WordPress 6.9: From Streamlined Content Creation to Powerful Developer Tools

Abha Thakor:
And welcome to Open Makers. I’m Abha Thakor, a host at Open Channels fm, leading our release shows and our learning based shows and welcome to another installment in the studio today and we have people participating via text. We have a number of folks who have also been involved in the latest WordPress release. This includes the wonderful Birgit Pauli-Haack who has kindly joined us again to share her vast Gutenberg and developer knowledge Akshaya Rane, a 6.9 coordination co lead Krupa Nanda, a test co lead for 6.9 and Aki Hamano, a triage co lead for 6.9 who is joining from Japan and will be joining us by text today due to time differences. Thank you so much everybody for making the time to share what it means for Everybody to have 6.9.

Abha Thakor:
WordPress 6.9 came out this week. It is codenamed Gene to honor the American jazz pianist Gene Harris. It’s the final major release of 2025 in which we’ve had two big releases. There were more than 915 contributors from across the world who have made this software release possible. I can’t wait till we get to 1000.

Abha Thakor:
Many more continue to work on volunteer language translations of the software and for their help we are all very grateful. It’s been my privilege to be involved in every release since 4.8 and I hope through our release shows we can enthuse you too to get involved with WordPress or one of the other open source Software releases.

Abha Thakor:
As 6.9 is a release that helps collaboration and has even more tools to help teams work and create content together. I’m going to first go to our guest Akshaya, who not only works as a team leader but was one of the co Release coordinators for 6.9. Akshaya, you’ve been involved in WordPress for a few years now. Has working on this release given you an insight into how the software and its community can benefit from closer collaboration?

Akshaya Rane:
Thank you. Definitely. So as a, as a 6.9 release lead and as a contributor you will understand the small things we need to take care of because WordPress is, it’s not a small software. It is more than 20 years and a lot of sites are based on it. So, so we need to take care of backward compatibility. The small, small things that could impact overall things, right? So from the in the release process you will understand how the things works.

Abha Thakor:
So Akshaya, being part of a release team, has it given you even more tips and Ideas for how you can work together with other people in the workplace.

Akshaya Rane:
Yes, it is definitely a great opportunity to work with a diversified team because. And you will get to learn from each other. Like.

Akshaya Rane:
There are few members who are across the team across the world and.

Akshaya Rane:
Very good experts in their respective fields. So you will get an opportunity to learn from them.

Akshaya Rane:
And collaborate with them.

Abha Thakor:
Running a release coordination is a difficult job because you’ve got to get all the people to work together and not all the people are as fluent in the same language that is being used. So how does WordPress as a software, but also from the release process, how does that make it easier for people to talk together?

Akshaya Rane:
So release process works in a synchronous manner. So everything happens on the slack. So it becomes very easy for everybody to coordinate. And mainly the process works. The beauty is process was across the time zone. Okay. So people from different part of the world are contributing and the work is going on across the tagloom. So that is a beautiful thing about it.

Abha Thakor:
You’ve also Talked at a WordCamp about remote teams and how people can work together better, but also within that, carving out time for when you can work and when you can collaborate. Is that the same with a successful release team? Do you need to be clear about when you’re going to be available, make sure you’ve understood the phases and communicate that to other people?

Akshaya Rane:
Yes, that is the most important thing. You need to be clear in the communication, like give the context, what is your ask for it when you are expecting things to happen. Okay. And people coordinate in that manner. And people are. I mean, there are more experienced people than me who are working in the part of the release team or. Or contributing to the release. And it is making the process overall helpful for release to happen successfully.

Abha Thakor:
Thank you. I’m just going to bring in a text reply from Aki Hamano and he says that throughout the release process there was active communication and that active communication really is at the heart of everything that we need to do as contributors. The core and the 6.9 release lead Slack channels that Akshaya has talked about were particularly active and people who want to get involved and to study how to be in a release. You can go back and look at these Slack channels, but it’s also important, he’s pointed out, for communications to confirm ideas between contributors and to prevent misunderstandings.

