overlaid accessibility overlays on them. Um, and the big one that I mentioned when we did the Post Status draft was, um, an e-commerce brand called eyebobs and they had the excessive.</p>



<p>On it. And excessively is probably a good case in point for why I think a lot of accessibility professionals really don't like overlays because they. Promise more than they can really deliver. And so they say we'll make, you know, install a single line of JavaScript. We'll make your website accessible in 24 to 48 hours.</p>



<p>And part of me wonders if the Overlake companies didn't promise that and they didn't promise we'll protect you from lawsuits. If they wouldn't get so much negative press, if they were more like we are part of the solution to being accessible, because there are some things. That automated technology can fix.</p>



<p>And um a good example of that is Joe Dolson has the WP accessibility plugin, which in some, in some sense of the word acts sort of like an overlay, it uses JavaScript to add things like add skip links to a theme that doesn't have skip links. He only does things he knows. He can do, right. And a lot of the bigger, like SAS based overlay solutions, they're promising that it will be 100% accessible, which is not realistic because there's just things that computers cannot do.</p>



<p>And human beings have to make decisions about like, even writing all texts, like you said, there's some cases where maybe I can get kind of close and there's other cases where. It just has no idea and it writes something completely wrong or, or it's like factually. Correct. But contextually makes no sense about why that image was selected.</p>



<p>And, and so that's really the thing about overlays is that, you know, they promise a lot more than they can deliver. And there's a great website that Karl groves put together. Well, he's got two, he's got the overlay, false claims.com where he talks about all of them. False marketing that they do. Um, and then the overlay fact sheet, which has come out of a ton of research research he's done into like, what can they literally actually achieve and what can they not?</p>



<p>And he's got a ton of like quotes and like tweets and stuff that he's included from actual people with disabilities and Mo a lot of them say that. Some I've heard, some of them say that they blocked like accessibility and user way, and some of these bigger plugins, their IP address so that the it won't load.</p>



<p>If they go to a website with that,</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> if you ask someone quickly to summarize what the accessibility to overlays are, and if you're someone who's looking into it, probably in the middle of a site project that may be accessibility, probably wasn't given that much consideration of in the beginning. And. There is a hint for you.</p>



<p>Maybe do it in the beginning then I guess, look at these links and just be very, very careful and realize that slapping a solution on something is probably not going to say. All of your problems, even the accessibility plugin. I think that accessibility plugin, the WP dash accessibility, I think it's fantastic.</p>



<p>Ideally, you want to start fresh. So it is that about summarize when it comes to overlays?</p>



<p><strong>Amber Hinds:</strong> Yeah. That pretty much summarize it. Yeah. I think the only other thing on that, that was really interesting that came out of the, that particular lawsuit with the eyebobs was eyebobs came out with a statement afterwards they've since removed AccessiBe, but they said.</p>



<p>Part of AccessiBe contract, as they promise to help you, if you get sued and they reached out to AccessiBe multiple times and assessed to be just didn't even</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> respond. I think if you have to put that in your contract clause, I think you've got other, you've got other concerns. Um, let's, let's talk about, very briefly to close things up here.</p>



<p>Cause we have, we've gone over lawsuits. We've gone over. Thing, you know, things, particularly from those lawsuits, we want to pay attention to design trends and dark mode and overlays. There was a post about accessibility teams goals for WordPress WordPress, 6.0, we're going to include the link in the show notes.</p>



<p>So we don't have to cover it too much here. But what was the biggest thing that you think we should pay attention to in this.</p>



<p><strong>Amber Hinds:</strong> Accessibility team for core has, um, they actually put up a post and they're kind of going back to how they assess which bugs or, um, accessibility issues to handle. And they are wanting to get feedback and input.</p>



<p>So if you are someone who uses WordPress and has experienced accessibility issues. I would highly recommend going and checking out the posts. They have a whole process for how you can submit, but they're going to use user and community feedback in order to make an order to prioritize their approach for 6.0,</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> okay.</p>



