The WordPress coreCoreCore is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. development team builds WordPress! Follow this site for general updates, status reports, and the occasional code debate. There’s lots of ways to contribute:
Found a bugbugA bug is an error or unexpected result. Performance improvements, code optimization, and are considered enhancements, not defects. After feature freeze, only bugs are dealt with, with regressions (adverse changes from the previous version) being the highest priority.?Create a ticket in the bug tracker.
BlockBlockBlock is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. themes, and their template and template part editing flows.
A myriad of design tools: layout control, block gap, typography options, border support, spacing, dimension controls, enhanced cropping tools, and duotone filters available in many blocks.
Navigation Block.
Improved block interactions, such as List View drag and drop, enhanced toolbar controls when using nested blocks, enhanced inserter between blocks, and block-level locking for patterns and inner blocks.
General UIUIUser interface improvements, like rich URLURLA specific web address of a website or web page on the Internet, such as a website’s URL www.wordpress.org previews, the improved settings modal, and refined icons and animations.
Insertion of patterns directly from the Pattern Directory.
Iterative performance improvements.
To note, not all of the above are currently ready, but there is some level of confidence that they can be by the time of 5.9.
Who Attended
Matt Mullenweg – Project Lead (advocating for the vision/mission of WordPress and aggregate body of users)
Matías Ventura – GutenbergGutenbergThe Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ project lead (host of the demo)
Kelly Hoffman – Lead Designer (advocating for Design and following up on design action items)
Helen Hou-Sandí – Lead developer (advocating for CoreCoreCore is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress., and extender community)
Josepha Haden Chomphosy – Executive Director (advocating for the community of WordPress and aggregate body of users)
Chloé Bringmann – Assisting with administrative and operational logistics
Héctor Prieto – Technical Project Manager (following up on technical action items)
While most of the efforts will focus on polishing existing features, the items below represent key high-level items to focus on in the weeks to come. Watch out for the recently created WordPress 5.9 Editor Must-Haves board for a more comprehensive and up-to-date list of items. Also, here’s an overview of different ways to keep up with Gutenberg, and don’t hesitate to join us at the core editor meeting every Wednesday at 14:00 UTC in #core-editor!
Block Themes and Site Editor
Block Themes and their template editors will be introduced in WordPress 5.9. It’s important to ease users into this new feature as it grows. To that end, the next steps will be to formalize editing flows for block themes, and to refine the Template Part Focus Mode.
Styling
WordPress 5.8 saw the introduction of theme.jsonJSONJSON, or JavaScript Object Notation, is a minimal, readable format for structuring data. It is used primarily to transmit data between a server and web application, as an alternative to XML., and WordPress 5.9 aims to go one step beyond by adding a Styles graphic interface for users to personalize the style on their sites. Apart from polishing the Styles sidebarSidebarA sidebar in WordPress is referred to a widget-ready area used by WordPress themes to display information that is not a part of the main content. It is not always a vertical column on the side. It can be a horizontal rectangle below or above the content area, footer, header, or any where in the theme., work will continue to enhance a wide array of design tools and enable them in blocks that benefit from them. These tools include typography tools, dimension and spacing tools, and UI updates like an improved ColorPicker.
Patterns
Patterns provide a huge help to customize your site by adding rich block compositions and editing their content, and they will play a big role in block theme editing. Thanks to patterns, users are no longer constrained to a theme’s layout as they can design their site’s layout with the help of template part blocks and already available patterns. WordPress 5.9 will offer users patterns directly from the Pattern Directory, so the design choices patterns empower will grow exponentially as the directory gets populated without switching themes or upgrading WordPress! Check out the Pattern Insertion Tracking Issue for enhancements on pattern insertion flows.
Thank you to @cbringmann, @chanthaboune, and @matveb for their work on getting this content processed and ready to ship. Props to @angelasjin, @desrosj, @jeffikus, and @kjellr for reviewing this post.
Transcript
October 14, 2021, WP5.9 Demo
Thur, 10/14 5:30 PM UTC • 56:06
Matías Ventura 0:00 So I did it sort of similar to the last time. I think it went well, even if a bit long.
Matías Ventura 0:21 So the first thing is since WordPress 5.8, all the major pluginPluginA plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party releases. And, we have a lot of stuff, I think more than the last time. There are over 400 updates and over 320 plus bugbugA bug is an error or unexpected result. Performance improvements, code optimization, and are considered enhancements, not defects. After feature freeze, only bugs are dealt with, with regressions (adverse changes from the previous version) being the highest priority. fixes, which is a TON.
Matías Ventura 0:43 So I think we should cover some of these briefly and then dive into the bigger topics.
