Preparations for WordCamp Europe (WCEU) 2023 in Athens are moving forward as the team will soon be contacting speakers selected for the event. Organizers have launched a Speaker Support Program aimed at encouraging more diversity on stage by connecting speakers with companies that are willing to financially support them.
WCEU has also opened registration for Contributor Day, which will take place on June 8, kicking off the event. Those who are unable attend in person can join in the #contributor-day channel on Slack as well as the specific channels for the contributor teams.
Alongside Contributor Day, WCEU has announced it will be hosting an interactive Workshop for Kids on June 8, to introduce future generations to WordPress. It will cover the basics of WordPress, how to create a website, choose a theme, and publish content. The workshop is open to kids aged 13-16 and all materials will be provided.
WCEU will also have free childcare available during the Contributor Day and the main conference from June 8-10, to make the WordCamp more accessible for parents and guardians. Children aged 16 and younger are eligible to attend but must register by May 20, as there is limited availability for childcare.
The call for volunteers is still open with a variety of roles available. Volunteers will receive one or two collectable volunteer t-shirt(s), a free ticket, and an invite to the Social, as well as the experience of contributing back to the WordPress community at one of its largest events.
Representatives of the BuddyPress core team will be hosting a contributor day alongside the French WordPress Community Contributor Day in Paris on April 20, 2023. This in-person event has filled up its registration and posted its schedule already, but BuddyPress core developer Mathieu Viet is inviting people to join online to contribute to BuddyPress.
“As we’re currently working on a very ambitious 12.0 release with the main goal of migrating from our Legacy URL parser to using the WordPress Rewrite API, there are many areas getting your contributions would really help us and make a huge difference,” Viet said.
BuddyPress 12.0 is expected to be released May 31, 2023, and merging the BP Rewrites feature plugin into the core plugin will be a major change that impacts the entire BuddyPress ecosystem. The effort to migrate BuddyPress’ custom URI parser to use WordPress’ Rewrite API has been in the works for the past decade. Contributors will also be providing backwards compatibility via a new plugin called BP Classic that will contain BuddyPress’ legacy widgets. The virtual contributor day will organize code contributions towards these efforts.
In addition to code, people can also contribute to documentation regarding how developers can prepare their themes and plugins to be ready for BP Rewrites, and documentation for end users on how the change will benefit their BuddyPress experience. Viet also intends to organize some common troubleshooting tips for the inevitable support forum requests that the major change will generate.
The event will run from 08:15 UTC to 15:30 UTC. Although virtual attendees may miss out on the hot drinks and pastries, they can be equal participants by joining BuddyPress’ Slack channel and jumping in on one of the projects.
WooCommerce 7.6 was released today with two new blocks merged from the WooCommerce Blocks plugin. The Single Product Details block and the “Add to Cart” Form block are now available to store owners who want to use the Site Editor to design their own Single Product Templates.
Along with the button, the “Add to Cart” form block will automatically display additional options, depending on if the product has a set available quantity or variations.
In templates where store owners are displaying multiple products, attributes filtering has been improved for the Products block. Inside the editor, there is now a collapsible menu for selecting attributes and filtering the display. It also shows a live preview of the products that will be included in this view.
For those who are designing pages and templates with patterns, WooCommerce 7.6 makes it much easier to get a consistent design with improved, scalable margins for patterns using the Products block.
This release also improves the Mini Cart block’s performance, with content preloaded, and an appearance that more closely matches the site’s active theme.
WooCommerce 7.6 includes several important updates for developers, including the following:
Clearer, renamed event names in block-based Checkout
Reintroduced cache for orders (after it was reverted due to causing an infinite loop on activation) when custom tables are enabled
Added an encoding selector to the product importer
Add/Remove order coupon actions are now logged in notes
Products widget can now be sorted by menu_order
For a more detailed look at the 673 commits in 7.6, check out the full changelog, which references each pull request included in the release.
WooCommerce has also released its Contributor Day Guide today for the upcoming 24-hour virtual event on April 19, 2023. There are instructions for how to get your development environment set up for contributing and how to join the Woo Community Slack. The guide outlines specific topics and tickets that will be addressed, with dedicated Slack channels for each.
Yoast SEO 20.5 was released this week with several security fixes and an improved Google SERP preview. The preview shows mobile and desktop snippets with Google’s current styling so users can see exactly how their snippets will look and tweak how they optimize them for Google Search results.
Another highlight of this release is that Yoast SEO has dropped compatibility with PHP 5.6, 7.0 and 7.1. The plugin now requires PHP 7.2.5 or higher (along with WP 6.0). While this may seem extreme at first glance, approximately 89.9% of WordPress sites are running on PHP 7.2+. WordPress doesn’t cross-reference these stats with WP version numbers, but it’s possible sites running on much older versions of WordPress are also on unsupported versions of PHP.
“To move the web forward, we need to take a stand against old, slow, and unsafe software,” Yoast founder Joost de Valk said at that time. “Because web hosts are not upgrading PHP, we have decided to start pushing this from within plugins.” He contended that the WordPress ecosystem was losing good developers because the project was moving too slowly and also made the case for security and speed.
