How WordPress 6.5 Is Evolving the Editing Experience

Abha:
Hello and welcome to another Do the Woo. It’s April, 2024 and we’re recording this and we hope there’ll be things in this that you still want to talk about in the next couple of months too and in future WordPress releases because hey, that’s what we’re here for today. We’re going to be talking about the latest, the greatest WordPress release. I’m your show host Abha, and I’m one of the contributors to WordPress core and other teams that have been heavily involved in release cycles for a number of years. It only feels like it was a few weeks ago that Do the Woo brought you that detailed insight into 6.4 release, and now we’re already onto another major release. In fact, if you’ve been looking at the WordPress news, we’re recruiting already for people working on 6.6. So if you think that could be you stay tuned, we’ll be telling you more.

They say time flies when you’re having fun. Well, 6.5 is the first major release of WordPress this year, and so lots of us have been working on it. In fact, there have been so many contributors across the world and every time it’s great to see more and more people contributing, but we really want to hear how you are using the new features of WordPress in your WordPress sites and in your WooCommerce sites and your development. The 6.5 release is named after, and I quote the dynamic versatility of renowned jazz violinist Regina Carter. So it’s going to be soon time to sit back and before you ask your smart speakers to play Regina’s violin music, which I can tell you is well worth doing. Let me introduce you to two more dynamic people who are joining us in the studio today and who are going to be helping me because as you can probably hear, I’m full of a cold. So welcome Anne McCarthy and Bud Kraus.

Anne:
Hello. Hello.

Bud:
Hi. How’s everybody?

Abha:
Now, where are you joining us from today?

Anne:
I am in Seattle, Washington, so I’m hanging out in Seattle right now, but in a week I’ll be in Florida, so I kind of bounce around. So it’s a good question to ask. Where are you at, Bud?

Bud:
I am in Nutley, New Jersey, which is 12 miles west of New York City.

Abha:
See us is a big place, so it’s nice to see you from different places within the US and just a shout out to everybody who’s been affected by the severe storms and flooding and also the recent earthquakes. And at Do the Woo we do want you to know that we are very keen to support all of our contributors for the WordPress and WooCommerce project. So if you are from one of those areas and you want to just join in the conversation, please don’t worry if you can’t do that as soon as we go live because I know we’ve had some messages already saying to people who haven’t been able to be here today, but we will get you on the show as soon as possible. I’m going to move us to the 6.5. Now we’ve been hearing about the lots and lots of different ways to take control of site building experience with 6.5 and that includes the new ways to manage a site’s typography.

And yes, you probably have heard that famous font library is actually here with 6.5. With it, users can manage, install and use fonts right inside that WordPress editor. All you’ve got to do is go to the site editor and appearance and sample this new font library waiting for you under the editor section. You can for any block theme, you’ll be able to install, remove and activate local and Google fonts. You can even use your own custom typography collections. You won’t be surprised. I’ve already had a go. I’m going to go to you Bud. First, what has been your reaction to getting your hands on this long heralded new feature?

Bud:
Well, it’s no doubt that it is the shiny new toy in WordPress 6.5 and it’s been what, two or three years in the making? And I know it did delay 6.5 for about a week. Actually when I was trying it out in RC two, I was running into some issues. Maybe that’s the reason why it was slightly delayed. I actually did report a bug. I think it’s terrific as it is, but I’m sure that there’ll be many changes going forward. It’s terrific in the sense that if you’re using a block theme, you’re in good shape If you’re not, well, maybe that’s something that we’ll see in the future that the font library would somehow be available for classic themes. Now, I just have a couple little points to make. One is it’s very easy now to use Google fonts and I believe there’s what, 6, 7, 800, 900 of them available, but you don’t have a really good way to see what Google fonts are available in the interface, and I suspect that may change over time at least I hope.

You get sort of a preview of what the font looks like before you actually add it to the site. So I think that is something maybe that we will see in the future. And the other thing that’s really cool too is you don’t have to stick with Google fonts. You can use any font from any font foundry that you use such as Adobe fonts or whatever. Of course it requires that you download the font to your computer and then upload it to your WordPress install. And as far as I know, most of the font file types are supported, so that’s not a problem. I just like it. I think it’s really good. I also like the fact that a lot of fonts have of course variations and you only have to use the variations or install the variations that you’re going to use instead of a whole font family.

I really think that’s nice. Now there is a little thing that I want to note that I found a little confusing actually. I found it confusing during my recent presentation, which was a little embarrassing, which was once you install the font, then of course you have to navigate to topography, whether you’re in the site editor or in a specific block, let’s say on a page or a post, you’ve got to be able to know to navigate to topography, and that’s where you’re going to see not just only the pre-installed theme fonts, but the ones that you’ve installed too, and that’s the way you use the font that you’ve installed. So one last thing too. I never quite got the, I know there was a lot of talk about the font library is very similar to the media library. I never quite got the understanding of that. I mean, I sort of do, but don’t. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. The bottom line is it’s here and I think it’s going to really make life a lot easier for a lot of people. It really was one of those things that WordPress had to bring to core in one way or another. It was one of the things that was so important in WordPress’s journey to becoming more of a design system.