Abha Thakor:
He felt that the development of the Notes feature is going to be something that will help not only release collaboration, but also real life working together because there’s so many challenges and problems when you work together, not just from understanding each other, but also in terms of what the software or solution might be, but by working together and sharing concerns or things that are not quite clear, it can all make a difference. So thank you, Aki, for sharing that and some of the insight that we’ve been able to gather from other contributors as well. I’m going to go to Birgit.

Abha Thakor:
Birgit, you have so many features I’m sure that you love about the new WordPress 6.9, but you’re a big advocate for furthering asynchronous collaboration, not just for WordPress contributors, but for the software itself, so that people can really get involved. Now that WordPress has this in notes, can you tell us about what this means practically for users and those managing websites for clients?

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Well thank you so much for inviting me to the show for today and it was very good. Let me just say this before I answer your question, Akshaya, it’s wonderful to see you in real life, kind of in person. Yeah, wonderful work. And on the coordination of 6.9 and GRUPA, it’s good to see you again. We met last year at WordCamp Asia for the first time and she does a wonderful job on the tech team to get everybody the information that they need to be a good tester for any release or any feature. So chapeau to both of you.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
For working through this release because it was a massive Release. There were 15 Gutenberg plugin releases came in. That’s the highest number ever through the eight years of Gutenberg plugin releases that made it into Core. And one of them, you ask me, is the notes section. For asynchronous collaboration. It’s huge because for editors who work with.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Multiple writers or if you write a blog post on the make blogs, you always need reviewers. And for them to be able to review them, you need to put it up on Google Doc. And now we have the notes section in WordPress. We don’t need that additional step anymore. So once you have it in Google Doc, you get the comments and you make the changes, then you have to take the content of a Google Doc and then put it into a WordPress post. And that step is totally eliminated. And with the things that came into notes that you can put notes in there, you have replies, you have a whole conversation there on a blog basis really makes it so much more streamlined to publish anything on the make.blog or any other website that works with multiple editors and authors.

Abha Thakor:
Thank you. Birgit. How does that work in terms of people being able to follow along with the release process? Do they still have access to seeing those different documents and conversations or is it just then restricted to the release team?

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Well, it will probably only be released restricted to those who have access to the make blog, Make Core blog for the developer notes, for instance, where developer notes are published with at least two reviewers, sometimes you have three or four who actually review the developer notes. That is still restricted to those that have access to the post and that is the author plus those who have editor privileges or admin privileges, which actually makes sense. There is another plugin out there that I actually really love is the preview.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Public preview of the post that has been around for ages and that gives other people who have not access to the site access to preview something that needs to be published. But that’s not in core. It is a core contributor who released it. That’s Dominic Schilling. But I’m not sure if that’s actually on the roadmap that outside people who are outside of the site can see the comments. That’s actually probably defeating the purpose because outside people should only comment on the published one and that’s in the normal comment section of WordPress and not in the notes. I’m not sure I answered your question.

Abha Thakor:
No, you did. You did indeed. And I think it’s just helping people see how it can work and if they’re following along in the Slack channels for the release and they don’t see the different documents, how they can be part of that. So it’s just making it clear. And that’s what we try to do with the show. We try and help people overcome what might be perceived as a barrier or they’re unsure about where to go. So thank you Birgit for sharing that. I do appreciate it. Krupa the collaboration features that have undergone a lot of testing during the run up to 6.9, but the testing for this release isn’t over. How can people help with testing specifically the collaboration features, but also other features in 6.9?

Krupa Nanda:
Thank you Abba. So for Knots feature, if we go deeper into it as a tester, our job is not only to find those positive part of this or whatever feature is there. It’s not about just testing it in a positive way. We also need to identify what happens if something goes in a different way. So for an example, if I have tested something in my system, I may have different set of, you know, plugin or theme or whatever things are there on my website could be different than yours. So the real time edge cases or the real time scenarios only comes into the picture when we have the variety of system configuration, variety of, you know, users. Those are testing at the same time. So I would really appreciate users if they are, you know, testing the features beyond its, you know, positive way. So for an example.

