Author: Doc Pop

Welcome to Press This, the WordPress community podcast from WMR. Each episode features guests from around the community and discussions of the largest issues facing WordPress developers. The following is a transcription of the original recording.

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Doc Pop: You’re listening to Press This, a WordPress Community Podcast on WMR. Each week we spotlight members of the WordPress community. I’m your host, Doc Pop. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine, and my contributions over on TorqueMag.Io where I get to do podcasts and draw cartoons and tutorial videos. Check that out.

You can subscribe to Press This on Red Circle, iTunes, Spotify, or you can download episodes directly at wmr.fm. 

Each month we like to do a community focused episode. We like to call them Word Around the Campfire, where we talk with WordPress friends about events and news within the community. Joining us this week is Mike Davey, a Senior Editor at Delicious Brains. Mike, how are you doing today?

Mike Davey: Oh, not too bad. Doc and yourself.

DP: I’m doing really well. And we also have Nick Diego, a Developer Advocate at WP Engine and a WordPress Core Contributor. Nick, how are you?

Nick Diego: Doing great! Thanks for having me.

DP: Let’s start off with the biggest news in the community this week. Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word address. Matt gave this presentation just yesterday. Nick, can you kind of tell us a little bit about the State of the Word and kind of where it happened, set the scene for us?

ND: Yeah, absolutely. So the State of the Word is something that’s done each year and it’s delivered by the co-founder of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg. And the goal of the event is to kind of share reflections on the progress of the project during the current year or the past year, and also kind of set the scene for what’s gonna be coming in the future of WordPress.

This year it took place in New York City, and it was actually live again this year to a handful of folks. And we learned a lot of great things about what happened in 2022 and also some things that we can expect this coming year.

DP: WordPress is turning 20. That was kind of a big eye-opener for me. The other thing to expect is the end of Gutenberg Phase Two. Nick, can you tell us about that?

ND: This whole block project started, Gutenberg project started, it’s broken into kind of four parts. We’ve been in stage two for quite a long time now. And that’s kind of everything focused around being able to build with blocks. The different supports and controls and functionality, Full Site Editing, all that kind of stuff.

And we’ve seen huge advancements in 2022 towards that stage two goal. There’s still a little bit of work left to do and that will be completed as we move into 2023, but the goal is that once we get to the end of the year, we will be completely done with the bulk of everything that’s needed for that stage two goal.

And then we can look forward to stage three.

DP: So, end of this year or end of next year, we should be done with Phase Two?

ND: Oh, my apologies for that. End of 2023.

DP: Okay. So 6.1 was sort of the biggest version of Site Editing so far. Of course, that’s how WordPress releases work. Each version’s gonna be the biggest one or the newest one. But 6.2 I was thinking, was going to kind of book end that at least as best as possible, try to wrap up any of the major issues or bugs?

Is that still correct or am I just misunderstanding what 6.2 is gonna be doing there?

ND: No. You’re a hundred percent correct there. I think that there’s a few outstanding items regarding Full Site Editing, and the Site Editor. A lot of work’s being done there. Kind of polishing off some remaining functionality that folks have been looking for. That’s all aiming at 6.2.

DP: And they talked a little bit about new plugin taxonomies being introduced. And I’m gonna say I didn’t fully understand that part of the talk. Mike, can you help explain to me what Matt was talking about there?

MD: Sure. Essentially, the idea is that plugin and theme developers sort of self-identify what their project goals are through that new taxonomy. Just looking at plugins though, there’s a few different categories they can put it in. One of them being commercial and I’m in favor of greater transparency.

My main concern with that is that a lot of users, especially a lot of new users, may skip right over anything that says commercial. And it seems to me like that might be a barrier for the freemium plugins, especially the new ones that don’t have an audience yet. And I mean, just from my personal perspective, the Delicious Brains plugins all have free versions, and those free versions do significantly enhance your capabilities. And so I worry that new users might miss that if the plugins are just tagged as commercial. Right. 

And speaking of looking just still at new users, I don’t think the current taxonomy scheme that we’ve seen is going to be of much help for them when they need to figure out which plugins to use. Solo? Community? What does that even mean? And don’t get me started on canonical, I seem to recall there was some confusion about that term just a few months ago, even among the WordPress cognoscente. Right? Like it’s not an obvious term to use. 

And if I were just going in blind, I would see the words canonical plugin assume that that means it’s something you have to have. And then I would question why it wasn’t just included in Core. Right? So I think maybe the way we’re terming them is confusing.

DP: Yeah, there seems to be a lot of kind of confusion about this. Maybe it wasn’t rolled out great. It sounds like the goal is to help identify a user on the plugin repository of what type of plugin they’re getting. It sounds like that’s the noble goal. And these are supposed to be self applied or self-identified.

I know that currently there’s some folks who are looking at the way that these have been tagged and not fully understanding ’em, but yeah, you’re bringing up some other points too, just like canonical. I mean, the terminology of that seems pretty off for sure.

MD: Yeah, I mean, I seem to recall the first time I’d ever seen the term. There was a big discussion a few months back about the plugin download stats being removed. And Matt Mullenweg said that I believe at the time in a comment on WordPress.org that the best way to do this would probably be via a canonical plugin.

And there were plenty of questions generated from that, like plenty of questions coming from very knowledgeable people saying, what is a canonical plugin? 

ND: So I think the spirit of the initiative is a good one. I think there are a lot of plugins in the repository. I’ll leave it at that. There’s a lot of plugins in the repository and the more that we can do to categorize them, I think is helpful. How that’s done. You know, there’s always gonna be concerns and questions around that.

I think that the commercial thing might actually be beneficial personally. I think that there’s a lot of plugins out there that are, it’s hard to tell if they’re being actively supported. Is it just somebody who built it and put it out there and just left it? Who’s actually behind these plugins?

It can kind of cut both ways. I know, but I think it could also be beneficial to showcase, “Hey, this plugin is free. Use it however you want, but it’s backed up by a company, and they are actively supporting this and they’re putting dev time towards it.” 

Again, I’m not sure how it’s all gonna play out in the end, but I do think that the plugin repository is a bit of a wild west and what can be done to kind of tame that, I think is in concept helpful.

DP: Each year we do the Plugin Madness competition over on Torque Magazine. It’s coming up in a few weeks or a few months. When I first heard about the taxonomies, I was like, oh, that sounds a little bit like, we’ve got kind of an enterprise and a maintenance and optimization.

We’ve brought basically plugins into four kind of pillars, which is not easy to do. And every year we get a lot of complaints about how we do it. It’s not an easy task. So I can kind of see that. And this is obviously something different. It’s not breaking it up into its functionality quite like that. 

But it is kind of fun seeing other people have to deal with the criticism that we get when we try adding any sort of taxonomy or grouping to things. And Mike actually mentions the developer download issue that came up where stats on downloads were removed.

I think probably for privacy concerns for users. Both of these things do kind of have that similar vibe where I think plugin developers, I feel like plugin developers are feeling like this kind of came out of nowhere, or maybe they weren’t consulted or they sort of feel like out of the loop on both of these. At least with this one, if I understand correctly they should be able to fix that. Like there’s no fixing the download stats. 

MD: I’m actually not sure to be honest, like I don’t know that you can, once it’s set, there’s probably some way to change it. Like, for example, because somebody made a side, “This was a commercial Plugin when I developed it five years on, I’m just making it totally free.” So there must be a way to, to change that setting, but I don’t know for sure.

ND: Yeah, I don’t either. 

DP: We’re gonna take a quick break and when we come back we’re gonna talk a little bit more about the community as seen through Matt Mullenweg and the State of the Word and what we’ve kind of learned about 2022 and 2023. Stay tuned for more. 

DP: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress Community podcast. I’m your host, Doc Pop, and we are doing our Word Around the Campfire segment where we talk about the WordPress community. Today we’re really talking about the State of the Word that happened just yesterday, as we’re recording. I’m joined by Mike Davey from Delicious Brains and Nick Diego from WP Engine. Mike, I’m curious, what was one of your favorite questions during Matt’s famous Q and A segment after State of the word?

MD: I’d have to say that my favorite question was, “Are we going to get to one universal theme?” Because it mirrors something I was thinking when Matt was showing off some of the new stuff about Gutenberg and he was showing the new Twenty Twenty-Three Theme with I think 10 style variations. Because it really does seem to me that that seems to be the sort of way that it’s driving. Right.

