



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



<p class="has-text-align-right has-small-font-size">For questions to be answered on the <a href="http://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast">Gutenberg Changelog</a>, send them to <a href="mailto:changelog@gutenbergtimes.com">changelog@gutenbergtimes.com</a></p>



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<p>Featured Image: &#8220;<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/8455331@N08/35088954290" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Moveable type used on Hawaii&#8217;s first printing printing press at the Hale Pa&#8217;i Printing Museum at Lahainaluna</a>&#8221; by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/8455331@N08" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Kanalu Chock</a> is licensed under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/?ref=openverse" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">CC BY-NC-SA 2.0</a>.</p>



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";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:115:"Gutenberg Times: Gutenberg Changelog #90 – New Testing Call for the FSE Program, Gutenberg 16.7 and WordPress 6.4";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=25736";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:128:"https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-90-new-testing-call-for-the-fse-program-gutenberg-16-7-and-wordpress-6-4/";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:62664:"<p>Tammie Lister and Birgit Pauli-Haack discuss the New Testing Call for the FSE Program, Gutenberg 16.7 and WordPress 6.4</p>



<p><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-69-gutenberg-releases-wordpress-6-0-1-the-create-block-theme/#shownotes">Show Notes</a> / <a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/gutenberg-changelog-69-gutenberg-releases-wordpress-6-0-1-the-create-block-theme/#transcript">Transcript</a></p>



<ul>
<li>Music:&nbsp;<a href="https://soundcloud.com/xirclebox">Homer Gaines</a></li>



<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">Announcements</h2>



<p><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/09/12/core-editor-improvement-commanding-the-command-palette/">Core Editor Improvement: Commanding the Command Palette</a></p>



<p><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/test/2023/09/18/fse-program-testing-call-26-final-touches/">FSE Program Testing Call #26: Final touches</a></p>



<p><strong>Training Team</strong></p>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/tutorial/intro-to-the-site-editor-and-template-editor/">Intro to the Site Editor</a></li>



<li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/tutorial/scheduling-posts-and-pages/">Scheduling posts and pages</a></li>



<li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/tutorial/creating-your-own-custom-synced-or-non-synced-patterns/">Creating your own custom synced or non-synced patterns</a></li>



<li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/tutorial/the-wordpress-database/">The WordPress Database</a></li>
</ul>



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



<p><a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/news/2023/09/understanding-block-attributes/">Understanding block attributes</a> by Michael Burridge</p>



<p><a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/news/2023/09/whats-new-for-developers-september-2023/">What’s new for developers? (September 2023)</a> by Justin Tadlock and Birgit Pauli-Haack</p>



<p>Learn more how to contribute to the Developer Blog</p>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/news/how-to-contribute/">How to contribute</a></li>



<li><a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/news/tips-and-guidelines-for-writers/">Tips and guidelines for writers</a></li>
</ul>



<p><strong>What&#8217;s released: </strong></p>



<p><a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/releases/tag/v16.7.0-rc.1"><strong>Gutenberg 16.7.0 RC 1</strong></a></p>



<p><a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/call-for-testing-of-the-new-font-library/">Call for testing of the new Font Library</a></p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">What&#8217;s being worked on and discussed? </h2>



<p><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/6-4/">Underrepresented gender led WordPress 6.4</a></p>



<p><a href="https://github.com/orgs/WordPress/projects/127/views/1">Project Board of Editor Tasks for WordPress 6.4</a></p>



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



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<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>



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



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Hello and welcome to our 90th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog Podcast. In today&#8217;s episode, we will talk about the new testing call for the FSE program, Gutenberg 16.7 and WordPress 6.4 of course. And I&#8217;m your host Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at the Gutenberg Times and full-time core contributor for the WordPress Open Source project sponsored by Automattic&#8217;s Five for the Future program. My special guest today again is Tammie Lister and she and I are working on the WordPress 6.4 underrepresented gender release team and she is the co-lead of the editor tech teams. She also works as a developer at Inpsyde and started our new writing project. You will hear about it maybe in a moment. So welcome to the show Tammie. How are you and have you recovered from the last WordCamp?</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: Yeah, I&#8217;m doing really well. Yes, I had the pleasure of going to WordCamp with Lee Bay on Monday, a couple of days ago now. It was really nice. It was a small WordCamp at a tiny little beach place up in the northeast of England and it was a real pleasure to go there and talk about Gutenberg as a product. And you mentioned my new writing project. Yes. I&#8217;m just writing about how do all the various parts and patterns, templates, it&#8217;s at presselements.com kind of come together design system with surprise thinking. So I&#8217;m doing really well. Thank you for having me.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Oh yeah, well the WordCamp sounds lovely in the last summer days in a bay.</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: Yeah, it was lovely to just be at a single track was I think I&#8217;m correcting saying the first WordCamp since the events of the past few years for my country&#8217;s community. And it was really nice to just get together and just all be there. And there&#8217;s something about those small WordCamps that are really nice to have those conversations. At the end of it, everyone can go to the same restaurant and then kind of relax down, and it was a real pleasure to just listen to it everyone&#8217;s talks and just learn how everyone was using Gutenberg and what everyone was creating. I got to see what agencies were creating and what they were doing as well, which was really fascinating.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, I like the small WordCamps too. In July, I was in Leipzig, which is also very small one-track camp and it was a very good, I felt very welcome in the German community because I had just moved to Germany and it was the first time at the German WordCamp so it was lovely and we had some great conversations.</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: You get to do those long lunches and just the pace seems, you&#8217;re not to kind of chasing to go and see everybody because there&#8217;s so many people in this space. You can actually have the conversations with everybody in the room and it was really nice.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: And you don&#8217;t have to make a decision on which session you&#8217;re going to now it&#8217;s just one track.</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: No, yeah, and it was super nice being by the sea so you could look out of the window and go by the sea and yeah, that was kind of nice.</p>



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



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, nice, nice. So we have a few announcements to make. So one of the more hidden features that were part of the WordPress 6.3 release was the command palette and that can be invoked within the site editor and now also with the post editor using control or command K. And it gives you a quick access to various tasks and settings throughout the space and you don&#8217;t have to hunt down the third level menu item to get to places where you needed to go.&nbsp;</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">FSE Program Testing Call #26: Final Touches</h3>



<p>And Anne McCarthy has published a great article on the Core Editor Improvement series, Commanding the Command Palette. So if you haven&#8217;t explored that yet, you definitely want to read that. And of course we show the links in the show notes and really it&#8217;s, well first of all the post editor I think is only coming with a 6.4. 6.3 was only with a site editor. But it&#8217;s such a lovely improvement if you are a power user you can get to places very, very fast. Have you tried it?</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: Yeah, personally the command palette I think is going to be really powerful going forward, but I don&#8217;t think people are quite using it yet. So what I love is that we are creating more documentation and that we are starting to really show these articles and use cases because in the conversations I&#8217;ve had with people there, curious but don&#8217;t quite know yet how to utilize it, I absolutely have tried it but I&#8217;m also trying to find out how do I start to use this and where do I start to do it? So the more articles that we have on how to extend it, the more happy I am and I think we&#8217;re going to get to the massive docs stuff data. So I&#8217;m really excited how all these features we start having things like that as well.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, and if you want to really get into the what&#8217;s coming to WordPress 6.4, I really would recommend that you follow Anne McCarthy&#8217;s call for testing on the final touches because the instructions lead you all through the area of the features of 6.4. Among them, the command palette but also the group block and the new pattern. And you get to learn how to manage the fonts of course the big new feature and how to swap up patterns and templates and display like button on the portfolio page. And it&#8217;s a fun call for testing and make sure that you get your feedback in before October 8th. So all the feedback that you get in can be fixed in beta and release candidate for 6.4. So it&#8217;s kind of both. It&#8217;s a training on the 6.4 features but it&#8217;s also a kind of have more people find the bugs before we release. So I really hope you can make it and go through it.</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: And that&#8217;s been one of the biggest comments from the phone library to the command palette that I&#8217;ve heard from people is where do I go for all this information? So having these hallway Hangouts to these posts I think is really essential. The moment I show someone one of these posts, their little eyes light up and they&#8217;re like, oh, I can go to one place and I can then follow these information.</p>



<p>Hallway hangouts are great for that as well for people where they can just go and then they can see a summary of links and they can just wander around without having to scour or use search, search inputs it really difficult to know to collect that information and not everybody can ask everybody and some people just want to at their own pace, discover these things. So again, that kind of goes back to finding that information. If you are in a release, you&#8217;re going to know I&#8217;m trying fonts because I&#8217;m in the release and it&#8217;s going to come up. I&#8217;m trying this because it&#8217;s in a release and it&#8217;s going to come out, but I&#8217;m not trying the things that aren&#8217;t in the release because I&#8217;m focusing on the release.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, we will share. Anne McCarthy also did a hallway hangout and going through the roadmap and just briefly said, &#8220;Okay, this made it, this didn&#8217;t make it, this made it.&#8221; And demo some of that as well if you don&#8217;t want to go through the call of testing. So I&#8217;m going to share that as well in the share notes. No show notes. Well share notes could be too. Right. And then a big shout-out also to the WordPress training team. They&#8217;re quite a productive bunch and their newest tutorials were, they&#8217;re not yet for the release of course because they don&#8217;t have all the information yet, but there&#8217;s an intro into the site editor. So if you haven&#8217;t gone and used those features, there&#8217;s a short intro. There&#8217;s also for those new to WordPress and how to schedule posts or pages. And one is also how to create your own synced or non-synced patterns.</p>



<p>Now that you can do it on WordPress patterns are really a great way to streamline your processes but also to help standardize your site production when you work within a team. And then last but not least, for this round of shout-outs, the WordPress database. And that&#8217;s a dive into, if you ever want to customize some of the WordPress, you need to know how the database is structured, how you can access it, how you can do all the edits, updates and deletes and what the actions and filters are. So this is, it&#8217;s a short intro but it&#8217;s really powerful so don&#8217;t forget to go to the <a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/">learn.wordpress.org</a> site to pick out all the tutorials that you need. But these are the four new ones from September, no, August. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: I think those are great. Someone could just be joining today and they turn up and they&#8217;re like what synced or non-synced? And we use language that we presume people know what they mean. I do all the time. So always. Yeah, it&#8217;s so good that we are actually correcting that by having these information resources.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: And they mix the production of those resources between someone who has been in the community for a long time and just needs a new feature. And those who came in yesterday and need to know, okay, how to create your website, what&#8217;s the site? So it&#8217;s so important to have these resources.</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: And there&#8217;s a lot of people who have a lot of knowledge on creating, if you are talking either not just an end user, but you&#8217;re also talking about someone who&#8217;s a developer. They may have used different systems and they may use the terminology synced or non-synced, completely different to how we use synced or non synced. So coming into our space and then we, because do use, we are adorable, but we do use terms in a very specific WordPress way for certain things. So having some clarity I think is great, because you never know what is your source of truth for a lot of these things. So I am so pleased to find this information.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Community Contributions</h3>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: And we just talked about this, that the new WordPress Developer Blog, which has only been happening for the last nine months is not so known in the community. And I just want to give a shout-out to Michael Burridge. He posted a great tutorial for beginners on understanding block attributes, beginners being block development beginners, and there is more to block attributes that meets the eye and attributes contain data needed for your block or the data can be retrieved in multiple ways. And in this he walks you through a progressive kind of complexity way from the anatomy of a simple block to sources and selectors and HTML attributes and also how to use a query as the source of those attributes. And there were actually some great comments from block developers. One was, &#8220;I&#8217;ve been creating blocks since 5.0 and this is the first time that I actually understood how the query works. Thanks, man.&#8221; And then another one, &#8220;I always struggled with using HTML attributes as a source and this makes it so clear.&#8221; So it&#8217;s definitely a post to look through even if you&#8217;re an experienced block developer.</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: I just adore this because really to me it does come back down to the visibility and in the olden days it was go to Make Core. It really, Make Core is not, it&#8217;s great, but it&#8217;s an information resource, and the Developer Blog is really where you are safe to, maybe it&#8217;s me, but I don&#8217;t think it is. You&#8217;re safe to Instapaper, you get your highlighter, your digital highlighter pen out and you sit down and you learn. And that&#8217;s what this is becoming. So when I&#8217;m talking to someone at a WordCamp, when I&#8217;m talking to somewhere, one of my first conversations with a developer is going to be, Hey, are you following this blog? Because this is just as if you&#8217;re following React or you&#8217;re following whatever your flavor of awesome that you&#8217;re creating with because everybody has their own pet scripts that they create with.</p>



<p>It&#8217;s like sports teams, are you following this? Because we always used to say, are you following Make Core if you are a developer, are you following Make Design? If you&#8217;re a designer. This should be on those lists of are you following this? I don&#8217;t actually just think developers. I think even if you are slightly interested in what&#8217;s going on because, and I think this is worth saying the scale of what has been put there, and this might be something to look at in the future is having a, you need to know because I think sometimes knowing what you need to know is curious on here and a lot of people are presumed knowledge. So that&#8217;s something as we&#8217;re kind of doing this, some people have incredible knowledge in PHP, but not the knowledge in JavaScript quite yet. And that&#8217;s great because this blog can give them that.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: In multiple ways and also to keep up with what&#8217;s changing because Core and Gutenberg reapers are changing so much.</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: Theme Jsons, block Jsons, if you were making blocks before and then you went for two years to do something like life and then you came back the way the blocks are done now or the way that themes are done now, completely different from the way that they were being done.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, that&#8217;s true. And there&#8217;s one roundup post on the Developer Blog that&#8217;s come out every month and Justin Tadlock just posted the one from September and it&#8217;s a monthly roundup post for WordPress developers working on plugins, themes, and agencies. And this edition has about 20-plus short updates that gives you an overview what&#8217;s released, what&#8217;s about to come out in future releases. And also for both the front end as well as backend, sometimes I use that distinction between Gutenberg and Core to make it more one thing.</p>



<p>And the monthly publishing frequency is actually more digestible, even if it&#8217;s 20 plus items. But you can decide, they are divided up into highlights and plugin and theme developers. So you only have to, if you&#8217;re a plugin developer, just do the 10 items from the plugin section, but it&#8217;s more or less digestible than the three times a year field guide that comes with, I don&#8217;t know, tons of updates that are, you never know from the one-liners if it&#8217;s really important to you personally or is it just something you can ignore and it&#8217;s really hard to keep track of it. So it&#8217;d always be published on the 10th of the month and we are working on the October edition. And it comes out October 10th.</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: It&#8217;s a random suggestion, but this is not, I would love to see behind the scenes of the default being there or behind the scenes of releases, I don&#8217;t know, but I would love to see more community developer stuff there. But that happens with eyeballs on the blog. So I think that that happens as it grows. So more people pay attention to the blog and then more people can be there.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Right. And if you are a developer and you want to share your journey…</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: There you go.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: &#8230; on certain things, if you go on the WordPress, so it&#8217;s <a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/news/">developer.wordpress.org/news</a> is the address of it. There are two things to contribute to. One is the tips and guidelines for the writers and the reviewers and the other one is how to contribute because it&#8217;s not only the writing part, it&#8217;s also, yeah, we need to organize it. We have editorial group meetings and all that. So this is all kind of laid out in two pages, well pages, they&#8217;re very long pages.</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: I would love to hear more because there&#8217;s so many good stories and so many problems people are solving that they don&#8217;t keep to themselves in a bad way, but they keep themselves, they don&#8217;t have a place to put it.</p>