Abha:
Thanks Bud and Bud, all those suggestions that you have, which are really good ones, you can add to the posts that people like Josepha put out about what features you would like to see in the next releases. And the beauty of this wonderful open source community and development is that everybody can do that. So I’m going to hope that after the show we’re going to see your additions from here on there because this is Do the Woo where we like to innovate and be part of the solution too. And I’m just going to go over to you because I know how hard you worked on the front library too and the amount of hours that everybody put into this. This is a huge piece of work. What for you are the big takeaways from the font library?

Anne:
Yeah, I think the flexibility, so both for end users to have the flexibility to control the topography if they want as well as extenders. So if you want to provide a custom collection, you want to change where the font collection is uploaded if you want to disable it entirely. This feature has been built both for simplicity for end users and extensibility and it is very tricky. This has been, I think it’s been about two years in the making. It has been a long arduous road, but I think there’s been a lot of lessons that we can learn for the future. And I’m really keen it’s never good to delay a release and I was part of the release squad and it’s not something I know we take lightly. And so I think it was necessary for this and just to get the right information out there.

The biggest change was where the fonts were uploaded as well as a couple of different bugs. But in particular there was a debate around where to upload it and for now it has been uploaded to WP content slash upload slash fonts and that has been the biggest change. And I know with the source of truth work that I do, there was a lot of last minute changing in a way that I don’t always love. But yeah, I wanted to touch on Bud. You talked about how it’s similar to the media library and some confusion there. And the gist of it is basically you upload it in one place, but it’s available everywhere and the same way you upload an image and you can add it anywhere across your site as far as the comparison goes, it’s just something that you can add both globally and locally to different blocks after you add a font.

So there is already a set of issues for follow-up on this feature, so don’t expect work to continue on this. Basically don’t expect things to stop just this is launched, this is the introduction of it. And there is definitely more to come in terms of expanding on what’s there. And this is, as Abha mentioned, this is the perfect time to be providing feedback and helping shape the future of what you want to see with this. So whether you’re extender or an end user, I have my own set of personal bugs and enhancements that I want to see, which I love that feeling of rooting things on and being a part of the process of developing stuff. So I’m very excited about it. I think it’s a huge feature and I am already this weekend I have plans to mess with my fonts.

Bud:
Can I ask a quick question? Are we likely to see Google font previews as we’re scrolling through fonts to select for our design?

Anne:
You mean the larger preview of when you were on Google Fonts?

Bud:
Not so much larger, but let’s say in the dropdown, if you were scrolling through different fonts.

Anne:
I see what you’re saying.

Bud:
Yeah.

Anne:
That has to do with a component issue. Each of those things are called the tools panel component. I could see something in the future where that for sure where that begets more visual and what you see is what that kind of style. There is not immediate plans for that in 6.6 from what I can see from, I’m starting to slowly pull together some of that stuff. But yeah, I could definitely see that in the future. I think that is something that is probably needed. And in my opinion, I really want to see, this is getting into the nitty gritty, but the new data views that is also part of 6.5 and the new way data is presented and laid out in these different views and formats, I think that should come to the font library. I think I am pretty sure I opened an issue around that or someone did because that is a prime example of reusing that same sort of, you’re looking at a list of posts, how does this all work together? How can you select a bunch and manage it? How does it look for fonts? We should be applying that same logic to that area. And so I think that would be a great example of using it there.

Abha:
That sounds really good. Similar things about the misunderstandings that are on there about the font library surround the question of that people think they may have to be downloading the fonts every time from the Google server or Adobe server or whichever font library they’re using, but my understanding is that’s not the case, is it Anne?

Anne:
You download it and it’s hosted locally on your site. So this is also in part of GDPR concerns. So part of the issue or one of the things I think we can improve upon is making sure people don’t overload their site with too many downloads. That is obviously a performance concern. But yeah, that is definitely, I think a huge part of why this has taken a while is to thread that needle correctly. And I also would love to see in the future maybe some more different libraries you can pull from and having that integration in place. And basically the way Google fonts is registered right now is the same way you can register a custom font collection. So I think that is very much doable in the future. I think it’d be rad to have a WordPress font collection. You can imagine the possibilities there.

Bud:
Can you now register, let’s say Adobe fonts into the Google? Can you do something like that now?

Anne:
You would have to host it through a plugin basically. You’d have to have it as part of a plugin and bundle it and have it as a registered font collection,

Bud:
But eventually that could come straight through into perhaps in core potential. Well, I don’t know about that. Right.

Anne:
I dunno about core plug in territory.

Bud:
Right,

Abha:
So before we leave the font library issue, one of the other things that we know you’ve touched already, Anne, is that people need to be aware about not overloading their sites with too many fonts, but perhaps that’s an opportunity too to help people understand through things like learn dot WordPress dot org about how many fonts to use or what not to do. So we can try and encourage that best practice and people don’t end up with local performance issues. And also the same will say we’ve all been there, the circle continues on the way fonts are used in design where Microsoft first introduced them and different colors and you used to get newsletters that came out in every single color and font that was known to the product. Is that something that you think is going to be an issue for how the end user uses the font library

Anne:
In terms of overloading using too many different fonts and all that sort of thing? Yes. Well this gets very designed theoretical. There’s actually someone local to Seattle who talks about the benefits of using multiple different typefaces and how it can be beautiful design, which is very much sometimes a design. So I won’t go down that whole rabbit hole, but it’d be interesting to talk to her. Yeah, I don’t think so because I think the main way we’ll see users interact with this is actually through cell variations. And there is something that was merged traditionally in the Gutenberg plugin where each block thing can come with different style variations, which basically changed the look and feel of your site without you having to design it. And there’s a recent PR that actually splits out the colors and the typography from the style variations. So let’s say you have,

Abha:
That’s brilliant.