Is that we may eventually get to the point where we have just sort of one universal theme and you can change so many things about it, right? Fairly easily that it’s the only theme you really need. Now as Matt did say during State of the Word, we’re probably going to see some really weird themes still, no matter how advanced we get with these new themes, right? We’re probably gonna see some niche themes, I think he mentioned one that looks like a terminal, that sort of thing. But I suspect we’re going to see eventually it driving towards one universal theme.

One of the other things he mentioned, you can create themes just using blocks and style variations, and I really think that that is in line with WordPress’s initial and continual mission of democratizing publishing.

It seems to me that you can now be a low code or no code person and actually build a custom theme. It’s probably gonna take you a while. There may be some stuff you’ve gotta learn, but you can get in there and start doing it. And I think the more open we make this and the easier we make it to do, the more we fulfill that mission of democratizing publishing.

ND: Yeah, I agree. And I think that one of the things that we’re looking at as well as maybe there’s a kind of a default base theme for WordPress that people can build on. But I also think that when it comes to businesses, it’s going to be what a lot of people do. They have their own base theme. Then every single client site or every single site that they build is from that base.

Maybe they have some custom functionality that’s specific to their business. Maybe they specialize in eCommerce or whatever. That may require a bit of a different base. But having a solid base, whatever that might be, whether it’s the WordPress base or their own custom base, you can build so much on top of that, like never before.

I think we’re gonna see a lot of that especially in the agency framework.

DP: That makes a lot of sense that if you’re an agency, that you might have a theme that you just kind of like cookie cutter, just to start off everything with and then build around that. I could definitely see that. When I’m looking for themes, I keep finding more and more that themes are actually getting in my way.

Even with the Twenty Twenty-Three Theme that I got, I still ended up like trying to strip it down to the point where some of the things, I can’t find them. I think like the border around the edges or whatever. I’m kind of looking for just a theme that’s just a blank sheet to start with and I kind of wonder if that’s maybe gonna be what themes start becoming, and then they just have these like patterns and things kind of tucked in on the side.

If you want that border, it’s gonna be tucked in on the side maybe rather than kind of baked in. I think the more we bake into themes, the more difficult it actually becomes for some users.

ND: Once you have those controls and you want to be able to to change things, the theme can definitely get in the way of doing them.

DP: So my favorite question was, I think it was Courtney Robertson asked about certification in the WordPress space. And this has been a highly contentious issue, I think in the 10 years I’ve been covering it with Torque, and I was really surprised when she asked Matt about it, that he said that he’s kind of come around on it.

Matt was one of the people who felt that the idea of certification, the idea that there’s a global body saying here’s a test to see if you’re qualified, and kind of organizing that, it just didn’t feel very WordPressy. It felt like WordPressy should be a little more self-organized. And even in general, maybe the idea of certification wasn’t really a good idea.

I got the impression during Courtney’s talk very quickly that Matt was like, I’ve come around on this and I think it’s not a terrible idea and he didn’t say that things are in the works for that, but just the idea that he’s kind of come around on it makes me wonder if there’s possibly some sort of certification process talk happening behind the scenes.

I know that recently CertifyWP.Com has popped up as one of the newest groups trying to kind of create a certification process. The whole conundrum that they’re trying to solve is these people also hire WordPressers and sometimes they just don’t know what they’re getting when they’re hiring someone.

They don’t know if they really know what they’re talking about or not and the hope is that if someone has certification in WordPress, whatever that means, that you can hire them knowing that they’ll be able to do what they say they can do. Sort of like a little blue verification badge. Mike, did you have any thoughts on that particular segment?

MD: Overall, I think certifications are actually a sign of a maturity, which is not necessarily that WordPress needs to have them, but I mean, WordPress is turning 20 next year and certifications do provide some assurance to people outside of WordPress that this person knows what they’re talking about.

For example, you mentioned that somebody may hire a WordPress developer but they don’t necessarily know if that person’s competent. And I know enough about WordPress that I’m positive I could convince a small business owner that I know it all. But the fact of the matter is I don’t, and I’m not a developer.

Right? So a certification would help to, I think, alleviate some of those concerns for people outside of WordPress.

DP: Nick, do you have any thoughts on the WordPress certification as a program that should be adopted or not?

ND: Yeah, I think it’s an interesting one. I think that you know it. One, it gives something for people to strive towards. It kind of creates this collective idea of what, it’s hard because you gotta say, what is included in that certification? What are the things that you need to know? I think in concept, I like the idea. It’s a little bit gatekeepy, but I do like the idea. 

The problem I have with it is how fast WordPress is evolving.

MD: Hmm.

ND: You know? I couldn’t do what I did last year, what I do now, even though I would be considered a “WordPress expert” last year. So I think that this is something that you kind of gotta work into that process, whether it’s a recertification or hard questions to answer. But in concept, I like the idea, but the how it would work is a bit of a challenging one.

DP: It seems in general like, a lot of things are changing really quickly with Site Editor and I wonder if two years from now it’ll feel quite as radical or if something else will come around. You know, cause you’re right, like certification a year ago versus now, it seems like totally, it doesn’t mean you know what’s happening in WordPress necessarily cause things have changed so much.

I’m hoping things settle down because it’s actually getting a little hard to write tutorials on things right now with everything changing so quickly.

ND: Yeah, and maybe this is a perfect time to revisit certifications cause you’re a hundred percent right. Once we get to the end of Phase Two, things will settle down a little bit more and it might make more sense cause we’ll have a bit more of a solid understanding of what it means to be a certified WordPress professional.

DP: There we have it, Gutenberg Phase Five, certifications. You heard it here, first. Mike and I were talking a little bit before the show about Matt’s new love of AI. Mike, you want to tell us a little bit about that?

MD: I mean, I’m also very excited about AI and Matt did seem to be pretty excited about, in particular, OpenAI. He mentioned ChatGPT, which I’m sure by now just about everybody’s heard about it. The current level of technology we have in AI takes me back to nearly a decade ago when an editorial colleague asked me if he thought we would be replaced by AI.

My answer then is the same as it is now, not completely. There’s too many judgment calls to make, and more fundamentally, you need to really understand your audience on a gut level. And I don’t think that applies to just editorial and content either. I think that applies to just about everything.

AI is an excellent tool and a lot of work can be automated and we’re rapidly gaining access to the tools we need to do it. And from my perspective, that would free me up to do what really does need human intervention, planning, strategy, and ensuring that what we’re producing is the very best it can be and really meets the reader’s needs.

However excited as I am about the potential of AI, there are a lot of social implications here that I don’t necessarily think that people that really need to be thinking about it have been. And that would be its societal implications. I’m with Bill Gates on this one. At some point I think we’re going to have to start taxing robot labor. That is a policy intervention that goes far beyond anything Matt was talking about, but eventually I think we will need to do that because we’re going to need fewer people doing fewer things. 

With that said, I mean, if you’ve looked at what I’ve heard about Open AI’s like ChatGPT can in fact generate code and sometimes the code works like somebody built a working WordPress plugin using ChatGPT. But what I’ve also heard is that the code it produces, while it may work, is not good code. Right. It does need a lot of human editing. Again, it’s not best practice. It’s not necessarily secure. It does things in ways that a human developer probably wouldn’t. 

So we definitely still need human intervention there and human oversight and to make those judgment calls. But it is a very exciting era. And I think we’re just starting to see the potential.

DP: Matt certainly seemed excited about it as I think almost every CEO is, they’re at least open to the possibilities. The same thing happened a year ago. Everybody was excited about NFTs. I think AI has a longer lasting potential. During his talk, Matt, used a line that was written in ChatGPT, kind of as a throwaway gag.

Everyone seems to be throwing that into their speeches now. But at the end, Michelle Frechette asked him about OpenVerse, which is a CreativeCommons project where you can upload images or media, music, video. And these are open for anyone to use, and WordPress has adopted OpenVerse. It’s now something that they’re trying to get people to use and people are contributing.

But the question from Michelle Frechette was saying that usage isn’t that high. People aren’t using it that much. And during his answer, Matt said some of the rules that they use for OpenVerse include things like no faces can be shown because they don’t wanna get into legal troubles and worry about releases and stuff like that.

