First-Time Contributors and WordPress 6.8 Enhancements

Abha Thakor:
Hello and welcome to another “The WordPress Way”. I’m Abha Thakor and it’s time for our usual release show. This time we’re up to 6.8, so if you haven’t noticed or heard about this, a new release we’re here to tell you. 6.8 was released on the 15th of April. That’s when turning 25. And it’s got so many good things that you’re going to want to know about. And you’re also going to want to hear all the things that my guests in the studio today are going to reveal to you about the joys of 6.8, why you want to be involved with 6.9, and why you or a colleague really wants to get involved with the Developer Blog. So in the studio today we’ve got Joe McGill. So welcome Joe, who’s joining us from the US.

Joe McGill:
Thank you.

Abha Thakor:
And we’ve also got Birgit Pauli-Haack who is joining us from Germany.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Howdy.

Abha Thakor:
And I’m here with you from London. So we’ve got a fair covering of the world and of course we’ve got Bob in the studio based in Portugal. So if you haven’t heard your country mentioned in that little intro, make sure you come and talk to me because we also always want to hear from people in different countries that we’re not featuring and make sure that we’re coming and talking to you.

And don’t worry, we’re already planning our next release show. So if you’re going to be involved, we want to hear from you. So welcome Joe and Birgit. It’s been a tremendous beginning of the year. I can’t believe we’re in April already and 6.8 has launched. It’s been a year since we were here last time talking about these releases at this time of year.

So I know you’ve both been very involved in different aspects of this year’s release and this one has particularly been about polishing and improving that user experience. And I think for me, one of the absolute highlights has been that we have had more than 900 contributors from 60 plus countries and out of that 900 there have been 250 first time contributors. And I know from working with you on many releases that welcoming new contributors and returning contributors is something that brings a big joy to both of you. And I’m going to start on that today because it’s one of the questions that we’ve had from the feedback we do in preparations for this release is all about welcoming new contributors. So Joe, I’m going to go to you first because you’re still very active in core and in the performance team as well. Why is it so important that we continue to encourage first time contributors but also returners?

Joe McGill:
I think that’s a great question. I think for me it’s the recognition that we have all been in the experience of being a first time contributor at some point, right? And I have been working in WordPress for a decade now and when I did my first contribution, never had any concept that at some point down the line I would serve as one of the tech leads for one of the releases because the experience of contributing and the people who were there before me welcomed me, helped me learn how to be involved in the project, encouraged me to stay around. Like I’ve had these opportunities and have gotten to meet the two of you and had these conversations. So to me it’s a bit of pay it forward, right? Like I want to give other people the same sorts of experiences that I’ve been able to have and encourage that. That’s the big part of it to me is it’s just such a great community and experience to have to be a part of.

Abha Thakor:
Joe, you’ve been a core team rep as well, like myself, and I know one of the things that I’ve particularly valued is having someone who can help explain some of the technical things that you thought you understood, particularly in performance, but you haven’t quite joined up all the dots. So for anyone listening to this who thinks, yes, but I don’t have all the dots joined up and I don’t know all the little bits that I think I might need to know. Can you just share some of the support that is around?

Joe McGill:
I mean, I think first is just the recognition that we’re all learning always and being willing to learn in the open and being willing to ask for clarity of the things that you don’t know. Like I said, I’ve been involved in WordPress for a very long time and they’re lots of parts of this release that I Was, you know, super involved in at a leadership level that I probably don’t know the details of as well as the two of you, if it’s something that you’ve, you know, paid attention to more closely. So there’s no, like, bad question to ask. I think on top of that, looking for people who are involved in the things that you’re curious about and asking them directly for feedback, reading the documentation that I know we’ll talk about a little bit later across several different channels that we publish documentation. Depending on where you’re coming from and sort of your point of view, there’s just so many ways to learn more. Folks who are listening to this probably are already on that track, since they’re tuning into podcasts like this one, hopefully.

Abha Thakor:
And we know from listening and talking to our audience that sometimes they’re kind of curious. And I think WordPress is all about that curiosity as well. Thank you. Thank you, Joe. I know that I probably asked you so many questions about documentation when I got started on documentations and releases and. But now I love it. I absolutely can’t wait to read the next lot of field guides and documentations. And there is something about the way documentation is put together that can actually really help you, not just use the software, but think what you can achieve, what you can do with using that software. And I think that’s probably one of the biggest takeaways I had from working with you was this shadowing and then becoming a docs lead was documentation is so much more than just how to do something X, Y and Z. It is more about also what it means, how it fits together with everything else, and how you might therefore think, ah, that solves the problem. How did you get involved in documentation originally and if people are new to this area? Because I know the documentation team are always looking for new people to join. What would you recommend to them?