Matías Ventura 0:51 The highlights that jump to mind for me – we have a lot of improvements to the ListView, which was a major focus in 5.8. But it continued to get better. The main thing that it has now is that it supports stuff like collapsing different groups so that you can just focus on whatever you’re seeing. It supports drag and drop as well directly from the ListView. And we also get the names; these are the actual anchors. So if you add an ID to an element it shows up here, which can be pretty useful both on the front end to reference and to use as sort of guiding the way.
Matías Ventura 1:42 The cool thing also is that all settings now do this automatically. So if you’re typing “major highlights,” it just created automatically because we’re auto-generating the anchors, which we hope to use for a table of content soon. So you don’t need to be doing this manually anymore.
Matías Ventura 2:07 The other major focus has been expanding all the set of tools that we have for typography, colors, alignments, etc.
Matías Ventura 2:16 I’m quite excited about the typography ones because I think we’re arriving at a nice sort of balance between presets and the ability to customize. So we have this new one now that works really well with keywords. If you just move, it shows maybe a bit small there, but it shows what the theme has defined. Sort of like, as a different, normal, medium, large, what these presets are for.
Matías Ventura 2:45 You can move pretty quickly with them. And if you want to jump into custom values, you can go and set that up. But it’s like now is sort of like two stages that I think is going to feel nicer for, again, not having incompatible sizes and so on.
Matías Ventura 3:10 Alignment details. This is this is a tiny thing, but I’m quite happy we got there, which is essentially showing more information around what each alignment does.
Matías Ventura 3:22 In this case, these alignments are defined by this group block, but they are surface here so that you know, okay, “wide width,” means that it’s going to give me this amount of size and so on.
Matías Ventura 3:36 And this works, of course, across all the alignments,
Matías Ventura 3:41 We have a few more tools that are still being refined but should be ready for 5.9, which is like, again, border styles; if you want to have like a border or whatever like these are being done in a way that can be easily added to any block. Essentially, that’s been one of the major things to have consistent tools across the different blocks.
Matías Ventura 4:06 We have a lot of new tools for layout, especially the ones that I think we should highlight because they connect a bit with this sort of thing that we emphasize initially, which is one of the biggest hurdles has been how to handle responsiveness and so on. And the intention has been to build as much of that as possible into the blocks themselves so that people don’t need to be specifying. Again, how is this going to cascade how especially once you get into complex layouts. So the ones that we’re having now are like the ability to have either horizontal rows were blocked sort of organizing themselves horizontally, and in more ways than just cascade vertically and so on. So there are a lot of tools around that, that include some controls for the spacing between blocks. So you don’t need to be specifying each one alone and jump right to these. So, for example, this is applied to existing blocks that we have. Like columns, for example. Block spacing allows to control sort of, in a consistent way the gap between blocks. And this applies again to any sort of container we have.
Matías Ventura 5:30 We finally got the animations as well, for the like these things. This is just on the last release in is like there’s some jumpiness there that we need to fix.
Matías Ventura 5:47 Yeah, that’s the inserter between blocks. It is also like if I move fast here, it doesn’t do anything. But the moment I stopped a little bit, it jumped. So it’s, we might still need to do some tweaks to find the perfect balance there. But it feels a bit nicer. Even the way the plus comes in.
Matías Ventura 6:10 I won’t go too much into these just for the sake of time. But we also have a bunch of performance improvements, particularly in the inserter, which was getting like the more blocks you had, it was starting to get a bit slow.
Matías Ventura 6:32 Like with previews, because we’re doing like so much work for all of the blocks. So like navigating between the blocks was getting a bit. And we have some improvements there.
Matías Ventura 6:42 I don’t know off the top of my head, the improvements for the typing, which we track release over release, and we compare it to the major releasemajor releaseA release, identified by the first two numbers (3.6), which is the focus of a full release cycle and feature development. WordPress uses decimaling count for major release versions, so 2.8, 2.9, 3.0, and 3.1 are sequential and comparable in scope.. But maybe Héctor, you have some numbers there?
Héctor Prieto 6:57 Yeah, it’s about the 10%, or within 10% and 40% improvement each release compared to 5.8. So it really depends on each release. But it’s consistently better than in 5.8. It’s a minor improvement, but yet an improvement.
Matías Ventura 7:14 Yeah, it’s always nice, like we’re adding a ton of features. But that performance is also improving. It usually goes the other way. So it’s important to highlight it as much as possible and continue to make it a focus.
Matías Ventura 7:36 This one had a bit of publicity already, like the gallery block becoming an image block. So I won’t go into that right now. But it’s essentially just improving the whole block APIs allowing people to have the same control for each image to reorganize. It inherits a lot of the improvements from locks themselves. We have some smaller ones like these rich previews on links.