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



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: And Make Core isn&#8217;t the place. This is the place. So I am so excited we&#8217;re talking about this.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Even if your personal blog is not the place because you&#8217;re talking to clients on your personal blog or the agency blog. Yeah, it&#8217;s a place.</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: The personal blog is also sometimes one space and sometimes you might have like, Hey, I did this, I&#8217;d love other opinions about what I did, which is hard to do, but it&#8217;s also good to collaborate and share as well.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. But it&#8217;s more the exploration on the personal blog where you can collaborate with people, but then the outcome of it could be on the Developer Blog, on the official WordPress Developer Blog. So we have a discussion board on the Gutenberg, I share all those links of course in the show notes in the Developer Blog content repo on GitHub where we have discussions and we talk about those in the monthly meetings. So yeah, kind of hit me up either on Slack, WordPress or there in the meeting or in the channel we have actually a 4-dev-blog blog is the channel for all things Developer Blog. So yeah, come join us.</p>



<p>Excellent. Well, thanks for the ping here.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">What’s Released &#8211; Gutenberg 16.7</h3>



<p>Yeah, that brings us to our section, what&#8217;s released. And Gutenberg 16.7 had a three-week release cycle. And the change on is again about one and a half miles long with 290 PRs merged. Whoa. So Tammie and I, we have our work cut out today going over the most relevant parts. So Sarah Norris, your co-editor, tech lead, managed the release in preparation on the WordPress beta release that comes on Tuesday, September 26th, 2023. And 290 PRS, 72 of those are bug fixes, so it&#8217;s a really great release with some fixes as well.</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: Yeah, I think it&#8217;s worth saying that this is 6.4, it&#8217;s coming. We have the beta Tuesday? Always like to check. Calendars are hard and tricky and they see they&#8217;re popping up on my computer. With that, that&#8217;s why it took a little bit of a longer time. But those 72 bug fixes I think are incredibly important. We kind of get into that as well. Often we focus on the things we release, but the things we fixed and made even better and even more stable are incredibly important and this release has been a lot about that. So yeah, getting into that and getting into was Gutenberg for 6.4 is there, what now from Gutenberg? So I&#8217;m excited to dive into this and one day I&#8217;ll turn up and it&#8217;ll be a really short changelog for you.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, I don&#8217;t know, maybe 16.8 or so. Well let&#8217;s look at the November one because there&#8217;s not a whole lot of people, they&#8217;re all on vacation holiday.</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: But then it opens up again and then everyone&#8217;s like, oh, put all the things in there.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Absolutely. Yeah. So tell me, what features are you most excited about for WordPress 6.4 to just derail us a little bit more?</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: I really, it&#8217;s not features, well default theme. I&#8217;ve always loved default themes, which is like, yes, it&#8217;s a Gutenberg, but it&#8217;s a tangent because I think now it showcases what can be done with the editing experience in its current incarnation, if that makes sense. Incarnation is a weird word, but that&#8217;s true. What it should do is showcase, oh goodness, if no one&#8217;s been following along, I&#8217;m very excited to deliver that Christmas present. It shows what you can do and empowers. So that to me is always powerful because you click it and it works for so many people and so many people turn it on from day one. So that and then just the fixing, it&#8217;s not a feature. And then I do absolutely have to say font library mainly because maturity of product, I feel that I always say there&#8217;s a checklist of modern editing experiences like yes, block editor, yes, collaboration, but honestly font management feels pretty standard, font management design, so that is really big. What about you?</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, I&#8217;m definitely font management, but I&#8217;m excited of all of it, but it&#8217;s the font library, it kind of empowers the user first time that you are not having to rely on a theme to get you the fonts that you want. So you can do a theme selection outside of your favorite fonts and you can find fonts that can be decorative, and you can do a lot more with it as a designer with the site editor now than you could before because you don&#8217;t have to bundle all this, you can just kind of have it in there.</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: We&#8217;re saying it&#8217;s not just that you have to rely on a theme, you also don&#8217;t have to rely on tutorials or plugins or something you might be trusting and it could not be great code. And I don&#8217;t mean to scare people, but the way that sometimes people have implemented fonts have at best not being performant and at worse, not being secure and not being performant and having these ways just helps everything from those angles. And I&#8217;m not going to be super scary, but the more holes we block from a performance and security angle, the better in that. And it just happens that it&#8217;s just better from a user journey perspective as well. Spoiler alert. It&#8217;s always better that someone doesn&#8217;t have to Google how to add a font and then put code. Yes.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: And I also like that you can have the fonts stored locally on your site so you don&#8217;t have to go out to third parties and share your YouTube.</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: It encourages good behavior, which I think is really, we kind of started that with the accessibility with the little nudge of like, hey, that&#8217;s not an accessible color combination. Do you really want to do that? And it&#8217;s doing that. It&#8217;s encouraging the best practices and I think the more that we do that, the better. It makes gentle, happy nudges to best practices is the best way.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: All right, let&#8217;s get into the changelog. So the first feature that I see on the changelog, but it&#8217;s not, is rename root blocks in the editor via a modal. And this is so powerful because it helps you as a site developer or even as a template developer to actually name the things, the sections that your template is for or if you have a long post you can easily see it&#8217;s not only just heading, heading, heading, heading. So you can actually name these things and find your way around much better. It also keeps the name, if you give it a name in the pattern, it keeps the name also there. So I really love that new feature. Yeah, I&#8217;m glad it&#8217;s coming to 6.4.</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: So next we have font library, which you&#8217;ve already discussed I think, but really it&#8217;s a font collection backend and the front end. It seems a small feature but really I think in the importance of this is to do the call for testing again and say that because yes, something getting in but something getting in that has a really thorough call for testing and everybody has got their sticks and gone and tested it with everything and tested it with their existing implementations of fonts. I think is something worth calling because or tested, turning it off because quite a lot of people may have pretty established settings at the moment, so we need to know can you turn it off and particularly an agency setting, can you turn it off? All these kinds of things.</p>



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



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: So knowing how it works in your situation and being empowered to do that is really important.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, absolutely. Every new feature in WordPress comes with an off switch because that&#8217;s some people want…</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: But knowing how to do that now will super educate you for when 6.4 comes out and I think that&#8217;s my biggest reflection from working in that space is learn now at beta what you are going to be turning off going forward. Yes, it&#8217;s going to take you a little while to roll out those new features but it&#8217;s being able to know, and then pivot is really important.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: And so for the user that are using the site editor to build themes, so you can upload the font management thing is you upload a font that you first have downloaded and then upload it to a site and then you can select the variance of it and then it will fill up the dropdown boxes for font management for blocks, elements and for even patterns and templates and all that. So it&#8217;s so powerful. It also lets you delete fonts that are already enabled, just delete them and not have your user use them. So it&#8217;s quite a big new environment.&nbsp;</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: Almost want to plug in where someone says, hey, you haven&#8217;t used that for, someone sits with fonts for a certain time, Hey you haven&#8217;t used it for a while. I&#8217;m sure someone&#8217;s going to create that. Would you like to remove it? Because you know humans, I&#8217;m going to try a lot of fonts.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I like the gamification kind of thing. So after six months if you haven&#8217;t used it, I need to use it in my closet as well, to have a person point out to me, okay, you haven&#8217;t worn that T-shirt for two or three years.</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: But I think that&#8217;s something that we maybe can, totally going off track, but that&#8217;s something to look at as improvements to all of these kind of things is and that&#8217;s the evolution, that&#8217;s part of it. We&#8217;re putting these features in and then how do we build then giving the feedback. So part of this is also giving your feedback to all these features, so test it and then give feedback. This is the first pancake at font library and the best guess at what people are going to need, but it&#8217;s not going to be the ultimate, it&#8217;s going to be the first start of it.</p>



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



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



<p><em>Tammie Lister:</em> Next we move on to enhancements I think. Is that correct?</p>



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



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: There are lots of enhancements and one I would particularly like to call out is improving error messages and codes and not because I am fixated on errors but mainly because I think it&#8217;s really important to call out anytime the errors messaging is really improved. Sometimes like copy errors and different things, just hard to improve. But that has happened with the desk console and match JS, along with there&#8217;s also been visual tweaks to specific block commands. So all of these things they really add up to just a better experience for everybody no matter what type of user you are experiencing the editor.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Awesome. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, there have been some component updates and if you are using many core components, you probably want to go through a whole list. We have about three to shout-out. One is the support controlling open and closed state for dropdowns and dropdown menu. This definitely helps with a standardized way on how to manage that state. And then there&#8217;s a popover update. You can update the position types now for popover component and make them more flexible in using, so it could be an overlay or floating or it could be anything that you want. And the documentation for that is definitely is in the PR. So if you go through the changelog and you&#8217;ll see the PR for that. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: Another one I&#8217;d like to call out in there, to finally finish components is tooltip. So there actually has been a refactor using, I&#8217;m going to try and say this and see if it works, Ariakit and I think that&#8217;s it. Tooltip was kind of there, it kind of had bugs and it kind of was fixed but it was there. So this is quite a big one to do it. It means a lot of things, the biggest of those is it&#8217;s easier to create from and easier to extend from I think as well as you just get all the benefits of it being using that as well. So I think that&#8217;s really worth calling out.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, definitely. You don&#8217;t have to run your own tooltip kind of system, you can just tap into the WordPress one. Yeah, absolutely.</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: And if you think about how many different tooltips have you seen over time. To me that is a strong thread leading into a lot of the phase three site admin, stroke design system stuff going forward is just how can we have lots of awesome things in our Lego Kit, going back to Legos, that we can start using foundationally. So if we have one tooltip system, we have one modal, we have one and then you can extend it, then you can bring your designs to it. I think that that&#8217;s really powerful. So I am delighted to see this. Shall we move on to block library? So block library has quite a few in, I want to call out first of all buttons. Buttons are a really powerful part of the block library and there&#8217;s two particular things I want to call out which is allow using a button element for button blocks and show inserter, if button has variations. Again, these are small but real quality of life fixes as well.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: And what I learned, I don&#8217;t know if I learned it by reading through the PRs or by reading Nick Diego&#8217;s post on block variations on the Developer Blog. Sometimes you just don&#8217;t remember where you read things, but do you have it in your knowledge.</p>



<p>And is that you actually can replace a core block with your variation if you just use the is default and then the core block wouldn&#8217;t show up in the inserter but yours will replace that. So if you have a certain separator that you use throughout the whole site and you never want to see a different separator and whoever uses the separator has the right one, use that tool. Create a separator variation and set it is default and then it will automatically be the one that&#8217;s in the inserter for people to pick. And I think that&#8217;s so powerful and an easy way to extend the block editor for your client sites without having to do a whole lot of custom block development.</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: We need that article linked in the show notes I think.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. And speaking of buttons, what was missing terribly from the navigation block or the navigation menu item was that you could actually use a button in header in the navigation to call out a certain feature. If you look around and I saw that in the PR, how many sites actually are using having a button on the top in the header for navigating to a certain specific place on the site that everybody always wants to use like the login or the access your or Pay Now or these kinds of things. Now you can use it in the navigation block just as a block and add a button to it and style it of course. There&#8217;s a button, so I&#8217;m really happy about that.</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: So moving on, we have one of my favorite sections, the design tool sections. This is a small but mighty section in the changelog. And the ones that I would like to call out is add a blockGap to post content block, that is really useful. It&#8217;s one of those small things that you&#8217;re just like, oh yeah, blockGap is an unsung part that really in design tours you don&#8217;t know you need it until you need it. I think whenever you&#8217;re creating something and add block, instant element support for buttons and headings. And block supports, add background image supports to group block, really interesting for that one. And columns adopt block and heading element colors.</p>



<p>Again, what this says to me and what it is really is just refinement and knowing where these blocks and where things are getting used and that will be from feedback and that will be from people using them. Probably in this context a lot of it, and I&#8217;m going back to what you&#8217;re getting for Christmas, which is a default theme. So default themes are great because what they do is they push the editing experience and that&#8217;s probably where a lot of this has come from in a beautiful way of, oh we can&#8217;t do that pattern or oh this agency has given this feedback. So keep the feedback coming and really keep trying to make patterns and breaking the editor because as you do, you&#8217;re going to get the design tools and the experience that you want from it. Is my best message around design tools.</p>



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



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: And that leads on to patterns I guess.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, that&#8217;s another big feature, but I really happy about the background image for group block. Yeah, I just not always want to use a cover block for the whole thing.&nbsp;</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: Oh, I have so many sites where I just put cover block as the background before everything. It&#8217;s a horrible way, just so I can do that. So now I know I don&#8217;t have to be evil on my site.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: And you just upload it, check it from the, and you have a little at a sidebar, you get a little note which…</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: Don&#8217;t have to hack around it. We can actually use the editor how we wanted to use it, not how we were hacking.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: And the pattern changes in this Gutenberg release is also something to now the developers edit categories to your user patterns, to the patterns that you all create. You also can create categories to it so you can cluster them, you can make them available, you have a little taxonomy to them and you can also filter by that when you look in inserter as well as on the pattern site editor section. So that&#8217;s so powerful. It also when you create a sync pattern, it offers you the category and I&#8217;ve been testing this and I really love how that works. And you can also have it when you edit it, you can add categories in the sidebar. So it&#8217;s a very thought through process in multiple ways. So I really, really appreciate that and you can use them for sync patterns as well as the unsync patterns or the sync patterns are what we call five years the reusable blocks. So it&#8217;s a new term for the same thing. So I really love it.</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: So moving on, do you want to talk about custom pattern category management?</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: You can change the categories of course. Actually using the WordPress native taxonomy management for the pattern category. So you can access it through plugins, your themes to anywhere where you use custom categories anywhere because it&#8217;s just a custom post type and then you have a custom taxonomy with it. That&#8217;s all what that was…</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: Or you can just leave that out then confused.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: And I&#8217;ll just leave it there.</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister:</em> So moving on, I think we should be talking about the interactivity API and we have one particular bit that might seem a little bit unexpected, which we have with the image block and we have two. Which one is revise lightbox UI to remove behaviors and image block UI updates for the image lightbox. This shows just some thinking. Anyone that has experienced what the lightbox would say, one, lightbox is needed. Nobody is in doubt with we need it, but is it needed where it was? Is it needed to be called behaviors? Probably not. Was that the right place? Maybe. No, maybe not. So this shows reflection and what this shows is consideration and people taking feedback and something doing that. So I don&#8217;t know what you feel, but that&#8217;s what this shows to me is things should be released when they&#8217;re ready and when they&#8217;re in a place. One of the really key things is that this functionality is really wanted, but if we put it somewhere, everybody is going to learn that it is there. So where we put it better be the place we want it to be.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. Yeah. I think there were too many abstractions about the behavior thing, thinking about it, this would be an example, but at the end of the day it&#8217;s a feature for an image and that&#8217;s where you find it. You find it in your image settings, image box settings and in the sidebar and you can turn it on and off. What it does is actually, but it&#8217;s enabling that you can expand it on click the image that you&#8217;re looking at. So it fills up the full screen content if you want to and any user can, with the image decide if they want to enable it or not. So this is bringing something very complex to a very simple user interface and I really love that sometimes you take big detours.</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: And the first version was quite complex and I think it&#8217;s really good because it&#8217;s basic saying, hey, what we put in, what&#8217;s not what we, and again it shows putting something in the plugin gets the feedback that then oh nope, reverse the car and that&#8217;s good. So now what we have is lightbox is going to be there and lightbox is going to just be a lot more minimal and it&#8217;s going to be exactly what it should be. Actually what it&#8217;s coming down to is exactly what most plugins have for it more or less, which I think is going to be a lot easier from a pitch perspective and easier from a user perspective of understanding and easier to onboard users into the native from the non-native, which is always what I think because there&#8217;s so many sites that I know that they already have lightboxes, but I so want to put them onto the new lightbox the moment it&#8217;s there.</p>