<p>So you heard it here. This is, this is something you may want to keep your eyes on, especially if you want to see what accessibility progress is being made for. Would you say these are calls for contributions, calls for feedback, but definitely this is a blog post about like the future. At least we're looking ahead into the future.</p>



<p>I think this is a definite the transparency, the openness, or at least the acknowledgement that these are concerns. Um, you know, some, some things can be fixed faster or better than others ways. Probably it's a complex issue when you've got an ever evolving product. And I'm looking forward to your analysis as well.</p>



<p>It may be in a couple of months, we can touch base again. And see, um, how WordPress specifically is addressing accessibility after, um, it releases 5.9 this month. So great. Yes. Yes. She's just saying yes, just to get rid of me. We have a great list of links here. Make sure to check them out and show notes.</p>



<p>You gave your comments about general designs or in general design trends. There's also a link or two in there about design trends that, um, you should probably think about from a usability perspective. You throw that</p>



<p><strong>Amber Hinds:</strong> in there. Yeah, that that link is, uh, from bet Hannon's website. Um, one of her employees wrote it and it's actually really thoughtful about the different design trends and how some of them impact accessibility.</p>



<p>Um, it's a great blog posts, relatively newly published.</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> Fresh news. Yes. Whenever I see 2022 in the URL, that's a good sign.</p>



<p><strong>Amber Hinds:</strong> Cause that's how they get you with the SEO, click.</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> I'm a sucker. And then we talked about accessibility overlays and of course the word per 6.0 blog posts. Check that out as well.</p>



<p>So that in a nutshell, if you have been feeling a little bit guilty about not keeping up with accessibility, news and trends, Amber, just basically something. Probably all you need to know, at least for now. And then you up to you now to dig in those show notes for those links and get further familiar, Amber, what would be a good place for people to follow you in any other big accessibility stuff on social media so they can continue being an.</p>



<p><strong>Amber Hinds:</strong> Yeah. So we're just at equalized digital we're on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, and the best place to find out about the meetup is if you go to equalize digital.com/meetup, you can get recordings of all the past events and see what's coming up.</p>



<p><strong>David Bisset:</strong> Fantastic. Well, Amber again, thank you very much for joining me here.</p>



<p>One-on-one to bring the WordPress community a little up to speed on some latest accessibility trends and stuff.</p>



<p><strong>Amber Hinds:</strong> Yeah. Thank you.</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, 28 Jan 2022 02:07:39 +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:"David Bisset";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:59:"WPTavern: Looking Ahead to WordPress 6.0: The Early Roadmap";s: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:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=128968";s: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:161:"https://wptavern.com/looking-ahead-to-wordpress-6-0-the-early-roadmap?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=looking-ahead-to-wordpress-6-0-the-early-roadmap";s: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:10934:"<p class="has-drop-cap">With <a href="https://wptavern.com/wordpress-5-9-josephine-released-introduces-full-site-editing-and-new-twenty-twenty-two-default-theme">WordPress 5.9</a> only just stepping its toes out the door and greeting the world, the lead developers seem to have hardly taken a moment to catch their breath. Yesterday, Matías Ventura posted the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/01/26/preliminary-roadmap-for-6-0/">preliminary roadmap for 6.0</a>. It covers the general scope of the planned features to land this year.</p>



<p>Version 6.0 is expected to be a conceptual wrap of Phase 2 of the Gutenberg project, covering the visual site-building tools. They will continue playing a crucial role in future development, but developers will likely shift much of their focus to Phase 3 for WordPress 6.1 and beyond.</p>



<p>The following are the four phases outlined in the long-term roadmap:</p>



<ol><li><strong>Easier Editing:</strong> Block-based content editing.</li><li><strong>Customization:</strong> FSE, block patterns, block directory, block themes, and global styles.</li><li><strong>Collaboration:</strong> Co-authoring content.</li><li><strong>Multilingual:</strong> Implementation of multilingual sites.</li></ol>



<h2 id="editor-enhancements">Editor Enhancements</h2>



<p>Ventura listed 10 high-level focus areas around the post and site editors in core WordPress. They range from big-ticket items like a <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/23328">site-browsing mode</a> to a more back-to-basics approach to the writing experience. I will focus on some things I most look forward to.</p>



<h3 id="theme-global-styles-variations">Theme Global Styles Variations</h3>



<img />Twenty Twenty-Two theme design variations.