Matías Ventura 8:07 This is a bit more major. It was a small feature, but I think the impact is a bit more major: the ability to have locked areas in different patterns. We have this for the pattern of a whole. Like, you could lock everything down using templates, and so on. But this pattern locking, the cool thing that it allows, is sort of to say that each element is locked. So, in this case, I have like a paragraph here, and I cannot move it, I cannot remove it, I can only sort of change the text.
Matías Ventura 8:43 The same with a title and so on. And like you can also like if I don’t like Michelangelo, I can like drop a Kandinsky, image and so on. But I cannot remove the lock. I think this can be pretty, pretty cool once it’s in the hands of people because it gives you kind of like a way of building your own blocks in a way. Because you can combine all the pieces that core gives you You lock some of these down and now like your users or any or even yourself, you can just interact with these now in that you’re not going to mess anything up. But it’s sort of the same tools that everyone gets.
Josepha Haden Chomphosy 9:29 Can I ask the context question right there? One, I think this will cause a bunch of folks to rest easy based on some feedback we’ve gotten over the years. But is this specifically for individual patterns? Is it for reusable blocks, like what level of block is this available for what level of pattern is available for?
Matías Ventura 9:53 This is just an attribute of the blocks so it works on any block. And right now it’s not exposing the UI. That would be the next sort of next step for us to add.
Matías Ventura 10:05 Right now it’s a block attribute. So it gets it shows the rest in patterns, but it can sort of work anywhere.
Matías Ventura 10:20 Okay. How are we with time? Okay, we’re good.
Matías Ventura 10:28 Picture image. I think the main thing to touch is that we introduced duotone in previous features. Now, it’s been expanded to many blocks, and also integrated with theme.json so that you can change it globally across the site.
Matías Ventura 10:42 The one on featured images, I think is pretty cool, because you can sort of set up a theme with an effect on featured images, and users just upload their own images on they get the effect.
Matías Ventura 11:00 There’s some like minor sort of housekeeping, that’s also nice. The preferences model has been improved quite a bit. Blocks tools have been consolidated.
Matías Ventura 11:23 One thing that we’re trying isbecause it remains the case that nested blocks are always the most challenging things for people. One thing we’re trying is this idea of allowing certain child blocks that have sort of a strong relationship with a parent to share the tools. So in this case, what’s going on is for example, for buttons.
Matías Ventura 11:49 Each individual button is its own block; this is how it used to be. But if you wanted to change the alignment of all the buttons together, you used to need to select the sort of container for the buttons and change the alignment. Now we’re directly showing the alignment tools for the parent. So you can form a single child, you can modify all of them. This is a bit experimental. We’re still trying to see if it works out if people reactReactReact is a JavaScript library that makes it easy to reason about, construct, and maintain stateless and stateful user interfaces. https://reactjs.org/. well to it. But it’s been a challenge for some of these blogs, where you were sort of like editing here, and you didn’t see any way to change alignment.
Matías Ventura 12:31 So exposing this here is… and we are doing it as a tool that any block can try.
Matías Ventura 12:49 This is going to be, like we added the cropping tools, I think, a few releases ago. And now it’s available on like the site logo and different blocks like that.
Matías Ventura 13:03 We added improvements to just the text interface, the rich text interface, in this case, like the ability to highlight individual inline background color, which we didn’t have.
Matías Ventura 13:19 It’s always nice. This is like a little hidden feature. But we have these boundaries that we added to the initial release. It’s really useful for links so that you both have like, you have the cursor inside the link and then one step out, which I think not many editors are doing, but it’s really useful. So that you always know if you want to type outside and you want to go in and then type inside and you always have that sort of split.
Matías Ventura 13:57 Yeah, I think that’s about it for this sort of smaller highlights.
Matías Ventura 14:04 Any, anything that jumps to mind or you’d like to comment here?
Matt Mullenweg 14:14 Nothing on my end.
Matt Mullenweg 14:19 Helen, anything you want to jump in on?
Helen Hou-Sandí 14:20 No. I don’t have anything so far.
Matías Ventura 14:35 So the blocks and responsive tools we briefly touched upon, we’re still working on adjustable fonts, which is one of the main hurdles, how fonts can scale without overbearing UI to control that. But the other ones are working pretty well. So I’m going to go to the actual site editor.
Matías Ventura 14:59 It’s like, all of the complex controls, they are all cascading pretty well without any work on my part; I’m just using basic stuff. So I think that’s going to be pretty neat how the container blocks themselves are orchestrating all of these, and you don’t need to do anything extra. If we can extend this to font sizes, I think that will be pretty great. And then, of course, like, you’d always have the ability to refine that with media queries, and so on. But sort of like that, by default, things work. I think it’s going to be pretty major.
Matías Ventura 15:42 So the biggest thing that I think we’re now ready to do is like, just start to unveil block themes.
Matías Ventura 15:52 I was just like, setting this up, it was nice to finally see that everything is an actual block, I think we got there.
