In 2020, WordPress began prioritizing education as critical to the project’s future, launching Learn.WordPress to support beginners to advanced learners with free educational content. Over the past two years, WordPress’ Training team has been instrumental in building and expanding this resource with synchronous and asynchronous learning opportunities, as well as downloadable lesson plans for instructors to use in live environments.
WordPress’ Training team has published an Individual Learner Survey as part of a needs analysis for the free resources available on Learn WordPress. It is the first phase in the project which aims to expand and improve the materials produced by contributors. It takes approximately five minutes to complete and will cover a few basic demographic questions, learning styles, and also gauges respondents’ interest in the possibility of a WordPress certification program.
The survey is open to all who have used Learn WordPress resources as well as those who have not yet explored them. If you have a few minutes, take the survey and send some feedback to help make the resources more useful in the future.
WordPress.com users are getting early access to some of the major new features that are shipping with the upcoming WordPress 6.2 release. The platform rolled out Browse Mode today, describing it as “an easier way to navigate the Site Editor.” This is one of the most impactful changes coming to customization, as it unifies the design and makes it less confusing to navigate than previous iterations.
The Gutenberg plugin shipped Browse Mode in version 14.8, released in December 2022, and the feature is on deck to be rolled into the upcoming WordPress release.
WordPress.com also introduced users to split block settings, along with the ability to preview style options with the Style Book and apply design changes sitewide with the “Apply Globally” feature. One thing the platform did well in this announcement was to answer the user question, “Why would I need this?” for each new feature:
When to use this feature: You’re curious about switching up the colors or typography on your site, but you want to know what it’ll look like, especially within specific blocks, before committing.Â
WordPress.com launching these features to millions of users demonstrates high confidence in their readiness for use in production on the platform.
Self-hosted WordPress users will get this update in a couple months. Beta 1 is expected on February 7, with RC1 planned for a month later, and the official release scheduled for March 28, 2023. Those who want these features now can get them today by installing the Gutenberg plugin, where they have been tested for months by more than 300,000 users.
During the 2022 State of the Word, Matt Mullenweg highlighted a few examples of how Gutenberg adoption is growing beyond WordPress and how he believed it could become “bigger than WordPress itself.†Engine Awesome, a Laravel-based SaaS application, is one example he cited that is using the block editor to allow customers to build their own custom applications.
Steve Bruner, SlipFire agency owner and former CEO of Piklist, and WordPress developer and core committer Timothy Jacobs, joined forces in 2022 to create Engine Awesome.
“All companies use unique processes and workflows to run their businesses,” Bruner said in the company’s launch post. “Even those in the same industry do things differently from their competitors. Unfortunately, today’s software does not allow for this flexibility. Instead, they feature defined rules, often forcing us to put square pegs in round holes. We want to change that.”
Engine Awesome is a no-code application builder where users can create object types (similar to custom post types) to store and organize their data. Here is an example from the dashboard of a demo application for cleaning jobs.
It offers a user-friendly interface for team members or others involved in managing the business to schedule and edit entries as work is completed.
On the application building side, users can easily add, edit, or delete object types and add a theme for the layouts.
Editing an object type looks very similar to the WordPress block editor. App creators can easily add fields that will be part of that object and drag and drop to rearrange them. Users can create relationships between object types for smart ways of organizing the app’s data. Engine Awesome is also set up to connect apps to more than 5,000 services via Zapier integration.
If the interface looks similar to WordPress, it’s because the front-end uses the same theme.json system as WordPress core to provide different themes and appearance options. In the future, Bruner said the apps created could automatically inherit the styles of a WordPress site by consuming its theme.json file.
“Engine Awesome is a SaaS application with a Laravel and Postgres backend,” Bruner said. “We chose MongoDB to store customer data because its document-oriented design allows our customers flexibility when choosing their fields.
“The front-end is a headless React application built primarily using the Gutenberg JavaScript packages. We use the Gutenberg packages directly instead of the Isolated Editor project as it affords us a higher degree of control and customization.”
Engine Awesome provides a user-friendly UI for tracking information that might otherwise be added to a spreadsheet. It gives users a more flexible way to manage their business data via an application designed for their needs, at a fraction of the cost of having a custom app created by a development company.
Engine Awesome is currently manually onboarding new customers as the company works on its pricing and signup process. Prices start at $10/month following a 30-day free trial which includes an initial Zoom call to help customers get up and running.
