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Tag: News

  • Museum of Block Art Calls for Submissions Celebrating WordPress’ 20th Anniversary

    The Museum of Block Art (MOBA), a project launched in 2022 featuring art created using the block editor’s design tools, is calling for submissions celebrating WordPress’ upcoming 20th anniversary.

    In a short amount of time, the museum has collected more than three dozen works of block art, creative pieces that leave the viewer wondering how they were made using only WordPress’ core design tools. The MOBA features a diverse set of works – from a Mario mosaic made entirely of differently colored Button and Group blocks, to a textured gallery of city images melded together using the Columns, Cover, and Gallery blocks. All pieces are displayed with the HTML markup of the block(s) beneath, so curious viewers can dig into the details of which tools design tools have been applied.

    MOBA’s curators are challenging artists to submit WP20 blocks inspired by the 20th anniversary logos and/or the color palette and images from the default themes through the years. These blocks will become part of the art history of WordPress’ capabilities.

    MOBA founder Anne McCarthy said the submissions have “definitely evolved as the controls have grown since each new control added has a cascading creative impact.” To better illustrate this evolution, she has created release-specific virtual exhibits, including one for 5.9 and another for 6.0. She didn’t receive too many pieces for 6.1 and hasn’t created an exhibit for that release yet but has created some blocks using 6.1’s tools, and wrote a post about the process.

    “I think it would be really neat to compare a 5.9 exhibit to a 6.9 or 7.9 showing how far the art has come in the same way you might look at art in a museum across the centuries,” McCarthy said.

    “The vision is to explore WordPress, a software we take for granted, in a new way to create something unexpected—a virtual art museum featuring art made from the same blocks used to house the experience itself. WordPress is so known as a site building tool but we don’t talk about all that it unlocks, including being able to create some pretty rad art pieces. I hope it helps both empower folks to make their own art pieces and offers some inspiration, in the same way a museum might. I really just want to supercharge the sentiment of ‘Proudly Powered by WordPress’ to show just how much WordPress truly can power.”

    One piece, the circular rainbow created by Chuck Grimmet, was printed out and displayed on one of the walls behind Matt Mullenweg during the 2022 State of the Word address. McCarthy said she would like to see more real life exhibits of the work from MOBA contributors, and that there is a chance some will be displayed at an upcoming flagship WordCamp event. Another idea she had is offering a way to order the art and print it out as a fun use of e-commerce, perhaps as an integration with the WordPress swag store.

    Circular rainbow

    In the future, McCarthy hopes to recruit submissions from artists outside the WordPress community and someday host an art “hackathon” where people gather to produce submissions.

    MOBA’s curators are inviting users of all experience levels to create WP20-inspired blocks as part of the upcoming celebration. Those who are newer to the block editor can check out some of the recommended block tutorials as well as The Creative Side to Blocks series (volumes 1, 2, and 3) on WordPress.tv. Prospective contributors can learn more about how to contribute blocks to the MOBA collection on the museum’s website. Submissions will be reviewed by the initiative’s current panel of contributors.

  • WordPress 6.2 Beta 3 Released, Contributors to Host Live Product Demo on March 2

    WordPress 6.2 Beta 3 was released this week, another small milestone towards the official, more polished version that is expected in under five weeks on March 28, 2023. Testers will find 34 issues resolved since the Beta 2 release, bringing the cumulative number of enhancements to 292, with 354 bug fixes and counting. Details for the changes in beta 3 are available in the linked tickets:

    Contributors will be hosting a live product demo on Thursday, March 2, 2023 at 12:00 PM EST via Zoom. WordPress contributors Anne McCarthy and Rich Tabor, who are helping lead the release, will give viewers a tour of the features coming in 6.2.

    “This is a slightly different format from the previous 6.0 and 6.1 walk-throughs, focusing on showcasing the great work that’s been going into the release,” Marketing Team contributor Jonathan Pantani said. “Future releases can expect to see this, a walk-through/discussion, or both types of live events become part of the release cycle.”

    The event will be moderated by Nathan Wrigley, who will guide the discussion and present questions from the audience. Questions can be submitted in advance in the Make WordPress Slack via the #walkthrough channel. The livestream will be recorded and published in a follow-up post after the product demo has concluded. There is no registration for the event. Those who want to watch and participate live can launch the meeting using Zoom at the scheduled time.