<p>So the closer it is to their current experience, the easier that&#8217;s going to be as soon. As it&#8217;s in a completely different postcode or zip code, depending on your own adventure, it&#8217;s going to be really difficult for that kind of adventure.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. But it also has the danger that a lot of people have used lightboxes before and have a lot of expectations to it. So this is…</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: Lots of feelings when you talk about lightbox. Lightbox is one of those words that one, people will always visually see something. Two, people always have a favorite plugin and then three, people always have feelings.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: We have big feelings, yeah. And right now it&#8217;s the basic implementation of a lightbox for an image block. So if you expect in the gallery block that you all of a sudden can use it as a carousel, that&#8217;s an expectation that will not be met.</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: It&#8217;s a great call out, because I think people are going to want that. In fact, I encountered that recently of that&#8217;s actually a common use case patterns. So where you&#8217;re going to have something, I think that that&#8217;s going to be a real expectation and until that that happens, spoiler, it probably will, because it&#8217;s a…</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Sooner or later.</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: &#8230; natural progression. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Sooner or later it&#8217;ll happen.</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: It&#8217;s a natural, but we need to get these things in. We&#8217;ve kind of spoken about that with the font library and everything. We need to get things in a simple form and then we can complicate, but sometimes it&#8217;s still tempting to be complicated to start.</p>



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



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: Because we&#8217;re all human.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: We want all of it and sometimes…</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: We want all…</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: All of it.</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: &#8230; the cake&#8230; all the time.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: So then another thing that&#8217;s in the plugin is in the page inspector, the ability to switch templates for pages. So right now in WordPress we have two places where you can edit pages. That&#8217;s the old way, the WP admin pages kind of section and add or edit. But the other one is that you can, through the site editor, you have a pages menu there and there you can also now swap out templates for that particular page. So you have multiple templates for maybe a service or maybe a portfolio or something like that. You can now switch in the page editing section of the site editor, the template. I&#8217;ve seen some implementation where you actually can preview the template in the sidebar, but I don&#8217;t think that made it yet. I was briefly testing it, so if you find it kudos to you, but I only saw it in a demo on the PR but in a discussion, but I don&#8217;t think that part made it yet into the plugin.</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: Moving on, I think we&#8217;re at block API, is that correct?</p>



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



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Oh yeah. We&#8217;re moving on to new APIs for the block editor and two of them are for the use case of Gutenberg as a framework. So using it outside the WordPress context and Riad Benguella has been looking into certain packages to decouple it for the WordPress backend and one of them is to extract the undo redo into methods and storage and all that into a separate package so it can be used outside the WordPress context and also introduce something like a block canvas to have the iframe, the block list and the writing flow kind of also in the framework rather than just in WordPress.</p>



<p>That&#8217;s pretty much all I wanted to shout out that that is coming. Somebody is taking a look at that. I got quite a few, when I&#8217;m at WordCamp Europe, I had some conversations on how that actually is more developed and there is a plugin by Automattic, like Gutenberg-everywhere or block editor everywhere, but it&#8217;s not yet fully developed. And I think having that in core would definitely be a better way to work with that. So if things are coming, please test it because as Tammie said, feedback is everything in this kind of line of work.</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: I think something like that is also going to be curious as someone to test and think does it fit a use case from a pitch perspective? Is it something that you felt you were working around WordPress before? Would it fit into it, would it not? All these kind of things, because starting to see WordPress as that framework and WordPress as that foundation and Gutenberg as that kind of kit that you can build out from is a hundred percent what I&#8217;m kind of curious about. I mean it&#8217;s WordPress but the kit of WordPress is where all of this is going and it&#8217;s very, very exciting to me.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: For me too, we talked about it before on this changelog, but not very recently. So Gutenberg is used in Drupal. Gutenberg is used in Tumblr and Gutenberg is used in Day One, the journaling app.</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: Using it to build products, using it from, it&#8217;s such a hipster kind of word, but headless. And I mean that in an adorable way, but honestly choosing the right tool and the right foundation means being able to pick. And to do that we need things like having it as a framework. And we also need the other thing, curiously leading into the stabilizing block hooks feature, which is just having the right things in the right place at the right time, that&#8217;s kind of what it is. And marking things as experimental that should be and just being clean about a lot of what we do. A lot of the time we are just pushing to do stuff. So that is coming in here as well. It is going to be part of 6.4. There&#8217;s a lot of iceberg features that kind of go through, which is a stabilizing, block hooks feature is part of that. It&#8217;s where you are looking at a cross between core and also Gutenberg as well. I don&#8217;t know what you think about that?</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Well the block hooks feature was actually released in an earlier plugin version, but it was always hidden in the experiment section. And so if people don&#8217;t explore the experiment sections, they don&#8217;t even know if that&#8217;s what it is. And now for 6.4 there was the decision that, oh, we need this in 6.4. So before it can go into core, it needs to be stabilized, it needs to, all the experimentation code needs to be looked at. Is it something we want to support backwards compatibility for the next, I don&#8217;t know five years or 10 years or so. Yeah, so those are very…</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: And having that consideration, but I think it&#8217;s really important to have that consideration and go through as well. I haven&#8217;t explored too much really this, I think this feature is really about trying to get something in that also is going to be really powerful for the foundation.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. So the block hooks features is actually the one that was previously announced on the auto inserting blocks. So you could add a like button to a comment block without having a user needing to put it in. They just can take it out from the plugin version. So it&#8217;s an extensibility feature that people have been waiting for quite a bit. Just to reiterate, what are block hooks? Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: It&#8217;s worth calling it out separately. I think sometimes a lot of this, again the iceberg, a lot of this stuff as you were saying, it didn&#8217;t kind of get seen because it&#8217;s in there. The experimental flag is amazing because there&#8217;s so much good stuff hidden under there.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: And I&#8217;m calling out some of the bug fixes for the widget editor. Well that&#8217;s a blast from the past. We haven&#8217;t talked about widgets for quite a while, but it&#8217;s still very, very prominent in classic themes. And there were some broken layouts that had been fixed. The invisible area on the top toolbar, there was kind of a lot of white space there that had been fixed. And also the toolbar actually showing in the customizer, in the widget sidebar control, it has also been fixed. So if you are kind of waiting for those, it&#8217;s here now in the Gutenberg plugin and it will come to WordPress 6.4.</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: That&#8217;s really important. A lot of people still use widgets.</p>



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



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: So we have to a hundred percent still support that.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: And kudos to Aki Hamano who took those three fixes on and to push some over the finish line.&nbsp;</p>



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



<p>So now we come to a huge section in this release and that&#8217;s documentation. And there are multiple documentation updates, but I think we can cluster them into three kinds of categories or three sections. One is Gutenberg as a framework. So Riad Benguella has done Bootstrap, the documentation website that is geared towards the usage of Gutenberg outside of WordPress. Of course he hasn&#8217;t filled in the pages yet, but he did the architecture of it and also has one page in there to explain how to implement the undo and redo in a third-party editor.</p>



<p>And then Nick Diego and JuanMa Garrido and Ryan Welcher and some others have worked on the overhaul of the Block Editor Handbook to bring it up to date and rearrange some pages and also to delete pages like the outreach page, which was actually put in because there was the documentation missing, which is now in there. Or remove unneeded block theme documentation that is coming to the theme handbook very soon. So there&#8217;s some, so move the glossary and into a get it started, the FAQ and get the get it started section really robust. And also update how to set up a block development environment with some of the instructions that are much more geared towards and successful into implementation of a local development than before. Do you have any thoughts on that, Tammie?</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: I absolutely adore that we&#8217;re adding to our documentation. I think we don&#8217;t know what we don&#8217;t know about the weird statement, but the gaps. So if anyone is like, wow, I wish we had this resource. I think saying that, this is so great because many times you are even repeating the same information. I would love to have these resources to point to. So I am over the moon that we have these resources. So thank you everyone that&#8217;s doing them.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: And then the third section that I mentioned was about documenting, the comment palette, which Riad Benguella has in these dev notes from 6.3, quite a few examples in there, but on the Make Core block buried under, I don&#8217;t know, 450 posts and they are brought now, those examples are now brought into the commands documentation to add more context and to help people to create new…</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: That&#8217;s really important.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: New comments.</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister:</em> People are not using that enough quite yet. And that kind of goes back to the beginning when I was just, we were talking about testing and everything, but really it&#8217;s the chicken egg, whatever analogy that we used in your culture. Really having that, the people that create it really saying, hey, this is how you can do this. And then people exploring for themselves how to do it. So I personally am going to be checking out that documentation to see how to, because that&#8217;s not something that I&#8217;ve played with and I really want to play with, I really want to play with it, Clippy and all that, but just really trying to, but now we have these documentations and now we&#8217;re starting to have the Developer Blog. We can start going in and just having better resources to do it. So I&#8217;m very excited to see that.&nbsp;</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Me, too. Me, too. And I just wanted to call out one update on the component changelog to mark the popover slot removal as a breaking change. So we mentioned that the had an additional placement there, but there&#8217;s also probably a little breaking change there. It&#8217;s documented in a component changelog, but I don&#8217;t think it made it into Block Editor Handbook yet. So I&#8217;m going to call that out in the show notes as well, just for those who use that popover component in their own apps. It&#8217;s a small thing, but it might trip up some people. So did we actually get through it?</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: We survived.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: We survived.</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: Go team.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">WordPress 6.4 Beta Release</h3>



<p>Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right. Tammie, it was wonderful to have you here and go through this. So what&#8217;s next for us? Of course, it&#8217;s the WordPress 6.4 beta release on Tuesday, September the 26th. And the release party is at 18:00 pm UT? No, it&#8217;s on 4:00 PM UTC. Join us in the core channel and have a party.</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: I was meant to try to work out what time that was me for tea time. That&#8217;s just tea time for me, to bring tea and cake. And I think that&#8217;s really important to say, that for those working on 6.4, now we step, we&#8217;ve been doing stuff all along, but from beta choose own adventure. It really is where we start. Yes, we have been doing stuff. We have not been absent. We have absolutely been doing stuff, but really this is the hard end of the release where everything gets really like, ooh, and everybody starts doing lots of things.</p>



<p>It is a shorter release or the end of the year releases are always shorter. You always try and put everything in Santa’s stocking or whoever you&#8217;re going to believe in and it never fits. But from a Gutenberg perspective, that means that it&#8217;s kind of shipped for 6.4 and a plugin will be open for your happy things to go into 6.5, because Gutenberg time travels in the best possible way. So you will start seeing people starting to talk about wider projects and because of the gap, you&#8217;ll probably see people starting to talk about some of the wider projects around collaboration and some of those kinds of things. I don&#8217;t know what you think, but that&#8217;s kind of what the end of the year vibe is always. People take breaks, please people take breaks because you are human. But also people start thinking about some of the bigger projects. So I expect to see probably…</p>



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



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: &#8230; some lovely in-depth project, make posts, Developer Blog posts and just follow, always the tickets I love on the GitHub are the tracking ones. Once they tracking, if you search for tracking in the GitHub repo, that&#8217;s one of my favorite things to search for.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, yeah. Tracking an overview. Yeah, those are the big items. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: Tracking is like the new hotness over overview at the moment. It feels.</p>



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



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: We should unify that.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: I&#8217;m really looking forward to the next three, four weeks just because we&#8217;re going to see a lot of bug fixes coming into 6.4 from the beta release, and then the release candidate. Well release candidate one is the deadline for developer notes to come out and the field guide to come together. So have an eye out for that.</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: Yeah, you&#8217;ll start to see sources of truth posts come out, which would be like, here&#8217;s actually what was in, we&#8217;ve been talking a lot about here&#8217;s what&#8217;s going on, but say, I don&#8217;t know, the top toolbar focused outline. I&#8217;m literally looking at something in the changelog, turns out to hurt bunnies. I don&#8217;t know. Then that will be pulled because hurting bunnies is bad. So all those kinds of things is what will happen when it actually goes in and has more people testing it.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: So the final release, 6.4 is in November 7th, so it&#8217;s early Christmas this year to follow your metaphor there.</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: This is early, everybody.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, it&#8217;s early there.</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: &#8230; take a long, long break.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, after that a lot of people are going to take off because in America it&#8217;s going to be Thanksgiving, Christmas is bigger in Europe, Christmas holidays and all that. So in January…</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: But people also talk about, I think the other thing that people do over this time is think about a lot of the longer term projects. You&#8217;ll see a lot of housekeeping, a lot of tests, a lot of just general thinking about the bigger projects. So there&#8217;ll probably be, as I&#8217;ve mentioned, that the collaboration posts and things, which I think is always, you end on that and then you start afresh thinking about the roadmap. I love this time of year because, and this is one of my favorite releases because, and then you also get the default theme to play with. So you can start thinking about what you want to do and what you want to create with the editor. What tickets do you want in next year? What do you want to create? Sounds fun.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: All right. Well, we always love to hear from you. So if you have things that you want us to know about, send us your questions or suggestions or the news you want us to include, send them to <a href="mailto:changelog@gutenbergtimes.com">changelog@gutenbergtimes.com</a>, the <a href="mailto:changelog@gutenbergtimes.com">changelog@gutenbergtimes.com</a>. And as always, the show notes will be published on gutenbergtimes.com/podcast. This is episode 90. Wow. 90 episodes. Well, 10 more episodes we&#8217;re at 100.</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: Yay. You need cake for 100.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: I need Cake. Yes. Okay. So thank you so much, Tammie, to be on the show and make this a fun show again. And wishing everybody a nice start into the fall. And I hear you all in three weeks because 6.7 had a three-week week cycle. So 16.8 is not coming out until beginning of October. You all take care and I&#8217;ll be out of here. Bye, Tammie.</p>



<p><em>Tammie Lister</em>: Bye.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: All right, thank you.</p>