Bruner shared a few applications that customers have created using Engine Awesome:
Shelly’s Organic Home Cleaning has four teams of three cleaners each. Each morning teams will log into Engine Awesome to see their upcoming jobs. Once at the location, they place the job in “cleaning†status and being. Upon completion, the job is placed in a “Done†status. Homeowners are automatically emailed when the job has started and when it ends. Once the cleaning service moves to credit cards, we will email a Stripe payment link upon completion.
A Marketing company that builds interactive in-store displays is creating an application to manage them. Engine Awesome will hold product and store information, and the displays will update via our API.
Homeowners Hub, a home repair concierge, is testing an application where their vendors create a quote in their own Engine Awesome account, which gets updated in the Homeowners Hub account—providing a direct integration between the two companies.
Bruner said the most popular feature is building a CRM with an activity feed. All of the applications these customers have created have various Zapier integrations that provide further automation.
The app builder is fairly simple right now but there are many possibilities the Engine Awesome team plans to explore in the future. The current roadmap includes the following planned features:
Direct eCommerce functionality
Integrated scheduling and booking
Templates so users can get up and running quickly
Front-end forms
Enterprise features
It is exciting to see the block editor being used outside of WordPress but Bruner said Engine Awesome also plans on having a WordPress plugin that would deliver some of its functionality. The plugin specifics have not yet been nailed down, but the team is considering connecting WordPress sites to Engine Awesome to sync data. For example, WooCommerce customers could automatically be added to an Engine Awesome CRM.
“Down the road, we may include a version of the application builder in WordPress itself,” Bruner said. “Right now our focus is on making the SaaS product the best it can be.”
Will WordPress be ready to remove the Beta label from the Site Editor in the upcoming 6.2 release? The project’s Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy addressed this question in her latest WP Briefing podcast episode titled “What Does Concluding a Gutenberg Phase Really Mean?“
“All of the projects, with the exception of two, I believe, in the Phase 2 scoping ticket, will be shipped in the Gutenberg plugin before [the] WordPress 6.2 release comes out,” Haden Chomphosy said. “Barring any major breaking issues, those will then land in that major release in WordPress 6.2. So 99% of the features we considered in scope for Phase 2 will be in core by April.”
Haden Chomphosy also mentioned the possibility of removing the Beta label from the Site Editor, if a specific set of conditions are met. She referenced the tracking issue created in March 2022, that outlines the most critical remaining items in Phase 2 that must be completed before removing the label, as well as a few other follow-up items that are related but less critical to resolve before taking it out of Beta.
“We’ve been discussing that possibility with the input of the community over the course of the last few major releases, and we’ll do the same as we get ready for the 6.2 release as well,” she said.
“Fingers crossed that we get to remove that label this time around, but also, the acceptance criteria on it are pretty clear. So it’s really a matter of yes or no on all of the columns all the way down.”
Contributors have been aiming to get the Beta label removed since 6.1 but the criteria had not yet been met. The current blockers include a ticket to improve the Site Editor loading state so that everything is fully loaded before users start interacting, removing the jumpiness of half-rendered states. This item was added to the Todo column of the remaining WordPress 6.2 Editor Tasks project board.
Haden Chomphosy assured podcast listeners that the conclusion of Phase 2 does not mean that WordPress will stop accepting user feedback or bug reports on customization features.
“It definitely does not mean that we will stop shipping refinements to the user experience,” she said. “As much as I’d like to say this isn’t true, I think all open source contributors know that no matter how much you test a solution, you can’t actually account for all possible use cases when you work on a project this size.
“So as we find things that we didn’t realize were a little rough to use, we will, of course, make the effort to smooth those workflows as quickly as possible.”
As part of the big picture goals for WordPress in 2023, the project is embarking on an effort to work through old tickets that are stuck due to no consensus, missing decisions, or multiple possible solutions. WordPress Core Committer Jb Audras has organized Trac triage sessions dedicated to moving these tickets forward or closing the ones that are no longer relevant.
Audras’ audit shows that there are 19 tickets that are more than 15 years old, 688 that are 10 years old, but the largest chunk of 3,484 tickets falls into the 5-10 year old category.
The first kickoff session was held on January 26 in the #core Slack channel. Contributors started with a small selection of very old tickets with the goal of identifying a path towards resolution and an owner for the ticket. This generated some renewed discussion, for example, on a 17-year-old ticket where “HTML comments in posts aren’t handled properly” and another of the same age regarding an unwanted slash in get_pagenum_link().Â
In some cases tickets were closed and in others contributors are working on reproducing the issue, testing, and refreshing patches where possible. One 13-year-old ticket, which fixes the wp_get_attachment_url() function not returning a valid URL if the filename contains unescaped URL characters, was added to the 6.2 milestone with a PR awaiting review. Some tickets require deep historical knowledge of WordPress and will benefit from having participation from veteran contributors.