Although the latest version 20.5 will be incompatible with approximately 10% of WordPress sites running unsupported versions of PHP, this move forward is necessary for maintaining a healthy and secure ecosystem.
WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy is coordinating a second women and nonbinary release squad for the 6.4 release, which is anticipated to land in November 2023. In 2020, WordPress 5.6 “Simone” was led by an all-women and non-binary identifying release squad, a first in WordPress’ history, and Haden Chomphosy is proposing the project go for it again.
“Having a release squad comprised of folx we don’t typically see in technology also has a goal of increasing the number of underrepresented people who have experience maintaining, managing, and shipping software in an open source project,” Haden Chomphosy said. “All contributions to the release and release process are welcome.”
WordPress 6.3, which is targeted for a mid-July release, will give prospective 6.4 squad members the opportunity to shadow more experienced contributors and gain new skills by working with mentors and assisting with the release. She is calling for mentors to join in preparing this new round of leaders. The process is a several-months long commitment that gives contributors a head start on understanding their roles in the squad, though it is not required for participation in the 6.4 release.
Haden Chomphosy emphasized that anyone will be able to contribute to the release but the leaders in the 6.4 squad will be limited to this specific group.
“I short-hand the release to ‘women and nonbinary’ for easy referencing in our day-to-day collaboration, but the release squad will be open to anyone who identifies as a woman, nonbinary, or gender-expansive,” she said. “All contributions are welcome as always, regardless of how you identify or what groups you feel part of.”
WordPress has gained valuable new contributors and leaders from this initiative in the past, including 6.2 Core Tech Co-Leads Tonya Mork.
“Before joining the 5.6 Release Squad, I had not contributed to the project,” Mork said. “I had no idea how the release cycle worked or where to start. Yup, I was a contributing noob. But with mentoring, I was well supported in my onboarding. And you will be too! The experience was and still is incredible!“
Based on the response to Haden Chomphosy’s proposal, there should be no shortage of contributors and volunteers available to help with the women and nonbinary 6.4 release squad. She is requesting anyone who wants to be part of the squad or help as a mentor leading up to the release to leave a comment on the post.
The security issue was discovered by Wordfence security researcher Marco Wotschka in January 2023. It was submitted to the WordPress Plugin Security Team, which acknowledged receipt of the report nearly two months later on March 24, 2023.
“This can be leveraged by unauthenticated attackers to facilitate a site takeover by injecting malicious JavaScript into the database of an affected site that may execute when a site administrator accesses the logging page,” Wotschka said.
Version 1.7.2 of the plugin patches the vulnerability. It was released on April 4 with a note in the changelog that simply says “Security fixes.” Version 1.7.1 and previous versions remain vulnerable.
In August 2021, the plugin had more than 900,000 active users, and more than 2 million in 2018, but seems to be dying a slow death and is no longer maintained, as it hasn’t been updated in years.
Wordfence has more details in the advisory on how the plugin might be exploited and advises users update immediately.
In February 2023, James Giroux founded TeamWP, a project that aims to advocate for open, people-first workplaces in the WordPress ecosystem. His first initiative was to launch the Team Experience Index, a benchmark employee engagement survey designed specifically for people working in the world of WordPress.
“The distributed nature of WordPress companies means they often lack the resources and knowledge to create truly open, people-first workplaces,†Giroux said. “The Team Experience Index fills this gap by providing insights and benchmarks that help companies identify strengths and areas for improvement, fostering a more open, collaborative, and innovative work culture.â€
The comprehensive survey will be aggregated and anonymized. It takes approximately 4-7 minutes to complete and includes questions about employee experience, company culture, leadership, management and teamwork, career progression opportunities, professional development, compensation and recognition, and employees’ individual experiences.
While responses are recorded anonymously, it’s important to note that the company name is required, along with the employee’s role and the number of employees. Respondents should be aware that they are collectively giving away a lot of private information and should only share if they believe the insights will have a positive impact on the wider ecosystem.
Giroux plans to share the initial results of the Team Experience Index at WordCamp Europe in Athens in June 2023. Anyone working at a WordPress product or service company, agency, or hosting company is invited to complete the survey.
As more WordPress plugins for AI-generated content and images, chatbots, and assistants, are landing in the official directory, developers are beginning to explore even deeper integration with the block editor. Moving beyond the prototypical content generators that are cobbled together into a plugin, the tools developers are experimenting with today will provide a more deeply integrated experience that works seamlessly with the block editor as a natural extension of its capabilities.
Last week Human Made CTO Joe Hoyle published an early preview of generative AI natively integrated into the block editor with a video demonstrating prompts working across various blocks.
I’ve been working on a WordPress Gutenberg-native AI copilot. The results were pretty astounding to me once I got GPT to “speak Gutenberg†pic.twitter.com/adEfkPRHcb
“Taking a native-first approach to integrating generative AI into WordPress, we’ve been experimenting with approaches to a ‘WordPress Copilot’ that can ‘speak’ Gutenberg / block-editor,” Hoyle said.