<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:"Sun, 24 Sep 2023 09:51:36 +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:19:"Gutenberg Changelog";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:32:"BuddyPress: BP Attachments 1.2.0";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:"https://buddypress.org/?p=331360";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:52:"https://buddypress.org/2023/09/bp-attachments-1-2-0/";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:1290:"<p>Immediately available is <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/bp-attachments.1.2.0.zip" target="_blank">BP Attachments 1.2.0</a>. This BuddyPress Add-on maintenance release main goal is to fix two annoying issues (one of them is a regression introduced in previous minor release). Please make sure to upgrade asap.</p>



<span id="more-331360"></span>



<div class="wp-block-spacer"></div>



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



<ul>
<li>Make sure to only override the WP queried object if it is an Attachment one.</li>



<li>Only list the BP Attachments Add-on in optional components into the BP Components Administration screen.</li>
</ul>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Please upgrade to 1.2.0 asap !</h2>



<div class="wp-block-columns is-layout-flex wp-container-7 wp-block-columns-is-layout-flex">
<div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow"></div>



<div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow">
<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="wp-embedded-content"><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/bp-attachments/">BP Attachments</a></blockquote>
</div>
</div>



<div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow"></div>
</div>";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, 24 Sep 2023 04:34:26 +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:12:"Mathieu Viet";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:28:"BuddyPress: BP Classic 1.1.0";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:"https://buddypress.org/?p=331344";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:48:"https://buddypress.org/2023/09/bp-classic-1-1-0/";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:2331:"<p>Dear end users &amp; site owners,</p>



<p>If you don&#8217;t know yet what&#8217;s the purpose of BP Classic, we advise you to read the <a href="https://buddypress.org/2023/07/bp-classic-1-0-0/">Add-on&#8217;s first version announcement post</a>. In short: BP Classic is a BuddyPress Add-on that is being developed and maintained by the official <a href="https://buddypress.org/about/">BuddyPress development team</a>. It mainly provides backwards compatibility for BuddyPress 12.0.0 &amp; up in case your active BuddyPress plugins or theme are not ready yet for the great BP Rewrites API introduced in BuddyPress 12.0.0. It basically brings back the BP Legacy URL parser.</p>



<span id="more-331344"></span>



<p>NB: BuddyPress <strong>12.0.0</strong> is still under development and you can contribute to BP Classic as well as BuddyPress 12.0.0 improvements using the <a href="https://buddypress.org/2023/09/buddypress-12-0-0-beta2/">12.0.0-beta2</a> (or up) pre-version.</p>



<p>1.1.0 is fixing 2 issues:</p>



<ul>
<li>It makes sure BP Classic is activated at the same network level than BuddyPress (See&nbsp;<a href="https://github.com/buddypress/bp-classic/issues/21" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">#21</a>).</li>



<li>it improves the way the themes directory is registered (See&nbsp;<a href="https://github.com/buddypress/bp-classic/issues/23" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">#23</a>).</li>
</ul>



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



<p><a class="bp-suggestions-mention" href="https://buddypress.org/members/imath/" rel="nofollow">@imath</a> <a class="bp-suggestions-mention" href="https://buddypress.org/members/dd32/" rel="nofollow">@dd32</a></p>



<div class="wp-block-spacer"></div>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Please upgrade to BP Classic 1.1.0</h2>



<div class="wp-block-columns is-layout-flex wp-container-13 wp-block-columns-is-layout-flex">
<div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow"></div>



<div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow">
<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="wp-embedded-content"><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/bp-classic/">BP Classic</a></blockquote>
</div>
</div>



<div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow"></div>
</div>";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, 23 Sep 2023 08:05:37 +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:12:"Mathieu Viet";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:85:"WPTavern: Block Visibility 3.1.0 Adds WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads Controls";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=149369";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:96:"https://wptavern.com/block-visibility-3-1-0-adds-woocommerce-and-easy-digital-downloads-controls";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:3307:"<p>When WordPress contributor and developer Nick Diego released version 3.0 of his <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/block-visibility/">Block Visibility</a> plugin earlier this year in March, he <a href="https://wptavern.com/block-visibility-3-0-0-makes-pro-version-free-adds-browser-and-device-control-visibility-presets-and-more">made all the Pro features available in the free version</a>, with the exception of a few that would take more time. The plugin, which is used on more than 10,000 WordPress sites, allows users to conditionally display blocks based on specific user roles, logged in/out, specific users, screen sizes, query strings, ACF fields, and more. </p>



<p>In the latest <a href="https://blockvisibilitywp.com/block-visibility-3-1-0-introducing-woocommerce-and-edd-controls/">3.1.0 update</a> Block Visibility has added the missing WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) controls. These features were originally planned to be merged into the free version in April but required more development to improve how they work on sites with large product/download catalogs.</p>



<p>The WooCommerce controls include 18 conditional visibility rules with full support for products with variable pricing. It allows users to show or hide blocks based on products, cart contents, customer purchase history, and more.</p>



<p>&#8220;There is one notable change to the product-based rules,&#8221; Diego said. &#8220;Previously, you had to select which product you wanted to target with the visibility conditions. While this is still possible, Block Visibility can now detect the current product.</p>



<p>&#8220;This functionality is extremely useful on product pages, single product templates, and product grids (Query blocks).&#8221;</p>



<div class="wp-block-spacer"></div>



<img width="500" height="425" src="https://149611589.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/detect-current-product.gif" alt="" class="wp-image-149400" />



<p>The EDD controls allow users to show or hide blocks based on downloads, cart contents, customer purchase history, and more. Since EDD doesn&#8217;t have as many block-powered layouts as WooCommerce, Diego did not include the &#8220;Detect current product&#8221; feature.</p>



<p>&#8220;The EDD visibility control currently has no product-based rules,&#8221; he said. &#8220;If greater block support is added to EDD in the future, such as an EDD Products block that supports inner blocks, expect more functionality.&#8221;</p>



<p>Block Visibility 3.1.0 also adds a new Command Palette command to &#8220;Manage Visibility Presets,&#8221; which requires WordPress 6.3+.</p>



<div class="wp-block-spacer"></div>



<img width="1372" height="985" src="https://149611589.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/command-palette-manage-visibility-presets.gif" alt="" class="wp-image-149403" />image credit: Block Visibility repository &#8211; <a href="https://github.com/ndiego/block-visibility/pull/84">PR #84</a>



<p>Diego said he doesn&#8217;t plan on adding any new integrations to the plugin but will continue improving existing controls. Now that all the features from the Pro version have been merged into the free plugin, users who have the Pro version installed can deactivate it after upgrading to version 3.1.0.</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, 23 Sep 2023 02:07:22 +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:"Sarah Gooding";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:98:"WPTavern: WordPress Plugin Review Team Onboards New Members, Releases Plugin to Flag Common Errors";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=149346";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:108:"https://wptavern.com/wordpress-plugin-review-team-onboards-new-members-releases-plugin-to-flag-common-errors";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:3371:"<p>WordPress&#8217; Plugin Review Team continues to dig out from under a massive backlog that has grown to 1,260 <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/developers/add/">plugins awaiting review</a>.  Developers submitting new plugins can expect to wait at least 91 days, according to the notice on the queue today. </p>



<p>&#8220;<em>Currently there are 1,241 plugins awaiting review</em>,&#8221; Automattic-sponsored Plugin Review team member Alvaro Gómez said earlier this week.</p>



<p>&#8220;We are painstakingly aware of this. We check that number every day and realize how this delay is affecting plugin authors.&#8221; </p>



<p>Although the backlog seems to be getting worse, Gómez published an <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/plugins/2023/09/19/update-turning-the-tide/">update</a> outlining new systems the team is putting in place to get the situation under control. He likened it to patching a hole in a boat, as opposed to simply prioritizing bailing out the water.</p>



<p>&#8220;During the last six months, the Plugin review team has worked on documenting its processes, training new members, and improving its tools,&#8221; he said. &#8220;Now, thanks to your patience and support, the tide is about to turn.&#8221;</p>



<p>The team has now onboarded two rounds of new members, with three more reviewers added recently, and has a system in place to make this easier in the future. After receiving more than 40 <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/plugins/handbook/apply/">applications</a> to join the team, the form will be closing at the end of September.</p>



<p>They also sent plugin authors still waiting in the queue an email asking them to self-check their plugins to meet basic security standards, as another effort to mitigate the growing backlog.</p>



<p>&#8220;We find ourselves correcting the same three or four errors on +95% of plugins and this is not a good use of our time,&#8221; Gómez said. &#8220;Once authors confirm that their plugins meet these basic requirements, we will proceed with the review.&#8221;</p>



<p>A new plugin called <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/plugin-check/">Plugin Check</a> has just been published to WordPress.org for plugin authors to self-review for common errors, which will eventually be integrated into the plugin submission process.</p>



<p>&#8220;Once the PCP is merged with <a href="https://github.com/10up/plugin-check">this other plugin that the Performance team has been working on</a>, it will provide <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/plugins/2022/07/05/proposal-for-a-wordpress-plugin-checker/">checks for a lot of other things</a>,&#8221; Gómez  said. &#8220;When this is completed, we will be in a better spot to take in feedback and make improvements.</p>



<p>&#8220;In the short term, we are going to ask authors to test their plugins using the PCP before submitting them, but our goal is to integrate the plugin as <strong>part of the submission process</strong> and run automated checks.&#8221;</p>



<p>So far plugin authors have reported a few bugs and issues with the plugin not recognizing files or giving unintelligible errors. These issues can be reported on the <a href="https://github.com/10up/plugin-check/">GitHub repo</a>, which is temporarily hosted on the 10up GitHub account but will be moving to WordPress.org in the near future.</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, 22 Sep 2023 17:51:11 +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:"Sarah Gooding";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:84:"Do The Woo Community: WooBits: Accessibility, Diversity, Community, WooSesh and More";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:28:"https://dothewoo.io/?p=76579";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:62:"https://dothewoo.io/woobits-accessibility-diversity-community/";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:426:"<p>This week, diversity at WP Accessibility Day, WooSesh, Cart and Checkout Blocks and more WordPress and WooCommerce community.</p>
<p>&gt;&gt; The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://dothewoo.io/woobits-accessibility-diversity-community/">WooBits: Accessibility, Diversity, Community, WooSesh and More</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://dothewoo.io">Do the Woo - a WooCommerce Builder Community</a>	.</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, 22 Sep 2023 13:04:33 +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: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:112:"WPTavern: WordPress Accessibility Day 2023 Announces Diverse Speaker Lineup, Doubles Sponsors from Previous Year";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=149315";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:122:"https://wptavern.com/wordpress-accessibility-day-2023-announces-diverse-speaker-lineup-doubles-sponsors-from-previous-year";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:6744:"<p><a href="https://2023.wpaccessibility.day/">WP Accessibility Day</a> (WPAD), an independent 24-hour virtual conference, has published its <a href="https://2023.wpaccessibility.day/schedule/">schedule</a> for the upcoming event on September 27, 2023. Co-lead organizer Amber Hinds reports that more than 1,248 people have registered for the event so far with attendees across 30 different countries. Approximately 50% of attendees are from the U.S. </p>



<p>WPAD has attracted an influx of new voices this year. All speakers, excluding sponsored sessions, are first-time speakers at the event.</p>



<p>&#8220;We were nervous initially about speaker applicants, but we actually received a lot more speaker applications than last year and also more applications that were higher quality than in previous years,&#8221; Hinds said. &#8220;It was hard to decide!&#8221;</p>



<p>The keynote address will feature a conversation between Jennison Asuncion, co-founder of Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), and Joe Dolson, an accessibility consultant and co-founder of WordPress Accessibility Day. Attendees will learn how to perform usability and accessibility tests on their websites, how to build an accessible WordPress pages and posts using the block editor, simple ways to make email more accessible, how to understand color and contrast requirements in WCAG 2, and more. </p>



<p>Based on the stats for speakers (of people who opted to give the info), WPAD&#8217;s organizers have succeeded at recruiting a diverse lineup for the event:</p>



<ul>
<li>10 countries</li>



<li>67% female, 30% male, 3% Nonbinary</li>



<li>14% LGBTQ</li>



<li>41% non-white identifying</li>



<li>2 first time speakers who have never spoken at any event.</li>



<li>11 of the 27 speakers identify as having a disability. (41%) &#8211; There are speakers who identify as blind/low vision, deaf or hard of hearing, have limited mobility, and learning disabilities.</li>
</ul>



<p>&#8220;These were the hardest decisions we&#8217;ve had to make yet in selecting the WordPress Accessibility Day speakers,&#8221; Speaker Team lead Joe Dolson said. &#8220;There were so many truly excellent ideas proposed. As a result, our speakers include people who work across many different aspects of the web &#8211; inside and outside the WordPress community. I feel like we&#8217;ve ended up with an excellent cross section of topics, so we have something to offer for developers, policy makers, content creators, or community organizers.&#8221;</p>



<p>WPAD <a href="https://wptavern.com/wp-accessibility-day-secures-nonprofit-status-for-annual-event-calls-for-speakers-and-sponsors">secured non-profit status</a> earlier this year through a fiscal sponsorship partnership with <a href="https://knowbility.org/">Knowbility</a>, an Austin-based digital accessibility advocate and services provider. One of the reasons the organizers wanted to manage it independently of the WordPress Foundation was to reserve the option to do things like pay speakers for their time and expertise. Speaker pay is one expenditure for the event, which is supported by corporate and community sponsors.</p>



<p>Hinds said it was easier to attract sponsors this year and that the sponsors team received positive responses fairly quickly. They also added a microsponsorship option earlier this year (previously it was only on the registration form) and were able to recruit more businesses as microsponsors.</p>



<p>The team&#8217;s goal this year was to get enough sponsorships to cover the cost of the event itself, make a donation to Knowbility (part of the event&#8217;s fiscal sponsorship agreement with them), and have enough leftover to cover year-round expenses, such as Google workspace, Buffer, domain registration, and hosting.</p>



<p>Hinds said the organization met its sponsorship goals at most tiers, due to the hard work of the Sponsors team leads Bet Hannon and Joe Hall, along with the generosity of the community in supporting the event.</p>



<p>&#8220;We are thrilled to have doubled the number of sponsors this year over last year,&#8221; Hannon said. &#8220;I think this reflects the increasing awareness about accessibility as an issue to be addressed, as well as the wider WordPress community coming together to sponsor an event providing high quality accessibility education.&#8221;</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">New in 2023: WPAD to Broadcast via Zoom</h3>



<p>In addition to a whole new crop of speakers this year, WPAD is offering t-shirts for the first time as a thank you gift to attendees who want to make a donation when they register. </p>



<p>&#8220;We had a lot of people ask us last year how they could get a t-shirt, but they were only available to organizers, speakers, and volunteers,&#8221; Hinds said. &#8220;This year they’re available during registration so anyone can get one.&#8221;</p>



<p>Last year the event was broadcast via an embedded YouTube video on the WPAD website with third-party embeds for chat/Q&amp;A and the live transcript. </p>