Matías Ventura 16:03 Which is pretty cool. Like the navigation, the site title, and even little details, I’m using it in two places. Now just I don’t know why… But like, like, everything is synchronized because it’s not just text, the actual site title, and every block is benefiting from all the improvements we’ve added. So like the if I replace the sort of the site logo, this image is too small here, but it’s fine.
Matías Ventura 16:44 Again, the site logo also supports all the same tools as the image so I can like try duotone with a GIF and it works fine.
Matías Ventura 16:59 We made some major improvements to the handling of the areas like the headerHeaderThe header of your site is typically the first thing people will experience. The masthead or header art located across the top of your page is part of the look and feel of your website. It can influence a visitor’s opinion about your content and you/ your organization’s brand. It may also look different on different screen sizes., footer, and so on. They are like actual things now. So if I collapse everything to get a sense, you can sort of get a better sense of, “Okay, this is my footer, it says footer and so on.”
Matías Ventura 17:23 The same with a header, and there are multiple ways to see them. When you go to this drop-down, it shows you the ingredients your theme has for this specific template.
Matías Ventura 17:37 It also shows up here in the template tab. So like the idea is essentially to connect things as much as possible. And there’s always this: if you hover the header, it highlights the header and tries to connect all the dots a little bit there.
Matías Ventura 17:58 I think the query block, we went over it quite a bit the last time. I think most of the improvements have been bug fixes, to be honest. And we’re still relying a lot on patterns, I think that’s going to be the coolest thing because; let me select the header for example.
Matías Ventura 18:27 And it’s since I’m using I uploaded the site logo, even in the preview is showing the real logo like animated in the preview. So I can swap it with these different sorts of header pattern.
Matías Ventura 18:41 One cool thing with a navigation block is that it, like some patterns have very specific links that you can add because maybe it only supports like you can only have four links here because the design is what it says. So in those cases, you’ll be able to sort of choosing what page from your site you want.
Matías Ventura 19:03 And now it’s not working. Okay – you can just start the links from your site here. But let me switch back to this one.
Matías Ventura 19:28 Refresh.
Matías Ventura 20:15 So we were in header patterns and like right now the theme can specify them but you can also create them in this case I create them for my site.
Matías Ventura 20:38 I haven’t saved anything so my site I saved a converted this actually cool because we can see the. Like, if I added here…
Matías Ventura 21:15 Okay, the videos finally loaded.
Kelly Hoffman 21:22 I wonder if when we replaced the site icon it should do the resizing automatically.
Kelly Hoffman 21:30 Like how you had to manually do that?
Matías Ventura 21:31 I think it’s just the I think it’s this pattern that it was doing something weird.
Matías Ventura 21:39 Because on the other one. In this one, it was the actual size that it said. And that was fine.
Matías Ventura 21:49 Okay, I’ll keep moving while my videos continue to load.
Matías Ventura 21:57 So here is just like, again, another header pattern. And, again, you can do stuff like, I don’t know, replace the background with your own image. And here you can see much.
Matías Ventura 22:29 But yeah, I think this is going to be. The biggest question that this will open up is whether it makes sense to consider themes like this gigantic monolith of things. Or if we are going to start having, again, maybe you haven’t created like a full theme, but you create some really nice header patterns that you can use sort of in any theme. And they can just fit right in and work well.
Matías Ventura 23:02 I think that’s going to be an interesting thing. Because the like you’re not beholden to, again, whatever the theme has decided in this case, is the only sort of header that you get. And you can use different ones for different pages.f course, like the other thing I think, is.
Matías Ventura 23:29 It’s nice when it all sort of comes together and you can just like. Here I installed a block from the block directory, like a sketch block. So you can just sign your name here and sort of essentially interact with any, like combine different blocks or interact with any part of the site.
Matías Ventura 23:53 This is starting to feel like I think it’s sort of it will open up a lot of opportunities for people to just, I don’t know, create stuff.
Matías Ventura 24:12 Okay, and one more thing with the navigation block, because here I’m also using a navigation block. And one of the main sort of, we have a ton of improvements here.
Matías Ventura 24:38 We also have these sort of behaviors now other that work in a similar way. So you can say, on mobile, I wanted to collapse into a sort of hamburger menu, or you might want to say I always wanted to collapse, and then it just becomes like that all the time. You can still use it here and edit directly from the thing.
Matías Ventura 25:02 But it’s there. And this again, this opens up because even in the, in the case with this other pattern. Again, maybe you say, ” Oh, I really like this pattern, ” but I want the navigation to be this thing again. And, and that should just work too.
Matías Ventura 25:24 And there’s like, again, more improvements we can do on all of this stuff. But it’s, it feels like it’s it’s coming together.