  • Learn, Grow, Create: DE{CODE} 2023 Registration Open Now

    Is your website feeling a little stale? Have you been looking for a way to breathe some life into your workflow? You won’t want to miss DE{CODE} 2023, WP Engine’s all-virtual conference for developers. This free event will cover topics including eCommerce, headless WordPress, managed WordPress hosting, and beyond. Everything you could need to spice up your website and amp up your development skills.

    Register for free today!

    Live in Australia, London, or Toronto? No problem! DE{CODE} 2023 will feature the same insightful content across three regions on March 21 and 23, depending on your time zone:

    APAC: March 21, 2023 10 am – 4 pm AEST 

    North America: March 21, 2022 10 am – 4 pm CST 

    EMEA: March 23, 2022 10 am – 4 pm GMT

    Let’s dive into some of excellent programming you can watch for free.

    Learn

    DE{CODE} 2023 is packed with expert-led talks for any skill level. Whether you’re interested in headless, privacy, or security, there will be something for you.

    Though all the talks will be exceptional, we wanted to highlight a few.

    How Technology has Shaped the Power Dynamics Between Designers, Developers, and Marketers

    WordPress was created 20 years ago this year. To celebrate this incredible milestone, WP Engine Founder and CIO, Jason Cohen, is going to take a look at how the people behind WordPress have grown it from a blogging platform to what it is today. This talk will look at site creation in 2003, how it has evolved to today, and what the next decade might hold for website builders.

    7 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do with Advanced Custom Fields

    Advanced Custom Fields is incredibly well-loved among WordPress developers, powering over 4.5 million websites. Even though it is widely used, there is functionality you might not know you’ve been missing out on. Iain Poulson, Senior Product Manager at WP Engine and Rob Stinson, Product Marketing Manager and WP Engine will highlight their seven favorite “hidden” features.

    Go Beyond with Headless

    Headless WordPress has been a big conversation over the last few years. Jason Konen, Product Director at WP Engine, looks at actual companies and websites running headless. Then looks to the future of headless WordPress and Atlas from WP Engine.

    Connect

    After the sessions conclude, make sure and stick around for virtual networking, which offers the opportunity to ask the speakers questions and make new connections with other attendees.

    You won’t want to miss this opportunity to level up your developer game and attend one of the biggest WordPress conferences out there.

    Register today!

    The post Learn, Grow, Create: DE{CODE} 2023 Registration Open Now appeared first on Torque.

  • New Proposal Seeks to Update WordPress Release Process for Merging Gutenberg Features After Beta 1 Feature Freeze

    WordPress lead developer Andrew Ozz has published a proposal for the addition of a new “gutenberg-merge” ticket type that would formalize the latitude Gutenberg contributors have been given for committing code after Feature Freeze during the release cycle.

    Ordinarily, any new features and enhancements landing in the release are required to be committed before Beta 1 so they can be ready for testing. It used to be the case that tickets could be changed from “enhancement” to “task” right before Beta 1 as a rare exception for items that were not ready in time for beta and just needed a few more days to get committed.

    “The intent was to allow another two or three days, not a week or two,” Ozz said. “This exception used to happen quite rarely, perhaps a few times per year.

    “However lately this exception has become part of the standard release workflow. In recent years, it’s become common for 15 to 20 tickets for code coming from Gutenberg to be changed to tasks each release. The reason they are changed is not to give the developers a few more days to complete them. It is mostly to signify that they are going to be committed later.”

    Ozz contends that because the Gutenberg feature plugin is used on more than 300,000 site, including WordPress.com, and because 60% of users rapidly update to the latest version, that any features and enhancements coming from Gutenberg have already been tested.

    The comment section of the proposal is active with differing opinions. Several participants in the discussion did not agree that just because features are in the plugin does not mean that they have been adequately tested against the goals they were intended to achieve.

    “Something that worries me about how this could work is, that currently the level of documentation for features that land in core have a higher standard than Gutenberg merges,” Core contributor Fabian Kägy said. “Once we approach the beta 1 time the documentation team goes through all the features that were merged in that cycle, making sure there are dev notes for any changes that might impact users / developers. If this deadline is shortened this also means that it may become harder to uphold this standard.”

    Kägy also noted the challenges of plugin and theme developers testing their extensions against core in order to ensure compatibility with the latest version.

    “With this changed workflow the actual amount of time where you know with a pretty large likelihood what features will be part of a given core release becomes shorter, making it more difficult to ensure compatibly with a release in time of the release,” Kägy said.

