WordCamp Asia 2025 is just around the corner. Hear why Do the Woo and others are sponsoring this year.

It’s another year, I have ordered all the things and tested all the cables, there’s a little bit about tech and a little bit about life. Here’s what made the cut, now I’m going to be factoring in weight of everything as well.

The flat-lay this year was taken at my sister Charleen’s house, where she hosted Christmas for our family for the very first time. Charleen and I have worked on the home in Austin for several years and it was awesome to see it all spruced up for the holidays and also for my Mom to visit it for the first time in 13 years. Part of the idea of my sister being in Austin is that if there’s a hurricane or anything in Houston my Mom can just drive up a few hours and be totally comfortable, so we put in an elevator, solar panels, Powerwalls, fiber, and Starlink. Her house is also my Austin headquarters when I’m in town, she set up a nice desk for me to work. Christmas was the beta-test, with Mom + nurse + four dogs all up in Austin; the whole circus was cozy and comfy for the holidays.

I was telling my friend Rob Reid the stories of my Mom and sister’s homes and he said I had to listen to the song Get Mama a House by Teddybears and B.o.B, it’s a good earworm and I will say that getting them both in beautiful homes they love has been one of the most rewarding things I’ve spent money on. So as advice for other entrepreneurs, get your momma a house!

TL;DR on the gadgets: The most significant change to my bag has been the introduction of the Daylight Computer, which I think everyone should have and is a genuinely new platform, and that we’ve finally reached reliability and excellence on retractable USB-C cords, these Baseus cords available in a variety of colors and 3.3ft and 6.6ft lengths. I give them out like candy, everybody loves them. I’ve also started wearing Havn hats/underwear/shirts/etc to block unnecessary EMF. (They used to be called Lambs.) And I’ve found great nootropic benefits with DryWater and Celsius. Without further ado, here’s the list:

THE BACKPACK

1. Aer Fit Pack 3 backpack. This is still my go-to, and it’s embroidered with Automattic and WordPress logos. This is part of our standard swag at Automattic, and I’d like to get a WP-embroidered one on our .org swag store when that’s back up.

DEVICES

2. 16″ Macbook Pro, right now the M4 Max with 128 GB RAM, amazing what you can run locally on this this thing. I’m very excited about inference at the edge in the coming years.
3. iPad Pro, which I use as a second display when I’m on the road using Apple’s screen mirroring giving me another 10 inches of screen.
4. Daylight Computer DC-1 represents the first truly new platform I spend time on. It’s a healthier way of computing and I would like to increase my % screentime on it in the coming years. Also amazing for kids.
5. Kindle Paperwhite, this might lose to the Daylight in the future but I do like its form factor.
6. iPhone 16 Pro, you use your phone so much just always have the latest model. This is my primary phone.
7. Google Pixel 9 Pro finally is iPhone-parity for me, I use this mostly for tethering with Google Fi and testing our apps on Android. I got the pink one, it’s really a beautiful device and I could imagine a world where it was my daily driver but there’s just so much convenience in the continuity features of an all-Apple life. It’s the little things, like copy and paste, that really hook you.

One nice thing is that the iPad and two phones all have connectivity plans, which I try to spread across different providers so I always have something that works or I can tether to.

POWER/ADAPTER

You should ABC, Always Be Charging!

8. Baseus 8-in-1 USB-C hub, 99% of the time this is used as an ethernet or HDMI connector, it’s pretty reliable and not too heavy. (86 grams)
9. Anker 150W Charger Block, this is just a little extra, I could probably drop it.
10. Anker 47W Nano Charger, nice for setting up a charging station by the bed.
11. Baseus 100W power cable, with detachable charging block. This is the core of the entire system, and most of the time I just use this. It’s chunky at 236 grams but anchors everything else.
12. Belkin 37W Dual USB Car Charger, which I find myself using mostly in Europe when in transfers.
13. USB-C adapters, just in case.
14. Whoop 4.0 Charger/Battery Pack, I really enjoy the stress and sleep tracking features of the Whoop, and this keeps it charged. I did a podcast with their founder Will Ahmed.

CABLES

15. Insignia Micro USB 3.0 Charger, this is by far the most cursed cable I carry around, which is for taking photos off my Nikon SLR.
16. Cable Matters 4K HDMI Cable, I like the ultra-thin and this can be clutch when connecting to a conference room or hotel TV.
17. Baseus 100W/5A retractable cables, now in two sizes 3.3ft and 6.6ft (about 100cm/200cm). These are my favorite new things! Love love love.
18. Apple Watch Magnetic Fast Charger, I also usually wear an Apple Watch Ultra. I don’t do too many notifications, but it’s amazing for finding my phone.

AUDIO

19. AirPods Pro Gen 2 for pairing with the iPhone, these are so good and if I forget them it’s the first thing I pick up at the airport electronics store.
20. Pixel Buds Pro, for pairing with the Pixel 9 Pro, also amazing I just don’t use as much.
21. Custom ear plugs, for protecting hearing when the sound or music is too loud.
22. UE Premier custom headphones, this is still the best audiophile experience I have, great on planes.
23. USB-C Headphone Jack Adapter
24. Belkin RockStar 5-Jack Audio Splitter
25. Belkin RockStar 3.5mm Audio w/USB-C Charge Adapter

MISCELLANEOUS ELECTRONICS 

26. Aranet4 CO2 monitor, this can change your life, if the area you’re in isn’t well ventilated then you run cognitively lower without even noticing it.
27. Logitech mouse, with quiet clicks, I find a mouse is just ergonomically an easy productivity upgrade from the built-in trackpad.
28. Flipper Zero, the funnest little cloning gadget I’ve tried.
29. Pixel G1s RGB Video Light, can be used in party mode to set lights.
30. USB-C chargeable Candle Lighter
31. Petzl E_LITE Headlamp
32. Universal Airplane Phone Holder

PERSONAL ITEMS

33. Passport
34. Hermes business card holder, which I’ve been using more since spending more time in Asia with the increased community activity there.
35. Thread Wallet elastic card holder/wallet 
36. Hay catch-all Pouch
37. Sea2See Sunglasses
38. Marunao mint case
39. Lockpick set, you can learn to unlock most locks in a few hours of training. Like the Flipper this is kinda a hacker tool.
40. Blue Rock, a little worry stone you can hold in your hand and rub.
41. WordPress ring, because I’m married to the game.
42. WordPress pin, spruces up any outfit with a little open source rizz.
43. Plastic holder with stickers for our various brands and products, I love seeing WordPress or Tumblr stickers in random places, and sometimes place them myself.
44. Notecards from Ugmonk Analog, you can rabbit hole their entire site to upgrade your desk game. Lovely stuff.
45. Maruman N196A Nemosine Notebook.
46. OHTO Needle-point Pen 0.7mm, picked up in Japan and I like for when I want to draft something more thin-lined.
47. Montblanc Heritage Egyptomania Doue ballpoint pen, which I like for signing important things and also crossing out todos on the Ugmonk cards.

TRAVEL ESSENTIALS

48. Icewear Merino wool gaiter
49. Lambs EMF WaveStopper beanie, literally a tin-foil hat.
50. RAINS insulated gloves
51. Gore Thermo Beanie
52. Olo InVision Eye Mask 
53. Herb Bar essential oil blend, always nice to have something good-smelling around. Not endorsing this specifically, but I always have some essential oil around.
54. Immunity Throat Spray, suggested to me by the mushroom GOAT himself, Paul Stamets, I saw him use this at an event we were both at. When I travel or am around a bunch of people I’ll do three sprays in morning and night, and I’ve often been the one in my group to not get the “conference cold” that goes around.
55. Z-Biotics, introduced to me by my friend Sid, it’s kind of a game-changer anytime you drink, lessens the negative effects of alcohol. It works so well there’s a possibility of moral hazard. They have some new stuff around fiber, it’s an interesting company to follow.
56. Celsius energy powder packet, this is nice to turn any drink into a Celsius, when you need an extra boost. Be careful with these as they have 200mg of caffeine! I try to avoid after 2pm, and not in first hour I wake up.
57. DryWater electrolytes powder packet, I’ve switched to this over LMNT because I like the ingredients and sourcing better. Electrolytes when you first wake up is better than coffee, I’ll often mix this with tea.

If you want to get super-nerdy, here’s a spreadsheet with the weights. Basically I’m 10.7 pounds of computing devices (Macbook, iPad, Daylight, Flipper, iPhone, Pixel), and ten pounds of other stuff. Add in a bottle of water or other random things I put in the bag ends up being ~22-28 pounds most of the time, which I’d like to get down.

But with my backpack I can tackle a really wide variety of situations. It’s fun! If you have any tips or suggestions please leave them in the comments! I’m always trying out new gear.

BobWP celebrates the seven-year anniversary of Do the Woo, with hosts discussing its evolution, hosts’ experiences, digital accessibility, and exciting future plans for the podcast.

Birgit Pauli-Haack and Tammie Lister talked about WordPress 6.8, Gutenberg 19.9, 20.0 and 20.1 plugin releases.

Add a summary/excerpt here

Show Notes / Transcript

• Editor: Sandy Reed
• Logo: Mark Uraine
• Production: Birgit Pauli-Haack

Show Notes

Tammie Lister

• WordPress | X (former Twitter) | BlueSky
• making @ compositionproducts.com
• delivering @ logicalbinary.com
• thinking @ binatethoughts.com

Cursor AI

• Cursor AI vs Human Developer in Speed Build Special…shocking result!
• Revolutionize Your WordPress Development with Cursor AI 

WordPress 6.8

• WordPress 6.8: Release Squad, Timeline, and Focus
• Design plans for WordPress 6.8

Gutenberg plugin

• What’s new in Gutenberg 19.9? (19 December)
• Gutenberg 19.9 Introduces Style Book to Classic Themes
• What’s new in Gutenberg 20.0? (10 January)
• Gutenberg Plugin Reaches 200th Release Milestone with Version 20.0
• Gutenberg 20.1 RC1 (final release Jan 22, 2025)

Storybook

• WordPress Storybook
• StorybookJS

Stay in Touch

Transcript

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Hello, and welcome to our 113th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog.

Dear listeners, I wish you all a happy New Year, lots of fun and laughter, good health, and most of all, prosperity and peace. Yes, we took a holiday break and there are still three plugin releases that happened in the meantime. And in today’s episode, we’ll talk about WordPress 6.8, Gutenberg 19.9, 20.0, and 20.1.

I’m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at the Gutenberg Times and developer advocate at Automattic. Today’s co-host is Tammie Lister, OG Gutenberg developer and designer, product consultant, and long-time core contributor to WordPress and BuddyPress, I recently noticed again.

Thank you for joining me, Tammie. How are you today?

Tammie Lister: I am great. Thank you. How are you?

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I’m good, I’m good. I’m done with winter, but I think I can control that. So if you’re done with winter too, let’s help and change the weather if we can do it.

Tammie Lister: Yeah, I am very done with winter, although it’s kind of nice as long as you just don’t go outside. But also, as long as you wrap up warm, I think that’s the thing, just…

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. There are several days that I stay inside, which normally doesn’t happen, but yeah.

Tammie Lister: I have a wood burner, which makes winter a little bit more tolerable.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, we have central heating, which is very good. So, well, Tammie, you’re always on the forefront of web and WordPress development. What are you working on right now and what are your plans or outlook for 2025?

Tammie Lister: Yeah. So I guess over the holidays, I did what a lot of people did, which is I did some tinkering. So a lot of people take time off and the holidays appear to be the time when they sit down and do a project. And it appeared to be that everybody over the holiday has explored with AI development tools.

The one that I chose, well, I chose, I did a bit of Bolt, but I also did Cursor specifically. And I was using it as a rubber duck that’s basically for development. So I was doing a lot of that in my work. I’ve been doing a combination of working on themes, but also working on some product consultancy, and that’s been really interesting to balance those. But also looking at contribution perspective, stepping back into releases. So really for me, it’s with a lot of these tools is how can I get the ideas that are in my head out faster into prototypes rather than maybe them just sitting in my head. But I don’t think I’m alone based on what I was seeing on the socials and seeing in Slack. A lot of people were just brewing ideas and just getting them out, so…

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. No, no, I agree. And for those listeners who are not English natives, the rubber ducking is a process.

Tammie Lister: Ah, yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: … by developers who talk to actually inanimate object and get it out, but they have it ahead.

Tammie Lister: Sometimes a rubber duck.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s a rubber duck. And then by way of explaining it to somebody, most of the time a solution comes or at least, okay, another avenue to troubleshoot something opens up. So it’s a known process and it’s called rubber ducking.

Tammie Lister: Yeah. And a lot of these tools are really helpful for that, particularly with things like WordPress and Gutenberg, there’s always something you don’t know about or maybe there’s a feature you haven’t got to learn about. So one of the things I was able to do was be like it could teach me about that area whilst I was learning to code.

I also did some things which are completely unrelated to that, but on the newer features. I was able to say, “How would you implement it and teach me as you are doing it each stage,” which is really helpful. It’s having that training guide as well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I really love it. And it prompts you. So speaking of Cursor AI, it actually prompts you. “Shall I explain this a little bit to you?” kind of thing.

Tammie Lister: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And you say, “Yes, please do like I’m a 5-year-old,” or something.

Tammie Lister: “Explain it to me like I’m the rubber duck.”

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And then one of the AIs, when I say, “Please make it readable for a non-technical person,” and every time they come with a legal analogy. Yeah, legal. Can they do these trademarks? Well, anyway.

Tammie Lister: I like whenever you’re saying with that, if you don’t set any boundaries with things like that, they try and go above and beyond. They’re very over-performing so you’ll find it’ll be like, I watched this when I watched Nick Diego when he did his block challenge and it was just, I think he just said, “Make it Christmas-y,” and it was just like, “Have sparkles, have this, have that, have the other.” And I also discovered that if I didn’t set some boundaries, it was suddenly like, “Have this, have the other.” So just set some boundaries to it.                                                 So a good example from a Gutenberg perspective would be, say, use create block scaffolding, would be use the components. And knowing things like that means that it really tailwind otherwise. It’ll be like, “Put tailwind in it, put tailwind in this.” And it’s like, “Yeah, there’s some components we can use. It’s okay.”