Matías Ventura 25:37 Okay, I think I can leave the template editing there and jump into to the global styles part. Because I think what’s becoming clear is that you can express a ton of things just with templates, and then the actual styling can be a much smaller thing on top of it.
Matías Ventura 26:00 So if I go to the original, global styles is sort of the interface to the theme.json that we introduced in the last release. And now it allows sort of, it doesn’t allow you to edit everything just yet, but it’s starting to, we’re still like labeling betaBetaA pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process. here. But it allows you to say, again, get access to your color palette; you have all the main colors you can have these elements that apply to the site background.
Matt Mullenweg 26:39 Remember there was a website COLOURlovers? I think it’s actually still around, and it’s just all color palettes. That to me, that’s what I really want there. It’s not just choosing individual colors, but choosing palettes.
Matías Ventura 26:54 Yep.
Matt Mullenweg 26:56 Just like we have a pattern directory or block directory. Because palettes are essentially just a couple of hex values, that would be a very easy thing to create a directory. For wordpress.orgWordPress.orgThe community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/, you know, version of COLOURlovers.
Kelly Hoffman 27:12 I know Josepha has been thinking about ways to get more contributors. And so, you know, I’m also thinking about what are other things people could contribute, like color schemes, that are easy on boards.
Matías Ventura 27:29 Yeah. And this sort of the little preview is already like, becoming like you because you can very quickly change entirely how the theme feels.
Matías Ventura 27:43 And that can work for things like again, dark light color schemes, but also like completely different. Like here is where you would right now this is just like a single palette, but you will be able to select from different palettes. Let me see if I have some of the designs for that.
Matías Ventura 28:10 Like the same for font pairs, like if you combine font pairs and color palettes you can like really, really change the feel of the thing, without a lot of work, just want to apply a gradient. This thing is sort of like a small representation. So you can imagine like different badges like these that combine typography and colors or just colors and you just pick among them.
Matías Ventura 28:42 We had a prototype for that. But it’s not quite ready to show here, but I think it would be fairly straightforward because even right now like all of my modifications are, I’m saving them on my site. So that’s essentially like another color scheme. So like, jumping from one to the other is like it’s going to be super fun, I think.
Matt Mullenweg 29:06 Is the only way we can get Gutenberg updates to people in between releases if they run the plugin?
Matías Ventura 29:16 We can do more releases.
Matt Mullenweg 29:20 That brings so much other stuff. If that’s the only way, we might also want to think about things we could do in core to promote the plugin adoption.
Matías Ventura 29:33 Yeah, I think I think there’s like if we do something like this, for example, like the color palettes, again, like adding new palettes to the full theme, that’s something that we should be able to do outside of release cycles. The same I think has been like the pattern directory I think has been huge for that because we can introduce, significant features through patterns that they are not tied to.
Matías Ventura 29:58 That’s something I didn’t mention, but now sort of the patterns gallery is connected with the actual pattern directory. So this would be loading. If we make updates to the patterns in wordpress.org/patterns, you will get the new stuff here. So I think that’s also another avenue.
Matías Ventura 30:18 That’s neither for pattern nor for these color schemes, we would be running like any code. So we can, we can distribute those things much easier, much more easily.
Matías Ventura 30:37 And then the other big part of sort of global styles that this is like a bit more advanced, but it’s what themes would interact with a lot is the sort of being able, like, again, this is very rough, like the design is not finished. But the idea is that you will be able to, you have this sort of broad strokes that you can apply a sort of like a hierarchy of sorts, or you can pick a color scheme and font pairs and so on. Like, if you want to dive more individually, you can do so, and then at the end of it, you can even do it on a per-block basis. So if you want to say, I don’t know, I want all quotes to have these font sizes and these I don’t know being italics and so on like, this is more for like themes to do. But they, again, still allows that level of control on a per-block basis. And the cool thing is that it just works with any third-party block as well. So we are running out of like WooCommerce blocks like it inherits the whole system. So you can affect it globally or individually if you want.
Matías Ventura 31:49 Let me switch if I can to twenty twenty-two.
Matías Ventura 31:59 But even like trying different block themes and so on, it starts to really blur what theme you’re even running because you can switch to another theme, like using sort of the same color style and palette. And it can feel like just an extension of that theme. If you start thinking about how plugins work, like WooCommerce could supply their own templates, and they would just work with any theme; another plugin that’s doing something else can do the same.
Matías Ventura 32:38 And you should get that sort of real flexibility going on. I’ll reload because I change the theme. This whole idea of having to reload and change the theme will start to erode because you will be able to change a specific part, change a template, like a header template part, or just change the colors.
Matías Ventura 33:14 And this is also a mock-up of what we have in mind with those little previews where the idea is that yes, you can just get this sort of completely different field retaining the same template. But you can see like, again, a block template with an entirely different design applied, and how all of that can feel, right. And this is just like a different theme.json essentially saying we’re pretty close of, of doing that.