Anne:
Yeah, so let’s say you have free style variations and you really like the colors of one, but you like the fonts of the other, you can now mix and match that. And so that’s coming in 6.6. And so in my opinion, while the font library is, I think it’s excellent for end users, I think the main way we’ll see people interact with this is actually more in these presets from themes and then perhaps maybe for branding or whatever it is, maybe you work for university or you really like a certain, I have people who have multiple sites who try to have the same fonts across the sites as part of the having it feel familiar. And so it’s connected to the different brands. You can do that and have different colors. And so I could see a world in which it becomes maybe less prevalent.

I think that’s why right now I wouldn’t call it hidden per se, but it’s not really in your face feature because I don’t think it’s really meant to be, I think the so variations of the main way folks are going to interact with it and going forward I can see that being, especially with them split between the colors and typography, that being more of the way, and then if you want more advanced customization, you can go into and upload your own font. So I’m not super concerned about it as a widespread problem and that was part of the balance of how much friction to add to even get to that experience. And as part of why, for example, there’s not a select all for the fonts, we want people to be thoughtful about how many they’re selecting and how many they’re installing. So you can’t just mass install like 600 Google fonts on your site right now. And that’s intentional.

Abha:
But that’s a good thing to know too. And it’s a good thing for people who are doing the design base or they’re managing a website and they think, oh my goodness, this is going to be a disaster for our workload. It’s not because nobody can actually install all of those fonts. I’ve heard those rumors already. People think that’s what’s going to happen. So it’s good that the core team and release well thought about that and it’s going to be much more practical. So thank you for sharing on that Anne We keep hearing the word revisions and that there are revisions in this release. Improvements like timestamps, quick summaries and more. It doesn’t always mean something in the same way that it does in one country to other countries, but from a release squad’s perspective, what should people be getting excited about in terms of revisions, Anne?

Anne:
Yeah, so I’ll call out three things that I’m most excited about. One, you have access to all style revisions before you only had access to the last a hundred. And that was due to a limitation I think with the rest API. So now you have access to all star revisions you ever make on your site, which I think is just fantastic from a point of view of just data, I am obsessed with having access to all revisions. Two, you can toggle on and off the style book, which basically shows rather than looking at a template or a template part, you can actually see every different block in each variation of it. And so you can see all the different blocks that make up your site in the style book. And so you can toggle that on and off when you’re looking at a revision because sometimes maybe a revision includes changes to something that’s not in the template that you’re looking at.

And so I think that having a different angle where you can look at the revisions on your site is huge. And then the last thing that I’ll call out is also access to revisions for templates and template parts that is new to this release. And that is something, I previously ran an outreach program around the site editor and that was something that came up very frequently as a pain point. Yeah, you can hit undo, but that only goes so far and it’s not a good method. And so I’m very excited to see that. I think it just comes down to it where it’s something you don’t think about. It’s like insurance until you need it and all of a sudden you’re like, oh no, when did that change? Oh gosh, how do I roll back? And so I am very, very excited to see that and going forward, it’s also on my mind to think about how the three interact with each other.

How do you know when to go to which one and what is the psychology of that? And so that’s something that I think we need to figure out. And then I’m really keen to get feedback on from this release is thinking about how robust sour visions are, how visual they are right now, what can we learn from that when it comes to making post revisions visual in line with phase three work, where does it need to be different and how do folks know when to go to a template part revision rather than a template revision? And so I think this is some of the stuff that we’ll have to figure out,

Abha:
Which is a really good question because that comes up quite often is what is the difference with having revisions for templates and revisions for template parts in terms of particular if you’ve got a shop site or how do you know the difference? What is the purpose of the two?

Anne:
Yeah, exactly. And I think that that’s like when you’re making text changes versus color changes versus layout changes, there’s all these different little things that piece together and ties into what I think of as an overlapping problem is where did this change come from and where can I either roll it back or change it again and that can hit style inheritance where you set a global style for a heading block and then you’re trying to edit it locally and it won’t change because it’s set globally. That kind of problem also applies to revisions. How do we look at that? How does it work together and how do you make the changes that you want?

Abha:
I would absolutely love to see online WebPress a video actually explaining what you’ve just said. How do we tell where that change came from? What do we look at? And I think that’s how people will understand how revisions really have an importance, the value and probably understand a little bit more about where a vision is from a template or a template part and how they can understand where to go for that. So hopefully we may wish you talk to the trading team and see if that’s something that they could put together or somewhere listening to this. Thanks, I can make that video. Then go on to the training slack on Make WordPress Slack and I’m sure they’d want to hear from you.