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. But you really need to be knowing something about development to actually guide it also to something that you then also have production-

Tammie Lister: Yes.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Not production ready, but you can use.

Tammie Lister: And I found that when I was doing things which were not my wheelhouse, which was in thinking not WordPress, and I was just doing some different language stuff. And when I completely didn’t know the stack I was working with and it was just like, “Sure, I don’t know if you’ve just done or just taken me completely down the wrong path.” But then you go through the, “Explain why you did this,” and then it will pick through. And then oftenly, it will self-correct itself. Then you can be like, “Can you do this a simpler way?” and it’ll be like, “Yes, I can. You are correct.” And I don’t know if you find that you’d say please and thank you to it a lot because I say an awful lot of…

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Sometimes, yeah.

Tammie Lister: … please and thank you to my AI overlords.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And I like that when Nick said, somebody mentioned that, I think Jamie mentioned that when Nick was going through, I said, “You are always very polite.”

Tammie Lister: I am so polite just in case.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Just in case.

Tammie Lister: Just in case Terminator is correct. You’ve got to be polite.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Well, but this show, your listener is not in an AI show. We could probably talk another two hours about it, but we have other things to do today. 

Announcements – WordPress 6.8 Release

So there’s the announcement that WordPress 6.8, the release squad is done, the timeline is announced, and the focus is announced. And the schedule is beta one is March 4th. That’s pretty much around the corner. Then release candidate is the 25th of March, the first release candidate. And then the final release will be April 15th.

And Jonathan Desrosiers put up that post and I want to quote from his post, and he said, “The squad is also a bit smaller than usual because of the release being a polish and bug fix release. Also of note, the core tech lead and editor tech lead roles have been combined into a single tech lead role as part of the continued initiative to support more closely coordinated efforts across Gutenberg and Core.” And that’s the quote end. The tech leads are Joe McGill, Jonathan Desrosiers, and George Mamadashvili. So that’s a great team to put this all together. All 10 release squad members are actually long time contributors and have been on many, many releases before. So it’s Jeff Paul, Michelle Frechette, JB Audras, Felix Arntz, and Krupa Nanda. And Tammie Lister has raised a hand as a design lead for the release.

Yeah, so what does a design lead do on the release?

Tammie Lister: Yeah. So there’s, as of all these roles, there’s some keeping things on the track, things you do from the design perspective, the about page, getting any materials that are needed for the release. But really the best, the fundamentals are if anything has a niche design or design feedback ticket during the release, it’s unblocking. That’s the best way that I can put it from that. And because this release specifically is a polish and a fix, maybe go into what that really means. It means most of, if not all, of the big features are ready, or we are not really going to be doing so many of those. And I think that that’s something that last year actually was requested by the community specifically to focus on. I don’t know if we’re going to have one, two a whole year. I have no idea. We’re just entering this year.

But, I actually, from a design perspective, it’s quite good because we have quite a lot of tickets that need design feedback, both in Core and in Core Editor. So I’ve been able to look at those right going all the way back and triage them. Maybe a good thing too, because that’s often a word, but to explain the way that triage or at least the way that I approach triage is that triage shouldn’t leave a ticket in the state that you find it. So that could be your audition labels, but you are also moving it on. So we have a lot of tickets that they need feedback, but then they need to go to their next state. So just leaving something with a test or a feedback, that’s awesome, but it just leaves it with test or feedback. It doesn’t move it on. It doesn’t.

Also, some of these tickets, so if something maybe in five years ago was thought to have a design, and I actually discovered this over the holidays, well, just before the holidays when I was going through my old tickets in the Gutenberg repo. And I discovered that a lot of them have already had different interfaces done. So they’re completely invalid tickets now. But because people have been really not… So many people have been doing work and there’s so many tickets, been able to go back over some of those and saying, “Okay, well, the interface has changed. Do we still think that this is a valid application or do we wish it well? And do we want to close it because we’ve already taken a different approach as a project?”

So that’s one thing that can be done. Those aren’t all that common. But also just looking at because something has an easy fix, I call them paper cuts, there’s often little things that can be done as well. And I suspect there’s going to be quite a few of those from a design perspective, some little paper cuts we can get in. Design also doesn’t just mean visual design. I always like to include some CSS and styling in there because of my hybrid nature as well, so yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Cool, yeah. Well, thank you very much for stepping up to the plate and thank you for everybody stepping up to the plate and being on the radio.

Tammie Lister: And there will be of us joining, I think that’s always the important thing, is there’s a post on mixed design about how anyone can just step up and join in if you have an hour, half an hour a week that you can just sit there and do some triage that’s been involved and just raise your name and then you can get included in the release.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Excellent. Yes. Yeah, so that’s on WordPress 6.8. I think we will, on this podcast, talk about what’s going to be in there a little later in the year, maybe after WordCamp Asia, probably have another Gutenberg Changelog episode. We will have one before WordCamp Asia and one after Asia.

But we say the Gutenberg plans keep rolling in, two big ones and one not so big one. One was 19.9 that was in December. Then the first one in January was 20.0. And then just last week, oh, this week, we were recording this on January 17th, so this week, George Momotos really just did the 20.1 release candidate. So the Changelog we’re going to talk about is going to be from the release candidate, but the other two have been released and I share with you the release post.

Gutenberg 19.9                                                        

So let’s get started with Gutenberg 19.9. 

Enhancements

So what was a big change is something that’s probably not in any release, but it’s in the plugin release, is that the experiments page of the Gutenberg plugin has Anne McCarthy went through it and give it better titles, a description, and a little bit of an order on the experiment space because there are now 13 experiments listed on that page. So that is definitely a good thing, especially when you want to check them out and enable them and play around with the things. What’s in the experiments page is a few data views, then all the collaborative editing things and experiments then some new blocks. The grid layout, the interactive grid layout, is in the experiments. So those are there.

Tammie Lister: I think often people forget about that page, so it’s really nice to see it called out because I think it should remind people that it’s there as well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

Tammie Lister: So number one I’m seeing here is add PHP admin support for environment enhancement and document layout in Storybook. A lot of this is improvements to components and Storybook in general. This reminds me, I’m also seeing Storybook, Storybook, Storybook, Storybook, Storybook, and it reminds me of the importance of the design system. I’m going back to that. One of the things we are really looking at in this release is: how can we bring that awesome work that’s happened in the editor into those other areas of WordPress, and seeing this really good work from the Storybook reminds me of that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So Storybook, just in case you heard this for the first time, don’t confuse them with Stylebook. That’s a total different thing. But the Storybook is a way of documentation, certain components with their attributes and their different options so you can see them in isolation. And it’s actually available on the WordPress GitHub pages, and I will share the link in the show notes. So if you haven’t looked at it yet and you are developing for WordPress, it’s definitely a place to go and see what’s actually in the design system, as Tammie said, and also how you can use it for your own plugins. Well, not so much themes, but for the plugins, or any other admin contributions that you want to do.

The next pieces are more like individual blocks that got some enhancements. First up is the cover block that the image size option for the featured image is now available. You could assign the featured image to be part of the cover block, but you couldn’t specify the size for that. So now you can, and which is good for a lot of things. And talking about the featured image, no, it’s a new feature. It’s not featured image, sorry. It’s about the post template block that you can deeply nest it into the query block. It’s like query block inception over down, down, down, down.

Tammie Lister: And I would say there’s another one here with patterns model to drop down on query block any, and another one, add query total block for displaying total query results. The query block is a block that pretty much most agency workers always had to extend or have a variation of rather than be able to use out of the box for quite a while. And it’s not an amazing block. It’s just not quite got there because it’s so complex and it’s so many different variations. So anytime you add a feature, it’s just a lot to add a feature. So I think being able to see these improvements are really powerful.

And if you remember where the query blocks started, I think it’s great to see how it’s come along. I remember the first mock-ups to try and get a mind around the query block. And wherever it is now, I’m just really excited to see. And also from the sensibility perspective where it is now and the fact that I think a lot more cases, probably at least 30, 40% don’t need to extend it now. And I think that we’re probably only ever going to get to 50/50 because it’s such a complex situation, but being able to get to that from where most couldn’t use it is really powerful for the query block.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, and it’s so much the jump from the classic theme to a block theme is that a user can actually get in contact with a query block and really adapt it to what it needs to do.

Tammie Lister: And within, yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: How often have I had the request to remove a date or remove the author or remove the category pick? That was all developer-oriented kind of thing.

Tammie Lister: And a theme of understanding it, just a theme of being able to understand query blocks. So one of the big things that just learning as a themer is a real block, a block, a block. A blocker for you as a themer is trying to understand, and it often puts off a lot of people in theming because they may be more on the design side and they’re just like, “Oh, now I’ve got to learn the loop, got to learn how to do coding, and I’ve got to learn how to do that.” Well, with the query block, you don’t have to. It doesn’t mean if you know it, you can still use it. And I think that was really important to say when we’re talking about query block, that you can use it, but you can also use other methods or you could extend it and have your own really powerful option. And that’s something that I don’t think people will often hear is you have an option. And I find that a lot of times it does it for me now, but that little bit that it doesn’t, extending it is really powerful as well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And you mentioned the query total block. That’s a new block and it helps you display the query results ranges, so to speak. You get the total results, but it also gives you so, “12 results found,” or in the pagination it says, “Displaying 1 through 10 of 12,” or something like that. And it gives you a little bit more flexibility in display query related theme designs here.

Tammie Lister: And that’s a good note. The query block isn’t just a block. It’s a block with the blocks. And a lot of our mega blocks, I don’t know, nested blocks, a lot of those one are that. And we’re often, I don’t think we need more terminology, we really don’t, but we don’t see the complexity of them. And the query block is one of those really complex blocks. Navigation block is similar because of that nesting and because of the complexity inside it. If you look at even title image, the way that you have the content loops and the way that that can be, you don’t even need to have the finite control now. You can just have the content now and all those different options.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it takes a little bit getting used to and also getting experience in what works and what doesn’t work for you. Different thing, yeah.

Tammie Lister: Yeah, it’s blocks.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Well, I remember the time when I would try to get the pagination block on my page and it didn’t go. It didn’t show because…

Tammie Lister: Oh, that.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: … it was not inside the query button exactly.

Tammie Lister: Yeah, you’re reminding me. There used to be a thing where it used to, I think there was a while where it could easily just go outside and it would just hang around just outside. And it would never error so you would never know why it was erroring. It would just be like that. It’s pagination that you could click the pagination and go up and down it, but it wouldn’t do anything. But that also shows how far we’ve come because if you have that now, it would give an error. And now a lot of the system is interactive enough to self-correct itself, and it’d be like, “No query found,” or there’s a lot of error catching and correction in the system, or it’d be like, “No, that block has to be within the container.”

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Or it doesn’t show up if it’s not inside the container.

Tammie Lister: Yes, which is the refinements and the polish, which brings us lovely back to 6.8. I don’t know.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right, right, right. Yeah.

Tammie Lister: But that’s part of it, right? With all these complexities.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And I think the next one is a separator block that can now also divs instead of horizontal lines. So it can be styled, better styled. And it also is not announced because it’s a decorative thing. It’s not announced through the page reader, the screen reader.

Tammie Lister: Which was always interesting to listen to initially, the screen reader doing the spacer block and then when you hadn’t done it correctly and then doing the separator block and he was like, “Rah, rah.” It’s shouting at people.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Well, we laugh about it, but I think for someone who reads a screen reader, it’s not funny.

Tammie Lister: No, but that’s the thing. It’s like you’re laughing at the refinement.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right.

Tammie Lister: But it’s good. And only because of the really awesome feedback that we’ve had from the accessibility team and the learnings that we’ve done have we been able to get on that. And I think again, that shows that the learnings and the refinement and the collaborative work that has gone on behind the scenes between the team, we’re laughing with the gentleness of history, I think, right? That’s what we are able to do.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And until you hear actually a screen reader shouting at you, you have no idea how that actually works. So it’s always been an epiphany for me to not talk with people who know how to use a screen reader or teach me how to do it and do it myself. And then you say, “Oh no, that’s wrong.”

So the next part is about Stylebook. We talked about Storybook. That’s a developer stuff. Storybook, it’s a designer stuff, but that’s in the editor. And the Stylebook actually lets you go through all the blocks on your site with the style attached to it. So if you use one of the style variation and you open up the Stylebook, you see how each of the blocks, image block, paragraph block quotes look with that particular style and you can actually edit it. And as I said, there was something like that it’s a side editor thing, but now Stylebook screen comes also to the classic theme. And that I think is a really good move to have that there because there have been for eight years having blocks displayed in classic themes and not something like a Stylebook was available. Now, it is.

Tammie Lister: The only option before was to get the block theme tested data and then put it in. And then generally people, when you release the site, you had a page and then on that page you listed every book. I’m laughing at the work I’ve done.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I hear you.

Tammie Lister: I love Stylebook. Often I surprise clients by showing them it. They’re like, “Huh? Where did that come from?” And the reason I like it is I use the editor like Dreamweaver, and one of the things that I find is when I lay my foundations in a theme, I will then go straight to Stylebook. So I’ll do the foundations, the color, the typography, and then don’t make that noise, but yeah, and then I go to Stylebook and I’m like, “Okay, particularly color.” So one good thing I’ll be able to do calendar always, I can be like, “Oh yeah, no, the colors won’t necessarily going to reflect so well.” So I make sure that I get in my naming and my colors and all those things going so that I can have that dynamic base that pulls in on different blocks depending on what the block is and all those ways that I can have borders and shading and different things.

So that’s one of the things that I try to do when I’m pulling something through. And that can be whether I’m doing a base theme or whether I’m using Ollie or any number of different themes as a foundation, doesn’t matter. That’s exactly the same as a child theme. Doesn’t matter. It’s exactly the same approach every single time. And so Stylebook, whenever I show someone, they’re like, “Oh, I want to use this.” Still waiting for the day where I can have it detached and front end show someone because I still think that that would be chef’s kiss because the amount of projects I’ve had to do zero or something like that, or those other tools that you have to use on top of it. But yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, no, I really like the Stylebook. I remember the time where I had a GitHub test with all my test blocks and variations of the block and how that’s going to work, yeah. And the next one is also a Stylebook one that is a render overview colors in four columns. So one of the new features is that the color variations, I think, is the right terminology are now shown on top of the Stylebook. So you can see when you change the style variations, how the colors actually change. It’s cool.