They’re trying to keep it simple and some users do need a face or want an image of someone who has a face. So, Matt’s suggestion, coming back to AI, was talking about using AI to generate images, sort of like ThisPersonDoesNotExist.Com images to help add faces to that category.

And I know that, Mike, to what you’re saying, this is kind of a contentious thing for some people in terms of ethics, in terms of where are these images being generated from, or, you know, the source material. It’s pretty interesting and it kind of caught me off guard to see Matt really excited about it.

But I do think there are parts with ChatGPT in particular to help build maybe an article and you can go through and flesh it out more. I think there’s a lot of exciting stuff there. So I get it. We’re gonna take a final break here on Press This, and when we come back, we’re gonna wrap up our Word Around The Campfire segment and talk about Playground. So stay tuned. 

DP: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress community podcast. We are doing our Word Around The Campfire segment with Mike Davey from Delicious Brains and Nick Diego from WP Engine. We are mostly talking about the State of the Word address that Matt Mullenweg gave yesterday in New York. And the final thing I think I wanted to talk about was Playground.

I know both of y’all have interesting things to say with it. Nick, why don’t you just kick us off? What is Playground?

ND: Oh, that’s such a hard question. So WordPress Playground is a tool where you can spin up WordPress, right in your web browser. How it’s done is a bit beyond me technically, but I understand that it uses web assembly to create PHP and the server. Everything behind the scenes in WordPress, all within your browser.

So, it’s a pretty fascinating piece of technology. Even Matt said in the presentation, when he first saw it, he didn’t think it was possible. But it’s a really interesting way for you to spin up WordPress sites right in the browser and it really opens the doors for all sorts of interesting things.

DP: I was understanding that it even allowed you to kind of play with other people’s sites. Mike, do you know if I’m wrong on that?

MD: I’m actually not sure. I’ve only used it myself a bit in the last couple of days, but I did report on it back in the Delicious Brain Bites newsletter in early October, and I was impressed by it then and I’m even more impressed that it’s already ready for primetime.

My thought when I first heard about it was, that’s really neat. I can’t wait to see where it is next year. I never expected it to be ready this early. Now it is still experimental and in development, but there’s a lot you can do with it. This is another area that’s gonna be really helpful for people who are just getting started on their WordPress journey.

You can play and experiment as much as you like, and the only investment is time. You don’t even need to log in, like you do not need to be logged into WordPress org tag. That’s the playground. If you just type in WordPress playground into your search engine, go to that link. You can start right away. You can get right into the backend of the site and see what does what. 

ND: Well, one of the things I think is also really cool is that if you want to demo something in WordPress, instead of having to have a user, install a local version of WordPress and download the various plugins they need to demo. You can set up an entire WordPress site, all preconfigured what you want to have in it, and then that user can just hop in and start experiencing WordPress with your predefined configuration.

So, new users, great. Showcasing products and features, great. All sorts of cool things that you could do. So you could take something like ACF, Advanced Custom Fields, and have a Playground instance with it. You go in there, you could play around with ACF, learn how to use it, all that sort of thing, all within the browser.

So there’s a lot of really interesting implications for this technology.

DP: Playground is being marketed as a WordPress experience that runs totally in your browser. And as Nick is saying, you can use it to embed a real WordPress site in like a tutorial or a course, or you can use it as part of your pitch when you’re sending something to your client you can kind of put it in there. And then also in the description it says, experiment with an anonymous WordPress website, which is where I was kind of getting the vibe that maybe you could kind of plug in someone’s URL and just kind of play around with it and see if you can modify it and learn how it was made.

I was suggested to try using Playground specifically, cause I have a weird bug that I can’t tell if it’s in the theme or if it’s something I did and someone was like, “Oh, well, very easily you could just put your site into playground and try switching the theme up a little bit.” It’s sort of like a Local install, but maybe even easier.

Is it sort of like Local in a way? Is it possible you’re gonna be fitting that need?

ND: There are echoes of Local in Playground. However, I mean, Local’s obviously a much more advanced tool. All the integrations with Flywheel and WP Engine and all that kind of stuff. But there’s definitely some echoes between the two.

DP: That’s all we have time for on this episode of Press This. I want to say thank you so much to Nick and Mike, we will drop links to your projects in the show notes. If you enjoyed this episode of Press This, I’d recommend checking out our recent interview with Brian Gardner. He did a predictions about themes and trends for 2023, talking about what we think are gonna happen both with like, themes in general, like how websites look, but also themes like how themes are being used.

So if you’re interested in that, check out that episode. I also recently talked with Sé Reed and Courtney Robertson on the WP Community Collective, a group that is seeking to fund WordPress contributions and initiatives. You can hear that on the Torque Social Hour Livestream. You can find that on YouTube or on TorqueMag.io

DP: You can follow my adventures with Torque magazine over on Twitter @thetorquemag or you can go to torquemag.io where we contribute tutorials and videos and interviews like this every day. So check out torquemag.io or follow us on Twitter. You can subscribe to Press This on Red Circle, iTunes, Spotify, or you can download it directly at wmr.fm each week. I’m your host Doctor Popular I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine. And I love to spotlight members of the community each and every week on Press This.

The post Press This: Word Around the Campfire December 2022 appeared first on Torque.

Welcome to Press This, the WordPress community podcast from WMR. Each episode features guests from around the community and discussions of the largest issues facing WordPress developers. The following is a transcription of the original recording.

Powered by RedCircle

Doc Pop: You’re listening to Press This, a WordPress Community Podcast on WMR. Each week we spotlight members of the WordPress community. I’m your host, Doc Pop. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine, and my contributions over on TorqueMag.Io where I get to do podcasts and draw cartoons and tutorial videos. Check that out.

You can subscribe to Press This on Red Circle, iTunes, Spotify, or you can download episodes directly at wmr.fm. 

2022 is a big year for WordPress. One of the big versions of WordPress, 6.1, included major milestones for the Block Editor, fluid typography, and the block ecosystem. It’s been a huge year for WordPress, and as we close out this year, it seems like a good time to look ahead at what the future of WordPress might look like.

Joining us this week is Brian Gardner, a Developer Advocate, Principal at WP Engine. Brian, welcome to the show.

Brian Gardner: Thanks, Doc. Glad to be back.

DP: Yeah, I’m super excited to talk to you about themes and predictions and of course, WordPress themes is a pun. Did you get that pun?

BG: Yes I did.

DP: We’re talking about broader themes. 

BG: The theme of the show is themes, is what you’re saying.

DP: And there’s no way that could possibly get confusing later aswe’re talking about themes versus themes.

Before we get started, I’d like to hear some of your personal WordPress highlights from the past few years. What are things you’re excited about?

BG: Well, obviously, you know, cause you’re part of the company, but four years ago StudioPress was acquired by WP Engine and so that sort of was a huge seasonal like marker in my life and my plan at that point, I wasn’t sure about the direction of WordPress cause of Gutenberg just being introduced and I just kind of needed a time for myself just to kind of wander the proverbial wilderness. 

So I spent a few years just kind of trying different things in and out of WordPress and it was a little bit lukewarm at best just cause things were changing and I wasn’t sure where they were going. But about a year and a half ago, I caught something on WP Tavern that sort of reignited a really deep passion I have for WordPress.

And so to fast forward through some of that, I reached out to Heather Brunner, our CEO, talked to her about some things. She had talked about the Developer Relations Team here at WP Engine and asked if that would excite me. And it did, [clears throat] excuse me, using my love for design and WordPress and community and kind of wrapping it up into a thing.

And so in September of 2021, I officially joined here at WP Engine. And that really was just sort of the planting the flag of like with WordPress, I’m back. There’s just so much since then. As you talked about, the releases this year have really brought the Full Site Editing capabilities of WordPress to the point now where we’re at with the Site Editor.

And you and I talked about that just the other day, just walked through some things. And I have never been more excited about WordPress than I am right now. And for somebody who’s been doing this since 2016, I think that says quite a bit of where we’re at. And there’s a lot to be excited about and I could probably spend three weeks talking about it.

DP: Did we mention your style variation that recently came out? In that recap of like the last few years.

