Without warning, Matt has decided to shut down the WordPress Sustainability team, which was created just two years ago.
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Program transcript
Hello, I’m Alicia Ireland, and you’re listening to WPpodcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
In this episode, you’ll find the information from January 13th to 19th, 2025.
It was in June 2022 when, during the Q&A session after Matt Mullenweg’s presentation, the later Team Rep, Nora Ferreirós, asked about the possibility of creating a channel or platform to discuss sustainability in WordPress. At that time, Matt suggested opening a channel in Slack, which, a year later, during WordCamp Europe, became the Sustainability Team.
The team had several missions, not only focusing on improving the ecological aspect of the software, working jointly with the Performance team, but also addressing other tasks such as the economic sustainability of the project, leading a large part of the Five For the Future project, which is now precisely Matt’s measuring tool to claim that companies are not contributing.
An interesting aspect of this situation is how, in his last message before closing the entire team and Slack channel, Matt states that “he just found out the Sustainability team exists,” even though he himself approved it two and a half years ago. He added that since the team is not doing anything useful, he’s closing it. Undoubtedly, this marks another step in the ongoing changes within the WordPress universe.
And now there are 200 versions of the Gutenberg plugin, since the project was launched on February 3, 2017, almost 8 years ago when the concept of “blocks” started to enter the world of WordPress.
In version 20.0, the main focus is on fixing some details of the Style Book, the new pattern design when creating a new page, and a simple system to convert a page into a blog page.
The Design team has already revealed that the main focus for WordPress 6.8 will be polishing and fixing existing elements, focusing on resolving outstanding issues and improving the interface. Corrections and design revisions will be prioritized, along with simplifying interactions and eliminating “headaches” in the user experience. While new features may be added if they are well-prepared, the goal is to optimize what is already available.
And finally, this podcast is distributed under a Creative Commons license as a derivative version of the podcast in Spanish; you can find all the links for more information, and the podcast in other languages, at WPpodcast .org.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
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