Krupa Nanda:
So for an example, if the not feature is working, fine, but we need to think, okay, what if I just could take a piece of the text only, not the entire paragraph, but the piece of the text and let’s say if I can comment on it, maybe I can duplicate the same block where I have added the comment previously. And if I duplicate it, what happens if the comment is getting copied? If I’m getting the same thing, what if I delete the block and then again I undo and redo stuff. So these are the scenarios that I want people to come up with and I want those real time issues to be logged. So if, if issues are there, then you need to raise the ticket and, you know, then people can further prioritize and start working on it. So this is how, you know, we want people to think beyond or we can say think out of the box.

Abha Thakor:
Thank you, Krupa. And also, it’s not just about raising a ticket, is it? It’s also you want people to help be part of the solution. So I know as a, a previous core team rep, one of the things that we also were very keen on during testing processes was can you contribute to making a solution for this? Because quite often the person who’s raised it may have that ability and it is open to everybody to be involved. So Krupa, in terms of tickets, there were obviously, well, quite a lot of tickets. In fact, there were more than 400 core track tickets in 6.9. As part of the process, did all of those tickets have to be tested, all the work that gone into that?

Krupa Nanda:
Definitely, tickets are tested sufficiently and then only it gets merged into core or like be it a Gutenberg. But yes, it has to undergo a sufficient testing and the team also makes sure that if we have, if it is tested beyond the, you know, edge cases or not. So if there is something plus or minus, they, you know, try to confirm with the other teams. And if we are, you know, not sure that this particular thing may create some issues and we have these examples like we, we have certain things as part of the roadmap and so there are certain things those are not ready to ship. So we have to pull those things out and we need to make sure that it should not Break other stuff. So regression should not be created due to merging the different features. So this is what we need to take into the consideration.

Abha Thakor:
Thank you Krupa. You in your day job are a QA engineer. So you know, having things working and knowing where they’re not working is really important. In 6.9 there were more than 125 of enhancements and feature requests, but also more than 250 bug fixes. If we have more people involved in testing and testing in much more detail, how does this help in terms of bug fixes in the future?

Krupa Nanda:
So when we have different varieties of the, you know, test report on a particular ticket, it gives us that confidence. Okay, this has been tested by one person, two person, three person with the variety of these configurations and everything we have that. Okay, if this thing is working in XYZ thing, then it must be okay to release. So definitely having the number of people testing the same issue or testing a particular feature will help us to give that confidence to ship that particular feature to the release.

Abha Thakor:
Thank you Krupa. And I hope people will come and join in and you’ll find lots of welcoming people like Krupa in the test team and in the show notes you can find out how to join and get involved. I’m going to go back to Akshaya. Akshaya, we know that you love this release from all your enthusiasm during the last few months. Now I remember talking to you and you said the accordion was your favorite feature that had come out. Can you tell us why that is something that you are so excited about?

Akshaya Rane:
So accordion or the tabs block, these are very common requirement for every site. So that will actually help the publishers, the designers and the developers so that they don’t. This is like a core part of it. So they don’t need to switch to anything or add on anything. They can use the core feature and it will be helpful for everybody.

Abha Thakor:
I know you can’t be with us so much longer in the today’s show, but was that another feature that you wanted to highlight?

Akshaya Rane:
I like the Abilities API feature. I mean that introduction, it’s taking WordPress to a different level and I’m looking forward to the agents and interactions that it can create, the possibilities of it.

Abha Thakor:
So yeah, so that’s something to Akshaya’s list that you want to check out. So thank you Akshaya for joining us today and we hope to talk more to you for our blog that accompanies this podcast.

Akshaya Rane:
Thank you so much and thank you for making a part of it. Thank you.

Abha Thakor:
So, Birgit, I’m going to come to you not only because of your love for Gutenberg, and you really are the person that is.

Abha Thakor:
One of the biggest enthusiasts for it. That accordion and the time to read and the math term query are all features this time. And as you’ve highlighted at the beginning, there were so many bits of Gutenberg that went into core. In fact, I was absolutely blown away by the fact that the release includes 440 enhancements for the block editor site editor database. I couldn’t believe that. That is just amazing. You must feel so delighted about that. What would you like to share with people who are thinking, well, what’s the excitement? What do I need to know about? What can I use?