Bud:
Can I ask you a quick question about the revisions specific to template? Template parts? It’s great to see that we now have that, but I have to say I was a little, well, I don’t want to say disappointed, but geez, we’re back to the views that we get with pages and posts when we look at revisions. That is to the untrained eye, we’re looking at code. So I mean we want to see what it actually looks like, how far away like we do with style revisions. Okay, how far away are we from the ability to have a view of revisions that make sense to the user or makes more sense to the user,

Anne:
Meaning making them visual? So I actually have an issue open on that that I opened last summer. I’m looking at it right now, June 29th, 2023. And so I think one of the questions that has come up is that star revisions is inherently quite different from text changes and I don’t think we’re super far away. I actually was working with, I was hoping if you think about it, there are people who have built solutions to have visual revisions, especially editorial teams, especially enterprise spaces. I have seen those demoed. I have looked into that. Some of it I cannot speak to because it is private work, but it’s part of the work I did around phase three outreach earlier in the last year. And so there are some really interesting solutions. None of them are quite in line with the way, they’re not built in the way that core is built.

And so they’re not really compatible right now, but I am super optimistic about that. I think a lot of it has to come down to finding the right design approach, which is a problem we’re cutting across in a couple of different areas. We are at the meat of the issues. We’re at the hardest, toughest problem that cut across a lot of the experience, but I think we can learn a lot from the style revisions. What works well, one of the things is a side-by-side view, so having a visual side-by-side view. I mean, look at Google Docs, you can look at Google Docs and see how they do revisions. That is something that I think we’re not super far from. I think it just is a matter of prioritization and getting design thinking there.

Bud:
And what will be nice is that same concept go forward into pages and posts.

Anne:
Exactly. Yeah, all of it is related. I think we should a very similar form. The issue I have is make your visions more visual for template, template pars and posts and pages obviously. But I think that they all interconnect and I think the way star revisions have been so well received and obvious to use underscores that, but it is a different use case and we need to figure out at what level the revisions happen. I know some folks want to see this is also where you get into multiplayer, so how do you manage revisions with multiplayer? And that’s part of what I think is holding this up and why it hasn’t been prioritized is because it’s just very complex very quickly, especially when you add more people in. So yeah, I don’t see it for 6.6, but I think beyond 6.6, I would love to see that happen and I’d love to see contributions.

Abha:
Definitely. And for those people who are just joining us, we’re talking about all things WordPress 6.5 and this really is the show that you want to be tuned into after a release because we really get into the detail and how it works. And if you went sure, having some of our guests that we have, you will definitely know what to do and what’s coming next. So we’re going to move on to plugin dependencies. I’m going to go to you Anne, I plugin dependencies are going to be a particular joy for WooCommerce developers, and you get to find out right at the beginning what additional plugins may be required by a plugin, assuming of course a developer has added a note on this, what would your advice be to plug in developers to get the best out of this new feature?

Anne:
I mean, I would just say try to use it. If it applies to you, I would dive in and start using it. I also would greatly encourage you to think about the user experience, watch your users using it and see what you can contribute back up to core, because I think that that is also another area where I wonder what the UX is like. I wonder what we can do to make it better in future releases. So that’s my highest level get in there.

Abha:
Is there a best way for them to contribute back to core with that kind of input?

Anne:
I mean, just opening up track issues for sure, opening up track issues, sharing feedback. I think this could be a huge, it’s huge feature, but it has to be done in a way that’s both compelling to the plugin developers and makes life easier and makes life easier for the users. So I’m curious to see, for example, one of the things which I have not been able to play with, but some of the automatic rollback stuff, how does that work with plugin dependencies? How do these things work together? Well, if you’re managing auto updates, how does that work? Having some sort of sense of if this impacts you and what you’d to see and what would make things easier for you to use, I think would be really neat in thinking about how these things interconnect. But yeah, I haven’t had time to dig super deep into that on my end beyond just making sure it gets released. But yeah, but I’d be curious to know what your experience is like with that or if you have any thoughts too.

Bud:
On plug in dependencies. I am just wondering, for example, you say WooCommerce, so you install WooCommerce and then are we to get some kind of indication of what other plugins we should be using? Is that what we’re talking about when we talk about plugin dependencies?

Anne:
It’s more of the reverse.

Bud:
That was my second choice. It’s the other way, right?

Anne:
Yeah, it’s exactly that. It’s basically if something can’t plugins that rely on others, it shows that it surfaces that relationship. So including if you’re deactivate something, you’re deleting something, it’ll surface that relationship. It’s the easiest way to put that.

Bud:
It sort of reminds me of the olden days with classic themes and they’d say, best used with these plugins. It’s sort of in that family.

Anne:
Yeah, because basically before if any plugin required another plugin, you were kind of left on your own to figure that out. And so now this is, it’s, I just think of it as surfacing the relationship between them, which I think is really helpful and it’s consistent. It’s not. No one’s having to hack their own way of clarifying that where you’re getting all those notices now there’s a consistent standardized way which makes it really predictable for users.

Abha:
So we’ll add to the show notes, something about how people can add that issue on track. We’ll check some links with you, Anne, make sure it’s the most effective, particularly for people who’ve not done that before, because doing that in relation to feedback on a release is slightly different to raising a bug or an enhancement request. So we’ll check that through and make sure that our listeners can actually be part of the discussion, be part of the solution. So thanks for both of your contributions on that. We’re now going to look at what we’ve mentioned a few moments ago about data views. Now we know Anne loves data views, but do you think that they will make a practical difference and how do you think people will use them in the future?