<p>&#8220;We got feedback from attendees that this did not work well because they didn’t have control of the layout of the video,&#8221; Hinds said. &#8220;It was particularly limiting for attendees who rely on the sign language interpreters; they needed the interpreter video to be larger. Other people said that they found the interpretation to be distracting or they needed the slides to be bigger so they would be easier to read.&#8221;</p>



<p>The 2023 event will be live streamed using Zoom, which recently introduced a sign language interpretation view that allows hosts to assign interpreters. </p>



<p>&#8220;Attendees can choose to view the sign language interpretation in a separate window,&#8221; Hinds said.  &#8220;With this new feature available, we decided to change to Zoom webinars. We have one long 24-hour webinar that people can jump in and out of as they see fit, and each attendee can set a view for speakers, slides, signers, and captions that works best for them.&#8221;</p>



<p><a href="https://2023.wpaccessibility.day/attendee-registration/">Registration</a> for the event is free and it&#8217;s still open. Attendees have the opportunity to receive virtual swag and win prizes from the sponsors. Organizers have also gotten the conference pre-approved for continuing education credits for the International Association of Accessibility Professionals <a href="https://www.accessibilityassociation.org/s/wascertification">Web Accessibility Specialist (WAS)</a> and <a href="https://www.accessibilityassociation.org/s/certified-professional">Certified Professional in Core Competencies (CPACC)</a> certifications.</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, 22 Sep 2023 03:49:28 +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:"Sarah Gooding";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:97:"WPTavern: Community Team Invites Organizers to Apply for Hosting Next Generation WordPress Events";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=149225";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:108:"https://wptavern.com/community-team-invites-organizers-to-apply-for-hosting-next-generation-wordpress-events";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:3017:"<img width="1600" height="792" src="https://149611589.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/wordcamp-bengalaru.png" alt="" class="wp-image-149298" />Attendees of NextGen WordCamp Bengaluru &#8211; image credit: <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/community/2023/09/19/from-japan-to-rome-recent-and-upcoming-next-generation-wordpress-events/">WordPress.org</a>



<p>WordPress&#8217; Community team is evolving the WordCamp format to  promote adoption, training, and networking for professionals, leaving the flagship events to focus more on connection and inspiration. This change opens the door for more creative concepts around  the events&#8217; new mission:</p>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p><em>WordPress events spark innovation and adoption by way of accessible training and networking for users, builders, designers, and extenders. We celebrate community by accelerating 21st-century skills, professional opportunities, and partnerships for WordPressers of today and tomorrow.</em></p>
</blockquote>



<p>A group of <a href="https://wptavern.com/wordpress-confirms-8-pilot-events-to-launch-the-next-generation-of-wordcamps-in-2023">eight pilot events were confirmed in June</a>, and two recent &#8220;NextGen&#8221; WordPress events have already happened, including a community-building workshop in Japan, and WordCamp Bengaluru, a one-day event featuring the local culture and a walking tour of the city.</p>



<p>The Community team has compiled a list of more than three dozen <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/community/2023/08/30/the-nextgen-event-project-your-ideas-your-wordpress-community/">concepts to inspire NextGen event organizers</a>. The list spans a wide range of ideas, such as college campus based groups, sponsor networking days, show and tell night, job fairs, events for agencies, WordPress retreats, and many more. </p>



<p>Anyone who is interested to host one of these new event types is invited to <a href="https://wordpressdotorg.survey.fm/next-generation-of-wordpress-events">fill out a form</a> that the Community team has created to capture ideas for future events &#8211; either before the end of 2023, or during the first half of 2024. Organizers will be asked to identify a category for their proposed event from among the following:</p>



<ul>
<li>WP expertise level (beginners, intermediate, advanced)</li>



<li>Focused activity (training, recruiting, networking, contributing, conferencing, etc)</li>



<li>Job status (students, fresh graduates, job seekers, freelancers, business owners, etc)</li>



<li>Identity-based (women, castes, BIPOC, Latinx, LGBTQI+, tribes, age, etc)</li>



<li>Content topic focused (designers, block development, SEO, etc)</li>
</ul>



<p>Although the form is presented as a survey, it&#8217;s more of an interest form, which is why it collects the respondent&#8217;s contact information. Respondents who indicate they are willing to have a discussion about their ideas may be contacted by the Community team.</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, 22 Sep 2023 01:26:05 +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:13:"Sarah Gooding";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:117:"Post Status: Plugin Team Sees a Shift Starting • Browser Interoperability Issues • WCUS Q&amp;A • Enterprise WP";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:"https://poststatus.com/?p=155074";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:57:"https://poststatus.com/plugin-team-sees-a-shift-starting/";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:15209:"<h2 class="wp-block-heading alignfull" id="h-this-week-at-wordpress-org-september-18-2023">This Week at WordPress.org (September 18, 2023)</h2>


<div class="has-background has-theme-palette-8-background-color wp-block-post-excerpt"><p class="wp-block-post-excerpt__excerpt"><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f50c.png" alt="🔌" class="wp-smiley" /> Plugin Check plugin is now available🛜 Browser Compatibility Issues<img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/2753.png" alt="❓" class="wp-smiley" />#WCUS Q&amp;A Continued<img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f3a7.png" alt="🎧" class="wp-smiley" /> Enterprise Clients and the Business of WordPress </p></div>


<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity" />


<div class="gb-container gb-container-5e804289">

<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-news"><a href="https://wordpress.org/news">News</a></h2>

</div>


<ul>
<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2023/09/episode-62-enterprise-clients-and-the-business-of-wordpress/">WP Briefing: Episode 62: Enterprise Clients and the Business of WordPress</a></li>
</ul>



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity" />



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-community-summit-notes"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/summit">Community Summit Notes</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><strong><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/summit/2023/09/21/community-summit-discussion-notes-creating-wordpress-curriculum-and-educational-experiences/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Creating WordPress Curriculum and Educational Experiences</a></strong></li>
</ul>



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity" />



<div class="wp-block-columns is-layout-flex wp-container-9 wp-block-columns-is-layout-flex">
<div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow">
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">WordPress 6.4</h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/07/18/wordpress-6-4-whats-on-your-wishlist/">WordPress 6.4: What’s on your wishlist?</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/06/05/wordpress-6-4-development-cycle/">WordPress 6.4 Development Cycle</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/09/14/hallway-hangout-whats-new-for-developers-in-wordpress-6-4/">Hallway Hangout: What’s new for developers in WordPress 6.4</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity" />



<div class="wp-block-spacer"></div>



<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="wp-embedded-content"><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/plugin-check/">Plugin Check</a></blockquote>
</div>



<div class="wp-block-columns is-layout-flex wp-container-14 wp-block-columns-is-layout-flex">
<div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow">
<div class="wp-block-columns is-layout-flex wp-container-12 wp-block-columns-is-layout-flex">
<div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow">
<h2 class="wp-block-heading"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/community">Community</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/community/2023/09/20/attention-wordpress-women-in-india-and-your-event-organizers-this-important-workshop-this-weekend-is-for-you/">Attention WordPress women in India and those who support you: This important workshop this weekend is for you!</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/community/2023/09/19/from-japan-to-rome-recent-and-upcoming-next-generation-wordpress-events/">From Japan to Rome: Recent and Upcoming Next Generation WordPress Events</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/community/2023/09/19/contributor-working-group-mentorship-chat-agenda-september-21st-0700-utc-apac-emea-and-1600-utc-amer/">Contributor Working Group: Mentorship Chat Agenda | September 21st 07:00 UTC (APAC/EMEA) and 16:00 UTC (AMER)</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-core"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core">Core</a> </h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/09/20/seeking-proposals-for-interop-2024/">Seeking proposals for Interop 2024</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/09/19/analyzing-the-core-web-vitals-performance-impact-of-wordpress-6-3-in-the-field/">Analyzing the Core Web Vitals performance impact of WordPress 6.3 in the field</a></li>
</ul>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-developer-blog"><a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/news/">Developer Blog</a></h3>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/news/2023/09/understanding-block-attributes/">Understanding block attributes</a></li>



<li><a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/news/2023/09/whats-new-for-developers-september-2023/">What’s new for developers? (September 2023)</a></li>
</ul>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-meetings">Meetings</h3>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/09/20/default-theme-chat-agenda-september-20th-2023/">Default Theme Chat Agenda: September 20th, 2023</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/09/20/dev-chat-agenda-september-13-2023-2/">Dev Chat agenda, September 20, 2023</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/09/19/performance-chat-summary-19-september-2023/">Performance Chat Summary: 19 September 2023</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/design">Design</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/design/2023/09/11/design-share-aug-28-sep8/">Design Share: Aug 28-Sep8</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/docs">Docs</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/docs/2023/09/18/agenda-for-docs-team-biweekly-meeting-september-19-2023/">Agenda for Docs Team Biweekly Meeting (September 19, 2023)</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/docs/2023/09/06/summary-of-docs-team-biweekly-meeting-september-05-2023/">Summary of Docs Team Biweekly Meeting (September 05, 2023)</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/updates/2023/09/18/documentation-team-update-september-18-2023/">Documentation Team Update – September 18, 2023</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/meta">Meta</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/meta/2023/09/21/meeting-recap-for-september-20-2023/">Meeting Recap for September 20, 2023</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-openverse"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/openverse">Openverse</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/openverse/2023/09/18/last-week-openverse-2023-09-11-2023-09-18/">A week in Openverse: 2023-09-11 – 2023-09-18</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-performance"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/performance/">Performance</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/09/19/performance-chat-agenda-19-september-2023/">Performance Chat Agenda: 19 September 2023</a></li>



<li><a href="https://github.com/WordPress/five-for-the-future/issues/230">Core Performance Team badge missing from org pages</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-plugins"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/plugins">Plugins</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/plugins/2023/09/19/update-turning-the-tide/">Update: Turning the Tide</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/plugins/2023/08/21/xpost-wordpresscs-3-0-0-is-now-available/">WordPressCS 3.0.0 is now available</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/updates/2023/09/18/plugin-review-team-18-september-2023/">Plugin Review Team: 18 September 2023</a></li>
</ul>
</div>



<div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow">
<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-polyglots"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots">Polyglots</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots/2023/09/20/previewing-patterns-during-translation/">Previewing patterns during translation</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots/2023/09/20/agenda-weekly-polyglots-chat-september-20-2023-0700-utc/">Agenda: Weekly Polyglots Chat- September 20, 2023 (07:00 UTC)</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-project"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/project">Project</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/project/2023/09/15/wordcamp-us-2023-qa/">WordCamp US 2023 Q&amp;A</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-support"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/support">Support</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/support/2023/09/agenda-for-september-21st-support-meeting-2/">Agenda for September 21st Support Meeting</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/sustainability">Sustainability</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/sustainability/2023/09/20/sustainability-chat-agenda-september-22-2023/">Sustainability Chat Agenda, September 22, 2023</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/sustainability/2023/09/15/call-for-wordpress-sustainability-team-representatives/">Call for WordPress Sustainability Team Representatives</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-test"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/test">Test</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/test/2023/09/18/fse-program-testing-call-26-final-touches/">FSE Program Testing Call #26: Final touches</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/updates/2023/09/18/test-team-update-18-september-2023/">Test Team Update: 18 September 2023</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-theme"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/theme">Theme</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/themes/2023/09/15/theme-handbook-overhaul-phase-3-publishing-content/">Theme Handbook Overhaul: Phase 3 (Publishing Content)</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/updates/2023/09/19/themes-team-update-september-19-2023/">Themes team update September 19, 2023</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/updates/2023/09/13/themes-team-update-september-13-2023/">Themes team update September 13, 2023</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-training"><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/training">Training</a></h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/training/2023/09/21/proposal-updating-the-contributor-ladder-to-a-five-path-model/">Proposal: Updating the Contributor Ladder to a five-path model</a></li>



<li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/training/2023/09/19/training-team-meeting-recap-12th-september-2023/">Training Team Meeting Recap – 12th September 2023</a></li>
</ul>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-tutorials"><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/tutorials">Tutorials</a></h3>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/tutorial/using-block-patterns/">Using Block Patterns</a></li>
</ul>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-online-workshops">Online Workshops</h3>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/?meeting=gpl-in-the-wordpress-training-teams-vetting-processes">GPL in the WordPress Training Team’s Vetting Processes</a></li>
</ul>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-wptv">WPTV</h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://wordpress.tv/category/year/2022/">Latest WordPress TV videos</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity" />



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-related-news">Related News:</h2>



<ul>
<li><a href="https://blog.jquery.com/2023/08/28/jquery-3-7-1-released-reliable-table-row-dimensions/">jQuery 3.7.1 Released: Reliable Table Row Dimensions</a></li>



<li><a href="https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/main/doc/changelogs/CHANGELOG_V20.md#20.6.1">Node v20.6.1released</a></li>



<li><a href="https://www.php.net/archive/2023.php#2023-09-14-1">PHP 8.3.0 RC 2 available for testing</a></li>



<li><a href="https://www.php.net/archive/2023.php#2023-08-31-2">PHP 8.2.10 Released!</a></li>



<li><a href="https://www.php.net/archive/2023.php#2023-08-31-3">PHP 8.1.23 Released!</a></li>



<li><a href="https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer/releases/tag/v6.8.1">PHPMailer 6.8.1</a></li>



<li><a href="https://dev.mysql.com/doc/relnotes/mysql/8.0/en/news-8-0-35.html">Changes in MySQL 8.0.35 (Not yet released, General Availability)</a></li>



<li><a href="https://262.ecma-international.org/">TC39</a></li>



<li><a href="https://github.com/composer/composer/releases">Composer </a><a href="https://github.com/composer/composer/releases/tag/2.6.3">2.6.3</a></li>
</ul>



<p class="has-theme-palette-7-background-color has-background">Thanks for reading our WP dot .org roundup! Each week we are highlighting the news and discussions coming from the good folks making WordPress possible. If you or your company create products or services that use WordPress, you need to be engaged with them and their work. Be sure to share this resource with your product and project managers. <br /><br /><strong>Are you interested in giving back and contributing your time and skills to WordPress.org?</strong>   <a href="https://wordpress.org/support/article/contributing-to-wordpress/">Start Here ›</a><br /><br /><strong>Get our weekly WordPress community news digest</strong> — Post Status&#8217; <a href="https://poststatus.com/news/week-in-review/">Week in Review</a> — covering the WP/Woo news plus significant writing and podcasts. It&#8217;s also available in <a href="https://poststatus.com/newsletter">our newsletter</a>.  </p>



<div class="wp-block-spacer"></div>



<div class="wp-block-media-text alignwide is-stacked-on-mobile has-background"><a href="https://poststatus.com/"><img src="https://poststatus.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/vertical-post-status-logo-250.png" alt="Post Status" class="wp-image-85823 size-full" /></a><div class="wp-block-media-text__content">
<p class="has-text-align-left has-normal-font-size" id="h-get-ready-for-remote-work">You — and your whole team can <a href="https://poststatus.com/join/">join Post Status</a> too!</p>



