


<p><strong>Beau:</strong><br />Yeah, so I think it’s really interesting that you&#8217;re sort of bringing it from the merchant&#8217;s perspective because we try and do that a lot. Ultimately, even though we know that builders and developers are involved with many WooCommerce deployments, ultimately, it’s a merchant who has to use the product. And so, however we get there, we need to get to a good merchant experience. And frankly, something that we’ve seen over the years is that if you look back originally to the sort of WooCommerce early days, WooThemes days, and then all the way through—frankly, until now—the model for WooCommerce is you get WooCommerce, and then you will definitely add all of these other solutions. You’ll add a payment gateway, a shipping carrier, a tax solution probably, who knows—all sorts of things. Actually, fun fact, I think the number I’ve seen recently is an average Woo store has something like 44 plugins. So you’re talking about a lot of extra stuff.</p>



<p>And so that was intentional. That was the approach—</p>



<p>give builders and merchants the flexibility to get this core and then plug in any solution that they need and mix and match to get exactly what they want. And what we’ve seen over the years is, I guess, two things. One, that introduces a level of decision fatigue, discoverability, and complexity that people don’t actually love. No one really wants to manage a bunch of software. So there’s this level of complexity that it introduces. And then, the other one is frankly that the expectations of people on the internet have changed. WooCommerce has been around for over a decade. Things have changed in that time.</p>



<p>And so, what we are seeing is we actually need, as the platform, as WooCommerce, we actually need to have a little bit stronger of an opinion on what good looks like. And so, you will see us start to shift a little bit more towards, hey, if you don’t have a preference or you don’t have a specific need, you should just use this solution.</p>



<p><strong>Jonathan:</strong><br />Stronger defaults.</p>



<p><strong>Beau:</strong><br />Right, stronger defaults, which is theoretically something that WordPress has always had—decisions, not options. This has been a mantra forever, and we&#8217;ve usually tried to do that at the technical level, but we haven’t always done it at the sort of product experience level. And you’ll see us do that a little bit more going forward, and that’s directly based on feedback where we’ve just heard, &#8220;Look, there are too many things to manage. There are too many choices to make. I actually don’t want to do this. I just want to be told which ones work together. I want them to work really well. I want them to be integrated. If I’m using a specific payment solution, I want to get comprehensive payment reports, and I want it to perfectly handle my taxes,&#8221; whatever the combination may be.</p>



<p>And when you&#8217;re mixing and matching from the ground up, that level of interoperability can be pretty tricky to get right. So, you’ll see us do a little bit more of that—saying, &#8220;Hey, these solutions work together.&#8221; We still want to maintain the option—if you don’t want to use that, you’ve still got the flexibility. That’s the beauty of everything being open source and extensible. But if you go that route, then obviously, you&#8217;re taking all of that into your own hands, and now you need to figure out, do they work together as well as they could, which is frankly how things are right now. And that&#8217;s part of the value that builders provide in the equation—putting together a package of solutions and then making sure that they work well together.</p>



<p><strong>Jonathan:</strong><br />So, you guys just recently launched the business services category, and to me, that was good. I was happy to see that. It was a good example of, at least from an outside perspective, this continued evolution to take in a more holistic view of the things that merchants need. If you&#8217;re a merchant and you&#8217;re having any kind of success, there’s a whole series of additional things you are going to need at some point, right? And yeah, I think I&#8217;d love to hear more from you on anything that stands out to you in that evolution—the impact of thinking more holistically, of thinking about better decisions, not options, of thinking about that end-user experience. How is that affecting what you prioritize in terms of developing new features and introducing new things like the business services category?</p>



<p><strong>Beau:</strong><br />Yeah, that&#8217;s a great one. So, I guess just to touch on that briefly, for anyone who’s not familiar with it, I guess a few months ago now we introduced the business services tab within our marketplace. And this is basically where you go as a merchant to find sort of WooCommerce-adjacent services. So, the idea is they don’t necessarily need a technology integration; they may not be part of your website or part of your baked-in business workflow, but you need them to run a business. And I think this sort of breaking out of the idea of WooCommerce as just a plugin to, no, for a lot of people, WooCommerce represents their business. It is the hub, how they run their livelihood. And so, what can we do to help them do that? What are all the other pieces that are relevant when running a business, and how do we connect people to those solutions? I think previously, we just relied on, I guess, developers to either do that or for a business owner to engage with a developer and a tax professional or an accountant or whoever, and for them to just figure it out themselves. And if we’re in a world where we’re trying to enable merchants to get up and running and get going, then the more we can do to help them, the better. So, that’s really where that’s coming from.</p>



<p><strong>Jonathan:</strong><br />I like that a lot. One thing I want to touch on—so I think WooCommerce and WordPress, especially being in Automattic, there’s always been a unique interplay between what’s happening in core WordPress and what’s happening in WooCommerce. I remember WooCommerce was doing early work on blocks, and there was an alignment of interest there, I think because it was at Automattic, that might not have been there otherwise. It was a lot of work to try and figure out how do we do this. And I remember some of the early—at least from my perspective—there was a lot of pioneering work that was done in Woo on improving user interfaces and experiences that also had a positive impact on the work that was happening in core. So, how do you think about the interplay? WooCommerce, to me, is the largest and most impactful sub-ecosystem of WordPress, and that can be something that can be lost at times. How do you think about the relationship between what&#8217;s happening in WooCommerce versus what’s happening in WordPress? How does WooCommerce, from an engineering perspective, think about what&#8217;s happening in the project and where WordPress itself is evolving?</p>



<p><strong>Beau:</strong><br />Yeah, I think you&#8217;re spot on with the reality that if WooCommerce wasn’t within Automattic, things might be a little different here, and that would impact both WooCommerce and WordPress. The work that you’re referring to, investing early in blocks and thinking about what’s happening in WordPress core, is very much still happening. Actually, a perfect example of that—a couple of examples, actually—the product editor that you&#8217;ve seen us working on, if you&#8217;re watching the sort of things that are feature-flagged and available, if you jump into the right spot, that’s undergone a couple of really major changes, and there’s probably still another one coming, which is part of why we haven’t pushed that out as any sort of default experience for the majority of users. And that’s because it’s evolving alongside what’s happening in WordPress. And frankly, WordPress itself is still figuring out a lot of things related to full-site editing, to data views, to all these new components and new UX patterns and things. And so, we&#8217;re right there with them. We&#8217;re actually working alongside core Gutenberg teams and really bringing to them, &#8220;Hey, we have this complex experience that’s critical for commerce that you haven&#8217;t considered yet. Let’s work together and solve for that.&#8221;</p>



<p>Actually, a kind of random good example—we’re having a conversation at the moment around, should data views—so these are effectively the replacement for a WP list table—should they support drag-and-drop? On the surface, you&#8217;d say, yeah, absolutely. But there are a lot of scenarios where it breaks. If you&#8217;ve got a sort or a filter applied and you change the order, what happens now? So, there’s a bunch of things like that where the fact that we represent commerce, we represent a lot of really complex user interactions and a certain way of interacting with what is technically WordPress (which WordPress focused purely on content may not be taking into account). And so, what I like to think is that WooCommerce is basically one of the most complex applications of anything that WordPress could come up with. And so, if the WordPress platform can support that, it can support almost anything.</p>



<p><strong>Jonathan:</strong><br />I like that example a lot, and I think one of the strengths—it’s a double-edged sword—one of the strengths is that interplay of content and commerce that merchants see, right? They love the idea of being able to create content, which is often key to the marketing, the sales side of a commerce business. And it’s easy to take for granted—that&#8217;s not just trivial in these other platforms. They tend to be, &#8220;Okay, this is commerce, and maybe there’s some light content layer.&#8221; So, there&#8217;s a lot of complexity that comes with that because they’re not the same, yet they can have a clear relationship with each other. But the needs in commerce—it’s a different workflow, different expectations, different problem set, the caching versus non-caching. So, it seems like it’s a lot more work to do that and to stay with that.</p>



<p>As we’re nearing the end, what I&#8217;d love to touch on is—you see that work firsthand, and I think that’s increasingly appreciated for those who&#8217;ve been in the space for a while and been following. It could be frustrating that things don’t happen quickly. At the same time, I think people who are paying attention can also see that care and consideration and thinking long-term is also part of what you&#8217;d want in a steward of the ecosystem. So, for the builders who are listening and they’re looking to the future of WooCommerce, what are some of the things that you would be encouraging builders to be thinking about? Where should they be focusing some of their energy and efforts? Let’s start with the agency folks first. For folks who are building for merchants, they have clients, whether freelancers or agencies, what are some of the things that</p>



<p>you recommend that they be thinking about in the context of where you see the platform going?</p>



<p><strong>Beau:</strong><br />Great question. Yeah, so I think we&#8217;ve talked about blocks and the future of WordPress and where WordPress is going. So, I&#8217;d say part of it would be to understand that as much as you can, especially for bigger agencies—I think they tend to be better connected to what is happening with WordPress. So, understand that and be looking at what does this mean for the sites that I&#8217;m building, especially on the backend. So, in the admin experience, things are shifting towards blocks, towards this new WP admin design that is sort of coming slowly down the pike—the full-site editor. So, think about how that all applies to the type of work that you do and look at which solutions you&#8217;re picking. So, which extensions or plugins are you choosing to build new sites on? Especially, are they compatible with this future? I would frankly be really thinking about that at this point. If they’re not and you are not the developer of that solution, start working with that developer to understand how they can make it compatible with that future. Start engaging with us. Like I said before, we really are out there trying to engage more directly with developers and agencies because we want to hear what is happening out there. I think people actually forget that agencies are often—agencies and solo developers—they&#8217;re actually often the front line that’s really understanding the reality of applying software like WordPress or WooCommerce in a way that we frankly may not understand because we are building the software and they&#8217;re applying it in certain scenarios. So, getting that real-world feedback loop of, hey, how are you using it? What problems are you running into? Are there limitations we can remove? Are there things that we&#8217;re not doing that we should be doing, or whatever?</p>



<p>Really closing that feedback loop with us is the biggest thing. I mentioned earlier, I think we have a community Slack channel—that’s a great spot to start. We have a developer blog, which is at developer.woocommerce.com. There’s a developer-specific newsletter on there now, which I would strongly recommend anyone building for WooCommerce to be on. And then, we&#8217;ve started using GitHub discussions pretty actively as well. So, I&#8217;d suggest jumping in there. You&#8217;ll see RFCs for major changes that we&#8217;re looking at doing—things like that. We need real feedback from people who are frankly outside of that cycle of Gutenberg development (and I use Gutenberg there loosely just to refer to the whole roadmap). But yeah, real-world uses of WooCommerce—we want to hear about them.</p>



<p>And I guess I would say—this sounds a little &#8220;Matrix-y&#8221;—but open your mind a little bit. We&#8217;ve heard feedback from builders specifically or developers who don’t necessarily want change. They know how to build for the current system, and they want it to stay the same. We need to change to stay up with WordPress. WooCommerce and WordPress are inextricably tied together. That’s not going to change. So, we are going to stay deeply integrated with WordPress. We believe that’s actually the thing that makes us unique in the market and which gives us the strength and flexibility and the reach of WordPress itself. So, we fully intend to stay integrated with WordPress, and that means that the future is going in a certain direction. So, I would encourage everyone to understand that direction and come along with us.</p>



<p><strong>Jonathan:</strong><br />I like that a lot. The business services category launch, I think, is a good illustration of what I&#8217;m observing in the market, which is a growing interest from products to play in the WooCommerce space. More product companies are coming in, they’re seeing the opportunity, they’re seeing the size of the ecosystem, and that&#8217;s been an important part for a long time now—people building extensions. And you&#8217;re seeing bigger and bigger companies come in. There&#8217;s a full partnerships team at WooCommerce. For the people listening who are building products for the WooCommerce ecosystem, what guidance do you have to offer them? How would you encourage them to be thinking about the evolution of WooCommerce as a platform, as an ecosystem, and what should they be paying attention to?</p>



<p><strong>Beau:</strong><br />Yeah, that&#8217;s a good one. So, I think, as you said, there are a lot of people trying to enter the WooCommerce market, if you like. And for us, we&#8217;re in this weird spot. We&#8217;ve talked a lot about ecosystem thinking and the community and working with developers and builders, and that is the strength of what we&#8217;re doing. But frankly, if we&#8217;re to remain running as a business, we also need to commercialize certain parts of it. We need to be part of the money that&#8217;s flowing through this ecosystem so that we can continue funding the development of what we&#8217;re doing.</p>



<p>So, I mentioned there&#8217;s a few sort of central commerce experiences that we&#8217;re investing heavily in. I&#8217;d say off the top-line list of that is payments, shipping, taxes. These are areas that you&#8217;re going to see us invest in heavily, and you&#8217;ve already seen us probably building WooPayments. We also recently relaunched WooCommerce Shipping. So, these are areas that we know that it&#8217;s critical for merchants to have a great experience, and we believe that the best experience is one that’s going to be deeply integrated with WooCommerce. So, there are plenty of other solutions for payments and shipping in particular where it&#8217;s a plugin and then you go use some other dashboard to manage that part of your business. And we fundamentally believe that there is at least a certain audience who want that all in WP admin. They want an integrated experience, they want to be able to bounce between different parts. I mentioned earlier like payments and taxes, let&#8217;s say. You can imagine that actually extending to all three—so, if you&#8217;re taking a payment that includes taxes, that covers shipping, you want to be able to understand all of that in the performance of your business. And if that&#8217;s spread out across multiple systems, that can be really difficult. So, I&#8217;d say we&#8217;ll be investing more heavily in those areas, which is not to say that other people shouldn&#8217;t, but I guess know that we will be playing in those spaces a lot.</p>



<p><strong>Jonathan:</strong><br />For someone who is coming into the space—you just made that point about the importance of the integrated experience. If they&#8217;re new, how would you encourage them to be thinking about that? For instance, in the business services category, you introduced banking, for instance. And unless your intention is to get into banking (which, who knows?), but it’s—for someone who&#8217;s in the banking space and coming in, how would you be encouraging them to be thinking about things like that? Should it be integrated? There&#8217;s not existing precedent, right? It could be outside the space; they could go to a separate dashboard. How would you think about that example?</p>



<p><strong>Beau:</strong><br />Yeah, banking is an interesting one. Obviously, that&#8217;s a really complicated space.</p>



<p><strong>Jonathan:</strong><br />But also fundamental to commerce.</p>



<p><strong>Beau:</strong><br />Fundamental to commerce, pretty connected to payments, interestingly. So, it is an area that we&#8217;re sort of touching on. But I would say in general, what we would love to see more of is people who are really thinking about WooCommerce as a whole complex system and how can they build something that&#8217;s part of that complex system rather than, &#8220;I represent banking; I want to just make my banking visible.&#8221; That’s the first step. But actually building it in some sort of integrated way is really where we see things succeed more.</p>



<p>So, I mentioned that the business services tab is largely for things that really probably won&#8217;t integrate deeply or are somewhat separate or somewhat adjacent to the website itself. There may be some crossover—so actually, banking is maybe a good one. We probably could, and probably will, have more flows and better seamless handoff between your WooCommerce store and whatever that banking solution is. But we&#8217;re probably not going to, for example, replicate your entire banking website and banking experience all within WooCommerce. In business services, just as a specific example, I think is also really interesting for connecting things like developers. And this is an interesting sort of crossover—one of the services you may need as a business is a developer to customize your business website.</p>



<p><strong>Jonathan:</strong><br />Right.</p>



<p><strong>Beau:</strong><br />So, I think there&#8217;s an interesting crossover there, which we’ve just started exploring—opening up the ability for merchants to get access to various forms of technical support, to use a loose term there, as part of running their business.</p>



<p><strong>Jonathan:</strong><br />Well, I’m excited. There&#8217;s a lot to the ecosystem, and I think this is why you coming on episodes like this is especially helpful from my perspective, to give a broader sense of what&#8217;s going on behind the scenes. And I really appreciate you taking the time to share. We&#8217;ve given folks a lot of things to think about and work with. If someone wants to reach out to you, Beau, what&#8217;s the best way to get in contact?</p>



<p><strong>Beau:</strong><br />The best way is probably to tweet at me, or I guess &#8220;X&#8221; at me, however you say that now. Yeah, you can get me on there. It’s just @BeauLeins, which I’m sure we can put in the show notes or something for the spelling. Or frankly, you can also just email me: beau@automattic.com.</p>



<p><strong>Jonathan:</strong><br />Excellent. Beau, thank you for the time. Thank you for the work that you and the team have been doing, and talk to you soon.</p>



<p><strong>Beau:</strong><br />Yeah, thanks, Jonathan. Appreciate it. Been fun.</p>



<div class="wp-block-group has-global-padding is-layout-constrained wp-block-group-is-layout-constrained"></div>




<p>In this episode of <strong><em>Inside Woo</em></strong>, host <strong>Jonathan Wold</strong> welcomes <strong>Beau Lebens</strong>, head of engineering at WooCommerce, to discuss the development and future of WooCommerce within the WordPress ecosystem which grew out of his post on Woo, <em><strong>WooCommerce in 2024 and beyond: Roadmap update</strong></em>.</p>



<p>Beau shares his extensive experience within Automattic and provides insights into the uniqueness of WooCommerce as it evolves from a WordPress plugin to a complete commerce solution with its ecosystem. The conversation covers topics such as the challenges and responsibilities of maintaining backward compatibility, the role of WooCommerce in the broader WordPress evolution, and the strategic alignment with new WordPress technologies like blocks and full site editing. </p>



<p>Beau highlights ongoing efforts to improve the integration of merchant and agency experiences, focusing on performance optimization and ecosystem collaboration. They also chat about  new additions like the Business Services tab and emphasizes the importance of providing integrated, merchant-centric solutions.</p>



<p><strong>Takeaways</strong></p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>WooCommerce’s Growth</strong>: WooCommerce started as a simple plugin but has evolved into a robust ecosystem, tightly integrated with WordPress, providing flexibility for both developers and merchants.</li>



<li><strong>Stronger Defaults for Merchants</strong>: To reduce complexity and decision fatigue for merchants, WooCommerce is focusing on providing stronger defaults, particularly in payments, shipping, and taxes, while still maintaining flexibility for developers.</li>



<li><strong>Backward Compatibility</strong>: WooCommerce is deeply committed to backward compatibility, even when implementing complex changes like the High-Performance Order Storage (HPOS) project, to ensure stability for merchants and developers.</li>



<li><strong>Developer Engagement</strong>: WooCommerce is increasingly engaging with its developer community through GitHub, Slack, and blogs, seeking feedback to shape future updates and features.</li>



<li><strong>Ecosystem Thinking</strong>: WooCommerce embraces ecosystem thinking, encouraging third-party developers to build integrated solutions that work seamlessly within the WooCommerce platform rather than as standalone products.</li>



<li><strong>Commerce and Content Performance</strong>: One of WooCommerce’s unique challenges is balancing the performance needs of real-time commerce with content-focused caching, requiring continuous optimization.</li>



<li><strong>Future Investment</strong>: WooCommerce is investing heavily in key areas such as payments, shipping, taxes, and technologies like blocks and full-site editing, aligning with WordPress’s long-term roadmap.</li>
</ul>



<p><strong>Links</strong></p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://x.com/beaulebens">Beau Lebens on X (Twitter)</a></li>



<li><a href="https://developer.woocommerce.com">WooCommerce Developer Resources</a></li>



<li><a href="https://github.com/woocommerce/woocommerce/discussions">WooCommerce on GitHub</a></li>



<li><a href="https://developer.woocommerce.com/2024/07/23/woocommerce-in-2024-and-beyond-roadmap-update/">WooCommerce in 2024 and beyond: Roadmap update</a></li>