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Well, I got into documentation because I found about the blocker that there was a lot of user facing documentation was missing. The release cycle of the Block editor was so fast that documentation team couldn’t keep up because every time there was a new version, you had to throw out all the screenshots. And it was a really hard thing to do. So I got involved because I knew a lot about the Block editor already and I knew where the holes were and where a lot of people had trouble finding. And that was kind of. I really thought how to manage that. So we have multiple people writing documentation. So we needed a process, we needed a project management. So I built that, tried to Build that up in. But it was before the pandemic and it was kind of probably eight months before the pandemic. And the problem was that during pandemic nobody had time to contribute to documentation in that. So it all fell apart. And then I got involved in Gutenberg releases, the two week cycle and kind of figure out that part and then the documentation for a Release, a major WordPress release. And I was following also like you did. People that went before me, I’m standing on shoulders of giants and I just mimic what they did and talk to them and say okay, if that’s a problem, how do I solve it? And they said, well look at this part of the document release documentation or look at. So we did for the block editor changes in the major block major WordPress release, we do a tracking and tracking issue on the Gutenberg release and ask all the developers to chime in if they have a developer node that needs to be in the field guide and then organize that way so the person who puts the field guide together doesn’t have to also know everything about the Gutenberg part. So there was always a two, two headed kind of team. And I think that was this time as well. I think George Mamadashvili, who was the editor tech lead, had the tracking team and then you have to find the people who write it. What really helped me for Getting to know WordPress more is that when you write about it, you first need to know how it works, then then you need to know okay, why would I do that? And all that information you can put in into the documentation to teach it to other people. And that was actually the place where I have my sweet spot to kind of learn things, how they work and then figure out how to teach it to other people to make them feel the love and all the excitement about it.

Abha Thakor:
And that’s why belong as a documentation team, even if it’s just concentrating on the releases is so much fun and it’s so valuable thing to do. If you’ve never heard of documentation team or documentation for WordPress it exists and there’s so much of it that’s useful and you can find it at WordPress.org documentation. They even do special days devoted to how you can help with documentation as well. I think it is really crucial. I think Joe, you and I were talking before the show started about that field guide and why that field guide is so important to extenders. I’m not big. You’re a complete advocate of it too. And that actually it normally comes out in the RC stage of a release, say for people who are not familiar with that, those are release candidates and they happen before a release is actually set out live and its full final release. And it’s after the beta sections. So you can be pretty sure of what it’s going to look like, what things are likely to land, how they’re likely to look. And Joe, that’s when the Field Guide’s really important tool, isn’t it?

Joe McGill:
Yeah, I think one of the things we’ve done for a very long time as a sort of core development team, people who participate in making the software, is try to be mindful of any changes that we’re making when we’re introducing new features or making changes to existing features, particularly ones that may affect other developers who are using WordPress core functions in their themes and their plugins. That sort of thing is to mark those tickets as we’re working on them as needing a dev note. Right. And then it’s up to the people who worked on those to try to document the best that they can, the changes, how they may impact developers. And then we compile all of those into one sort of technical overview that includes links to all of the individual ones. And that is what we call the WordPress sealed guide, that it’s intended to be more technical focused documentation, more so than end user documentation, which is why there are multiple other channels and avenues for that sort of documentation, which I’m sure Birgit can tell you more about. But that is definitely one of the big artifacts that the core team tries to help produce to support all of the other people who are looking into the release to figure out what has changed, how does it affect me, what new things exist that I can use, how might my plugins or themes be impacted by some of these changes?

Abha Thakor:
And I think it’s important to note that you don’t have to be involved with every aspect of a release to be involved with things like helping the Field Guide get together the plugins letter that helps plugins authors understand what it means for the release, how, what steps they might need to take, because you can actually learn the bits that you need to know about and you can read those bits of information and then act on that. I know one of the questions that we’ve had from previous release shows is I you don’t have the time to learn everything about a release, to follow everything in a release cycle, to understand all the different things and they all change and to follow the course lag, but actually you don’t really have to following the Release list channel is quite important. You can pick up what you need to, you can scroll back and the release leads channel is on Slack and it’s available to everybody who would like to have a look at it. But also you can follow things like the beta posts, see what’s happening and from there. Because I think we’ve all said that there are different bits of the releases that we all focus on, particularly if we are supporting a release and we’re not, we’re not coordinating the whole thing, we’re just actually focusing on one aspect. I know, for example, for 6.8 the documentation was what was important to me for this one because there were so many things that I’d finally were in the 6.8 that I’d been following either in docs or comms or in Core before and I wanted to really see had landed. But also the components that I’m involved with, making sure that it worked for those and there was no issues or did it solve any of the problems that we already have and we have open tickets. But I certainly wasn’t following every aspect to be able to do that. Ben has. Birgit has talked about writing documentation. One of the joys that you can have with writing documentation or develop a blog articles for the WordPress.org developer blog is that you can perfect your knowledge of something. You can practice it. So when I was reviewing some of the docs that was coming out, were coming out, I was going, okay, let me just try that. How does that work? How do I explain that? Does that explanation therefore makes sense to me? And I know as a reviewer of an editor on the developer blog, that is a crucial thing, actually trying it. Does it work?

