Knowing who, what, how, and when contributions are made to the WordPress project is one of the goals the Community has set to improve its health.
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Program transcript
Hello, I’m Alicia Ireland, and you’re listening to WordPress Podcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
In this episode, you’ll find the information from September 9th to 15th, 2024.
Understanding how contributions are made in WordPress is important, not just in terms of code, but across all teams. And for that, data and dashboards that logically present this information are needed.
This has been the focus in recent months with the Health Dashboards project: experimenting with the available data.
Dashboards have been created for three teams and one project, WordPress 6.6, which shows the information about companies and individuals involved in the Five for the Future initiative and how the workload is distributed among these people and companies within the project.
The Core dashboard highlights opportunities related to the new version, contributor activity, how contributions are distributed, and the companies involved.
The Training dashboard also shows opportunities, video retention, and course enrollments.
The Community dashboard includes sections on opportunities, new user metrics, unique events and attendees, and available funds.
For now, this information is part of a proof of concept, and the next steps aim to automate these processes.
In support of the Five for the Future initiative, a child theme built with blocks has been created for the site’s redesign and added functionality.
This is the starting point for adding new elements and ideas to the project, which had largely stagnated since its launch without significant changes. Upcoming features may include a blog, a newsletter, and various usability improvements.
In terms of updates, we have the release of WordPress 6.6.2 with 15 core fixes and 11 block editor fixes, primarily focused on addressing CSS issues in certain themes.
Looking ahead to WordPress 6.7, the release of Gutenberg 19.2 brings new experiments to the editor, such as the end of the experimental phase for the Block Bindings interface and the ability to extend the preview menu with new options.
The Core team has announced new priority values for the admin toolbar, along with explanations of common development practices and frequent errors in the Gutenberg project.
They emphasize the importance of using private APIs first, being intentional when making APIs public, avoiding API creation for convenience, and promoting semantic extensibility. They also address the need to maintain clear purposes for each code package, avoid premature optimization, and exercise caution when introducing new data stores, as they add complexity.
Additionally, the evolution of the HTML API continues, with ongoing efforts to support all HTML tags, modify internal HTML content, and review all CSS semantics.
The focus hasn’t yet shifted to Bits, the shortcodes replacements, but there is a proposal to integrate the entire tool natively in PHP, suggesting a new function for future versions of the programming language.
In the Developers Blog, there’s an interesting article on using WP-CLI for site administrators, where you can learn how to check core, plugin, and theme versions, monitor changes, manage users, or create backups.
The Plugins team has opened a discussion or clarification on how plugins should install other plugins… what should and should not be done if you want your plugin to be in the WordPress.org repository.
Essentially, there are two basic rules. First, you must always ask for user permission. Second, a plugin cannot install another plugin that is not in the directory.
Various suggestions for workflows are now being proposed, generating many comments about what should or should not be allowed, depending on the types of plugins involved.
The Design team has shared its biweekly update with some interesting details for the editor, such as quick value auto-completion for image sizes (showing 100% pixel size, and 75%, 50%, or 25%), some improvements in WordPress.org’s 2FA, several patterns for Twenty Twenty-Five, and the Style Book for classic themes.
Two of the biggest projects are the complete redesign of the Five for the Future site and the learning flows of Learn WordPress.
The Sustainability team has outlined the first steps and plans to create guidelines for making WordPress websites more sustainable. The goal is to educate the WordPress community on reducing environmental impact, and they plan to collaborate with other WordPress teams and reference existing web sustainability guidelines.
The team focuses on defining an appropriate format and identifying target users, discussing whether to divide the content by developer, designer, and novice user profiles.
What are the medium-term goals for the WordPress project? WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy reviewed the 11 points Matt Mullenweg raised at WordCamp Europe, along with the general goals for the project in 2024, which focus on the content manager, community, and ecosystem.
For WordPress itself, efforts are centered on redesigning the admin panel, something introduced in Phase 3 of Gutenberg without initial priority, which has now temporarily set aside real-time changes in the editor.
Regarding the community, the goal is to attract new users to events, shifting from attracting potential contributors to drawing in WordPress users. This suggests that WordCamps aim to engage editors and administrators, while WordPress events like WordPress Day or next-gen events focus more on project contributors.
The third focus area is Data Liberation, a project that has its challenges due to its complexity. WordPress Playground is gaining attention as a tool to simplify these processes. Thanks to this, we might soon see a “Try WordPress” button on the project’s main page, allowing users who have never seen how it works to test it easily from their browser without needing to sign up with a hosting provider. For now, it would be just a button with no extra configuration, so users would experience the same setup as a fresh installation.
Some ideas still in the works include making WordPress fun again, possibly reviving the Feature Notifications project in light of the admin panel redesign, or the next steps for GatherPress and its current testing phase.
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, and the podcast in other languages, at WordPress Podcast .org.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
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