New Tools and Updates in WordPress 7.0 for Developers and Content Managers

Abha Thakor:
Hello and welcome to Open Makers on Open Channels fm. I’m Abha Thakor, a journalist and IT communicator and your host for the release shows. We are very privileged to share with you the experience of WordPress’s own wonderful staff, Birgit Pauli-Haack, whose Gutenberg Times is a major aid for understanding the developments that you’re going to want to know if you’re using WordPress or if you’re new to IT and Open Source in general. Birgit and I are Both on the WordPress Developer Blog editorial team and through these podcasts we’ll be featuring learning and sharing opportunities for you, your colleagues and groups that you’re involved with. Because we’re all about sharing, learning and better understanding of Open Source so that it works even better for you. We’re going to look today at a number of different things, all centered around quite a major big release. It’s WordPress 7.0, very long awaited, and it’s going to be one that you’re going to want to study with us today. We’re going to look at why Open Source is important for releases, the opportunities for you to be part of that conversation, and also finding out what you can do with Open Source. Believe me, it will blow your mind. Isn’t that so big? We’re always amazed and just enthralled by the different opportunities we see.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Absolutely, absolutely. And hello Everybody. Yeah, happy WordPress 7.0 Armstrong. And just before we started the recording, I was listening to what a Wonderful World by Louise Armstrong, who the release was dedicated to, and it was just fabulous because that’s so telling about the Open Source World and WordPress World.

Abha Thakor:
So definitely. And we’ll even include a special playlist today. So for those who regularly tune in. As a musician, you’ll know that I’m always keen on highlighting how music and open source software comes together. And it is about expressing yourself, how you want to share the developments that you’re doing, and also your creativity. And as Birgit said, what better person to be inspired by than band leader Louis Armstrong? And a big shout out to all the big bands that are being playing around the world in the last week. And I’ve had the privilege of hearing two of them live these last two days while I’ve been preparing for this podcast. And all the usual thanks to our researchers who helped for this, and we’ve had some really new great teams come on this time. And even better, we’ve had a bit of jazz playing in the background live as well while we’ve been preparing for this. So let’s get cracking and let the music play. So WordPress 7.0 has a lot of features that you will want to be aware of when you go to using any open source, and we’re going to take you through that hopefully in a logical way. We’ve been doing a lot of work with our listeners about how we can make release shows more useful to you and how we can structure them so that you can get the most out of it. So we’re going to start with the process of safe updating and learning because there are lots of new features in WordPress 7.0, as well as various other major releases from other open source that have come in the last few weeks. When WordPress like in many other solutions, it lays the foundation for AI throughout the software. Now that has a significant importance because of that change in the product. You’re not going to want to just press update, so if your finger is hovering on that update button, just move it back while we share a little bit more about the release. And we’re going to do some signposting to help you actually get the most out of it, because it can cause you so much problems now, unless you like having headaches, shouting comments, shouting users and things disappearing, you want to just take a little step back. We did a testing for this, a lot of people said, but my homepage stays the same. It’s the detail, it’s where you want to look into how this update is going to work for you, what plugins and everything else. So we’re going to take a bit of a look at that as well. And we’ve got the best person today with us to help us do that too. So we’re going to have a very quick run through on what you need to do really before clicking so big. You and I always talk about on the dev blog and working in the community about people learning about staging sites and not clicking update on such a big headline release like this on a live site, particularly if they’re running a store, that’s a really bad idea. And the idea of safe updates for you, why is it so important to get that message across?

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Well, it’s easy to update, but it’s harder to troubleshoot when something goes wrong. On the on the update, WordPress Core is tested quite a bit. There were multiple runs at release candidates and testings and bug fixing and all that. What we don’t have control over are the plugins that are installed on your site. And we can only hope that the plugin developers also test their plugins towards the new release and those testing cycles. The release cycle, release candidate cycle, beta cycle is actually for them as well to work along on the release to make sure that their plugins and themes are compatible. So what can you do to test that out? Well, one is to use Playground Instance and upload all the plugins that you use or the most important ones. You could also, if your hosting company offers it, use the feature of a staging site. Then I have seen that many, many hosting companies offer that, that you can push your live site into a staging site, update the staging site, click through all the, not all the pages where if you have thousands of posts and all that, but click through the most important ones. And as Abba said, if you have a checkout page, take test the checkout process. Definitely another way, yeah, I think that’s the best way to do or well, another way is what a lot of agencies do with their client sites is wait till the next point release comes out and have other people kind of test it before and wait two or three weeks to kind of make sure that all the yeah baby bugs are kind of fixed and then use 7.0.1 to update to VFR7.