<p>I have a running list of features that I cannot wait for. It seems that I find something new to add to it every other day or so. However, <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/35619">global styles variations</a> would easily land in the top three.</p>



<p>The feature was expected but did not quite make it into WordPress 5.9. The goal was to allow users to select from multiple presets, transforming their site&#8217;s colors, fonts, and more at the click of the button. Several variations for Twenty Twenty-Two are already in progress.</p>



<p>This is sort of like a light version of child theming where only the <code>theme.json</code> file can be switched around. <a href="https://wptavern.com/skins-are-back-in-style-proposal-for-themes-to-bundle-user-selectable-design-variations">Essentially, they are <em>skins</em>.</a></p>



<h3 id="navigation-structure-as-a-dedicated-ui">Navigation Structure as a Dedicated UI</h3>



<p>This will most likely be one of the most crucial features of wrapping up Phase 2 of Gutenberg. Some pieces of it can be tough to follow, but several screenshots and videos are in the <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/36667">associated ticket</a>.</p>



<p>Essentially, the goal is to refine the experience of moving around and interacting with the site editor, global styles, templates, and navigation. The work in 5.9 was stellar, but now there is a need to create a more intuitive interface.</p>



<p>Part of this is exposing the site structure as navigation outside the Navigation block in the UI. Users can currently only edit this from within the site canvas.</p>



<p>Such things are easier said than done, so contributors will have their work cut out for them. It will take a community effort.</p>



<h3 id="template-creation-and-theme-switching">Template Creation and Theme Switching</h3>



<p>There is currently a limited number of templates that users can create through the site editor interface. For example, they can add an archive design but not break that down for specific types of archives (e.g., <code>category</code>) or slug-based versions of them (e.g., <code>category-news</code>).</p>



<p>Eventually, the site editor should allow the creation of any possible template from the template hierarchy. Presenting that in an easy-to-use interface will be a challenge. The hierarchy is limited only by the number of objects (posts, terms, etc.) on a site.</p>



<p>The other piece of the <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/37407">template-creation process</a> is decoupling them from themes. Users should never lose their customized templates when switching from one to another. This becomes even more vital as plugins begin to introduce block templates.</p>



<h2 id="patterns-as-first-class-creation-tools">Patterns as First-Class Creation Tools</h2>



<img />Block pattern explorer.



<p>Since their introduction alongside WordPress 5.5, patterns have been one of the most powerful tools available to users. I have been telling anyone who will listen that <a href="https://wptavern.com/block-patterns-will-change-everything">they will be a game-changer</a> for at least two years. WordPress 6.0 might just make good on my promise.</p>



<p>One proposal would make patterns a <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/31153">central part of template and page building</a>. Several pieces to this may fit into various flows, but one of the overarching goals should be for end-users to figure out what to do with an empty template or page. If done right, patterns can help them get off the ground running.</p>



<p>A proposal to <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/27575">transform existing content sections</a> with patterns is also on the table. I wrote about how this was a <a href="https://wptavern.com/if-this-is-modern-wordpress-theme-development-sign-me-up">missing component</a> of the user experience earlier this week.</p>



<p>For theme authors, pattern registration may become less complex. Currently, they must use the Patterns API to register them via PHP. However, there is a proposal for WordPress to <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/36751">automatically recognize them</a>. Patterns would most likely live in a dedicated <code>/patterns</code> folder in the theme and be registered similar to page templates. However, the final solution has yet to be determined.</p>



<h2 id="block-enhancements">Block Enhancements</h2>



<p>There is an array of block-related enhancements to look forward to. Much of that will revolve around continued iteration on the Navigation block. Theme authors should also have more blocks for <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/34994">controlling the output of comments</a>.</p>



<p>However, let me dive into some of the features I am most looking forward to.</p>



<h3 id="featured-images-with-superpowers">Featured Images With Superpowers</h3>



<img />Concept design of post featured images used in the Cover block.