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Well, what you get excited about actually depends on how you use WordPress. So if you’re a content creator, you absolutely love the new blocks and the enhancement to the block editor and the new block, the term query block, it’s probably not so much for one.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
A personal blog or so, but the big magazines, the big newspapers, the sites that have been in business for a long time and have a lot of content, they really have new features with the term query block because they can set up multiple archive pages, they can add additional filtering to their sites, and it’s more about the categories and about the tags and then the content can be around that. The time to read block was in the plugin for quite a long time, but it had accessibility issues. And for 6.9 the team has really doubled down on figuring out how to solve those and then make it ready for core. So the time to read block not only has a one time that is never accurate because people have different abilities on reading speed. And so now you can display a range of times and then you could also say, okay, oh, I don’t want the time to read, but I want to give my visitors and my readers still and.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Indication on how long it’s going to take to read things and I give them the word count of my post. So that’s a different way to signal to the reader how long it will take or can you do it now or do you want to do it later or never or whatever.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Then my personal favorite comes from a long time being interested in math is the math block and have a feature now to display mathematical formulas.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
In your text. So if you are a math teacher or interested or math professor or student and you want to share whatever you’re doing in math, you always had to figure out some way to Display the formulas and sometimes people use just images to do that or had to handwrite it and take a photograph. And now you can put it in latex, so called Latex markup and then display it nicely on your blog and then also style it, have different font size and over backgrounds or something like that. So those are the new blocks. But I’m also very happy about some of the adjustments.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
So the other part that I like is the so called stretchy text. Those are variations for the paragraph as well as for the heading blocks that you can access through the transform tool. So it’s the first button in your block toolbar and where you can have a paragraph become.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
A list item or something like that. And now you can just.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Transform a heading into a stretchy heading. And what does it mean? It means that the text is stretched out so it covers and increased or decreased. So it covers the full width of a container. Most of the time the full blog post. But sometimes you also have a full page, the full browser window depending on the underlying container that you use there. But it definitely gives more design variety for content creators to make it a little bit more exciting or yeah, just a different way to use fonts. The COVID block has improved video handling and the gallery block very important. Now you can with one click change the aspect ratio for all the images. So if you want to have a gallery, until now you had to do it by image by image and now you can do it in the settings of the gallery block to say okay, this should be a square or this should be a tall or not so tall aspect ratio for each of the images in the gallery. Those are really streamlining the content creation and also unifying some layouts.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
What else is in there I also like. So the social icons block.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
That’S more interesting for, for developers or for site owners who know a little bit of development. Now the social icons block was always restricted to the number of blocks or the various services that Core has implemented. But you cannot implement all of the social networks and all of the.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Sites out there. So the contributors now implement implemented an extensibility how you can extend the social icons block with a variation so you could have your own set of icons that beyond that are maybe interested for your locale.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
India has different payment systems. They are not in Core, but you now can create social icons. So you can have icons there where you say, okay, this is my, my payment system for my Ko Fi payment system, my Patreon payment system, wherever you want to give me my money. That would work. Yeah, or I did a small plugin for a site for the Gutenberg Times site for the podcast to I wanted to have icons for each of the podcast directories where you can find the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. And this wouldn’t have been possible without the extension of the social blocks, a social icons block. And for those who are interested in multilingual or production, the video block has now the feature that you can have multiple language subtitles for multiple language in your video block. For the subtitles, that’s huge because now you can take that that content, put it in a translation AI or something like or translate via Google, collect all the languages and then upload it through to your video block. So this plays and visitors have a chance to select their language from the list of subtitles available. Yeah, it can go on and on. There’s also a lot of features for but I think for the theme for the theme developers, an important feature is now that you can style the form elements through the theme JSON format JSON file. So for the inputs for the radios, for the select, you can have one styling through the theme JSON and then it replicates through all your forms on the site. And the other one is that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
You can now create border radius presets through the theme JSON file. So that’s I think the most important pieces there. The one, one big one. Ha. I’ve totally forgot. That’s the hide and show of blocks. You can select on a block now if you want to hide it or you want to show it on the front end. So you could have.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Practically.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
A block on your post that only shows on Christmas or you only want to make it available for a certain period of time and then for the next year you kind of hide it on the post and then next time Christmas comes around, you enable it again. This builds the foundation for more conditional hide and show of blocks. But the foundation is now there in 6.9 and it’s a rudimentary functionality. Right now it’s only the hide and show, but it also for 7.0 contributors are already working on hide and show blocks depending on screen size. So that definitely will add to the responsiveness of your site. And of course the visual drag and drop has been tremendously improved. Now you see what you’re actually dragging and dropping around your canvas. It’s a very nice representation of the content that you’re moving right now. So this is definitely also a good feature for content creators.

