Learn, Share and Grow with the WordPress Developer Blog Community

Abha Thakor:
Hello and welcome to the WordPress way, and we’re looking at all things developer support today and you’re joining Abha Thakor. And thank you for joining and being with us today. In the studio we have Justin Tadlock and Mary Baum, both currently in the United States and they’re here to show you just how a little thing called the Developer Blog could be your secret way to improve how you do websites. Have more fun with them, but also share your expertise. Welcome Mary and Justin.

Justin Tadlock:
Hi.

Mary Baum:
Thank you for having us.

Abha Thakor:
So both of you have been around since really the Developer blog was first an idea and has now been up and running and doing some great things over the last few years. So I’m going to start with things that is probably the most useful question for people listening today. We talk about the Developer Blog in all of our release shows, but it’s quite difficult to know why would you go to a developer blog to go and learn how to use WordPress for more case studies for more different situations, improve your technique? Why would you want people to actually go to a blog to do that? Justin, I’m going to go to you first. What is the thinking behind the idea of putting this amazing amount of information under a blog?

Justin Tadlock:
Speaking for myself, I first started blogging 20 years ago or so and I didn’t know there wasn’t a training team or there wasn’t really a lot of documentation in the WordPress space. And so I personally, I just started blogging about the things I learned and I found out that other people, they enjoyed reading and giving feedback and I’m glad now to see that, you know, we’re 20 years later in the WordPress space. We have a place to where I can put all the crazy ideas I have that I’m testing out and I feel like that’s a great place for other developers. Hey, you know, if you just say I got an idea, I want to share it with the world, I think it’s really cool. So that’s like the viewpoint I’m coming from. So I just think this is cool and I want to share it and.

Abha Thakor:
You’Ve done some amazing features for the developer blog in the time it’s been up. Justin, when you get an idea for a blog or a case study, do you know how you’re going to end up with the finished article? Or is it a work in progress for quite a while that you get input in from other people?

Justin Tadlock:
It’s almost always a work in progress. Things change as I start writing the article, they change as I’m building out the code and it’s very rare that something ends up the same way I started it. And so I always find problems along the way and that need new solutions or just find a new way of doing something as I’m working through it. As far as the writing goes, I, I would say I probably can be pretty formulaic sometimes in how I personally showcase certain features or certain ideas. And I think I have some people on my team, I have a template within my team at work that I’m like here, if you don’t know how to write, you know, a tutorial, here’s how I do it. You know, just kind of an intro and then we walk through step by step how we build that thing. And I, I would say the one thing too I try to do is teach people at like the lowest level as much as I can. Like, if you don’t, maybe you don’t know this advanced JavaScript yet, but can we at least walk you along that path to kind of getting you to where the tutorial is trying to take you?

Abha Thakor:
And I think that’s probably quite useful, the idea of having that kind of template so that maybe other people who are thinking that I’d have a case study, but I don’t know how to depict it into something like the dev blog. Could they pick up from looking at your articles and some of the other articles a way of setting out what they’re trying to explain or even working out a solution? Not even for the dev blog?

Justin Tadlock:
Yeah, I think people could do that, you know, just follow how I do things or how we have other great writers too, how they write their posts, and we’re all kind of present things differently to the world. And I think we’ve had really great success with the writers that we do have, and I think just following along their examples is good inspiration for others who maybe want to contribute at some point.

Abha Thakor:
I think one of the nice things I like about the dev blog and something that we very much focused on when we were creating how it was going to look, was that you’ve got beginners, you’ve got intermediate, you’ve got advanced, and you’ve also got a breakdown by topic areas, say maybe design themes, all sorts of different areas so people can think, well, okay, I couldn’t write something for one of those audience that maybe I don’t feel confident writing for advanced developer, but they could have a go at contributing something for a beginner. So I’m going to go to Mary on that one. Mary, how and why would you say that people should have a go at putting an idea forward for beginner content on the developer blog?

