EDITS.WS

Author: Sarah Gooding

  • New Video Explores Site Building Progress from WordPress 5.9 to 6.2

    WordPress 5.9 “Josephine” was released in January 2022, but that seems like ages ago when you compare the advances made in site building over the past year. Anne McCarthy, an Automattic-sponsored contributor who heads up the Full Site Editing Outreach Program, has published a short video that tours the important changes in WordPress over the past few major releases. The video also doubles as a preview of some of the features coming in 6.2.

    If you are using the Gutenberg plugin and have been tracking the relentless progress of the Site Editor, you will notice how limited the design options are in 5.9 and how much more consistent and expansive they are today. In 5.9 users users can only add a Front page template, and the site building interface is disjointed and less polished.

    McCarthy demonstrates how WordPress 6.2 will introduce smoother interactions with browse mode. It will also greatly expand the template options available for users to add and includes a new colorized list view.

    The Navigation block has had a long, rocky journey but seems to be reborn in 6.2. McCarthy showed how much more intuitive it has become with the new experience of editing navigation in the sidebar, and repositioning via drag and drop with live previews.

    The instant that Style Variations were introduced in WordPress 6.0, it seemed they were always with us. Looking back at 5.9 in the video, the Site Editor appears so bare without them. WordPress 6.2 will extend this even further with improved block style previews, a style book, and a new zoomed out view that makes it easy to see changes at a glance.

    Everything coming in 6.2 is converging towards better usability and more design options for site editors. The challenge here is to continue introducing new features without the interface becoming cluttered and chaotic. Many of these features are still being ironed out. For example, McCarthy mentioned that the Edit button is still a work in progress and may soon be relocated to be more prominent in the Site Editor.

    This video gives a quick visual summary of what is being done to wrap up the full-site editing phase of the Gutenberg project before contributors move on to Collaboration. It is worth a watch to see the site building progress that contributors have made in just one year.

    If you want to get involved in making sure all these features in 6.2 are ready for prime time, check out McCarthy’s latest FSE Testing Call: Find Your Style. It will plunge you into the new features of the Site Editor to perform a few tasks. It’s essentially a guided opportunity to explore the new interface while contributing back to WordPress, and you will earn a fancy testing contributor badge that will display on your WordPress.org profile.

  • Automattic Launches Blaze Ad Network for Jetpack and WordPress.com Sites

    Automattic is bringing Tumblr’s Blaze ad tool to WordPress sites with its launch today on WordPress.com and Jetpack. Blaze made its debut in April 2022, to the delight of Tumblr users who will gladly shell out cash to get people to look at their cat or promote a game they made. It’s an affordable way to attract new followers or just send out something funny into the universe, starting at $5/day.

    WordPress.com users can now to go to wordpress.com/advertising, select a site, and promote content with Blaze. Jetpack users have access to the ad network inside the WordPress.com dashboard.

    After selecting a post, users are taken to the design wizard where they can add an image, title, a snippet, and a destination URL. The URL can be the post or page or it can direct visitors to the main website.

    When Blaze first launched on Tumblr there was no way to target the promoted content – it just displayed to random users. Now there are a few more options. When promoting content from WordPress.com or a Jetpack-enabled site, users can narrow the audience by device: mobile, desktop, or all devices, select from a few main geographic areas (continents) or serve it everywhere. There is also a dropdown with topics of interest, but they are fairly general, e.g. Arts & Entertainment, Automotive, Business, Education.

    After selecting the audience, users can set the budget for the campaign, starting at $5 with a max daily budget of $50. With a minimum of $5/day for a week users can expect an estimated 5,900 – 8,000 impressions. For $25/day, users can expect 29,700 – 40,200, and up to 59,500 – 80,500 for $50/day. Site owners can monitor the success of their ads in the Campaigns tab.

    Content sponsored by Blaze will be promoted across WordPress.com sites and Tumblr pages, an audience that accounts for an estimated 13.5 billion impressions per month.

    Blazing has become somewhat of an art in the short time it has been available on Tumblr. It will be interesting to see how ads originating from WordPress.com and Jetpack go over with the Tumblr audience.

    https://www.tumblr.com/madmadammims/700822694806044672

    Creating advertising content that works across the disparate audiences between WordPress and Tumblr-powered pages may be a challenge for some site owners. Tumblr users can only target audiences by location for blazed posts. It’s possible that WordPress’ additional targeting options can help funnel the ads to sites where they will be most well-received, but the announcement says ads will be promoted across WordPress.com and Tumblr.