“Copy-pasting paragraphs between ChatGPT and WordPress only goes so far, while having the tools directly embedded in the editor for block layout generation, auto-linking, formatting, translation summarization and more open up a world of possibilities and productivity wins for content creators.”
Munir Kamal, WordPress developer and founder of Gutenberg Hub, has created a native AI writer with a similar UI to the tool Hoyle previewed, as they both were inspired by the Notion app. His preview video demonstrates far more capabilities than the earlier AI content generators for WordPress have implemented.
I've been working on a native AI writer inspired by Notion, designed to seamlessly integrate into #Gutenberg. Unlike clunky admin approached #AI plugins this will be your hidden Ai content assistant. Keep an eye out for it at the @GutenbergHub shop.#WordPress#chatgptpic.twitter.com/WmCkJCpF0l
Kamal has tapped into the GPT API to add more options to the AI writer, including the ability to rewrite, improve the generated text, fix grammar, simplify language, make it shorter, make it longer, and translate. He plans to release it as a commercial plugin in his Gutenberg Hub shop when it’s ready.
“With the increasing advancements in AI technology, thanks to OpenAI for taking the leap, I believe it will become an even more integral part of blogging,” Kamal said when asked about AI and the future of blogging. “It can assist in generating ideas, improving grammar and structure, and even help with SEO optimization.
Hoyle is equally optimistic on the future of AI integrated into WordPress tools. It will be exciting to see if his Gutenberg-native AI copilot can be extended to blocks inside the Site Editor, to offer a text prompt-guided design experience without having to click through the tools.
“Going through this project has convinced me that LLMs [Large Language Model] have much more potential than I was giving them credit for,” Hoyle said. “It feels like there’s still a lot to discover what the models are capable of.
“As the availability to GPT-4 (and with it larger token limits) increases, we see a clear path of improvement to what we’ve shown today. The data and information that is stored and available to the Content Management System is ideal for model-training and building a corpus of data specific to the user. Generating, improving and suggesting content of all types that is specific to the data set will be another lead forward in the utility of these tools. We see a future where AI will support and enhance the work we all do, and see the necessity to integrate the technology deeply into the tools and solutions we create.”
Gutenberg 15.5 was released this week with more new features and refinements to WordPress’ full-site editing capabilities. The project will soon be moving on to Phase 3 with real-time collaboration on the roadmap, but there are still many improvements on the way for the Site Editor and core blocks.
This release introduces experimental support for grid layouts in the Group block. Gutenberg contributors are testing a Grid layout type as a new variation for the Group block. They decided on this implementation instead of a new block in order to get more real-world use on the first iteration.
After testing, I found the Grid layout type fits as a natural addition to other Group variations. This first iteration ships with one setting for configuring the minimum column width, but more options can be added in the future. I found it to be far easier to manipulate than the Columns block for basic grids. It may be easier for users to discover and understand if it were implemented as a new block, with the grouping implicit instead of having to add a Group block first and then select a layout.
Grid layouts are a common feature of page builder plugins and this new capability is necessary to make Gutenberg’s page building capabilities more robust. With more testing, contributors can settle on an implementation and build it out from there. If you want to give it a try, the Grid variation for the Group block can be enabled under Gutenberg > Experiments.
Gutenberg 5.5 also introduces the ability for theme authors to identify a custom pattern to be displayed when users load a specific template, such as a 404 page, author page, or single post, instead of relying on a fallback template or starting from a blank slate. This makes it possible to have custom patterns as template starters, a friendlier jumping off point for users who are editing their sites.
The update brings the ability for users to style their Captions in the Styles interface. Captions’ color, typography, and size can now be easily edited with changes applied globally.
A few other important updates in this release include the following:
New Post Modified Date variation for the Post Date block lets users display the post’s most recent date updated
Sticky Position: New “Make sticky†action added to the Template Part block
Buttons: Disabled support for “edit as HTML” in block options
 Time to Read block adds spacing and typography support
Columns block adds support for template locking
“Image size†replaced with “Resolution†in image size controls
Check out the changelog in the release post for a full list of all the bug fixes, enhancements, and performance, documentation, and code quality improvements.
Support for the WordPress mobile apps is moving to the WordPress.org forums. Previously, users were routed to WordPress.com, even those who were self-hosted, and Automattic employees handled support tickets related to the mobile apps.
Although the mobile apps previously had forums on an older bbPress installation, they were rarely used as those in need of helped were piped through the WordPress.com support queue. The new mobile support forum is listed on the Support page and is already active with requests regarding app crashes, XML-RPC errors, and issues with core blocks.
Bringing mobile support to a public place has the advantage of allowing users to help each other, search through old threads, and look for answers in the same way they do for problems with themes or plugins. It standardizes the support experience so users know what to expect. The Meta trac ticket for the forum creation has been closed now that the initiative is complete and the forum is operational.