Abha Thakor:
And minor releases don’t take very long to come on board, so sometimes it’s worth just following, seeing, checking, finding out how it’s going to work for you. And as Birgit said, using Playground to experiment if you haven’t already during the release cycle. Now we’ve also got some fantastic resources on WordPress, Playground and some podcasts that we’ll signpost in the show notes from this show so you can find out a little bit more about that. We’ve also got someone coming back to talk to us about things like Playground and how you can use them a bit more effectively as well. So as Birgit has been talking about, the the idea of staging is a bit like an area where you can test, you can update, you can see what is going to be more important, what could be difficult. When I’m training with clients, one of the things we always say to them is find out what is your most important things in your site, your transactions, your processes, what would give you the biggest headache if it went wrong. And from that, prioritize those within your testing environment and your staging site. It really makes a difference. And also it means that you can test the things that clients are going to have a problem with, potentially things like your transactions, your payment screens. And as we’ve said earlier, don’t just check your homepage because the changes that you are going to sometimes see may not happen on your homepage. One of the things that is a very useful tool and it’s free to you, it’s in your dashboard, is the Site Health plugin. And there’s so much work and effort gone into this and they still want people to be involved with this going forward. And again, we’ll put the link in about this and how you can use it. But bigot, what are the things that you really like about the Site Health plugin?

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Well, the Site Health plugin takes care of. So there is Site Health in your site and then there’s the plugin. And the plugin has a troubleshooting component to it where you can say, okay, I don’t know where the problem comes from. And you hear a lot of support people every time you troubleshoot a plugin or something. Did you test it with all the plugins off? Did you test it with a default theme? And the Site Health plugin has one button to do that, to take all the plugins out of your site and change the theme, but only for the admin user who has access to the troubleshooting on the live site on the front end, it stays workable for all the visitors that you have. So you as a site administrator can really test things when they go wrong. Like you have a plugin that changes the sidebar or something like that, and it didn’t work right as you want it to. So you can. But most of the time it’s actually a conflict between plugins. So you can turn the plugins off and then one at a time add them into again and see if it’s still working. It’s fine. It’s not that plugin. If it’s still working, then the next plugin. And so you have quite an interesting iteration process that you, as a site owner without any developer involved, can test things out to narrow down where the problems reside. A tip, it’s not going to be in core. It’s probably in one of the plugins that that has a conflict with another plugin. So that’s why when I was working with an agency within minutes using this troubleshooting plugin, I was able to narrow down the problems and then get into the details of it.

Abha Thakor:
And it’s such a vital tool, really, and I think probably underused because people don’t know why it’s so important.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Yeah, well people have maybe are intimidated by it or. So the good thing is it’s just web admins the front side, the guests that come to your website won’t see you are working at the back end of it. So yeah, don’t be shy, you can always connect with me when you have

Abha Thakor:
trouble and there’s so much help out there and that’s wonderful. One of the wonderful things about using an open source platform is that people are wanting to help each other. So if you any of things that we feature today, please do get in touch. We love to hear from you all about things that you want us to feature, more of, explanations you want us to focus on and we’re really keen that we make this as interactive as possible. And of course the other thing bigger is that people need to be aware that we WordPress 7 needs a PHP update. So it is really important that you check with your website host that it supports the latest PHP which is 7.4. Now you can also do this on your own PHP settings screen, but it’s really a best idea to update PHP on a staging site if you are going to do it first and your host isn’t going to be doing dealing with it for you. And at the very least before you do any updates, including your php, please please, please make a backup of your website and not just your normal backup, but one that includes all of your files. So as full update as you can. So there you are, we’ve got you started into the right place and we hope you that will really help you in making the best out of what 7.0 has to offer. So we’re now going to look at what it means for you as a site manager, head of content and in terms of encouraging users, be it of a group of your firm or however you use WordPress. So while the things that has come out of 7.0, which is actually quite exciting, are visual revisions and they’re something that really means probably more than you think it’s going to mean to you and it’s going to give an experience of the software that you may have thought, well I can’t do this, but you can with this version. So folks who found things like the classic comparison revision screens hard to read and to know, well, I don’t know what I changed there, I don’t know if I want to go back to that earlier version. You don’t need to worry about that now because in 7.0 there are such significant improvements you can get an inline display in the editor, which means that you can look at things in such more detail and the colors are a little bit easier to see as well. You can also view the changes that have been made in different saves or different publications, depending on how you’re using visual revisions at block level. And that’s a much clearer view than you had before. One of my favorite features is that you can check the sidebar banner flags and they will help you find the changes on the page that you’re on. And I love the fact that I can all my colleagues can go to a screen now and edit much more easily. And for the people I train and support, that’s a really big win. And I think you’ll find it’s going to be a big win for you too. Less mistake opportunities, ability to check an error and change it with such a better workflow. And actually that has a knock on effect on improving your content processes, your time availability and your reflective learning. In terms of actually that piece of content didn’t work when I wrote it this way. How did it work when I had it up before? We also have distraction free modes as well, all of which are really going to help you big I know you love some of the visual revision stuff that we’ve got in this version. What are your key favorites for people to look out for?