    Blaze campaigns require approval to be in compliance with Automattic’s Advertising Policy before being published. They are currently moderated in approximately 30 minutes but this may change in the future as more users try out Blaze.

    Automattic is treading new ground in creating its own ad network that any user across Tumblr and WordPress can tap into. It’s a strategic move to extend access to the world of WordPress, given that it’s such a large audience, and it will be interesting to see how the company improves the targeting options to meet the challenges of serving both audiences.

  • ClassicPress Community Votes to Re-Fork WordPress

    In December 2022, the ClassicPress community voted on whether to re-fork WordPress or continue on with the project as-is. As WordPress continues to evolve, ClassicPress fell behind in pursuit of PHP 8+ compatibility. The fork is based on WordPress 4.9 and users are increasingly limited in what plugins will work with the five-year-old codebase.

    In a discussion limited to ClassicPress core contributors, Viktor Nagornyy, one of the project’s directors, announced the results of the vote: “The option to re-fork has 20 votes while continue-as-is has 18.” Nagornyy summarized previous discussions and suggested an approach that would be more realistic for the project’s limited contributors:

    ClassicPress can’t be WordPress without Gutenberg, but it also can’t be its own CMS with a small core team at this time. There are simply not enough developers to make progress without backporting code from WP to move away from WP.

    An almost even split in the poll suggests the best option might be a hybrid one, find a compromise solution that will satisfy both sides.

    With a small core team, we have to find ways to be more efficient, to get more done with less. The only way to do that is to leverage all the work that’s done by WP contributors. As the core team grows, we can always explore the possibility of splitting away from WP but at this point in time, it’s simply not feasible.

    Some participants in the previous discussion saw re-forking as postponing the inevitable, kicking the can down the road until the next re-fork, but it is the only option if users want to retain compatibility with the rest of the WordPress ecosystem.

    “If you read recent threads, you find out that the community expects plugin compatibility with WordPress… another reason for the re-fork option,” ClassicPress core committer Álvaro Franz said.

    Franz, who is also the author of the WP-CMS fork based on WordPress 6.0, previously said he would be unwilling to help with a continuation of the current version based on WordPress 4.9.

    “It [ClassicPress] doesn’t have to be a competition (and it never could compete with WordPress anyways), but it can be a leaner version, for people who are already disabling Gutenberg via plugins, for developers who want a different approach to the way they develop their projects (closer to ‘the classic’ experience, but yet… modern!),” Franz said.

    “Eventually, it won’t make sense to run a fresh copy of WordPress to then go and install a plugin that ‘disables’ half of it. What’s the point? Why not have a version that covers that specific use case?”

    As part of Nagornyy’s proposed hybrid approach, he suggested the project retain some changes that were introduced in ClassicPress in v1.x, such as the privacy-oriented changes (anonymizing data CP sends to APIs), the news widget, and ensure that all API endpoints use ClassicPress APIs as in v1.x.

    The discussion continues around how to proceed with the fork. ClassicPress contributors are leaning towards using Franz’s WP-CMS fork based on WordPress 6.0 but have not finalized the details yet.

  • WordPress Performance Team Working Towards Unbundling Performance Lab Plugin

    WordPress’ Performance Team met this week with the express purpose of responding to Matt Mullenweg’s recent request to stop adding functionality to the Performance Lab plugin which could otherwise work as a standalone plugin.

    At the end of December 2022, the Performance Team published instructions for how to test the new SQLite implementation, which was bundled into the Performance Lab plugin as a module. Mullenweg commented on the post, indicating he saw the SQLite functionality as better suited to becoming a standalone community plugin:

    Can we please make this its own community plugin, hopefully to become a canonical one, and stop putting additional things like this into Performance Lab — it feels like we’re stuffing things into PL unnecessarily.

    In mid-October I have requested that we stop this unnecessary bundling before with @tweetythierry around WebP, which was put into Performance Lab, so it is disappointing that another large function like SQLite was bundled into Performance Lab plugin.

    In an effort to galvanize a base of testers for upcoming performance features, the Performance Team has leaned towards bundling new performance-related functionality into the plugin. Although they are already developed as self-contained modules so they can be easily extracted as individual plugins, the concern is that their visibility would be greatly reduced. The Performance Lab plugin has more than 30,000 active installs. Any standalone plugin would take time to build up to a user base, whereas functionality added to Performance Lab has an instant audience.

    “Agreed that there are definitely valid use cases for stand alone plugins, remaining mindful of some of the advantages of a single hub plugin such as development/maintenance, adoption, promotion, developer onboarding/contribution etc. which the Performance Lab facilitates well today as a central performance focus community hub plugin,” Performance Team contributor Thierry Muller said in response to the unbundling request.