Mary Baum:
Well, I’d like to see beginners get the idea that they’re capable of growing. You know, I’m somebody who did not write a line of CSS until I was 47 years old and that was not yesterday. And a lot of people, it’s true that WordPress is the gateway drug to coding and it can be true for anybody. So if beginners are starting to read the developer blog, I’m hoping they will come across other headlines that look interesting and start to understand them as they read more and gradually get hooked by this thing. That is a great way to have a better site and get interested in something new. And I mean, in my case it was life changing, but even to just learn a little bit more has so many personal benefits, not to mention what it lets a beginner do for their site and their business or their organization, whatever it is. So if you’re a beginner, I say yeah, read the beginner articles, read some of the no code articles and the design code articles, but then just look through the headline and start reading stuff that jumps out at you for any reason. Maybe you understand two words in the headline, maybe you understand the whole headline. Maybe there’s a problem you’ve been wanting to solve and start taking a look at the snippets. Those at least are very digestible. All the tutorials are very digestible.

Abha Thakor:
Absolutely. And I guess one of the things about it being a blog is that if a beginner comes on the site and they find something interesting, they look at a solution that they’ve had to a problem that they’re also experiencing. They can also add comments onto that blog to share what they’ve learned, what they might have tried differently. And it does allow that bit of interactivity.

Mary Baum:
Yes, it does. As opposed to training content, which is pretty much one way communication.

Abha Thakor:
And I think that’s part of the idea of the WordPress community. It’s about that two way dialogue, three way, four way. You know, people are working together and coming up with ideal ways of going forward. But as I think Justin’s already said, a solution that he might have come across one day, he might have a better solution two days later, or find a way that actually improves on something that he looked at a year ago. Justin, I’m going to come back to you about how a beginner who has found content maybe felt they could add to a comment on a blog. How do they go about actually taking that next step in terms of saying I’d like to have a go, I’d like to maybe contribute to something on the dev blog?

Justin Tadlock:
So how do we go from, you know, we’ve discovered something on the dev blog and we’re communicating. So if you want to contribute, we have a hub repository which I know probably sounds scary to people who aren’t in the code, but is we just use it very text based just as a tracking system essentially for our articles. So what you can do is we have a discussions panel in the GitHub repository. So you can just. The first step would be, hey, here’s an idea I have. Even if you don’t plan to write it, but you want to learn about it, that’s a good way to inspire maybe me or you know, someone else who’s writing for the blog who has a solution. So it’s almost a little bit like support in that way. If you have an idea that you don’t know how to how it works, then maybe someone else picks it up. But it’s also a good opportunity for you, you to learn. I think that’s for myself. One of the reasons I started blogging in the first place is I was also learning as I was teaching others. I actually think that’s one of the best ways to learn a new technology, new coding, new programming language has set a goal for yourself, not just to build something but to also teach others. And it doesn’t matter what level you’re, you consider yourself. Everyone’s a beginner or advanced at all points of their life at something. So yeah, just kind of take that step if you’re interested. And we, we have information on the website that will take you over to the GitHub repository and you can get involved. And we also have the Slack channel. Is it just Dev Blog hashtag Dev Blog?

Mary Baum:
I think it’s core Developer blog.

Justin Tadlock:
Okay.

Mary Baum:
Or core Dev blog and that’s on.

Abha Thakor:
The Make WordPress Slack for anyone who’s not come across it already. So there are, as Justin said with Slack Channel, as Mary’s just shared as well, it is the core Developer blog on Slack. Everyone can join it if you’d like to. We will put in the show notes, the links to the GitHub repo and also to the dev blog. But if you have just joined us, we’re talking about all things developer.WordPress.org which is the place that you will find the developer blog. And you just put developer.WordPress.org news and every month it will tell you what’s new in WordPress. Many of the articles Justin has been very instrumental in. It’ll also give you a chance to search for beginner intermediate advanced articles and by topic, Justin’s just been sharing how it’s a great way to learn by not just reading the articles, commenting on the articles, but also maybe volunteering to contribute to those articles because by explaining it to somebody else, it’s a way that our brains will actually absorb information too. So there’s lots of win wins. Thank you, Justin. I’m going to go to Mary. Mary, you and I have been involved with mentoring many of the writers who have come up through the developer blog over the last few years. For you, what is the best thing that someone can do who’s maybe interested? Obviously they’ve had a look at the GitHub or maybe they’re not familiar with GitHub. What would help them the most in terms of being able to think of a post they could write or they could contribute to. Where would they start on that?