Matías Ventura 33:47 See, like here with twenty twenty-two. Like, since the layout is the same, the only thing that feels that change is the typography.
Matías Ventura 34:04 And the home template that’s a bit more opinionated, but this is again, the same theme like this is an example of duotone applied to feature images. How it affects the whole template so you can get this thing very quickly.
Matías Ventura 34:25 And I don’t have a UI for it, but I’m going to change the theme.json I’m using.
Matías Ventura 34:33 I’ll see what happens.
Matías Ventura 34:49 And this is just again, it’s just changing the little preview here. It’s the same theme with the same templates and so on we can see that the color palette is new.
Matías Ventura 35:06 I was saying that it will be interesting if you’re browsing the theme showcase, like being able to try, like, “Oh, I like the sort of the styles that this theme has.” But without having to adapt the templates, or you could just browse styles, apply those styles, and so on. If we get the font, the Web Fonts APIAPIAn API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways. going.
Matías Ventura 35:34 Because right now this is restricted to, again, what the theme is bundling.
Matías Ventura 35:40 But again, you should it feels like you should be able to have your own preferred fonts that you even use across themes.
Matías Ventura 35:48 Like there’s a lot, I think there’s a lot of decoupling there that we’re like, barely starting to see. And we’re coming also from like years of this is how things work, themes are this full bundle of stuff.
Matías Ventura 36:01 But I think we have a lot of opportunities now to say, again, this is just like a really well-curated set of font pairs and so on, and you just apply it to a different context.
Matías Ventura 36:19 I’m going to switch to the previous one.
Matías Ventura 36:23 Any anything more on these?
Matías Ventura 36:27 The biggest thing is going to be that we need to build the UI for now. But I think we have all the pieces ready.
Josepha Haden Chomphosy 36:48 While we’re transitioning to the next topic, I want to give us a time check. We have about 19 to 20 minutes in the time that we had planned for this.
Matías Ventura 37:00 That’s perfect. Because I think we cover mostly everything, we can be a bit looser now.
Matías Ventura 37:25 The other animation that we have now is this upload theme that shows like, again, if you’re adding something in-between stuff, or on top of stuff, and so on.
Matías Ventura 37:40 I think maybe Kelly you want to like because I think one of the biggest pieces that we had is how do we start to evolve the navigation around this stuff?
Matías Ventura 38:18 Because I think one cool thing would be because now you can, again, that you get access to like, again, your blogblog(versus network, site) template or whatever you will be able to edit, oh, I have this categoryCategoryThe 'category' taxonomy lets you group posts / content together that share a common bond. Categories are pre-defined and broad ranging. for, I don’t know, travel. I want to change how that category’s template looks; you will be able to do that.
Matías Ventura 38:51 From the so here, like when you’re managing categories is like now you’re able to add to your category template. So there should be something here that shows or that even starts to connect all of those dots.
Matías Ventura 39:04 I think that’s something that we haven’t really looked into but it will be important, I think.
Kelly Hoffman 39:12 Yeah, I think as long as we’re making this iterative, we’re approaching it very iteratively. And we have like this one item in the top bar right now that’s like “site editor.” And it’s like everything is in there; most things are site editing and site creation. That’s like all these styles, page management’s template management. And if we keep going down the road of keeping everything in one item, like I think over time, everything would fit in there. So I think each of these pieces is ready for primetime or core.
Kelly Hoffman 39:54 I think keeping it all separate is going to possibly create some longer-term problems down the road because it’s really like site creation and site editing is like most of what is in WordPress core today. So.
Kelly Hoffman 40:12 I can show some visuals.
Matías Ventura 40:22 And I guess like the other question is going to be how if we want to label these sort of like, I don’t know if it’s beta, but something that sort of, again, “early access” or whatever, like if we want to set that tone.
Kelly Hoffman 40:40 That’s as part of it. Yeah.
Matías Ventura 40:42 Because I think a lot of the at least the things that I’m finding is can be really fun to play with. But it’s different it’s like it’s a different world, there are different things that it’s been really cool to see the community start to create in them and get excited about them and so on.
Kelly Hoffman 41:06 So like, right now, you can visually just like edit the content of your page, but like, what if next time we go to pages, you see it in the context of like, like you see your sidebars in your header and footer? But yeah, it’s just like how, like, when do you introduce people to that? And how do kind of like, I guess it set the context that like, is this beta or is this like, Are you in a playground? Or is this like, Primetime? Like, is this replacing your current experience?
Matías Ventura 41:41 And I’m also really like enjoying the sort of curated customization that you get as well.
Matías Ventura 42:06 Do you want to jump in your screen?