Anne:
Yeah, I mean, I’m using what I’d call the project name, but basically we don’t need to name everything. It’s basically how you interact with your content, whether it’s simplest template, parts, patterns, posts in the future posts pages. And right now it’s isolated. This work is isolated to the site editor intentionally. And I think of it, the reason I’m excited about it is it’s like a taste of phase three. It overlaps with workflow and what it does at its simplest, it just changes the way you’re interacting and viewing data. So whether that’s filtering, whether that’s a default view when you first land in your pages view, you can change it to be, if you’re looking at a list of templates, sometimes I just want to see the names. Other times I want to see a preview of the template. I want to see a visual look of, okay, how are my templates looking across things?

Same with patterns you can kind of change. This allows you to change and customize and personalize, which I think is very much in line with phase three, very much in line with the future of WordPress is a lot of personalization, workflow, getting rid of the noise, focusing in the way that you want, as much as you want. You can add a bunch of detail, you can check off a bunch of things as part of this and say, show me everything. Or you can be like, ah, too much. I don’t want to see this. I just want to have it at the simplest and I want it to look in this view. And I think I’m really excited about it because it does touch on a lot of what I’ve heard from pain points from folks as part of the conversations I’ve had around multi cult collaboration in the future and WordPress and especially with workflow.

And so the simplest thing I can think of is even managing basic posts between a government people. It’s like I have a view or I look at all the posts that are waiting for me to review and it’s like I can log in to WordPress and go and have this custom view. And right now 6.5 doesn’t offer that, but this lays the groundwork for it. And so this is an area that a lot of iteration, I think we’ll see it expand to more places. I mean, we could talk about the font library is having this great view of being able to filter and look at different things and install different things and manage things in bulk. And same thing with revisions. Imagine you could look at revisions and see and filter all revisions made by Anne between this period of time. That would be incredible to have.

And bringing this kind of supercharged way of consuming information and honestly simplifying it is huge. And so the potential of it is really exciting right now. It’s in early stages. It’s an inherently and intentionally scaled back just to the site editor and block themed. It’s meant to not be super intrusive. You shouldn’t see your cheese move too much. But I think in the future we’ll see this continue to evolve. And right now I think it is a very practical, honestly just fun. You can kind of view things different ways, kind of like, do I want to see a preview by template or not? How do I see what patterns are synced and which ones are not? It’s as simple as that. And it can get way more complex in a way that I won’t get into. But yeah, that’s my short, this is as short as I can be about a spiel with this.

Abha:
I love it. I love it because it really explains what data view is about and it makes it practical. And that’s part of what we are wanting to do with the show is we are wanting to make sure that we explain things in a way that people can get their head around, they can understand how can I use this? What difference is it going to make to me? Thank you for sharing that.

Bud:
I think in the history of WordPress, I think in six five we’re going to look back and say this was the most important change and not the font library. And the reason is I think of this is the view of WordPress in the future. This is what the admin might look like and work like so cool about this. I mean, I love where this whole experimental nature of what data views is about. One last thing I said I’d be short is that I was a little disappointed in this release that when you had a particular view, let’s say with templates, you couldn’t save that view. If you navigated away from the page, it went back to some kind of default.

Anne:
No, I agree with you though. I love that you pulled that out. I have to be, I’m biased. I’m so deep into this stuff, but I totally agree with you. I think it’s a huge game changer. And I was also really hoping that the views, saving views, sharing views, all of that touches on workflow stuff, exactly what you’re describing. And I’m also frustrated that it’s not preserved whenever I move away.

Bud:
And I’m sure you can envision a day where every user obviously has their own views, their own customization. It’ll be maybe part of the way we think about the user page now except just vastly different where every user can customize their experience with the admin. And so great. And of course to me that also opens up what phase three is about. I mean, you can just see all this stuff, even though I’m not as involved hardly on any scale like you, but I do follow it. I see. Yeah, you follow it. Oh yeah. And I see I’ve been around long enough to see where we have been and where we are now, and it’s extraordinary.

Anne:
I totally agree. It’s going to be really, really cool. And right now I do want to call it for developers, it’s not yet extensible. You can reuse the design stuff, but the package that is built with this is intentionally listed as experimental because these APIs are changing so much because the scope of this is so large, it was an intentional decision to release it here, but also not open it up fully to extenders. You can use the same design language, you can look at the components and see how it’s done and integrate it now. But in terms of actually using that package, we’re not quite there yet. And that’s intentional. We don’t want to be releasing something that’s going to change over and over and over again. I know that’s a big pain point that has come up with folks just in terms of creating block themes. So that’s something that I think is very much in the minds of folks working on this, is we both need feedback and want people playing with it and also need to be careful about the right timing of making these APIs available. So I wanted to call that out too.

Bud:
And speaking of APIs, I have to ask you a question because I am not as technically obviously as you, but I am a little concerned, quite frankly with all these talk of new blocks that take advantage of, let’s say the interactivity API, new blocks such as mega menu and things like that. And wondering, is that the kind of thing that should be in core? Where is the limit that you can see that? Does everything have to be in core?

Anne:
Yeah, I agree

Bud:
With you. These new APIs open up the possibility that more and more things are going to be in core.