The next “Classic†triage session will happen in the #core Slack channel on Thursday, March 9, 2023 at 10:00 AM EST. Anyone who wants to be part of finding a resolution for some of these old tickets is invited to join. Participants in the kickoff session also discussed alternating between very old and very new tickets, which are often easier for getting newer contributors involved.
The annual vender-neutral survey received 872 qualified responses from people in more than 20 major industries. Responses indicate that open source adoption continues to grow, as 80% of organizations reported increasing the use of OSS over the past year. The industries where open source adoption increased significantly include oil and gas, telecommunications, and energy.
When asked which categories of open source are being used or evaluated in their organizations, more than 32% of respondents said they are using open source software development life cycle tools, containers and container orchestration tech, and databases. Open source content management systems, a new category this year, have been adopted by more than 21% of respondents. One interesting finding is that usage of open source security tools has declined from 22% last year to 15.94%.
One question of the survey aimed to identify the reasons why organizations choose open source software and respondents could select more than one answer. The variety of reasons with no particular standouts indicates that organizations have many diverse and important factors that drive them to using open source software, which may not be easy to predict based on industry or organization size.
The top four challenges organizations reported in supporting open source software include maintaining security policies or compliance (41.97%), lack of skills, experience, or proficiency (37.50%), keeping up with updates and patches (36.70%), and lack of low level technical support (36.47%).
Download the free report to get a more detailed look at the top open source infrastructure technologies, frameworks, and data technologies.
Perforce OSS Evangelist Javier Perez and OSI Executive Director Stefano Maffulli will be discussing the findings on February 16th in a live webinar. They will be highlighting the most popular OSS used today, key challenges, how it varies by industry, region, and company size, and the latest trends for this year. Registration is free.
WordPress and Matrix contributors are proposing a new Meta team subproject that would explore replacing Slack communication with Matrix, an open source federated chat system. Matrix already powers a variety of communication tools, including Element, the most mature Matrix client – a universal chat app that is often described as “a Slack alternative.â€
In 2020, Automattic invested $4.6M in New Vector, creators of the Matrix open standard for decentralized communication. At that time, Mullenweg indicated his intention for Automattic to adopt Matrix-based tools and build bridges to WordPress.
The contributors proposing this new exploration outlined a few of the major benefits of Matrix over Slack for the WordPress community’s official real-time communication tool. They contend that the Slack onboarding experience is difficult because it requires an invitation email to a WordPress-hosted email address and users have to identify the correct Slack workspace to join.
The Slack client is also not the best communication tool for some local communities where users are more active on their mobile devices than desktops.
“One of the benefits of Matrix is it supports free choice of clients, one of them being a client that is very similar to Telegram, called FluffyChat,” Automattic-sponsored contributor Alex Kirk said. “There are also particularly lightweight clients (called Hydrogen), a full featured client called Element (previously known as Riot), a client that is more like Discord called Cinny, CLI clients, and many more.”
Kirk’s team has also made it possible to embed a Matrix chat into a Gutenberg block, powered by a plugin called Chatrix. It adds a Matrix client to WordPress pages through the Block Editor or as a popup.
“This could even be set to a particular room, so that users can be asked to join a specific room or Make team by giving them a link to a particular WordPress(.org) page.,” Kirk said. “This could make taking part in Make WordPress teams much easier and possibly encourage more contributions.”Â
Should an open source project use an open source chat system if problems like onboarding can be fixed? Is Matrix a good fit for the WordPress project? Will it be able to provide the same or better reliability as Slack with third-party integrations that speed up contributors’ communication workflows? Are there other benefits like cost savings or features that Slack cannot accommodate? Can all the previous Slack content be migrated? These are important questions the newly formed meta sub-team aims to discuss by beginning bi-weekly meetings. Kirk is encouraging anyone who wants to take part in the meetings to comment on the Make.WordPress.org/Meta post.
“In particular, we’d like to contribute our projects Chatrix and OpenID Connect Server to the WordPress project,” Kirk said. “Additionally, work with people of the community interested in Matrix to see which Slack integrations would need to be ported and how that could be done, as well as understand through testing with other WordPress teams how good or bad the experience is, either on its own, or comparing it to Slack.”
WordPress’ Performance Team is working on unbundling the Performance Lab plugin after feedback from Matt Mullenweg who requested large features become their own community plugins with the possibility of becoming canonical plugins. As part of this effort, the new SQLite database integration is now available for testing as a standalone plugin.