Tammie Lister: So the post editor, I guess we’re moving to, so we have inline commenting, added new sidebar as extension of the canvas. And with inline commenting, we order the comments and the sidebar and UX enhanced comments. So this is all really adding the commenting and getting us on the path to that awesome work as well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s a collaborative effort. And inline commenting is asynchronous, not synchronized collaborative. You can only see it when you enable the experiments for it, but it’s really cool where you can add the comments per block and then you can reply to it. And there are some quirks with it in terms of the list of posts where you see the number of comments, but it never matches what the comments are. So there’s some kind of a bug in there. But as long as the feature isn’t settled yet, I don’t think there’s a sense in fixing that one because that’s the last thing to fix.

Tammie Lister: If you use Google Doc comments, you can use this. I think that’s the best way to describe it to someone. It’s very like how you would expect commenting to work.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah, try it out then if it doesn’t, post some feedback on GitHub.

Tammie Lister: Yeah, try it out. And if you find a bug, report it. You see it, report it.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So that’s about the enhancements of 19.9. It’s a pretty solid release and has a lot of bug fixes as well. 

But Fixes

There is one thing from the bug fixes that I wanted to point out. I think that was for the sync patterns. The content-only block was editing mode was removed because it’s not really, if you want to sync pattern, do you want to edit the content? So the editing mode was reversed to do that just in case you ran across it and you couldn’t edit your patterns. 

Documentation

And then documentation improvements or a lot of Storybook updates were there, as well as the documentation of the fields package, which is a part of the data views package for the developers that if you use the data views outside of the site editor for your own plugins, you definitely want to look at the fields package.

Tammie Lister: And there is a deprecation on icons, which is important to think about if you are looking at using the design system. So warning has been renamed caution field. And the only reason I raised that is if you’re already using it in your design system, being aware that icons have changed, but again, in the Storybook you’d be able to find that information.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Awesome. Thank you. Thank you. I think was, I think that’s all I wanted.

Tammie Lister: Did we do one of the releases? I’m very excited with all.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, we are done with 19.9. 

Gutenberg 20.0

Now, we come to Gutenberg 20.0, and 20.0 means that’s the 200th release of Gutenberg. Who would’ve thunk in June 2017 that we will have…

Tammie Lister: I know.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: … the 200th release? Who was ever thinking that far? Yeah, there are 274 merge PRs by 71 contributors, 13 of them were first time contributors. I think that’s one of the largest numbers of first time contributors for a Gutenberg plugin. And the project came with 83 enhancements and 82 fixed bugs. We are not going to read through all 83 of them. Sorry, people.

Tammie Lister: My brain’s still stuck on the 200th as some… Because at the first, I’m like-

Birgit Pauli-Haack: You were part of the original team?

Tammie Lister: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: For many, many years. Three or four years, I think.

Tammie Lister: Which I think is the first few are always unexciting because you’re just like pushing pancakes. But I think if you, from the first 10.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Where did that expression come from? Sorry, sorry, sorry. I need to go back to what are you doing? Pushing pancakes?

Tammie Lister: So your first pancake is always not such a good one. It’s like the first pancake you put out, right? That’s the first few releases or something that you put out. They’re just like, “Eh, it’s just good.” But you’re not counting those because you’re just like releasing. You’re just getting it out. But by 200, and the thing that I’d like to reflect is the cadence. And I think that that’s the important thing.

So with WordPress, we’re very used to having regular releases throughout the year, but they generally have a gap now. You’re having three or so throughout a year. That’s our cadence. But with Gutenberg, because of its plugin format, you’re having that real frequency of release. So we’ve got into that habit of a proper sprint release is what people have got into. And the sheer amount of things that go into it, it’s overwhelming. Every time I come and do this, I’m like…

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it’s a lot. “Who reviewed all that?” HPR has some review and a lot of people have-

Tammie Lister: And testing. HPR has someone that creates it, the original issue, someone that works on it, someone that then tests it, someone that then documents it, someone then pushes it. Well, it has at least two people that will review it. And then there’s so much work. So at least probably five to seven people have touched it per PR potentially.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And it’s so important to have a few different views in there to really fix all the bugs before it gets released. But you’re never successful in that. But I also like, I sometimes go back to some of the issues as well as the PRs. And sometimes they’re a year old or they started with a brilliant idea but the software wasn’t there yet. But then people keep looking at it and say, “Is it there yet? Is it there yet? Oh, could we do this?”

Tammie Lister: Back then, we couldn’t have achieved most of what we do now, which is why everything should be re-looked at. I often say if anything really is left at the interface when I first worked on it, we maybe have a problem because it should be iterated and changed on. Because even down to animations and interactions, we know more how people work on. People have changed and adapted. There’s a whole pandemic happened. People interact devices have changed. The Playground, look at what can be done with devices.

And I guess that leads us on to even looking at these lists. You look at the blocks, the thing that we have listed here is the block library, I guess. You have the details block. That strikes me in this release, the details block was something that when they originally came out, it was the paragraph block, right? The first block, and then it’s added up. So now we have a details block, we have a page list, social lines block, things block, and all these different blocks that are also maintained on top of everything as well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, we also have old widget blocks. The latest post thing is really outdated. It should be deprecated because you have the query block now for that. It’s evolving.

Enhancements                                                       

So what’s in 20.0? So there is an enhancement on the create block scaffolding tool or two of them. So now you can use external templates and customize more fields. And then the other part is that you have a default template that helps you with the multiple block plugin case. Up until now, it was only you could create a plugin with a block and then you had to get the additional blocks in with a certain flag. And now it’s a little bit easier, I think, to do that.

I like this tool. A create block is such a neat way to start out with a block and then just focus on the editor and the front end. And you don’t have to all come in.

Tammie Lister: Yeah, I love it. And to me it means that it stands with other, going back to when we were talking about Cursor, it uses it. It picks it up. And I think by if I looked at any other language that I’ve started playing around with, they all have their own versions to do scaffolding. So it makes it over par with that and just easier.Can you do it by hand? Yes, of course you can do your own thing, but it also helps from a learning perspective. And then you can just do it right from the start. Same as I love the create block theme plugin, all these tools. Can I hand code a theme? Yes. Can I hand code a block? Yes. Can I do other things while those tools are doing it for me? Yes. So it’s about the tools doing it. And also with what you are saying, it’s going to mean that I’m doing it. I’m having that foundation to then build up on top of.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, and you do it the same time over and over. So maintainability is also pretty big with using that. There’s also a wp-env environment, the development environment that comes with Gutenberg, and now has multi-site support. It’s definitely increasing the footprint of the developers who you’re going to use it. So the block library has some consistent work done where the blocks sidebar has changed the component and brave contributors go block by block and make it consistent going through that. So it is a different panel and it uses a tools panel item and the tools panel instead of the settings panel. It’s definitely they changed the components out of it and used the tools panel drop down for that.

Tammie Lister: So in this release, we’ve also got some focus on Stylebook. So we’ve got to give Stylebook its own route, so it can be linked to directly and add the appearance design menu through admin action. So again, this is iterating on Stylebook and improving it more, which is really, really exciting. I’m curious to test out the linking to it directly as well to see if what that happens with permissions. So we’ve achieved what I wanted it to do.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Good idea, but I think you need to have some edge.

Tammie Lister: I do. I don’t think it’s quite the front-facing thing that I’m wanting.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, it’s not.

Tammie Lister: But it’s getting there.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: In there, yeah. Its own route is really powerful when you…

Tammie Lister: Yeah.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, you want to link to it. And then the block hooks got two additional enhancements. One is to apply the block hooks to post content on the front end and the editor so people can see it, and the other one is in sync pattern to actually also apply the block hooks. So before then, the block hooks wouldn’t work in patterns. Now, they do. Block hooks is a method to add a block at the end or at the beginning of another block for display. And now with this release, you can also see it in the editor and edit there. So the user has a little bit more control over there, the blocks that are automatically added.

Tammie Lister: Speaking of tools, there’s adder in the plugin, there’s adder Playground blueprint JSON to the assets blueprints folder of plugin repo. So anytime I see anything about Playground, I get super excited. For those that haven’t explored it, the way that I describe it is a collection of awesome recipes to be able to either pre-run or from testing to your plugin or to be able to just run. So you can even run a testing PR with them. There’s just so much that you can do with them in the browser. You can either have single installs or you can have a bit more perpetual sites as well with Playground. And it’s just really, really powerful in getting more powerful.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And if you want to learn more about blueprints, the Playground, new interface for the last month actually, has the blueprint gallery coming into the Playground interface. So you can actually read through them and test them out right away. And they are really cool as examples to, okay, if it can do that, then maybe it can also do that and you have a blueprint on how to do that. So I love that. And well, I built some of the blueprints, so I’m really excited about getting those done.

And my next thing is to enable all the experiments or more than one experiment in the good mug repo and have a Playground for that. And the next one, and that’s just merged into the blueprint gallery. But I also am thinking about the distraction-free writing experience that if you have a Playground to just do writing, so you need to have the distraction-free enabled and some other things that need to be enabled, but so you can really have a writer try it out without having all the distraction things.

Tammie Lister: I love that idea that you could use Playground to test modes like what you are suggesting. And that’s also really important to say with Playground you can also and gone into a sidetrack off Playground, but with Playground you can also install plugins. And that’s something that often is not thought of. So the recipe can also be add Woo, add this, add that. So it can be the whole configuration setup. As you are saying, it’s not just open the editor at a certain point. It’s not like if this, then that workflow, it’s also installing things and configuring them as well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And you could even import some demo content because most plugins only shine when you actually have content to look at.

Tammie Lister: Yeah, it’s true.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And the “hello world” not always does it.

Tammie Lister: Could I have it with Stylebook lockdown? Or I’m just like, “Is this how I get my Stylebook?”

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And now with the root, you could actually make the Stylebook your landing page.

Tammie Lister: And that’s how I get my design system. So okay, now we solved my problem. How do we solve the next problem on the Changelog? So we solved both our problems today.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes.

Tammie Lister: So moving on from that, we have write mode, allow template part editing in write mode. Anything that is improving write mode is also exciting for me because it’s one of those little paper cutters, it’s probably like a small version of it, but it’s an easing of the experience to me and that is also really useful. So I had love to see these iterations over time as well.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, me too. Yeah. And for the longest time I wasn’t really getting what the difference is between design mode and write mode. But now with the template part, I am actually getting it. It’s really cool.

Tammie Lister: I describe the difference between using Google Docs and Dreamweaver. That’s the best way I can describe for me.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Very good analogies. For a long time document about…

Tammie Lister: When you add things in.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Well, this is a fun show and we are, I think, that’s true with 20.0.

Tammie Lister: Two down.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Two down, one to go. And it only had 94 PR so it’s not that much in there. 

Gutenberg 20.1

But the Gutenberg 20.1, it has not been released yet at the time of this recording. And so it will be released on January 22nd will be the release of 20.1. There’s a lot of 20s in my life at the moment.

Tammie Lister: There are.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: So it’s 20.1. All right, yeah. So what does it bring?

Enhancements

Tammie Lister: This has a lot of things again in the block library. This is the details block. So really requirements with the allowed block attributes there, and that reminds me of a lot of these blocks are created and then I need to be gone over again. And that’s something you were saying about going over the components and then bring them in. But a lot of these, a new feature like allowed block attributes or different things happen and then you need to go back over the old blocks and reiterate them because they maybe came out after or before and different things. So yeah, some of that’s going. Page lists, add color support, anything that sees adding support to a block gets me very excited from the senior perspective. And social links button, add clear button for color option, that seems like a small thing, but I know how important that is. Clears color is really, really important.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Every time I say, “Where did this go wrong? Let’s clear the colors first.”

Tammie Lister: Yes. And then with, I kind of made move on to design tools because that’s the next one after that. But with post comment link, showing border controls by default, and query total show border controls by default, again that’s deciding on the best defaults is also something you only know when you first release something you are not too sure, particularly with the design tools and to give a frame of design tools. That’s anything from borders to backgrounds to anything that is styling things. And it’s generally the things that are in theme JSON with the tooling visualized. So that’s when we’re talking about design tools. It’s the visual knobs and things that you can push to do that fall and interact with theme JSON. That’s a weird way of framing it, but that’s the best way I can put it.

And a lot of these defaults are guessed first time when something comes out. So the post comment link, a guess will have been come up that needed to be on, that needed to be off. So by having these things adjusted, it means that this feedback was given that that should be on by default or this should be off by default.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: But there are so many people. That’s just a 50/50 decision, but people are not 50/50. So sometimes they want it and sometimes they don’t want it. But yeah, I had a constant…

Tammie Lister: I had a toolbar where the option had to be added because that’s constantly my example of there is no good answer.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, but there is a shortcut, a keyboard shortcut.

Tammie Lister: There is an answer, put that option in.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And also remember it. That was also a part of it. That block editor remember me or my choices. Yeah, the clearable option, the color because is also available for the navigation block and it now surfaces the menu name in the list view. That’s for the navigation block. That was something that people just wouldn’t recognize the various menus in the list view. And the list view is your friend. So yeah, whatever we do for the list view is actually really a quality of life enhancements there. So the next one is, I’m not quite sure what this refers to, but maybe you know, the new default.

Tammie Lister: I’m not sure about this one either, I’ll be honest. So it’s the new default rendering mode for editor via post type supports. Looking at it a little bit, what it seems to be doing is similar to what I was saying, which is it basically says it updates how the new default rendering mode can be set for a post type. So to me, it responds to feedback given. So it says it doesn’t require best endpoint or any API-related changes.

So reading between the lines, it says that it would be feedback had been given on that and it says existing add post type support can be used to change or reset the default rendering mode. And then it gives some code examples to that. So again, it’s giving options that you can decide on defaults, which is what you were saying about. Really you don’t always know, but initially you have to make a best bet and then you can bring those refinements in.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: And then there’s an enhancement for the data views that it adds a media field to the UI for content preview of the posts and pages in the grid view.

Tammie Lister: I get excited about anything coming into data views.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Data views, and it’s for the media field is really important for featured images and all that.