Anne:
Yeah, and the mega menus, I mean for sure, there is not a mega menu block. Nick Diego made like a prototype basically. And I think it kind of got blown out of the water in a way that was not intended and that was just, and with great power comes great responsibility. That is just an example of things. But yeah, I think we’ll see more standards put in place so that when there are common problems that developers are running into, we can just move into the interactivity. API, which is a great example, creating interactive feature rich experiences on the front end of a site is a problem impacting anyone building a website today. So by creating a standard and core, so core creates the standard that folks can then use, that then eases it, then folks can do the plugins and have that comes outside of core. Core is not doing that. But in terms of managing feature requests and seeing what things folks want to use with the interactivity API that I think responsibility is on core to create a standard that is easier for folks to use and that frankly creates a better user experience. You’re not going to be dealing with conflicting stuff if you’re building with core, things will work well together.

Bud:
Now, when you talk about standardization, are you not also thinking of the block hook API?

Anne:
Yeah, block hooks is another great example and that is another thing that we saw released in 6.4 and block hooks, basically auto inserts blocks and 6.4, you could only do it with unmodified content, so like an unmodified header, you could add a shop icon next to a shopping cart into the navigation menu, and now in 6.5 you can actually add it to modified content, which is huge. And there’s already work being planned for 6.6 to evolve that further, particularly around having a user interface for that. So I actually was a part of a discussion on that

Bud:
Issue. Is that because of the interactivity API, the way the block hooks API works with that? Did that make that possible or am I

Anne:
What do you mean?

Bud:
Well, you’re saying before in six four there was no ability to change.

Anne:
So in 6.4 and block hooks was released, you could only hook in a block. So you could only insert a block into something that was not modified yet, meaning a user had not gone in and modified it. So if someone’s creating a custom navigation menu, which is a very common action, they want to move around, reorder their navigation menu items that suddenly becomes modified content. And so you could not hook a block in. So the use case where it was quite small, but it was laying the groundwork for the future, which in 6.5 block hooks allows you to hook blocks in modified content. And so that opens up a world of possibilities. And then the interactive API is separate. So you can imagine block hooks, let’s say block hooks adds a like button at the very bottom, a little heart to the bottom of your post or page let’s say. And that automatically gets added into your templates and you’re able to then use it and delete it if you want. But then the interactivity, API, for example, could create that when you’re liking the heart or when you’re pressing it, that it causes a beautiful little reaction. They will play with each other, if that makes sense.
Okay. Okay. Yeah, it does.

Abha:
We’re going to actually now have a look at some of the other sides of 6.5. We’ve touched on it a little bit too. And our next show, we’re going to be talking about some of the multilingual things in 6.5. But before we do that, and let’s go back to things like the block and site editors. Now Ann, the performance gains in this release are sizable and people are talking about a double speed loading of the block and side editors compared to 6.4. Is this something that you think we’ll carry on that we’ll continue to see that kind of speed evolution?

Anne:
Yeah, I do. I actually am working with Ella who is the 6.6 editor, quarter tech lead as of now. She’s one of the people who’s been announced. She already has an issue open in GitHub that is tracking even more performance stuff. I mean, I think I saw something the other day. She’s looking on pattern loading, performance speed. So when you’re looking at pattern previews and the inserter, how do we improve the speed of that? She is already grinding away at that and has a number of prs that are closed, and performance work is tricky. You can’t really plan to improve the performance system, something you have to kind of find performance issues and then address them. So it’s very difficult to kind of say right now this is where this is going. But yeah, that is definitely an active focus and there’s actually a news post that you should keep an eye out for hopefully this week, early next week that will come out on WordPress news talking about a lot of the performance gains in WordPress and the way that impacts the wider web. Felix has been working very hard on, he’s one of the performance team members, sponsor contributor from Google who has been grinding away at this post that I’m really excited about. So definitely see that continue. And if you’re interested in performance, there is a whole performance team that champions a lot of this work. And the performance lead role is something that we helped introduce a couple releases ago and I’m excited to see it continue.

Abha:
Absolutely. The joys of the performance team are amazing. They’re such a friendly team as well. So if that is your love to work on improving that, then all you’ve got to do is join Slack and join the Make WordPress instance and go and check out the core performance team. We’ll be talking more about performance, our next episode too. I’m going to take us back to the end user. And of course with 6.5, it’s not just about block theme users, there’s benefits for those using classic themes too. Classic themes now has a pattern tab, which you can find under the appearance section. And that pattern tab is available for classic themes. And I’m going to get you to elaborate a bit more about what this means for those people using the classic theme.

Anne:
Yeah, so this is also another thing that’s iterative. I feel like I’m a broken record, but in this release there’s the patterns tab to help surface where you can manage patterns including importing them and all that sort of stuff, which is super helpful. I think it’s really something that has been asked for a while because the site editor has moved on, that there is a whole patterns experience in the site editor. Now the reason that is being done is to lay the groundwork for patterns, the experience you see in the site editor patterns where it’s very visual and all that sort of stuff to bring that to classic themes. So in the same way we’re talking about, okay, how do we bring the font library to classic themes? There are adoption pathways and points about that across the experience that I will not go into, but patterns is one of those.

It is a much better experience in the site editor and how do we bring that to classic themes and that is slated ideally. Fingers crossed, this is one of my things I am very paying close attention to because it impacts so many people bringing that to 6.6. So that patterns tab right now, it opens up kind of the current interface, but you can imagine in the future that patterns tab will open up a more narrowed scope site editor style experience of just the patterns view so you can get a much more visual and future rich experience editing and creating patterns and saving them, exporting them on the data views look of filtering them and all that sort of stuff. So that is 6.5 starts that process. It actually started in 6.4 with some other stuff and 6.5 starts that process and 6.6 will hopefully bring that full circle.