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Well, I definitely like the colors. I’m a very visual person and I like the colors that it kind of tells me, okay, first there’s this yellow color that identifies the block where the changes happen. And then in the visual revision screen I see, I can navigate to that block and then I see is it an addition or is it a deletion with green and red? That’s really nice. And I can also if there were some attributes changed like some of the design changes in the they are also marked in the sidebar. So I can see when the color changed from green to from maybe a blue background to a red background or a blue background to a purple background. That’s also noted in the sidebar. Before you just had to squint a little in the old revisions thing and look at the HTML and who wants to look at that? It kind of hurts your eye and you have to squinch really hard to organize what you’re seeing. But now you can all see it in the revision and you don’t have to leave the editor, you just click on exit revision and you’re back to your post instead of going back to the other way to the old revision screen. And that changes. So yeah, it’s definitely a major improvement for content editors and also for editors who look at changes that are made and authors who want to see what the editors did. So yeah, it’s definitely for the collaboration piece, a much easier way to collaborate on.

Abha Thakor:
It’s also more intuitive. And that means if you’re trying to sell why you want to use a particular software or how you want people to get involved, rather than just sending everything to one particular person or a small team to do, you can get more people involved when we have features like this. And of course there’s more on the horizon. It’s not quite here yet, but it is something to be excited about. So multi user editing didn’t get into 7.0, but it is something that is going to be coming in the future. And that idea of real time editing that it’ll build from as well and that will go on to get as a part of the software. And again, not just in WordPress. We’re seeing these developments now in lots of open source software and it’s something to look out for. And one of the reasons that it’s to be celebrated is that these ideas for having things more intuitive, for studying how we all use the softwares, comes from the people who use it. So the best way for you to actually influence where the software that you like is going, the changes it’s going to be doing, where it’s going to make things easier is to be involved is to follow along. And that does not have to include a lot of extra time if you are time poor and you don’t have that facility at the moment. But it doesn’t mean that you get to be involved a little bit earlier, get to test your site a bit earlier, get to see some of these major new things and to try out how it could work for yourselves. And of course at the developer blog, we’re always keen on hearing from people about how you are using new features and sharing that with other people. And we’ve got a great team who can help you with putting those ideas across as well. Birgit, in terms of the multi user editing that is to come, why do you think that people should be excited about it and how do you think Gutenberg has changed with this version of 7.0 that really sets the road path for that?

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Well, real time collaboration is a major step up in collaboration on a post. Even if you’re a blogger who works with a designer together and have the content or the text also with visual images and icons and all that you want to have collaboration field and not say, get this screen. Oh, somebody else is editing, you need to wait or just kick them out. And yeah, that was the method until now where only one person could look at one post or page and now two or three people can do that on shared hosting, but that’s for the next version. It’s not in 7.0 and the bigger editorial teams have been waiting for this for quite a long time. It has been tested on larger editorial teams like news sites where the editor, the author, the web developer, they’re all in the post and now they can actually be in their post and don’t have to wait in time to wait their time, even if they are not working on the same paragraph. And it’s also interesting to see, I don’t know, if someone wants to have connect with the AI tools to it, then you can give the AI tool a user and then you can also work together on it without overriding each other. But that’s just Future Music. The reason why it was pulled was it had been tested quite a bit with many hosting companies and it was not as stable as it was supposed to be. And you can only figure that out when you have it in the real system. So that’s why there was this six week delay on the release, to make sure that if it’s in there it’s good and if it’s not good that it’s going to be pulled and it was pulled just to give it more time in the oven, so to speak. I like that.

Abha Thakor:
I like the idea of it being ready and cooking and it’s going to have so many wonderful things that we’re going to be able to do with it. But we do have notes and we have already, if you’ve used WordPress and recent releases, you’ll be familiar with Notes, but we’ve got much more that we can do with notes now. And if you haven’t seen them before and you want to know a bit more about them, we feature them in the WordPress 6.9 show, which is on OpenChannels FM. But in 7, the notes feature is even more valuable. As far as I can see Birgit from testing it, it means that your team can now add and read notes down directly in the WordPress editor itself. They don’t need to capture those little bit of additional information or comments in other software or emails. They can. And also you can reply directly to their comments or ask new questions in the Notes itself as part of your site, which I think is amazing that we can do this. And it’s obviously not live. Anybody who’s panicking and thinking, oh no, everybody will be able to see things on the live site. Notes are not aimed at that. So it is about actually creating the material, having that discussion and not having to go outside the software. Is that really how you see it being used, Biggie, or have you got any other wonderful tips that you can suggest for how people can make use of it?