Tammie Lister: Yeah. I know it’s an experiment, but being able to just play around and any new feature that comes into data view is just exciting to be able to play with.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, yeah. I find them so much modern and I really would love to have make a kind of a snip decision or snip feature that kind of switches out the WP admin with the data views. But of course it cannot be that fast because it’s been-

Tammie Lister: I think you have to go a little bit gently with humans.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. A friend of mine said, “That’s for you, humans.”

Tammie Lister: Yeah, but I think that that’s why we have experiments. We’re going to make sure that the cake is having some testing. I know at core days in run, that was something that the ad was definitely sharing that by it being in there, it can be tested. It can be all the best version can be done. And then really those people call them edge cases, I call them stress cases because they cause stress. They can be felt afterwards and implemented. Otherwise, it would just take way too long to do so. At the moment, it’s the best case. That’s what data views are. And that doesn’t mean it’s all the cases.

So that’s part of the work with data views is really to go back over it and make sure it does all the work. And if you think of WP admin, anything to come out of the isolated view really has to just do all the work. And that’s something I’m very aware when I’m looking at what design things can I bring through. It’s like sprinkles at the moment is the best way I can put it because it has to be stuff that’s really, really packaged and baked already.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And looking at how the WP admin had been extended by plugins for 20 years, yeah.

Tammie Lister: How has it not been extended by a plugin at this point.

Because it’s been so long. It’s so long and tried and tested and it’s known. So that’s something when you bring something new. It will be there and we’d be talking in a couple of years as if it had always looked that way. And it will be the WP admin. It will just be a case of it has to be done in a certain way because and then everybody will be able to use it and understand it and implement it in that way.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. But that’s actually a very good way to end this podcast. I think we are through with 20.1.

Tammie Lister: Three for three.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: We did three in one.

Tammie Lister: Yay.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: That’s really good. And so thank you so much, Tammie, for being here.

Tammie Lister: Thank you for having me.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: I am so glad we are back in 2025 with the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. And as always, the show notes will be published on gutenbergtimes.com/podcast, and this is episode 113, 113th. And if you have questions and suggestions or news you want to include, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com. And you can also leave… If you listen to that on Spotify, Spotify also gives you a feature to comment on it. That’s a great place to leave questions so we can answer them in the next episode. And thank you, everyone, for being a listener here and welcome back to 2025. And thank you, Tammie, for taking the time out of your life to be on the show and share all the good things with us.

Tammie Lister: Thank you so much.

Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right, you take care. Bye.

Tammie Lister: Take care too. Bye.

Howdy,

I know it’s still a month or two, but I am officially done with Winter and the cold. I am already looking forward to Spring and nature painting the world with color again.

Next month, I will warm myself up again by spending some time in Manila, Philippines at temperatures between 24° and 31° Celsius. If you are making plans for WordCamp Asia and might have time to meet, please let me know or use my public calendar bit.ly/bph-wcasia.

If not WordCamp Asia, might I run into you at CloudFest at the Europa Park in Rust?

What are your plans for 2025 regarding WordCamp and conferences?

Have a fabulous weekend!

Yours, 💕
Birgit

Developing Gutenberg and WordPress

Fabian Kägy published What’s new in Gutenberg 20.0? (10 January), celebrated the 200th plugin release and highlighted the following updates:

1. Enhancements for the Style Book
2. Starter Patterns get a new UI
3. Easily set a Page to become the Posts Page
4. Display Block Type Badge for renamed blocks
5. More Highlights

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Nithin Sreeraj took a closer look at the features in his post Gutenberg Plugin Reaches 200th Release Milestone with Version 20.0

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George Mamadashvili made the RC1 of Gutenberg 20.1 available on GitHub for testing. The final release will be on January 22, 2025.

Tammie Lister and I chatted about the last three Gutenberg plugin releases and recorded Gutenberg Changelog 113th episode. We also talked about WordPress 6.8, exploration with AI, storybook and Gutenberg 19.9, 20.0 and 20.1. It was a fun first episode for 2025. It will land on your favorite podcast app on Sunday or shortly after.

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Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners

In his video My Top 10 Website Layout Designs, Jamie Marsland collected his favorite layouts and demonstrated briefly how his assembled them in subsequent videos. It’s a great collection as if you are a site builder, you should be able to rebuild them and have them in your arsenal.

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1,086 Block Themes are now available for browsing in the WordPress Theme directory. The latest approved submissions are:

• Trivium by Effe Themes
• FSE Medical Clinic by Creta Themes
• General Food Store by WP Radiant
• Mechanic Car Repair by Titan Themes
• WENS Vivid by WEN Solutions, offering some great front page patterns for restaurants.
• WhiteBlack by Tommaso G. Scibilia. The artist from Sicily, Italy, published his 11th Block Theme since August 2024, that’s about two themes per month. 🎉

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Jan Hoek published the Vital Video Block plugin, a tool to help you with your YouTube video display and avoid slow-downs from background loading.

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Dominik Schilling updated one of my favorite plugins: Public Post Preview with four features:

• Under Settings > Reading Public Post Preview you can now set a different default expiration time.
• It also shows a link icon in the list of posts so you don’t have to go into the edit screen to obtain the temporary link.
• The list view also lists a filter to see only posts with the Public Post Preview link enabled.
• The Preview drop down of the editor also lists the public post preview.

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Colin Newcomer talks you along on getting started with WordPress Patterns. You learn what are Patterns, the synced and the unsynced kinds, and how to management them on your site. The detailed screenshots and instructions make this a great tutorial.

The only missing part is the Synced Pattern overrides that arrived with WordPress 6.6 last summer. This feature allows users to make content-specific changes to synced patterns without altering the underlying layout or design. Nick Diego posted an introduction to overrides in Synced Patterns on the WordPress Developer Blog.

Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks

Simon Cooke, business development director at HumanMade, discussed in his post How WordPress’ full site editing supports global scalability. In his view, WordPress Full Site Editing (FSE) helps large companies manage websites across different regions more easily. It allows businesses to create consistent design templates while giving local teams flexibility to adapt content. FSE makes it simpler to maintain a unified brand look, support multiple languages, and create websites that work smoothly in different markets. By providing centralized design tools and easy-to-use content blocks, companies can build more efficient and adaptable digital experiences globally.

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Brent MacKinnon, invites you to WooCommerce’s January Developer Office Hours: The Future of WooCommerce Themes on January 22 at 22:00 UTC. Ellen Bauer, WooCommerce’s Product Lead for themes, blocks & patterns, will share insights on theme development and block patterns. She will share the new starter block theme replacing Storefront, discus of block-based theming best practices and customization and answer your questions. The Developer hours will be held on the WooCommerce Slack space in the #developers channel.

More updated from WooCommerce Developer Blog

• Order DataStore Caching — A new approach to optimize WooCommerce performance
• New WooCommerce blocks cart item image filter
• Developer advisory: Block Checkout field entities
• Feedback request: Adding order fulfillments to WooCommerce

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Fränk Klein took a deep dive in how WP_DEVELOPMENT_MODE helps with developing Block themes, as it bypasses the theme.json cache. Learn how to enable it and how to use it. He also offers an array of code snippets for conditional handling in your wp_config.php file, and shares some pitfalls.

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Amor Kumar, principal engineer at WebDev Studios, created the Block Starter Theme, so you can “craft your next WordPress block them with a simple foundation”. This project is targeted toward agencies or developers building tightly controlled themes for clients. To facilitate full control of the editing experience, the following WordPress core features have been disabled: Openverse integration, Core block patterns, Core block styles, and search in the Block directory. The readme file lists how to use it and suggests a particular workflow for building a block theme. It’s definitely a great way to get started.

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In his post How your plugin can customize the WordPress Command Palette, Steve Bonisteel, technical editor at Kinsta, explains what the Command Palette is, and how its API can be used by plugin authors to provide a streamlined interaction with the block editor.

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In his video WP Queries in PHP and JavaScript – Brain Coords provided a tutorial on how to build a custom Avatar block. “I share how I built a custom solution for displaying guest speaker images on my podcast website using WordPress. I combined plugins like Seriously Simple Podcasting and the outdated WP Term Images, then created a custom Gutenberg block to dynamically display speaker headshots.” he wrote.

 “Keeping up with Gutenberg – Index 2024” 
A chronological list of the WordPress Make Blog posts from various teams involved in Gutenberg development: Design, Theme Review Team, Core Editor, Core JS, Core CSS, Test, and Meta team from Jan. 2024 on. Updated by yours truly. The previous years are also available: 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023

Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.

JuanMa Garrido expanded the access to the Block Development Examples on the GitHub Repo. He built a TypeScript app using ReactJS and host it on the WordPress GitHub pages. Each example has its own card, that also shows the contributing author. The list can be filtered by tags. The details view links back to the readme.md file for each individual examples with explanations, code snippets and related resources.

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In his 404th episode of the WPbuilds podcast, Nathan Wrigley interviewed Alan Fuller, of Fullworks Plugins. They discussed Fuller’s journey from corporate life to WordPress plugin development. The conversation covers WordPress’s evolution from shortcodes to blocks, focusing on Alan’s “Display Eventbrite Events” plugin and its challenges, such as documentation gaps and API limitations. Alan also shares insights on developing for tools like Elementor, tackling support issues, and marketing struggles due to social anxiety. He highlights the role of AI in replacing part-time developers and reflects on pricing missteps. The episode explores WordPress development trends and Alan’s experiences with modern collaboration tools like Slack and GitHub.

---

Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg’s master branch?
Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review.

Now also available via WordPress Playground. There is no need for a test site locally or on a server. Have you been using it? Email me with your experience

Questions? Suggestions? Ideas?
Don’t hesitate to send them via email or
send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.

---

For questions to be answered on the Gutenberg Changelog,
send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com

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Celebrating 7 years of Do the Woo

Want to transform your basic WordPress comment section into something that pulls readers into the conversation? The default comments section can feel a bit uninspiring – it’s just text boxes and basic avatars that don’t encourage much interaction.

But with some smart design choices and modern tools, you can create comment sections that make readers want to join the discussion. A well-designed comment area shows visitors their thoughts matter, building a space where meaningful conversations happen naturally.

This guide explores how to enhance your WordPress comments through Gravatar integration, which lets you display verified user profiles and avatars. You’ll learn how to use Gravatar’s features to boost trust and recognition among commenters. For those comfortable with code, we’ve also included tips on styling your comment section with CSS to match your site’s design perfectly.

Ready to build a more engaging community through better comment design? Let’s get started.

Why modernize your WordPress comments? A quick overview

Basic WordPress comment sections can make your site feel outdated compared to platforms where users interact through verified profiles. This affects more than just appearances – it impacts how visitors engage with your content.

Sites with basic comment sections often struggle with:

• Lower return visitor rates, as users don’t feel connected to the community.
• Reduced time spent on pages since there’s less incentive to read discussions.
• More spam comments due to lack of verification.
• Limited user recognition between posts and discussions.

Adding modern comment features changes this dynamic. When commenters can display verified identities, discussions become more meaningful. Users take more care with their responses when their professional profiles are attached. They’re more likely to return to check responses and participate in new discussions.

Quick improvements through tools like Gravatar bring:

• Automatic user recognition across WordPress sites.
• Built-in spam reduction through email verification.
• Professional-looking user profiles that build credibility.

Improving your WordPress comments form with Gravatar

Gravatar is a 3-in-1 solution that can help you create a truly engaging comment section. Let’s look at the different applications. But first – let’s look at what Gravatar truly is and explore its relationship with WordPress. 

First and foremost, Gravatar is a free profile platform by Automattic (the people behind WooCommerce and WordPress.com) that lets users create dynamic online identities that follow them around the Internet. The profiles are connected to the email address, so whenever you use that to register on a Gravatar-integrated site, the user data is automatically pulled (more on that later). 

For example, WordPress.com websites are integrated with Gravatar. When you create a profile with a website built on WordPress.com, your Gravatar information is imported, saving you time and effort throughout the registration process. If you don’t have a Gravatar profile and sign up for WordPress.com, you’ll get one automatically and have it linked to the email address that was used. 

WordPress.org also uses Gravatar but only to pull the profile pictures. 

If someone else writes a comment and doesn’t have a Gravatar profile, they’ll show up with this mystery profile picture or a different avatar that you can change from the settings. We recommend that you enable the Gravatar option and not override the profile pictures – this ensures that Gravatar user who comments on your website will have their avatars show up in your comments section. 

Gravatar is not just about avatars though – people with Gravatar profiles can create in-depth dynamic identities that can capture a wide range of information, from verified social media links, photos, articles, featured articles, and even payment links. As a WordPress author, a Gravatar profile becomes a crucial tool, as showcasing that you are an actual person behind your blog posts boosts the authenticity and authority of the written content and encourages people to engage because they know it’s an actual human being on the other side. 

Letting your commenters display similar levels of information about themselves is equally important – it encourages people interact and voice their opinions through a more legitimate looking profile. This is also something Gravatar can achieve through deeper integration. 

Using the Gravatar Enhanced plugin 

Okay, so you have a Gravatar profile, but it still doesn’t fully show up in your blog posts and pages. This is where the Gravatar Enhanced plugin comes in. It’s also completely free and lets you add customizable profile blocks to any post or page. 

While you can’t add the profile block to the comments section, the Gravatar Enhanced plugin lets you send automated emails inviting commenters to create Gravatar profiles, boosting their presence on your site. You can customize your invitation message, making it clear why Gravatar boosts their credibility as a commenter.

Integrating the Gravatar REST API 

Finally, the Gravatar API offers the most powerful way to integrate your WordPress website with Gravatar, letting you take full advantage of the platform’s comprehensive profile service. You can fully control what level of information you want to import from Gravatar profiles when they sign up with your website. By working with a developer, you can control what information is displayed for each user in a comment thread, and also create accessible and verified user profiles for each active member on your website, built on Gravatar data. This is ideal in many scenarios, such as a forum or online community website.

The integration offers several immediate benefits:

• Users who already have Gravatar profiles see their avatars automatically appear when commenting.
• Email verification happens automatically, reducing spam comments.
• Profile information syncs across all WordPress sites, creating consistency.
• Users can maintain separate personal and professional commenting profiles through multiple email addresses.

However, if you have a simpler WordPress blog and just want to optimize your comments section, you can use WordPress plugins to get simpler Gravatar functionality. Another essential tool here is Jetpack, which comes with Gravatar Hovercards.