Mary Baum:
Well, I think once they log into GitHub they’re going to come to the project board and if they’ve used Trello or any other Kanban system, I’ll talk directly to a new writer. Now just look at the various columns to see if there’s a topic you’re interested in that you can help out with or look at it just in terms of ideas. And the other thing is to if you are somebody who’s already involved, say with the block editor, if there’s something in the pull request that you’d like to write, that’s obviously not necessarily a beginning developer, that’s a beginning writer and we will help you. And we have editors available, particularly the three of us, who are going to make your writing sound great. And when it comes to writing, because this is a blog post, this is, it’s journalism. So you can speak a little bit more plainly than you would in documentation. Although I encourage people to speak plainly in documentation too, or a tutorial.

Abha Thakor:
And I think that’s the beauty, isn’t it? Mary of the of WordPress is that we have lots of ways that people can learn from things on learnwordpress.org to documentation on WordPress that’s on the make.WordPress.org website, and to things like this developer blog.

Mary Baum:
And studies show that people learn better from things that we write in plain language. Say so go ahead, use normal words, use active verbs. Tell us what to do, not what should be done. I mean, even I go so far as if there’s a passive construction coming up, I will bend over backwards to use something else. And my fallback is always, rather than having something be done, I say it has to get done because that implies movement. And as we build a little bit of familiarity and energy into what we write, which is really just like talking to somebody the way you would over ice cream, you will keep engaged for the whole article.

Abha Thakor:
And Mary, the idea of talking in that way and talking a bit more informally, but still helping people understand without, you know, going off the point is that something that there is help with. So somebody’s listening to this and goes, well, I don’t have. Or they think they don’t have skills in that area. Can they reach out? Can they say, I’d like to do this because I found this solution. I know this works. This is the way I would suggest to people to do it. I’ve got some notes. Can you help me structure that? Absolutely.

Mary Baum:
And you can even ping me directly. And I will see to it that whatever we come up with is going to be readable. You will sound like you wrote for the New York Times.

Justin Tadlock:
Yeah, I will just say I’ve been a published author. I’ve even took journalism in English and college. And I still let Mary just hack up my articles to bits because they sound so much better at the end. We have great editors and so even if you don’t sound great, you will by. By the time it’s published.

Mary Baum:
Yes, you will. And thanks. That’s a huge compliment from Justin. Remember that Justin for a while was the editor of the WP Tavern.

Abha Thakor:
And I think that friendliness that you can hear on the show today just shows you that if you would like to contribute, because we get a lot of people who are interested and then are a bit reluctant to submit their idea or finish through on what they’ve sent because they’re worried that it won’t be the same as an advanced developer who’s been writing things like this for a long time. But actually that doesn’t matter. The most important thing is it’s a place for people to develop their writing, to develop their what they’re trying to say and the solutions they found. Because there is no absolutely one way of doing things with WordPress. There are so many different ways and you might have found a way of using it that somebody else has not thought of yet. So and I just really want to give a big shout out to all of our team of editors because it is a lot of work and it’s very important to recognize that with the editing work that goes in behind the scenes too. Justin, I’m going to come back to you. We’re going to have a look at one of the pieces to give people an idea of how the developer blog can make a difference in their life and that it is worth them spending time not just finding content that works for them, but also contributing to that content. We’re going to have a look a piece that we’ll put in the show notes. Justin wrote it about mastering light and dark mode styling in block themes.

Abha Thakor:
The discussion that came with the editorial board about this people piece and that actually this seems quite a topic that will have a benefit to lots of people. And it’s probably one of those questions that people think, well I probably there is a way to do this. I just don’t know how you started this particular blog with looking at the challenge. It wasn’t looking at the, you know, this is what you’ve done on a case study. It actually started with how the challenge is for many developers about creating themes with both light and dark modes and that some methods for doing that can be quite complicated. As part of that challenge, you laid out some rules about how you were going to address that challenge, which I thought actually was a really good way of looking at a problem. It’s a great problem solving approach in general anyway. And did it help you writing it that way and approaching it from the perspective of this is a problem that a lot of people are going to have that I’ve had. I don’t know what I wanted to do with it, but this is how I’m going to stick to finding a solution first of all and build from that.