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
So on the developer blog we have the process that it will be. The writer writes it in Google Docs and then two revisionists look at that text and have some comments on it. So and then once it’s all reviewed by two people, it needs to go into the blog. And I did the test a few weeks ago that I just composed everything in the blog and then had gave people an access to or note to it. And then they did the comments in the Note section on WordPress. So we actually eliminate two major steps. One that you have to know to go to the Google Doc and do the comments there and work through it and update that. And then you still had to copy paste the Google Doc into the blog and still work on the formatting and the code edits and all that, which is a major hurdle. Or it takes you at least another half an hour or an hour even, depending on how long it is. And some of the developer blog posts are quite long because there are tutorials from zero to Hero. So it takes a while to get through that. So I think it definitely improves the process when everybody who has access to the blog can leave notes. Not everybody. We only need two. But yeah, so. And I definitely feel that the eliminating the Google Docs step would be a major streamlined process and I think many editorial teams feel the same way.

Abha Thakor:
There’s always going to be a bit of learning with any release in any software. And that’s not just open source software, but if we can try and build on things in every release so that people are getting to learn something about that feature, a bit more about it next time and a bit more it does make that learning process a little bit easier. And I think notes and some of the blocks and some of the patterns are very good examples of that. That the way it’s been developed does allow for people to learn to give feedback on. Actually this space bit difficult is another way of doing it. So do have a look, even if you’re not quite ready to move all of your sites to WordPress 7.0, do have a look at some of these features. We’ve been talking about and some of the others we’re going to feature today because you will start to find it’ll make your life so much easier and the processes as big as talked about as well. It will eliminate steps that you don’t need and actually that training burden will reduce because you’re only having to learn in one environment. So it is worth having a look and we will link to things that will help you too. You also don’t need to be in the notes all the time to actually have an idea if someone’s doing an update. There are notification mechanisms and a dashboard widget as well that you can use. Use.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Yeah, exactly. And there’s also an email notification system going on. So when somebody leaves a comment and you are away from your computer you can still or you could still see it in your email when you pick it up on your mobile or so you definitely don’t have to be on the site to know that there are notes waiting for you.

Abha Thakor:
And if this is something that you like using and you think actually I’m using this as a developer and I want to show how this could be used by others, then let us know. Please reach out to either Birgit and myself and we’ll see if this is something that could go forward for the developer blog as well. Now moving on to other aspects of the editing co editing type function and just being able to better edit I think as well. Bigot you’ve got this release also has things like partial text selection, you know, multi block notes and I quite like the idea of being able to add feedback with links. I don’t have to go out of WordPress to add a link to information.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Yeah, it’s very nice. Yeah. Especially when you want to provide some resources to a post or link to documentation pages so you don’t have to go deep on an article. It definitely helps to have the comments in there and yeah update them and resolve them. You can actually resolve them.

Abha Thakor:
Oh, even better.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Check. Yeah.

Abha Thakor:
So it’s really cool and that it really is that idea of everything working in a way that is much more intuitive that makes this release actually quite special. And from the testing that we’ve done for this show, it’s an area that people said, oh, I don’t know if I can use it because I can’t cope with it having to have lots of different things open to be able to then put it all into WordPress. But with 7.0 you don’t have to do that anymore. And the future for WordPress and where it’s going is going to make that even more intuitive.

Abha Thakor:
We’re going to move on to patterns and this release really is probably my favorite so far for patterns. They it makes patterns so much more usable. I have liked Patterns but I’ve been a little bit okay, I’m not quite sure you’re going to do everything that I need. But it is coming and in this release there was so many wonderful things that we can now do. One of the things with patterns is that it can treat patterns as a single block and also you can do customization. You can actually have options to not do any customization as well. And just to drop your content in Birgit, can you take us through a little bit of your favorites about what’s in patterns this time?

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Yeah. So the team has been working on so called content only features around the editor to streamline at one content creation and also to hide some of the overwhelming design tools for people who don’t want to make those decisions or are kind of paralyzed by other decision possibilities. And with pattern it is so you can select a pattern from the inserter and put it in your canvas and just change the things that are content related like the heading or update a new picture or rewrite the paragraph that is in there but you don’t have to Deal with a design that’s also good for agencies who want to provide a very streamlined content editing process to their clients and say, well, we have created a design that is standard for your brand and use all the colors and we selected all the patterns and designed them as well. You don’t have to deal with that. Just do the content and then they can lock down the designs for it. That’s really wonderful. There’s also a feature that has been in 6.6 actually, that is section styles and those can be applied to patterns and kind of the content creator can decide which color, for instance, which color scheme this particular pattern should follow if there are multiple available for the site. Because sometimes you want to break up the white wall of text with some color and with some different backgrounds, but those are standardized in patterns and you can just loop through the different variations of it and you don’t have to think about your own decisions for that. Yeah. And if you want to customize your pattern because you are a theme developer who’s working the site editor, you’re a site owner and you want to kind of freshen it up a bit, you can go and click on the edit pattern button that’s in the sidebar to get to all those design choices and work it from there.