    Core contributor Peter Wilson outlined two concerns with the proposal:

    • by treating Gutenberg as a special case, it will increase the conflict between those who primarily work in the WordPress-Develop repository and those who primarily work in the Gutenberg repository,
    • bypassing the feature freeze requirements for the editor goes against the contention that Core is Gutenberg and Gutenberg is Core.

    Wilson said the late merging of Gutenberg features has “been a source of conflict for several years.”

    “Bulk merges of Gutenberg features late in the cycle have also been an issue reported from both those who work primarily in the Gutenberg repo and those who work primarily in the WordPress-Develop repo,” he said. “For years incremental merges during the cycle have been advocated but never achieved per the comments in the linked post.”

    Wilson also disagrees with the proposal’s assertion that features developed in the Gutenberg repository are better tested in the feature plugin, as the goal of the Beta and RC periods are to test the release as a whole.

    “With Gutenberg as a plugin replacing core blocks with the plugin’s versions, testing the release as a whole doesn’t happen until after the editor changes merged in to WordPress-Develop,” Wilson said.

    “It’s only once Gutenberg is merged in to WordPress-Develop that the unit tests start running on various hosting providers running the test suite in a range of environments.”

    WordPress Core Committer Joe McGill encouraged the proposal’s authors to elaborate on the policies and expectations that will be applied to committing patches to tickets designated with the new ticket type.

    “For example, should all of these commits be completed before RC-1, unless a bug is discovered during the RC period—and only the fixes discovered be committed, or are there other rules in play?” McGill said. “Personally, I still think that we should aim to have code for any major new feature merged before the Beta-1 milestone, regardless of whether it’s being tested in the Gutenberg plugin or not.”

    The discussion is ongoing in the comments of the proposal. Although the proposed changes primarily affect core contributors, committers, and release leads, they also impact testers and WordPress’ plugin and theme developer community working to ensure compatibility ahead of a major release. Those who have feedback on how Gutenberg features are handled during and after “feature freeze” should jump in on the comments of the proposal.

  • Meetup.com Follows Through on Commitment to Improve Website Accessibility

    In November 2022, Meetup.com raised concerns with the WordPress community (and the broader community of accessibility professionals) after it added an accessibility overlay to its website, powered by EqualWeb. Accessibility advocates and professionals unequivocally discourage the use of overlays as they are often marketed as a quick fix for making websites ADA compliant and immune from legal action when the accessibility issues persist underneath.

    Meetup.com removed the accessibility overlay in response to the WordPress community’s concerns and committed to focus on direct improvements to the Meetup.com platform. WordPress’ Accessibility team reports that the company is following through with this undertaking and has completed an assessment with Deque, a well-respected accessibility consultancy.

    The assessment identified 732 issues that need to be resolved, which Meetup.com plans to address through two phases. Approximately 40% of the issues are related to design and color contrast. These will be resolved in the first phase with the help of an external consultant who will guide Meetup.com’s engineers and staff to fix issues and ensure ongoing compliance. In the second phase, the company will tackle the remaining issues which center on web remediation. These include problems with the site’s component library and website components.

    Meetup.com serves approximately 24 million visitors every month in more than 190 countries. The WordPress project uses the platform for local meetups and educational events – both virtual and in-person. As a result of WordPress’ diplomatic advocacy and Meetup.com’s reception to user feedback, the platform will soon provide a better experience for people with disabilities and those who use assistive technology.

  • WordCamp London In Early Planning Stages for September 2023

    The organizers of WordCamp London are in the early planning stages for an event that would take place in September 2023. It has been nearly four years since London hosted a WordCamp. The event was cancelled in 2020 and scheduling was not resumed until recently.

    Organizers have created a survey that respondents can take anonymously in approximately 2-3 minutes. The questions were created to help them know how to shape the event. In 2019, WordCamp London brought in 768 attendees and sessions were livestreamed for the first time. Organizers are asking how many people attendees would like to see at WordCamp London, with options ranging from fewer than 400 to more than 800. A few popular WordCamps in recent years have elected to keep a smaller number of spots available in order to better manage uncertainties and ensure a sold out event.

    The survey also attempts to gauge potential attendees’ preferences on the number of conference days, as well as interest in volunteering, organizing, sponsoring, or speaking at the event. There is an option at the end for respondents to leave their contact information to stay in the loop on opportunities to participate in and support the WordCamp.