<p class="has-text-align-left has-small-font-size"><strong>Build your network. Learn with others. Find your next job — or your next hire.</strong> Read the <strong>Post Status</strong> <a href="https://poststatus.com/newsletter/">newsletter</a>. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/2709.png" alt="✉" class="wp-smiley" /> Listen to <a href="https://poststatus.com/podcasts/">podcasts</a>. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f399.png" alt="🎙" class="wp-smiley" /> Follow <a href="https://twitter.com/post_status/">@Post_Status</a> <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f426.png" alt="🐦" class="wp-smiley" /> and <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/post-status-llc/">LinkedIn</a>. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f4bc.png" alt="💼" class="wp-smiley" /></p>
</div></div>



<div class="wp-block-spacer"></div>
<p>This article was published at Post Status — the community for WordPress professionals.</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:"Thu, 21 Sep 2023 18:30:34 +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:"Courtney Robertson";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:90:"Do The Woo Community: Agency Growth, Optimization, Automation and Enterprise Level Clients";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:28:"https://dothewoo.io/?p=76568";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:79:"https://dothewoo.io/woo-agency-growth-and-enterprise-with-josh-and-zach-webber/";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:450:"<p>Zach and Josh from Big Red Jelly share insights on agency growth and enterprise as a WooCommerce and WordPress digital agency.</p>
<p>&gt;&gt; The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://dothewoo.io/woo-agency-growth-and-enterprise-with-josh-and-zach-webber/">Agency Growth, Optimization, Automation and Enterprise Level Clients</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://dothewoo.io">Do the Woo - a WooCommerce Builder Community</a>	.</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:"Thu, 21 Sep 2023 13:00:03 +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: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:93:"WPTavern: WordPress.com Plugin Pages Add Download Link for Using Plugins on Self-Hosted Sites";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=149118";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:104:"https://wptavern.com/wordpress-com-plugin-pages-add-download-link-for-using-plugins-on-self-hosted-sites";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:4552:"<p>WordPress.com plugin pages have been updated to include a download link for WordPress.org  plugins listed in the .com directory. These are the listings that are scraped from WordPress.org. The plugins are available for free on WordPress.org for self-hosted sites but can only be used on WordPress.com with a paid subscription.</p>



<div class="wp-block-spacer"></div>



<img width="1792" height="1244" src="https://149611589.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Screen-Shot-2023-09-20-at-2.41.03-PM.png" alt="" class="wp-image-149200" />Logged out view of WordPress.com plugin pages



<div class="wp-block-spacer"></div>



<p>The text in the sidebar includes a link to an article explaining the difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com. It appears on both the logged-out and logged-in views:</p>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>This plugin is available for download to be used on your <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://wordpress.com/go/website-building/wordpress-com-vs-wordpress-org/" target="_blank">WordPress self-hosted</a> installation.</p>
</blockquote>



<p>Themes hosted on WordPress.com have a similar notice with a link to download the theme and use it on a self-hosted site.</p>



<p>This change comes as the result of developers <a href="https://wptavern.com/developers-raise-concerns-about-wordpress-com-plugin-listings-outranking-wordpress-org-on-google">raising concerns</a> about WordPress.com plugin listings outranking WordPress.org on Google Search in some instances. During that discussion, many developers were surprised to learn that their plugins created for WordPress.org were also listed on WordPress.com as only available with a paid subscription. Patchstack responded by <a href="https://wptavern.com/developers-claim-damaged-trust-following-public-confrontations-with-wordpress-leadership">updating its readme file</a> to ensure that WordPress.com users and visitors are made aware that the plugin is available for free in the official WordPress plugin repository. This response may not be necessary now, unless developers want to include a direct link to their plugins.</p>



<p>In a <a href="https://poststatus.slack.com/archives/CHNM7Q7T8/p1695076392811079">discussion on Post Status Slack</a>, some plugin developers said they would prefer a link to the actual plugin page where they can see and participate in reviews. The omission of a link back to WordPress.org may be intentional, as it would take users off of the .com site, which does not facilitate customers upgrading to paid plans in order to use plugins.</p>



<p>Some developers had also asked Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg to noindex those pages, but he said that WordPress.com users should also be able to search Google for the listings.</p>



<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">I think it should show up for .com users who are Googling, and Google appears smart enough prioritize correctly. That’s a SEO benefit, and not at the expense of any plugin authors.</p>&mdash; Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt) <a href="https://twitter.com/photomatt/status/1704028824500146324?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 19, 2023</a></blockquote>
</div>



<p>Some developers have asked to know what percentage of their active installs come from WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org, or other hosting platforms. Mullenweg said there are currently no reports for this but that the data could be interesting. </p>



<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">There are no reports currently for plugin installs by web host. I could see that being interesting, though, especially with how some hosts bundle.</p>&mdash; Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt) <a href="https://twitter.com/photomatt/status/1703878877263917316?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 18, 2023</a></blockquote>
</div>



<p>&#8220;If people are providing more distribution to unaltered plugins, I think that&#8217;s great,&#8221; Mullenweg said during the discussion last week. &#8220;Happy for all our plugins to be duplicated and distributed by every host and site on the planet.&#8221;</p>



<p>When asked if WordPress.org could extract the data for known plugin distributors, like WordPress.com, Mullenweg <a href="https://twitter.com/photomatt/status/1704109689922027565">said</a>, &#8220;.com or any other host could share plugin info if it’s allowed by their privacy policy. Also it’s fairly trivial to get plugin info from crawling sites.&#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:"Wed, 20 Sep 2023 20:27:33 +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:"Sarah Gooding";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:91:"WPTavern: #91 – Vagelis Papaioannou on How to Learn to Use WordPress and Help With Events";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:48:"https://wptavern.com/?post_type=podcast&p=148915";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:105:"https://wptavern.com/podcast/91-vagelis-papaioannou-on-how-to-learn-to-use-wordpress-and-help-with-events";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:49609:"Transcript<div>
<p>[00:00:00] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Welcome to the Jukebox podcast. From WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.</p>



<p>Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how to learn to use WordPress and help with events.</p>



<p>If you&#8217;d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice. Or by going to WPTavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players.</p>



<p>If you have a topic that you&#8217;d like us to feature on the podcast, I&#8217;m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox.</p>



<p>So on the podcast today, we have a Vagelis Papaioannou. Vagelis is a software engineer from Greece. His journey with coding began during his elementary school years. In an experimental coding class. This sparked a lifelong passion within him.</p>



<p>His love for WordPress dates back to the early versions. For the last eight to nine years, he has actively participated in the Greek WordPress community, engaging in various roles, such as organizing WordCamps and meetups. Vagelis also contributes to multiple teams, cherishing the small contributions that allow everyone to make a difference. He also serves as the project translation lead for the Greek language.</p>



<p>Vagelis, although a self-confessed introvert, shares his initial struggles with being a part of the community and attending local meetups. He encourages people to step outside their comfort zones, and attend events like WordCamps and meetups, where they&#8217;re likely to discover a welcoming and friendly atmosphere. Vagelis recounts his own experience of attending such events, initially feeling scared, but eventually having an enjoyable time, making many lasting friendships along the way.</p>



<p>He talks about how local meetups are more casual gatherings than WordCamps. People come together to talk about WordPress, learn, and spend time with like-minded individuals. From meetups by the sea to forest walks, these events offer opportunities for both education and social engagement.</p>



<p>On the subject of WordCamps, Vagelis unravels the magic behind these larger multi-day events, with presentations and a contributor day. He emphasizes that contribution to the community doesn&#8217;t necessarily require coding skills, and encourages more people to get involved. WordCamps are not only platforms for learning and exchanging ideas, but they also provide a space for attendees to have fun, network, and explore all manner of other opportunities.</p>



<p>We talk about the importance of the code of conduct at WordCamps. This code ensures that participants know that they&#8217;re going to have a safe and inclusive experience. With attendees joining from all corners of the globe, these events attract a diverse range of individuals who are passionate about the software and the community.</p>



<p>We then talk about the effort required to organize these events. Vagelis explains why he&#8217;s willing to dedicate his time and energy to be a part of such complex projects. He talks about the benefits participants gain from taking an active role, whether as an organizer, speaker or volunteer.</p>



<p>As Vagelis shares his personal experiences in organizing and participating in events like WordCamp, Athens, he strongly advocates for more community involvement, and highlights the need for new organizers to get involved, to allow the community to meet up once again.</p>



<p>We then get into a discussion of other ways that you can be involved. This time in the Learn project, which is making freely available materials so that people can learn about WordPress at a time that suits them. Vagelis talks about what the Learn team does, and how you can join them. He discusses how the team works using GitHub for collaboration and accommodating individuals with various skills and abilities.</p>



<p>From the educational content available on the learn.wordpress.org website., To the valuable connections made through hallway chats, Vagelis emphasizes the power and importance of the WordPress community.</p>



<p>If you&#8217;re a seasoned WordPress enthusiast, or just starting your journey in contributions, this episode is for you.</p>



<p>If you&#8217;re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading over to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast. Where you&#8217;ll find all the other episodes as well.</p>



<p>And so without further delay, I bring you Vagelis Papaioannou.</p>



<p>I am joined on the podcast today by Vagelis Papaioannou. Hello Vagelis!</p>



<p>[00:05:27] <strong>Vagelis Papaioannou:</strong> Hello Nathan. Hello.</p>



<p>[00:05:28] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Very nice to have you on the podcast today. Just to give you a little bit of orientation, right at the outset we&#8217;re going to be talking about WordPress events. We might well dip our toes into WordCamp Europe. We might talk about local meetups and WordCamps in general. And then we might also pivot to talk about something which Vagelis is interested in, the training team.</p>



<p>But before that, just to paint a picture of who you are and what your experience is with WordPress. I wonder Vagelis if you wouldn&#8217;t mind just giving us your bio. You can start as early as you like. Anything you want to say about you and WordPress.</p>



<p>[00:06:04] <strong>Vagelis Papaioannou:</strong> Yeah of course. My name is Vagelis, I&#8217;m from Greece. I was raised and born in Athens and I live in Thessaloniki for the last 21 years. I&#8217;m a software engineer and my journey with coding started at elementary school where we had this experimental class of coding and I got really into it. And then that just made my passion.</p>



<p>So regarding WordPress, I&#8217;ve been using WordPress since the version one point something, I can&#8217;t really remember. I was using b2 and then I jumped over to WordPress. The last eight, nine years I&#8217;ve been part of the Greek community of WordPress. I&#8217;m trying to go to build as much as possible I can.</p>



<p>And I&#8217;m a WordCamp organiser. I&#8217;m a meetup organiser. I do contribute across multiple teams like training, testing or photos and all that small bits that everyone can do. I&#8217;m also the P.T. for the Greek language translation. Yeah that&#8217;s pretty much it I guess.</p>



<p>[00:07:14] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Yeah that&#8217;s a lot. That really is a lot. It&#8217;s an absolute pleasure to have you on. We didn&#8217;t discuss this in our pre recording chat, but I&#8217;m just wondering if you could paint the picture for us of what the state of the WordPress community in Greece is like. Just judging by my accent you can probably tell that I&#8217;m from the UK, and we might have a very different complexion here.</p>



<p>We&#8217;ve obviously just this year had a huge WordPress event in Greece. WordCamp Europe was held in Athens earlier this year. If I&#8217;m looking at it from the outside I get the impression that the Greek community is thriving because they put on events like WordCamp Europe, but I don&#8217;t know if that&#8217;s the case.</p>



<p>How is it being a Greek WordPress user? Are there plenty of events? Is the community thriving or is it in a different state?</p>



<p>[00:07:59] <strong>Vagelis Papaioannou:</strong> Well the community is pretty big. We have a huge Facebook group with almost 20,000 people. We do two major events, two WordCamps, one in Athens and one in Thessaloniki. Sadly COVID 19 hit us really hard, so we had to stop for a while. We also stopped the meetups but we&#8217;re getting back to it. We&#8217;ve done like 10, 11 meetups the last year in Thessaloniki, and I know there are plans to do more meetups in other areas of Greece.</p>



<p>We also in planning of a special WordCamp. We try to figure out where to do that and how to plan it so we can apply for it on WordCamp Central. And yeah we have a lot of users, lots of people trying to translate, we have a lot of coders.</p>



<p>We also have a lot of people actually working in key companies regarding to WordPress, like Automattic and stuff like that. So yeah, we&#8217;re doing good I guess. But because I&#8217;m that kind of person, I know we could do better in some fields, but that&#8217;s a whole different story.</p>



<p>[00:09:10] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Yeah I guess there&#8217;s always room for improvement. I can completely sympathise though with the whole COVID thing. I think it&#8217;s fair to say that it put the brakes on in the UK and I don&#8217;t think the community has quite got back to where it was. Things are beginning again. There are various different WordCamps and meetups and things like that which are coming back from being online.</p>



<p>Broadly speaking I think a lot of them carried on in an online way, but I&#8217;m not sure that the interest was maintained. And so a lot of them are now coming back and hoping to be in the real world once more. But the flagship event, one of the bigger events that we had in the UK was WordCamp London and, as yet, it has not re emerged. So fingers crossed.</p>



<p>[00:09:52] <strong>Vagelis Papaioannou:</strong> Yeah. I&#8217;ve been on the last WordCamp London and I had a blast. It was a great event. We had great fun and I really hope that it&#8217;s coming back.</p>



<p>[00:10:01] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Yeah fingers crossed for that as well. We&#8217;re going to talk a little bit about local meetups and what have you, and WordCamp Europe in particular. Let&#8217;s begin there. Let&#8217;s begin with WordCamp Europe and paint a picture.</p>



<p>Prior to that though I wouldn&#8217;t mind having a conversation around the fact that it&#8217;s very obvious to somebody like you and somebody like me, who probably obsess more than is healthy for us about WordPress, but we know that there&#8217;s a community. We&#8217;re well aware that these events take place. There was a time though when I was a user of WordPress, I was using nothing else, it was probably about two years into my journey with WordPress that I actually noticed that there was a community at all.</p>



<p>Prior to that I was simply going to the .org websites, downloading the software, using that software, and then you know rinse and repeat, building websites and so on. And then I can&#8217;t remember where, it was possibly on social media or something, I remember seeing a picture. The collection of people with WordPress T-shirts on standing in a hallway or something. And I was thinking well that&#8217;s curious, what are they doing?</p>



<p>And then obviously as time went on, it occurred to me oh there are these events. So given that the listenership to this podcast could be anybody, do you want to just talk a little bit about what WordPress events are? What they endeavor to do? How they are organised? Whether that be big events, little events, meetups and so on.</p>



<p>[00:11:21] <strong>Vagelis Papaioannou:</strong> Definitely. Well first of all I need to reassure everyone that&#8217;s listening to this that I&#8217;m an introvert. So it wasn&#8217;t easy for me to be a part of a community, any community. Or just go in a random place in a local meetup, open the door and just stay there with a bunch of random folks.</p>



<p>So if you feel like that, just come to any event even if it&#8217;s a WordCamp, a meetup, gathering, whatever. Just come, say hi and we&#8217;re all really welcoming and friendly. And you&#8217;re going to find someone who can really make you feel comfortable.</p>