Abha Thakor:
I think it’s really good actually that you can actually detach the pattern now and to edit it fully, customize it. You don’t have to have everybody doing that, which is a big plus. So you can detach the pattern as big as been talking about and you can change the structure or design of it. And that just is going to make so much more sense in terms of what used to happen in editing environments that were offline. Because a lot of the things that you are now seeing in 7.0 are mimicking much more those processes, those workflows that we used to have offline. And I think that is going to be where software like this really makes a huge progress for the practical of how we need to use it. So as Birgit has talked about, you know, we’ve got the benefit now that you have ability just to add your content, your headline, whatever it is you need to do in terms of content additions into your patterns. But also for me from a, you know, I’ve been working in editorial now for a couple of decades and safer editing and safer workflow really are the key. Because when you manage processes and you’re putting a project together, those things are part of our risks that we evaluate as managers, as developers, as team leads and this release, I think, has brought in so many things that make that safer workflow actually a little bit more robust. Also, we’ve talked about colors, so if you are looking at the colors that you’re using, please do also have a look at what our WordPress accessibility team is working on, because it really is important that we look at that and follow the help and advice that they are really great efforts to put together. And there is also an accessibility update with 7.0. We’ll link it in the show notes and you can find out how it constantly tries to make the experience better from an accessibility perspective. So patterns are the things. If you haven’t tried them before, you’re gonna like them. With this release, there’s also the idea of responsive block visibility. Now that sounds like a very, very posh phrase. Biggie, what does it actually mean? It is posh. No, apart from you needing a drink to say it, you know, what does it really mean and how is it going to make a difference to the people who are out there using WordPress?

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
So in 6.9, there was one feature that came into that was the foundation for this and that was hide or show a block and now so you could use it for seasonal things that you. Or shoutouts in your post or pages. And now the next step is to say, okay, hide this block on mobile because it kind of uses a full bleed and it kind of pushes the whole context down when you’re on mobile. So hide it on the mobile or show it only on the tablet or show it only on the desktop. So these three options are now built into the same features. So you have. And you see how this block is and it goes right with it. And we’re going to talk about it, about the navigation overlay for later on. It’s also a mobile responsive kind of thing, but you can now decide which blocks are shown on the phone and on the tablet or on the desktop. And you see it in the sidebar when you have the list view is your friend, right? So the list view shows you all the blocks that are on your page or on the post. And. And then you see a little eye next to it when it’s hidden, that’s kind of through and then also as a tooltip is hidden on tablet or is hidden on block. So you see wherever you look at it what happens with the block. That’s really interesting to handle that. So it’s quite obvious. It’s intuitive. That’s one of the most intuitive things that I’ve seen in the block editor that you say, okay, I make a decision, I don’t want this on mobile, I don’t want this on on tablet. I only want this on desktop because it’s a huge gallery and when it’s on mobile it doesn’t show. So yeah, people have been asking for that for probably eight years. Here it is, it’s now here.

Abha Thakor:
So if you didn’t know what it was after that wonderful explanation by bigot, this is a feature you want to be using, responsive block visibility. It isn’t for the developers out there only. It is for everybody who is using WordPress. Now, we had a look in preparation for the show about one of the things that people complained they found difficult, that we looked at the tech clinics that we run to see where did people find project delays and actually having blogs appear or text appear or images appear that didn’t work on mobile or actually could have worked on tablet but didn’t work on desktop. This again. And I know I keep saying it, but 7.0 really does have lots of workflow improvements. And I know project manager hat on, but this isn’t just for the project managers out there. This is also a real change that will save you time, that is intuitive, that will actually get you to think more about your user and where your user might be accessing content and therefore how long they’re likely to stay looking at your content and how their journey is going to progress. This is really important stuff. Go and impress the people that you’re working with WordPress with and get them to see how responsive block visibility could be a big thing for them. We’re going to move on to AI and then go and look at some of our favorite new blocks, because I’ve got a few blocks that have come in and the live messaging that we run during this recording as well. So I’m going to hand over to Birger a bit to tell you a little bit about how and why AI in WordPress has changed with this release and some of the things that you can look out for while I kind have a look at your questions and I’ll be also adding in some of the favorite things about AI.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
All right. Yeah. So the AI features that come with 7.0 are not for site owners, site content managers, or any of that unless you really want them. They are more the foundation for plugin developers to use a unified standardized system of APIs for AI. So there are two components with that. One is the WP client, AI client that works with the other one. That’s the connectors API. So there’s a new menu item that says Connect connectors and it has some defaults in there. So you can connect with an API key to your ChatGPT environment, or to your Anthropic or cloud environment, or to Google Gemini environment, but you don’t have to use them at all and then nothing happens. But now with the WPAI client in core plugin developers can offer additional features for people who want to use AI to make sure that they are so what are the application? It’s not the writing part, the writing part. Any blogger is a better writer than any AI could be, and that’s supposed to be that way. But I can see that the thinking about SEO, thinking about accessibility in content is a major burden for a few bloggers because they don’t have the technical expertise, they don’t have the time. So there can be and there are plugins that offer AI to check for SEO readiness or for accessibility on certain things. Yeah, there is an AI experiments plugin available that shows off some of that those features, but of course it’s only an experiments plugin. So the AI features that come in are more for plugin developers than for normal mere model WordPress users, unless they are inclined to use them with another partner.