<li><a href="https://developer.woocommerce.com/category/roadmap-insights/">Roadmap Insights</a></li>
</ul>



<p><strong>Chapter Titles with Timestamps</strong></p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>00:00&nbsp;Introduction and Welcome</li>



<li>00:38&nbsp;Beau Lebens&#8217; Journey at Automattic</li>



<li>02:38&nbsp;The Evolution of WooCommerce</li>



<li>05:14&nbsp;WooCommerce as an Ecosystem</li>



<li>10:18&nbsp;Challenges and Responsibilities in WooCommerce Development</li>



<li>16:49&nbsp;High Performance Order Storage (HPOS)</li>



<li>25:00&nbsp;Open Source Dynamics in WooCommerce</li>



<li>28:16&nbsp;Understanding Performance Bottlenecks</li>



<li>28:28&nbsp;WooCommerce and Hosting Ecosystem</li>



<li>29:03&nbsp;Commerce and Content: A Performance Perspective</li>



<li>30:01&nbsp;Engineering Challenges and Merchant Experience</li>



<li>31:12&nbsp;WooCommerce&#8217;s Evolution and Stronger Defaults</li>



<li>34:49&nbsp;Business Services and Holistic Merchant Support</li>



<li>36:59&nbsp;Interplay Between WooCommerce and WordPress</li>



<li>41:41&nbsp;Future Directions for WooCommerce Builders</li>



<li>46:27&nbsp;Guidance for WooCommerce Product Companies</li>
</ul>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Tue, 15 Oct 2024 09:00:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5:"BobWP";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:36;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:57:"WPTavern: Jetpack 13.9.1 Patches a Critical Security Flaw";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=175212";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:68:"https://wptavern.com/jetpack-13-9-1-patches-a-critical-security-flaw";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:2144:"<p><a href="https://jetpack.com/blog/jetpack-13-9-1-critical-security-update/">Jetpack 13.9.1</a>, a critical security update, was released yesterday to fix a vulnerability in the Contact Form feature that had been present since 2016. This flaw allowed logged-in users of a site to access forms submitted by visitors.</p>



<p>The vulnerability was discovered during an internal security audit, prompting the Jetpack team to collaborate with the WordPress.org Security Team to release patches for all versions of Jetpack dating back to 3.9.9.</p>



<img width="2158" height="744" tabindex="0" src="https://wptavern.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/image-33.png" alt="Full list of the 101 different versions of Jetpack released yesterday." class="wp-image-175217" />



<p>The Jetpack team also warned: “We have no evidence that this vulnerability has been exploited in the wild. However, now that the update has been released, it is possible that someone will try to take advantage of this vulnerability.”</p>



<p>Wordfence team <a href="https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/wordpress-plugins/jetpack/jetpack-1391-missing-authorization-to-authenticated-subscriber-sensitive-information-disclosure">shared</a> that the plugin is “vulnerable to unauthorized access of data due to missing capability checks in the Contact_Form_Endpoint class in various versions version up to, but not including, 13.9.1. This makes it possible for authenticated attackers, with subscriber-level access and above, to read all Jetpack form submissions on the site.”&nbsp;</p>



<p>The vulnerability has been given a CVSS score of 4.3, and users are advised to update to Jetpack 13.9.1 to secure their websites.&nbsp;</p>



<p>The Jetpack team reassured users, stating, “We will continue to regularly audit all aspects of our codebase to ensure that your Jetpack site remains safe.”&nbsp;</p>



<p><strong>Update</strong>: <a href="https://wpscan.com/plugin/jetpack/">WPScan</a> will share the Proof of Concept on November 11, 2024, to give users time to update. The vulnerability was reported by their researcher Marc Montpas. </p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Tue, 15 Oct 2024 04:02:57 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:7:"Jyolsna";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:37;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:29:"WPTavern: HeroPress Turns Ten";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=175202";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:40:"https://wptavern.com/heropress-turns-ten";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:2520:"<p><a href="https://heropress.com/">HeroPress</a>, launched by Topher DeRosia, has <a href="https://heropress.com/ten-years-of-heropress/">turned ten</a>. Born from the idea of amplifying the voices of those who have overcome significant challenges, HeroPress has spent the last decade celebrating the diverse and inspiring journeys of people who have found strength, opportunity, and success through their connection with WordPress.</p>



<p>At its core, HeroPress is about storytelling. It showcases the personal and professional journeys of individuals from all walks of life, connected by their use of WordPress.</p>



<p>Back in 2015, HeroPress had hit a snag following failure to<a href="https://wptavern.com/heropress-fails-to-attract-backers-cancels-kickstarter-campaign-ahead-of-deadline"> attract backers</a> but this didn&#8217;t stop Topher. So rather than releasing videos with translations as originally planned, he opted for text-based essays, which are easier and more cost-effective to create, translate, and download over low bandwidth.</p>



<p><a href="https://heropress.com/essays/finding-your-place/">Andrey “Rarst” Savchenko</a> wrote the first essay for HeroPress, and over time, it has become a beacon of hope for those seeking inspiration.</p>



<a href="https://x.com/hellofromTonya/status/1844835198283743394"><img width="2412" height="1064" tabindex="0" src="https://wptavern.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/image-34.png" alt="" class="wp-image-175222" /></a>



<p>The global reach of HeroPress is reflected in the incredible diversity of its contributors: 278 essays have been published in 29 languages from 66 countries, featuring 136 women, 134 men, and 3 non-binary individuals.</p>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">
<p>HeroPress has been a blessing in my life for ten years now. It has been a deep deep privilege to share the stories of WordPress with the world.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Topher DeRosia</p>
</blockquote>



<p>As HeroPress turns 10, it’s also looking for <a href="https://heropress.com/donate/">financial support</a>. “HeroPress isn’t just a website — it’s a platform that brings hope and connection to the global WordPress community. Your financial support ensures that we can keep sharing these stories, helping to inspire more people through the power of WordPress,” said Topher DeRosia.</p>



<p>You can also <a href="https://heropress.com/contribute/">share your WordPress story </a>with HeroPress.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Tue, 15 Oct 2024 03:55:32 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:7:"Jyolsna";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:38;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:40:"WordPress.org blog: WordPress 6.7 Beta 3";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:35:"https://wordpress.org/news/?p=17984";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:56:"https://wordpress.org/news/2024/10/wordpress-6-7-beta-3/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:8279:"<p id="block-3cf2f536-f167-464f-a4ba-07f45105e476">WordPress 6.7 Beta 3 is now ready for testing!</p>



<p id="block-b65e3bf0-0494-4039-a701-f21e505600ad"><strong>This beta version of the WordPress software is under development</strong>. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, it is recommended you evaluate Beta 3 on a test server and site.</p>



<p id="block-e904322b-c488-4166-8312-0b769067b943">You can test WordPress 6.7 Beta 3 in four ways:</p>



<table class="has-fixed-layout"><tbody><tr><th>Plugin</th><td>Install and activate the <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-beta-tester/">WordPress Beta Tester</a> plugin on a WordPress install. (Select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream).</td></tr><tr><th>Direct Download</th><td>Download the <a href="https://wordpress.org/wordpress-6.7-beta3.zip">Beta 3 version (zip)</a> and install it on a WordPress website.</td></tr><tr><th>Command Line</th><td>Use the following <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/cli/">WP-CLI</a> command:<br /><code>wp core update --version=6.7-beta3</code></td></tr><tr><th>WordPress Playground</th><td>Use the <a href="https://playground.wordpress.net/#%7B%20%22preferredVersions%22:%20%7B%20%22php%22:%20%228.0%22,%20%22wp%22:%20%22https://playground.wordpress.net/plugin-proxy.php?build-ref=11b364fbffbab28d9127be91ee2d48f6645a6509%22%20%7D,%20%22features%22:%20%7B%20%22networking%22:%20true%20%7D,%20%22steps%22:%20%5B%20%7B%20%22step%22:%20%22login%22,%20%22username%22:%20%22admin%22,%20%22password%22:%20%22password%22%20%7D,%20%7B%20%22step%22:%20%22importFile%22,%20%22file%22:%20%7B%20%22resource%22:%20%22url%22,%20%22url%22:%20%22https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wpaccessibility/a11y-theme-unit-test/master/a11y-theme-unit-test-data.xml%22%20%7D%20%7D,%20%7B%20%22step%22:%20%22importFile%22,%20%22file%22:%20%7B%20%22resource%22:%20%22url%22,%20%22url%22:%20%22https://raw.githubusercontent.com/WordPress/theme-test-data/master/themeunittestdata.wordpress.xml%22%20%7D%20%7D,%20%7B%20%22step%22:%20%22installPlugin%22,%20%22pluginZipFile%22:%20%7B%20%22resource%22:%20%22wordpress.org/plugins%22,%20%22slug%22:%20%22query-monitor%22%20%7D,%20%22options%22:%20%7B%20%22activate%22:%20false%20%7D,%20%22progress%22:%20%7B%20%22weight%22:%202%20%7D%20%7D,%20%7B%20%22step%22:%20%22installPlugin%22,%20%22pluginZipFile%22:%20%7B%20%22resource%22:%20%22wordpress.org/plugins%22,%20%22slug%22:%20%22create-block-theme%22%20%7D,%20%22progress%22:%20%7B%20%22weight%22:%202%20%7D%20%7D,%20%7B%20%22step%22:%20%22installPlugin%22,%20%22pluginZipFile%22:%20%7B%20%22resource%22:%20%22wordpress.org/plugins%22,%20%22slug%22:%20%22debug-bar%22%20%7D,%20%22progress%22:%20%7B%20%22weight%22:%202%20%7D%20%7D,%20%7B%20%22step%22:%20%22installPlugin%22,%20%22pluginZipFile%22:%20%7B%20%22resource%22:%20%22wordpress.org/plugins%22,%20%22slug%22:%20%22health-check%22%20%7D,%20%22progress%22:%20%7B%20%22weight%22:%202%20%7D%20%7D,%20%7B%20%22step%22:%20%22installPlugin%22,%20%22pluginZipFile%22:%20%7B%20%22resource%22:%20%22wordpress.org/plugins%22,%20%22slug%22:%20%22test-reports%22%20%7D,%20%22progress%22:%20%7B%20%22weight%22:%202%20%7D%20%7D,%20%7B%20%22step%22:%20%22installPlugin%22,%20%22pluginZipFile%22:%20%7B%20%22resource%22:%20%22wordpress.org/plugins%22,%20%22slug%22:%20%22user-switching%22%20%7D,%20%22progress%22:%20%7B%20%22weight%22:%202%20%7D%20%7D%20%5D%20%7D">6.7 Beta 3 WordPress Playground instance</a> to test the software directly in your browser without the need for a separate site or setup.&nbsp;</td></tr></tbody></table>



<p id="block-93b754f0-e211-47b7-ac89-349d85c2f02f">The current target date for the final release of WordPress 6.7 is <strong>November 12, 2024</strong>. Get an overview of the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/6-7/">6.7 release cycle</a>, and check the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/">Make WordPress Core blog</a> for <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/tag/6-7/">6.7-related posts</a> in the coming weeks for more information.</p>



<p id="block-7b5d791d-225a-4623-83ee-19a586c7094b"><strong>Catch up on what&#8217;s new in WordPress 6.7</strong>: Read the <a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2024/10/wordpress-6-7-beta-1/">Beta 1</a> and <a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2024/10/wordpress-6-7-beta-2/">Beta 2</a> announcements for details and highlights.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="block-f1abd396-a019-4c9a-bcb8-9ac381a61ca1">How to test this release</h2>



<p id="block-92dfcab6-d2a8-4753-84ce-8ef7b6dd1e90">Your help testing the WordPress 6.7 Beta 3 version is key to ensuring everything in the release is the best it can be. While testing the upgrade process is essential, trying out new features is equally important. <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/test/2024/10/01/help-test-wordpress-6-7/">This detailed guide</a> will walk you through testing features in WordPress 6.7.</p>



<p id="block-6519fad7-59ea-45f1-9b8f-ca14c09c865d">If you encounter an issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area of the support forums or directly to <a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/newticket">WordPress Trac</a> if you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report. You can also check your issue against a list of <a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/tickets/major">known bugs</a>.</p>



<p id="block-4bd66b13-6784-4a4f-bb7a-b4dab8e5fc12">Curious about testing releases in general? Follow along with the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/test/">testing initiatives in Make Core</a> and join the <a href="https://wordpress.slack.com/messages/core-test/">#core-test channel</a> on <a href="https://wordpress.slack.com/">Making WordPress Slack</a>.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="block-67b6a6c7-a95e-4b27-8946-a66d15105cb7">Vulnerability bounty doubles during Beta/RC</h2>



<p id="block-16175da3-84c9-45d0-b735-08a9d4453a14">Between Beta 1, released on October 1, 2024, and the final Release Candidate (RC) scheduled for November 5, 2024, the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/security/2024/02/12/welcoming-2024-with-wordpress-6-5-beta-1/">monetary reward for reporting new, unreleased security vulnerabilities</a> is doubled. Please follow responsible disclosure practices as detailed in the project’s security practices and policies outlined on the <a href="https://hackerone.com/wordpress">HackerOne page</a> and in the <a href="https://wordpress.org/about/security/">security white paper</a>.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="block-14306771-b240-4e15-948f-7504757bbb61">Beta 3 updates and highlights</h2>



<p id="block-93917d31-4478-45b5-b71c-1c8a1f49cc65">WordPress 6.7 Beta 3 contains more than 26 Editor updates and fixes since the Beta 2 release, including 18 tickets for WordPress core.</p>



<p id="block-ffdc1220-c2f5-4c23-982b-60c366c629d1">Each beta cycle focuses on bug fixes; more are on the way with your help through testing. You can browse the technical details for all issues addressed since Beta 3 using these links:</p>



<ul id="block-3fcf78c7-bebc-42e1-96f6-8b605ea23aae" class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/commits/wp/6.7?since=2024-10-09&until=2024-10-14">GitHub commits for 6.7</a> since October 9, 2024</li>



<li><a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/query?status=closed&changetime=10%2F09%2F2024..10%2F14%2F2024&milestone=6.7&col=id&col=milestone&col=owner&col=type&col=priority&order=id">Closed Trac tickets</a> since October 9, 2024</li>
</ul>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="block-c414b25e-802f-4f29-a31c-9e13394a4947">A Beta 3 haiku</h2>



<p id="block-a0f155a2-19b3-4645-a516-c7ae56541e5f">Code in motion hums,<br />New features bloom, bugs retreat,<br />6.7 calls.</p>



<p id="block-014ab749-322b-44bd-bf4f-bf5817d90bfd"><em>Props to <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/joedolson/" class="mention"><span class="mentions-prefix">@</span>joedolson</a> and </em><a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/jeffpaul/" class="mention"><span class="mentions-prefix">@</span>jeffpaul</a><em> for proofreading and review, and haiku from&nbsp;<a href="https://wordpress.slack.com/team/U030RHV73" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">@colorful-tones</a></em>.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Tue, 15 Oct 2024 00:30:07 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:14:"David Baumwald";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:39;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:71:"WordCamp Central: Beyond the Savannah: Join Us at WordCamp Nairobi 2024";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:39:"https://central.wordcamp.org/?p=8222797";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:95:"https://central.wordcamp.org/news/2024/10/beyond-the-savannah-join-us-at-wordcamp-nairobi-2024/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:8394:"<h1 class="wp-block-heading">Introduction</h1>



<p>Kenya, a land of breathtaking contrasts, is renowned for its abundant wildlife, vibrant cultures, and welcoming smiles. In the heart of this diverse landscape lies Nairobi City, famously known as the Silicon Savannah—home to one of Africa’s most dynamic and engaging WordPress communities. In the midst of all this, WordCamp Nairobi 2024 will be held, marking the 8th annual gathering of WordPress enthusiasts, developers, and innovators in Kenya.</p>



<p>This November, the Kenyan WordPress community invites you to join us in ‘The City Under the Sun’ as we come together for two days of learning, collaboration, and connection. WordCamp Nairobi 2024 promises to be a celebration of creativity, innovation, and the limitless possibilities of WordPress in Africa and beyond.</p>



<h1 class="wp-block-heading">The 2024 Theme:</h1>



<a href="https://central.wordcamp.org/files/2024/10/Blog-Image-3.jpg"><img width="1024" height="640" tabindex="0" src="https://central.wordcamp.org/files/2024/10/Blog-Image-3-1024x640.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-8223263" /></a>



<p><strong><em>&#8216;Beyond the Savannah: Connecting the Kenyan WordPress Community to the World&#8217;</em></strong></p>



<p>Our theme this year, “Beyond the Savannah”, symbolizes our commitment to expanding horizons and exploring WordPress&#8217;s limitless possibilities. We aim to bridge the gap between the Kenyan WordPress community and the international stage, fostering collaboration, knowledge sharing, and growth.</p>



<p>Just as the Kenyan savanna is a vast and diverse landscape, so too is the world of WordPress. Our theme encourages us to venture beyond our comfort zones and discover new opportunities for growth and innovation.</p>



<h1 class="wp-block-heading">When Will it Happen and Where?</h1>



<p>WordCamp Nairobi 2024 will take place on <strong>November 1st and 2nd, 2024</strong> at the <strong>Daystar University, Nairobi Campus Towers</strong>, located in the heart of Nairobi. This venue offers modern facilities and stunning views of the city skyline, providing an inspiring backdrop for two days of learning and networking.</p>



<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr"><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/15.0.3/72x72/1f3db.png" alt="🏛" class="wp-smiley" /> Exciting News! WordCamp Nairobi 2024 will be at Daystar University, Nairobi Campus! This innovative venue is perfect for networking and learning.<br /><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/15.0.3/72x72/23f3.png" alt="⏳" class="wp-smiley" /> Don’t wait! Limited tickets available—secure yours now! <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/15.0.3/72x72/1f39f.png" alt="🎟" class="wp-smiley" /><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/15.0.3/72x72/1f449.png" alt="👉" class="wp-smiley" /> <a href="https://t.co/uCHLG4QqdB">https://t.co/uCHLG4QqdB</a><a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/WCNBO24?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#WCNBO24</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/WordPress?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#WordPress</a>  <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/DaystarUniversity?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#DaystarUniversity</a> <a href="https://t.co/ZxGgTcCagg">pic.twitter.com/ZxGgTcCagg</a></p>&mdash; WordPress Kenya (@WordPress_Kenya) <a href="https://twitter.com/WordPress_Kenya/status/1844730970311631037?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 11, 2024</a></blockquote>
</div>



<h1 class="wp-block-heading">What to Expect: Speakers and Sessions</h1>



<p>WordCamp Nairobi 2024 will feature a diverse lineup of local and international speakers, each bringing unique insights and expertise to the event. From experienced developers to creative designers, content creators, and entrepreneurs, our speakers will cover a wide range of topics relevant to the WordPress community.</p>



<p>You can expect sessions on beginner workshops, advanced development, design and UX talks, business and marketing strategies, case studies, and much more.</p>



<h1 class="wp-block-heading">Sponsorship Opportunities</h1>



<p>WordCamp Nairobi 2024 is made possible thanks to the generous support of sponsors. We offer a range of sponsorship opportunities that allow your brand to be part of the event while supporting the local WordPress community. <strong><a href="https://nairobi.wordcamp.org/2024/sponsors/call-for-sponsors/">Become a sponsor today</a></strong> and help us make this event accessible to everyone.</p>