<p>I was aware of the community for a long time before I even managed to go on a local meetup here in Thessaloniki. And I remember me being there, just sitting on a chair, and I didn&#8217;t feel like talking to anyone. I was kind of scared. Scared grown up man, just in a strange place with other folks talking about software, which I love.</p>



<p>So the next time was better and I actually had fun. I made a few contacts which I can now call friends. And that&#8217;s pretty much what a local meetup is. It&#8217;s just a gathering. We just get a soda, we talk about WordPress. We may have a presentation, we may have snacks. It&#8217;s a cool two hours spending with friends around WordPress. That&#8217;s pretty much it.</p>



<p>I remember our last meetup, it was a month ago and we did it on Thessaloniki seaside. So we had like this beautiful sea view and we were just 20 people talking about random stuff. And then the idea struck, and someone said, shall we do another one? But like in Naousa, which is a different place, a different town. There&#8217;s a forest there. We can walk through the forest and go eat and do some stuff. And we agreed to do that. So that&#8217;s our next meetup. It&#8217;s on September the 2nd. So it&#8217;s pretty informal.</p>



<p>And the same goes for WorldCamps, but WorldCamp is a bigger event. It&#8217;s usually like a couple of days event. There&#8217;s the presentation day and then there&#8217;s a contributor day where we gather and contribute.</p>



<p>Just a side note, you don&#8217;t have to code to be a contributor. You can contribute in so many ways and we do need more contributors to help in so many teams.</p>



<p>So yeah WordCamps, like I said, WordCamps are informal. You can come to learn something but if you feel that you can&#8217;t learn anything you can just come and have fun with us. Have a nice lunch, meet new people, exchange ideas. And maybe at the end of the day you learn something new. I don&#8217;t want to digress so that&#8217;s pretty much it.</p>



<p>[00:14:11] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> No I think that&#8217;s great. That was a really nice summary. And I think a really important point that you made there, especially for people who&#8217;ve never been to these events before, is the no code piece. That is to say, you really genuinely don&#8217;t need to know a line of code, you don&#8217;t need to know any of that whatsoever to enjoy the event.</p>



<p>Because usually, especially at the larger events, there&#8217;s a whole broad range of things that are being presented, workshops that are being given. Yeah, some of it will be about the code but a lot of it will be about other aspects of life on the internet. So it may be SEO, or marketing, or design, or something like that. So there&#8217;s definitely something for everybody.</p>



<p>And also, I&#8217;ll throw into the mix, the somewhat undermentioned but very important hallway track. And this is simply when you&#8217;re not at a presentation. This is just hanging out, being in the corridor, chatting to people. And my understanding from chatting to people over the years is that quite a lot of serendipitous things happen during those hallway chats. You know friendships are created, businesses are formed, partnerships are made during those kinds of hallway random meetups. And it&#8217;s those things in particular are really nice.</p>



<p>[00:15:24] <strong>Vagelis Papaioannou:</strong> And you also get the vibe of the market. So if you&#8217;re into that market, you get the vibe of where are we heading to? And that&#8217;s a good thing to always stay up to date.</p>



<p>[00:15:36] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> I think also it might be worth mentioning that there is an enforced code of conduct. So there really are kind of rules and guidelines around what is acceptable. So if you have any fears or worries around that, what your participation would look like? How you would feel? How comfortable you would be or what have you, there are definite guidelines to make sure that your experience is as friendly as possible. Let&#8217;s put it that way.</p>



<p>So WordCamps are the big ones. Then we&#8217;ve got these more ad hoc local meetups where really you&#8217;re probably just capturing people from the local area. Maybe a few miles around, as opposed to people getting on aeroplanes. They typically happen more like once a month or something like that.</p>



<p>Why have you been so keen to contribute to these things though? Because my understanding is, especially an event like WordCamp Europe, you only have to attend to realise how breathtakingly large that undertaking is. The enterprise of putting on an event for several thousand people, coming from all over the globe.</p>



<p>The fact that it&#8217;s, the catering is done, the internet is provided, there&#8217;s AV, there&#8217;s translations, there&#8217;s people standing around with the correct T-shirt on, helpfully guiding people all over. What I&#8217;m trying to paint a picture of is just how breathtakingly large these things are, and complex are. So I&#8217;m just wondering, why do you give up your time in this way? What do you gain from it?</p>



<p>[00:16:57] <strong>Vagelis Papaioannou:</strong> It is indeed a massive event especially the Europe, US and Asia. I mean it&#8217;s about giving back I guess, to the community because we all get something out of it. I&#8217;m that kind of person that I believe we should always try to give back, even if we don&#8217;t get enough. We should give more than we get. This is how I work.</p>



<p>However, about WordCamp Europe, yes it was a massive thing. It required so many hours of work. Oh and I forgot to say that most of the times it is fun to get involved in these kind of stuff. And WordCamp Europe was fun for most of the time.</p>



<p>At the end of the day it is a massive event. It&#8217;s our country and we&#8217;re a bunch of people that we had to help to organise a good event, if you know what I mean. It&#8217;s always about giving back. I don&#8217;t have something specific in my mind. I never go out to try to find contacts. I never try to go out and do business or whatever. I just want to give back.</p>



<p>[00:18:01] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Certain sense of pleasure from being there, helping, making sure that it all runs smoothly. I can totally empathise with that.</p>



<p>Okay so again, thinking about the listeners who have never been to such an event as that. I described the kind of things that might be on offer. You talked about the fact that volunteers, community members, helping out at these events are a crucial part of that puzzle.</p>



<p>Are you able to just tell us some of the different roles? Now you might just cherry pick some that you know top of your mind. But just to give a flavor of the kind of things that you could be doing should you dip your toes into the water and offer your time at one of these events. What are the kind of things that you might find yourself involved with?</p>



<p>[00:18:45] <strong>Vagelis Papaioannou:</strong> Well it&#8217;s easy to find something to do on these kinds of events. I mean if you can use Gutenberg you can join the website team. If you can design you can go with the design team. That&#8217;s pretty straightforward.</p>



<p>But if you just want to volunteer and that means that you will be there at the three days of the event, and you will all be spending time for the event while being there. Which is a different thing than being an organiser, because we had to work like months, several months before the event. So if you just want to be a volunteer you can do so many things from registration, or from helping the sponsors, from making sure everything is okay. From sitting on a corner and waiting for someone to ask you something.</p>



<p>There are so many roles, and I believe that volunteers are a huge part of any event, even if it&#8217;s WordCamp Europe or a local WordCamp. Without the volunteers we can do nothing. And also we need to make clear that the organisers are also volunteers. I had a chat with multiple people, and it looks like some folks believe that we&#8217;re getting paid or we get something like a benefit or I don&#8217;t know, whatever. But we don&#8217;t, we&#8217;re just volunteers just like the rest of the volunteers and we are all equal during this event.</p>



<p>[00:20:08] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> As one of the lead organisers, given that you probably have months and months of work involved in it, well probably years is more the correct way of describing it. But given that you&#8217;ve probably got to make trips to the event, now you mentioned that you don&#8217;t get paid, but is there a system whereby, if you&#8217;re at that level and you&#8217;re organising things and you have to, I don&#8217;t know, let&#8217;s say for example you don&#8217;t live in Greece so you needed to make a journey to Athens. Are there any scenarios in which those things are paid for? Or are you always dipping into your own reserves for the WordCamp organising endeavor?</p>



<p>[00:20:42] <strong>Vagelis Papaioannou:</strong> I guess you can just look for a sponsor for a company that would like to sponsor you to do that. But in my case I covered everything. I&#8217;m in Greece, I&#8217;m just 500 kilometers away from Athens, so that wasn&#8217;t a big thing. But for other people coming from other countries, and if you consider that this is during summertime, and summertime in Greece the prices are going high, because of the tourism and all that stuff. They have to book hotels just like did, so it&#8217;s a big expense to be fair. I mean, it&#8217;s a few thousand euros to be able to go to venue visits and then go to the event, and stay for a week.</p>



<p>[00:21:24] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Yeah that&#8217;s interesting. I certainly have met people who have been sponsored to attend these events. Yeah thank you for that.</p>



<p>We should probably also talk about the affordable nature of these events, because typically if you were to go to a three day conference, well in WordCamp&#8217;s case it&#8217;s often two days, and then there&#8217;s something called a contributor day which we&#8217;ll get onto in a minute.</p>



<p>The cost of these tickets is really low. If you were to attend an event of similar size and scope elsewhere, I feel that you might have a very high ticket price. But WordCamps don&#8217;t have this ticket price. Now I understand that some of the money is offset from the sponsors, but typically they&#8217;re very affordable to attend in the region of, I don&#8217;t know 40, 50, 60 euros, something along those lines.</p>



<p>So I just wanted to raise that as a point. You don&#8217;t need to have deep pockets if you want to attend. And if you&#8217;ve got local WordCamps it&#8217;s very likely that the cost will be low as well. In fact, in many cases, I think it would be true to say that the cost of your ticket probably wouldn&#8217;t even cover the food.</p>



<p>[00:22:27] <strong>Vagelis Papaioannou:</strong> You always get your money back. And I mean our local WordCamps cost 25 euros. And you get lunch, you get swag, which swag is really, really important. And when someone goes to WordCamp Europe for the first time and you travel abroad, just bring an extra bag with you. You&#8217;re going to need it. I&#8217;m always bringing an extra bag when I go to WordCamp abroad.</p>



<p>So yeah you always get your money back. You get coffees, you get refreshments, lunch. WordCamp Europe was 50 euros. It&#8217;s really cheap because if you consider other events of that scale, the ticket could be like 600 euros easily. So yeah these are really cheap events.</p>



<p>[00:23:09] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> I&#8217;ll also point out the fact that there are, there&#8217;s quite a few initiatives. Many of them actually I believe begun by a previous WordCamp Europe over many years. So for example, if you have children that you need to be taking with you, that is also something which at WordCamp Europe at least, I can&#8217;t speak about the other ones, there are facilities provided for that.</p>



<p>And also great lengths have been gone to, to make sure that the events are accessible as possible. So by that I might mean that for example, if you need the use of a wheelchair or something like that, great lengths have gone to to make sure that you can access all of the different parts of the event.</p>



<p>But also that things like live translations are done, and not by an AI robot sitting in the corner but by a bank of real human beings, and all of those things really, they&#8217;re amazing. I&#8217;m quite proud in a sense that the WordPress community sees those things as important enough to spend the money on, to spend the time on, to get right.</p>



<p>[00:24:13] <strong>Vagelis Papaioannou:</strong> Yeah that&#8217;s really great. And this is again done by volunteers, so we should just sit back and realise how much work we need to do in order to get these done. This year in Europe we had childcare and we also had workshops for children, which was really great. Every event should be inclusive, and accessibility should be our first concern.</p>



<p>However this is something that brings a lot of drama into the community for numerous reasons. But yeah we should all help everybody, everyone, every single one to come to WordCamp and have fun.</p>



<p>[00:24:56] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Yeah nice. So I think we&#8217;ve painted a picture there hopefully of an event which is not only affordable, if you can make it there. The cost of the ticket is affordable, but also inclusive. There&#8217;s a whole variety of different things, you don&#8217;t need to be into one particular thing aka code.</p>



<p>If you want to attend, it&#8217;s very likely that you&#8217;ll meet some people, make some friendships. And in my case I think it&#8217;s fair to say that quite a lot of real, proper, genuine friendships have been built up from chatting to people who were stood next to me that I never knew just five minutes before.</p>



<p>So they&#8217;re the big events. Now I can&#8217;t remember whether you mentioned whether you&#8217;re a part of a more local meetup, but I think if we could just get into that quickly.</p>



<p>[00:25:42] <strong>Vagelis Papaioannou:</strong> I&#8217;m organising me and a few friends, I&#8217;m going to call them friends because after all these years I consider them to be my friends. We&#8217;re organising the Thessaloniki meetups, which is a monthly meetup. We try to do presentations. We also have a workshop going on about creating what we called the first community block theme, but we didn&#8217;t do it fast enough. Someone else did that, but that&#8217;s fine. And we also tried to do a few outdoors meetups. The next one is in a month or so in the city near Thessaloniki.</p>



<p>Local meetups are great. We just have a beautiful small place, sponsored by a local business here in Thessaloniki. We gather once a month, we have some snacks, we have some refreshments, we exchange ideas, we have a laugh, we do the presentation and then everyone goes home. And then we just wait for the next one.</p>



<p>It&#8217;s really hard to organise these kind of events. It really needs some time to get them done correctly, and it&#8217;s always done by our personal time, so it&#8217;s not that easy. But it&#8217;s fun, and people really like these kind of events.</p>



<p>Oh, I forgot to mention, these events are free, so anyone can just come and join us. There&#8217;s no ticket or whatever. We do have a sponsor which helps a lot for snacks and refreshments, and we do have another sponsor for the venue, so we&#8217;re pretty much covered and yeah, it&#8217;s fun.</p>



<p>[00:27:22] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Yeah so much more frequent. The cadence is typically I think once a month, something like that. Much more local, so there&#8217;s no accommodation requirements. You just make your way there. Often in the evening when the work day is over. A couple of hours of presentation, like you said a few snacks and that&#8217;s the way it goes.</p>



<p>So a real nice way to keep up to date with your local WordPressers. And I think these things, once they kickstart themselves after the pandemic, I think really just events like that really do underpin the whole community. Without them I don&#8217;t know where we&#8217;d be in all honesty.</p>



<p>[00:27:55] <strong>Vagelis Papaioannou:</strong> It&#8217;s an important part of the community, the meetups, I believe.</p>



<p>[00:27:59] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Yeah I think so too. Let&#8217;s move on. Let&#8217;s pivot because we&#8217;ve got something else to talk about. So this is something called the training team. Obviously it&#8217;s connected with WordPress but I wouldn&#8217;t really say that I know too much about this. During the process of this interview hopefully I will be learning a lot about it as well.</p>



<p>Let&#8217;s just lay the bedrock. What is the training team? What&#8217;s its purpose? How long has it been around? Any place you want to begin there really.</p>



<p>[00:28:23] <strong>Vagelis Papaioannou:</strong> Well the training team is brilliant. There&#8217;s so much content for anyone and everyone in there. And how I met the training team. A year ago I wanted some resources about our local meetup, and I was talking with someone from the marketing team, and they told me just go to the training team and get some content.</p>



<p>What&#8217;s a training team? I&#8217;ve never heard of it. And then I joined the training team and I&#8217;ve seen that there are so much good content in there. There are courses, there are lesson plans, there is so much content for all different levels of WordPress users or developers. For the last year it grew so much.</p>



<p>There are two main things in training team, tutorials and lesson plans. You can follow a tutorial and then something new, or you can get a lesson plan and use it on a local meetup, or on your class and teach the others something new. And in order to do that there are a bunch of volunteers working day and night creating content.</p>



<p>But most importantly keeping the content up to date, because that&#8217;s the most important thing. Whenever a new version of WordPress comes out and there are changes, we have to go back, review the content and do the appropriate edits. And also because we&#8217;re trying to be inclusive, we want to translate that content, and this is where I fit in. I try to translate as much content as possible in Greek. And I also have on the website in order to do some patterns, to do that translation easier for the translators.</p>