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Yeah, I’m glad you mentioned the developer blog. There is a roundup post being published every month at the 10th of the month and the release cycle being between 6 and 10 months or 6 and 3 months. Yeah, kind of in that thing. So every month there is a post called what’s New for Developers? And the writers are actually picking up from Core as well as from the block editor Gutenberg Repo, what is new coming. And so when the field guide comes out, it only adds additional detail. But most of the things were already been discussed on the developer blog in the what’s New for Developer on a monthly basis. So following that is actually kind of taking care of that. The field guide comes out and I’m totally overwhelmed with things because I don’t know where to look first and what’s crucial for my system. So if you. But if you follow every month. It’s how you eat an elephant bit by bit or bite by bite. And that’s how you as extender or site owner can approach that. So you’re not overwhelmed when six weeks before the release comes out, when the field guide comes out.

Abha Thakor:
And that’s a brilliant explanation because it’s one of the questions again that we’ve had from people is that I can feel very overwhelmed by all this new information, but it does come out a little bit earlier. It’s not just the day of and I think we’re getting better at that as an open source community, we’re getting better at making information available and as Joe has talked about, in different places, not just in one format. You know, we’ll get it in the developer blog, we’ll get it in the documentation thanks to core and documentation team. But you also get the information on things like learn.WordPress.org and it’s presenting information in ways that can help people not just know that it’s there, but how do I use it? We’re always looking for case use for the developer blog. So if there’s something in 6.8 and you think, or one of the earlier releases and you think, I have a wonderful case study here that everybody else could learn from, please get in touch with either the developer blog on the make WordPress Slack or contact us through do the Woo and we’ll put you in touch with the right people. And we really want to hear what your case studies could be because actually we’ve got a show all about these kind of use case studies that we’re planning already for later in the year as part of our release roundups. And it’ll be lovely to if we’ve got some people who are going to write about some of these or share some of these with an editor for the developer vlog. I’m going to take us now directly into the detail of 6.8 again in looking with people about what’s most useful in terms of release show some of the things that we’ve talked about already. Lots of our newer audience have said if you go straight into 6.8, we don’t know how that the context is. So hopefully we’ve addressed that. But please do keep sharing those feedbacks. If you want to be involved in how we do our research on this, please let me know again and you can contact me through do the Woo and we will be really grateful for your suggestions. So going on 6.8, it is named after legendary pianist Cecil Taylor and jazz pioneer and people often say, what has jazz got to do? Because if you think of WordPress not only as fun, but also it has that same kind of innovation, that same kind of experimentation, that curiosity that Cecil showed in all the music that he was looking to create. He looked at how you could layer things, how the piano could be a percussion instrument. Well, in many ways, for all those music lovers out there, WordPress is just like that. It can be so much. It can be your bass, it can be your finale, it can be the bit that you add on top of something else that you’ve got. It can be the warrior that you experiment. And the 6.8 release really has lots of new things that have been polished, but also will help you. And we’re going to talk to Birgit first of all about some of the improvements to the WordPress site building experience, because there’s been quite a few, not just in this 6.8, but in some of the releases leading up to it. We have workflows that are more streamlined, we’ve got more design capabilities. So Birgit, how is that content creation so much more intuitive now in 6.8?

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Well, there are multiple ways that kind of come together and one of them is certainly that the zoom out view and the starter content are really helping the content creators to actually the zoom out view gives you a better look at the whole page. If you’re doing, for instance, landing pages that you add patterns to it and you see how they are all fit together. That can be invoked with just a little button on the top toolbar. And then there is the starter content is when you create a new page, you get a set of page layouts that you can select from. Of course you can switch it off if that kind of annoys you a bit. And you find them under the pattern category static content. But developers and theme developers as well as plugin developers can now also provide starter content for other custom post type for custom post types as well as for posts, which makes it all the more versatile for content creators. And then another part is when you design a site, the style book has gotten so much easier to access and to update certain aspect of your design, even if that’s the theme is good. But then users have their own opinions sometimes about and want to add additional color or want to change the typography of a certain section. That is much easier to do in the style book. And it also gives you a better overview. If you select a particular style variation that comes with your theme, you will see how all the blocks behave with that new style variation so you get a better feeling for it’s not so much more try it out and save and be surprised on how it looks on the front end. You get so much more in the block editor too. To deal with. So these are the three things that I really like. What I also like is that many blocks have received all the design tools now, be it the color, the. The border, the dimensions, the shadow. Yeah, that’s. Now almost every block has these design tools where they are expected. And then there were quite a few improvements on remember there was a polish and improvement. There is only one new block in there that’s a query loop total block. The others gotten much, much better. And I wanted to just point out two of the blocks. One is the details block that now has a feature where you can make it actual accordion and group them together. It’s not yet a good intuitive way, but it will come. But now you can group them together. So if you have a FAQ group and you open one, the others close. Now you see the summary or the title of that particular section in the list view and it’s also easier to style them. So that’s definitely an improvement. The separator block has always been a horizontal line, but now you can as designers, you can add them a different tag. That’s a div tag. And once you have that, the design options are kind of infinite pretty much. Because with the css, you can now style the separator block quite easily.