<h1 class="wp-block-heading">Nairobi Vibes and Accommodation</h1>



<p>Nairobi, often called the “Green City in the Sun,” is a vibrant fusion of cultures, energy, and modernity. From its rich cultural heritage and diverse people to local cuisines, buzzing nightlife, dynamic art and music scenes, lush nature parks, and bustling shopping hubs, Nairobi offers a unique blend of experiences. As a hub of <strong>tech and innovation</strong>, and with its pleasant year-round weather, Nairobi has something for everyone.</p>



<p>If you&#8217;re traveling from outside Nairobi, there are several accommodation options near the venue, ranging from budget-friendly hotels to more luxurious stays. We recommend booking early to secure the best rates and proximity to Daystar University. <a href="https://nairobi.wordcamp.org/2024/travel/accomodation/"><strong>Click here for detailed accommodation information</strong></a></p>



<h1 class="wp-block-heading">Tickets</h1>



<p>Tickets for WordCamp Nairobi 2024 are now available! We offer <strong>General Admission</strong>, <strong>Microsponsor Support, </strong>and<strong> Student Admission</strong> tickets, ensuring that there’s a suitable option for everyone. All tickets include 2-day access to sessions, workshops, food, drinks, swag, and more. <strong><a href="https://nairobi.wordcamp.org/2024/tickets/">Get your tickets now</a></strong> and join us for an unforgettable experience!</p>



<h1 class="wp-block-heading">Join Us at WordCamp Nairobi 2024!</h1>



<p>WordCamp Nairobi 2024 is shaping up to be an unforgettable event filled with learning, collaboration, and exciting opportunities to connect with the WordPress community. Whether you&#8217;re new to WordPress or a seasoned professional, there’s something for everyone. From insightful sessions to hands-on workshops, networking with peers, and celebrating the unique energy of Nairobi, this event promises to be a highlight of the year.</p>



<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">WordPress lovers, it's time! Grab your tickets for <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/WordCampNairobi2024?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#WordCampNairobi2024</a> NOW! <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/15.0.3/72x72/1f39f.png" alt="🎟" class="wp-smiley" /> Don’t miss out on this incredible opportunity!<br />Click to book <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/15.0.3/72x72/1f449.png" alt="👉" class="wp-smiley" /><a href="https://t.co/O3tFfLDcU2">https://t.co/O3tFfLDcU2</a><a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/WNBO24?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#WNBO24</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/WordPress?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#WordPress</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/TechEvents?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#TechEvents</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/NairobiTech?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#NairobiTech</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/WebDevelopment?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#WebDevelopment</a> <a href="https://t.co/GsE5aQFHvl">pic.twitter.com/GsE5aQFHvl</a></p>&mdash; WordPress Kenya (@WordPress_Kenya) <a href="https://twitter.com/WordPress_Kenya/status/1835704120864276554?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 16, 2024</a></blockquote>
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<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Contact Us: nairobi@wordcamp.org</li>



<li>Our Website: <a href="https://nairobi.wordcamp.org/2024/">https://nairobi.wordcamp.org/2024/</a></li>



<li>Tickets Info: <a href="https://nairobi.wordcamp.org/2024/tickets/">https://nairobi.wordcamp.org/2024/tickets/</a>&nbsp;</li>



<li>Sponsorship Opportunities: <a href="https://nairobi.wordcamp.org/2024/sponsors/call-for-sponsors/">https://nairobi.wordcamp.org/2024/sponsors/call-for-sponsors/</a>&nbsp;</li>



<li>Join the Talks: #WCN24 #WordCampNairobi #WordPressKenya</li>
</ul>



<p></p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Mon, 14 Oct 2024 19:08:25 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Jeremy Kabaya";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:40;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:67:"Do The Woo Community: Team Members Video, During a Call, Off or On?";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:43:"https://dothewoo.io/?post_type=blog&p=86083";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:68:"https://dothewoo.io/blog/team-members-video-during-a-call-off-or-on/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:7945:"<p>As an agency or a service, you are on Zoom, Google Meets, etc. having those calls with your team. Small and large.</p>



<p>The question is. </p>



<p>Should there be a rule for video on or off?</p>



<p>There were a couple of things that prompted this thought with me. One was a podcast episode from <strong>Woo AgencyChat</strong> and another from a post our host Katie Keith shared on X.</p>



<img width="1024" height="526" tabindex="0" src="https://i0.wp.com/dothewoo.io/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/2024-10-13-1.32.45%E2%80%AFPM.png?resize=1024%2C526&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-86086" />



<p><a href="https://x.com/KatieKeithBarn2/status/1844018227736625500">You can see all the replies and the conversation here. </a></p>



<p>Here is a summary of those responses.</p>



<ol class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Mixed rules depending on context:</strong> Some companies have expectations for cameras to be on during scheduled meetings but allow flexibility for unscheduled or informal calls. For example, some prefer cameras on for important discussions, but may allow them off in situations like unscheduled meetings or when someone is not prepared.</li>



<li><strong>Cultural expectations:</strong> Many teams don&#8217;t have strict rules but generally encourage cameras to be on. Some teams naturally default to cameras on because it&#8217;s become part of the company culture, while others leave it to individual preference.</li>



<li><strong>Flexibility is key:</strong> Several respondents suggest a &#8220;soft rule&#8221; where cameras are encouraged but exceptions are understood (e.g., someone is unwell, internet issues, or self-consciousness). Some also suggested having cameras on at the start to ensure attention but allowing them off later.</li>



<li><strong>Cameras for communication:</strong> Many argue that having the camera on improves communication, trust, and engagement by allowing facial cues to be seen, though some disagree and suggest that it’s not always necessary for effective communication.</li>



<li><strong>Empathy and personal boundaries:</strong> Some responses highlight the importance of understanding personal preferences and comfort levels. Leaders are advised to meet people where they are and not force cameras on, which could create pressure or anxiety.</li>



<li><strong>Job context matters:</strong> For specific situations like interviews or client-facing calls, many agree that cameras should be on. However, for internal team meetings, it&#8217;s seen as less critical unless it helps foster better engagement.</li>



<li><strong>Respect and engagement:</strong> There’s a sentiment that having the camera on is a way of showing respect to the team and being fully present in meetings, as it helps with connection and understanding.</li>



<li><strong>Other considerations:</strong> Some suggested improving audio quality or offering a compromise like sharing a headshot if the camera is off. Others mentioned that if cameras are optional, it can create misunderstandings, and there should be clarity on expectations.</li>
</ol>



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<p class="has-secondary-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-f0a1ab971f9dce87252b162a11a595d4">Thanks to our sponsor&#8230;</p>



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<h3 class="wp-block-heading">And then there are cases like this. </h3>



<p>He had&nbsp;<strong>Joe Riviello, founder of Zen Agency</strong> on Woo AgencyChat. He is also a cardiovascular perfusionist while running his agency.</p>



<p>Joe talked about a very interesting situation around the case of, video off or on.</p>



<p>&#8220;The majority of my staff, our leadership, is very experienced. I try to vet everyone who comes through the door, all of our staff, and I try to hire people who have many years of experience&#8230;. About two weeks ago, we hired a gentleman—I won’t say any names—who was really an experienced SEO. He wasn’t really in the whole e-commerce realm but was an experienced SEO. That’s a portion that we’re really trying to build out in our agency. We see good opportunities there, especially utilizing AI in that space. </p>



<p>So anyway, we hired this guy. I vetted him, I hired him, and he started last week. Everything seemed to be going great. I was on vacation last week, so I didn’t really get any face-to-face time with him, but this week I did. I had face-to-face time with him yesterday, along with the rest of my marketing team. We had a group meeting, and his face wasn’t on the Google Meet, though it normally was when I was interviewing him and discussing the role. Anyway, I could tell something was not right; I could just tell. As we were in the meeting, I went into my G Suite, and I looked up his IP address and saw an IP address from the Philippines.</p>



<p>So that raised a red flag. I asked him to show his face, and he wouldn’t show his face. He said he had to restart his computer. So I said, “Well, you know what? Instead of showing your face, just tell me your birthday,” because I knew his birthday from a background check that we ran on him. He couldn’t say his birthday. He just dropped off. </p>



<p>So immediately at that moment, I picked up my phone and called this guy, and he answered the phone while he was in the meeting with me. “Hey Joe, how’s it going?” So I knew something was up, and I would not stop, man. I just kept grinding, trying to get it out of him. It turns out he was working a couple of different jobs in the same role, but who knows if it was even him doing the work or not. </p>



<p>I know one of his previous employers— it definitely was not him doing the work because I phoned them, and now apparently he no longer has a job there either.&#8221; So again, I’m not going to mention any names, but that was an interesting day yesterday and part of my morning today.&#8221;</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">A unique case but&#8230;</h3>



<p>Now I admit this is not typical, and also this was a recent hire. But still, one can have definitive ideas of video camera etiquette, and you still need to be prepared for those unusual moments. Also, a great lesson learning in hiring remotely.</p>



<p>You can read the transcript or listen to the full episode, <strong><a href="https://dothewoo.io/balancing-careers-and-agency-evolution-with-joe-riviello/">Balancing Careers and Agency Evolution with Joe Riviello</a></strong></p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Mon, 14 Oct 2024 11:52:59 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5:"BobWP";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:41;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:63:"WPTavern: State of Enterprise WordPress 2024 Survey is Now Open";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=175111";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:74:"https://wptavern.com/state-of-enterprise-wordpress-2024-survey-is-now-open";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:2103:"<p>The 2024 <a href="https://soewp.com/">State of Enterprise WordPress Survey</a> is now open. This marks the second year Big Bite, a UK-based enterprise WordPress agency, is conducting this survey.</p>



<p>Last year, over 100 prominent organizations using WordPress, including Macy’s, New Statesman Media Group, and The Times, participated. The <a href="https://soewp.com/2023-report/">2023 report</a> highlighted how enterprises monetize their websites, with 9 out of 10 respondents planning to continue using WordPress due to high satisfaction. Additionally, nearly three-quarters of the brands surveyed rated the return on investment from their WordPress sites as good or excellent.</p>



<p>This year’s survey aims to build on these insights by gathering more data on usage patterns, customization trends, budget allocations, and the challenges enterprise brands face with WordPress. The survey takes about 6 minutes to complete and covers topics such as enterprise profiles, WordPress usage and selection, costs, maintenance, and future plans of enterprises.</p>



<p>Iain McPherson, CEO of Big Bite, commented: “The findings from the 2023 survey paint a very positive picture of enterprise WordPress, with almost three quarters of respondents stating that they’d be very likely to recommend the platform to other large-scale organizations. This signals that we’ll see even more major brands adopting WordPress in the coming months and years, however it’s crucial that we don’t rest on our laurels.&#8221;</p>



<p>He continued, &#8221; By releasing State of Enterprise WordPress as an annual report, we want to create an ongoing dialogue with as many enterprise users as possible, ensuring that the wider WordPress ecosystem can continue to evolve and meet the needs of large-scale brands.”</p>



<p>Enterprise organizations using WordPress or those with an enterprise-level solution are invited to <a href="https://bigbitesurveys.typeform.com/soewp2024">take the survey</a> and share their experiences through the end of October. All responses will remain confidential.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Mon, 14 Oct 2024 04:35:27 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:7:"Jyolsna";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:42;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:64:"WPTavern: ACF Plugin Forked to ‘Secure Custom Fields’ Plugin";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=175027";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:69:"https://wptavern.com/acf-plugin-forked-to-secure-custom-fields-plugin";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13647:"<p>Yesterday, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg <a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2024/10/secure-custom-fields/">announced</a> the forking of the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin into a new plugin called <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/advanced-custom-fields/">Secure Custom Fields</a>.</p>



<p>In the announcement, he stated: “On behalf of the <a href="https://wordpress.org/about/security/">WordPress security team</a>, I am announcing that we are invoking <a href="https://github.com/wordpress/wporg-plugin-guidelines/blob/trunk/guideline-18.md">point 18 of the plugin directory guidelines</a> and are forking Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) into a new plugin, Secure Custom Fields. <strong>SCF has been updated to remove commercial upsells and fix a security problem</strong>.”</p>



<a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-org/detailed-plugin-guidelines/#18-we-reserve-the-right-to-maintain-the-plugin-directory-to-the-best-of-our-ability"><img width="2104" height="1526" tabindex="0" src="https://wptavern.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/image-30.png" alt="Point 18 of Plugin Directory Guidelines " class="wp-image-175066" /></a>Point 18 of Plugin Directory Guidelines 



<p>The post went on to explain, “<strong>This update is as minimal as possible to fix the security issue. </strong>Going forward, Secure Custom Fields is now a <strong>non-commercial plugin</strong>, and if any developers want to get involved in maintaining and improving it, please get in touch. Similar situations have happened before, but not at this scale. This is a rare and unusual situation brought on by WP Engine’s legal attacks, we do not anticipate this happening for other plugins.”</p>



<img width="2110" height="1448" tabindex="0" src="https://wptavern.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/image-25.png" alt="SCF Plugin Changelog" class="wp-image-175053" />SCF Plugin Changelog



<a href="https://x.com/WordPress/status/1845180875798884632"><img width="2110" height="798" tabindex="0" src="https://wptavern.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/image-29.png" alt="" class="wp-image-175060" /></a>



<p>The ACF plugin is popular among web developers for its capabilities in customizing edit screens and managing custom field data. However, it has become <a href="https://wptavern.com/impact-of-wpengines-ban-on-acf-plugin">embroiled in a dispute between Automattic and WP Engine</a>, its owner. Following <a href="https://wptavern.com/wp-engine-banned-from-using-wordpress-org-resources">WP Engine&#8217;s ban</a>, the ACF team was <a href="https://x.com/wp_acf/status/1841843084700598355">blocked</a> from accessing WordPress dot org on October 03, 2024.</p>



<p>Next, Automattic tweeted about a vulnerability in the plugin. The tweet was later deleted. In response, the ACF team released <a href="https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/blog/acf-6-3-8-security-release/">ACF 6.3.8</a>, a routine security release stating, “WP Engine remains blocked from accessing our plugins on the .org plugin repository and therefore this update has been shipped to WP Engine’s repository and to the ACF website.”, they said.</p>



<p>The ACF team also provided a copy of this update to the WordPress.org Security team, which posted it to the plugin repository.</p>



<p>On October 9, a <a href="https://wptavern.com/wordpress-org-login-gets-mandatory-affiliation-checkbox-following-wp-engine-dispute">mandatory affiliation checkbox</a> was added to the WordPress.org login. Users could access their accounts only after confirming, “I am not affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise.”</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">WP Engine Reacts</h3>



<p>WP Engine <a href="https://x.com/wp_acf/status/1845169499064107049">tweeted</a>: “We have been made aware that the Advanced Custom Fields plugin on the WordPress directory has been taken over by WordPress dot org. A plugin under active development has never been unilaterally and forcibly taken away from its creator without consent in the 21 year history of WordPress&#8230; This essential community promise has been violated, and we ask everyone to consider the ethics of such an action, and the new precedent that has been set.”  </p>



<p>They <a href="https://x.com/wp_acf/status/1845247349276148208">added</a>: “We were saddened and appalled by Matt Mullenweg’s actions this morning appropriating the Advanced Custom Fields plugin that our ACF team has been actively developing for the WordPress community since 2011.”</p>



<p>In response, WordPress.org <a href="https://x.com/WordPress/status/1845179941727690824">noted</a> that this is not the first occurrence of such an incident: ”This has happened several times before, and in line with the <a href="https://github.com/wordpress/wporg-plugin-guidelines/blob/trunk/guideline-18.md">guidelines you agreed to by being in the directory</a>. Best of luck with your version. We&#8217;re looking forward to making ours amazing for our users, using the best GPL code available.” </p>



<p>In a <a href="https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/blog/acf-plugin-no-longer-available-on-wordpress-org/">blog post</a> on the ACF website, the team shared, “The change to our published distribution, and under our ‘slug’ which uniquely identifies the ACF plugin and code that our users trust in the WordPress.org plugin repository, is inconsistent with open source values and principles.&nbsp; The change made by Mullenweg is maliciously being used to update millions of existing installations of ACF with code that is unapproved and untrusted by the Advanced Custom Fields team.”</p>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">
<p>Advanced Custom Fields is a sophisticated plugin with over 200,000 lines of code, which we continually develop, enhance, support and invest in to meet the needs of our users across WordPress.  We’ve made 15+ releases over the past two years, since joining WP Engine, and added significant new functionality to the free plugin as well as continually improving performance and our security and testing practices to meet the ‘enterprise grade’ that our users deserve.”</p>



<p>Iain Poulson</p>
</blockquote>



<p>The post concludes, “Mullenweg’s actions are extraordinarily concerning and pose the grave risk of upending and irreparably harming the entire WordPress ecosystem.&nbsp; His attempt to unilaterally take control of this open platform that we and so many other plugin developers and contributors have relied on, in the spirit of sharing plugins for all, provides further evidence of his serious abuse of trust, manifold conflicts of interest, and breach of the promises of openness and integrity in the community.”</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Impact of the Fork&nbsp;</h3>



<p>This development does not affect WP Engine, Flywheel hosting, or ACF PRO customers. Free plugin users can choose to install <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/advanced-custom-fields/">Secure Custom Fields from the plugin directory</a> or the ACF 6.3.8 version from <a href="https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/blog/installing-and-upgrading-to-the-latest-version-of-acf/">advancedcustomfields.com</a>. For sites with auto-updates enabled through WordPress.org, the update will automatically transition them from Advanced Custom Fields to Secure Custom Fields.</p>



<p>The WordPress community is no stranger to forking; for instance, WordPress itself was forked from the b2/cafelog project, and ClassicPress was forked in response to the introduction of Gutenberg. However, the forking of the ACF plugin has sent shockwaves through the community, raising ethical questions about the decision.</p>



<p>Interestingly, the Securecustomfields.com domain currently redirects to the ACF website, as highlighted by <a href="https://x.com/kellie/status/1845232004750770636">Kellie Peterson</a> on X.</p>



<p>The community has expressed their support and criticisms about this forking.  The previous reviews of the ACF plugin are still visible under the <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/advanced-custom-fields/">Secure Custom Fields</a> plugin. Following the announcement, several members posted both positive and negative reviews about the plugin in the repository while others took to X.</p>



<a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/advanced-custom-fields/#reviews"><img width="500" height="369" tabindex="0" src="https://wptavern.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/image-20-500x369.png" alt="" class="wp-image-175044" /></a>SCF Reviews from Plugin Repository



<p>Colin Stewart <a href="https://x.com/cost_dev/status/1845213012954591601">tweeted</a>: “In light of today&#8217;s news, since I mentioned in my previous post that I&#8217;m a member of the WordPress Security Team before anyone asks me: No, I was not aware.” Justin Sainton also <a href="https://x.com/JS_Zao/status/1845245386862268521">tweeted </a>along the same lines: “I do not love it. (Speaking independently, as a member of the Plugin Review Team)”</p>



<p>Several people also pointed out that ACF&#8217;s logos are still there in the new plugin, while WP Engine logos are still in the assets folder, while others referred to the post published by the Plugin Review Team <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/plugins/2021/02/16/reminder-forked-premium-plugins-are-not-permitted/">Forked Premium Plugins Are Not Permitted</a>.</p>



<a href="https://x.com/richardhyland/status/1845216757352468777"><img width="2890" height="978" tabindex="0" src="https://wptavern.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/image-21.png" alt="" class="wp-image-175046" /></a>



<a href="https://x.com/BFTrick/status/1845172736785850698"><img width="2888" height="1028" tabindex="0" src="https://wptavern.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/image-22.png" alt="" class="wp-image-175049" /></a>