<p>And now we&#8217;re in the state where we&#8217;re trying to find more people to contribute in translations because if we manage to translate all that content then there is no excuse for someone to say, I don&#8217;t know how to do that because everything is in there. So you can really learn something new every day from the training team. Which, by the way, can be found, this is confusing, at learn.wordpress.org. So training team is a team, but the website is learn, and this is where you go to learn WordPress. That&#8217;s the idea.</p>



<p>[00:30:41] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Do you know if there was a reason if you like, why the team was given a lot more focus and attention more recently? What I&#8217;m wondering is, we spoke a little while ago about the effect of things like the pandemic, and effect that that had on the community. I don&#8217;t know if it&#8217;s coincidental or if it&#8217;s intentional that more effort seems to be being put recently into things like providing training materials.</p>



<p>There seems to be a lot more of that being created, but I see a lot more of it being mentioned in different parts of the WordPress ecosystem. So I didn&#8217;t know if it was an endeavor just to bolster what we&#8217;ve already got, or if it was trying to react to, I don&#8217;t know, community dwindling, something like that.</p>



<p>[00:31:21] <strong>Vagelis Papaioannou:</strong> It&#8217;s probably both. I also think that training team has more resources now. By saying resources I mean more people, and more people join every day, and the more people we get the more content we have. And it looks like it&#8217;s getting a lot of support from the community and also the team leads.</p>



<p>The previous ones,, and the ones we currently have did a really great job. I&#8217;m not going to get into names because I&#8217;m going to forget someone and it&#8217;s not fair. But they&#8217;re all great, and they all did so much about the training team. And I think this is part of the success of the team. It&#8217;s going to get better, I&#8217;m pretty sure about it.</p>



<p>[00:32:02] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Yeah so obviously it&#8217;s putting out content, it&#8217;s keeping that content up to date. WordPress is going through, well certainly in the last several years has gone through some real transformational changes. And it does feel like we&#8217;re with the advent of WordPress 6.2 and 6.3 and probably 6.4, there&#8217;s going to be a lot of changes, made and so communicating those changes is going to be really important.</p>



<p>You mentioned that the team leads have been great. You also mentioned that there seems to be a steady trickle of people heading in your direction, wanting to help out with the team. How does that team organise itself? How do you come to decisions about, okay, we&#8217;ll make this piece of content, but we won&#8217;t make that piece of content just yet? Where do you meet? How often do you meet? What platforms are you using? And so on.</p>



<p>[00:32:47] <strong>Vagelis Papaioannou:</strong> Well there&#8217;s a weekly meeting happening in the Make Slack of the training team. If anyone listening to this and doesn&#8217;t use Slack, just download Slack and join. How do we even call that? It&#8217;s always confusing. Well the Make Slack which is where all the WordPress folks are gathering around, and all the teams and all the info. And you can get really mad really quickly because of the massive amount of the information. But don&#8217;t worry about it just join training team. There&#8217;s a weekly meeting there.</p>



<p>And then we do use GitHub, but don&#8217;t be scared if you hear of GitHub. We don&#8217;t really use it only for coding, we also use it to raise issues. And by raising an issue it can be a lesson plan idea, or a content idea. And this is where all the review is going on, and all of the conversation. And then all of a sudden the content is getting published into the website. It&#8217;s really easy. Everyone can contribute.</p>



<p>I forgot to mention that I&#8217;m dyslexic. So it&#8217;s really hard for me to do many things related to languages and stuff, but I do manage to contribute successfully on those teams without any problem. And whenever I need a hand, a helping hand, there&#8217;s always someone to help you.</p>



<p>You can also facilitate an online meetup in training team. That&#8217;s another great thing training team does. We do online meetups, and you can learn how to code custom Gutenberg block using React or JSX. Or you can just learn how to use a block, like the very first steps and one to do using Gutenberg.</p>



<p>[00:34:29] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Yeah I think it&#8217;s really remarkable the rate at which I&#8217;m seeing content being produced. And also a shame in a sense that it doesn&#8217;t get mentioned quite as much as I wish it did. I have to sometimes go looking for these things or subscribe to an RSS feed. But if everybody in the WordPress community was just familiar with that URL, learn.wordpress.org, I think you&#8217;d be hard pressed to find nothing there which should be of interest to you.</p>



<p>Whether you&#8217;re kind of an expert in building blocks, or whether you just want some primer, some kind of 101 of how to begin using WordPress. It is increasingly an amazing resource. And so bravo for all of the things that are being done there.</p>



<p>I&#8217;m just curious about the kind of jobs that might be needed, because I&#8217;ve seen video content. So obviously at some point somebody needed to sit down with a screen and record that stuff. But presumably there was some kind of script that was created for that. I&#8217;ve seen lots of written tutorials. I&#8217;ve seen things which you could describe as courses, where you know one thing leads onto another thing, there is isolated bits of content. What kind of tasks are in need of being done to keep that initiative going?</p>



<p>[00:35:43] <strong>Vagelis Papaioannou:</strong> That&#8217;s a really hard one. I mean everyone can find something to do. You can do the meeting notes, which I can&#8217;t because I&#8217;m dyslexic, but you can. You can do a translation. You can get a lesson plan and translate it. You can create a lesson plan if you have an expertise, or you can create a tutorial. Or if you can create a video tutorial you can get the video and do the transcript.</p>



<p>You can review the content and test what the lesson plan guides you to do and see if it&#8217;s correct or not. And then provide feedback for the author to correct it, or say, yeah it&#8217;s great just publish it. There&#8217;s so many things from the smallest to the biggest one. And it&#8217;s really easy, even with an hour per week you can really make the difference.</p>



<p>[00:36:33] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> I guess the whole imposter syndrome thing may be something that people are concerned about. You know they&#8217;re listening to this and think, do you know what I think I&#8217;ve got something that I want to share, but there&#8217;s probably somebody out there who&#8217;s better at it than me. You know they&#8217;re a better writer or they&#8217;ve got skills for putting videos out there.</p>



<p>I guess we should address that. Are there any barriers to entry here in terms of the quality of what you&#8217;ve got to produce, or the level of expertise? You know if you are going to be writing or producing materials around, let&#8217;s say, something in WordPress Core, you probably do need to have some decent understanding of how that all works so that the content is actually useful.</p>



<p>[00:37:09] <strong>Vagelis Papaioannou:</strong> Yeah definitely. Well if you get into coding, I mean if you do a coding tutorial I guess you should just follow the coding standards and all that stuff. But again, if you do a mistake it&#8217;s not the end of the world. Someone will point you out to the right direction and you&#8217;re going to figure it out.</p>



<p>And as you may already know, and I&#8217;m sure you do, the best way to learn something really deeply is by writing or teaching it. This is the best way if you want to master a craft. If you try to teach it to somewhere else, you get really deep into it. And at the end of the day you will realise your weaknesses and you get better. Or you will realise that you shouldn&#8217;t have that imposter syndrome, which I have really bad.</p>



<p>[00:37:55] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Amazing. You&#8217;ve come on this podcast. Thank you for that. Takes a lot of effort.</p>



<p>[00:37:59] <strong>Vagelis Papaioannou:</strong> I have to say it&#8217;s not an easy thing, but I mean I&#8217;m dyslexic it&#8217;s not something terrible. It&#8217;s just, okay I may read half your email and I may respond to half of it, or I may mess a few characters. But other people may get these as a weakness and step back because they have something like that. We have people in WordPress community that they can&#8217;t even see and they code daily, which is a massive thing.</p>



<p>If you consider that there&#8217;s a person without sight who can create some kind of code which is what they do for a living. Why should I stay back because I have that minor thing? And people shouldn&#8217;t just stay back. Just join the community. If you know one thing to do just say, yeah I&#8217;m good at it, and you&#8217;ll find someone to pair with and create something really good and helpful for others.</p>



<p>[00:38:56] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> What a cheery episode this has been. I really enjoyed this. And we talked about these fabulous events which you can get yourself involved in. Potentially make some real meaningful friendships and learn lots of things. But also pivoted to talk about the learn.wordpress.org, the training team if you like, and all of the free resources that are over there. A sort of sub community, if you like, of people there that you can also make friends with, and become part of the training team setup.</p>



<p>If somebody has been listening to this today and has thought to themselves, do you know what, maybe that&#8217;s for me, I&#8217;m going to give it a go. Whether that&#8217;s organising an event or becoming interested in training and all of that kind of thing. Let&#8217;s tackle the training team bit first. Where would you advise people to go? You mentioned obviously Slack but I wondered if there was somewhere else that you wanted to mention as well.</p>



<p>[00:39:44] <strong>Vagelis Papaioannou:</strong> If you don&#8217;t want to join Slack yet, just go to learn.wordpress.org, and this is the main website. And at the very bottom of your screen you&#8217;ll find the CTA. Have an idea for your content? Let us know. Apply to present a tutorial. Submit the topic idea. Just click any of those buttons. And on top of that there&#8217;s another block which says get involved, learn how to contribute. And you get all the info from there. It&#8217;s really easy. And there&#8217;s nothing scary into the process of being part of the team. There are all really welcoming and we&#8217;re really all good people. Well most of us.</p>



<p>[00:40:24] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Yeah thank you. And then pivot that to events, meetups and WordCamps. Where would you point people if they want to begin that journey?</p>



<p>[00:40:32] <strong>Vagelis Papaioannou:</strong> Well I guess from their local community. Also be aware that you may see that there are a few faces that are again and again on the same event. An example, I&#8217;ve done a presentation at WordCamp Athens 2022. I&#8217;ve done one in 2021 I guess. I can&#8217;t remember. And then I did one in 19.</p>



<p>This is not because I&#8217;m special or something. This is because you didn&#8217;t apply. If you apply. You may get up there. We need help. We need more people. We need more organisers. We need more people to do presentations, more speakers if you want to. Don&#8217;t block yourself, just find your local community, get in touch with them, apply to facilitate an event, apply as a speaker.</p>



<p>It&#8217;s really easy. And even if you don&#8217;t get approved at the first time you apply as a speaker just do it again. Try again. It&#8217;s not the end of the world and it&#8217;s not personal. It&#8217;s probably because that specific event had too many applications, or maybe your presentation was too specific to something.</p>



<p>I mean I&#8217;m a coder but I&#8217;m not going to do a really deep, deep coding presentation because I know most folks are not coming for that on a local WordCamp, and they kind of get bored and we need to sell these tickets. So we had to do some funny presentations coding wise, but not just open your terminal people, type npm install and do that stuff. Yeah you know what I mean?</p>



<p>[00:42:09] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> If somebody has been listening to this podcast, this is more particular to you, where, if you wish to share that is, where would people be able to contact you? Perhaps you&#8217;ve got a website that you want to mention or a, I don&#8217;t know, a social media handle that you feel is a good way for people to get in touch.</p>



<p>[00:42:25] <strong>Vagelis Papaioannou:</strong> I do have a website which I made at WordCamp Athens some year. I can&#8217;t remember. It was a presentation about headless WordPress, which was really good back then when people started to freak out about Gutenberg. And I don&#8217;t use it at all, so there&#8217;s no content in there, so don&#8217;t use that.</p>



<p>Find me on GitHub. My username is vagelisp. Or on Twitter, and my handle on Twitter, it&#8217;s VagPapDev. Yeah that&#8217;s hard. V A G P A P D E V. That&#8217;s my Twitter handle. You can find me there. And of course on any of the Make Slack channels as Vagelis. And on Greek community Facebook and Slack channels as Vagelis as well.</p>



<p>Some may spot it that my name is spelled wrong and you may seen this with an n, Vangelis. I just don&#8217;t like it with a name. It&#8217;s my name. I&#8217;ll write it however I want.</p>



<p>[00:43:20] <strong>Nathan Wrigley:</strong> Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. I do hope that you get some people reaching out. That would be really great. I appreciate it. Thank you so much.</p>



<p>[00:43:27] <strong>Vagelis Papaioannou:</strong> Thanks for having me. It was really fun. And I really hope someone got something out of it, and someone got the boost, they may wanted to join their local community.</p>
</div>



<p>On the podcast today we have <a href="https://twitter.com/VagPapDev">Vagelis Papaioannou</a>.</p>



<p>Vagelis is a software engineer from Greece. His journey with coding began during his elementary school years, in an experimental coding class. This sparked a lifelong passion within him. His love for WordPress dates back to the early versions. For the last eight to nine years, he has actively participated in the Greek WordPress community, engaging in various roles such as organising WordCamps and meetups. Vagelis also contributes to multiple teams, cherishing the small contributions that allow everyone to make a difference. He also serves as the Project Translation lead for the Greek language.</p>



<p>Vagelis, although a self confessed introvert, shares his initial struggles with being a part of the community and attending local meetups. He encourages people to step outside their comfort zones and attend events like WordCamps and meetups, where they’re likely to discover a welcoming and friendly atmosphere.</p>



<p>Vagelis recounts his own experience of attending such events, initially feeling scared, but eventually having an enjoyable time, making many lasting friendships along the way. He talks about how local meetups are more casual gatherings than WordCamps. People come together to talk about WordPress, learn, and spend time with like-minded individuals. From meetups by the sea to forest walks, these events offer opportunities for both education and social engagement.</p>



<p>On the subject of WordCamps, Vagelis unravels the magic behind these larger, multi-day events with presentations and a contributor day. He emphasises that contribution to the community doesn&#8217;t necessarily require coding skills, and encourages more people to get involved. WordCamps are not only platforms for learning and exchanging ideas, but they also provide a space for attendees to have fun, network, and explore all manner of other opportunities.</p>



<p>We talk about the importance of the code of conduct at WordCamps. This code ensures that participants know that they are going to have a safe and inclusive experience. With attendees joining from all corners of the globe, these events attract a diverse range of individuals who are passionate about the software and the community.</p>



<p>We then talk about the effort required to organise these events, Vagelis explains why he’s willing to dedicate his time and energy to be part of such complex projects. He talks about the benefits participants gain from taking an active role, whether as organisers, speakers, or volunteer. As Vagelis shares his personal experiences in organising and participating in events like WordCamp Athens, he strongly advocates for more community involvement and highlights the need for new organisers to get involved to allow the community to meet up once again.</p>



<p>We then get into a discussion of other ways that you can be involved, this time in the Learn project, which is making freely available materials so that people can learn about WordPress at a time that suits them.</p>



<p>Vagelis talks about what the Learn team does and how you can join them. He discusses how the team works, using GitHub for collaboration and accommodating individuals with various skills and abilities. From the educational content available on the learn.wordpress.org website, to the valuable connections made through hallway chats, Vagelis emphasises the power and importance of the WordPress community.</p>



<p>If you&#8217;re a seasoned WordPress enthusiast or just starting your journey in contributions, this episode is for you.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Useful links.</h2>



<p><a href="https://learn.wordpress.org/">Learn WordPress</a></p>



<p><a href="https://github.com/vagelisp">Vagelis&#8217; GitHub</a></p>



<p><a href="https://twitter.com/VagPapDev">Vagelis&#8217; Twitter</a></p>



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