    For many in Europe, and especially the UK, WordCamp London was their first WordCamp experience. Those interested to attend can sign up for updates on the placeholder website, or follow the camp on Twitter or Mastodon. For those in the local area, the WordPress London Meetup has opened registration for this month’s gathering at The Liberty Bounds. They plan to discuss WordCamp London and reconnect and will resume having speakers and pizza at future events.

  • Industry-Wide Tech Layoffs Impacting WordPress Professionals

    Most WordPress professionals managed to escape 2022’s round of tech layoffs, which primarily affected venture capital-funded startups and larger companies that had overhired during the economic upswing that came with pandemic precautions being lifted in many places. Mass layoffs hit Meta, Peleton, Stripe, Carvana, and more during the last half of 2022.

    Tech layoffs have continued relentlessly in 2023, with major players like PayPal, Spotify, Google, Microsoft, Coinbase, Salesforce, and Amazon cutting tens of thousands of workers in January. This round of layoffs seems more brutal than the last, as it hits more close to home for WordPress professionals.

    Layoffs.fyi, a layoffs tracking website, has logged 376 tech companies with total of 107,930 employees laid off. Both the number of companies and number of employees laid off in January were the highest they have been over the past year.

    Last week, GoDaddy announced it will be reducing the size of its global team by about 8% (approximately 530 employees), with cuts that hit teams working on WordPress and WooCommerce hosting products.

    “Despite increasingly challenging macroeconomic conditions, we made progress on our 2022 strategic initiatives and continued our efforts to manage costs effectively,” GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani. “The discipline we embraced was important but, unfortunately, it was not sufficient to avoid the impacts of slower growth in a prolonged, uncertain macroeconomic environment.”

    The layoffs came as a surprise to GoDaddy employees, after they had been assured the company would not be cutting jobs. A few days after employees were let go, the company reported significant growth in its last earnings call, with a total revenue of $4.1 billion in 2022, up 7.2% year-over-year, and 8.4% on a constant currency basis.

    A former GoDaddy employee, who was impacted by the layoffs and wishes to remain anonymous, said “employees and their managers were blindsided.” They were offered approximately three months of severance pay plus two weeks severance per year of tenure.

    “The severance package was average at best – a few months of runway in exchange for releasing GoDaddy from all liability,” the source said. “It’s the minimum requirement to get people to sign legal releases. Items such as stock that wasn’t fully vested must be forfeited.”

    The source reported that the employees who were laid off were cherry-picked from different teams. Despite GoDaddy’s heavy investments into WordPress and recent acquisitions of the Skyverge and Pagely brands, the company elected to downsize many who were active in its WordPress efforts.

    “I’m seeing lots of WordPress-related product/marketing folks getting cut,” the source said.

    DigitalOcean, which acquired managed hosting company Cloudways for $350 million in cash last year, told staff it is laying off 11 percent of its workforce, approximately 200 employees. The Register reports that 100 employees were immediately let go and another 100 will follow. The cuts include members of the company’s content team, causing concern about the future of the company’s documentation resources.

    Larger tech companies are not the only ones reducing their workforces. The economic conditions behind these cuts are also affecting smaller organizations like XWP, a WordPress agency that laid off employees two months ago. Human Made, an agency that builds WordPress sites and products for enterprise customers, has also been affected. The company recently announced a round of redundancies for the first time in its history.

    “This has been a tough few weeks, particularly for those leaving who now face an uncertain future,” Human Made CEO and co-founder Tom Willmot said. “It’s also been tough for the rest of company, this is not [a] situation we wanted to be in and even with the wider economic headwinds the industry is facing, there are also important lessons for us to learn.”

    As part of its commitment to transparency, Human Made also published the details of its redundancy support package, which includes a minimum notice period of four weeks plus one week for each year past two, and two weeks pay on top of notice, among other benefits.

    WordPress product companies are stepping up to help people find new work. Easily Amused, Trew Knowledge, SiteCare, and other companies across Twitter, Mastodon, and LinkedIn have responded to posts with links to open positions. Michelle Frechette, Director of Community Engagement at StellarWP, publishes a weekly thread with available jobs from around the WordPress community. Her most recent thread from last week includes information on 10 companies that are currently hiring.

  • WordPress Unveils Commemorative 20th Anniversary Wapuu

    The global WordPress community is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the software’s first release on May 27, 2023. Two decades ago, WordPress made its debut featuring Texturize, XHTML 1.1, manual excerpts, and a new admin interface.