    Muller outlined three different options contributors discussed in this week’s Performance Team meeting:

    • Option 1: Keep PL as is, but additionally deploy modules as individual plugins
    • Option 2: Make PL a “wrapper” focused on central infrastructure and recommendation of individual plugins
    • Option 3: Deprecate PL completely in favor of individual plugins

    Option 3 seems to be the least attractive to those who participated in this week’s discussion, as it introduces more hurdles for discoverability. Performance Team contributor Felix Arntz noted that one benefit of option 1 is the plugin would continue to work as-is for the 30K people who currently have it installed and that option 2 “would require a complex migration that users likely would not understand.”

    WordPress developer Jonny Harris suggested that having each functionality in its own plugin helps with testing but also asked what defines a module.

    “Would the current Site Health checks all be together, for example?” Harris asked. “SQLite and WebP are clearly their own modules, but what about smaller things?”

    Arntz suggested contributors continue the discussion regarding the scope of how the current modules could be distributed as plugins. He suggested every module could become its own plugin where some modules become standalone plugins and others would be grouped together into a few “topic specific” plugins.

    Contributors are discussing the different approaches in more detail on a GitHub issue and will be voting on the best approach. The vote will be open until Friday, January 20, 2023.

  • Gutenberg Times to Host Webinar on How to Use New WordPress Layout Features

    Gutenberg Times will be hosting a live Q&A webinar titled “Layout, Layout, Layout” on January 11, 2023, at 05:00 PM in Eastern Time (US and Canada) via Zoom. This event is open to WordPress users of all experience levels who are interested to learn more about how to use WordPress’ layout features when building sites with blocks.

    Host Birgit Pauli-Haack will be joined by WordPress veterans Isabel Brison, Andrew Serong, and Justin Tadlock. Brison will be demonstrating different layout scenarios during the presentation, and attendees will be able to participate with questions.

    Any user who has attempted to layout a design in WordPress has likely tried out container blocks that offer layout settings. These blocks include Columns, the Cover block, and the generic Group block.

    The event will cover how to manipulate layouts by defining the width of post content, arranging blocks horizontally or vertically, right or left aligned, and inside container blocks.

    “In terms of block styling, Layout is a complex feature because it affects child blocks in ways that go beyond CSS inheritance,” Pauli-Haack said.

    WordPress 6.1 introduced more layout controls and flexibility in the block editor, but Pauli-Haack said the dev note on updated layout support was written more for developers.

    “Feedback from users through the FSE program and other connections revealed that handling the layout settings for container blocks is not particularly intuitive and takes some trial and error to find the right combination,” she said. “The Live Q & A will bring a better understanding to users and #nocode site builders.”

    When Pauli-Haack started the Live Q & A’s in 2018, she routinely brought in guests who were building the block editor, with the intention of having users meet them and discuss features like full-site editing, block themes, case studies, and discuss challenges.

    “Since then, quite a few initiatives of the official WordPress project have come to life,” she said. “There is the highly successful Full Site Editing outreach program, spearheaded by Anne McCarthy, who now holds regular Hallway Hangouts with community members and contributors.”

    People are also learning the ins and outs of site editing through the efforts of the training team, which began creating courses and lesson plans and hosting workshops on Meetup.com in 2021. These are also recorded and uploaded to WordPress.tv and YouTube. WordPress.org also launched a blog for developers in November 2022. With all these new learning opportunities, Pauli-Haack is changing the focus for her live events.

    “For the Gutenberg Times Live Q & As, I am now looking at topics and discussions about more complex concepts, more case studies, and technology on the cutting edge,” she said. Most recently, the show featured the developers and digital strategies of the Pew Research Center, a high profile site that was built with a block-first approach.

    “We are also in planning phase to hold a Live Q & A with the developers of GiveWP who are using Gutenberg as a framework to build the next generation of their popular donations plugin with the components and scripts that Gutenberg uses, but outside the post or site editor,” Pauli-Haack said.

    She also has another Live Q & A planned with the WordPress VIP design team that works on design systems for companies that need a streamlined way to stay within their design standards. Pauli-Haack intends to talk with them about a plugin they created that lets designers automatically create a website’s theme.json file with all the styling pulled directly from Figma designs.

    The upcoming Layouts webinar is free but attendees need to register to get the zoom link. An archive of all the past Live Q & A events is available on the Gutenberg Times website. The best way to stay informed about future events is to subscribe to Gutenberg Times’ Weekend Edition, as subscribers get an early invitation for the next Live Q & A’s.