Abha Thakor:
I think even if the AI tool at the moment isn’t what you are wanting to use or in your area of expertise, it is important to understand as big it has explained why it’s important, how you would use it, how you might want to brief somebody and if the same, if you’re a plugin developer getting on board now, if you’ve not already and understanding how to implement it, what opportunities it gives you are absolutely crucial. So do have a look. We’re going to link to a couple of articles on the developer blog all about this facility and features as well. But also if you are out there and you are already using the AI capabilities in terms of the foundations that it gives WordPress, we really want to hear from you, we want to hear how you are using it, how it might be that other plugin developers could use it a bit more, how it will make a difference to what what they’re doing. The more we can share, we can do it better.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
So the plugin developers now don’t have to worry about connecting to any AI system because there’s a unified system there. So you only need to kind of push the prompt to the WPAI client and then the client decides which LLM is going to use it that is there. So yeah, and there is a developer, but I’m glad you mentioned that abba but on the developer blog, Felix Arntz, who’s on the AI team, has just published a great tutorial on how to have an image generation AI tied into a blog post, tied into a plugin and walks a plugin developer through the various stages of making this happen. And once you have that there, you can kind of apply it to any other ideas that you might have that an LLM could do with a website.

Abha Thakor:
Do have a look at it. We’ll find you more links as well as people start to experiment more with this. But as Birgit says, a lot of the pain in terms of working with AI has been removed and there are some foundations there that really are worth getting more to grips with. Now one thing spirit that we have heard a lot about is in terms of font management and font management, there are some improvements with 7.0, particularly in themes, and that is going to be useful for people who work with WordPress from all sorts of different aspects and levels. It’s something that comes up every time when we prepare for release. Shows as well about how font management works, whether custom CSS for individual blocks is going to be something that’s more focused in a release. Can you share a bit more about how you find it useful?

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Well, the font management screens were first of all pretty hidden. They were not really intuitively found only when you go into the style section in the font section you were kind of able to upload a few fonts. Now it’s in the main appearance menu in your WP admin and it is available not only to block themes that work through the site editor, but also to classic themes that have been around for many, many years, decades even, that you now can as a user upload additional fonts. You can upload the fonts. You can also if you tab into the Google Fonts and install them from there. The feature itself didn’t have an improvement per se, it’s just much more intuitive to find it because it’s right in your face in the appearance menu and you can work from there. There was another thing you mentioned. Oh the custom css. Custom CSS is an interesting thing because we used to have it once in the additional CSS in the customizer, but there’s also a additional CSS on a block level, but on the block level for the whole site. So if you want the paragraph always to have a certain font, you can standardize that through the style section in your site editor. But now with WordPress 7.0 you also get the block level additional CSS for your post. So you might have a post where you say, okay, I want one shout out here that is different from any of the other shoutouts that I have on my site. And I want to control it, style it through custom css. You can do that. Then it’s only in that particular post, that particular paragraph one, or that particular button or heading. And you can do it on the canvas for your post. In the sidebar there’s an advanced section and that’s how you can reach it. So those are three ways to add additional css. But of course there are multiple other ways. And I actually did accounting and found 14 ways to add CSS to, to a block theme.

Abha Thakor:
Now that sounds like a developer blog that you need to write.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Well, it’s actually. So I have a post on that on the Gutenberg Times, actually.

Abha Thakor:
Wonderful. We’ll link it in our show notes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
And it kind of divides up from who is doing those. Is it for the developer or is it for the user? So we have a whole little. I have a whole little table there that lists all the 14 ways. And then do we have a developer? Do we have a theme editor or theme builder or the user doing it? Because those are the hierarchies for adding styling to a website. Yes, I definitely going to share that with you and our listeners and it’s

Abha Thakor:
going to be great because I want to try all 14 ways now. So you see, we definitely have the right people coming on our shows. Talk about the releases. You definitely want to stay tuned to Open Channels FM and see what’s happening in the world of releases because we’re going to feature them here and have been doing for a number of years. So make sure. And we’ll make sure we keep getting some wonderful guests like Big Ed.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Thank you so much. So much credit. You’re so kind.