These cards display additional information about the commenter without requiring readers to leave the page.

Whichever option you choose, the technical benefits are substantial:

• Reduced spam through email verification.
• Better user recognition across comment threads.
• Privacy controls that let users manage their identity display.
• Automatic profile updates across all WordPress sites.

This integration turns basic comment sections into trust-building tools. When readers see verified profiles and consistent identities, they’re more likely to engage in meaningful discussions. Plus, linking Gravatar profiles with WordPress comments creates a natural bridge between casual readers and active community members.

Styling WordPress comment forms with CSS

If you want more control over how the comment sections work, you could edit their style with CSS. So, here’s a short tutorial on how you can customize a comment form through the WordPress CSS editor. 

1. From your WordPress dashboard, go to Appearance > Editor > Styles. Click on the pencil icon on the right to start editing styles.

2. Click three dots on the top right, then Additional CSS, or scroll to the bottom of the panel on the right to access Additional CSS.

3. Start by adding code for the actual form. You can target it using the class comment–form. We’ll change the background color and fonts, as well as add a rounded colored border. Let’s also style the labels while we’re at it.

.comment-form {
background-color: #fefae0; /* Soft pastel yellow */
border: 1px solid #bc6c25; /* Rich contrasting brown */
border-radius: 8px;
padding: 20px;
font-family: 'IBM Plex Mono', monospace; /* IBM Plex Mono font */
font-size: 16px;
color: #333;
}

/* Style the form labels */
.comment-form label {
font-family: 'IBM Plex Mono', monospace;
font-size: 14px;
font-weight: bold;
color: #555;
margin-bottom: 5px;
display: block;
}

4. Next, we’ll do the input fields, with a background color plus a colored, rounded border.

.comment-form input[type="text"],
.comment-form input[type="email"],
.comment-form input[type="url"],
.comment-form textarea {
background-color: #f8f9fa; /* Light grey for contrast */
border: 1px solid #bc6c25; /* Same border color */
padding: 10px;
border-radius: 4px;
font-family: 'IBM Plex Mono', monospace;
font-size: 14px;
color: #333;
margin-bottom: 15px;
}

/* Style the textarea (comment box) */
.comment-form textarea {
min-height: 120px;
resize: vertical;
}

5. Finally, the submit button, which we’ll give a different color, font, and rounded border.

.comment-form input[type="submit"] {
background-color: #bc6c25; /* Rich brown */
color: #ffffff; /* White text for contrast */
font-family: 'IBM Plex Mono', monospace;
font-size: 16px;
font-weight: bold;
border: none;
border-radius: 4px;
padding: 10px 20px;
cursor: pointer;
}

Put it all together, and here’s what you should expect:

Launch your engagement-focused comment section 

Transforming your WordPress comment section from basic to engaging doesn’t require massive changes. By implementing Gravatar profiles and thoughtful design choices, you can create an environment where readers naturally want to participate.

The combination of verified identities and user profiles shows visitors that their contributions matter. When commenters can display their professional information and verified social links, discussions become more meaningful and spam decreases naturally.

Start by checking that Gravatar is selected as the active avatar service in your WordPress settings. Then explore additional tools like Jetpack for hovercards or Gravatar Enhanced for easy profile integration. For more technical implementations, the Gravatar REST API documentation provides everything needed to build custom solutions.

Remember: A well-designed comment section isn’t just about aesthetics – it’s about creating a space where your community can thrive.

Transcript

On the podcast today we have David Darke.

David is a Bristol-based entrepreneur and long time WordPress user. He is the co-founder of Atomic Smash, a digital agency specialising in WordPress and WooCommerce performance optimisation. Since its founding in 2010, Atomic Smash has grown from a two-person team into a thriving agency known for helping businesses improve their digital platforms with WordPress. The podcast today traces David’s experiences growing the agency and the many highs and lows that he’s been on.

David’s story begins in a business incubator where the affordable desk space facilitated invaluable networking and relationship-building opportunities. Through perseverance and strategic networking, David has grown the agency from these small beginnings to a robust team of twenty professionals.

We talk about the myriad challenges he faced, from overcoming the initial skepticism due to his age, to the trials of managing business growth and client expectations. You’ll hear about the critical role that external business coaches have played in guiding his agency through different stages of growth, and how strategic learning has been pivotal in expanding beyond core web development skills to mastering business acumen and operational strategies.

David also discusses his current role, which involves less hands-on coding and more focus on technical oversight, sales, and strategic client interactions. He shares his insights into the importance of delegation, finding work-life balance, and ensuring his team operates efficiently without overextending themselves.

We also get into the evolving web industry landscape, particularly the integration of AI and SEO into their service offerings, aiming to position his company as a strategic partner for client growth. He emphasises the importance of hiring the right talent, including freelancers, and the necessity of pausing business coaching to implement growth strategies effectively.

Whether you’re an aspiring freelancer, an agency owner looking to grow, or simply passionate about WordPress, this episode is for you.

Useful links

Atomic Smash website

David on LinkedIn

Version 4.2 is coming your way with new hosts and new shows. Plus we are celebrating 7 years of Do the Woo.

Forty-one is a nice birthday because it doesn’t feel like too much pressure. For forty I did a big eclipse thing that ended up amazing, this year I’m replicating what I did a few years ago and celebrating in New York, Houston, and San Francisco.

My birthday today has already been lovely. Saw the amazing Broadway show Maybe Happy Ending (powered by WordPress!) thanks to a suggestion from my colleague Susan Hobbs who’s a connoisseur of musicals. Then did some fun karaoke in K-town. I didn’t realize how much I missed New York! Tonight will celebrate with one of my favorite DJs, Lemurian, who flew up from Tulum. In the spirit of a blog post for my birthday, I’d like to share with you all a blog post I’ve been working on a while inspired by one of Lemurian’s mixes. In 2018 Max (aka Lemurian) played at someplace called Concept and opened with a very interesting track.

Now, the thing that caught my ear was the bassoon. A double-reed instrument that you don’t often hear in the front of things, much less house music. Here is the original track on Spotify:

This lead me down a rabbit hole to an amazing (WordPress-powered) site called Lyrical Brazil that takes the Brazilian Portuguese lyrics and translates them. Please read that entire blog post. It turns out this song was written by a police officer who was shot and then paralyzed from the waist down, then started a Brazilian music school Candeia which was a fixture of Portela samba school. Here’s the lyrics of the song, translated:

Let me go, I need to wander
I’ll go around, seeking
To laugh, so as not to cry (repeat)
I want to watch the sun rise, to see the rivers’ waters flow
To hear the birds sing
I want to be born, I want to live
Let me go, I need to wander
I’ll go around, seeking
To laugh, so as not to cry
If anyone asks after me, tell them I’ll only come back after I find myself
I want to watch the sun rise, to see the rivers’ waters flow
To hear the birds sing
I want to be born, I want to live… (repeat)

Stunning poetry. Made all the better when you understand the context in which is was written.

One of the things I say to my friends is that in lieu of birthday gifts I just want them to publish, whether it’s words, photos, music, or anything. I leave you all with that. Each of us has an incredible story, a unique life experience that is yours and no one else’s. Find a way to express that creatively, and put that on the open web. It’s scary! Vulnerable. But you’ll find once you do that the rewards are better than you ever imagined. 2025 is going to be a weird year, let’s blog through it. Mazel tov!

All birthday posts: 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41.

Happy New Year! ðŸŽ† 🙌 🎉🥂

I hope you had some wonderful time with your family or friends over the holidays, and you started re-energized and excited into 2025.

At Gutenberg Times, we, that’s you and me, are now celebrating our seventh anniversary! Although, I started curating Gutenberg updates right after WordCamp Europe in June 2017, I registered the domain Gutenbergtimes.com and started the newsletter on January 14, 2018.

My dear friend, Bob Dunn aka BobWP started the DoTheWoo network around the same time, and we are planning a joined anniversary podcast episode to chat about our journey in the WordPress community. Stay Tuned!

As I just returned from vacation, I am pretty sure I haven’t caught up with all the great things that happened around the block editor. The updates here are pretty cool, though!

More again next week 🤗

Yours, 💕
Birgit

PS: We are not only four weeks away from WordCamp Asia. If you want to meet there, use my public calendar to self-schedule a meeting: bit.ly/bph-wcasia.

Developing Gutenberg and WordPress

Jonathan Derosiers has published the final planning information for WordPress 6.8. The 10-person release squad consist of long-time contributors with a ton of experience. Desrosiers also confirmed the schedule, which was earlier proposed by Hector Prieto,:

• March 4, 2025, for Beta 1
• March 25, 2025, for RC 1 and
• April 15, 2025, the general release.

WordPress “6.8 will focus primarily on being a polish and bug fix release. New features will be considered if deemed reasonably ready.” Derosiers wrote.

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Justin Tadlock published the monthly roundup post on the WordPress Developer Blog What’s new for developers? (January 2025). You learn about the new Query total block, updates to styling blocks in themes, Playground updates as wells important update for Plugin developers.

State of the Word

On December 16, 2024, Matt Mullenweg, Matias Ventura, Junko Fukui, and Mary Hubbard delivered the State of the Word 2024 from Tokyo. The WordPress YouTube channel has all three videos for those of us, who could not be in Japan.

• State of the Word 2024
• Q & A with Matt Mullenweg
• STOW Panel Discussions on publishing in the open and the future of WordPress in Japan and beyond.

Nicholas Garofalo published a recap on the WordPress news site: State of the Word 2024: Legacy, Innovation, and Community.

Jyolsna J E posted her recap on the WPTavern. Recap of the State of the Word 2024 

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Gutenberg plugin

Gutenberg 19.9 was released on December 19th. In his post What’s new in Gutenberg 19.9? (19 December) manager Ramon Dodd highlighted:

1. Style Book in classic themes
2. Introducing the Query Total block

Jyolsna JE has the skinny for you via WPTavern: Gutenberg 19.9 Introduces Style Book to Classic Themes

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Gutenberg 20.0 was also released. It’s the 200th release of the Gutenberg plugin. The release post is still in the works but you can read the changelog on GitHub.

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Next week, Tammie Lister and I will talk through the two Gutenberg releases on the next episode of the Gutenberg Changelog. It’s going to be great fun as Tammie was one of the original designers/developers on the Gutenberg team, so the 200th release is a great occasion to talk about the journey in WordPress. Tammie Lister is also the design release lead for WordPress 6.8.

Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners

Ella van Durpe created an early prototype to Write Books With the Block Editor. The nascent project outside of WordPress is used to create e-books and documents using the Block Editor, even offline. You can export your work in EPUB format for e-book readers like Kindle or as DOCX files. Its features include chapter navigation, cover design, and a demo editor available as a Progressive Web App (PWA). It’s still evolving, with planned improvements like revision history and better file support. Feedback is welcome to shape its development. You can try it out by going to the demo editor and install it as a PWA locally via the installation icon in your browser bar:

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Marko Krstic released his DBlocks Finder plugin for blocks & synced patterns and helps users find and manage Gutenberg blocks and synced patterns within their WordPress sites.

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Anne Katzeff shared in her blog post Convert Content from the Classic Editor to Blocks, the few easy steps to converting content from the Classic to the Block editor. Katzeff also created a video with the steps you can follow along which covers converting blocks one post at a time or Global conversation using the Convert to Blocks plugin by 10up

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Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks

Nick Diego published a code snippet on the Developer blog on How to filter the output of a block binding, using using the block_bindings_source_value filter. He provides a practical example of modifying the display of book prices in different currencies based on a URL query parameter.

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In his post WordPress Themes Need More Weird: A Call for Creative Digital Homes, Nick Hamze advocates bringing back creativity and uniqueness in website design, especially when it comes to WordPress themes. He points out how everyone’s designs are starting to look the same, which kinda kills the vibe of real self-expression. Hamze is urging theme designers to ditch the boring old layouts and go for bold looks that show off strong opinions and suit specific needs. Think of themes like album covers—it’s all about having personality and making that instant visual impact. Overall, it’s a shout-out to designers to try out those unconventional ideas to jazz up WordPress themes and make the whole web scene way more fun and varied!

Theme: Psychedeli by Automattic

In Mastering light and dark mode styling in block themes, Justin Tadlock shows you how you can implement a light or dark mode depending on the visitors system settings. “The color-scheme property and light-dark() function are the foundation of the method used in this tutorial. They are both baseline CSS standards in 2024, so the challenge is making them work with WordPress standards.” Tadlock wrote.

 “Keeping up with Gutenberg – Index 2025” 
A chronological list of the WordPress Make Blog posts from various teams involved in Gutenberg development: Design, Theme Review Team, Core Editor, Core JS, Core CSS, Test, and Meta team from Jan. 2024 on. Updated by yours truly. The previous years are also available: 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 |  2024

Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor.

Eric Karkovack posted on the Kinsta blog on how to Use the WordPress Block Bindings API to power your blocks. The Block Bindings API, introduced in WordPress 6.5, is a significant advancement for WordPress developers. It allows binding data sources to core WordPress blocks, enabling the creation of dynamic websites more efficiently.

For more use cases and more in-depth insights, you can also peruse the WordPress Developer Blog. This page lists all articles on Block Bindings.

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In his video, Create an AMAZING WordPress Carousel with the Interactivity API!, Elliott Richmond takes you along on to build a Slider with the create-block scaffolding tool, using the interactivity api template. You’ll learn in this video:

• Setting up a carousel container and managing context variables.
• Calculating offsets and indices dynamically for smooth navigation.
• Adding seamless transitions with CSS for a polished user experience.
• Reverse-engineering forwards and backwards navigation with ease.
• How to prepare your slider for integration with WordPress settings or database values.

Sounds like a fun programming adventure! Richmond also shared his code on GitHub

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Ryan Welcher also shared a snippet on the WordPress Developer Blog:
How to register a block variation but hide it from the inserter. “In some cases, a custom block is overkill, and a block variation is a better solution. For example, a user in the outreach channel wanted to add an attribute to a block that was only used in a template and, based on the existence of that attribute, add some custom functionality.” Welcher wrote.

Playground updates

This week, and new version of Studio, the WordPress.com local development environment based on Playground, was released. The post Build Locally, Deploy Globally: Meet Studio Sync for WordPress.com has all the details of the new Sync features. You can use it to

• Synchronize local sites with WordPress.com hosted sites
• Take a local site live with a WordPress.com hosting plan.