<a href="https://x.com/techandtrading/status/1845467669727736099"><img width="1816" height="586" tabindex="0" src="https://wptavern.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/image-31.png" alt="" class="wp-image-175071" /></a>



<a href="https://x.com/DanielW_Kiwi/status/1845299674665865524"><img width="2926" height="1082" tabindex="0" src="https://wptavern.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/image-24.png" alt="" class="wp-image-175051" /></a>



<a href="https://x.com/interesting_op/status/1845187104516489466"><img width="2114" height="770" tabindex="0" src="https://wptavern.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/image-28.png" alt="" class="wp-image-175058" /></a>



<p>The creator of Ruby on Rails, David Heinemeier Hansson, published <a href="https://world.hey.com/dhh/open-source-royalty-and-mad-kings-a8f79d16">Open source royalty and mad kings</a>. WP And Legal Stuff published <a href="https://wpandlegalstuff.com/the-acfscf-fork-and-legal-risk/">ACF>SCF ‘fork’ and legal risk</a>. </p>



<p>Tim Nash, a WordPress security consultant, has published an <a href="https://timnash.co.uk/advisory-advanced-custom-fields-changes/">advisory about the ACF changes</a>, while James Giroux published <a href="https://jamesgiroux.ca/acf-gets-a-fork-by-wordpress-org/">ACF Gets A Fork By WordPress.org</a> where he says “While emotions are high, this move highlights the importance of maintaining the security and integrity of WordPress’s ecosystem. Forking under the GPL is not unprecedented, and this action reinforces the need for WP Engine/Silver Lake to negotiate in good faith.”</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Other Forks</h3>



<p>In a blog post titled <a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2024/10/spoon/">Forking is Beautiful</a>, Matt mentioned two recent WordPress fork attempts &#8211; <strong>FreeWP &amp; AspirePress</strong>. </p>



<p>About Vinny Green&#8217;s <a href="https://freewp.com/">FreeWP</a>, Matt said: &#8220;We strongly encourage anyone who disagrees with the direction WordPress is headed in to join up with Vinny and create an amazing fork of WordPress. Viva FreeWP!&#8221;</p>



<p>In response, Vinny took to <a href="https://x.com/vinnysgreen/status/1844488053060141233">X to clarify</a>: &#8220;I love how I never said I was going to fork the project and only wanted to support those who did. Matt is incredible at only hearing the things he wants to hear. Thanks for the free promotion, I guess. We in the biz called that earned media.&#8221;</p>



<p>The <a href="https://freewp.com/faq/">FAQ section</a> in the FreeWP website has more details about the project: &#8220;To the best of our knowledge, it is a website that starts with “freewp” and ends with “.com”. Any further details are at the discretion of the individual who manages it.&#8221; </p>



<p>&#8220;What’s FreeWP then? Besides a more pleasant depiction of the domain? Its burgeoning project that is dedicated to the following mission: Coming soon. And not a fork.&#8221; </p>



<p>So you guessed its status! But you can sign up now to get updates. </p>



<p><a href="https://aspirepress.org/">AspirePress</a>, on the other hand, is a loosely collected group of volunteers that offer their support to the WordPress platform and it &#8220;exists to be a community of individuals focused on helping WordPress become the platform we all aspire for it to be.&#8221;</p>



<p>They are building a <a href="https://aspirepress.org/a-vision-for-aspirepress-and-a-community-run-org-mirror/">mirror of WP .org</a> and <a href="https://x.com/AspirePressOrg/status/1845280032228331818">tweeted</a>: &#8220;In case we have&#8217;t been crystal clear, we <strong>have not</strong> forked WordPress. Rumors to the contrary are exaggerations.&#8221;</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Sun, 13 Oct 2024 17:57:12 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:7:"Jyolsna";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:43;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:120:"Gutenberg Times: Gutenberg Changelog #109 – Gutenberg 19.4, Creating a Block Theme, Responsive Navigation Block Plugin";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:53:"https://gutenbergtimes.com/?post_type=podcast&p=30411";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:89:"https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-109-a-responsive-navigation-block/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:68591:"<p>In this episode, Birgit Pauli-Haack and Anne Katzeff discuss Gutenberg 19.4, Creating a Block Theme, Responsive Navigation Block Plugin, and more.</p>



<p><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-109-a-responsive-navigation-block/#shownotes">Show Notes</a> / <a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-109-a-responsive-navigation-block/#transcript">Transcript</a></p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Editor:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandy-reed/">Sandy Reed</a></li>



<li>Logo:&nbsp;<a href="https://markuraine.com/">Mark Uraine</a></li>



<li>Production:&nbsp;<a href="https://icodeforapurpose.com">Birgit Pauli-Haack</a></li>
</ul>



<p class="has-larger-font-size" id="shownotes"><strong>Show Notes</strong></p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Special guest: Anne Katzeff</h2>



<ul class="wp-block-social-links is-layout-flex wp-block-social-links-is-layout-flex"><li class="wp-social-link wp-social-link-linkedin  wp-block-social-link"><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/annekatzeff/" class="wp-block-social-link-anchor"><span class="wp-block-social-link-label screen-reader-text">LinkedIn</span></a></li>

<li class="wp-social-link wp-social-link-x  wp-block-social-link"><a href="https://x.com/ASKDesign2" class="wp-block-social-link-anchor"><span class="wp-block-social-link-label screen-reader-text">X</span></a></li>

<li class="wp-social-link wp-social-link-wordpress  wp-block-social-link"><a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/askdesign/" class="wp-block-social-link-anchor"><span class="wp-block-social-link-label screen-reader-text">WordPress</span></a></li>

<li class="wp-social-link wp-social-link-instagram  wp-block-social-link"><a href="https://www.instagram.com/annekatzeff_askdesign/" class="wp-block-social-link-anchor"><span class="wp-block-social-link-label screen-reader-text">Instagram</span></a></li></ul>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://www.askdesign.biz/blog/2024/01/building-my-first-wordpress-block-theme-part-1/">Building My First WordPress Block Theme &#8211; part 1</a></li>



<li><a href="https://www.askdesign.biz/blog/2024/02/building-my-first-wordpress-block-theme-part-2-navigation/">Building My First WordPress Block Theme – part 2: Navigation</a></li>



<li><a href="https://www.askdesign.biz/blog/2024/04/building-my-first-wordpress-block-theme-part-3-header/">Building My First WordPress Block Theme &#8211; part 3: Header</a></li>



<li><a href="https://www.askdesign.biz/blog/2024/09/building-my-first-wordpress-block-theme-part-4-child-themes/">Building My First WordPress Block Theme – part 4: Child Themes</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Announcements</h2>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2024/10/wordpress-6-7-beta-2/">WordPress 6.7 Beta 2</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/test/2024/10/01/help-test-wordpress-6-7/">Help Test WordPress 6.7</a></li>



<li><a href="https://www.wpgraphql.com/">WPGraphQL</a></li>



<li><a href="https://www.wpgraphql.com/2024/10/07/wpgraphql-becomes-a-canonical-plugin-my-move-to-automattic">WPGraphQL Becomes a Canonical Plugin</a></li>



<li>Developer Hours: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lBIkf3xNDw">How to Simplify Client Editing in WordPress</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Community Contributions</h2>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/getdave-responsive-navigation-block/">Responsive Navigation Block</a> (Plugin) </li>



<li>Video: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5kzAaEsDMg">Responsive MOBILE MENU using the WORDPRESS Navigation block</a></li>



<li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lKBhwFqAds">Video: WordPress Mobile Menus Fixed in 3 Minutes!</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Gutenberg 19.4</h2>



<p><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/10/09/whats-new-in-gutenberg-15-9-31-may-2/">What’s new in Gutenberg 19.4? (9 Oct)</a></p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">What’s in active development or discussed</h2>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Twenty-Twenty-Five Default Theme</h3>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://github.com/WordPress/twentytwentyfive">GitHub repo</a></li>



<li><a href="https://2025.wordpress.net">Demo Site </a></li>
</ul>



<p class="has-large-font-size">Stay in Touch</p>



<div class="wp-block-group"><div class="wp-block-group__inner-container is-layout-flow wp-block-group-is-layout-flow">
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Did you like this episode? <a href="https://lovethepodcast.com/gutenbergchangelog"><strong>Please write us a review </strong></a></li>



<li>Ping us on X (formerly known as Twitter) or send DMs with questions. <a href="https://twitter.com/gutenbergtimes">@gutenbergtimes </a>and <a href="https://twitter.com/bph">@bph</a>.</li>



<li><em>If you have questions or suggestions, or news you want us to include, send them to <a href="mailto:changelog@gutenbergtimes.com">changelog@gutenbergtimes.com</a>. </em></li>



<li><em>Please write us a review on iTunes! <a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/itunes/">(Click here to learn how)</a></em></li>
</ul>
</div></div>



<p class="has-large-font-size" id="transcript"><strong>Transcript</strong></p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Hello and welcome to our 109th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog Podcast. In today&#8217;s episode, we will talk about Gutenberg 19.4, creating a block theme, Responsive Navigation Block plugin, and more.</p>



<p>I&#8217;m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at the Gutenberg Times and a full-time Core contributor for the WordPress Open Source Project sponsored by Automattic.</p>



<p>Today I&#8217;m delighted to team up with Anne Katzeff once more to spread the joy of WordPress. Anne is a theme developer who has embraced block themes and posts regularly in the Outreach channel with questions that helps others as well. Anne and I, we met in Florida, and we are co-organizers of the local WordPress Meetup. And she became a dear friend. Welcome to the show, Anne. How are you today?</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Hi, Birgit. It&#8217;s great to see you. Always enjoy talking with you. I&#8217;m doing well today. Thank you. How about yourself?</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>I&#8217;m doing well. I finally got over my cold. I might still sound a little horsey like the last episode, and I apologize for that. I didn&#8217;t know until I listened to how bad it actually was.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Creating a Block Theme<strong>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</strong></h3>



<p>Yeah. So Anne, you shared your learning on building your first block theme in a series of blog posts. So let me go right in there. What were your biggest wins looking back in your approach of building themes?</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff</em>: All right, let&#8217;s dive right in. As I was reviewing it, I realized that way back, the seed of it was being invited to be a test case for the Create Block Theme plugin. And a couple of folks on that development team zoomed in with me and watched me live use the plugin my first time using it. So I didn&#8217;t know anything, it was really interesting for all of us because there was this learning curve and they were trying not to interfere and ask questions. So I was a tester and they monitored me, and that experience gave me the confidence to start exploring block theme design. And so I was quickly a fan of the Create Block Theme plugin. The very first clear takeaway for me at that time, it was still part the font embedment was still part of that plugin, and it&#8217;s now been introduced into Core. And I think that&#8217;s part of what the plugin&#8217;s role is is to serve as an exploration platform. And those features that people really find useful are gradually taken into Core and become part of that.</p>



<p>So that was the first one. And then creating a child theme. So I&#8217;ve always created child themes, I know how to do them in various ways. But to just have that one button to do it was like, &#8220;Oh, yay.&#8221; And then I went through a series of pain points as I was starting to&#8230; I was actually working on a real site and doing all this for the first time with block themes. So I got familiar with Global Settings, and my first pain point was the content and wide measurements. I didn&#8217;t understand that, so I had to play around with that and wrap my brain around it. And then segueing from there into the group layout settings, that was a real pain point for me. It was like, &#8220;What? What are you talking about?&#8221; So all these new concepts. And for me to learn these things, I just play around. I&#8217;m not afraid to make mistakes, so I just try this, try that.</p>



<p>I got a feeling for how all those things work, found the connection between nested or group blocks and the width characteristics within them. And I realized, God, there&#8217;s so much flexibility in this building of block themes. So then I went on to navigation, another pain point for me. It really was a completely different way of constructing a menu. So that took a lot of exploration, a lot of challenges. And I think I figured it out logistically how to add the pages and posts. That wasn&#8217;t the problem. The problem was more how to style it. So in Global Settings you have your typography, your colors, and your layout. And I saw colors, links, just weren&#8217;t really applying to what was happening in the navigation. So I gradually discovered that you have to go into the template or rather the template part. Let me look at my notes because I had to review all this yesterday like, &#8220;Okay, so how does this work?&#8221;</p>



<p>Yeah, it&#8217;s styled in the block of a nav pattern, which is my process, and then that&#8217;s placed into a template.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> So say that again. Your process is to create a pattern, put the navigation block in there, and then add that pattern to a header.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> To a header. Yeah. Right. So in case, because of the synced part of the pattern, we wanted to be able to edit it globally, I think. This is months ago, so I&#8217;m trying to remember what was it that I figured out.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> So I think that&#8217;s what I did. And I just sort of stumbled, gradually stumbled on to how to style the navigation and the hover. I think there may be a hover now, not positive about this, but at the time I had to use custom CSS.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah. For the link, there is now a hover feature in the Global Style. So you could always do it via the theme.json file. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> True. Right.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haa</em>ck: So you kind of ventured out to create or design the theme right in the Site Editor. And kind of setting up your, first, your color palettes, then your typography, and then the layouts. So that&#8217;s the width that the wide widths kind of thing. And then you try to do the header and the navigation and everything in a child theme. Is that kind of….</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> You got it. Yeah. So theme.json was a new language for me. I know HTML and CSS, so I didn&#8217;t want to dive into that cold. So I&#8217;m using the full Site Editor as a bridge, and that was also part of my learning curve and my still part of my process is to use the full Site Editor, make all my customiza&#8230; or as many customizations in there that I can along with occasional CSS. See, I come into it with, I&#8217;m a custom CSS girl, but I realized quickly, &#8220;Oh, I don&#8217;t need to do that anymore. There&#8217;s really no need for that style CSS file aside from registering the theme.&#8221; So a little tweak in my process there. And finally, when things are looking good or a certain milestone, I&#8217;ll save the changes to the theme. Now, I had a lot of trepidation about doing this. I couldn&#8217;t breathe the first time I did it because I wasn&#8217;t sure what exactly is going to happen.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Is my theme going to go away?</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Is my theme going to disappear? So I took the leap and did it, and then I exported that theme. And that was a big light bulb for me. Then I realized, &#8220;Oh, if I do that, then I can do version control.&#8221; Because I have control over the theme files. Once you save what&#8217;s done in the full Site Editor, once you save it to the theme, it takes those from the database and puts them into the theme files. That was the key for me. I&#8217;m still doing it that way. That&#8217;s where I&#8217;m at today.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> So that&#8217;s where you are today. So did you create new templates for your theme or for that client site?</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> I probably did. Let me see. Oh yeah, for the blog part, yes, I absolutely did. So I used Twenty Twenty Four as my parent theme, and it comes packaged with certain patterns and options for the blog.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Okay, yeah. And then now I understand it. So the child theme you took from Twenty Twenty-Four.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Yes.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> And then you modified it with the colors and the typography and all the others?</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Yes.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Cool, cool, cool. So the listeners, you can read up about that on Anne Katzeff&#8217;s blog where she has four parts and really goes into the details on how she managed the navigation and the header and why child theme and all that.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Yeah. I wasn&#8217;t sure how many parts it would turn into.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Right.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff</em>: So I didn&#8217;t ever say part one of blah, blah, blah, but I think four parts, that&#8217;s it.</p>



<p>Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, right now, that&#8217;s what I found on your blog. I watched it kind of growing a bit and feeling that. You said that you had to try a lot of trial and error to kind of figure things out. How do you feel about creating your second block theme?</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Much better, much more comfortable. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>What would you start first with? What would you start with?</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff</em>: Well, strangely enough, the very first time I did all this, created my first block theme, I actually forgot to create the child theme. So I was moving along in Twenty Twenty Four, making all these modifications, and then I realized, &#8220;Oh, I have to make my child theme.&#8221; So I wasn&#8217;t sure again what will happen if I do that. So I basically started from scratch because I didn&#8217;t want to mess up anything. So now it&#8217;s so crazy, Birgit, because that&#8217;s always the first step for me is to create a child theme. And I know a lot of people just would take the parent theme Twenty Twenty Four, whatever it is they want to modify and run with it. And that&#8217;s a perfectly fine way to do it too. It&#8217;s just that I like to know that my customizations will stick if the Twenty Twenty Four theme is updated. And indeed it has been updated.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff</em>: What was the question? Oh, was it easier? Yes, definitely.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah. And what would be your first step that&#8230; From the trial and error, what are the learnings kind of? How would you approach it now, apart from creating the child theme first?</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff</em>: Yeah, I would do pretty much what I&#8217;ve already done the first time. So I&#8217;d go into the child theme is being modified. I&#8217;d go through the full Site Editor and modify my Global Settings, tackle my navigation almost right away probably after my Global Settings with typography, choosing the font and colors. And determining what that inner content width should be because I think the default is 840 maybe, and that&#8217;s a little too narrow for me. Yeah. So I make it a little bit wider. I try to stick with what works and not mess around too much.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> So you want your theme to be connected with the Twenty Twenty-Four, so when that gets updated, your theme gets updated too, but you keep the modifications from-</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Exactly. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> But the Create Block Theme plugin also gives you two more choices. One is to clone the current theme.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Right.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> So then you make it a new theme, which is not, it&#8217;s detached from Twenty Twenty-Four. And the other one is that you can start a theme from scratch. It&#8217;s not entirely from scratch, but you get the bare minimum on templates and hardly any presets for that. So you can kind of go into the theme.json or in your Site Editor and start from a white background pretty much.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff</em>: Yep.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> So you don&#8217;t have, I&#8217;m not quite sure what the trigger would be to actually use a child theme with that setting, because if you can clone it, then you get it. But then the updates from Twenty Twenty-Four, you wouldn&#8217;t get.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> I think I do it with client work as a good fallback for them, a safety net.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Mm-hmm.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>If I were designing a theme to submit to the repository, I would probably use the clone feature and not worry so much about any updates because it would be a standalone theme. So that&#8217;s kind of the delineation for me.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Okay, cool. Yeah, no, I find that very interesting to talk to theme developers and how they&#8230; So what are the new concepts that you find easier now that you went through both of them? The classic theme, you&#8217;re a long time classic theme developer and now building block themes. What was the shift? Do you need to think a little bit differently with something?&nbsp;</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Well, as a user of block themes, that was an easy transition for me. But yet clients still struggle with that. I think they get initially intimidated, and then once I do some tutorials with them, they go, &#8220;Oh, okay, I&#8217;m good.&#8221; But getting into the full Site Editor, there were several new concepts, primarily, like templates, I understood. But template parts and patterns, I wasn&#8217;t quite sure what is the exact difference here. And gradually I came to understand blocks are the place that we begin. We take a bunch of blocks to form patterns perhaps, and then we can reuse those patterns if they&#8217;re synced into the template parts. And the template parts are what form the layouts for the templates. So once I played around with all those different things, I understood the sequence. And they are building blocks, literally. And I also figured out, &#8220;Oh, template parts are actually mini templates.&#8221; They&#8217;re like little guys that could stand on their own maybe at some point in time.</p>