Yoast-sponsored contributor Ari Stathopoulos, who is leading the initiative to develop the SQLite implementation, requests that hosting companies, plugin developers, and theme authors test the plugin. Contributors are aiming to put it on track to become a canonical plugin and eventually merge the SQLite implementation into WordPress Core in a future release.
Stathopoulos updated the call for testing with instructions for how to test the standalone plugin. This is not something that should be tested in production. After activating the plugin, users can just follow the instructions on the screen to install the SQLite database.
When testing I found that I had to delete the wp-content/db.php file in order to get the plugin to install, because it displayed the following error:
The SQLite plugin cannot be activated because a different wp-content/db.php drop-in already exists.
After clicking the Install button, the plugin takes you to the familiar WordPress install screen where you select the language and enter the site name and password.
In the testing instructions, Stathopoulos noted that the plugin will create a fresh database and no content will be migrated from the original database. The old database will remain and if the plugin is deactivated the site will go back to using MySQL. Stathopoulos explained why users will not see content from their old database when the new one is active:
The SQLite implementation does not include a way to migrate data from one database to another. Since this is a proposal for an implementation to be merged in WordPress Core, we need to follow the WordPress Core principles. Data migration is not something that Core should do; it is clearly plugin territory. Your data remains safely in your previous database, and you can access it again by disabling the SQLite module.
When SQLite gets merged in Core, migration and backup plugins will add support for it.
Results of the vote on the best approach to unbundling the Performance Lab plugin indicate that contributors are more in favor of keeping the Performance Lab plugin as is, but additionally deploying modules as individual plugins (32 votes) versus the alternative of making PL a wrapper focused on central infrastructure and recommendation of individual plugins (10 votes).
It’s possible the SQLite Integration Plugin may accessed as an independent module or recommended through the Performance Lab plugin in some way in the future, but it’s not yet been decided. Once a path forward is formalized, it will be more clear how the Performance Lab’s new structure will affect the standalone SQLite integration plugin.
Yoast SEO version 20.0 was released today with a new admin settings interface that also reorganizes the menu to into four main sections: General, Content types, Categories and Tags, and Advanced.
In this update, the plugin did not add new features and settings but rather moved them to better match user workflows. The new sidebar menu should result in fewer clicks in accessing the most used settings.
The individual settings pages are also sporting the new design, which is lighter and brighter than the previous screens. With such a large number of settings to re-learn, Yoast SEO has also added a quick search to assist users in finding settings pages faster.
“We felt that the default WordPress admin design no longer suited us,” Yoast founder Joost de Valk said. “Our product team was itching to take our experience to the next level. WordPress’ interface was holding us back a bit, as the admin interface outside Gutenberg hasn’t progressed for years.â€
Reaction to the new design was mostly positive, although some users are not keen on plugins building their own UI in the admin. If all plugins did this, the WordPress admin would become a wild buffet of disparate interfaces that add cognitive load to site management.
“It was… surprising so I’ll reserve real judgement until I use it a while,” WordPress developer Jon Brown said. “First impression though was ‘this needs an advanced mode that hides all the useless banner images and text and just goes back to a list with toggles.’ It’s pretty, but feels overwhelming.”
 The Yoast SEO plugin and the new settings UI work with WordPress version 6.0 or higher. Users who are struggling to adapt to the new settings pages can reference Yoast SEO’s documentation, which has a video and guide to navigating the new interface.
Thrive’s premium plugin suite reports more than 200,000 users. This includes Thrive Architect, a visual drag and drop page builder, an LMS course builder, and other marketing-focused plugins for generating leads, creating quizzes and testimonials, and doing A/B testing.
In 2013, Thrive Themes co-founders Shane Melaugh and Paul McCarthy began their company with early products Hybrid Connect, Viral Quiz Builder, and WP Sharely. Ten years later the product suite has grown to nearly a dozen conversion-focused tools that Thrive Themes sells for $299/year.
Although the co-founders will not be joining Awesome Motive, the team that is currently maintaining and supporting the plugin is being acquired. In the Thrive Themes announcement, Melaugh said the company’s products will not be rebranded or replaced. No price hikes are planned for existing customers and Awesome Motive plans to honor legacy memberships.
“It has always been our policy to reward loyal customers and that will not change,” Melaugh said.
“I’ve been watching Thrive Themes from the sidelines for a long time anyway. So my stepping away changes nothing on that front.
“It will still be the same people building the products, and the roadmap we laid out for 2023 and beyond won’t change because of this acquisition.”