The Sync feature is available to users with a Business or eCommerce plan.

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In the online workshop, an online workshop on WordPress Playground for developers,, Core WordPress Playground developer, Berislav Brgiacak joined developer educator Jonathan Bossenger to share insights into how developers can leverage WordPress Playground. Their notes are available on GitHub. You’ll learn

• how to configure a playground instance with your custom plugin and theme, and store that in GitHub.
• how to create a blueprint version of the above configuration to share with clients and coworkers.
• about possible use cases to use Playground.

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Nick Diego and Ryan Welcher also tackled Playground in their latest Developer Hours: Everything you need to know about WordPress Playground. WordPress Playground allows users to create fully functional WordPress instances directly in their browser, with no installation or setup required. Beyond spinning up WordPress sites, Playground offered powerful capabilities, from testing plugins and themes to running demos and even supporting app development. No matter how you engage with WordPress, Playground has something valuable to offer. In the session, Welcher and Diego explored tools and workflows for plugin and theme development, demonstrated how to use Playground for testing and support, highlighted key improvements introduced in 2024, and offered a preview of exciting new features planned for 2025.

---

Adam ZieliÅ„ski did some experimentation over the holidays, and has been using WordPress as a git repo, using Playground. As to answer the WHY he wrote: “I want Notion that’s free, offline first, and where I own my data. I also want to collaborate with my wife and my improve group. WordPress is the perfect foundation, the hosted version solves many of my problems, but I really want to version my data as static files.”

---

Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg’s master branch?
Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review.

Now also available via WordPress Playground. There is no need for a test site locally or on a server. Have you been using it? Email me with your experience

Questions? Suggestions? Ideas?
Don’t hesitate to send them via email or
send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.

---

For questions to be answered on the Gutenberg Changelog,
send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com

---

Featured Image: Exhibition: The Last Supper Motor world Munich Photo by Birgit Pauli-Haack

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I wrote over on WordPress.org about breaking the status quo with a Joost/Karim fork. It’s a perfect time as Automattic is re-focusing its work while the legal stuff is going on.

Making great software, great product that stands the test of time and not just survives but thrives through monumental technological shifts is incredibly hard. That challenge is part of the reason I love doing it. There is never a dull day, and the reward of seeing the code you wrote used by the most amazing creators in the world is an indescribable pleasure. When I see what people create with WordPress, some days I feel like I’m grinding pigment for Leonardo da Vinci or slitting a quill for Beethoven.

In open source, one thing that makes it even harder to ship great software is bringing together disparate groups of contributors who may have entirely different incentives or missions or philosophies about how to make great work. Working together on a team is such a delicate balance, and even one person rowing in the wrong direction can throw everyone else off.

That’s why periodically I think it is very healthy for open source projects to fork, it allows for people to try out and experiment with different forms of governance, leadership, decision-making, and technical approaches. As I’ve said, forking is beautiful, and forks have my full support and we’ll even link and promote them.

Joost is a self-proclaimed leader in the SEO space, an industry known for making the web better. He asked for and I gave him WordPress marketing leadership responsibility in January 2019 and he stepped down in June of 2019, I think we would both agree in those 5 months he was not effective at leading the marketing team or doing the work himself.

Karim leads a small WordPress agency called Crowd Favorite which counts clients such as Lexus and ABC and employs ~50 people.

Both are men I have shared meals with and consider of the highest integrity. I would trust them to watch any of my 15 godchildren for a day. These are good humans. Now go do the work. It probably won’t happen on day one, but Joost and Karim’s fork, which I’ll call JKPress until they come up with a better name, has a number of ideas they want to try out around governance and architecture. While Joost and Karim will be unilaterally in charge in the beginning, it sounds like they want to set up:

1. A non-profit foundation, with a broad board to control their new project.
2. A website owned by that foundation which hosts community resources like a plugin directory, forums, etc.
3. No more centralized and moderated plugin and theme directories with security guidelines or restrictions are what plugins are allowed to do like putting banners in your admin or gathering data, everything done in a federated/distributed manner.
4. The trademarks for their new project will either be public domain or held by their foundation.
5. “Modernization” of the technology stack, perhaps going a Laravel-like approach or changing how WordPress’ architecture works.
6. Teams and committees to make decisions for everything, so no single person has too much power or authority.

Karim has a similar post. Joost says he has the time and energy to lead:

Now, as core committer Jb Audras (not employed by me or Automattic) points out, within WordPress we have a process in which people earn the right to lead a release:

However in Joost and Karim’s new project, they don’t need to follow our process or put in the hours to prove their worth within the WordPress.org ecosystem, they can just lead by example by shipping code and product to people that they can use, evaluate, and test out for themselves. If they need financial or hosting support is sounds like WP Engine wants to support their fork:

Awesome! (Maybe it’s so successful they rebrand as JK Engine in the future.) WP Engine, with its half a billion in revenue and 1,000+ employees, has more than enough resources to support and maintain a legitimate fork of WordPress. And they are welcome to use all the GPL code myself and others have created to do so, including many parts of WordPress.org that are open source released under the GPL, and Gutenberg which is GPL + MPL.

Joost also is a major investor (owner?) in Post Status (which he tried to sell to me a few months ago, and I declined to buy, perhaps kicking off his consternation with me), so they have a news media site and Slack instance already ready to go. He also is an investor in PatchStack and appears to be trying to create a new business around something called Progress Planner, both of which could be incorporated into the new non-profit project to give them some competitive distinctions from WordPress.

To make this easy and hopefully give this project the push it needs to get off the ground, I’m deactivating the .org accounts of Joost, Karim, Se Reed, Heather Burns, and Morten Rand-Hendriksen. I strongly encourage anyone who wants to try different leadership models or align with WP Engine to join up with their new effort.

In the meantime, on top of my day job running a 1,700+ person company with 25+ products, which I typically work 60-80 hours a week on, I’ll find time on nights and weekends to work on WordPress 6.8 and beyond. Myself and other “non-sponsored” contributors have been doing this a long time and while we may need to reduce scope a bit I think we can put out a solid release in March.

Joost and Karim have a number of bold and interesting ideas, and I’m genuinely curious to see how they work out. The beauty of open source is they can take all of the GPL code in WordPress and ship their vision. You don’t need permission, you can just do things. If they create something that’s awesome, we may even merge it back into WordPress, that ability for code and ideas to freely flow between projects is part of what makes open source such an engine for innovation. I propose that in a year we do a WordPress + JKPress summit, look at what we’ve shipped and learned in the process, which I’d be happy to host and sponsor in NYC next January 2026. The broader community will benefit greatly from this effort, as it’s giving us a true chance to try something different and see how it goes.

Social media has become one of the most effective places for building and shaping personal brands, especially on sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram, which allow you to demonstrate expertise, connect with industry peers, gain knowledge, and grow a following. Besides all of this, your social media presence also often serves as a first impression for potential employers, clients, or collaborators, so it’s very important to have a strategy at hand. 

First, you’ll need to recognize that social media can quickly amplify both positive and negative aspects of your brand. Consistent, thoughtful posting can establish credibility and authority, while missteps can rapidly damage your reputation. Your “digital footprint” – the trail of data you leave online – has a lasting impact on your personal brand.Â?

To help you on this journey, we’ll go through all the aspects of a successful online persona and what you can do to make the most out of your digital presence.

Let’s begin! 

Why consistency across platforms is so important 

Building a strong personal brand relies on maintaining a consistent image across social media platforms. This uniformity helps people recognize and remember you more easily. When your profiles look and feel similar on different sites, you’re reinforcing your brand with each interaction.

Think of it like a jigsaw puzzle. Each social media profile is a piece, and when they fit together, they create a clear picture of who you are and what you stand for. Inconsistencies can muddy the waters and weaken your brand’s impact.

Gravatar is a tool that offers a solution to this challenge. It acts as a central hub for managing your profile information and avatar across multiple platforms. With its “Update Once, Sync Everywhere” feature, you save time and ensure a uniform online presence.

Gravatar integrates with many platforms, including WordPress, GitHub, and Slack. Beyond profile pictures, it syncs your bio, social links, and other profile elements, creating a cohesive online identity that strengthens your personal brand.

How to strategically separate personal and professional profiles 

Keeping your personal and professional online identities separate is a smart move. It helps protect your privacy, maintains professionalism, and allows for more targeted networking. But how do you do this effectively while still maintaining a cohesive personal brand?

Gravatar offers a unique solution by linking identities to email addresses rather than names. This allows you to create and manage multiple profiles easily – one for work, one for personal life, and even one for anonymous use if needed. To set this up, simply use different email addresses for each profile you want to create.

Here are some tips for maintaining consistency between different profiles while catering to different audiences:

• Use similar color schemes or design elements across profiles to maintain brand recognition.
• Adapt your language and content to suit the audience of each profile. Your professional profile might be more formal, while your personal one could be more casual.
• Consider using different profile pictures across your profiles, depending on their intent. For example, a suit for your professional profile, and casual attire for your personal one.

Gravatar’s privacy settings allow you to control what information is visible on each profile. This gives you full control over your data and what you share in different contexts.

How to choose the right platforms for your personal brand

Picking the right social media platforms for your personal brand is like choosing the stage for your performance. You want a venue where your audience gathers and where your talents shine brightest.

Start by understanding what a personal brand really is. It’s the unique mix of skills, experience, and personality you want the world to see. With that in mind, here’s how to choose your platforms:

• Find your audience: Where do the people you want to reach hang out online? If you’re targeting professionals, LinkedIn might be your go-to. For a younger, more visual audience, Instagram or TikTok could be better bets.
• Match your content style: What kind of content do you enjoy creating? If you love writing, X (formerly Twitter) or LinkedIn might suit you. For visual storytellers, Instagram or YouTube could be ideal.
• Align with your goals: What are you trying to achieve? If it’s professional networking, focus on LinkedIn. For thought leadership, X or Bluesky might work well. To showcase your work visually, consider Instagram or Behance.

Popular platforms and their strengths:

Platform	Best for
LinkedIn	Professional networking and B2B connections
X/Twitter	Quick insights and industry conversations
Bluesky	Similar to Twitter, but decentralized
Instagram	Visual content and lifestyle branding
YouTube	In-depth tutorials and vlogs
TikTok	Short-form, entertaining videos

Start with one or two platforms where you can consistently create high-quality content. As you grow more comfortable, you can expand to others. Think quality over quantity: It’s better to excel on fewer platforms than to spread yourself thin across many.

When setting up your profiles, ensure your bio, profile picture, and overall aesthetic align with your personal brand. Use similar usernames and social media handles across platforms when possible to make it easy for people to find you.

And don’t forget to review and update your profiles regularly. Your skills, achievements, and brand messaging will evolve over time, and your online presence should reflect that. 

Understand what success looks like on social media 

Success on social media isn’t just about racking up followers. It’s about achieving your specific goals. Are you aiming to become an influencer, or are you trying to drive conversions for your business? Your strategy should align with these objectives.

If you’re after conversions, focus on engagement rates, click-throughs, and lead generation. For brand awareness, keep an eye on reach, impressions, and share of voice. Remember, vanity metrics like follower count can be misleading.

Quality trumps quantity when it comes to followers. This aligns with Kevin Kelly’s “1,000 True Fans” principle, which suggests that to be successful, you don’t need millions of followers but rather 1,000 true fans who deeply value your work.

These dedicated followers are more likely to engage with your content, share it, and convert into customers or clients. They provide a stable foundation for your personal brand and can be more valuable than a larger group of passive followers.

Deciding on posting frequency and sticking to a schedule

Consistency is key when building your personal brand on social media, and it can only be achieved if you’re realistic about your schedule and the posting frequency that you can maintain long-term without sacrificing content quality. This could range from daily posts to a few times a week, depending on your capacity and the platforms you’re using.

Create a content calendar to plan your posts in advance. This helps ensure a balanced mix of content types and topics. Use scheduling tools to automate your posts, saving time and maintaining consistency.

Experiment with different posting times to find when your audience is most active and engaged. Many social platforms offer insights on optimal posting times for your specific followers.

Keep in mind that it’s better to post high-quality content less frequently than to publish subpar content just to meet a quota. Your followers will appreciate thoughtful, valuable posts more than a constant stream of mediocre updates.

Studying people with similar personal brands

Analyzing successful personal brands in your niche can provide valuable insights. Focus on extracting unique elements from their content strategies, audience engagement tactics, and cross-platform synergies. Use social listening tools and AI-powered analytics to conduct in-depth competitor analysis.

Look for emerging trends and untapped opportunities within your niche by studying patterns across multiple successful brands. The goal isn’t to imitate, but to innovate and adapt these insights to your unique voice and style.

Gravatar’s consolidated profile view can streamline your research process. It allows you to quickly assess an influencer’s digital footprint across various platforms, revealing valuable insights into their overall brand consistency and platform-specific strategies.

An interesting approach is to explore “brand archetypes�. These archetypes, first identified by psychologist Carl Jung, include personas like the Sage (sharing wisdom), the Creator (driving innovation), and the Hero (overcoming challenges). For example, Apple embodies the Creator archetype through innovative design and creative empowerment, while Google represents the Sage through its focus on knowledge and information sharing.

Analyze profiles of successful people in your field to identify which archetype they embody. Look at their content style, messaging patterns, and how they engage with their audience. Don’t just copy them – use these insights to refine your unique voice while staying true to your chosen archetype. Your Gravatar profile can help reinforce this archetype through consistent visual and written elements across platforms.

Mastering the art of collaborations

When thinking about collaborations, many people imagine regular guest posts or social media shoutouts. However, you can go way beyond those. Experiment with innovative formats like multi-platform storytelling campaigns, collaborative product launches, or industry-specific challenges.

When approaching potential collaborators, spend some time on the partnership proposals. Clearly outline mutual benefits and set realistic expectations. After a few tries, start analyzing metrics of successful collaborations to understand their full impact on brand growth and audience engagement.

Gravatar’s verified links feature can help establish credibility when reaching out to potential collaborators. An up-to-date Gravatar profile ensures that collaborators always have access to your latest work and achievements, facilitating more meaningful partnerships.