<p>So it all kind of started to fall into place. I got a nice comment this morning on part three of my blog series, which is about the header. And where I explain that pattern of blocks to patterns to template parts to templates. And the person appreciated the breakdown. I went, &#8220;Oh, I&#8217;m always relieved when people find value in what I say.&#8221; It&#8217;s like, &#8220;Okay, someone&#8217;s listening.&#8221; Someone like me, like Sally Field. So it was validating to get that feedback.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> So that was the big concept for me. And then little tweaks in the language with the Create Block Theme plugin. Some of the options at the very beginning are still there now. But I think the language was tweaked or maybe it was just my evolution because perhaps the saving changes to the theme was always there. Was it always there?</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah. That was a Core feature of the Create Block Theme that you could take everything out of the database into a theme and have it in the files.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> And it seems so straightforward now when we&#8217;re talking about it. And I think on some level I got it, but on another level I really didn&#8217;t. And so I was scared. I&#8217;m scared to do that, but then I….</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> You braved it.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> I did. And it&#8217;s like a miracle.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> The Outreach channel is a great place where we can almost talk directly with developers, including the wonderful Create Block Theme plugin team and get answers to our questions. No question seems to be a silly one in that Slack channel, which is nice.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah, so dear listeners, I think we talked about it before with Jessica Lyschik as well, that the Outreach channel is definitely a place where you can meet a few of the developer theme builders and also block builders. And also I know that there are quite a few that hang out there, like Justin Tadlock and Nick Diego, myself and a few others. Yeah. I know that Rich Tabor once in a while kind of looks at some of the questions because it&#8217;s really important to figure out what is not working right or what is not explained right. And to find the difference about it, we need to have a conversation and that&#8217;s the place to have the conversation. So recently I had a conversation, it was not in the channel, but I realized that there is another way to&#8230; In the Site Editor on the right-hand side, when you create a template, you can also click on a design section underneath it, and then you get different ways to form the template.</p>



<p>And those are actually patterns, template patterns pretty much. So they have a theme, they have a template type, and then you say archive. So when you create a new archive template, you get a suggestion of a series of patterns if they&#8217;re with a theme. Yeah. And that was kind of really something that I had a hard time getting my head around. Where does it all live? And it lives in a pattern directory of a default theme. You will find them in the Twenty Twenty-Four. You also will find them in Twenty Twenty-Five. Yeah. So that&#8217;s another way of offering your theme users multiple ways to skin the cat or to display some of the things that you want to display on an archive page for a category or a single post template. And you have multiple patterns of those. Then you can offer them when they click on a new template or switch them up.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Yeah. And then there are all those patterns on WordPress.org that you can just&#8230; If you&#8217;re logged in, it&#8217;s so easy you just copy it, I think, not remembering off the top of my head, but it&#8217;s a wonderful feature.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah. It would be added to your Canvas. Yeah. I think the new Zoom Out&#8230; Have you tried it with the new Zoom Out view?</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Oh, yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Oh, yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> What do you think about it?</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Well, I have notes about that. Let me gather my thoughts here.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> You have notes about it.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Yeah, I do because I had a lot of reactions to it. One last thought before we segue into that about the patterns. Not only are there some wonderful patterns that can be inspiring, but you can learn so much from their structure on how to do a layout. So there are multipurpose patterns out there. So the Zoom Out separator, I think it begins to address the issue of very cluttered UI, user interface. There&#8217;s a lot packed into the real estate here, and we&#8217;ve had ongoing discussions about it. You&#8217;ve got the left and right sidebars, the admin sidebar, the full Site Editor sidebar. And then if you open up the list view, you&#8217;ve got another sidebar, pop-up modals, dropdown sub-menus. It&#8217;s really hard to find your way and then remember where you are. So I think this feature is making strides, it still needs work.</p>



<p>So far from what I gather, it looks like just a one-step zoom. I had a thought initially. Wouldn&#8217;t it be cool if it were a magnifying kind of thing?</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Mm-hmm.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> I&#8217;m not sure if we need that, but it would be cool. And it&#8217;s almost currently a toggle on and off.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Mm-hmm.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> We&#8217;re starting to get a number of view-related options I noticed, because that Zoom thing is tucked between several other icons up on that upper right corner, the display and other things.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah, the preview.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> The preview. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Mm-hmm.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>And I&#8217;m thinking when you reach a certain threshold of stuff that is related, can&#8217;t we find a way to group them and reduce that clutter?</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Mm-hmm. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> These are just some of the thoughts I had.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah, you&#8217;re right.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff</em>: But the other thing that happened while I was looking at this and seeing all the work being done, there&#8217;s a great discussion on GitHub as this feature evolves. And to me it was such a wonderful example of WordPress collaborative teamwork.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Mm-hmm.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Some snippets of the conversation are like, &#8220;During the act of dragging, everything else should be inert.&#8221; &#8220;Ah, yes.&#8221; And then another one. &#8220;We can be much better at changing the visual appearance of the Editor, highlighting drop zones, for instance.&#8221; &#8220;Ah.&#8221; It&#8217;s great stuff if you have the time to read through it. It just made me so appreciative of the details the….</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> That people think about. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>People are working really hard at this stuff.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Mm-hmm.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>And it doesn&#8217;t take&#8230; It&#8217;s not a simple fix sometimes, it takes discussion and testing. So you&#8217;ve put the issue out there, there&#8217;s some discussion and then there&#8217;s testing, and then there&#8217;s resolution and tweaking, and it&#8217;s very cool. It made me really happy to be a part of it even as an observer.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yeah, it&#8217;s a great description of how actually things are getting done in Gutenberg and how many people are kind of working on it and discussing it. So the Zoom Out view is right now, I think the biggest advantage is when you&#8217;re working with patterns and you&#8217;re trying to create a page with a subset of patterns. So you have a hero pattern, then you have a services pattern, and then you have a post pattern and you kind of want to assemble one page with all the different patterns. So you actually, and then afterwards&#8230; And that&#8217;s how you use the Zoom Out because it only highlights the sections. So it’s between the patterns. So you&#8217;re not putting a pattern inside another pattern, inside another pattern.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Right.</p>



<p>Birgit Pauli-Haack: Which I have done multiple times. And I said, &#8220;Well, I’ll get myself out of it again.&#8221; So I got a real trouble thing there.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> And so for that, it is really good because then you can just&#8230; And there on the left-hand side with a Zoom Out, there are four or five action items that you can do. One is delete a full pattern, which is sometimes really difficult. And then you can move a pattern up and down just if you had it in the wrong place. Yeah. Those are the two things that I can remember for those.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Yeah. Reducing the number of distractions.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yes, that&#8217;s pretty much kind of a single purpose kind of zoom kind of thing. And when you&#8217;re done with all the patterns, you can zoom in again with clicking on the toggle again. And then manage all the single blocks that you have there now with the pattern. So yeah, changing the images, changing the headlines, changing the text, and you don&#8217;t have to worry about the patterns again. I think that&#8217;s right now the biggest advantage of using Zoom Out. I think it&#8217;s not particularly helpful in any other context right now, but it&#8217;s also, you can&#8217;t select a single block while in Zoom Out. You have to get out of Zoom Out before to do that. So it kind of separates the concerns a little bit and takes care of the overwhelm.&nbsp;</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Yeah, totally.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah, there are I think 50 patterns in the Twenty Twenty-Five or so. So it&#8217;s really interesting to kind of move them around and mix and match them. Yeah. So yeah. Any other insights that you want to share with our listeners about your block theme building adventures before we go into our announcements and to the rest of the show?</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Ooh, let&#8217;s see. While you were talking about all that, I was thinking about the navigation again. And now we mentioned there&#8217;s a new mobile option on that, which I have yet to explore, but I&#8217;ve been seeing posts about it on Twitter. So get ready, hold onto your hats. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah, we are going to talk a little bit later about that. That&#8217;s a new plugin, a plugin to test things out, but we can talk about it now.&nbsp;</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Community Contributions &#8211; Responsive Navigation Block</h3>



<p>So Dave Smith, who&#8217;s a Core contributor on Gutenberg and has actually worked on a Navigation Block quite a bit before, he&#8217;s now working on the Zoom Out, and he&#8217;s also a release lead for 6.7. He created a standalone plugin where you can have a Responsive Navigation Block. So it comes with two variations, a Navigation Block for desktop and a Navigation Block for mobile. And you can style them differently. So you need to install the plugin and then you can create the different Navigation Blocks for a certain header, what? Yeah, template.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Would it pick up automatically? It picks up the content from the regular navigation, desktop navigation?</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: No, you need to design it. You need to design.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Okay.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Is it a desktop or is it a mobile kind of thing?</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff</em>: Okay.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> And you can rename them as well. Yeah, so Dave did a longer video, 25 minutes. I haven&#8217;t watched it completely, but I will share the link to it in the show notes. I went for Jamie Marsland&#8217;s three-minute piece because it all came out today or yesterday kind of thing, so I didn&#8217;t get a chance to see it all.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> It&#8217;s hot off the press.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Hot off the press. Yes. So you install it and then you decide, &#8220;Okay, which one is the desktop? Which one&#8217;s the mobile?&#8221;</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Okay.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>And then you can give the mobile a different background or something like that. And then it picks up on the&#8230; And even when you look at the&#8230; edit the mobile Block, Navigation Block, it actually reduces the Canvas to a mobile size.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Oh, wow.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: So it&#8217;s also-</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff</em>: You get a preview.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> &#8230; that part of it. You get a preview of how it is.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Oh, nice.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> So it&#8217;s also using some of the Zoom Out, Zoom In kind methods in the background.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Right. Oh, the mind, how it works. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> So yeah, it&#8217;s kind of really interesting. Yeah. We share the link in the show notes and then also to the two videos so you can kind of learn more about it dear listeners.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff</em>: Now you were saying you can rename those menus.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yes.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> And that just sparked another memory for me because yesterday I think I wanted to rename a pattern and I wasn&#8217;t able to do it. I was like, &#8220;Really? I can&#8217;t rename a pattern.&#8221;</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Well, was it your own pattern? Or was it a pattern that came from the theme?</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Well, it&#8217;s all mine now because it&#8217;s embedded in my child theme.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Right. But when you said, okay&#8230; If it&#8217;s in the theme, you probably are not able to. So you need to duplicate it first to rename it.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Oh.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Or you go into your files if you have them and rename it there because they don&#8217;t want&#8230; I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s something that you want to rename the pattern from your theme because when the update comes, it kind of will overwrite stuff again if it&#8217;s the same….</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Got you.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yeah. So it&#8217;s kind of that one is definitely something to…</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Always something to experiment with. Yeah. Okay.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Announcements</h3>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah. So we have announcements here.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Okay.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> WordPress 6.7 Beta 2 has come out and is ready for testing. Remember final release is November 12th and it&#8217;s coming closer and closer. Now the WordPress test team also has some great instructions on how you can assist in testing the new versions. It&#8217;s in the Help Test WordPress 6.7 aptly titled post. It&#8217;s a long post, but it has a great table of contents menu where you can kind of pick the feature that you want to test and then you go in and get some nice instructions. First, a little explanation of how it&#8217;s supposed to work, and then some instructions, what you can do with it. I went through the theme testing instructions there. This is actually a great way to explore the new theme.&nbsp;</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Absolutely.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> &#8230; some testing instructions. Yeah. So go ahead and start testing your own plugins and themes and everything if they&#8217;re compatible, how they&#8217;re compatible to 6.7. The release candidate is scheduled for October 20th. That&#8217;s also when the Field Guide comes out. So if you are waiting for the developer notes that come with a Field Guide, that&#8217;s the date to look out for. That&#8217;s also where all the developer related APIs have all the explanations in there. So are you looking forward to 6.7?</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Sure.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Anything in particular?</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Maybe. I don&#8217;t know off the top of my head. As we go through the enhancements, I&#8217;ll chime in.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah. All right. Yeah. So there&#8217;s another development that I wanted to let you know about it. WPGraphQL, it&#8217;s a way to use GraphQL with WordPress Database and it&#8217;s mostly used for headless WordPress developers or by them. Jason Bahl has started working for Automattic and brings his WPGraphQL plugin with him and it&#8217;s going to be a canonical plugin, meaning it&#8217;s going to be a plugin that will be maintained by Core developers. So he&#8217;s back full-time working on the plugin, which he couldn&#8217;t do at WP Engine. So that is a great development out of that. And I remember 2018, or was it even &#8217;17? I think it was in 2018 that Jason Bahl developed or showcased his WPGraphQL plugin at WordCamp US. And that seems so far away again, now it&#8217;s about six years. Yeah. And having developed that since then almost full time, it&#8217;s really very robust. And a lot of enterprise level websites are actually built on top of it.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Ah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah. Because to integrate WordPress with other data and need to use WordPress for the content management or content creation. But the other website or the website that use that content is also connecting with other data.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Oh, wow.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> So they needed a front-end on top of it that&#8217;s in JavaScript or any other maybe Next.js or something like that. But the WPGraphQL kind of connects all those pieces. It&#8217;s really cool.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Wow. Sounds cool.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah. And there is a new Developer Hours on the schedule and it will change the broadcast method. So if you are a regular attendee of the Developer Hours every two weeks of the month, you had to go to Zoom first and then log in and had to be at Meetup first, then on Zoom first, and then you were able to kind of attend the Developer Hours. Now all these processes are shortened and it will be a live stream on the WordPress channel on YouTube. So you just kind of subscribe to that, it&#8217;s announced there. And I will share of course the link in the show notes. The next Developer Hours is happening on Tuesday, October 15th, and at 15:00 UTC. If my calculations are correct, that&#8217;s 5:00 P.M. Central Europe Time or 11:00 A.M. Eastern Time. And that&#8217;s directly from the YouTube channel. You don&#8217;t have to log in&#8230; You only have to log into YouTube, which you probably have an account for and then you can be participating in the chat.</p>



<p>So the topic is How to Simplify Client Editing in WordPress. And the description reads like, “Discover the full potential of WordPress Editor and Site Editor in these presentations designed to showcase the many ways you can simplify, curate the ways your clients edit content in WordPress. Will tackle a common challenge, creating a more controlled and user-friendly block editing experience that aligns with brand guidelines, limits user capabilities and prevents accidental changes and more. So you learn practical techniques like lock patterns, enabling content only editing, disabling specific blocks, configuring the theme.json, adjust editor settings and restrict block functionality.&#8221; So it&#8217;s Nick Diego and Jamie Marsland and they will discuss the current limitations and how you contribute to the future of WordPress to better support your clients and non-technical users.&nbsp;</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> It sounds great.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>It&#8217;s a really great topic and these are so many questions that we get when we are on WordCamps or in other places on how can I make this go away? Kind of how can I&#8230;</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Ah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yeah, how can I not have them change the color of things? Or something like that. Yeah, so&#8230;</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>That&#8217;s exactly the branding issue. Exactly.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Right. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> And fonts.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yeah. It&#8217;s a big change.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Don&#8217;t change the type. I know you like those curly Q fonts, but no one can read them.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> I know it&#8217;s an existential fear from designers that clients mock up the design that they spend so much time to do.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> It&#8217;s real.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> It&#8217;s real. Yeah. So join Nick Diego and Jamie Marsland on October 15th, 15:00 UTC. All right. So we talked about the plugin.&nbsp;</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">What’s Released &#8211; Gutenberg 19.4</h3>



<p>Yeah, we are now to Gutenberg 19.4. And that&#8217;s been released this week and it had 186 PRs from 54 contributors. And of those 54 contributors, six&#8230; Well, let me look at it first. Yeah, six, were new of them, so congratulations for your first contribution to Gutenberg to those new contributors.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Anne Katzeff: And again, what struck me was the amount of work that goes into it and fixing bugs, cleaning up the UI. There seems to be a lot more attention on that, which makes my heart sing.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah, it&#8217;s the first Beta of 6.7 came out October 1st. And this is the first Gutenberg plugin after that that has a lot of bug fixes in there that will come into 6.7. The enhancements are locked, so those won&#8217;t get into 6.7, but all the bug fixes that or most of them will come into 6.7.&nbsp;</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Enhancements</h3>



<p>So let&#8217;s start with the enhancements. So for end users, it&#8217;s probably easier to find the Query Loop Block. First of all, why would you know what that&#8217;s called because it sounds so technical? But it&#8217;s the posts and the post types and the blogs and all that. So all these keywords are now discoverable when you look for that. So what else is in there? Do you want to take turns on it?</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Oh, I saw the File Block, allow content only editing. It&#8217;s just there&#8217;s so many little things that users come across. And if you find something that doesn&#8217;t seem right, just let the team know because they clean it up and it looks like that is one of the bugs that&#8217;s been fixed. So that was good.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah. If it was in content only, you weren&#8217;t able to upload anything or do anything.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Yeah. I mean, what? So it&#8217;s a stumbling block that&#8217;s been removed. And the other one with the navigator, they just added a new smoother transition for exiting certain scenarios. So I like that. Instead of this jarring screen change. What else did we see? We talked about the Zooming feature.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Zoom Out, yeah, we already talked about that.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah. There are quite a few enhancements for that. There&#8217;s a content only Zoom Out Mode and then there&#8217;s also only Zoom Out on inserters on block selection.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> So help me understand this one, Birgit, because I think it&#8217;s meant to ensure that the default block inserters display on hover, even on Zoom Out Mode. So is that what it addressed?</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah. So you have that in Canvas too, that when you hover between blocks that you all of a sudden get a sibling inserter. And that&#8217;s a little bit [inaudible 00:39:27] in the Zoom Out Mode. So it only will show up, let the inserter show when you actually select a block.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Got you.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: So it&#8217;s not going to hover&#8230; When you hover over Zoom Out, it was showing every time you&#8217;re going from one place to the next, it shows you an inserter, which you probably wouldn&#8217;t need at that moment because you are just hovering.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Exactly.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> So now they&#8217;re doing it when you select the block.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Yeah. That&#8217;s fine-tuning. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: It&#8217;s definitely-</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> That was great.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> So the Zoom Out, so what will come to the 6.7 is the Zoom Out Mode for patterns, but they&#8217;re also working on other things on the Zoom Out and for the Zoom Out Mode and kind of figuring out, okay, when can you do what in different scenarios?</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Okay.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> And so it&#8217;s definitely an active development. And we&#8217;ll only have a reduced from the plugin to the 6.7. There&#8217;s only a subset of that it will come to 6.7 that they are very confident about. And the other ones, they&#8217;re still kind of trying to figure things out. Yeah. And the data forms, the Data Views. We talked about quite a lot here on the podcast and also on the Weekend Edition. With 19.4, there&#8217;s also the data forms component that&#8217;s part of the Data Views that has now combined field support. So you can have form labels and fields next to each other. So they are in columns or something like that.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Ah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> So the component now offers that particular feature for developers who use that for their plugins.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Okay. Good. And then something about the Edit Mode, they updated the tools menu with the right and slash design order. There was a lot of attention given to that. And to be honest, I&#8217;ve never ever used that feature. It&#8217;s like I don&#8217;t really see the point of it, but&#8230; To me, it just adds to the clutter. I&#8217;m all for clearing out the clutter.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah. I think it&#8217;s also there for those who are traveling the Canvas via keyboard navigation, so they can get in and out. So the problem there is that you need to navigate either to go from block to block or go into the block. And that&#8217;s where the right end design or the right end design mode kind of changes. Is it either do you edit the block or do you want to select the block kind of? So for someone who is around the Canvas with a keyboard, there&#8217;s a toggle in between. For those who actually see what they&#8217;re doing and use the mouse, it&#8217;s almost seamless. So that&#8217;s why you probably haven&#8217;t used it because you can select the block with a mouse and automatically are in the Edit Mode. But you can also scroll the Canvas and then point with a mouse to get into an Edit Mode. But when you&#8217;re around with a keyboard, you need the different modes to know if you are traveling up and down the Canvas or you&#8217;re going deeper into the block. I don&#8217;t know if I explained this.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Okay. So it&#8217;s like an accessibility tool?</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yes, absolutely.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Okay. Got you. Thank you for that explanation.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> It probably also would get a little bit more prominent for the Zoom Out view because then there&#8217;s a different Edit Mode and a different Select Mode as well. So there&#8217;s similar concepts there that will come with the Zoom Out. But I&#8217;m really excited about the next one, and that is that you now have a command, palette command to add a new page within the Site Editor so you don&#8217;t have to get out and out and out, go to the pages…</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Yeah. Thank you. Absolutely. And it&#8217;s so sensible. It&#8217;s like tackling the separation of content and design. It&#8217;s just such a sensible addition. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah. And there&#8217;s a little quality of life kind of change. For the connected blocks, the color is going to be purple, but now they also have a purple backdrop color. So you can really see, okay, this is&#8230; The color, the purple was nice, but it also was very subtle. So with the background it&#8217;s a little bit more obvious, ah, for the block.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Okay. Yeah, because I wasn&#8217;t sure if I agreed with that enhancement. My concern was does it pass in accessibility tests?</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Mm-hmm.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>And I would assume it does. That gets grayed out maybe for people with color blindness or issues.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haac</em>k: Yeah, I&#8217;m not an accessibility specialist, but I am sure they have at least checked the color contrast with it if it&#8217;s a grayed out kind of backdrop there.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> So the text is purple, it&#8217;s a darker purple on a lighter purple.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Okay.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> And it&#8217;s a more of blurry kind of backdrop. So it&#8217;s actually an icon kind of stands out there.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Okay.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> So for the next one, the extensibility new feature is that the pre-save post and the save post filters that were before unstable are now stabilized. And the difference is that if they&#8217;re unstable, you never know what happens. There might be breaking changes if you use them for your plugin development. What they allow you is to add additional things to check before a post is saved. So if you don&#8217;t have an excerpt, you can, as a plugin developer, you could prevent the post to save until an excerpt is added to it or the featured image or something that&#8230; or any other kind of check that they want to do on the publishing thing. And you would use the pre-save post filter and then allow the save post filter as well if you want to save additional things with it.</p>