Abha Thakor:
So not only is this release really good for content creators, it’s also good for the developers who are creating materials and are maintaining sites for organizations that have a lot of content. And I think that’s what I’m hoping in this release we can show is that WordPress is a constantly evolving tool. It isn’t static, it isn’t as big. It has pointed out if you have different payment systems coming online now with social icons block, you can adapt those so that you can include the ones that are local to you through things like the gallery block. If you’re changing your whole way of displaying photos, you can do it with very few clicks. Really this idea of streamlining that content but also making sites more responsive to the needs that people have and to the markets as they change is a key thing for WordPress.

Abha Thakor:
And I’m just going to bring our other contributors in. So.

Abha Thakor:
I’ve got one contributor who is joining us today from New Zealand and I’m just going to read the text message that she’s put into the, into my chat here and she’s saying that the reason that she uses WordPress is, is that there are always things to learn and you can have things that become easier. Sometimes you have to wait a while and the more we can get people involved with the solutions, the more that can make a difference into getting all these variety of options available sooner. We can also show what is needed. Big you’ve shared about the hide and show blocks and that there’s much more planned for 7.0. Are there any others within the block additions.

Abha Thakor:
That you think will be really expanding in the future? And that’s come in from Philippe who is joining on text from France and it’s his question to you.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Thank you for the question. Yeah, I think there are quite a few things that have been just rudimentary implemented right now.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
There is the.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
I’m pretty sure that the accordion block will be stabilized and have more things to contribute there. I also know that the COVID block always involves the button blocks involves the navigation block is a big.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Importance for a website and has still a few quirks for content creators to get around and figuring out the navigation block. And they are definitely coming some big improvements there with 6.9. The big improvement there was that now the navigation block follows the slug. So if on a page you change the URL for it, the navigation block who actually.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Refers it on all of your pages follows that. So you don’t have to update all the pages with a new navigation. It doesn’t do that with a title because that’s pretty fixed anyway but the slug so there won’t be any more dead links anymore in your navigation bar. That only works however when you start building navigation with 6.9 because all the links that were in your menu before that they didn’t have that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Reference that it needs to the ID for the post is not in the navigation bar before 6.9, so that’s certainly something I really like.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
What else? So there is the site editor has the template management.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Where you can edit your templates and then.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
That has been really new for WordPress that a content creator or a site owner is able to edit a template and then change how each post or page is kind of displayed.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
And so that has been in WordPress 5.9, so almost 10 releases there. But what was hard was that if you worked on a template it would be live all the time. You couldn’t do a draft of it and have it then later on activated. That was actually slated for 6.9, but it didn’t get all the way there. So the idea was good.

Abha Thakor:
Will we see that in seven, do you think?

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
We will definitely see that in seven. And that is also something that can now be tested in the Gutenberg plugin and there will be more tests that it should be.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
So people who have different approaches to their template management can actually chime in and help out with that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
So that’s one.

Abha Thakor:
Thank you for answering that question. And Philippe, thank you for pulling those questions together at your side as well. Krupa, I’m going to come back to you about this stretchy text and is it useful for folks to practice and see what they can do with it?

Krupa Nanda:
Yes, definitely, because till now we had to achieve this particular thing with the help of the custom codes and you know, like the developer has to add an extra effort to make this happen. So let’s say I Have mobile with a different size, it will look different on a browser on a different system it will appears bit strange and the title is something where you know it catches your eye when someone is going through your website they might not go through every single details but the header or the main text area is something that they want to look into. Like the introduction of the stretchy text has made it really easier job and for the people like me who doesn’t do much into the development but with the help of the one click of these, you know, block you can achieve this and it it just beautifully adjust with the different size of the container and it’s like a magic when you type it and you remove it and when you add something it does everything automatically.