Abha Thakor:
Big. One of the other things I know that you’re quite keen on in terms of the new blocks as well, because there are some new blocks that people can, can experiment with as well this time. But I actually like the breadcrumbs block. That’s something that I find really clear and something that when WordPress went through a lot of change, it got more difficult in my mind to try and explain breadcrumbs to people and trying to get them to use that. But I think the breadcrumbs blog actually not only improves where we wear, but actually does all the things that I wished WordPress would do before. So I’m quite excited about that. Also we’ve got things like the Lightbox slideshow and the new gallery block. Have you had much chance to use that in the field?

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Well, I tested it all in the field, yes. I have my own way to collect some photos. It’s not a public blog, but it’s putting it together and I really like the gallery. So the Lightbox in the gallery was before was available, but you had to. You couldn’t browse all the photos in the gallery in the Lightbox. You had to close it again, click on the other picture, open it up again and close it again. So now with this new feature, new feature in the gallery block, you can select that it has a navigation like the previous and next button. You can also select if it says text or just the arrows. And that’s a major improvement. Also something that people had asked for quite a bit and had quite. There were quite a few plugins that actually offered that feature. Now it is in core and you can start styling it quite a bit. But I do agree with Abba, the breadcrumbs block is one of the main features I think of 7.0 because it’s also very smart. The smartness of the breadcrumbs block is unusual for a first version of the block of version of a block. But it can detect if you are on a on a post that has categories and if the categories have a hierarchy, it knows this as well and it puts it all in into the breadcrumbs. It can also detect that you are on a page that has a parent page. So it also will add the parent page into the breadcrumbs and people can find their way through your site independent from where they are now. They have. You can add a home button or home link to it as well. So people can go very deep in your navigation but then also come back up again in terms of the information architecture. There were quite a few contributors working on this blog and Justin Tadlock is one of our writers on the developer blog he actually had a Separate plugin, the breadcrumbs plugin for breadcrumbs block plugin for WordPress and this. He consulted on that and had a lot of opinions about how this block should work. And most of those things are actually now in this first version. And it takes a major effort to have all the discussion on the GitHub PR and the issues. So kudos to Justin and kudos to the contributors who actually built this breadcrumbs block. Speaking about first version, we also have an icons block.

Abha Thakor:
I love the icons block. I Have been campaigning for that for years. I love this. It’s such a. It’s my favorite thing about the whole release.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Yeah, yeah, I think that too. And that for that block, it didn’t go far enough for a few people. I think it’s for first version, very good. Because you cannot add your own icons to it. You have to use the icons that come with WordPress and a selection of that. But it’s a very good first version. And the API to add other API is a programming interface, blah blah, blah thingy for techies to upload additional icons hasn’t been finished so that it didn’t make it into the release and because there’s some architectural things that need to be considered and agreed upon and kind of figured out. Yeah. And that sometimes takes a while. So the icons block is fantastic because you now you can have additional visuals that you can add to your website or to your pages. But it. And the best thing is yet to

Abha Thakor:
come though, and it is going to be good because it’ll make such a difference from all aspects of branding. You want to have a seasonal push on a particular theme. It really will make a big difference into how things are done. But also it goes back to this idea that I had been saying from the beginning of the show about workflow. 7.0 for me shows how WordPress and other open source softwares that have come out in the last few weeks actually have a very similar aspect. It shows how workflow can be improved and the greater growth in that improvement can only happen by having contributors, people, testers, users, giving feedback, being part of the conversation and being part of the solution. And if you’ve never contributed before, please don’t let that stop you because it is an environment in open source where that willingness for people to learn, to be involved, to give feedback, to be part of the positive contributions are welcomed. Now Birgit referred to some of the wonderful contributions we’ve had just on some of those new blocks. In WordPress 7.0 we’ve had a staggering 875 plus contributors from countries across the world. And in this release alone there’s been more than 200 first time contributors. Now that’s amazing. Immense, absolutely immense. And if you think, oh well, there’s so much new, it’s too much for me to cope with. Actually as we’ve talked about today in the show, there are some new things, but there are also lots of improvements. Things that have been built on from the feedback and that only happens by involvement. So if something in here you love you want to see more of you have an idea for how it can be fixed. There are lots of ways to do that and we can also signpost to you the shows that we feature how you can be involved we’re also going to be looking at some of the other open source softwares in the coming months. So if you’re involved in releases on those products or you’ve got a great story of how you use those products, Maybe you use WordPress and some of the other open source solutions, please get in touch with me. I’m Nonstop News UK on most of the socials, I’m on Slack and we’ll be really ground really to have a look at how we can explain that to other people, share those stories going back to 7.0. There’s also some other things that you might want to look at. Data Views and Data form they come up quite regularly in recent releases Birgit but why are they important for people to really get to grips with?