Abha Thakor:
Is there bigot somewhere that people could read more about that that you would recommend?

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Yes, there are. There is one that’s on the Gutenberg Times. The Source of Truth has come out in the end of March. That’s the Gutenberg. And if you search there for Source of Truth, you’ll find it. And it has a nice table of content that touches on every single block, on every design concept or pattern concept. Yeah. So that is definitely a place to go to read even more than what I now have summarized with and we’ll.

Abha Thakor:
Include that in the show notes as well so people can go to that which should be really good. And thank you for all your work that you’ve done on the Source of Truth as well, because that’s a terribly important document that we all work with and we appreciate and I think, as Joe’s talked about already, that there is so much advanced information now and not everything will land. But I think the fact that you have a chronological list and you can see what’s changed, it does make it easier and it doesn’t have to be that overwhelm and hopefully, you know, WordPress will continue to evolve through its contributors and as we learn best practices, as we learn what works elsewhere, what people do in their own project management world, all of these things improve open source and improve what we’ve put out as WordPress together. I’m just going to come back to two of the things that you’ve talked about, but also in the style book improvements. So obviously we’ve got much clearer layout now and more labels with a site editor because we’ve got the site, we’ve got the site colors, the typography and the block styles and then it’s easier to edit colors and amend typography. Do you think the changes that we’re seeing actually will save people time and they’ll make things easier to find?

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Yes, I think so. That’s the short answer on this. I definitely think that the zoom out view and the pattern gotten so much better that you can actually assemble a page without having to touch single block. You can always touch a group of blocks that have been already styled and that it definitely has gotten so much better. Yeah. The style book also lets you as a site owner or designer, think about the overall concepts of color and typography and then can drill down into how does each block react to it. And the other part is that if they are not following completely, you could decide if you need to change the theme, which many people won’t be able to do, but they can access through the style book for each block the styles and then make adjustment be it on. But those adjustments then propagate it through the whole site. So that’s actually an improvement because you don’t have to touch each single block on each page to do adjustments on the design of the border for the image or the spacing between the blocks.

Abha Thakor:
That is such a great explanation, Birgit. And I think actually one that I think we could get a developer blog out of because it’s the kind of area again it hits some of the questions that we’ve had from the feedback of what it actually can do and I think we can see how we can put that into a developer blog. If you’re listening to this and you think, oh, I didn’t know how to do that or I know how to do that in a different way and I’d love to be involved in that blog. This is your opportunity and there’s so much more that we can introduce you to the developer blog. As we said at the beginning of the show, how we can help new contributors and returning contributors is something that we’re all committed to.

Abha Thakor:
WordPress environment for quite a long time, but we’re all learning. As Joe beautifully put earlier. Joe, on that note, I’m going to come to you in my next question. The push forward for more design tools has continued apace. Really. And those design tools don’t require coding knowledge. 6.8 shows that. Again, why do you think that is important? Because for some people it’s well, surely that means that I won’t have work or it’s it won’t be as good as what it could be if it was done by an expert coding it, or it won’t be as flexible. But actually, I know BIG has touched on some of these aspects already, but why is it important? Because you work as an obviously advanced coding knowledge yourself and I know you feel that pushing forward with having tools that don’t require that coding knowledge is very important part of the mission of WordPress.

BobWP:
Sure.