BG: Uh, no. So Twenty Twenty-Three is the new theme that shipped with WordPress 6.1 here just recently. And part of that theme, it meant to serve a couple purposes. It was really basically a fork of the 2022 theme. But what they wanted to do is showcase the possibilities with the Block Editor. And part of that was a new functionality that’s called Style Variations.

And so for block themes what this does is it allows a builder or a themer to sort of skin a design, kind of keep the gist of a design, but to sort of offer up different flavors of it. Much the way, like an iPhone cover might be for an iPhone, like maybe today you want a blue version or a pink version or whatever.

And so what they did was they decided that they were gonna make style variations, sort of the pinnacle of the theme release, the default theme. But what they also did was they opened it up to the community. They had a call to action for people in the community who wanted to submit designs or style variations.

Two of which came from WP Engine. It was Damon Cook and myself. We submitted two different style variations to this. They were both selected and have shipped with Twenty Twenty-Three. And we’re really, really excited about that.

DP: Well, for this show, we’re gonna talk about themes of WordPress in 2023, and I think in the later part we’ll talk about broader themes, but right now I want to stay focused on downloadable, modifiable themes. That type of theme. What do you think is gonna be the biggest theme trend in WordPress for 2023?

BG: Well, I love talking about themes. Obviously I have been doing that for quite some time and I think it’s kind of strange cause we’re four to five years into this Gutenberg project, and I think the biggest thing I think we’re gonna see next year is just basically the go-to-market of commercial themes, we have yet to see it much. Right now there’s several themes on the WordPress.org theme repository. I think we’re up to a 120, 130, maybe block themes that are free and maybe I could count on my one hand how many themes are out there that are being sold.

Ana Segota is one of them. Ellen at Ainoblocks.io themes is another, but there really isn’t that market yet. And it surprises me, somebody who helped basically start the Premium WordPress Theme movement way back in the day. Like there’s so much opportunity here and why are we not seeing it yet? A lot of which has to do with features that are not shipped yet and just sort of the volatility still of things in flight.

But I think now that we’ve seen 6.1 released and with 6.2, we’re gonna tidy up a bunch of things. I think we’re gonna get to a point where developers and product builders realize that things are stable. And with that also outside of themes comes, plugins and so on like that. But I think that’s probably the biggest thing we’re gonna start to see is sort of this rebirth of the commercial theme market.

DP: Yeah, that’s really interesting. People are often reaching out to me, “Doc, you use WordPress. I’m getting back into WordPress for a nonprofit. I’m making a site or whatever,” and there is this kind of interesting moment where I’m kind of excited again to get them into the Site Editor. I think there was a moment where I was a little hesitant to get them in there. I didn’t know where to send them to find their themes. But I think everything’s coming along solid and I am kind of excited about this new wave of block-based themes on the commercial market.

I think 2023 is gonna be a good year for that. That’s a good point. 

BG: Yeah. 

DP: So will the changes in the Site Editor, will they affect the way WordPress sites look? Will we start to see visual design ripples all because of the way block themes are built?

BG: You know, I think so. I think one of the things that excites me the most about where we’re at is what I call frontend and backend visual parody. Whereas in the past, classic themes and you know, building for WordPress years ago, there would be the frontend experience, but the backend was all either widgets and HTML markup code and things like that.

And to some degree there were elements of like a visual thing. I think page builders sort of brought that to WordPress over the years. Beaver Builder, Elementor, things like that where you could actually see and build your site in a way that was not requiring code as much. 

But I think now that so many of the settings and the blocks and the features and all that stuff are now part of WordPress Core. I think we’re gonna see a standardization. Even inside the backend. Right. 

We were on the other day just going back and forth between like the posted Page Editor and the Site Editor, which are different experiences now, but I know that there’s a huge movement in lots of discussions around sort of bringing that and harmonizing the way that that looks.

So there’s literally just one editing experience in the backend of WordPress, and that’s visual and it represents the front end and the backend. So I think most people are gonna start to see all of that come together in a point where the vision that was cast years ago finally sort of the lights go on and we’re like, “Oh, this is how it was all meant to be in function and I’m here for it.”

I love it. I can’t wait for it. And it excites me beyond belief.

DP: So I’ve been looking at trend forecasts for 2023, and I’m not talking about just website themes, but you know, broader trends. We’re seeing suggestions that creative typography, gradients, vivid minimalism, AI design, and candy pastels might be the hot things for 2023. Are you seeing any of these trends in theme design kind of already poking their heads up?

BG: Yes, in fact, I’ve been responsible for some of them. My Sherbet theme variation in the 2023 theme leverages some very bright pastel gradients. Again, it’s a web trend and probably will be around for a couple years. Gradients have been around for, for several years and, and what used to be gradients in just like a button have now become gradients in backgrounds or even duotone filters, which sort of overlay images.

And so we’re starting to see creative use of color in a way that’s easy to sort of do. Back years ago, it used to require some very tricky CSS things and things that browsers didn’t support. And so we see these things now sort of more at the fingertips of people.

And what WordPress is doing is the theme structure is set up in a way where now in the backend of WordPress with a couple of clicks and some eyedroppers and a color wheel. You change the gradient and change the colors and do the things that typically have either required code or like a heavy use of Custom CSS.

And so, not only will these sort of trends continue to exist, I think WordPress’s ability to allow builders to do things creatively, sort of with all of those controls will really start to see some things that are really unique.

DP: Yeah. I hadn’t even thought about it when I was asking you about changes to the Site Editor that could ripple across the web, but the Site Editor does make gradients super easy. Almost to the point where I could see people just using it just because, “Oh, what’s this extra tab of gradients?”

I could kind of see that helping perpetuate the trend. And as you said, your Sherbet theme definitely takes advantage. I didn’t even think about that. But those gradients and the minimalism and the candy pastels are all kind of there. It’s pretty cool that you’re on top of the trend, Brian I appreciate that.

BG: I try to be.

DP: Well, we are going to take a quick break and when we come back we’ll hear more from Brian Gardner about WordPress themes and predictions for 2023. Stay tuned. 

DP: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress Community podcast. My name is Doc. I’m here today with Brian Gardner talking about themes and predictions in WordPress for 2023. Now, the first half of the show, we talked about modular themes and downloadable themes and the way that WordPressers think about it.

Now I wanna talk about more broadly some of the changes that we might be seeing in WordPress web design. I think one of the things that comes to mind is some people were saying the Site Editor might be the “death of page builders” and others are saying “No, page builders are probably gonna be even bigger in 2023 than they were in previous years.”

Do you have any thoughts on that?

BG: I do, and I’m not exactly sure yet what those are. I know initially when Gutenberg came out, everybody said, “Oh, it’s gonna be the death of page builders.” 

I think page builders, those product teams have obviously had several years of even seeing what’s in the pipeline to continue to evolve their product and iterate and whatnot.

And the other problem I think that is most in their favor is sort of this slow adoption of the Block Editor, right? So many people don’t like change. They don’t understand how things are built. Things are still in flight, and it’s easy to sort of revert back to just what you’ve been using for the last several, however many years, right?

I’ve seen so many people say, “I’m a Divi person. I’m an Elementor person. I know how to work with it. There’s more control. It’s easier to use, so I’m gonna continue to use these things.” 

So I think there’s always gonna be a subset of folks who, and I think it’s gonna be a large enough subset of folks, most of these products and companies will be able to sustain even the evolution all the way to its maturity of the Block Editor.

So I think it remains to be seen. I think there’s probably some pivoting that’s taking place. I know Elementor’s thinking about going towards the cloud, and so to some degree I think there’s been an evolution of those lines of business. I think everything will coexist for quite some time.

I mean, WordPress has been traditionally a backward compatible software that generally has slow adoption of new features. And so I think it’s gonna be some time before anything really becomes a difference maker or not.

Doc Pop: I know that accessibility has been something I’ve heard about in WordPress like kind of as an emphasis more and more over the past five years. It seems like in the broader web and in particular on social media, 2022 was a big year for even introducing the idea of accessibility to the broad audience.

I think Twitter added Alt text descriptions. It’s a huge part. When you join Mastodon, people let you know to camel case your hashtags to make things more accessible and definitely add alt descriptions or maybe don’t share images that don’t have alt descriptions.

I’m wondering are we gonna see some of this blend over to how people start designing websites in 2023?

