28. Sabbatical Version

More than 700 contributors to WordPress 6.5, with over 2,500 changes, have enabled the release of the latest version: WordPress 6.5, aka Regina.

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Program transcript

Hello, I’m Javier Casares, and you’re listening to WordPress Pódcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.

In this program, you’ll find the information from April 8th to 14th, 2024.

The correction of a security issue in the Avatar block has led to the release of WordPress 6.5.2. Up to this point, everything seems quite normal, although it’s notable that WordPress 6.5.1 was skipped, which was prepared for another update and, due to how tags are handled, it was necessary to create the subsequent version, hence updating the documentation to ensure this does not happen again in the future.

The Core team has announced that from WordPress 6.6 onwards, support for PHP 7.0 and PHP 7.1 will be dropped, making the minimum development compatibility version PHP 7.2.24.

The release of the Gutenberg 18.1 plugin brings some new features to the editor, such as the ability to set background images directly from the editor and the possibility to swap and edit template parts much faster.

The Performance team has launched a new plugin called Speculative Loading following the experimental API of the Speculation Rules, designed to improve future navigation by trying to preload possible URLs that will be visited and not just some of their components.

On the Developer Blog, a post has been published explaining in detail the workings of the Interactivity API with an example of a basic toggle block and all the necessary steps and components to modify as a base idea to create your own interactive blocks in the future.

The Design team is working on the new grid experience and how it is displayed to users so that it can be used in the simplest and most intuitive way possible. The focus is on being able to create grids by dragging cells and how to manage the blocks in each of the cells.

The Accessibility team continues to work on improving the user experience with Gutenberg and is reviewing elements such as the overriding of patterns or the editing of templates.

Regarding Meta, the accessibility and usability of the new design proposal for the plugin directory are being reviewed.

And about that team, Meta has launched an update of the design of the WordPress support forums which is gradually being applied to the various WordPress.org sites of local editions.

The Support team is reviewing the contributor ladder with the goal of increasing people’s involvement in the team, making it sustainable in the long term.

The first steps that have been proposed to prepare the final document are to identify team tasks to create a transparent system and define clear roles, and then, match the tasks with contribution levels, considering the training and experience for each of them.

The Community team has announced the 44 students who have graduated from the Mentorship Program which had 28 mentors providing support over 6 weeks.

Among the achievements are thousands of strings translated in core, plugins, themes, and even documentation; collaboration in team meetings leading or taking notes; contributions with documentation; leading tables at a Contributor Day; organizing a WordCamp; or contributing in Playground and WP-CLI.

If everything goes as planned, along with WordPress 6.7 around November 2024, we will have the third edition of this program.

Meanwhile, following the acquisition of Meetup.com by Bending Spoons, the new team has been in contact with the WordPress community to discuss an investment of $50 million over the next few years in their platform, asking for feedback to improve their system; all this while the community finalizes the launch of GatherPress and a pilot program, in which control of WordPress events is in the hands of the community and not a private company.

WordCamp Europe 2024 has released its schedule.

Thursday, June 13th will be a Contributor Day with about 800 contributors. Friday, June 14th, spread across three rooms, will feature multiple talks and a morning with various workshops and multiple mini-talks. The model will be repeated on Saturday, June 15th, ending with the classic keynote by Matt Mullenweg and the announcement of WordCamp Europe 2025.

And finally, this podcast is distributed under a Creative Commons license as a derivative version of the WordPress Podcast in Spanish; you can find all the links for more information at WordPress Podcast .org.

You can follow the content in Catalan, German, Spanish, and French.

Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!