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Well then so Data Views and Data Forms are developer tools to build for instance plugin sites or list of things like in the site editor, the list of pages, the list of patterns. All those use the same components. And which are the data views and the data forms. They are components that not only are available to the block editor, they’re also available to plugin developers and agency developers that modify the admin experience. And if they use the Data Forms and Data forms they’re not obligated to use and they’re not mandatory, but they help users to have the same interfaces independent from where the feature comes from. For instance the list of pages or templates, they have a grid view, you can also change it into a list view. And you have always the same place where you can add some quick edits or you have where you can change or delete things. So when you always know where to go, the cognitive load of managing a website reduces considerably. And that’s why the Data Views and Data Forms have been coming up so often, because they are built while the Site editor improves, but they’re also built that way that it can also be used for other things on your admin or for the plugin. The advantage for plugin developer are that they don’t have to think about interfaces anymore, they don’t have to do all the research and kind of make the design of it because the components are readily available and standardized. So if they need additional things that the Data views out of core can do, it’s the best way to contribute is to say okay, we need these other things also for the data views. Instead of building that themselves, they have a whole army of contributors who actually maintain that code. So that’s the beauty of open source projects where you can build on top of other people’s work and grow with them. With the new ideas that you have, you can start your creativity kind of on a much higher level. You don’t have to start from zero. You start where Core left off, so to speak.

Abha Thakor:
You can see why everybody loves working alongside Bigot. She just has the coolest explanations for things and encouragement. So if you are not already, you know, logging in and thinking I need to be part of this, then follow up with the blogs that we’ve been doing on this and you will know that you really do want to be part of open source Bigot. Is there anything else you want to share about 7.0?

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
I could, but I also posted a 5,000 word source of truth on the Gutenberg Times with explanations on a lot of things. Also the little things like what comes to a paragraph or what improvements are to the query loop. And yes, you don’t have to wait, you can just go to The Gutenberg Times WordPress 7.0 Source of truth and

Abha Thakor:
we’ll be linking to that as well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Yeah, I’m really happy about the paragraph columns feature. So you can highlight a paragraph and then say in the fonts menu, make columns out of it. Then all of a sudden the paragraph is in two columns instead of just one. And. And you don’t need to fiddle around with the columns block. You don’t have to fiddle around with any design or any of that. You just have that paragraph in two columns. And that goes back to what Abba said maybe half an hour ago about the offline editing part, where you also do the design for printing. And that two columns paragraph block comes into the online world of WordPress does make a difference.

Abha Thakor:
And it’s something that we all need to really take note with this release is that there are so many features now that if you thought you knew what WordPress could do and you haven’t used it in a couple of years, prepare to be really amazed by what you can do now. And also for those managing teams or actually working out the resources and project managing for what teams might be doing, 7.0 really does lay that foundation for how your project management can be improved and how it offers a solution to you that you may not realize it can do. There’s lots of open source solutions out there and we’re really keen on Open Channels FM to hear about your story. Do get in touch. Do let us know if you want to be involved in the research and the opinion exploration that we do before every release show. And we do test the release we do go through right from stages of early on in the release cycle so that people can actually tell us what is it they want to know. We like to show as part of what we do on Open Channels FM lots of opportunities for how you can not just contribute to open source, but also how your learning journey can be enhanced and hopefully we can be part of your journey forward. Thank you very, very much, Birgit, for being with us again today and as part of our release examinations, but also for being involved and being willing to answer questions throughout because Bigot is fantastic. And just like our other release people who come on to help with our release shows, they look at the questions that you send us, that you ask us, that our testers go and look at things that come up as we do our little shows, copying what’s happening on the release schedule and seeing what people might want to know through these shows. So we are very indebted to you all for coming up with those questions, giving that time, but to people like Birgit as well, for being involved in the few months before we do these podcasts. So we hope that she’ll want to be involved as we go forward too. Do check out our show notes Big we wish you a good rest after this latest release because I’m sure you probably now want to go and put your feet up and not think of something related to 7.0 for a little while.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
We’re thinking about 7.1 and of course

Abha Thakor:
there is opportunity for you to be involved. If you’re listening to this and you haven’t already thought, oh, okay, maybe I can test. Maybe I’m a host, I can be involved. And we had lots and lots of hosts involved this year. It was in 7.0. It was fantastic.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Well, thank you for having me. It was wonderful.

Abha Thakor:
We will put the links to other releases that come out and we will make sure that Birgit tells us about other things that you can be involved with too. So see you next time.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Bye everyone.