BG: I would like to think so. I think it’s gonna take a village of people who are really diligent and who care a lot about that, to really sort of enforce that. I think there’s still so many things that people just are unaware of, that break accessibility or are bad experiences for those who have disabilities and whatnot.

Strangely enough, even big companies like Squarespace still delivering themes that have fonts and backgrounds and colors that do not pass contrast, color accessibility checking and stuff like that. So it really needs to come from the top. WordPress itself can make the dashboard accessible.

I know there’s lots of movement there. But it’s gonna take, companies doing it on their own sites. I know our team here at WP Engine has really embraced that. We’ve updated our site significantly to sort of accommodate for what those changes need to be. But I still think that’s there’s a lot of ignorance around this and it’s not even purposeful ignorance.

People just don’t know better. Right? They just don’t even know what it is, why it matters. How to do things. So even in small cases, right? I’ve got a bookmark of a color contrast checker that I use all the time, and every time I choose colors for a theme, first thing I do is pick colors that are accessible and pass a contrast test.

And so I think there just needs to be more information about it. There needs to be more podcasts talked about it. But it’s also one of those things that sort of isn’t in the mass appeal, right? I think we’re all interested in looks and design and things like that and what looks good and people will continue to do things that. I can see it now when I hit a website.

I’m like, I guarantee you that’s just bad accessibility, right? But I understand that it looks good. So there’s sort of that struggle between what to do with that. But we’ll see. I think there’s gonna be just more talk around it. And so therefore, I think just by nature of that, it will get better.

But probably not as much as those who really care about it want it to be.

DP: I mentioned earlier that one of the predictions I was reading said that creative typography might be one of the themes that we see in 2023. And I definitely am seeing brand logos getting a little more interesting and Instagram posts or even TikTok or whatever, having very cool fonts that they’re using, at least to capture your attention.

I do kind of wonder if creative fonts and accessibility are on opposite sides of the spectrum. Do you have any thoughts on that? Is one kind of going in the wrong direction for readability or are they going to be kind of functionally the same for someone who’s using a screen reader?

BG: I would say for the most part, the whole idea of an emphasis on typography as design, with two elements to that, right. Variable font support, which I’ll get to in a second. And then the other part of it, which is a baked in now part of WordPress, fluid typography. These two things together really play into the benefit of accessibility.

So I’ll start with the variable fonts. First of all, Google Fonts has significantly upgraded their font library to include fonts that now feel like premium fonts. For my taste for years, it’s like, okay, these are the same six fonts, open sans, lato, that we see everywhere. None of them look really good. They’re okay. 

But people would go to Adobe or Custom Foundry to pick a font that would just really wow you. So I’m really thankful for Google sort of increasing the depth of their library. And as part of that is now what we sort of call variable font tiles.

And so what that means is, traditionally, your fonts would be set to different weights. Usually like on the scales of a hundred. 400 would be regular, 300 would be light and so on. Semi bold, 600, bold 700, that kind of a thing. But what variable does is it makes it completely fluid.

So like it’s literally from 100 to 900. So if you wanted to set a font weight for whatever reason to 815, you can. And it’s not a choppy increase. It literally is designed in a way in which it can scale that way much the way SVGs work. 

And so you take that and what WordPress has recently added, which is a mobile kind of responsive approach to typography. It’s called Fluid Typography. And so what that does is it allows you to set a font. Well, it allows you within theme JSON to set some predefined font sizes that a user could use. Sort of going through like the t-shirt approach using extra small, small, medium, large, extra large, that kind of a thing.

And so builders can say, for large, I want it to be 36 pixels. Well, we know on a phone, 36 pixels is a lot bigger than on a desktop. And so what the fluid part of it does is it allows you to say, “Hey, for this font size, for large, I want it to be 36 pixels at most, right? The maximum size. But on smaller devices, let’s reduce that so you can set a minimum, maybe 24 pixels or 20 pixels.” 

Something that will still look good and scale, but also not be as big on screen. And so you can literally set a font and then watch as you reduce a browser width. And I’ve posted several of these on Twitter. You can watch the font degrade down to a smaller version to the point where you set it at a minimum.

Some of these designs and what this really opens the door for. I have a theme called Avant Garde that is sort of like using type as design and my hero text is using font sizes that are 120 pixels, just to make it really big and bold and avant garde. Well, 120 pixels on a phone doesn’t work. It breaks, things stack, and get cut off.

And so now this fluid typography allows it to go back down to scale so it fits on the screen and looks good. So I think a lot of these things sort of play into another, and it’s all sort of benefiting the web.

DP: I think on that note, we’ll take another short break and when we come back we’ll hear more from Brian Gardner about WordPress themes and predictions for 2023. We’ll wrap up our discussion, so stay tuned.

DP: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress community podcast. This episode we’ve been talking to Brian Gardner about WordPress themes and predictions for 2023, and I’m really enjoying hearing all of these themes and kind of a lot of the things, Brian, that you’ve been saying, I’ve been starting to see them sprinkle around the web.

One of the questions I was kind of wondering, as a theme developer, where do you like to look for your inspiration when you think about upcoming trends?

BG: Super good question. I have a couple of my kind of go-to, I guess they’re called CSS galleries or, you know, web galleries. One is called onepagelove.com. It’s just a showcase of well designed things and, and everything’s sort of categorized. So if I wanted to look for like landing page design inspiration, I can kind of break things down.

And there are other software platforms like Webflow. If you go to their theme, or template library that they have, the community library, it’s just a good place to get inspiration. I’ve gotten pretty good over the years at seeing something I like and then shutting it down and then interpreting it on my own.

So it’s not necessarily, copying or visual plagiarism. And so it’s amazing. Most of the stuff I’ve designed has always been some sort of visual fork of something I’ve seen somewhere else. Lots of design inspiration places out there for sure.

DP: You know, we mentioned that Gutenberg and kind of what’s been leading up to the Site Editor and block themes has been something that’s been happening for at least four years now in WordPress. And it’s funny, on Mastodon I wrote something about WordPress and the Site Editor, and I got this response from someone I don’t know, “Call me old fashioned, but I don’t like using blocks in WordPress and I’m allergic to Gutenberg.”

So there’s still some of these people that are holding out. I have to say I’ve been eager to switch over just because I know when I see cool new plugins or new blocks, I know I’m gonna have to kind of adopt to be able to use those. But it was after a recent conversation with you that I kind of really started to see a large part of the appeal.

Site design seemed a lot more unattainable for me in the customizer, and now with the Site Editor, it seems, like now that I’ve gotten past this learning curve, I actually feel like everything’s gonna be better. And this brings us to a tweet that Mike McAllister recently said. He said “2023 is going to be huge for the WordPress industry. I know it’s been a rough transition to this new paradigm, but after spending the last six months deep in the Site Editor, I’m very bullish on the potential here.” 

So I guess Brian, To wrap this up, the question is how, how do we get the community who are allergic to blocks? How do we get them to see what’s possible and why they want to change?

BG: Well, thankfully Matt Mullenweg did us a big service by essentially saying at WordCamp US that the support for Classic Editor is gonna go away. I know that it’s been a couple of years extra that it’s already been. I think we’re gonna start to see some elements of tough love, right? Just from all the way at the top saying it’s time to embrace, it’s gonna move.

We’re gonna stop enabling it to be so easy to go legacy or classic WordPress. And this really is the future. And in order to drive that adoption, some of these things need to happen, right? People need to just not have access to the tools that enable them to do this. So starting with Matt, I think, a lot of our team, in particular Developer Relations, Nick Diego, myself, Damon Cook. We get paid to basically talk about WordPress, the Block Editor, show people how it’s used, leverage the possibilities, through our content, through our presentations, through engagements we have with the community. 

And we’ve seen this all over the community. GoDaddy has their own version of sort of developer relations, Automattic does. And a lot of our positions exist to help facilitate that change. Not just as a mandate, but just as a way of getting people on a call, on a one-on-one in a group session to say, “Hey, let me show you what’s possible.” 

Because like you and I the other day, once people start to actually see it and realize that it’s actually easier than they think, that’s when this adoption will start to happen. And now that a lot of the features and a lot of the functionality is now part of WordPress Core, that makes it easier to do, right? Like a year ago, it’s like we understood the possibilities. We saw it all in Gutenberg the plugin, which is exploratory and usually not recommended for production.