Abha:
And Anne, you’re never a broken record. We absolutely love hearing you and listening because you explain everything in such a wonderful way that you get people excited about it. And we are so lucky that you are in the project and you are here on Do the Wo with us. So please never ever think that. So there’s also been link editing changes and improvements. So what does that mean for the average user?

Anne:
You should see it be much easier to add and manage links, and that’s a very simplistic point of view. This also includes impacting interacting with links in the navigation block. So that link control component, you can think of it as this little piece that’s used across the experience anytime you’re interacting with a link that has been refreshed, rich table and a number of folks did a lot of work there, including with accessibility folks to make sure the link getting experience remains accessible. I think there’s a current debate about whether to add some, I think the open tab discussion is always a lively one and there is a current discussion whether to make that a preference. So some of these link control things, again, getting into personalization and customization, people have different use cases for different things. So that is another thing to look forward to in the future is potentially having the ability to customize how you want that to look.

But yeah, it’s the preview of it keyboarding in and out of it when the link pop up, if you’re at a link, you get this little module popup, when does that actually get initiated? How do you interact with it? All that sort of stuff. The UI of it has changed slightly. And if it’s a good design, if it lands well, it should be, you should notice it’s easier, but not really necessarily be able to name why. I always think I had a designer tell me one time, good design recedes into the background. And so the hope of this is that link editing suddenly becomes something you don’t think much about. And so that’s part of the goal in this release.

Abha:
And link editing has been a pain point for people on mobile devices. So if you haven’t tried this yet, WordPress really counts on getting in user feedback. If it doesn’t work for you, go to the make WordPress org slash core and there are instructions for how you can add feedback to track. It really does make a difference. Please do check it out. Every view is important. Now, one of my favorite things about from an end user perspective as well is the drag and drop improvements. And I think they’ve actually been quite good, but they’ve also just taken some of that angst out of the experience. Bud, do you want to share how you found those?

Bud:
Yeah, this is wonderful. I love this change. This is one of those quality of life changes, which I thought six five was loaded with this stuff that a lot of things, like Anne said, you may not even be aware of it unless you’re glued to this thing. And for example, if you had, let’s say a group block or some kind of container block at the end of your list view and you try to move that let’s say all the way to the top of the list of all the items, forget it, it was impossible. Now it’s such a different experience, it’s really smooth and it works and you say, oh, this is exactly how this should work. So I mean, I love the flexibility and the smooth operation of drag and drop when you use within the list view. But now I have a question which for either one of you really is I do not. And I’m wondering, does anybody here use drag and drop in the actual page editor when it comes to drag and drop? I drag and drop my blocks using the list view, but aren’t there other ways to do drag and drop and they’re not as smooth as the list view? Anybody want to comment on what I’m trying to so inarticulately say,.

Anne:
Yeah, list view. What you’re basically talking about is there’s a tool that you open up in the sidebar and it shows your content listed out and nested and all that sort of stuff. And drag and drop improvements have come a really far away there. But I agree with you. There actually has been improvements made to drag and drop for this release onto the canvas. So when you’re actually looking at your content, you’re not looking at the sidebars, you’re not looking at anything else. For example, you can drag an image next to another image and it’ll automatically create a gallery and upload the image. I’m like that feature as someone who takes photos. I’m like, heck yes. It’s so cool. There was a lot of work done around also dragging and dropping into template parts. So being able to easily drag something and drop something where it needs to go.

There’s also a new design and a new kind of intuitiveness that has been worked on around where you can’t drag something. So demonstrating to someone when a little, there’s basically a crossed out X, you can’t drop there. So no drop zone improvements have been made. And then also, I don’t know what you call this, I actually don’t know the technical term for this off the top of my head right now. I’ve read it a thousand times, but making the drop zones more accurate. So for example, kind of like when you don’t know where the plus button’s going to show up, it’s like drop zones are similar. There’s a sensitivity to it. Kind of like if you’re playing a video game and the controller is really sensitive and you’re spinning around too much, like drop controls and drop zones are very similar. There’s a sensitivity to it of when you can drop something in and where, and that work has been improved upon.

And again, some of the link control exactly what you’re saying, but this stuff should recede into the background. It should just be easier and you should not really know why it shouldn’t be super abrasive. So yeah, there’s more to come though. That is something that is also, there’s already an issue open for 6.6 around continuing to work on this. So again, the common refrain share where you’re still finding pain points and exactly if you’re like, wow, the on canvas drag and drop is not great, and here’s a couple examples and videos of you doing this. Super helpful. I definitely agree with you. I think that’s something that we can continue to work on

Abha:
And I think that is the benefit. But I know I attend most of the release parties and when I do, I always try not just to test the latest release version, but also doing things like drag and drop last release, it was adding a new page, this 6.5, that’s been my key thing. That’s what I wanted to know. Has it worked through all the different aspects of the releases journey? So if there’s something that you know want to land in the next release that you think, I want to be able to test this, I don’t want to just find at the end of a cycle, it doesn’t work for me because everybody has a different setup. Everybody uses WordPress in their own unique way and that’s the joy of it. But it also means that we really, really need people to test right from the beginning. And I’ve been on releases for quite a long time in WebPress, and one of the joys for me is how it gets easier each time to test. There’s more information, there’s more platforms to do it. There’s more beta tester user help. And I now test on W-P-C-L-I as well, which I wouldn’t have dreamed of testing three years ago. And it was only because I sat down with someone that contributed today, and Allied had always been telling me how great W-P-C-L-I was and I thought, okay, I’m going to do this.