Abha Thakor:
It’s definitely one to try. It’s one of my favorites on the release obviously making sure we’re following design guidelines for that though as well within our organizations. On that question, I have one back for Birgit that’s come from Samson who is texting in from Nigeria. Samson has asked Gutenberg gives us a lot of design tools, but it also gives a user who has no design expertise necessarily access to things. Is this something that is a down negative for WordPress and if you have users who have no skills that you should be looking at other software or is there a way of still having good design and using these Gutenberg tools?

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Yeah, it’s an interesting question to have. Of course I’m no designer so you don’t want me to design something but give me the tools and I mock it up. Yes, absolutely.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
So there are multiple ways to approach this if you’re a developer. There’s on the developer blog so developer.WordPress.org news there is a post by Nick Diego where he published 15 different ways how you can curate the editor experience for content creators and that definitely. So you can switch off the colors or you can switch it to brand colors only or you can switch off no border radius. You can switch off quite a few of the design tools through the JSON file or through some minimal PHP code in your functions PHP for the theme. There’s also.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
A huge effort and that started about a year, two and a half years ago to reduce the footprint of the design tools for content creators that can be also managed through agencies where you say okay, this pattern is only available for content creators to edit the content. There are no other ways to use that pattern. You can only change the image, the header and the paragraph and the rest is kind of hidden away. The tools for that you can also not move them or something like that. So it’s called a template lock or it’s a content only parameter on the patterns and that idea.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Will follow along on the post and page editor where things can be locked down. There’s also the idea of having for a pattern, for instance the allowed blocks that can be put in a certain pattern or a certain container block to can say, okay, this cover block can only have a heading, a paragraph and a button, but no verse, no math, no anything else in that container. And that is called allowed blocks. And that’s in 6.9 a new feature.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
That had where you get a little in the advanced section, those are all advanced tools and where you can select the blocks that are allowed in that particular block or container block. So there are multiple ways to do this. There is not one switch because everybody has a different approach on what they want to hide away and what they want to allow for content creators. But yeah, reaching down and figuring out.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Those dials is definitely a little challenge for developers and site owners too.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Narrow it down.

Abha Thakor:
Maybe that’s something that we can look at on the developer blog in the future as hide and show becomes more embedded.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Absolutely.

Abha Thakor:
And we’ll link to the show notes the article that Birgit has just mentioned on the developer blog. But also thinking of the developer blog, if you are using 5.9, 6.9, whatever piece of software that you’ve been using for something particularly unique and that works in the current version and you want to share that or you think it’d make a good case study, do get in touch with a developer blog. We’re always looking for ideas, we’re always looking for new writers. And if you just want to write something and are interested in doing step by step instructions, there are lots of pieces that, that we’re looking for writers for. Again, we’ll share those in the show notes. If you’re not sure about where to start, you can always reach out to Bigot, to myself, to Mary and we’ll add the links in and we really want to have people involved Bigot. As a result of that question, I have another question that we had earlier from Alejandro from Brazil who wanted to know that WordPress has all these features and things that is, as you’ve said, can be quite difficult to navigate sometimes when they’re new, when there’s not as much information about around them. But one of the things he wanted to point out was that for him makes developing interesting. It’s not that that it’s an impossible barrier. He finds that it means that he continuously has something to go back to clients with. I can now do this for you. You can save time with this new feature. We can still reuse the content that you have had newspaper, magazine type content by making it more accessible through these approaches. We can add video here, we can take away materials here. And he talks about the library effect and he and I are working on a piece for Open Channels FM next year. So do look out for that where we’re actually going to be talking about expanding the library of tools that you can use. And I think that is what Gutenberg really does give us, isn’t it? So I’m going to go first to Birger and then go to Krupa on that question.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Yeah, that’s what I fascinated for the last eight years when I published the Gutenberg Times for the first time. A friend of mine said, well, once Gutenberg is released in Core, what are you going to write about? I said, yeah, well, there will be always development there and there will always new features there and there will be in the plugin and other people will actually build on top of the block editor and Gutenberg. And so there is one tool that I really like is the Create Block theme plugin that helps no coder to develop their theme with the site editor and then use that plugin to download and have all the changes that they made in the editor be put into the file system of a theme and then upload it to a next site and then change it if they need to. But that plugin is really helpful in that regard. Another one is it’s not a plugin, but it’s a scaffolding tool for developers. It’s called Create Block.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
NPM library where you can say Create block and then put in.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
The name of the new block that you need. And then it scaffolds the whole block library that you need. So the block editor, the edit files, the save files, the index files, the plugin files, all that you don’t have to think about through 10 or different files, it kind of does it all for you. And then you can start really implementing features. Another one? Well, if you don’t want to go that route, you can go to automatic telextomatic.com where you can build a block from plain English prompt. So yes, because it is modern development, it is based on JavaScript and it’s based on React. Certain things just happen to be possible now with computer languages like JavaScript and PHP.