But now that it’s landed in WordPress core and the masses have access to these things, now it’s time for, as Mike said, the product people to come in and build things that sort of extend these capabilities, show them off, demonstrate how they can be used. 

And so I’m really excited about all the plans I have, our team has, friends in the community, people like Rich Tabor has, just really excited about helping people see the light, if you will, and really excited about that.

DP: You know, on wrapping up here. I think the one big thing that we have to mention with 2023 is that we’re likely to see WordPress 6.2 and the kind of bookend of Gutenberg Phase Two. Right? We’re about to see kind of like feature complete, you know, things will still be added. It’s sort of the main features will be in 6.2.

Does that sound right?

BG: Yeah, I know that some of the Phase Two and Phase Three, which is more like multilingual and collaborative stuff, keeps getting pushed out. I think it’s because they’re trying to just really get the tool set done. 

6.2, there’s not a ton of new stuff. A lot of it is just refinement of experience in things that are already existing. I’m actually really excited about that as well cause there was a lot of stuff that was kind of, felt like it was crammed in, in ways that were like, okay, this probably could look and function and feel a little bit better.

And that’s what this 6.2 push is gonna be about. Which is like really refining and obviously bringing in some new things but just making it a better user experience, which then will help sort of the adoption. We just talked about.

DP: Well, on that note, I think it’s a great place to wrap up. Brian, I had a great conversation with you today. I believe your Twitter handle is @BGardner and your website is BrianGardner.com. People can check that out to see some great examples of your themes. And I want to say thanks for listening to Press This, a WordPress Community Podcast from WMR.

DP: You can follow my adventures with Torque magazine over on Twitter @thetorquemag or you can go to torquemag.io where we contribute tutorials and videos and interviews like this every day. So check out torquemag.io or follow us on Twitter. You can subscribe to Press This on Red Circle, iTunes, Spotify, or you can download it directly at wmr.fm each week. I’m your host Doctor Popular I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine. And I love to spotlight members of the community each and every week on Press This.

The post Press This: WordPress Themes of 2023 with Brian Gardner appeared first on Torque.

Welcome to Press This, the WordPress community podcast from WMR. Each episode features guests from around the community and discussions of the largest issues facing WordPress developers. The following is a transcription of the original recording.

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Doc Pop: You’re listening to Press This, a WordPress Community Podcast on WMR. Each week we spotlight members of the WordPress community. I’m your host, Doc Pop. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine, and my contributions over on TorqueMag.Io where I get to do podcasts and draw cartoons and tutorial videos. Check that out.

You can subscribe to Press This on Red Circle, iTunes, Spotify, or you can download episodes directly at wmr.fm. 

WordPress 6.1 is out now and features a bunch of new stuff; fluid typography, new site health checks, improved template systems, and much more.

It also features a new theme, the Twenty Twenty Three theme, which I dug around in this weekend as I was doing my own site redesign. To be honest, this was my first time actually diving into a full block based theme with style variations. So, I’m really excited today to be talking to Anne McCarthy, Product Liaison at Automattic, who is also a Core Editor Triage Lead on 6.1 with Nick Diego.

So we are gonna be talking about Site Editing. What’s new in 6.1 and what’s coming to 6.2 and beyond. Anne, thank you so much for joining me today. I wanna start off by just asking you what is your WordPress origin story? 

Anne McCarthy: Thank you so much for having me as well, this is really exciting to be on your podcast and yeah, my WordPress origin story, I feel very thankful.

I landed at UNC Chapel Hill as a student. And so I got my start basically being, I think it was called an instructional technologist. So I helped students and teachers use WordPress and this guy Jeff VanDrimmelen and basically took a risk on me. I was not a computer science major, but I had used Blogger for about six or seven years prior.

And he was looking for someone who could teach folks how to use the software, and he basically taught me everything I know. UNC had a multi-site that happened to be a client of the VIP team of Automattic. And so somewhere along the line I heard about Automattic and, three years in, learned about the wider world WordPress.

So my first couple years were pretty narrow, where I just thought it was just the software that UNC was using and I didn’t know the richness of the open source tradition and just the community. So it’s been really fun in the subsequent years to dive into that. 

DP: That’s awesome. I was a Blogger user as well, and switched over to WordPress in 2007.

And like I was saying earlier, I was just kind of working on my site redesign. I’ve only done four in the past 15 years, I guess. And this was my first time using the Site Editor and I wanna get started talking about some of the terminology here.

Cause actually it was a little easier for me to be like, I’m looking for a Full Site Editing theme.

AM: Mm-hmm.  

DP: Cause that just seemed like a thing. And it’s weird when I say I’m looking for a Site Editing theme or a theme with a Site Editor. That doesn’t quite sound like the new thing.

I’m trying to get my terminology right. I know we’re switching to Site Editor, but what do we call the current system of how sites are gonna work for WordPress?

AM: I love this question because there’s both like the short term “How do we explain this to folks?” And then there’s the long term, right?

Like the long, long term is probably just, “I’m using the WordPress Editor to build my site.” You won’t need to know if you’re using the template or the site Editor. And this is something in the FSE Outreach Program, which is a program I run about these features which has the FSE title in it, which is under a debate right now. Whether to update and how best to update. 

We talk about this a lot cause there are block themers there, there are agencies there, there are users there and it’s like, what’s the terminology, what do we call this? For themes in particular, we use Block Theme. That is what I would say is the official term. 

And then all of what you’re describing of the functionality can get kind of messy because there’s different types of themes that can adopt different parts of these features. I personally, and this is my personal opinion, and I’ve commented about this publicly on these Make posts, I think that using the term Full Site Editing is not the end of the world. I think where we need to get better about is being more nuanced when we’re talking about a specific feature, and that’s where things get muddied.

Is when someone’s talking about the Site Editor, but they’re like, “Oh yeah, I was using Full Site Editing. It’s like, well, what do you mean? What were you using exactly? Were you using the Styles interface? Were you using a theme block? Were you using the Crew Loop block? You can kind of get into the granularity there.

But yeah, in general, I would say right now, I think the community’s trying on Site Editor. We’re probably gonna find limitations and have to work through that from there. But yeah, a theme that uses the Site Editor typically we call a Block Theme. And I could get into so many details around the different types of themes as well, but hopefully that clears it up.

DP: I think that actually does. So I clumsily say a block-based theme or whatever, but I think what I was looking for with my redesign is I wanted to experience the block theme and in doing so, if I’m gonna go for a block theme, I might as well go for THE block theme.

So I did the WordPress Twenty Twenty Three theme, and then we also have these style variations in there, which I was explaining to my boss this morning and kind of clumsily kind of going like, is that like a sub theme? I mean style variation probably is the term we’re gonna use, but it does sort of feel like you’ve got a theme and you’ve also got a sub theme that’s gonna change little bits about your themes.

But style variation is the term we use there, right? 

AM: Yeah. Style variation is what we use there. And what’s interesting is you’re touching on something really, again, both in the short term and long term. Like short term, we’re calling it style variations. But imagine in the long term you’re creating a WordPress site and you’re like, oh man, that site has really cool styles.

I really like the fonts and the colors that are going on here. Ooh, that theme has really cool patterns, like I kind of wanna use both. And then that other theme has like a template that I really wanna use for that specific 404 page. Like that’s the kind of thing that in the future you could mix and match.

And so themes for a long time have provided the level of functionality. And now with block themes, you’re kind of neutralizing the functionality and bringing to the forefront the design tools. In a way that can allow for this mixing and matching in the long run. And so kind of what you’re describing, like is this multiple themes in one?

Yeah. It kind of is. The way the block themes work, it does allow you to change the look and feel without switching your theme. And it’s neat and very powerful. 

There’s a block theme developer who’s done some really neat stuff around having one theme that has like four niches in it. And part of how she allows for these different niches is to have different style variations along with different block patterns that go with each. So maybe you have a bunch of patterns that are related to a yoga studio and then a bunch of patterns related to a blog. You can have all of that within a single theme.

So it’s really powerful and flexible. But of course there’s rough edges around this. “Wait, when do I use these Style Variations and can I import them? Can I snag it from this right now?” And those are things that we’re figuring out. 