Consider forming a “collaboration ring” – a strategic alliance of complementary personal brands that regularly support and amplify each other’s content. This approach can create a network effect, expanding your reach and influence exponentially.

Understanding how to use AI strategically in social posting

With time, more and more social media strategies use AI to increase productivity and generate ideas. 

Consider using AI-driven sentiment analysis to fine-tune your messaging. These tools can help you understand how your audience perceives your content, allowing you to adjust your tone and style for maximum impact.

For example, Natural Language Processing (NLP) analyzes audience comments, helping you tailor your content to their interests and concerns. Meanwhile, computer vision AI can optimize your visual content for better engagement.

AI-powered chatbots are also a staple for handling routine follower interactions, freeing up your time for more strategic tasks. And predictive analytics can identify optimal content themes and formats for different platforms and audience segments.

However, it’s crucial to maintain authenticity. Use AI as a tool to augment your creativity, not replace it. The most effective personal brands blend AI-driven insights with a genuine human touch.

When using AI, be transparent with your audience. They’ll appreciate your honesty, and it can even position you as a forward-thinking brand embracing cutting-edge technology.

The importance of a digital footprint management strategy 

Your digital footprint – the trail of data you leave online – is very important in shaping your personal brand. Every post, comment, and like contributes to the digital persona you’re creating. Managing this footprint is essential for maintaining a positive professional image and seizing career opportunities.

• Start by regularly reviewing your online presence across all platforms. Set up Google Alerts for your name to stay informed about what’s being said about you online. 
• Be mindful of what you post and comment on, ensuring it aligns with your personal brand values.
• Create and share content that reinforces your expertise and professional interests. This proactive approach helps shape your digital footprint positively. 
• Utilize privacy settings on social media platforms to control what information is publicly visible.

Remember, your digital footprint has long-term implications. Today’s casual post could impact future opportunities. Strive for a balance between authenticity and professionalism in your online interactions.

How to use social media analytics to your advantage 

Social media analytics are powerful tools that provide insights into your content performance and audience behavior. 

Key metrics to track include:

• Engagement: Likes, comments, shares
• Reach: How many people see your content
• Follower growth: Track growth over time, and take note of anything you post that’s cause a sudden burst in followers.
• Click-through rates on shared links: Which links are getting the most engagement?
• Audience demographics: Age, location, interests

Use these metrics to improve your content strategy. If posts about a certain topic get more engagement, consider creating more content in that area. Most major social media platforms offer built-in analytics tools – familiarize yourself with these.

Set specific goals for your social media presence and use analytics to track progress. This data-driven approach allows you to make informed decisions about your content and posting strategy.

We recommend that you experiment with posting at different times and use analytics to find your audience’s most active hours. 

While numbers are important, they’re not everything. Use analytics as a guide, but don’t let them stifle your creativity or authenticity. The most successful personal brands balance data-driven decisions with genuine, value-driven content.

Elevate your personal brand with Gravatar 

Throughout this guide, we’ve explored numerous strategies to elevate your personal brand on social media. From maintaining consistency across platforms to leveraging AI and analytics, each approach contributes to a stronger, more impactful online presence.

Gravatar is a powerful tool that can be invaluable in building a strong online presence and reinforcing your personal brand. Its most important features include:

• A consistent avatar across thousands of websites
• A centralized profile with your bio and links
• Easy updating: change your Gravatar once, and it updates everywhere

With Gravatar, you save time and ensure consistency in your online presence. It’s particularly useful if you’re active on multiple platforms or managing different online identities.

Taking control of your online image starts with simple steps, and setting up a Gravatar profile is an excellent place to begin. It forms the foundation of a cohesive personal brand across the web, allowing you to present a unified, professional image wherever you engage online.

Like any worthwhile endeavor, your personal brand is an ongoing project. Regularly revisit your strategy, stay open to new tools and trends, and always prioritize providing value to your audience. With persistence and the right tools like Gravatar, you can build a personal brand that truly stands out.

Create your free Gravatar profile today.

WordPress.com launched a new update to Studio this week, and we’re already seeing some buzz.

Studio is our free and open source app for local WordPress development, enabling you to spin up unlimited WordPress sites on your personal computer.

Through its newest feature, Studio Sync, you have complete freedom to:

• Connect your Studio site to and from aÂ?WordPress.comÂ?production or staging site, included for free inÂ?Business and Commerce hosting plans.
• Push and pull changes as a team by connecting a local Studio site to a sharedÂ?WordPress.comÂ?site.
• Synchronize your local and hosted sites at any time with one click.

Studio is an excellent tool to have in your development arsenal, and you can download it for free, explore the docs, and become a contributor on GitHub.

Oliver Sild, CEO of Patchstack, shared on X  an email he received from WordCamp Central explaining why Patchstack’s application to sponsor WordCamp Europe 2025 was rejected.

The email, written by Felipe Santos, detailed a shift in the sponsorship process. It stated that “the Community team is transitioning from a first-come, first-served model to a new approach. While the sponsorship process will remain familiar, we are placing greater emphasis on contributions and the relationships companies maintain with the WordPress project. We recognize that this shift may feel frustrating, but sponsoring WordCamps is a privilege, and we aim to increase expectations in this area moving forward.�

Santos suggested that Patchstack pledge to Five for the Future as it “would be an excellent way to demonstrate commitment and build trust within the community.� He added that they will re-evaluate Patchstack’s eligibility “once significant contributions have been established.�

Sild countered that “the tier we applied to still has 6 spots open. I know companies who were accepted for sponsorship after we were rejected who also don’t have five for the future.â€�

Patchstack is a leading name in WordPress security with a mission to make open-source safer and raised $5 million in its Series A funding round last year.  They published 76% of all known WordPress-related security vulnerabilities and became the largest CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) Naming Authority by volume in 2023. Their Zero-Day Bug Bounty Program awarded the highest bounty in WordPress history – $14,400- to John Blackbourn, who exposed a critical vulnerability in the LiteSpeed Cache plugin last month.

Sild also shared that Patchstack contributed to Five for the Future till the person who pledged the hours via Patchstack left the company. Sild also highlighted Patchstack’s other contributions – reporting vulnerabilities in plugins and ensuring the security of the ecosystem, and running a managed VDP platform built in collaboration with the European Union. 

He continued, “Over 50% of all new security vulnerability disclosures in the WordPress ecosystem were found & reported by our community of security researchers. All of the validating, triaging and coordination was done by our team for the WordPress ecosystem for free. That’s 4566 individual vulnerabilities in 2024 alone.â€�

Interestingly, there is nothing about contributing to the Five for the Future mentioned in the WordCamp Sponsorship Handbook, WordCamp Sponsorship Agreement or WordCamp Europe’s Call for Sponsors page. Sponsorship packages are still open for the 2025 event at the time of publishing this article.

Sild’s post sparked widespread criticism about the rejection and the community soon came out to support Sild. Simon Harper, owner of SRH Design shared, “It is ridiculous to think that Oliver, the Patchstack team and volunteers have “not contributed enough” to WordPress.

Taco Verdo of Emilia Capital was disappointed, “Sometimes I really don’t understand what we’re doing in the WordPress community team… :(“

Francesca Marano,  Head of Partnership at Patchstack, dubbed it “Another sad day open sourceâ€�. She shared, “As someone who was active for a long time in the community team and was around when the Five for the Future program was created, I am surprised and saddened by a few things: 1. Not having the change publicly discussed in the community make blog. 2. Not having the criteria added to the sponsorship page (Still shows only GPL) 3. Relying on FFtF data, which has been unreliable since the beginning. I was still active in the team when we started discussing how to improve the program,â€�

Todd E Jones, founder of Copyflight, tweeted, “Right now I fail to see how A8 has real concerns for security or accessibility. Dismissive of experts in both areas.â€�  Web developer Robert DeVore also shared his thoughts, “Without programs like Patchstack, the WordPress ecosystem would be a wasteland (worse than it is now). Anybody who doesn’t see that is a blind idiot.â€�

Co-founder of Nevma, Takis Bouyouris, had this to say: “The #WordPress Community needs to stop being ridiculed like this. Once we had hard and fair rules in @WCEurope. Observe the GPL, observe the CoC. Now contributing to the community becomes some convoluted madness where you cannot contribute unless you contribute enough based on a vague and untrustworthy metrics.�

WPTuts tweeted, “Sadly, this seems indicative of WordPress (as a project/company) at the moment: hell-bent on alienating the community and contributors who have made WordPress what it is today and are a significant reason for its success and popularity. Unless you tick those boxes, you’re out!â€�

Matt Mullenweg termed the email “crappyâ€� and promised to look into it. He commented, “I agree that’s a crappy email to get, and it’s also not 100% accurate. Thanks for raising this issue, I’ll look into it. Thank you for all you and your colleagues do trying to make WordPress and its plugins and themes better.â€�

WordCamp Europe has faced criticism in the past for diversity issues in speaker lineups and organizing teams, but this marks the first major controversy regarding sponsorships. The WordCamp Europe Organizing Team shared that they have no information on this as WordCamp Central handles the sponsorship application processing.

(I’m waiting to hear from the Patchstack team and WordCamp Central and will update their responses).

Update: Oliver Sild expressed disappointment, stating: “Right now, the last thing we’ve been told is that we’re not eligible to sponsor any WordPress events. Honestly, it’s a pity, because for us WordCamp EU has been our “home baseâ€� and it has been a our annual tradition for years to bring the entire team together. We had 20 people in Torino for a full week. We had to change the plans for this year and we’ll organise this year gathering elsewhere – so our presence at WCEU will definitely be smaller. Our team is involved with organising WordCamps in Poland, Lithuania, and across Europe – I’m sure they’ll continue to contribute. We have been also reached out by so many people who hope we’ll organise a side-event for WCEU or even start a new developer focused conference. We are seriously thinking about both.”

Oliver also mentioned learning that some companies were selected to sponsor WordCamps despite not contributing to the Five for the Future initiative. Despite Patchstack’s direct inquiries, they received no further clarification or explanation about the decision to reject them or the comment from Matt about the email not being “100% accurate.â€�

Patchstack also signed up for Five for the Future. They will Â?sponsorÂ?3Â?contributorsÂ?for a total ofÂ?4Â?hoursÂ?per week acrossÂ?Community, Documentation, Meta and Training teams.

Full Text of the Email Received by Oliver Sild & Team: “Hi Francesca and Oliver, Thank you for your patience as we continue to refine our approach to WordPress event sponsorships. I understand your interest in learning more about the process and what steps might strengthen future sponsorship opportunities. To provide some context, the Community team is transitioning from a first-come, first-served model to a new approach. While the sponsorship process will remain familiar, we are placing greater emphasis on contributions and the relationships companies maintain with the WordPress project. We recognize that this shift may feel frustrating, but sponsoring WordCamps is a privilege, and we aim to increase expectations in this area moving forward. For instance, I noticed that Patchstack has not yet made a pledge to Five for the Future, a program that enables companies to contribute to the WordPress project through dedicated volunteer hours. Taking this step would be an excellent way to demonstrate commitment and build trust within the community. WordPress thrives because of its contributors and your participation would make a meaningful impact. Once significant contributions have been established, we are happy to re-evaluate your eligibility for financial sponsorship of WordPress events. Thank you for your continued interest in supporting the WordPress community. If you have any further questions or need assistance with the next steps, please don’t hesitate to reach out. I hope that helps and Happy New Year! — Felipe Santos support@wordcamp.org”

WordPress.com has introduced Studio Sync, a new feature for its local development app, Studio. Launched last year as a free, open-source tool for Mac and Windows users, Studio now integrates seamlessly with WordPress.com through this update.

Studio Sync allows developers to effortlessly synchronize local, staging, and live environments with just a few clicks, bridging the gap between local development and live site hosting. The feature also supports team collaboration, enabling multiple developers to connect their local Studio sites to a shared WordPress.com site. 

Currently Studio Sync is available only to users with WordPress.com Business or Commerce plan. Interested users can check the documentation to learn more about this feature.Â?

After releasing Studio, WordPress.com had released the Studio Assistant – a multilingual, AI-powered chatbot that simplifies development tasks through an intuitive chat interface.

Transcript

On the podcast today we have Elena Brescacin.

Elena is an accessibility consultant from Italy who has been blind since birth, and working online since 2000 with Tangity Design, a part of NTT Data Company. Her journey with WordPress began in 2021, but she has been aware of it since 2003. A computer geek, Elena enjoys finding solutions to everyday challenges through technology.

Elena is here to discuss the significant accessibility advancements and challenges within WordPress, especially with the transition from the Classic Editor to the Block Editor. She shares how Full Site Editing has empowered her to manage most of her site content and structure without needing constant visual assistance, despite some areas needing further improvement.

We talk about her experiences navigating the internet using screen reader software, the importance of adhering to HTML semantics for accessibility, and her involvement in the WordPress community, including her contributions to the Italian Polyglots and speaking at WordPress events.

Elena also reflects on the evolution of the internet, personal experiences with various web accessibility tools, and her advocacy work in digital spaces. We get into real-world challenges, such as inaccessible event venues, and the advantages of online events for better accessibility.

Elena shares her frustrations and triumphs in web accessibility, her insights on the impact of proper semantic website design, and her continued efforts to raise awareness and support a more inclusive internet.

If you’re curious about web accessibility, particularly how WordPress is used to create content, this episode is for you.

Useful links

Elena’s Mastodon

Elena on LinkedIn

 Tangity Design

Share to fight prejudice, Elena on TEDxAssisi

Same Editor, Same Language: How Gutenberg’s Accessibility Enhances Creativity and Inclusion at WordPress Accessibility Day 2024

BlIND – Blogging e indipendenza: WordPress senza vedere at WordCamp Verona 2023

WordPress a dieci dita: creare un sito con la sola tastiera at WordCamp Italia 2021

Interview with Elena Brescacin at WordPress Core Days, Roma 2024

JAWS (screen reader)

 Braille Display

NonVisual Desktop Access

Voiceover for Mac

Elena’s Plus Brothers

Defeating silence and stigma with WordPress / Sconfiggere silenzio e stigma con WordPress

How Elena Brescacin Uses ally to Break HIV Stigma and Champion Accessibility

The Themes and Hosting teams has unveiled their representatives for 2025.Â?