Joe McGill:
I think in a lot of ways that sentiment that you hear come up anytime somebody’s talking about a no code sort of option for building a website or even now we’re seeing it more and more as we’re seeing this sort of revolution of AI technology really push into the technology space that we’re all involved in, that it creates a lot of understandable fear that if you are making a living doing some kind of task, that a tool comes along and can do that instead, that you are no longer gonna, you know, be relevant or something. I think that is absolutely a natural reaction that people have, right. Is to have a little bit of fear and uncertainty when things like that happen. But I like to think about it, I think maybe in a different framing, which is that, you know, as human beings since, you know, we started walking on this planet, we have been the kinds of people who figured out how to use tools to improve our lives. Right. And you know Each iteration of our learning as a species, we have these moments where, you know, new tools, we learn how to adopt them, how to incorporate them into our workflows and that sort of thing. And it allows us as a group of people move faster or further or do things that we wouldn’t have possibly been able to do in generations prior. And I think taking it back to your specific question, for a lot of people, you know, building websites, creating sort of experiences online takes certain specialty knowledge that takes an investment of time that not everybody has the privilege to spend that time getting right. And so the ways that we as technologists create tools that allow people to accomplish their goals faster and easier just enables all of us to have a richer experience on the web where we’re getting the benefits of the contributions of more and more people. Personally, as somebody who has built themes on WordPress since, I mean, early, early days of WordPress, I now find it’s much more enjoyable to take a tool like has been developed by the community called Create Block Theme, which is a plugin that you can install in your WordPress site, use these tools to tweak your layouts, your typography, your colors, and actually save those changes to a theme. To create a theme from WordPress itself. It is not 100% perfect. There are still some things that if you have very specific needs or very specific ideas, you would need to like, be able to shift over into the development side and do some custom work. But for a lot of uses, you can do so much more, so much faster visually in the editor and actually see what your, you know, the feedback directly of what you’re doing without specialty tools and all that sort of thing. And it’s really great. I think it’s such a great improvement on the experience that enables just so much more creativity in our community.

Abha Thakor:
And I think that’s just valuable hearing that from someone who actually was coding themes as well. And we can share that link in the show notes, so we’ll check that one with you. But I think, Joe, that how tools can improve Our lives in WordPress. This is going to have to be a developer blog and I’ve Even started the GitHub card to say I’ll collaborate on it with you if I can persuade you to write it with me. Because I think that would just be amazing. And it is thinking about how it can save you time, how we’re all quite often time poor, so where things are able to help us or actually allow us to concentrate on the more creative or the more solution focused aspects then WordPress can allow us to do that and do the and WooCommerce too. And I think it’s just starting to think in that way as well and not just see things as a challenge or something to be feared. But how can this aid what I do in my own work, my own understanding, my own creativity and for my clients, but also how can I contribute to that to make it just a little bit better or share what I use with it? And again, another way to do something for a developer blog. Thank you for that. The other thing that we’ve had people talk about is that it’s the query total block, which big it’s already referred to. But also things like the file block updates, which is probably one of my favorite things about this release, apart from two of the performance things we’re going to be talking about shortly. For many people, they all think this might be a long overdue and that’s why we have a release that is a polishing and improvement release so that we can actually fix these things. Now users can update the file name and that text that appears on your download button. It is going to be so much easier for customization and it actually makes that file block in my view actually useful rather than something I would sit there and go ah, don’t like this, but didn’t know quite what to do with it. But of course that’s the joy of WordPress. If there’s something that you have seen and you think I don’t like how this works, have a look. Is there a ticket on the system that we call track and has someone else raised it as an issue? Is there something that is people want as an enhancement and if it’s not there already, maybe it’s something that you want to raise, maybe it’s something you could devote some time to and I think that’s where a lot of ideas can come from. Again, I’m going to first take that to Joe and then back to Birgit. The ideas are in this release. Obviously they have come from all sorts of places. It’s not just been from one person or a small group of people. If someone particularly likes a performance update or a Gutenberg update in this release and they but they think actually it could just do a little bit more and it would be perfect. How do they deal with that? What’s the next step for them? I’ll go to Joe first, then to Birgit.

Joe McGill:
There are so many answers to that question. I think for people who have the knowledge and ability, even you know, tinkering with the code themselves and sharing, you know, an iteration or an idea that they have been able to do, like on their own blog or through their own podcast or YouTube channel or something. You see people sharing ideas and gaining traction around those ideas can be really useful, I think, more directly, if you’re wanting to influence the. The development of a feature in the WordPress project itself is through contributing to the issues in WordPress track or for things that relate to the WordPress editor and some of the new UI features that are being built into WordPress, going to the Gutenberg GitHub repo and contributing to the issues and the discussions, there can be a great way to just sort of get involved and help, you know, help iterate on those ideas.