<p>So these features were all there before, but they had the unstable something, underscore unstable in front of it. And that means for any developer, &#8220;Okay, if I use this, I&#8217;m on my own.&#8221; There&#8217;s no documentation, there is no guarantee that it&#8217;s backwards compatible and any of that. It can change at any time. When it&#8217;s declared stable, it&#8217;s kind of the promise of backwards compatibility is kind of attached to it. So a lot of plugin developers are really happy about that, I would think.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> You&#8217;re so good at explaining things.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Oh, really?</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Yes. Absolutely.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Sometimes I think I&#8217;m kind of rambling a bit.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> No. Not for me. It works for me.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Thank you. The Block Hooks are now supporting asynchronous filters and actions. So if you want to go out and do something with another feature, you can use async methods for your plugin and your blocks that you add to another block. That&#8217;s the Block Hooks, right? Block Hooks are, there&#8217;s a hook where you can say after this paragraph, put a link there or put a hash there for whatever. And then now you can do it with async filters and action. So cool. It&#8217;s an enhancement for the developers that can, so they can use modern stuff like JavaScript.</p>



<p>All right. So I think we are&#8230; Are we through the post or did&#8230;</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> I think the enhancements.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> We&#8217;re through enhancements?</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> I think so.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Documentation</h3>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yeah. There are two things I wanted to point out, I think from the documentation. Yeah. So speaking about Data Views, all the documentation is actually in the storybook site that&#8217;s attached to the Gutenberg repo. And they now added another page there that kind of adds a high level graphical representation of Data Views and data source attraction. Which is really helpful for those who want to use that. It&#8217;s a new API, so documentation, so it&#8217;s a little bit behind, but if you want to explore that, that&#8217;s definitely here for your perusal.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> I&#8217;m a big fan of visuals that help us understand concepts, so I like that one.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yeah, me too. Me too. Gives you a little map of your clutter brain. I don&#8217;t want to do mine. And there is another item in the documentation section of the Changelog. They added another page for Core concepts at the interactivity API documentation about using TypeScript within the interactivity API model. So that&#8217;s definitely worth a read for those who use the interactivity API or those who want to use them and still trying to figure out the use case, which can be hard. I cannot see that, we will get there.&nbsp;</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Code Quality</h3>



<p>Speaking of stable, the BorderBoxControl component as well as the BorderControl and the BoxControl. These three components are now also promoted to stable. So it&#8217;s safe to use in your custom blocks or if you use them in your plugin settings pages as well. So I&#8217;m glad that there&#8217;s some work there to migrate things that have been around for a while to actually say, okay, make a decision. It&#8217;s stable and we support backwards compatibility for that. It&#8217;s definitely a commitment. I don&#8217;t know, some people have commitment issues but not developers. So that&#8217;s the Changelog from Gutenberg Plugin 19.4.</p>



<p>Well, thank you so much for going through that with me. I also know just today, the Developer blog has a roundup post every month called What&#8217;s New for Developers, and it comes out today. Today&#8217;s October the 10th, and the 10th is the publishing date. And I will add that to the show notes so you can also not only look at the 19.4, but also what&#8217;s coming from Core into 16.7 and what&#8217;s just new. There&#8217;s a ton of things in there. I reviewed it this morning and I was amazed what all is in there that was in 19.3, was in 19.4 and also comes with 6.7. So it&#8217;s definitely a great place to catch up. So now end the section-</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> And I&#8217;ve been keeping an eye&#8230; I&#8217;m, sorry, Birgit.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah. Go ahead.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">What’s in Active Development or Discussed</h3>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff</em>: I&#8217;ve been keeping an eye on the development and design of the next default theme Twenty Twenty Five.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Okay. Yeah.&nbsp;</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> And initially I thought, &#8220;Oh, I&#8217;ll contribute to this.&#8221; And I just haven&#8217;t had the time, but I&#8217;m keeping an eye on it. I&#8217;m getting really excited about new things that are coming our way when that&#8217;s all ready&#8230; Several months ago there was a call for, I think Carolina may have done this, but someone probably Carolina said, &#8220;What would you like to see in the next default theme?&#8221; And one of the things I mentioned was some more portfolio type of options for artists and designers and folks like me. And sure enough, there&#8217;s a portfolio aspect to it for photo blogs and I would think other applications. There&#8217;s a bunch of stuff happening with grids like the density of grid layouts, the Data View options, patterns. We&#8217;ve got the, like we&#8217;ve been talking about today, the Zoom Out and the drag and drop&#8230; We didn&#8217;t actually mention the drag and drop part of the Zoom out, which-</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> No, we didn&#8217;t.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> &#8230; that was one of the most exciting parts for me. So when you&#8217;re in the Zoom In, you can drag and drop from somewhere-</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>The patterns.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> From the patterns, that&#8217;s right.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> From the patterns. Yes. In this Zoom Out Mode, you can drag and drop them over.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Zoom&#8230; Oh, okay. Yeah, got switched in my head. Another feature that&#8217;s been mentioned elsewhere on the Twitterverse, for example, the uploads for HEIC images, that&#8217;s been enabled or will be enabled. And there are just so many different design tools that they&#8217;re considering, like item colors in a list item, borders for different colors for borders and paragraphs and buttons and things like that. And an integration of a Lightbox similar to the Gallery. Well, maybe I have it twisted in my head there.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> The Gallery Block will have a Lightbox aspect to it. And then again, I always want to see, and I would love to see more work in the UI design and Custom Fields area. So we haven&#8217;t really touched on that, but those are things that are of interest to me.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> So I think they’re doing a fabulous job. Coming your way.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Coming your way to the WordPress instance near you with WordPress 6.7. And I wanted to&#8230; That sounded so technical with the HEIC image. Those are images made with an iPhone and you can now upload them to your WordPress site without having to go into your computer, download them to your computer and then go and upload them again. Now you can do this from your phone. And that&#8217;s actually quite interesting. So you can use your WordPress site if you want to, like your Instagram kind of thing, but you have your own space there. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Does it convert those images to JPEG?</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yes.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> It does. It compresses them.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah. That&#8217;s actually the feature, because web browsers don&#8217;t support HEIC images, so you need to convert them to what browsers do and to make them there. But on upload it will do all the things, all the magic. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Okay.</p>



<p>Birgit Pauli-Haack: And yeah.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> See I don&#8217;t rely on the native WordPress compression. I do that compression myself before I do an upload and I convert to JPEG, but this is all on desktop. So if you want to go directly from your phone to your site, that&#8217;s a nice feature.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah, that&#8217;s what a lot of people do that want to share their photos, upload them to the blog. And then of course with the new Twenty Twenty-Five, and thank you for pointing that out, you are now getting a great designs for photo blogs and portfolio things. I really like also, the patterns that they offer for galleries, there are six or seven patterns.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff</em>: Oh, really? Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yeah, they are in there.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>That&#8217;s great.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah. And 6.7 comes with a bunch of new design tools. It&#8217;s mainly borders for everybody. Every single block.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> That could be a blog title. Borders for all.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Borders for all. Borders for us. Oh no, that was a bookstore.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Oh, right. Right, Borders Bookstore.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>So the images got their Lightbox with 6.5, I think.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Okay.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>There was nothing in there for 6.6. And then now with the 6.7, the gallery, so when you add images to the gallery, there&#8217;s another feature there. There&#8217;s actually, when you upload a bunch of photos in your Canvas, in your next post, it automatically creates a gallery. So that&#8217;s also something. And then when you have an Image Block and you drag and drop another image next to it also automatically creates a Gallery Block, so you have them side by side.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Huh. Okay. So it doesn&#8217;t automatically create a column.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> No.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> A Column Block. Okay.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. And now when you&#8217;re in the gallery, the link feature of the image, and that&#8217;s also for the Image Block, the link feature, it kind of comes out as a drop-down, the link button and it gives you the choice. Do you want to link at it or do you want to have a Lightbox or expand on click because you can&#8217;t have both? There&#8217;s only one click and it&#8217;s either a link to someplace else or you get your Lightbox there.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff</em>: Makes sense. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> That you can set for every image in your gallery. So it&#8217;s now possible.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Right.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>And then-</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Yeah. Wouldn&#8217;t it be curious if some of the gallery images clicked&#8230; When you clicked on them, you&#8217;d get a Lightbox for one and then a link for&#8230; What a mess. You have to choose.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah. It confuses people. And then when all the pictures have the link to Lightbox, then you also get a gallery slider. Not a slider, but a previous and next for your images. So you can actually watch the gallery in expand mode throughout the images. Yeah. So it&#8217;s really-</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Will there be a navigation device? Or you just do it with your keyboard?</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> There will be arrows next to each other.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Arrows. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Okay.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> I don&#8217;t know if there are bullets, so you know how many are in there. I don&#8217;t recall, but I need to test them.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Maybe you can style them.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>Yeah. Well, yes you can-</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Yeah. You can probably style them differently.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah, you need to style them through CSS then. Yeah, you can-</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>Oh, I see what you mean. Yeah. Below the Lightbox, the dots underneath.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. So you kind of indicate how many of that. So yeah, glad that we talked about 6.7 a little bit. Yeah, the Query Loop definitely has some nice features in there, now it knows the template you are adding it to. And then you can actually&#8230; Ryan Welcher did great work on that to add additional settings into the sidebar for the Query Loop Blocks. So you can change the order and you could do that as well. And then you have drop-downs for categories and all that taxonomy, different kinds of taxonomies by author.&nbsp;</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Yeah, I would really want to play with that. Yeah, because what I was wondering, I think I read somewhere that you can have maybe a grid of six, let&#8217;s say, and then interrupt that pattern with maybe two, and then go back to another grid of six. So I think you can mix them in, which is very exciting.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah. And so you have three Query Blocks and then each one of them can be a different category or can have a different feature set or something like that. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Yeah. That&#8217;s great. Outstanding.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah, that&#8217;s what you also see on the&#8230; We talked about Twenty Twenty-Five that you have different kind of blogs. So one is a simple blog, the other one is the photo blog, and the third feature is kind of a news blog. You have multiple posts a day or something like that. You get a magazine view.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff</em>: Yeah, the categories are perfect for a newspaper or magazine type of content.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Exactly, yeah. And there is one little trick that if you get some&#8230; Because you have multiple Query Blocks, so it goes out and does the query multiple times, that might be a performance hit.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff</em>: Oh yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> But if you remove, because on that magazine look, you don&#8217;t want that pagination there on the Query Loop. You can take that out of it and then the performance is a little bit better there.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Okay.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah, it&#8217;s going to be really interesting. Yeah. All right.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> All right.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> So we&#8217;re coming to the end of the show and if people want to get in contact with you, how would they find you?</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Oh, so on Twitter, who am I on Twitter? Let me have a look at myself on Twitter. ASKDesign2 and-</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Okay. With the number 2, right?</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> With the number 2. And where else? On Instagram am I the same? Probably.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack: </em>So are you on WordPress Slack?</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> I am on WordPress Slack. Who am I there? Let&#8217;s see. It&#8217;s funny, you never look at yourself on these things. I am Anne Katzeff on that. Yeah. So those are the two places.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> So it&#8217;s K-A-T-Z-E-F, right?</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> K-A-T-Z-E-F-F as in flower.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> All right. And your website is&#8230;</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Askdesign, A-S-KDesign.biz. So when I was first getting my website up and running, askdesign.com was already taken. That domain name was already taken by a plumber. So my brother said, &#8220;What about .biz?&#8221;</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Mm-hmm.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff: </em>So that&#8217;s what I did.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, that&#8217;s a good domain name, yes. All right, so I will share all the links to Anne as well in the show notes. And thank you very much for taking the time and being here and going through the changeover with me.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> My pleasure.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> &#8230; sharing all your blog theme experiences here.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Thanks for the invite.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah, absolutely. You might get another one in a couple of months.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Okay.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> So dear listeners, always the show notes will be published on <a href="http://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast">GutenbergTimes.com/podcast</a>. And this is episode 109. And if you have questions or suggestions or news you want us to include, send them to <a href="mailto:Changelog@GutenbergTimes.com">Changelog@GutenbergTimes.com</a>, that&#8217;s <a href="mailto:Changelog@GutenbergTimes.com">Changelog@GutenbergTimes.com</a>, or just ping me on Twitter or on WordPress Slack. That&#8217;s it for now, I&#8217;ll talk to you in two weeks with 19.5 and more about 6.7.</p>



<p>Thank you so much, Anne, and goodbye.</p>



<p><em>Anne Katzeff:</em> Thanks so much Birgit.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Sun, 13 Oct 2024 09:33:02 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:18:"Birgit Pauli-Haack";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:44;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:27:"Matt: Everyone’s An Owner";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:23:"https://ma.tt/?p=127874";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:38:"https://ma.tt/2024/10/owner-mentality/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:4893:"<p>Last Friday we said goodbye to 159 colleagues as part of our <a href="https://ma.tt/2024/10/alignment/">alignment offer</a>. It was a tough day, there are a lot of close relationships within Automattic, and goodbyes are always hard.</p>



<p>On Monday, I got to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pviYWzu0dzk">be Oprah for a few minutes</a>. We had scheduled a town hall for leaders around the company to speak to everyone, and our <a href="https://woocommerce.com/">Woo</a> team had ~350 people in person at a meetup in Tulum. I had five minutes to talk, and over the weekend, I had been brainstorming with finance and HR for something nice we could do for everyone who stayed. We couldn&#8217;t give them all a six-month bonus, which would have cost ~$126M, but we did take how much we spent on severance for the 159 people, rounded up a bit, and granted everyone at Automattic 200 shares of A12 stock, so about a $12M bonus for the employees.</p>



<p>What&#8217;s A12 stock? This is probably the first time you&#8217;re hearing about it, we haven&#8217;t had a chance to talk about this publicly much before.</p>



<p>Usually, options or common stock in a private company is fairly illiquid, with rare opportunities to sell or lots of restrictions <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-said-to-consider-changes-to-employee-stock-compensation.html">like what Uber had</a>; it&#8217;s not an efficient or predictable market. Options are &#8220;nice&#8221; because they can defer taxes, but you still have to exercise them, and they can go underwater. Also, as a fully distributed company, we have people in 91 countries, so security and tax laws around options make them not worth it in most places outside of the US.</p>



<p>When thinking about a stock plan for Automatticians, we thought, our most sophisticated investors have nice protections like a 1x liquidation preference, what if we gave that to employees, too? So to summarize, A12 is a special class of stock available only to buy if you&#8217;re a current Automattician with these characteristics:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>There are twice-a-year windows to buy. You have to hold for 1 year, but then there are quarterly windows to sell, which is very predictable.</li>



<li>Automattic maintains the internal market, and provides a backstop so you can always sell the shares at what you paid for them or more, like a 1x liquidation preference.</li>



<li>Current employees can buy, but former employees are eligible for every selling window, there&#8217;s no politics like can happen with tender offers. It&#8217;s reliable and predictable.</li>



<li>Unlike options, A12 stock never expires. Once you own it, you own it.</li>



<li>Initially we only allowed $25k/year of A12 to be purchased, but as our business has scaled we now allow up to $1M/yr of A12 stock to be purchased. (Remember, the company has to backstop the purchase price.)</li>



<li>A12 is just economic rights, it doesn&#8217;t have any voting rights.</li>



<li>A12 stock can be transferred to a trust.</li>



<li>The price is set by an external firm, just like our 409a. Because that process discounts us so much for being private, it&#8217;s a pretty good deal compared to what investors would pay for a share.</li>



<li>We&#8217;ve mostly moved away from options, which really only work for already wealthy, sophisticated hires. We pay very generous base salary (which banks love, makes it easier to get a mortgage) and then people can make a personal decision whether the characteristics of A12 fits with their financial planning alongside index funds, stocks, and bonds.</li>
</ul>



<p>We&#8217;ve been running this program since 2016. The main downside risk for A12 holders, which isn&#8217;t that different from common stock, is that we go out of business and can&#8217;t keep our commitments. But that&#8217;s true of any stock investment, and we have a pretty solid track record.</p>



<p>We want everyone to have an owner mentality, so we&#8217;ve also now started granting 1 share of A12 stock to every new hire.</p>



<p>Our legal team has their hands full right now with the <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/05/wordpress-ceo-matt-mullenweg-goes-nuclear-on-silver-lake-wp-engine-.html">Silver Lake / WP Engine stuff</a>, but we&#8217;d like to open source our docs around this so other companies can offer the same thing easily, I&#8217;ll see if we can make time for that in the next few weeks.</p>



<p>We also announced something else cool for employees on Monday around our Grand Meetup in 2025, but to know that secret you have to <a href="https://automattic.com/work-with-us/">work with us</a>. We are one of the most open companies, but we can&#8217;t publish everything! <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/15.0.3/72x72/263a.png" alt="☺" class="wp-smiley" /></p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Sat, 12 Oct 2024 23:06:05 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:4:"Matt";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:45;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:40:"WordPress.org blog: Secure Custom Fields";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:35:"https://wordpress.org/news/?p=17956";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:56:"https://wordpress.org/news/2024/10/secure-custom-fields/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:2839:"<p>On behalf of the <a href="https://wordpress.org/about/security/">WordPress security team</a>,  I am announcing that we are invoking <a href="https://github.com/wordpress/wporg-plugin-guidelines/blob/trunk/guideline-18.md">point 18 of the plugin directory guidelines</a> and are forking Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) into a new plugin, Secure Custom Fields. SCF has been updated to remove commercial upsells and fix a security problem.</p>



<p>On October 3<sup>rd</sup>, the ACF team announced ACF plugin updates will come directly from their website. Sites that followed the ACF team&#8217;s instructions on “How to update ACF” will continue to get updates directly from WP Engine. On October 1<sup>st</sup>, 2024, WP Engine also deployed its own solution for updates and installations for plugins and themes across their customers’ sites in place of <a href="https://wordpress.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">WordPress.org</a>’s update service.</p>