Kelly Hoffman 42:12 Sure. So right now, we have the separate menu item at the site editor. And this is one idea, like yesterday, to have like how we can kind of slowly introduce people. So right now, people are used to going in their parent menu to see customizerCustomizerTool built into WordPress core that hooks into most modern themes. You can use it to preview and modify many of your site’s appearance settings.. So if we had something called the editor, for example, when we labeled it beta, then we just bring people right to their homepage, which is like them editing their homepage template. And that could be like, just like easing people into it. And the only thing they would have access to is what we have ready right now, which is the styles that we were just looking at and then template editing.
Kelly Hoffman 43:02 And if they have like, this is a backward compatibility thing. Like if they had other template parts, we could show that there. But um, this was just like a very high-level idea of how to be a bit more iterative and not making everything be like this is a separate thing. This is full site editing. It’s just like, here’s how you edit templates. Now visually, here’s how you can edit all the styles across your site.
Kelly Hoffman 43:36 I think there are trade-offs. Of course, everything’s but that was kind of, I don’t know, one idea of how to introduce people.
Kelly Hoffman 43:51 What’s like immediate thoughts around this?
Josepha Haden Chomphosy 43:56 I was gonna say, do we want to stop and take some questions from folks if we got any?
Matías Ventura 44:15 We didn’t go into too much detail on anything.
Kelly Hoffman 44:32 There is a lot of stuff in this release, it’s exciting.
Helen Hou-Sandí 44:40 Big differences even from two weeks ago, because I have moved my site over to a block-based theme.
Helen Hou-Sandí 44:49 Two weeks ago, like the day before WordCampWordCampWordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. US.
Helen Hou-Sandí 44:53 It was fun. Yeah, it was fun. I think that’s what I said last time. And so you know, sometimes we target, how fast how quickly can somebody get something done? And sometimes it’s how willing is somebody to stick to it? Right and get through the process, because standing up a whole site is not going to be a five-minute process. Sounds nice, but it’s not going to be. And so like, how enjoyable is the tool? How much can you see that you’re able to get to the point that you want?
Matías Ventura 45:32 This is definitely more of the theme territory. But definitely the starting point of themes on a new site. I think somebody mentioned page patterns as a thing. I think those are. Those are the things that are not touched on today that I think are the things that will make the biggest difference in terms of, you know, is somebody’s going to see this and understand how they can use it. Because I know for me, like that was the hardest thing set like even though, I know I know what I’m doing. And I can open up a bunch of tabs and look at, you know, the suggested patterns and style guide for that theme. That’s like not reality. Right? And so like, how can I have that stand up on my site without having to like, replace existing content? No, that’s all those things exist, I think. But what what do those things look like in twenty twenty-two?
Matías Ventura 46:36 Yeah, even like, I think the I think like full page patterns for templates sort of over for like, your block, your archives, you’re single, but like those are going to be really areas of exploration now because it sometimes feels archaic, that you need to switch your whole theme because you like the block of this other theme, like, there’s a lot of means like, oh, I need to let go of my homepage header design and all of the stuff because I like this specific template, I should be able just to choose that as my blogging template.
Matías Ventura 47:16 And I think that’s, I think that’s something we’ll need to start traversing that path because we will still have the baggage of this is how things work and so on.
Matías Ventura 47:29 And it can be even in the way that things are set up. Now, like all these template bars that you’re creating, and so on, they are tied to your theme, when there’s no need for them to be tied to your theme. They are just because that’s how things work. And that allows you to like not if you switch a theme that you like, you don’t get into weird states. But in some cases, I think these weird states can make more sense for a user. Because, again, if they’ve made so many leads to a header, and they have it exactly the way they want, they may not want to lose it when they switch things like that whole idea; I think we need to start challenging.
Helen Hou-Sandí 48:11 Feels like if you can pick color palettes that reduces a lot of even wanting to switch a theme in the first place. Right? What Matt was saying.
Kelly Hoffman 48:22 Then combine that with fonts too.
Matías Ventura 48:28 And it would feel more like, again, you’re operating on the palette and font pairs on one side and then on like templates on another, and templates can be something that you aggravate to again if you’re running another plugin or whatever else it is it can come with its own templates that just feed into your sort of style color palette and so on.
Matías Ventura 48:55 And that’s really I think that can be really cool.
Matías Ventura 49:12 I think like the main thing for me is that like just sort of preparing for them. I ended up with a list of so many things to also improve. Because once you start seeing things in like, in a more real context, you start saying, oh, this block is lacking that feature. Oh, it would be really nice if this block did that other thing.
Matías Ventura 49:49 If you improve a block then it just affects so many areas of the site, now. It’s not just when you’re writing on where you’re now it’s also when you’re composing your design when you’re doing all this stuff.