<p>Instead of superpowers, this would cover the use cases already possible in traditional theming. As much as I like block themes, one of the most glaringly-obvious issues is the Post Featured Image block. Essentially, it currently outputs the <code>post-thumbnail</code> image size.</p>



<p>Theme authors can set the width and height but not use cropped sizes that they have registered (<a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/38044">fixed</a> in the dev version of Gutenberg). They also cannot use it within the context of other blocks like Cover and Media &amp; Text.</p>



<p>Beefing up featured image capabilities will hand over much-needed design tools to theme authors. Right now, the missing features are blockers for many layouts.</p>



<h3 id="inline-tokens">Inline tokens</h3>



<p>If there has been one feature I have seen developers ask for more than most, it is the ability to output dynamic data within blocks or HTML templates. Some of this is solved with the Pattern block, but it does not cover every use case.</p>



<p>For example, there is no way to output the current date within a paragraph. This is a routine use case for the site footer copyright line. More typical is grabbing dynamic URLs to theme or plugin resources like images. Ventura noted in the post that they would explore the viability of inline tokens in this release cycle.</p>



<h3 id="other-blocks">Other Blocks</h3>



<img />Table of Contents block.



<p>There may be a Table of Contents block on the way. It has been just under a year since I first <a href="https://wptavern.com/the-gutenberg-wordpress-plugin-to-introduce-a-table-of-contents-block">wrote about such a proposal</a>, so I am eager to see this land.</p>



<p>The Quote and List blocks should finally <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/25892">allow child blocks</a>. Both are severe limitations that were always possible in plain HTML and the classic editor. I know more than a few bloggers who will be happy to see this happen.</p>



<p>Improvements to the Table block are also likely coming. At the moment, it offers a poor user experience &#8212; users cannot even tab through cells. At most, it handles the most basic of use cases. Currently, there are <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/32400">over two dozen open tickets</a> to clean it up.</p>



<h2 id="design-tools">Design Tools</h2>



<p>Several components should make theme authors, in particular, excited about 6.0.  We could be looking at new height and width controls for more blocks, providing more flexibility in theme designs. And <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/34641">using <code>min</code> and <code>max</code> CSS features</a> along with flex-based containers could make fine-tuning responsive designs easier.</p>



<p>On the typography front, there is a ticket for <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/33543">introducing responsive fonts</a>. This is relatively easy to handle with custom CSS at the moment if a user chooses a theme&#8217;s predefined size. However, with custom sizes and line-heights, it is problematic. Because these tools exist in WordPress, we need responsive handling baked in.</p>



<p>One long-awaited typography feature is likely to launch in this cycle: the <a href="https://wptavern.com/a-web-font-api-possibly-coming-to-wordpress">Web Fonts API</a>. After being <a href="https://wptavern.com/proposed-web-fonts-api-not-coming-to-wordpress-5-9-possibly-landing-in-gutenberg-first">pulled from WordPress 5.9</a>, it is now being <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/37140">developed within Gutenberg</a>. I expect this to land sooner rather than later because the bulk of the code is finished.</p>



<p>Support for customizing captions across various blocks and possibly finding a solution for link hover and focus states are also on the slate for 6.0.</p>



<hr class="wp-block-separator is-style-tavern-separator" />



<p>What features are you looking forward to the most in WordPress 6.0?</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, 28 Jan 2022 01:42:44 +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:"Justin Tadlock";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:112:"Post Status: WordPress 5.9 “Joséphine” Introduces Full Site Editing and Themes Created Entirely with Blocks";s: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:31:"https://poststatus.com/?p=93038";s: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:55:"https://poststatus.com/wordpress-59-josephine-released/";s: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:3554:"<p class="has-drop-cap"><strong>WordPress 5.9</strong> “Joséphine” was <a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2022/01/josephine/">released as planned this past Tuesday</a>. <strong>Matt Mullenweg</strong> was the lead on this release. 5.9 involved 470 tickets on <strong>Trac</strong> and over 1,900 pull requests.</p>