Abha Thakor:
Right. Krupa. Going back to what we’ve been talking about in terms of library of wonderful features that we can use. I have a question that’s come in from Ingrid and Oscar who are sending their message from Norway. So thank you for being involved with developments for the show today. They want to know they’ve got a team that they would like to be contributing to WordPress and they’d like to be testing now and they would want to be testing early in seven because they want to see some of the features that didn’t make it as tickets because they were wonderful tickets that made it. But there was quite a lot that was not in the release that people might have liked to have seen. They want to know how can they do that and what in particular in 6.9 needs extra testing that’s going to be built on in other releases.

Krupa Nanda:
Okay, so like we have two, three questions over here. So first I think I would like to answer how they can get involved so very first you can be part of this make test team and core team in a slack so that you can stay updated with what is happening through the meetings and triage sessions and everything so that you have that sense of what is currently happening every week. And you can get the schedule like when these meetings are happened on make.WordPress.org meeting so you can join whenever you can. Or also WordPress adores the async communication. So if you are not able to, you know, be part of this meeting in person, you can anyways and anytime go through those meetings later based on your time. So that is one way and during those meeting, during those meeting there is one important part called announcement. So through those announcement you will get the news about the current feature is being shaped or what is happening in the Gutenberg what is happening in core developer blog. So you will have all the aspect of understanding and you will be able to navigate to the different direction wherever your interest is. So this is one thing that you can get involved, how you can get involved. Second thing for the like how you can be part of the 7.0 so you can check the project boards in Gutenberg WordPress repo and you can you know, pick whatever interest you and you can start you know building up and you can volunteer for anything. So if you would like to you know, build something and if you want to contribute to a specific feature, you just go and you know share whatever you want and someone will assign you the ticket. Second thing about the 6.9, like what you want to test. So for an example command palette. So this feature is was pre before 6.9 it was only available in the editor part. Like it was not thoroughly inside the dashboard. Now with this 6.9 we have this command palette available in dashboard. So this is entirely admin side now if you want to, you know, do some improvements and if you want a feature to be available in the front end also. So we don’t know the possibility and feasibility and other stuff but we can anyways explore everything like whether it can be doable or not. You can, you know, come up with the proposal and something that is there in your mind. So this command palette is one part that you can, you know, be part of it other than not feature is there because not is something that is. We can call it as a very initial stage or phase one. It is in phase one we have lots and lots of improvements already logged and requested enhancement so you can start picking up tasks from there itself. There are 2,3 features that were actually planned for the 6.9 but couldn’t make it. Say for example icon blow content only mode for the designer in the content team and then the template management. So Birgit already covered all the this part, but this feature was not stable enough to be part of the 6.9. So you can start picking up those tasks and share your feedbacks and you can start working on those things. So these are promising things for the 7.0.

Abha Thakor:
Thank you Krupa. And to add to that, of course we can’t forget that introducing the WordPress Abilities API and that’s probably one of the things I’m most excited about in 6.9.

Abha Thakor:
The first implementations of it are in this particular release and it’s going to just build and build. It’s going to improve smoother developer workflows, new possibilities in automation and AI integrations. Jonathan Bosinger has written a piece about the WordPress Abilities API which we’ll add to in the show notes as well. And also in answer to the question, there are lots of performance updates that we’re going to put more detail on in the blog that accompanies the show because we couldn’t feature everything as much as we’d love to, but we are going to do more on performance in 6.9 and 7 later this year, early next year. So if you are interested in that, please get in touch and we’re going to use some case studies and look at the developer blog as well. As part of that just bringing in Aki’s comments, who.