Matías Ventura 50:04 Yeah, there’s a lot of small and improvements and so on that, we need to continue doing.
Josepha Haden Chomphosy 50:18 last thoughts before we check a broad level go/no-go thought here?
Josepha Haden Chomphosy 50:27 Excellent, folks. Are we feeling comfortable that in the next two weeks we can get this ready for go? Or do we want to pump the brakes, pull some stuff out how we’re feeling?
Josepha Haden Chomphosy 50:41 Also, if there are bits and pieces that specifically need a brake pump, we can, we can note that in the post that we’re pulling together about this as well.
Matías Ventura 50:54 I think from my perspective, the thing I’m, I was a bit worried about was the navigation menuNavigation MenuA theme feature introduced with Version 3.0. WordPress includes an easy to use mechanism for giving various control options to get users to click from one place to another on a site. flows, which I think we did a lot of progress over the last few weeks. And I think we need to like set some good boundaries there.
Matías Ventura 51:10 There has been a lot of work in also supporting like, sort of mega menus where you have in your sub-menus, you have images and paragraph any sort of block, which is cool. But there’s also like the 80% of cases where you just have a few links, and we need to ensure that that experience is as best as we can make it.
Matías Ventura 51:32 And that for me had been over the past few months, one of the worries. I think we’re in a better place. And I think we’ll get there. But that for me was one of the things that jumped.
Kelly Hoffman 51:46 I am feeling pretty good about everything. Any other? I didn’t want to hop in first.
Josepha Haden Chomphosy 52:03 It’s a broad go for me.
Matt Mullenweg 52:06 I think if we can set the expectations, like this beta label, I think are some of the features.
Josepha Haden Chomphosy 52:13 Yeah, I think there are a few things that need like, “this is good, but not not not final sale,” sort of indicator. Yeah, I think that’s a good call.
Kelly Hoffman 52:24 I guess my only thing is like maybe where we have the beta labels if that’s perhaps we just put some text that someone doesn’t have the Gutenberg plugin installed. Being like, “receive faster updates to this if you install the Gutenberg plugin.” Maybe a link to the directory, that could both drive adoption, the Gutenberg plugin, and also provide a way that people aren’t stuck in this beta state for, you know, four months.
Josepha Haden Chomphosy 52:44 And we have also I think we checked the stats like two or three days ago and it looks like over 50% of Gutenberg plugin users are on the latest version most of the time.
Josepha Haden Chomphosy 52:58 And I think that’s great news. Also, I don’t know how we got people on old versions of the plugin at all, but it’s mostly the newest folks and so I think that’s a good call out to suggest they swing back to the plugin.
Matías Ventura 53:11 Yeah, I think it’d be important to like if we can add that sort of contextual thing to any beta label because we don’t want it to be perceived like all this is like a beta in the sense that it’s not ready or it’s not like it’s more in the sense that there’s a lot that’s evolving and it needs that sort of like faster iteration pace and people need to be open to like interacting with it in that sort of way.
Matías Ventura 53:38 I don’t think we have an advantage in the sense that a lot of this experience comes with a theme like we’ll continue to be building bridges and experiences for like classic themes to also get blocks in more places and so on but it’s like it’s a more gradual adoption there. And this is more like okay if you want to try with the theme and you can always switch and use another one if that doesn’t fit.
Helen Hou-Sandí 54:14 Also a broad go.
Helen Hou-Sandí 54:17 Yeah, my primary concern is all explained, you know, like, if we ship it at a point where there are big gaps in like the matching between the editor and the front end, then we might break that trust and not be able to gain it back. Right? But I think at some point over the past year it has flipped into like there are some things that are not matching. I’ve flagged a lot of them with poor Anne McCarthy who gets like all my complaints in GitHubGitHubGitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/, but you know, those mismatches now are mostly minor, right in a way where like, yeah, it would be nice if we could get it like exactly right. But the more tagtagA directory in Subversion. WordPress uses tags to store a single snapshot of a version (3.6, 3.6.1, etc.), the common convention of tags in version control systems. (Not to be confused with post tags.) thing is like the one that I’m maybe a little bit a little more insistent on.
Helen Hou-Sandí 55:05 Yeah, I think like overall like, the mismatches now are minor enough that like, I don’t use it and feel like I can’t trust it right like I can use it for the most part and have a reasonably good idea of what it’s gonna look like without having to like save and refresh and do that whole thing. Like I said, it was fun getting my site set up. I got frustrated, you know, because of computers, but like I was willing to put in a few hours right into this thing and by sight feels like something that I want it to be now and that’s like, that’s what we want from the software, and it’s really nice to kind of have stayed away from this and really approach it from like user -and. It’s been really nice too. Thanks.
Josepha Haden Chomphosy 56:02 I think I think that’s it for this meeting.