DP: So all, all of this kind of ties into, I think, WordPress 6.1, which the Site Editor and block themes have been around, but I think 6.1 is probably gonna be the most full featured yet because that’s gonna happen every release. Can you tell us what else is new in WordPress 6.1? 

AM: Yeah, so there’s a ton of stuff I could go over, you touched on some of it, like fluid typography is definitely a big feature.

We’ve long heard feedback around folks wanting more responsiveness and a lot of work is being done to have some intrinsic responsiveness. Certainly relying on break points, having a more intuitive system that automatically works. 

One of the other things that I think is like a bit hidden in this release that I think is really cool is there’s a lot of improvements around the navigation block fallbacks. So different setup states. It’s like how do we make sure someone’s having to not start from scratch or figure it out themselves. How do we make it where it automatically works and someone’s not having to think about it at all, whether they’re switching a theme or starting a new site, how can we make that super easy?

And a ton of work went into that to improve that experience, which is huge. Navigation is so important for a site obviously. So it’s a huge lift, but it’s kind of invisible cause it’s related to fallback. So I always like to call that out. 

In terms of everyday tooling and just everyday writing experience, I’d be remiss to not mention the updated quote and list blocks, which now allow for nested blocks, which is really exciting.

So for example, you can have a list block inside a quote block, which sounds really simple, but it’s quite difficult to actually accomplish and is available with 6.1. 

Also really neat for folks who are more on the agency side, I’m trying to cut across different audiences. Like on the agency side, there’s a really neat, I think Rich Tabor came up with this term of Content Only Editing. So imagine you’re using a pattern. You place a pattern, which is a collection of blocks onto a post or page and it has a header, some paragraphs, an image. And imagine you can’t actually rearrange how they each are set.

So the design is set. You can’t change where the image is, but you can replace it. So basically it allows for this Content Only Editing where it preserves the design, but you still have creative control. And I think this is great for a number of use cases. I actually am helping a nonprofit with the site right now and I’m probably gonna implement some of this for them.

Because sometimes they need more curation options. They need to have the editor be a bit more contained and this allows for that which is very neat. And it’s obviously opt in. It’s not something that’s gonna be out of the box. 

Another one that I think is, I wrote a post about this, but the number of design tools across blocks, the consistency is profound in 6.1.

The work is not even all the way done, but a huge, huge amount of work was done to both standardize and just basically propagate, for lack of a better word, these design tools to more and more blocks so that you’re not using one block going, “Wait, I have margin and padding control in this block. Why don’t I have it in this other one?”

A lot of that has been addressed, which is really exciting and also opens up a lot of cool creative options. One of my side projects is this Block Art Museum. And whenever I saw these design tools coming out, I think it’s gonna be so neat to see the level of art folks can create with the Block Editor with 6.1 because of just how many tools.

And the last thing I’ll mention is I just wanted to call out that Twenty Twenty Three, and actually Twenty Twenty Two, are both, as of this release, marked as accessibility ready. And they both mark the first block themes to have that tag, which I think is really exciting, or default themes to have that tag. And that was a lot of work done by a number of people to review those things and get fixes in place.

And obviously accessibility is always an ongoing task, but personally speaking, it was really important to see that work done. And so I like to call that out as well. 

DP: I think that’s a good spot for us to take a quick break and when we come back, we’re gonna talk to Anne McCarthy about what’s coming in 6.2, so stay tuned.

DP: You’re listening to Press This, a WordPress Community Podcast on WMR. This week we’ve got Anne McCarthy talking about what is in 6.1, which is currently the version of WordPress that’s available. And now we’re gonna switch gears a little bit and talk about long term. I wanna talk about what is the future of Site Editing, but we’re gonna start with just 6.2. Anne, do you have any details you can give us in terms of timelines and what to expect in 6.2? 

AM: Yes. I cannot necessarily speak to timelines cause that’s always a mystery to me in some ways. Like that happens in different conversations.

But I can talk about the work that’s being done. Basically before even 6.1 wrapped up, a huge amount of effort was done by Matías, who’s the project architect of Gutenberg to really gather a set of issues that could help wrap up Phase Two. And Phase Two is all about Site Editing and block themes and all that sort of stuff.

But if we were to try and wrap this up in 6.2, what would be the key functionality and features and refinements that we would need to get in place to start looking at Phase Three and customization, which is really exciting. I know it makes a lot of people nervous. 

And so there’s actually a GitHub issue right now. I’m gonna list the number. It’s 33094. It’s in the Gutenberg repo. It’s 33094. I should get it tattooed on me at this point cause I look at it so much. But it basically is a list of tasks and it’s being updated regularly. I myself and another contributor are providing weekly updates as well, so people who just wanna follow along can look at that issue, and see what’s being done, which I think is really exciting. It’s a new way of managing the work that’s being done, but I think thus far has been really helpful to get some early feedback in place. 

And part of that, just to kind of address it directly, we’ve heard a lot of feedback about the Navigation Block UX. It feeling frustrating. Some of the stuff I talked about with fallback with 6.1, there’s still work to be done there. A huge part of the current work around wrapping up Phase Two in this issue is around improving the Navigation Block UX, and that’s through basically what we’re calling List Editing. So you can imagine rather than just directly only being able to edit the navigation block in the editor itself this is exploring what it might look like to have a mini list view where you can actually edit the order of things and add new things and rename things in the block setting sidebar.

So that’s like an interesting one to call out specifically just cause I know the Navigation Block gets brought up a lot. 

Tied to this, there’s a lot of stuff around pattern categorization and experience. So for example, we have a category of patterns called Query, which is fine if you’re kind of a nerd, but what if you’re brand new to WordPress? What the heck is Query? How do we improve both those labels and what’s categorized within them? 

And then also bringing in patterns into the content experience. So imagine you have three blocks. One’s a heading, one’s a column, and one’s a paragraph. Imagine if there was a way for you to, while you’re editing that content, see other patterns that match the same content blocks. And you could switch through them and switch around your content without losing your content. But keeping the different format of those blocks in place. 

There’s also work to be done around unifying the different editors. So kind of like we were talking before, like what do we call this thing? How do we bring back content editing into the site editors? You’re not having to switch between the different modes. How can we make it really cohesive and obvious that what you’re doing is editing the entire site versus editing just this template or just this post or page. So it’s a combination of unification and distinction, for lack of a better word.

And some of that’s gonna be done through things like colorizing template parts. So whenever you click into a template part, you get a notice that you’re, you know, hitting something that’s global across the site. Some of it is just pure exposure, so bringing back, through like information architecture, it’s like what does this look like when we’re navigating between these different items and using the different items.

There’s also some fun stuff around managing font sets. A pathway to migrate widgets to block themes. Some cool stuff around style switching. But that whole issue, if you really get into it, there’s a ton there. I also have to mention on the broader Core side the initiatives around performance and theme experience and I always get this almost wrong page, PHP 8.2, compatibility. 

Some site health improvements, REST API improvements, rollback improvements, like all of those are continuing on as well. I always feel like it’s easy not to mention that stuff and it’s so important. So I wanna call that out too. 

There’s a ton of work being done. Right now, there is not yet a roadmap for 6.2, but I expect that to come in the new year, probably in January at some point Matías usually writes those. And I imagine by then too, we’ll have a sense of when the release might be. 

DP: You started off this conversation about 6.2 as an interesting note. A probable goal for 6.2 is to try to wrap up, as best as possible, cause this is always gonna be something they’re gonna be working on. But just try to wrap up Gutenberg Phase Two. And I’m just gonna go through kind of a recap of the Gutenberg phases. There’s four of them. 

Phase One, it was the Block Editor just for posts, just for writing posts and having just basic blocks. Phase Two was what they called Full Site Editing customization options, which is basically bringing that Block Editor to everywhere on your site, like the way that you do any customization to your site. And then I think the order of the next two have changed. I’m not sure which one’s next, but I think the next one’s gonna be Phase Three I think is gonna be multilingual website support.

Followed by Phase Four, multi-author collaboration, which is the one that I’m super excited about. Although I totally get multilingual is very important for something that’s running 40% of the web. 

AM: It’s actually still gonna be three is gonna be customization and four is multilingual.

DP: Oh.

AM: I know people have lots of feelings about that cause it’s like we should do multilingual first and it’s actually customization’s next. So your thing is up next. I can tell you that. Which is exciting. 