Abha Thakor:
Has also been involved in contributing code for five years and about a year ago started being involved in releases he wants to emphasize that it’s not necessary to write code right away, but he does encourage contributors to understand tickets and issues, test whether you can reproduce bugs, express your own opinions, and actively discuss with other contributors. And I think, as we’ve all felt and throughout our release shows, we say this is what makes a big difference and it’s about WordPress being ours. It’s about something that we all share together and hopefully we can make better too. On the performance Note, just as a way of encouraging you to think that WordPress is getting faster and better, the amount of time that the performance team spend on WordPress is phenomenal. If you are not already clued up on this, you can join them on the Slack channel. As Krupa has talked about as well, there were more than 45 tickets devoted to performance alone in 6.9, and that really is something quite amazing. Birgit, was there anything in particular that you wanted to highlight from the performance side?

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
There are, as you said, a ton of.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Improvements for the performance. One of them was that it now loads block styles only on demand on classic themes. So block styles are when you want to have a standardized change in how the paragraph looks or how a button looks or the verse looks. And those block styles were always loaded to all of the whole site, even if the block wasn’t on the page, which for block themes that’s normal, but for classic themes that wasn’t implemented yet and that’s now available.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
There’s also a template enhancement output buffer. It sounds all technical, but now.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Developers can modify what the template shows programmatically, which is actually quite interesting. There is an RSS feed catching caching with that and lots and lots of inline so the inline style limit has been reduce services. It’s all very, very technical and for content creators or for site owners it will be oh this is fast. And that’s all that there is. So performance are really.

Birgit Pauli-Haack:
Performance improvements are really things that developers are very interested in because their code runs faster. But for users it means that the SEO might increase site owners when sites are faster, Google maybe link to them faster or easier, but that is we all have attention span issues in every millisecond that the site loads faster. We are happier and read it.

Abha Thakor:
And I think the performance enhancements really do make that difference. We’ve got this time we’ve got changes which modernize WordPress’s text and encoding and the UTF8 handling as well, which as Virgil said, you don’t have to know all about the technical to see the difference it means that we do now have a more reliable and consistent text processing across WordPress widely supported environments, which is amazing. And this helps plugins and themes and it will help them handle international content emojis and so much more. And if Anyone thinks that WordPress stands still, just have a look and listen to some of our WordPress release shows and you’ll see how each release builds on each one. More importantly, you’ll see how you can make a difference. If you’ve been listening to this show and you think, yes, but that’s for developers or this is for people who are paid full time to work on this, WordPress is for everybody. The people we have on the show today, the contributors we’ve had who’ve done some of the research towards it, they all come from a variety of backgrounds and we’re always keen on on OpenChannels FM to make sure we are as inclusive as possible, that we cover as much of the world as possible. If we haven’t been to your part of the world and you have an amazing case study that we could use, if there’s something that you want to talk about in terms of how WordPress, WooCommerce, all of the whole system has made your life even more special, then let me know. We’re really keen to talk to the countries that we haven’t done so already and we already are planning for our next WordPress release shows. If you want to be involved, just like the people who have been involved today, let me know. We’ve had contributions.

Abha Thakor:
We’ve had contributions today from people who made contact after our last 6.8 show. They used it as some of their meetups. We’ve had people who’ve extracted items from it and gone on to put themselves forward as possibly writing something for the developer blog. We want to use this as a learning mechanism and an encouragement for everybody who is out there. It just leaves me to do a big, big thanks to everybody who has been involved. For the people in the studio today, to Birgit, to Krupa, to Akshaya, to Aki who joined us by text, for all the people who did the questions and for those who are going to help us put the blog piece together. I’ve had already 12 text messages that have come in with pieces that they want to put in there and a couple of extra questions. So hopefully our guests will be happy with sharing their answers to those too. Stay tuned and we’ll be back. We’ll be let you know what’s happening on our social media channels about the next release when the call for volunteers opens for 7.0. When new test things come about, stay tuned and we’ll keep you in the know.