    An official anniversary website is publishing updates about how the community can get involved in the upcoming celebration plans. Organizers and participants will be using the #WP20 hashtag on social media to designate posts as related to the event. Community organizers hosting celebrations can have their events listed on the website by submitting them through a form.

    As part of the festivities, the project has released a set of commemorative logos, which were created in the style of the new WordPress.org design. The project has adopted a more vibrant blue color in recent days, allowing the original dusty blue to fade into history.

    WordPress is also releasing a new commemorative 20th anniversary wapuu. The mascot is festooned with a party hat and a balloon with the anniversary logo. It was created by WordPress contributor Emalina “Ema” DeRosia.

    The artwork for the wapuu is available for anyone to download and use. It comes in multiple file types, including SVG, PDF, PNG, along with the Adobe Illustrator design file. WordPress’ swag store is closed at the moment but is expected to reopen soon with limited edition 20th anniversary swag, and some items may feature the commemorative wapuu.

  • WordPress 6.2 Beta 2 Released with Fixes for 71 Issues and Important Performance Improvements for Block Themes

    WordPress 6.2 Beta 2 was released today and is now available for testing, one week after Beta 1. Testers can easily download the latest beta zip file or install the WordPress Beta Tester plugin and set it to the “Bleeding edge” channel and the “Beta/RC Only” stream.

    Beta 2 includes fixes for ~71 issues since last week’s release, along with the most recent Gutenberg plugin 15.1 release, which was not included in Beta 1. Testers can check out the list of the most recent commits to 6.2 on GitHub and recent commits on Trac.

    In the most recent Performance Team meeting, WordPress core committer Felix Arntz highlighted an important fix for how lazy loading is handled in block themes. WordPress 5.9 fixed a performance regression where WordPress’ default of lazy loading all images was causing slower performance on the Largest Contentful Paint metric (LCP) metric. This resulted in 30% faster page loads in some cases.

    Four months ago, it was discovered that block themes were having an issue with lazy loading where the previous fix was not working as expected.

    “With the introduction of block themes, that logic was not functioning correctly, resulting in all featured images to be lazy-loaded, regardless of whether it was the LCP image or not,” Arntz said in the commit message.

    “Together with an update to the core/post-featured-image block included in [55079], this changeset fixes the logic to correctly handle featured images in block themes as well.

    “Additionally, in combination with an update to the core/template-part block from [55246], this changeset includes an enhancement which uses the benefits of block template parts to avoid lazy-loading images in the header block template part, making the lazy-loading heuristics even more accurate for sites using a block theme.”

    The fix, which is included in the 6.2 Beta 2 release, introduces enhanced logic to determine the LCP image in block themes and avoid lazy-loading it.

    Provided everything stays on track, the official release is now just six weeks away, targeted for March 28, 2023.

  • Watch WordCamp Asia 2023 via Livestream February 17-19

    WordPress enthusiasts from around the world are beginning their journeys to attend the inaugural WordCamp Asia, which is happening in Bangkok, Thailand, February 17-19. Organizers are expecting 1,500 attendees at this new flagship event. For those who cannot attend in-person, there will be a livestream broadcasting the sessions from the conference days after Contributor Day, which kicks off on Day 1.

    The livestream schedule shows dates and times in visitors’ local timezones. Depending on where you are in the world, it may be tricky to catch some of the sessions but the event will also be recorded. Virtual attendees can favorite the sessions they are interested to watch and print or email them to keep track.

    There are topics for every experience level – from starting a WordPress blog to advanced performance and scalability for PHP developers. Attendees can learn how to start a subscription business with a no-code SaaS and FSE (Full Site Editing). Theme authors can learn how to monetize in the era of block themes and website owners can explore using AI translation to translate their websites to find a wider audience. WordCamp Asia will also feature a few sessions on careers, including non-technical careers in the WordPress market and career changes from the medical field to WordPress. This is just a small sampling of the interesting topics that will be discussed at WordCamp Asia.

    Matt Mullenweg will join for an AMA on February 18, in Track 1, which will also be livestreamed to Tracks 2 and 3.

    During the event, organizers plan to announce the location of the next WordCamp Asia coming in 2024. Naoko Takano, one of the organizers, joined the WP Tavern Jukebox podcast last week to discuss the organizing process and the importance of WordPress hosting its first flagship event in Asia. Check out the episode for more perspective on the event, which has been in planning for years after getting cancelled and postponed multiple times due to the pandemic.