<p>Sites that continue to use&nbsp;<a target="_blank" href="https://wordpress.org/" rel="noreferrer noopener">WordPress.org</a>’s update service and have not chosen to switch to ACF updates from WP Engine can click to update to switch to Secure Custom Fields. Where sites have chosen to have plugin auto-updates from&nbsp;<a target="_blank" href="https://wordpress.org/" rel="noreferrer noopener">WordPress.org</a>&nbsp;enabled, this update process will auto-switch them from Advanced Custom Fields to Secure Custom Fields.</p>



<p>This update is as minimal as possible to fix the security issue. Going forward, Secure Custom Fields is now a non-commercial plugin, and if any developers want to get involved in maintaining and improving it, please get in touch.</p>



<p>Similar situations have happened before, but not at this scale. This is a rare and unusual situation brought on by WP Engine&#8217;s legal attacks, we do not anticipate this happening for other plugins.</p>



<p>WP Engine has <a href="https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/blog/installing-and-upgrading-to-the-latest-version-of-acf/">posted instructions for how to use their version of Advanced Custom Fields that uses their own update server</a>, so you have that option, though the WordPress Security Team does not recommend it until they fix the security issues. You can uninstall Advanced Custom Fields and <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/advanced-custom-fields/">activate Secure Custom Fields from the plugin directory</a> and be just fine.</p>



<p>There is separate, but not directly related news that <a href="https://www.wpgraphql.com/2024/10/07/wpgraphql-becomes-a-canonical-plugin-my-move-to-automattic">Jason Bahl has left WP Engine to work for Automattic and will be making WPGraphQL a canonical community plugin</a>. We expect others will follow as well.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Sat, 12 Oct 2024 18:26:55 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:14:"Matt Mullenweg";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:46;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:108:"Gutenberg Times: Testing WordPress 6.7, Gutenberg 19.4, responsive Navigation Block — Weekend Edition #307";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:35:"https://gutenbergtimes.com/?p=30296";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:112:"https://gutenbergtimes.com/testing-wordpress-6-7-gutenberg-19-4-responsive-navigation-block-weekend-edition-307/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:18121:"<p>Hi there! </p>



<p>Greetings from WordCamp Karlsruhe! A great new WordCamp in Germany, with talks in German. I am writing this from the Karlsruhe venue. The video team is busy uploading the recordings to WordPress TV and has already published the sessions almost in real time.  <a href="https://wordpress.tv/event/wordcamp-karlsruhe-2024/">When you read this, all talks will be online.</a></p>



<p>It has been a great way to get grounded after the last two weeks and talk with with long-time friends and make new ones. in the WordPress Community.  Huge Thank you to the organizers, volunteers, speakers, sponsors, and attendees for a wonderful event. </p>



<p>And now we continue with our usual programming. Enjoy the updates and have a great weekend! </p>



<p>Yours, 💕<br /><em>Birgit</em></p>



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<p><strong>Table of Contents</strong></p>



<ol><li><a class="wp-block-table-of-contents__entry" href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/testing-wordpress-6-7-gutenberg-19-4-responsive-navigation-block-weekend-edition-307/#0-word-press-release-information">Developing Gutenberg and WordPress</a></li><li><a class="wp-block-table-of-contents__entry" href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/testing-wordpress-6-7-gutenberg-19-4-responsive-navigation-block-weekend-edition-307/#0-p">Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners</a></li><li><a class="wp-block-table-of-contents__entry" href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/testing-wordpress-6-7-gutenberg-19-4-responsive-navigation-block-weekend-edition-307/#3-building-themes-for-fse-and-word-press">Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor</a></li></ol>
</div></div>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="0-word-press-release-information">Developing Gutenberg and WordPress</h2>



<p>The <a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2024/10/wordpress-6-7-beta-2/">WordPress 6.7 Beta 2</a> ready for testing! The final release is scheduled for November 12, 2024. The WordPress Test team has some instructions on what and how you can assist in testing the new version. <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/test/2024/10/01/help-test-wordpress-6-7/">Help Test WordPress 6.7</a>. </p>



<a href="https://make.wordpress.org/test/2024/10/01/help-test-wordpress-6-7/"><img width="652" height="374" tabindex="0" src="https://i0.wp.com/gutenbergtimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/early-6.7-highlight-grid.png?resize=652%2C374&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-30359" /></a>



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<p><strong>Anne McCarthy</strong> continued their series of Core Editor Improvement post with<a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/10/08/core-editor-improvement-new-features-and-flows-for-font-management/"> New features and flows for Font Management</a>. They highlighted enhanced flows for typography, including better font selection, more intuitive settings, and improved accessibility features. The updates aim to streamline the user experience, making it easier for users to customize text styles and sizes. Overall, these enhancements focus on providing greater control over typography in block-based layouts, aligning with user feedback and needs.</p>



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<p>Gutenberg 19.4 is now live. It&#8217;s stoke full of bug fixes from the first two weeks of WordPress 6.7 beta testing. Besides those, release lead <strong>Carlos Bravo</strong> highlighted in his post <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/10/09/whats-new-in-gutenberg-15-9-31-may-2/"><strong>What’s new in Gutenberg 19.4? (9 Oct)</strong></a></p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/10/09/whats-new-in-gutenberg-15-9-31-may-2/#new-write-design-modes">New Write / Design modes.</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/10/09/whats-new-in-gutenberg-15-9-31-may-2/#public-block-bindings">Block Bindings Editor APIs are public</a></li>
</ul>



<a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/10/09/whats-new-in-gutenberg-15-9-31-may-2/"><img width="652" height="367" tabindex="0" src="https://i0.wp.com/gutenbergtimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/gb-19-4-write-design-2048x1152-1.png?resize=652%2C367&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-30395" /></a>



<p><strong>Anne Katzeff</strong>, theme developer from Boston, and I caught up on the Gutenberg Changelog episode 109. Besides covering the Gutenberg 19.4 changelog and other announcements, and we talked through <a href="https://www.askdesign.biz/blog/2024/01/building-my-first-wordpress-block-theme-part-1/">Katzeff&#8217;s experience on building a block theme.</a> As always, the episode will arrive at your favorite podcast app over the weekend. </p>



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<p>🎙️ Latest episode: <a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-110-gutenberg-19-5-wordpress-6-7-create-block-theme-plugin/">Gutenberg Changelog #110 – Gutenberg 19.5, WordPress 6.7, Create Block Theme Plugin and a Thousand Block Themes at the Repository</a> with Joni Halabi </p>



<img width="652" height="184" tabindex="0" src="https://i0.wp.com/gutenbergtimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Screenshot-2024-10-25-at-17.17.35.png?resize=652%2C184&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-30608" />
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<p><strong>Joen Asmussen</strong> listed in his <strong><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/design/2024/10/07/design-share-65-sep-23-oct-4/">Design Share #65 (Sep 23-Oct 4)</a> </strong>the various projects the WordPress design team has been working on: </p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Using Data Views to manage navigation menus</li>



<li>Exploring different treatments for the&nbsp;Featured image&nbsp;control</li>



<li>Favorites in Data views</li>



<li>Reorganizing the&nbsp;block&nbsp;transform menu</li>



<li>Contextual ordering controls in data views</li>



<li>ListboxControl component</li>



<li>Component Audit</li>
</ul>



<a href="https://make.wordpress.org/design/2024/10/07/design-share-65-sep-23-oct-4/"><img width="652" height="451" tabindex="0" src="https://i0.wp.com/gutenbergtimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/transform.webp?resize=652%2C451&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-30400" /></a>



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<p><strong>Nick Diego</strong> published <a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/news/2024/10/10/whats-new-for-developers-october-2024/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><strong>What’s new for developers? (October 2024)</strong></a>. With WordPress 6.7 just around the corner, stay up-to-date on the latest developer news from the past month, including major updates to WordPress Playground.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="0-p">Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners</h2>



<p><strong>Fränk Klein</strong> published a Case Study in <a href="https://wpdevelopment.courses/articles/my-peak-challenge-case-study/"><strong>How <em>My Peak Challenge</em> boosted conversion rates and engagement with a block-based website</strong></a> and share the approach of converting a site to a block-based theme. &#8220;When it came to WordPress, the agency relied on Elementor in the past. However, the poor performance and user experience led PerezCarreno &amp; Coindreau to rethink their approach. And give Full-Site Editing a try.&#8221; he wrote.</p>



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<p><strong>Dave Smith</strong>, core-contributor, released a stand-alone plugin, <strong><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/getdave-responsive-navigation-block/">Responsive Navigation Block</a>.</strong> It comes with two variations of the Navigation block for desktop and mobile you can style using the styles controls. of the block editor. Via the plugin&#8217;s settings page you and update breakpoint size and unit. <em><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5kzAaEsDMg">Dave also published a video about his new plugin</a>. </em></p>



<p>On YouTube, <strong>Jamie Marsland </strong>published a little tutorial on how to use this new plugin: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lKBhwFqAds"><strong>WordPress Mobile Menus Fixed in 3 Minutes!</strong></a></p>


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<p>On <strong>October 22 at 20:00 UTC</strong>, <strong>Wes Theron</strong> invites you to join him for the online tutorial: <a href="https://www.meetup.com/learn-wordpress-online-workshops/events/303497771/?eventOrigin=group_events_list"><strong>Creating a portfolio site with a block theme and patterns</strong></a>. &#8220;This will show you how to leverage an extensive patterns library to save time and build your site from a solid foundation.&#8221;</p>



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<p>There are now<strong> <a href="https://wordpress.org/themes/tags/full-site-editing/">993 Block Themes</a></strong><a href="https://wordpress.org/themes/tags/full-site-editing/"> </a>listed in the WordPress Theme Directory. The latest additions are:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/themes/podbase/">Podbase</a> and <a href="https://wordpress.org/themes/adonay/">Adonay</a> by <a href="https://github.com/Automattic/themes">Automattic</a></li>



<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/themes/coach-mentor/">Coach Mentor</a> by <a href="https://superbthemes.com/">Superb Themes</a></li>



<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/themes/creazione-fse/">Creazione FSE</a> by <a href="https://gracethemes.com/">Grace Themes</a></li>



<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/themes/photolancer/">Photolancer</a> by <a href="https://cozythemes.com/">CozyThemes</a></li>



<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/themes/drweb/">Drweb</a> by <a href="https://realtimethemes.com/">Real Time Themes</a></li>



<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/themes/kids-learning-toys/">Kids Learning Toys</a> by <a href="https://www.ovationthemes.com/">Ovation Themes</a></li>



<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/themes/alpha-brunch-cafe/">Alpha Brunch Cafe</a> by <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/abuturab/">Abu Turab</a></li>



<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/themes/maxiblocks-go/">MaxiBlocks Go</a> by <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/ckp267/">Christiaan Pieterse</a></li>
</ul>



<a href="https://wordpress.org/themes/tags/full-site-editing/"><img width="652" height="434" tabindex="0" src="https://i0.wp.com/gutenbergtimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Screenshot-2024-10-12-at-16.12.11.png?resize=652%2C434&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-30402" /></a>



<p><strong>&nbsp;<a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/references/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">&#8220;Keeping up with Gutenberg &#8211; Index 2024&#8221;</a>&nbsp;</strong><br />A chronological list of the WordPress Make Blog posts from various teams involved in Gutenberg development: Design, Theme Review Team, Core Editor, Core JS, Core CSS, Test, and Meta team from Jan. 2024 on. Updated by yours truly. The previous years are also available: <strong><strong><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/references/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index-2020/">2020</a>&nbsp;|&nbsp;<a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/references/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index-2021/">2021</a></strong>&nbsp;|&nbsp;<strong><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/references/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index-2022/">2022</a></strong></strong>&nbsp;|&nbsp;<strong><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/references/keeping-up-with-gutenberg-index/gutenberg-index-2023">2023</a></strong></p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="3-building-themes-for-fse-and-word-press">Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor</h2>



<p>In  a webinar for Cloudways, I shared <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DURhjdY6R8U"><strong>How to use Create-Block scaffolding tool for creating blocks</strong></a> and demo&#8217;s the basic examples of building a copyright block. I followed the example of the Block Editor Handbook: <a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/block-editor/getting-started/tutorial/">Tutorial: Build your first block</a>. The slidedeck also <a href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1XCgATXz0bsM5BZ9TsMHAy3uTeQxmfGBaOw3l4Ihzj14/edit#slide=id.g306224f485d_0_125">provides a ton of resources</a> on block development with articles from the WordPress Developer Blog. </p>


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<p>If you depend on <a href="https://www.wpgraphql.com/"><strong>WPGraphQL</strong></a> for your headless WordPress instance, rejoice as Jason Bahl has joined Automattic and is <a href="https://www.wpgraphql.com/2024/10/07/wpgraphql-becomes-a-canonical-plugin-my-move-to-automattic">back full-time working on it as a canonical plugin for WordPress</a>. </p>



<p><strong>Jyolsna JE</strong> at WPTavern picked up the story: <a href="https://wptavern.com/wpgraphql-to-become-a-canonical-plugin-as-its-creator-joins-automattic"><strong>WPGraphQL to Become a Canonical Plugin as its Creator Joins Automattic</strong></a></p>



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<p>The <strong>Developer Hours</strong> are now live-streaming on YouTube. On October 15, 2024, at 15:00 UTC you can discuss <a href="https://www.youtube.com/live/6lBIkf3xNDw"><strong>How to Simplify Client Editing in WordPress</strong></a> with Jamie Marsland and Nick Diego. &#8220;You’ll learn practical techniques like using locked patterns, enabling content-only editing, disabling specific blocks, configuring theme.json, adjusting Editor settings, and restricting block functionality. We’ll also discuss the current limitations and how you can contribute to the future of WordPress to better support your clients and non-technical users.&#8221; They wrote in their description. </p>


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<p>In his latest live stream, <strong>Ryan Welcher</strong> was <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIDS4PFUHBI"><strong>looking at the Block Bindings API coming in WordPress 6.7</strong></a>, exploring the now public APIs stable editor APIs. A dev note is in the works and will come out with the Fieldguide later this month. For a preview, you can consult the PR <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/65713">Block Bindings: Open the stable editor APIs&nbsp;#65713</a> for some insights, too. </p>



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<p><strong><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/need-a-zip-from-master/">Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg&#8217;s master branch?</a></strong><br />Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review. </p>



<p>Now also available via <a href="https://playground.wordpress.net/?blueprint-url=https://gutenbergtimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/playnightly.json">WordPress Playground</a>. There is no need for a test site locally or on a server. Have you been using it? <a href="mailto:pauli@gutenbergtimes.com">Email me </a>with your experience</p>



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<p class="has-text-align-center has-small-font-size"><em>Questions? Suggestions? Ideas? </em><br /><em>Don&#8217;t hesitate to send <a href="mailto:pauli@gutenbergtimes.com">them via email</a> or</em><br /><em> send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph</em>.</p>



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<hr class="wp-block-separator has-css-opacity is-style-wide" />";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Sat, 12 Oct 2024 09:14:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:18:"Birgit Pauli-Haack";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:47;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:81:"Gravatar: The Non-Technical Founder’s Guide to Building a Robust Social Network";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:32:"http://blog.gravatar.com/?p=2274";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:61:"https://blog.gravatar.com/2024/10/11/create-a-social-network/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:25215:"<p>We believe that the days of a few large social networks are over, and the future is many, more niche platforms.</p>



<p>Users are increasingly concerned about privacy and moderation policies on major social media apps. This shift has sparked interest in newer, more focused social networks that cater to specific interests or communities.</p>



<p>Creating a social media platform isn&#8217;t just for tech giants anymore. Whether you&#8217;re a seasoned entrepreneur or a visionary with a unique idea, there are various approaches to bringing your social network to life. This guide explores different methods and provides a checklist of essential elements for launching your app.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Laying the Groundwork for Your Social Network</strong></h2>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Defining Your Vision and Unique Selling Proposition (USP)</strong></h3>



<p>Your vision sets the foundation for your social network. It should address a specific need or gap in the market while aligning with your personal or company values. Here are some examples:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Long-term goal:</strong> &#8220;Create a platform that connects pet owners for playdates and advice sharing.&#8221;</li>



<li><strong>Potential pivot:</strong> &#8220;Expand from pet owners to include pet service providers like vets and groomers.&#8221;</li>



<li><strong>Value alignment:</strong> &#8220;Promote responsible pet ownership and animal welfare.&#8221;</li>
</ul>



<p>Your USP is what sets your platform apart. It could be a unique feature, target audience, or approach to content. Examples include:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Unique feature:</strong> &#8220;AI-powered pet breed identification from photos.&#8221;</li>



<li><strong>Target audience:</strong> &#8220;Focus on exotic pet owners, an underserved niche.&#8221;</li>



<li><strong>Content approach:</strong> &#8220;User-generated care guides verified by veterinarians.&#8221;</li>
</ul>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Market Research and Competitor Analysis</strong></h3>



<p>Thorough market research involves both quantitative and qualitative methods:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Quantitative: </strong>Online surveys about pet ownership habits and social media usage.</li>



<li><strong>Qualitative: </strong>Focus groups with pet owners to understand their needs and frustrations.</li>



<li><strong>Cultural considerations:</strong> Pet ownership norms in different countries or regions.</li>
</ul>



<p>Identify market gaps by exploring current trends. For example, you might find that while there are many general pet forums, there&#8217;s no dedicated platform for aquarium enthusiasts.</p>



<p>For competitor analysis, examine existing pet-related social networks:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Strengths: </strong>Large user base, extensive pet care articles.</li>



<li><strong>Weaknesses: </strong>Limited features for local connections and generic content.</li>



<li><strong>Business model:</strong> Advertising revenue, premium memberships.</li>
</ul>



<p>Use a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis to compare your idea against competitors:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Strengths: </strong>Niche focus, unique features.</li>



<li><strong>Weaknesses: </strong>Smaller initial user base, limited resources.</li>



<li><strong>Opportunities: </strong>Growing pet ownership trends and increasing demand for specialized information.</li>



<li><strong>Threats: </strong>Potential for larger networks to add similar features.</li>
</ul>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Creating User Personas</strong></h3>



<p>Develop multiple personas representing different user segments. For example:</p>



<table class="has-fixed-layout"><tbody><tr><td colspan="2"><strong>Sarah, 28, first-time dog owner</strong></td></tr><tr><td><strong>Demographics</strong></td><td>Young professional, urban dweller.</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Psychographics</strong></td><td>Seeks advice, values convenience.</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Goals</strong></td><td>Find local dog parks, connect with experienced owners.</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Frustrations</strong></td><td>Overwhelmed by conflicting online advice.</td></tr></tbody></table>



<p><br />Consider creating an anti-persona to understand who you&#8217;re not targeting and focus your features and marketing efforts on actual pet owners.<br /></p>



<table class="has-fixed-layout"><tbody><tr><td colspan="2"><strong>Emma, 60, non-pet owner</strong></td></tr><tr><td><strong>Demographics</strong></td><td>60, retired, small-town resident.</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Psychographics</strong></td><td>Values a low-maintenance, pet-free lifestyle.</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Goals</strong></td><td>Enjoys travel and hobbies, avoids pet responsibilities.</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Frustrations</strong></td><td>Finds pet care burdensome, dislikes animals in public spaces</td></tr></tbody></table>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Outlining Core Features and Functionality</strong></h3>



<p>Start with must-have features for your Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Use the MoSCoW method to prioritize:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Must have:</strong> User profiles, pet profiles, and friend connections.</li>



<li><strong>Should have:</strong> Photo sharing, direct messaging.</li>



<li><strong>Could have: </strong>Event planning for pet meetups.</li>



<li><strong>Won&#8217;t have (for MVP):</strong> Marketplace for pet products.</li>
</ul>