Abha Thakor:
Absolutely. Baker, I was going to bring you in there because I know you have some comments on this.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Well, I just can reiterate what Joe said, but not everybody is really comfortable with Track and how to. Because it needs to have certain markdown and others. Also not very comfortable with GitHub. So there is actually a channel where a lot of people come together. Sometimes you also have a. Okay, I want to. This works, but I found something quirky and is it supposed to be like that or is it just me? Yeah, I’m. I don’t know if that’s a bug or I don’t know, I’m not doing it right or I’m doing it wrong. Yeah, there is a channel called outreach on the WordPress Slack and there are a few hundred people in there and if you ask a question, some of them will pick it up. So there are people in there that have a theme question that tried to do something new with it and wonder, is it supposed to happen like that with the theme template part or. Or a cover block or a sticky post or something like that, and it didn’t work that way. Then either you get help and say, well, you’re doing it wrong, but they’re all nice people and they actually have a solution for you. Or somebody says, okay, yeah, that would be good to have an issue created on Gutenberg with all the information and. And then there are people triaging the repo or all the issues and kind of put a little label on it that says actually that identifies the theme or the feature as well as if it’s a bug. And also if it needs testing, sometimes we can get much clearer when there is something there and people test it and add to the information and that’s how that collaborative effort is done. But yeah, and if you’re really struggling with that just ping me on WP Slack and I’ll answer within a day and kind of can point you in the right direction. It’s sometimes not easy to find the first way. And yeah, one of my stories is that I. That Gutenberg was developing so fast that from one version to the next I didn’t find a certain feature and I said, well, it’s a bug. The feature went away and then it came back and said, well, yeah, we moved it into a different menu. That’s totally okay because it wasn’t communicated and only that way we know, oh, there was a gap in information. So it’s always helpful to have even if, yeah, you might feel, yeah, I wasn’t contributing at all for that. But you did actually, because it kind of made people aware there is a gap of information and that. That’s by itself already very helpful because if you don’t know it, millions of other people don’t know it either. So. And that’s the essence of that.

Abha Thakor:
Absolutely. And we’ve got a couple of more examples from 6.8 where people’s feedback, people’s not sure about why it does something have actually resulted in improvements polish to the software. So one of them is image blocks. Now that has been a problem for some people with having to have workarounds or duplication of effort. But now feature images are actually really easy to set from the image block and hopefully we’ll avoid some of that duplication. But again, some of that change came from testing and we’ll again add it to the show notes how you can get involved with that. Testing 6.8 is new. It’s a great time to see how it works, find what makes it better for you, but also get involved with testing much earlier because you can influence the direction of a release. We also have in 6.8 the social icon block update. So now you can add discord to the social icons. But actually it is so much easier. I was adding social icons in a training material session to WordPress with 6.8 and it took me seconds again for WooCommerce store owners, this is how WordPress is really going to help you. Because if, because if you are wanting to add these things, you don’t have to rely on a theme. We’ve talked about this already in the show. You can use Gutenberg, you can use one of the WordPress default themes and you can just play around with what works for you. You don’t have to stick to the same theme. And all of that is how WordPress continues to evolve. Thank you biggie for going through that. And Joe, I’m going to come back to you about performance because it is an absolute big thing for WordPress and that commitment has carried on and will continue. It’s not just been for one Release. So in 6.8 advertises itself as speeding up everything, you know, from all the different aspects from the editing side editor to colors, typography, but also just using a site if you are a user speed in which you go to different areas, the password, security. A lot of these things are myths and I know I’ve spoken to WooCommerce store owners or people considering moving to Wu and think, oh well, WordPress doesn’t do performance, so it doesn’t do password updates or security or doesn’t do interactivity. But actually none of that is actually the case. And you’re the man to really help share why performance is so important in WordPress and what 6.8 has meant for you in terms of the performance improvements and a little thing called speculative loading, which is one of my favorite performance improvements in 6.8.