DP: You’re talking about multi-author collaboration will be next? 

AM: Yes. Mm-hmm.

DP: Oh Wow. 

AM: That’ll be Phase Three. So that’s what’s gonna be underway for Phase Three, which is gonna be really interesting. I think it’s really easy to just get stuck on kind of like the Google Doc style of editing, but it also includes things like editing workflows and notifications and comments and all sorts of stuff that we don’t necessarily think about when we think about collaborative editing.

DP: So back to something you mentioned also in 6.1 and something that might be kind of tweaked in the future. You mentioned that for new users to Site Editing, they may not quite be sure what they’re editing or what’s editable. I’ll just kind of say with my personal experience over this weekend, I’m not ashamed to admit the frustrations that I ran into were customizing my front page.

You’re obviously gonna start with your front page on your redesign, and then when I got to posts, I just didn’t know what to do. In the previous versions of the customizer, WordPress customizer, you could kind of click on a post link in the customizer and it would open up that, and I feel like you could kind of explore your site and customize sort of through this window of the customizer.

Where here, it took me a long time to figure this out, and I’m still not sure I got it. But here I kind of feel like it’s starting you with the default kind of front page template. But then if you want to, there’s gonna be a list of templates; templates for pages, templates for your about page, templates for your privacy page maybe, or stuff like that. 

And so you have to kind of learn how to navigate, un-intuitively for me, learn to navigate to these other things. To even know that that’s how I edited it, that I just was not there. Is that kind of how I should be thinking? Is that if I want to change how my posts look, that was the thing that was frustrating me, they all have this gray color on the image as an overlay. I needed to go to templates and I guess go to posts? Is that kind of the new flow for this? 

AM: Right now, that is correct. And I think one of the things that’s what you’re touching on is actually something I didn’t mention with the phase two customization issue, but it’s something that we’re actively testing right now in the outreach program.

So there’s a current FSE exploration I’m calling an exploration because it is that early. But it all ties into some of these issues I was talking about with wrapping up phase two. And it’s called Browse Mode. So that experience of what you’re describing, of clicking through your site and seeing how the different pieces look and how you make changes and how it impacts those, that’s exactly what Browse Mode is trying to address.

So imagine you enter the Editor and you can click on your site in that way. You enter your Editor and on the left hand side you would see a navigation. The list of your templates, template parts, content editing, like that kind of stuff in the sidebar.

So stuff around styles, would all be in a sidebar and open by default. And then from there you can click around your site. Kind of similar to the customizer experience that I think people have gotten used to to address this exact problem that you’re describing. Cause right now when you open the site and you’re just dropped into your home page content, it’s confusing. And so how do we unify both the content editing and also allow people to see changes across their site? 

And this comes into play with style variations as well. If you’re switching out style variations, you wanna know like, is this just impacting this on this template or is this impacting everything?

So this is part of the design challenges that are in place right now and that are being attempted to solve. And I’m really glad I was about to ask how your experience was, cause you’re touching on a lot of things like the global versus local. How do I even interact with templates? What do I need to know?

And the burden to know a lot about templates is also something that has come up. Because the average user doesn’t understand the template hierarchy, for example. 

DP: Yeah. Well, I think that’s exciting. I’m glad that y’all are thinking about folks like me who admittedly are coming from the old version.

So we’re not necessarily a new user, we’re just kind of used to doing things a certain way. I’m glad that that’s being taken into consideration, but I imagine that’ll help, you know, any user with that navigation. I think if anybody was trying to figure out how to edit a post, I don’t know how they would find that without Googling it. 

And then once you know where it is, I think once I’ve gone through that process, now I know where to look for something else. Maybe that’s in the same spot as this. So we’re gonna take a quick break here and we’re gonna come back and wrap up this interview with Anne McCarthy about 6.2 and the future of Site Editing.

Stay tuned. We’ll see you soon.

DP: Welcome back to Press This a WordPress Community Podcast here on WMR. My name is Doc. I am chatting with Anne McCarthy, a Product Liaison at Automatic, and we just got done talking about what’s coming into the future of Gutenberg Phase Two wrapping up, and 6.2 coming out sometime next year. You know, I think I want to just ask a couple more kind of general questions that I think you’ve had some experience with.

One is, before the show started, you and I were talking about an experimental program that you’re running on Slack. Can you tell us about what that is? 

AM: Yeah, so the FSE Outreach program started as a reaction to basically how the Block Editor was introduced. So how could we learn from that experience of bringing the community more with us, doing more intentional outreach and getting earlier feedback.

And so the whole intent of the program is to help people, explore, be educated about, be aware of what’s coming with Full Site Editing, and actually give direct feedback in a way that influences the direction of the product, which is really exciting. It is for everyone. There is no necessarily like set level you need to be in with experience because we do need feedback from everyone.

Whether you’re a block theme or a plugin author, an agency, a brand new user, if you’re in higher ed, if you’re an accessibility expert, like we need all of it. And so it’s a neat program that basically I do a combination of product feedback. So doing calls for testing these explorations.

I’ll do some stuff around surveys. So surveying theme authors around what they need or end users around what they’re experiencing. And then some educational stuff around, hallway hangouts. They’re basically just really casual collaborative conversations that folks can have around what’s coming up.

I typically host them and some other folks have hosted them. And they’re just meant to kind of have like a more IRL kind of high bandwidth conversation about these important topics. But yeah, it’s a place where if folks just wanna lurk. You can lurk. I share every two weeks a roundup of issues that have captured my attention on GitHub as well as posts that are important.

And try to just have it be a place where people can, can stay up to date, ask questions, and embrace being new to this stuff and have a place to share their feedback. 

DP: That actually brings me to another question. I was wondering what are some of the features that you would like more visibility given to from folks in the community?

AM: Ooh, interesting. Like that are already in place? 

DP: Yeah, I mean, like if you could help put a spotlight on some things in WordPress that you would like people to work on, what would be those areas or specific things you would like to see some folks working on?

AM: I would say one of the big things that keeps coming up for me. I’ll say a couple of different things and hopefully this is answering your question.

I wanna see some more interesting plugin experiments around Site Editing. I think for example, there’s a bunch of curation options that you can have that expose or hide different design tools and different options. I think it’d be really neat to have a plugin that helps you like choose your level of complexity

You could maybe kind of like, if you’re playing a video game, it’s like, what’s your difficulty level? It’s kind of like, I want a version of that for the Site Editor. That’s like a big thing is just like experimenting with that kind of stuff. 

In terms of features that I wish were talked about more or emphasized more, it kind of is related to the same thing. I think there’s some stuff around just curation options, like the stuff you can do with pattern locking or template locking, or even just block locking. And having different ways that folks can be creative and still have design control and creative control, but within certain guardrails, I think is one of the most exciting things that’s happening with the Site Editor, like everyone. Basically is like, oh, this is looking up too much control. This is too overwhelming. Um, and actually a ton of work has been done to allow for curation and to make the experience more manageable especially for folks in an agency realm who might wanna do that for their clients. And it’s just something that I feel like it repeatedly needs to be discussed. 

And then more broadly, one of the things that I really, really, really feel pretty vigilant about is accessibility. So making sure folks are doing accessibility testing when we are creating these features and also bringing the accessibility team into this stuff.

And the accessibility team always needs more contributors. So if you’re looking to get involved in that way I think that that’s a huge way to get involved and something we have to think about when we’re creating the future of things. Does that answer your question? 

DP: I think so, yes.

Anne, we need to wrap up here. I really appreciate your time. If people want to reach out to you or ask you questions as a follow up, I think we were saying, uh, to find you on the WordPress Slack. Is that correct? 
AM: Yes, that’s correct. I’m @Annezazu. And then I also have the site nomad.blog. And I have a contact form there and I truly do welcome folks to reach out.

DP: You can follow my adventures with Torque magazine over on Twitter @thetorquemag or you can go to torquemag.io where we contribute tutorials and videos and interviews like this every day. So check out torquemag.io or follow us on Twitter. You can subscribe to Press This on Red Circle, iTunes, Spotify, or you can download it directly at wmr.fm each week. I’m your host Doctor Popular I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine. And I love to spotlight members of the community each and every week on Press This.

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