Justin Tadlock:
Yes, as far as the rules go, I actually set some specific rules for myself when writing about anything that would go on a theme. We have a WordPress themes directory on WordPress.org and there are very specific rules about what you’re allowed to do in a theme and then what’s kind of considered plugin territory and is not allowed. So there are some restraints I put on myself and when I’m writing is I want anyone who’s writing reading these tutorials to know, okay, this should be safe to also add to my theme to the WordPress, you know, themes directory and not just a custom build and it works for everyone. But you know, I want to make sure we’re covering as many use cases as we can. But yeah, as far as the problem goes, mastering light and dark mode there’s been a thousand solutions in the past 20 years it feels like or however how many years people have been talking about it. And last year one of the CSS functions became like baseline, widely available to, you know, most browsers. So I was like, oh, we can finally solve this without some really super complicated messy method that that is not really going to work for something in the theme directory. So I just had a few ideas and started playing with it and I, I think that actually worked out. That tutorial worked out well. I’m planning a follow up by the way, where we’ll take the next step and actually creating a button where users can toggle the light and dark mode on and off. The first tutorial it was just it automatically uses the user’s preferences. But now whenever I get this, the next one written, we’ll take it that next step.

Abha Thakor:
For anyone who’s not seen the tutorial yet, do check out our show notes and it’ll be in there as well as a link to Justin’s other posts for the developer blog. Mary, I’m going to come back to you to just move tacks slightly to talk about releases. Now people who follow this show know that this is the place that you want to come to after a WordPress release has launched because we have some of the people who’ve been involved on the show, talking about the release, going into some of the highlights for you and answering some of the questions that we do some research on in the run up to the release. Now in our last show on the release we talked about 6.9 and the fact that it was now planned for 2026. But news has changed. The plan has now changed to having WordPress 6.9 cycle actually being at the moment. So if you would like to be the release squad or help in some way, there are opportunities already being promoted and again we’ll put them in the show notes and we’ve got a date of 21st of October this year for Beta 1 and a estimated release of 6.9 as 2nd December 2025. Mary, you and I have been on Quite a few WordPress releases over quite a few years.

Mary Baum:
Absolutely.

Abha Thakor:
For people thinking that they just like to be involved, testing is one of the ways that we’re always saying come and be involved because it’s probably one of the most important areas. Testing what comes out in a beta release, putting forward solutions, looking at the tickets that are sat on track, that are scheduled for possible inclusion in a release, and seeing if there’s something there that you can help with for you. Why is that testing process just so important for us to continuously be asking people to get involved?

Mary Baum:
Well, we’d much rather find a bug and fix it before the launch than after because it’s the same. It’s the same reason that we would prefer in any product marketing situation to hear about problems directly from our customers, our users. And let’s face it, every one of us is a customer of WordPress.org and of the releases, even those of us who make it, we all use it for something. We’d rather hear about the problems while we can stick to them for the general than have them surface out in the world. We don’t mind them surfacing out in the world, but we do know. Well, what I knew 20 years ago when I was in marketing research was that 95% of the people who find a problem in a product that’s already launched are going to tell their friends. And now I assume they’re also going to tell social media, which didn’t really exist back then, but they won’t necessarily tell the people who can actually fix it. So the more we test and the more we can fix, the more we can present, the More finished a WordPress we can present on launch date. The great thing about the web is that the paint never dries on anything. And the sad thing about The Internet is that the paint never dries on anything, so there’s always something to fix. We just want there to be as few things to fix after the fact as possible, for people to be as happy with the product as possible from day one.

Abha Thakor:
And of course, when we talk about the idea of wanting issues that have come in, wanting problems logged, it’s not about a group of people just sat there and knowing all the solutions. WordPress we is everybody. It’s all the contributors to WordPress. That includes the people who are reporting an issue, those people who are testing the users. It’s everybody. And together we can find those solutions, as Mary has talked about. Mary, in terms of. Because at the moment, obviously, we’re on a very early stage of 6.9. If people have particular favorite issues or things that are really upsetting them and they want to fix, and they can search on track, which is where they’ll find a list of problems that other people might have found or enhancements, is it too early for them to go and look at those tickets on track and comment on things that might possibly be in a 6.9 or have been moved forward to 6.9 from earlier releases?