Joe McGill:
Yeah, in both those topics that you touched on, both performance and security, WordPress has put a lot of. I mean the people who work on WordPress have put a lot of emphasis on trying to continually improve WordPress’s security and performance. I think both of those topics, accessibility is another one that comes up often with any of those topics. There is no real destination, there’s no time in which we can say like we have totally solved all of the potential issues related to this topic. It is a part of our product development practice to continually iterate on, to improve on and that sort of thing. On the security side, like you mentioned, there was a big effort in this release led by John Blackbourn, but with several other contributors to improve the mechanism by which we hash security, the passwords that are used in WordPress. And so it’s sort of an automatic process now that the next time, you know, after you’ve up updated to 6.8, next time you log in, the passwords that are stored in the actual WordPress database will be upgraded to just a more secure version of your password. So it shouldn’t affect you as an end user, but it makes the actual password that WordPress uses after you’ve typed it in and kind of how that whole process works, it makes it a little more secure, harder to guess, harder for people to log in, you know, to log in to your user account from a sort of an attack vector sort of point of view. In the same way we have Had a performance team that I’ve been involved with that I think started at WordPress 6.2 in that release cycle. And what’s been fun now, you know, several years later is to see how some of the work that started in much earlier release cycles still are finding them their way into new WordPress releases well after some of those concepts were first discovered. So speculative loading is I think probably the big headline feature in this release. It started as a feature project that Felix really spearheaded that we released as a part of the performance team through the Performance Lab sort of suite of plugins that that team puts forward. It is a really cool feature that just enables your WordPress site to basically tell browsers that that make use of this speculative loading API, which is a fast becoming a standard API and across browsers give them a little bit of information about your pages, about which ones can be preloaded a little bit faster. So we take a pretty conservative approach to that. In WordPress Core when it was introduced, the plugin, if you want to experiment with that, is a little less conservative. But the idea is that really when you start to like mouse over or point over a link on your website, the browser will automatically start to preload that page so that when you actually do click that link, it feels like it loads much faster. And we’re seeing some really cool improvements there. There was another improvement to just some of the underlying ways that WordPress queries different posts on your website where as we were doing research a couple years ago or last year for a totally separate issue developer that I’ve worked with named Karthik realized that when we are caching some of those queries so that like you don’t, your database doesn’t get hit every time that we’re trying to cache queries. There were some weird cases where if like the list of post types that were being queried were in a different order, even though they would result in the same result, those would be cached as totally separate things. So you would end up with two database requests when it was not really necessary. So we made some changes in this release that could improve those sorts of problems and like little things like that that I think were constantly trying to improve, which are pretty cool.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Yeah, it’s pretty amazing.

Abha Thakor:
And you can read more about the performance updates in the field guide for 6.8 and again and we’ll share those in the show notes. So there are so many ways that we want to help you understand the latest release, be involved with it, give feedback, find your way through it and find More importantly, what it can mean for you because everyone’s WordPress experience is different. Joe’s talked about accessibility and accessibility is probably one of the most important things for any software and for any project. And in 6.8 there have been 70 plus improvements to blocks, data views and overall user experience. This is on top of other accessibility changes. We are going to be doing a bit more on this particular area. One of my colleagues on do the Woo also does a lot on accessibility. So if you don’t feel like you know enough about it, tune in to the shows that we’re doing about this and also just join the accessibility team. You don’t have to contribute straight away. You can follow, you can learn. There’s so many fantastic people working on these teams and they will welcome you with open arms on Data views. I’m going to just go to Birgit. Why are they so important and what does it mean for use and what does it give you?

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Well, the data views first are very handy to organize the list of patterns or the list of pages or the list of templates in the site editor. But they are even more important for a future WP admin update because they’re building with those. What you see in the site editor is actually the basis of what will come sooner or later to WP admin as an overall interface change modernization of that. And there are actually components that WordPress provides not only for its own pages for listing applications, bunch of data or a lot of data. It’s also these components also provided for plugin developers for their own. Yeah, if they have new data that comes in from either external or they have new custom post types, they can also use the components that are provided through WordPress for their own pages. The updates that you see in 6.8, they are mostly developer related, but there are quite a few of them a user can now with a little bit. Some of the tools modify the amount of white space that are between different sections. So if you have because the page only can fill so much. So if you reduce the white page there’s more to see. That’s one part. It’s also some of the page related settings are now also integrated into the data view of the site editor for pages that’s the only piece that’s kind of twice in WordPress. Now you have it through the old WP admin site and then you can also create pages in the site editor. That’s just a transitional phase and don’t get confused about that. But it also now you can set the homepage any page in the site editor as a homepage. And now at the last changes that there are now confirmed dialogues for deleting pages or patterns or something like that, which was missing. They were only kind of you clicked on it said oops, they were gone. And that was that. And any WordPress user who has worked with the system is actually prepared to have a confirmed dialogue there before anything is deleted. So that was kind of missing. But the data views give you really a bleak look into the future of WordPress. That can take a year or another two, but that it’s coming and it’s evolving through the window of the site editor and how templates, patterns and pages are kind of organized and provide all the different features there and evolve. What was there quite a few things that weren’t possible or are not possible in the older interface that are now available through the data views.

Abha Thakor:
Thank you, Birgit. And that again is a really good explanation. It’s one of those things that came up from the last few shows in the release that people said data views is different to what I’m expecting. How and what does this mean? So explanations like you’ve given today that Joe shared last time, illustrations all help and we’re actually going to pull some of this together with Bob’s help so that we can create some information that we can share with the training team as well at WordPress and hopefully make everything a little bit easier and maybe even as there’s a developer blog in there as well. Thank you Joe. I’m going to come back to you on the new filter for loading block assets on demand because actually that sounds amazing and it’s surely going to be a huge improvement for performance.