I’m going to try this. And it means that when you’re actually implementing it, when you’re talking to clients about what this release is going to do, how it’s going to change, what they need to get to grips with, but also when you’re revising your own training materials or using the ones that Learn has or even contributing to learn ones, you have all of this at your disposal. So if you are not convinced already that 6.5 is something you want to know about. Did you know that 6.5 touches on changes in 40 components of WordPress? That is immense. So if you did not see a bug or enhancement you were hoping for in this current release, then this is the time to help make a difference, help move it forward. Comment on the post. We’ll put some links in the show notes too. We’ll even see if we can get a little video about how you can actually make a comment for feedback.

And there might even be a video already. And let’s hear how you were using the new features. There is the amazing developer blog. I’m very privileged to be part of the editorial team for that since it launched. And we are always wanting to hear about case studies. If you’ve got a case study that explains how you use some of these new features that somebody else could actually then use, or if you could make a video or a tutorial and not just in English, you can make it in your own locale language on how to use these new features. We have a whole trending team who will be really keen to hear from you. We also have a marketing team who want to be able to communicate with other people, with other press media about the things that you can do with WordPress. There are so many ways, and I know will join me and say that if you don’t like one route, there’s another.

And there is so many ways that you can make a difference to a release. The release squad for 6.6 is recruiting. Now, as Anne said, some of the posts are now already filled, but there are still vacancies and you don’t actually have to be on a release squad itself to be part of a release. Sometimes you can mentor other people because we’re always wanting to make space, have new people join, be involved, share the learning, share the excitement, and share the joy of working together. And I’m going to leave us out on that thought. If you’ve obviously been on the squad lots of times too, and I’ve had a privilege in working with you on that and it’s been a real joy as it has talking to you today, but you’ve also supported people on the release. If people are thinking about doing either of those or even joining the mentorship program and becoming involved in a team, what would your advice to them be, but also why do you have such a passion for it?

Anne:
I’ll answer the last question first. I have had personal experience with the impact of getting both my story and other people’s stories out on the web. I’ll never forget the early days of creating sites for people and having them see it for the first time and be like, everyone can see this. I worked with professors and departments on that and having, seeing a professor’s life’s work, literally he was in his eighties and having it online and the way that he wanted it and have it presented in the way that he wanted it nearly brought him to tears. I’ll never forget those moments and I still have those. And to be able to work on the software that does that for so many is really, really, really deeply inspiring, especially when you think about the foundations of open source and inclusion and democratizing. I think it’s a really powerful mission in terms of getting involved.

Oh my gosh, there’s so many ways. There’s so, so many ways, and so I am a big believer in following the stuff that just really gnaws at you. Maybe it’s like a bug. Maybe you’re like, oh my God, every day when I use this, this is driving me nuts. Get into it, open an issue, share crappy designs. I’m not a designer and I share stuff on there all the time that I’m like, this is what I’m thinking. This is where my brain’s at. And it could be like a sketch on a piece of paper. On the flip side, the stuff that makes you really passionate. I love taking photos and I never thought photos and WordPress would merge, but there’s the WordPress voter directory and that is a whole project that is a whole subset of this that you can get involved in. And so finding the stuff that’s easy to get involved in that gives you energy, that keeps you up at night, those are the things I would start with because there are definitely going to be other people in the WordPress community who feel the same.

There’s a great channel. The FSE outreach program has transformed into this overall outreach program, and so I definitely want to call that out as a great place to get started. You’ll see opportunities to test. You’ll see opportunities to get feedback. You’ll see people asking questions. You’ll see opportunities to learn from others, and I would love to see in particular folks on the WooCommerce side get involved in that discussion. There’s a whole other microcosm of community and within w as you all know, and I want to see Bridges being built across the two. And so that’s very much on my mind and I wanted to make sure to call that out as a space that folks can join and that would only help the future of WordPress and e-commerce and democratizing building stores and all that good stuff. There’s a lot of potential there. And so if you’re overwhelmed and know where to go, the Outreach Channel is a great place to start

Abha:
An absolutely perfect answer, and it really is an opportunity for anybody who wants to be out there. We really, after this show goes live, we would love to hear how you are using 6.5, 6.4 or any of the new releases in your work. We’d love to be able to see what you are doing so we can feature that too. We are very keen to hear from all parts of the world. People who follow this show know that we are always going to different places, and if you are a developer in a different continent from our guest today, that’s wonderful too. We want to hear from everybody about how they’re using these features, how they’re using in WooCommerce. As Anne said, there’s plenty of ways to feedback. We’re going to have a look at some of the things that we can add to the show notes to make it as easy as possible. And that leads me just to say thank you very much to our two guests today, the amazing Anne McCarthy and the absolutely amazing Bud Kraus as well joining us from the US today. And hopefully by the next time I’m with you all, I’ll actually not have this call, so I’ll be able to talk to you even more about the Wonders of Multilingual too. So thank you for joining us, and as always, do the Woo is your place to be. Thank you for joining us.

Anne:
Thank you.