  • WordCamp Europe 2023 Speaker Applications Open, Organizers Call for More Interactive Sessions

    WordCamp Europe 2023 is being hosted in Athens this year with two conference days scheduled for June 9 and 10. The first day’s theme is “WordPress Now” (Everything that can be currently achieved with WordPress) and the second day is “WordPress Tomorrow.”

    Organizers have opened the call for speakers and are especially interested in scheduling talks that “empower people to feel more comfortable using WordPress.” They are soliciting new voices this year with fresh perspectives.

    After reviewing attendee feedback from the previous year, organizers have identified more than three dozen requested topics across the development, business, community, and design categories. These include many more development topics, such as security, CI/CD, headless CMS, ReactJS for PHP Developers / Building Blocks, and more. Attendees are also eager to hear about content monetization, recurring revenue, GDPR compliance, brand identity, and designing for accessibility, to list a few examples.

    Presentation formats will include traditional talks, hands-on workshops, expert panels, and lightning talks. Organizers are encouraging speakers to add activities to sessions that will get the audience involved and avoid the afternoon slump. They cited a few examples, including a WordCamp in the Czech Republic where a security researcher installed a Wi-Fi honeypot in the venue and demonstrated how dangerous public wi-fi is when logging into a WordPress site that doesn’t have SSL.

    WCEU has launched a Speaker’s support program to help fund selected speakers with financial barriers to attending. Organizers arrange for speakers and the sponsoring companies to connect but are not involved in selecting who receives the funds.

    The call for speakers will close the first week of February and applicants will receive a response by the second week of March. Speakers will be announced in the second week of April.

  • BuddyPress 11.0.0 Adds Filter for Improved JS and CSS Asset Loading, WebP Support, and New Ways to Fetch Activities

    BuddyPress 11.0.0 is now available thanks to the efforts of 34 contributors. The release is named “La Scala” in honor of a pizza restaurant located in Issy-Les-Moulineaux, a Paris suburb.

    Version 11.0.0 introduces a few important changes. BuddyPress has improved the way it loads its JavaScript and CSS assets with the addition of a new filter so that they are now only loaded on community pages. Previously, the plugin would load them indiscriminately on every page, a leftover from how they were loaded in the first Template Pack (BP Legacy). This change is being rolled out progressively, so users who want to take advantage of this improvement will need to add the filter to their bp-custom.php file.

    add_filter( ‘bp_enqueue_assets_in_bp_pages_only’, ‘__return_true’ );

    BP 11.0.0 also enables the use of use .webp images for profile and cover images, after a user requested it in a negative review. This feature requires WordPress 5.8 or newer.

    This release introduces the ability to fetch activities for or excluding a group of users. For example, developers can now write code to fetch activities for a select few users based on user ID or block updates from some annoying users by excluding their user IDs.

    “This change is simple but powerful!” BuddyPress core developer Dan Cavins said. “For instance, you could create custom interest activity streams, or build a mute feature to let your members take a break from other, too-chatty users!”

    Version 11.0.0 also gives developers the ability to build custom xProfile loops including a specific set of profile field groups.

    BuddyPress 10.0.0 introduced an add-ons section in the plugin administration screen for users to easily test plugins or blocks maintained by the BuddyPress development team and hosted on WordPress.org. BP lead developer Mathieu Viet said the team will soon be publishing a Community Media Attachments add-on and a block-based Activity Post Form that will “standardize the way to extend activity updates with richer and more engaging content.” These feature plugins are part of what Viet anticipates will be “a transitional year for BuddyPress” and may be published to the add-ons section independent of a major release.

    BuddyPress users should watch for updates to the add-ons section and check out the full list of changes in 11.0.0 in the BuddyPress codex. Updating to the latest version will require WordPress 5.7 or later.

  • Awesome Motive Acquires Duplicator Plugin

    Awesome Motive’s product suite of nearly 20 commercial plugins has expanded to include a backup plugin. The company announced its acquisition of Duplicator today, a 12-year-old freemium product with more than 1.5 million users.

    In addition to the backup utility, the plugin enables users to migrate, copy, move, or clone a site from one location to another. Commercial licenses range from $49/year to $299.50/year.

    Snapcreek co-founders Bob Riley and Cory Lamle, creators of Duplicator, will be moving on to pursue other endeavors but the rest of the team will continue to work on the product at Awesome Motive led by John Turner.

    This is the first WordPress business acquisition of 2023, and it’s a major one as 1.5 million users are changing hands to rely on a new company. Users can expect no pricing changes but some have already expressed concern about having to put up with Awesome Motive’s trademark aggressive marketing that litters the WordPress admin with ads and upsells.