Joe McGill:
Yeah, and this is one of the things that came out of just iterating on performance improvements. You know, we noticed that a lot of time on the server is spent loading a bunch of these file assets when, you know, when somebody visits your page. And we had already made some improvements to all of the ones that core loads so that they would be loaded more efficiently and realized that there was some opportunities to extend some of those functionalities to extenders like plugin developers. So there’s some documentation again on on the WordPress core blog that you can see, I think links to it from the field guide we talked about earlier about how you might make use of some of these features to load your files a little bit more quickly for plugin developers that are have a lot of blocks and a lot of patterns and those sorts of things.

Abha Thakor:
Thanks Joe. And it’s again, have a look at these new things if you haven’t heard about them already. And we’re going to go just really into our final question now, Birgit, what for you is the best thing about this release and the next coming things that you’re most excited about?

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Oh, that’s there are so many things, but it’s really hard. So from the release I really like how the navigation block is now easier to handle. I like how the details block has gotten more power. I like that little thing that you mentioned that the image block can now also be transformed into a featured image. So yeah, and another really good thing is what we didn’t talk about is that the gallery block now has the expand to click until now every page. If you wanted to have it big on the screen, you needed every image in the gallery need to have that setting and now the setting is gallery wide. So that’s definitely a small improvement for those who don’t use gallery blocks, but for those who use them, they really like it. So yeah, these are the few that I wanted to point out that I like in my everyday kind of work. I like the zoom out view, but it definitely needs more iteration in future releases.

Joe McGill:
Yeah, a couple of things that I’m I think have been most excited about as I have followed this release and supported, you know, the amazing group of people who have been working on a lot of the features that are headlined in this release is one of the things that I think is a companion to the sort of that zoom out view. And some of that, some of those tools that Birgit already mentioned is we’re making it a lot easier for folks to be able to when you’re editing a page or a post type, be able to actually preview that page while you’re editing it in the context of the template. So if you are editing a page and you there’s the little icon up at the top of the page that looks like a little laptop view where you can like change your view from like desktop, tablet, mobile. There’s now a show template button there as well. You can also get to it from the page sidebar when you’re like editing the published date and some of those sorts of things. And that allows you to turn off or on sort of like your page or your post in the context of the template that is going to be rendered in. It’s still like an early iteration. It keeps improving each release. But a couple of things that we’ve done there to make it easier that once you have set a preference it sort of sticks with you. So every time you refresh the page, you don’t have to reset that setting every time. From a developer point of view, you can actually set the default view for certain post types to automatically render in the context of the template. We experimented with shipping page post types in this release as that being the default and found that it was probably just a little confusing still and backed that out. But all of the functionality is still there, which is really cool. I’ve seen for years. You know, you want to be able to actually see, like when you want to edit a featured image of a post, like, you want to actually see it how it’s going to show up on the front end and not hit like publish and then go look and preview the page and realize, oh, I it didn’t look the way that I thought it was going to. So seeing the post in that context is really cool. And I think continuing to iterate on the design tools that are being expanded beyond just the block editor, but even classic themes now and see the style book from their appearance menu. So even if you’re in a classic theme, but you’re using, you know, the block editor for your block, your post publishing, you can preview what do all the blocks look like in your theme and you can’t edit them yet. I think maybe that will come in a future iteration, but you at least get those previews to be able to see, like, oh, these are all of the different components that we have on our site that we have access to that we could use in posts. And I think that sort of iteration is something that is very cool to see.

Abha Thakor:
Thank you, Joe. It has been an amazing release in terms of just seeing how things can be just improved a little bit further and they can make such a difference into how that is used. And I’m so, so glad that we’ve had a release this year that has been able to concentrate on that. We’re going to share in the show notes how you can contribute to a ticket in 6.9. So please do go and look at that. Our show notes are meant to be there also as a bit of education and training to help people get involved, but also to help you find your way around the cycle so that everyone can feel that they can be involved. Joe and Birgit, it just remains for me to say thank you ever so much for being with us again this time and we will be coming back to you for some of the questions that we haven’t managed to cover today. In fact, I’ve been so delighted that three quarters of the ones that we’ve had in the research you both have been able to answer, shed light on and make just a little bit easier for people to use. And we are ever so grateful on do the Woo for you taking the time to do that and all the contribution that you do and also the inspiration that you give to others. So please do continue to share your links with us and we will continue to put those out through do the Woo. And for those who have been listening today, if you’ve not been involved with a release before or you’ve been a first time contributor, we want to hear from you. So please get in touch with me either through do the Woo on make WordPress Slack or on X. I’m non stop news UK and we would love to have you join our next release panel and hopefully we’ll have contributions from Birgit, Joe McGill and lots of the other people on the team as well. Thank you to both of you and we hope to see you soon.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Thank you for having me.

Joe McGill:
Thank you.