2023 has ended, and 2024 is here, bringing calm but also updates on what we’ll see in the upcoming WordPress versions.
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Program transcript
Hello, I’m Javier Casares, and you’re listening to WordPress Podcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
You’ll find updates from December 25th to 31st, 2023.
The quietest week of the year has come to an end, as the close of the year is traditionally a time of rest in the Community.
However, this hasn’t stopped some teams from doing some work and publishing summaries of what 2023 has brought and what’s coming in 2024.
One team doing a retrospective is the Openverse team, the multimedia search engine of WordPress. They’ve focused on unifying all subprojects into one and launching Openverse.org, their main site, in addition to providing more analytics information and improving security measures in contents, particularly regarding sensitive content.
This effort involved 25 contributors, over 1500 tickets, the addition of 7 new content providers, surpassing 750 million images and 3 million audios.
What can we expect in 2024? Mainly, improvements in user experience and quality of results, with a daily expansion of data sources.
Another team summarizing their year is the Themes team, which has added over 1400 new themes, 300 of which are block themes, all thanks to the collaboration of 15 theme reviewers.
But the most visible changes in WordPress will be in the editor, especially in the Site Editor, where most work was focused in 2023.
To start, we have the Command Palette, which allows us to move more easily, and with fewer clicks, through the various editing screens.
Another new feature is the Style Book, where you can see an example of all the blocks and how they look, as well as make general or specific modifications to perfect your site.
A hidden gem is the style shortcuts. Not only can we copy and paste blocks from one content to another, from one WordPress to another, but we can also copy the style to keep it exact.
And for those who don’t want menus or distractions, the Distraction-Free Mode arrives, leaving the editor in full-screen mode, hiding menus and tools so you can work as if you were on the front end of your site.
Two tools that have evolved a lot in the past 12 months are Patterns, which have become a basic system for quickly creating sites, and the List View, which helps clarify the organization of each block in that place.
However, undoubtedly, if there is something that will be representative of 2024, it is the continuation of the Mentorship Project, coming with its second edition.
It will be the first major project of the year, as calls for mentors and students will begin on January 8th, and they will be announced on February 14th.
The program will last between 4 and 6 weeks, running parallel to WordPress 6.5, meaning those who want to participate should reserve from February 19th to March 29th.
Another approach we might see in this second edition is Projects.
The goal of this system, applied in other open-source projects, is to train a student with a specific goal or project to focus on and learn from. A couple of proposed examples are the creation of community themes or creating courses, among several people, for Learn WordPress.
These projects should be short in duration, about 4 weeks, mentorable, and with a general benefit to the Community. And as it’s for students, it should be relatively simple.
2024 begins, accompanied by a proposal for those participating in the Community who want to explain it, and for those looking to join the Community and seeking a goal to do so.
Finally, this podcast is distributed under the EUPL license. For more information and links, please visit WordPress Podcast .org or follow the content, also, in Catalan, Spanish, and French.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
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