    In the co-founders’ farewell post, they assured users that Awesome Motive will continue working on their prior roadmap.

    “We have shared our extensive feature wishlist, and we know that with Awesome Motive’s resources and experience that wishlist will become a reality much faster,” Riley said.

    “As we pass the baton, Cory and I want to say thank you to everyone who has supported us on this journey. We are extremely grateful to be able to play a small part in the amazing WordPress ecosystem.”

  • Gutenberg 14.9’s New Magic: Push Block Changes to Global Styles

    Gutenberg 14.9 was released this week with a powerful new feature for site editing that allows users to push individual block changes to Global Styles.

    When WordPress makes it this easy for users to design their own sites, there’s always the lingering concern – will the tools inadvertently be used to make sites that are wild and wacky à la GeoCities? For example, if a user makes a change to a Heading block on the Page template, that doesn’t get automatically enabled for headings on other templates, which could potentially create an inconsistent design across the website.

    The new “Push changes to Global Styles” button allows users to apply that same change to all blocks of that type. In the example below, the H1 heading has been updated to have a lime green background with red text. Under the Advanced panel in block settings, a new button appears for pushing changes to Global Styles.

    It’s important to note that the feature only works inside the Site Editor. Users writing posts and pages will not have the ability to push changes to Global Styles. The new button gives users a quick way to update blocks across the site without having to manually edit every template or figure out the right CSS to apply.

    Other important changes in 14.9 include typography support for the Page List block, a new option to import sidebar widgets into a template part when switching from a classic theme, and word count/time to read meta info has been moved to the top of the outline.

    New Features for Theme Authors

    Gutenberg 14.9 introduces support for shadow presets in theme.json, with two bundled default presets (Natural and Sharp). Theme authors can see how it’s done and create custom box-shadow presets, or wait for an upcoming tutorial on the topic. The 14.9 release post includes a screenshot of how this feature might be implemented:

    Theme authors now have the ability to set the minimum font size for fluid typography in theme.json. It is currently hard coded to 14px by default, which may not work for all designs.

    Another new tool for theme developers is the ability to register patterns for specific templates, which would restrict where they appear. This was added via a new templateType property in the patterns registration API. Theme developers can restrict patterns to only show up for the templates where they make sense, such as 404, single-post, single-product, and category templates, for example.

    Check out the 14.9 release post to see all the bug fixes and enhancements to the editor, accessibility, performance, tooling, and more.

  • New CF7 Blocks Plugin Brings Blocks to Contact Form 7

    WordPress developer Munir Kamal has released a new plugin called CF7 Blocks that does exactly what it says in the name. It brings blocks to one of WordPress’ most beloved plugins, which has kept the same familiar interface and has not yet adopted the block editor.

    The Contact Form 7 plugin was created by WordPress developer Takayuki Miyoshi, who has devotedly kept it updated for the past 15 years. His stalwart commitment to keeping it free forever is one of the reasons it has grown to more than 5 million active installs. The developer community has built hundreds of integrations and extensions for CF7 because users found it easy to build forms with its simple interface.

    Contact Form 7 interface

    CF7 users currently edit forms in the plugin’s dedicated interface. The plugin also includes a block, so users can return to the block editor and select a form to embed.

    The new CF7 Blocks plugin makes it possible to edit CF7 forms using WordPress’ default editor, instead of having to mess with shortcodes and HTML. It still has its own dedicated Contact form editing page, except with the ability to customize fields as blocks. New forms will use the block interface and old ones can still be edited using CF7’s default HTML editor.

    CF7 Blocks offers a more intuitive experience with pre-made form templates that will automatically insert the necessary blocks so users don’t have to start from scratch.

    In the block settings, users can easily customize the text of the labels, enter a value for placeholders, toggle the label on or off, mark fields as required, customize dimensions, and more. Fields can easily be dragged and dropped for re-ordering, a feature that is especially useful with lengthier, more complex forms.

    One handy feature is that form fields can easily be transformed into other fields with the click of a button, making it easy to customize a form when the pre-set templates aren’t exactly what is needed.

    In the same tradition of Contact Form 7, CF7 Blocks is available for free in the WordPress plugin directory. The plugin also has its own website where users can subscribe to get updates and find out what’s coming soon. Kamal said users can expect more fields to be added to the plugin in future releases beyond the standard fields that come with Contact Form 7. Design options for visually styling and customizing forms are another feature on the roadmap for CF7 Blocks.