Mary Baum:
It is absolutely not too early. You know, I’m tempted sardonically to say it’s a little late, because Alpha on 6.9has actually been open since late March. But since we didn’t think there was going to be a six. Nine, there’s been no particular rush. But I would say now the rush is on. There is not nearly as much time between now and beta 1 10/21 as any of us thinks. So I would say time is of the essence and please do it now.

Abha Thakor:
So I think that, you know, if you want to get involved, if you think that you would like a ticket to be really solved in this next version of WordPress, and that could also be in a minor release in terms of you want to see just a tweak in what they’re doing in a minor release. There are opportunities for that, too. I’m gonna just jump to Justin. Justin, you obviously spend a long time, as actually all of us on the show do, in terms of looking at what is coming up in a WordPress release. What keeps that interest for you? What makes you still interested each release?

Justin Tadlock:
Well, like others, I have tickets that I want to see solved, and hopefully we get one or two of those. You know, each release there, I don’t know, there’s always something on the horizon that I’m looking forward to. There’s, you know, Technology’s updating and WordPress is updating. And personally I just look through the changelog every other week for the Gutenberg Project and I say, oh, that looks really cool, I want to play around with it. And before we had Gutenberg and like the two week release cycle there it was, I would look through, I would open my code editor with, you know, the WordPress trunk and I would literally do a search for the new version and I would just look at new functions. Like, I don’t know, I’m just kind of a nerdy developer, so whatever I see and that I could potentially use, I want to at least give it a try and see if it’s worth my time.

Abha Thakor:
And of course the beauty of having people who are fascinated by WordPress on the developer blog team is that they’re also going to write about it and they’re also going to tell you in lots of fun detail about how you can use it too. So another reason to stay connected with the developer blog. And you can also subscribe to the developer blog on the site. There is a big subscribe option at the top. So for developer.WordPress.org news, if you’ve not been there already, it’s time that you discovered what it was. And speaking of subscribing, you can subscribe to Open Channels FM to find out and keep in touch with what’s happening with the releases in WordPress. Discover some of the contributors that we have. Also hear the interviews with people who are making major changes in how WordPress is used out there in industry and from small changes to big things that you’re going to want to keep your eye on and see if you can emulate for your organization or just have fun with experimenting with. It just remains of me to thank my two guests today. Justin and Mary, thank you very much for for coming along and talking about the developer blog on them on WordPress and just being part of that whole learning experience not only on WordPress.org but also as part of our mission here on Open Channels fm. Justin, what would you say to inspire people to get involved, read and be part of the developer blog?

Justin Tadlock:
Just come check us out and I’m sure there’s something fun for you to discover there.

Abha Thakor:
Thank you Justin and Mary. When can people read about the editorial meetings? When can they just come and have a listen? What time do they happen and where?

Mary Baum:
The editorial meetings are at 15:00 clock on the first Thursday of the month in the core developer blog. They’re on Slack so you don’t have to look pretty or sound good. Just make sure your Slack is open and that at least one of your eyes is open and you’ll be great.

Abha Thakor:
Please join us and that’s 1500 UTC and it’s on the Slack channel on Make WordPress and we’ll put that link in the show notes too. Thank you very much both and we hope that when we’re doing the research for 6.9 that will be coming to you both with some questions in the research. If you’re listening to this and you are wanting to join the developer blog and not quite sure where to start, please do reach out to open channels FM and the WordPress way show. I am Albert Thakor and you can find me on Nonstop News UK on various channels or reach out to me via Open Channels and we’ll help you get started. Also, if you’re wanting to get involved with 6.9 and you’re not sure where to do that yet, do let us know. If it’s your first time on a release, we would love to hear about how you get involved. If you’re making something new in WordPress or WooCommerce, we’d also want to know. We’re particularly interested in hearing about what’s happening in different parts of the world and every month we do try and go to different places. Next month in August we are going to be talking about all things WP Playground. So if you’ve not heard of WordPress Playground and you don’t know how it can make your life so much easier, save you lots of time and actually be quite a fun environment to be testing and working in, then you want to come and join us for for a very interesting show with a person who’s been developing on Playground for a long time and is now working full time on it. So join us for that in August and do send us your questions as ever and we’ll try and make sure we incorporate those into a show. So thank you for joining us and join us next time.