<p>Technical complexity and resource requirements will inevitably have an impact on the features you get started with. For instance, implementing a real-time chat feature might require more resources than a basic messaging system. The good news is that as long as you priortize UX at every stage of your network, it’s fine to roll out more advanced features later!&nbsp;</p>



<p>Finally, <strong>plan for scalability from the start.</strong> Design your database structure to accommodate future growth, such as adding new pet types or expanding to international markets. Letting your users know what’s coming through a roadmap is a great way to keep them engaged or interested even though your network might be at early stages.&nbsp;</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Essential Elements of a Social Media Platform</strong></h2>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>User Authentication and Security</strong></h3>



<p>You need <a href="https://blog.gravatar.com/2024/07/26/user-authentication-methods/">reliable authentication and security measures</a> to protect user data and build trust. Consider implementing:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Multiple authentication methods:</strong>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Email and password.</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>



<img tabindex="0" width="2289" height="1145" src="https://blog.gravatar.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/pap_graphic.png" alt="Password Authentication Protocol example" class="wp-image-2277" />



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Phone number verification.</li>



<li><a href="https://blog.gravatar.com/2024/05/09/single-sign-on-solutions/">Single sign-on</a> (e.g., Sign in with <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/">Google</a>, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/">Facebook</a>, or <a href="https://www.apple.com/">Apple</a>).</li>
</ul>



<img tabindex="0" width="1500" height="1500" src="https://blog.gravatar.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/signin_iag.png" alt="Single Sign On example" class="wp-image-2279" />



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Two-Factor Authentication (2FA):</strong>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>SMS codes.</li>



<li>Authenticator apps (like <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.authenticator2&hl=en">Google Authenticator</a> or <a href="https://authy.com/">Authy</a>).</li>



<li><a href="https://blog.gravatar.com/2024/05/04/authentication-protocols/">Biometric verification</a> (fingerprint or face recognition).</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>



<img tabindex="0" width="660" height="371" src="https://blog.gravatar.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/biometric-verification.png?w=660" alt="Biometric verification" class="wp-image-2280" />



<p>Ensure compliance with data protection regulations like <a href="https://gdpr-info.eu/">GDPR</a> and <a href="https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa">CCPA</a>. This includes:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Clear privacy policies.</li>



<li>User consent for data collection.</li>



<li>Options for users to download or delete their data.</li>
</ul>



<p>Regularly conduct security audits and penetration testing to identify and address vulnerabilities.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>User Profiles and Account Management</strong></h3>



<p>Create comprehensive yet <a href="https://blog.gravatar.com/2024/06/05/user-profile-page-examples/">flexible user profiles</a>:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Basic information:</strong> Name, username, profile picture.</li>



<li><strong>Optional fields:</strong> Bio, location, interests.</li>



<li><strong>Pet-specific info (for a pet-focused network): </strong>Pet types, breeds, ages.</li>
</ul>



<p>Offer granular privacy settings:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Control who can see profile information.</li>



<li>Options to make certain posts public or private.</li>
</ul>



<p>Consider implementing verification systems for specific user types, such as certified pet trainers or veterinarians.</p>



<p><img src="https://s0.wp.com/wp-content/mu-plugins/wpcom-smileys/twemoji/2/72x72/1f4a1.png" alt="💡" class="wp-smiley" /> If you’re looking for an excellent profile management tool to integrate into your social networking platform, <a href="https://gravatar.com/">Gravatar</a> allows users to create and manage their online identities across multiple platforms, saving development time and ensuring profile consistency.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Content Creation and Sharing</strong></h3>



<p>Support various content types to keep your platform engaging:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Text posts (with character limits appropriate for your audience).</li>



<li>Images and photo albums.</li>



<li>Videos (consider length limits based on your server capacity).</li>



<li>Links (with preview capabilities).</li>



<li>Polls or quizzes.</li>
</ul>



<p>Implement content moderation tools:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Automated filters for inappropriate content.</li>



<li>User reporting systems.</li>



<li>Human moderation for complex cases.</li>
</ul>



<p>Address copyright issues by implementing <a href="https://copyrightalliance.org/education/copyright-law-explained/the-digital-millennium-copyright-act-dmca/dmca-notice-takedown-process/">DMCA takedown procedures</a> and educating users about copyright laws.</p>



<p>Optimize for mobile:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Easy photo/video uploads from mobile devices.</li>



<li>Mobile-friendly content creation interfaces.</li>
</ul>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Social Interactions</strong></h3>



<p>Design intuitive features for connecting and interacting:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Friend/follow actions:
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><em>Add Friend</em> or <em>Follow</em> buttons on profiles.</li>



<li>Suggestions for new connections based on mutual friends or interests.</li>
</ul>
</li>



<li>Privacy controls:
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Blocking and muting options.</li>



<li>Control over who can send messages or comment on posts.</li>
</ul>
</li>



<li>Engagement features:
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Likes, reactions (e.g., love, laugh, support).</li>



<li><a href="https://blog.gravatar.com/2024/07/11/enable-comments-in-wordpress/">Comments with threading for conversations</a>.</li>



<li>Sharing options (within the platform and to external sites).</li>
</ul>
</li>



<li>Groups and communities:
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Public and private group options.</li>



<li>Group roles (admin, moderator, member).</li>



<li>Group-specific content feeds.</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>News Feeds and Content Discovery</strong></h3>



<p>Create an engaging and personalized content experience:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Algorithmic feed:</strong>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Balance between chronological order and relevance.</li>



<li>Machine learning for personalized recommendations.</li>
</ul>
</li>



<li><strong>Discovery features:</strong>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>&#8220;Explore&#8221; or &#8220;Trending&#8221; sections.</li>



<li>Hashtag systems for content categorization.</li>
</ul>
</li>



<li><strong>Ethical considerations:</strong>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Transparency about how content is ranked.</li>



<li>Options to see a chronological feed to avoid filter bubbles.</li>
</ul>
</li>



<li><strong>User control:</strong>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Ability to mute certain topics or users.</li>



<li>&#8220;See less like this&#8221; options for fine-tuning preferences.</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Notifications and Alerts</strong></h3>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Types of notifications:</strong>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>New friend requests or followers.</li>



<li>Likes, comments, and mentions.</li>



<li>Direct messages.</li>



<li>Group activity updates.</li>
</ul>
</li>



<li><strong>Delivery methods:</strong>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>In-app notifications.</li>



<li>Push notifications for mobile devices.</li>



<li>Email digests (daily or weekly summaries).</li>
</ul>
</li>



<li><strong>User control:</strong>
<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Granular settings for each notification type.</li>



<li><em>Do Not Disturb</em> modes or scheduled quiet times.</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Development Approaches: Choosing the Right Path</strong></h2>



<table class="has-fixed-layout"><tbody><tr><td><strong>Approach</strong></td><td><strong>Pros</strong></td><td><strong>Cons</strong></td><td><strong>Best For</strong></td><td><strong>Examples</strong></td></tr><tr><td><strong>No-code Solutions</strong></td><td>Rapid prototyping and iteration. Lower initial development costs. Accessible to non-technical founders.</td><td>Limited customization options. Potential performance issues at scale. Dependency on the no-code platform&#8217;s future.</td><td>MVPs, small-scale projects, validation of concepts.</td><td><a href="https://wordpress.com/">WordPress</a> + <a href="https://buddypress.org/">BuddyPress</a><a href="https://bubble.io/">Bubble</a><a href="https://www.adalo.com/">Adalo</a>&nbsp;<a href="https://draftbit.com/">Draftbit</a></td></tr><tr><td><strong>App Templates and White-Label Solutions</strong></td><td>Faster time-to-market with pre-built features. Essential social network functionality included. More cost-effective than full custom development.</td><td>Less unique in terms of features and design. May include unnecessary features. Potential licensing costs and restrictions.</td><td>Entrepreneurs seeking a balance between customization and speed. Niche social networks with standard features.</td><td><a href="https://socialengine.com/">SocialEngine</a><a href="https://www.ning.com/">Ning</a><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/peepso-core/">PeepSo</a> (WordPress plugin)</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Custom Development</strong></td><td>Full control over features, design, and UX. Better performance and scalability potential. Ownership of all code and IP.</td><td>Higher initial costs. Longer development time. Requires ongoing maintenance and updates.</td><td>Unique social network concepts. Platforms expecting high growth. Projects with specific technical requirements.</td><td>Facebook (initial version)<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/">LinkedIn</a><a href="https://www.tiktok.com/">TikTok</a></td></tr><tr><td><strong>Hybrid Approaches</strong></td><td>Combines benefits of multiple methods. Allows for gradual scaling and customization. Flexibility in development.</td><td>Can be complex to manage. Requires clear planning and architecture. May lead to technical debt if not managed properly.</td><td>Startups with some technical expertise. Projects with evolving requirements. Platforms needing quick launch with future customization.</td><td>Starting with WordPress + BuddyPress, then adding custom featuresUsing a white-label solution with custom front-end</td></tr></tbody></table>



<p><br />When choosing your approach, consider your technical expertise, budget, timeline, and long-term goals. For example, if you&#8217;re validating a concept, a no-code solution like Bubble might be ideal. For a unique, scalable platform, custom development could be the best choice.</p>



<p>Hybrid approaches offer flexibility. You might start with a template and gradually replace components with custom code as you grow. Or use microservices architecture to combine off-the-shelf solutions with custom-built features.</p>



<p>Remember to leverage APIs and third-party services for non-core functionality. For instance, <a href="https://akismet.com/">Akismet</a> for spam protection or <a href="https://blog.gravatar.com/2024/06/03/profiles-as-a-service/">Gravatar’s REST API</a> for user avatars can save development time and improve your platform&#8217;s features.</p>



<p>Whichever path you choose, focus on creating value for your users and be prepared to adapt your approach as your social network evolves.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Leveraging Gravatar for User Profile Management</strong></h2>



<img tabindex="0" width="1473" height="918" src="https://blog.gravatar.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/gravatar-profiles-as-a-service-1.png" alt="Gravatar – Profile as a Service homepage" class="wp-image-2282" />



<p><a href="https://gravatar.com/">Gravatar</a> (Globally Recognized Avatar) is a powerful tool for simplifying user profile management in your social network. This service allows users to create and maintain a single online identity across multiple platforms.</p>



<p>Key benefits of integrating Gravatar:</p>



<ol class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://blog.gravatar.com/2024/09/06/onboarding-user-experience/"><strong>Simplified user onboarding</strong></a><strong>:</strong> Users can instantly import their existing profiles, reducing registration friction.</li>



<li><strong>Consistent user representation:</strong> Avatars and profile information remain uniform across various platforms.</li>



<li><strong>Automatic updates: </strong>When users modify their Gravatar profile, changes reflect across all connected platforms.</li>



<li><strong>Reduced development time:</strong> Eliminates the need to build a complex profile management system from scratch.</li>
</ol>



<p>Gravatar&#8217;s universal API integrates easily with various platforms, from <a href="https://wordpress.org/">WordPress</a> sites to custom-coded applications. Popular platforms like <a href="https://github.com/">GitHub</a>, <a href="https://slack.com/">Slack</a>, and <a href="https://openai.com/">OpenAI</a> already use Gravatar, providing a familiar experience for many users.</p>



<p>Implementation is straightforward:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Sign up for a Gravatar developer account.</li>



<li>Use the Gravatar API to fetch user profiles based on email addresses.</li>



<li>Display Gravatar images using a simple URL structure.</li>
</ul>



<p>For more details on how to implement Gravatar in your social network, check out the<a href="https://docs.gravatar.com/api/profiles/tutorial-user-profile/"> Gravatar API Documentation</a>.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Ensuring Security and Data Protection</strong></h2>



<p>Security and data protection are paramount for any social network, so make sure to implement these best practices to safeguard your platform:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Use secure authentication methods, including multi-factor authentication.</li>



<li>Encrypt all data, both in transit and at rest.</li>



<li>Regularly update and patch your systems to address vulnerabilities.</li>



<li>Conduct frequent security audits and penetration testing.</li>
</ul>



<p>Gravatar is a privacy-forward platform that stores user data securely and allows users to control information sharing, simplifying compliance with global data protection laws with legislation such as the GDPR and CCPA.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Other compliance measures you should consider are:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Implement clear, accessible privacy policies.</li>



<li>Obtain explicit user consent for data collection and usage.</li>



<li>Provide options for users to access, download, and delete their data.</li>
</ul>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Launching and Growing Your Social Network</strong></h2>



<p>A successful launch involves several important steps:</p>



<ol class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Beta testing: </strong>Get a small group of users to test your platform before the official launch. Their feedback will be invaluable for making improvements.</li>



<li><strong>Gather user feedback:</strong> Create channels for users to easily provide feedback. This could be through in-app forms, email surveys, or user interviews.</li>



<li><strong>Make iterative improvements:</strong> Use the feedback to continuously improve your platform. Be prepared to pivot if necessary.</li>
</ol>



<p>For marketing and user acquisition:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Leverage existing social media platforms to create buzz about your new network.</li>



<li>Use content marketing to showcase the unique features of your platform.</li>



<li>Form partnerships with influencers or brands that align with your target audience.</li>
</ul>



<p>Community management is the best strategy for retaining users and fostering a positive environment. Engage with your users regularly, moderate content effectively, and create opportunities for people to connect with each other.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Measuring Success and Iterating for Improvement</strong></h2>



<p>Tracking Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is crucial for measuring your social network&#8217;s success and guiding improvements. Focus on these essential metrics:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>User growth rate: </strong>Track new sign-ups over time.</li>



<li><strong>Daily and monthly active users (DAU/MAU):</strong> Measure platform engagement.</li>



<li><strong>Retention rate: </strong>Monitor how many users return regularly.</li>



<li><strong>Engagement metrics: </strong>Track likes, comments, shares, and time spent on the platform.</li>



<li><strong>Churn rate:</strong> Measure the percentage of users who stop using your platform.</li>
</ul>



<p>Utilize analytics tools like <a href="https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/analytics/">Google Analytics</a>, <a href="https://jetpack.com/">JetPack</a> (for WordPress), <a href="https://mixpanel.com/">Mixpanel</a>, or custom solutions to gather and analyze this data.</p>



<p>Then, make sure you implement a continuous improvement cycle:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Collect data: </strong>Regularly gather metrics and user feedback.</li>



<li><strong>Analyze:</strong> Identify trends, issues, and opportunities in the data.</li>



<li><strong>Hypothesize: </strong>Develop theories about how to improve based on your analysis.</li>



<li><strong>Test: </strong>Implement changes on a small scale or with A/B testing.</li>



<li><strong>Evaluate: </strong>Measure the impact of your changes.</li>



<li><strong>Iterate: </strong>Refine successful changes and roll them out platform-wide.</li>
</ul>



<p>Stay updated on industry trends and competitor offerings to inform your improvement efforts. Remember, successful social networks continuously evolve based on user needs and behaviors.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Next Steps: Turn Your Vision into Reality</strong></h2>



<p>Creating a new social media platform that offers value to users is entirely possible, with various avenues to get it done. The technical hurdles vary depending on your chosen method, but with the right approach, everything can be accomplished.</p>



<p>Remember, building a social network is a journey of continuous learning and adaptation. Stay curious, be open to feedback, and don&#8217;t be afraid to iterate on your ideas. Your unique perspective as a non-technical founder can be a valuable asset in creating a platform that truly resonates with users.</p>



<p>Take advantage of tools like the Gravatar API and all the benefits it brings. Explore the <a href="https://docs.gravatar.com/">Gravatar Profile-as-a-Service documentation</a> to see how easy and convenient everything can be!</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Fri, 11 Oct 2024 14:54:25 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:11:"Ronnie Burt";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:48;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:84:"Do The Woo Community: Do the Woo Joins WooSesh as a Featured Community Partner Again";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:43:"https://dothewoo.io/?post_type=blog&p=86039";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:88:"https://dothewoo.io/blog/do-the-woo-joins-woosesh-as-a-featured-community-partner-again/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:933:"<p><a href="https://woosesh.com/">Well, get ready, <strong>WooSesh</strong> is coming October 29th and 30th. </a></p>



<p>An event we all look forward to every year. And we will once again be their <em>Featured Community Partner</em>.</p>



<p>For those of you that don&#8217;t know about WooSesh, it&#8217;s <em>the</em> virtual conference for WooCommerce store builders designed to help grow your&nbsp;business. In other words, you, are readers and listeners.</p>



<p>It&#8217;s free to register and the schedule is amazing. Also, don&#8217;t miss the Do the Woo Recaps both days with our hosts Courtney Robertson, Jonathan Wold, Robbie Adair and Marcus Burnette.</p>



<p>And make sure you watch for an episode of WordPress Event talk coming next week with founder Brian Richards and BobWP.</p>



<p>But again, it&#8217;s free. <strong><a href="https://woosesh.com/">So make sure you get your ticket today</a></strong>!</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Fri, 11 Oct 2024 14:42:08 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5:"BobWP";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:49;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:40:"WordPress.org blog: Forking is Beautiful";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:35:"https://wordpress.org/news/?p=17953";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:41:"https://wordpress.org/news/2024/10/spoon/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:1776:"<p>The right to fork the software is at the heart of open source. WordPress itself started as a fork of the <a href="https://cafelog.com/">b2/cafelog project</a>. WordPress was one of several forks from b2, which included b2++ (which eventually became WordPress Multisite) and some like <a href="https://b2evolution.net/">b2evolution which still continue today</a>.</p>



<p>The last decent fork attempt for WordPress was <a href="https://www.classicpress.net/">ClassicPress</a> in 2018, over disagreements about <a href="https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/">Gutenberg</a> being integrated into core.</p>



<p>We&#8217;re very proud to announce that <a href="https://x.com/vinnysgreen">Vinny Green</a>, a former WordPress community member, has started his fork, <a href="https://freewp.com/the-wait-is-over-freewp-is-here-to-shake-up-the-wordpress-ecosystem/">FreeWP</a>. We strongly encourage anyone who disagrees with the direction WordPress is headed in to join up with Vinny and create an amazing fork of WordPress. Viva FreeWP!</p>



<p>If there are other forks of WordPress we should highlight, let us know.</p>



<p>Updates with other fork efforts:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://aspirepress.org/about-us/">AspirePress</a> &#8220;AspirePress exits [sic] to be a community of individuals focused on helping WordPress become the platform we all aspire for it to be.&#8221;</li>



<li><a href="https://openpress.ai/">OpenPress</a> is not a fork, but their name implies they want people to consider it as an alternative to WordPress. They are building on Laravel, using the CC-0 license, and claim to be optimized for AI. <a href="https://github.com/OpenPress-ai/wp-openpress-exporter">Their plugin to export from WordPress is here</a>.</li>
</ul>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Thu, 10 Oct 2024 21:00:01 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:14:"Matt Mullenweg";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}s:4:"type";i:128;s:7:"headers";O:48:"WpOrg\Requests\Utility\CaseInsensitiveDictionary":1:{s:7:"*data";a:9:{s:6:"server";s:5:"nginx";s:4:"date";s:29:"Mon, 28 Oct 2024 09:06:18 GMT";s:12:"content-type";s:8:"text/xml";s:13:"last-modified";s:29:"Mon, 28 Oct 2024 09:00:38 GMT";s:4:"vary";s:15:"Accept-Encoding";s:15:"x-frame-options";s:10:"SAMEORIGIN";s:16:"content-encoding";s:2:"br";s:7:"alt-svc";s:19:"h3=":443"; ma=86400";s:4:"x-nc";s:9:"HIT ord 1";}}s:5:"build";s:14:"20211221010300";}