Themes Team Reps 

In November, the Themes Team announced their search for community members familiar with WordPress theme development to serve as representatives for 2025. The call for nominations was open to everyone, allowing individuals to nominate themselves or others.

Interestingly, several comments on the announcement post suggested re-nominating the 2024 representatives. After consulting with current and former team representatives, the Themes Team decided to retain the existing team reps for another term:

• Alexandru Cosmin from Romania is sponsored by Extend Themes as a part-time reviewer. He released his first WordPress theme in 2008, and since then, has played diverse roles—serving as a reviewer, developer, and team representative.
• Ganga Kafle from Nepal is a full-time WordPress contributor sponsored by Rank Math. Active in the community since 2012, he is an organizer for WordCamp Asia 2025 and a moderator for WordPress-related podcasts like Go With WP.
• Shiva Shanker Bhatta from Nepal is the founder/CEO of AF Themes. With over a decade of experience in WordPress, he focuses on themes, plugins, and community contributions.

In 2024, the Themes Team closed a total of 39,796 tickets, with Alexandru Cosmin, Ganga Kafle, and Shiva Shanker Bhatta collectively handling 1,708 reviews. Ganga Kafle and Alexandru Cosmin were the top reviewers last year.

Hosting Team Reps

After a Call for Nominations, four candidates were proposed for the Hosting Team Rep positions: Matthias Pfefferle, Javier Casares, Zunaid Amin, and Lucas Radke. However, Matthias and Javier declined the opportunity. Following an anonymous survey, the team announced the following representatives for 2025:

• Zunaid Amin from Bangladesh is joining as a new Hosting Team Rep. He is a WordPress Engineer at Rocket.Net.
• Lucas Radke from Germany is the Product Manager at WordPress VIP. He is continuing as Hosting Team Rep.

An author box in WordPress might seem like a simple addition to any blog, but it’s actually one of the most important elements. Showing author credentials builds content authority – something that’s becoming increasingly vital in an era of AI-generated content and information overload. When readers can verify the expertise and background of the person behind an article, they’re more likely to trust and engage with the content.

WordPress includes basic author bio functionality, but the default options often fall short when trying to showcase author credentials and links effectively. If you want to connect with your audience, you need something that does more than just display a name and photo.

To help you with that, we’ll show how to create dynamic, professionally styled author boxes using the free Gravatar Enhanced plugin, helping you transform basic author information into compelling author profiles that update automatically.

Why would you want to customize your WordPress author box?

The internet is a place where literally anyone and anything can post content, humans and bots alike. But that doesn’t mean that they are experts in their field or that the posted piece is something users can trust. 

A well-designed author box with verified links does just that – it shows the face behind the words and puts your content above the millions of spammers and bots, building trust and showcasing expertise. 

Besides that, Google and other search engines look for signals that demonstrate Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) when ranking content. An author box with verified credentials, professional links, and relevant expertise helps strengthen these signals. For example, if you’re writing about medical topics, displaying your medical credentials and links to professional profiles helps validate your authority on the subject.

Okay, but what if you have a site with multiple authors? Well, it becomes even more complicated. Without additional tools, you’d have to create separate WordPress profiles for each author and add their credentials to the post. A better alternative is to find a profile management tool that lets you pull author information from a central database and updates automatically as their profiles update (hint: It’s Gravatar!)

Finally, author boxes also improve reader engagement. When readers can verify who’s writing the content and see the author’s expertise, they’re more likely to trust and engage with the material. Plus, social proof through professional network links and credentials helps establish a stronger connection with your audience.

Default customization options for author boxes in WordPress

WordPress comes with basic author box functionality, but its default options can feel limiting. By default, each author gets two main elements: a Gravatar-powered profile picture and a biographical text field found in the Users section of the WordPress dashboard.

Getting your author box to look exactly how you want proves challenging with these basic tools. The visual styling depends entirely on your active WordPress theme, which means changing how it looks often requires diving into template files and custom CSS. You can change the background color and the padding of the box, but that’s pretty much it, 

Any customizations made through template files must be implemented through a child theme to prevent them from disappearing during theme updates. This creates an ongoing maintenance burden, especially for multi-author sites that need consistent styling across different contributors.

The biographical text field also has limitations. Authors can’t easily add social media links, credentials, or other dynamic content that might change over time. Each update requires logging into WordPress and manually editing the bio text – a time-consuming process when managing multiple authors.

These restrictions often push site owners to look for better solutions that don’t require constant maintenance or coding knowledge. The need for more flexibility in design and easier profile management has led to the development of tools that expand on WordPress’s built-in author box capabilities.

Gravatar Enhanced: The best way to customize your author box in WordPress

The Gravatar Enhanced plugin rethinks how author boxes work in WordPress. At its core, the plugin’s Profile Block pulls information directly from Gravatar profiles, offering a fresh approach to displaying author information that’s both dynamic and easy to manage.

The Profile Block stands out by eliminating the need for manual updates. Authors can modify their profiles once at Gravatar.com, and these changes automatically appear across every site using the block. This centralized management saves significant time, especially for authors who contribute to multiple WordPress sites.

For guest authors, the process becomes remarkably simple. Instead of creating WordPress user accounts, site owners just add the Profile Block and enter the author’s email address. 

The block automatically fetches and displays their Gravatar profile information, including professional credentials, social media links, and biographical details.

Customization options are extensive but user-friendly. Through the block settings panel, you can:

• Adjust the background color to match your site’s design.
• Modify padding and spacing for better visual balance.
• Choose which profile elements to display.
• Customize border styles and box shadows.
• Set the width and alignment.

All these features integrate smoothly with WordPress’s block editor, making it simple to add author boxes to any post, page, or custom post type. The block inherits your theme’s typography settings by default, ensuring a consistent look across your site. If you want, you could also further customize it through CSS, giving you even more flexibility in how they look on the front end. For example, you could add border animations on hover or put semi-transparent overlays for a more interesting design. 

As you can see, unlike traditional author boxes that display basic information, the Profile Block acts as a verified digital business card – readers know they’re seeing authentic, current author information pulled directly from the author’s Gravatar profile.

How to set up your customized author box with Gravatar Enhanced 

Getting started with a more powerful author box takes just a few simple steps. First, create a Gravatar account using your WordPress email address – this forms the foundation of your enhanced author profiles.

Setting up your Gravatar profile is straightforward:

• Upload a professional photo for your avatar.

• Add a detailed bio highlighting your expertise.

• Include relevant social media profiles and professional links.

• Add any certifications or credentials that build trust – either through custom links or photos. 

Next, install the Gravatar Enhanced plugin on your WordPress site. 

Once activated, you’ll find the Profile Block ready to use in the block editor. Add it to your single post template or anywhere you want author information to appear, input the author’s email connected to their Gravatar profile, and the plugin will automatically generate the profile block using their profile information.

Because the Gravatar profile is dynamic, every single change will be immediately updated on the block as well. No need to juggle multiple author bios or worry about outdated information.

For multi-author sites, simply repeat the process for each contributor. They’ll control their own profiles through Gravatar.com while you maintain a consistent, professional look across all author boxes on your site.

Transform your WordPress author boxes with Gravatar Enhanced

Moving beyond WordPress’s basic author box functionality opens up new possibilities for showcasing writer expertise and building trust. The Gravatar Enhanced plugin replaces manual profile management with automatic, real-time updates while adding excellent customization options and privacy protections.

Instead of wrestling with template files or juggling multiple author accounts, you get a streamlined system where authors manage their own profiles. 

Ready to upgrade your author boxes? Get started with Gravatar Enhanced today and give your content the professional polish it deserves.

As we kick off 2025, we are on the cusp of Do the Woo, version 5.0 and our 7th Anniversary.

LinkedIn empowers agencies and founders to connect and grow by sharing authentic content, engaging actively, and building meaningful relationships.

Automattician Alex Shiels of the Meta team has announced the resumption of WordPress.org services after the holiday break of two weeks. Users can now register new accounts, submit plugins, themes, and photos, and review plugins once again.

Last month, Matt Mullenweg declared WordPress.org’s first-ever holiday break. He said, “In order to give myself and the many tired volunteers around WordPress.org a break for the holidays, we’re going to be pausing a few of the free services currently offered.â€� 

Initially, WP Engine was the sole exception, retaining full access to WordPress.org. Later, user registrations were reopened to support WordCamps following a ticket raised by Joost de Valk of Emilia Capital on WordPress GitHub. The ticket highlighted that a WP.org account is required to purchase WordCamp tickets.

Matt did not share a specific date for resuming the services, stating, “I hope to find the time, energy, and money to reopen all of this sometime in the new year.�

To create a new account, users must provide their email address and a username. The registration form includes three checkboxes: confirming acceptance of the Privacy Policy (mandatory), subscribing to the WordPress Announcements mailing list, and the infamous pineapple pizza. Only accepting the Privacy Policy is required to proceed.

Nick Hamze has called for making WordPress themes exciting and the web weird again. “WordPress desperately needs your creativity, your weird ideas, your willingness to break the visual rules. The future of the web shouldn’t be a monochrome landscape of identical layouts.�, he said.

He believes there are plenty of good themes in the Repository but no great themes with “designs that break the mold and spark excitement.â€� 

We need more themes that make people say “Wow!� or “That’s different!� rather than “That’s clean and professional.� The web needs more personality, more risk-taking, more fun.

According to him, great themes should:

• Have a distinct point of view
• Embrace specific aesthetics boldly
• Design for specific use cases
• Break some rules thoughtfully

Hamze’s call comes amid growing uncertainty about the future of WordPress themes. While the repository now hosts over 13,000 free themes, recent community discussions have often cast a grim outlook.Some of the discussions/articles published on the fate of themes include:

• The Theme Is Dead, Long Live the Theme
• WordPress Themes Are Dead
• The End of WordPress Themes is in Sight
• Will Page Builders & Full Site Editing Be the Death of WordPress Themes?
• Is WordPress Theme Business Dead?
• WordPress Themes Are Dead. Long Live WordPress Themes!

Vova Feldman of Freemius too recently highlighted the stagnation in the WordPress theme market: “The WordPress Theme Market is in big trouble! Over the past six years, the annual single-site pricing for themes has shown little to no growth. In fact, the average price has decreased by 9%, dropping from $55.78 in 2019 to $50.75 in 2024.�

Many will remember the excitement generated by the Ollie theme, but it faced pushback from the Theme Review team. Though Matt Mullenweg, Josepha Haden Chomphosy and Justin Tadlock supported the theme, in the end, it was featured on the repository only after dropping its innovative onboarding features.

Accessibility Challenges

Amber Hinds, CEO of Equalize Digital (the team behind the Equalize DigitalÂ? Accessibility Checker plugin) noticed some accessibility issues with Hamze’s post and she drew attention to them. She said, “WordPress themes need more #a11y and expected interfaces that convert. Not “weird” designs that confuse people or kill time on site.â€�

Matt Mullenweg joined the conversation and replied, “You’re tipping into net negative contribution territory. Like at what point do you say a Rothko painting isn’t high contrast enough?�

However, this sparked backlash. Katie Keith of Barn2Plugins questioned, “Why would the leader of the WordPress project say something so disrespectful to one of the community’s top accessibility experts simply for highlighting some accessibility issues? THAT is tipping into net negative contribution territory.�

WordPress developer Earle Davies also shared his thoughts, “Wonder why accessibility in WordPress sucks? When experts highlight accessibility flaws, it’s considered a net negative contribution by the leader of the project. No surprise a8c employees argue why they choose design >accessibility. WP/GB accessibility sucks. Indisputable fact.�

Accessibility Expert Alex Stine tweeted, “Matt has always taken this stand-offish approach to accessibility and I quit trying to figure out why.â€� He also said, “Accessibility and inclusion are important. Sure, themes should be eye popping fun. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be accessible too.â€�

Accessibility Advocate Anne Bovelett added, “If a theme is not accessible by contrast, it may look like a Porsche Carrera to the site owner and a good part of the visitors, but it will be a Porsche with windows that can’t be seen through from inside nor outside with doorknobs that won’t budge, to a large percentage of visitors.â€� She also shared her YouTube video showing examples of how many people experience the web and suggested organizing Design Days like Core Days. 

Designer Brian Gardner had this to say: ” I’m all for creative WordPress themes—whether bold and quirky or plain but practical. As far as I’m concerned, they should ALL be accessible. At a bare minimum, every theme should pass basic color contrast requirements.”

“Rothko should be fine as long as no one needs to access the painting to order medical supplies or pay their water bills. Although, a text/audio alternative to the painting is very beneficial for those with low or no vision.�, tweeted Steve Jones, Co-Owner and CTO at Equalize Digital.

Jenni McKinnon, CEO of WP Pros(e) asked, “If the Rothko painting was on a website, then wouldn’t the WCAG point to what is (or isn’t) “high contrast enough?”â€� while Courtney Robertson of GoDaddy emphasised: “Democratizing publishing is for all. WordPress must ensure no one is excluded from creating or consuming content.â€�

Kevin Geary of Digital Gravy also does not support Nick Hamze. He said, “WP “themes” are dead. It’s a dead concept. If you don’t realize this, you’re completely out of touch with how sites are built and managed. It’s especially antithetical to the fundamentals of a block editor….WP needs actual leadership and real improvements to the software. We’d all LOVE a “sanitized and professional” wp-admin right about now. “Weird themes,” not so much.”

According to Carolina Nymark of Yoast (former team representative for the Themes Team), “Themes can be art and experimental and still be accessible and high quality. You just have to decide that is what you want to build.� And for WordPress developer Brian Coords, “True creativity often thrives within constraints. Weird for weirdness sake is not art or self-expression. Creating something meaningful that inspires a shared experience between people (regardless of how they navigate the web) should be the ideal.�

Discussions are still going on about accessibility. Meanwhile, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) fined AI accessibility startup accessiBe to pay $1M for misleading advertising.Â?

The modern web has gradually shifted from a vibrant tapestry of personal expression to a landscape of identical designs, where millions of websites share not just similar structures, but identical visual language, spacing, and interaction patterns. As we collectively gravitate toward the same “provenâ€� layouts and “conversion-optimizedâ€� designs, we’re not just losing visual diversity – we’re ceding control over how we present ourselves to the world. This matters because genuine self-expression online isn’t just about aesthetics – it’s about maintaining spaces where authentic voices can flourish. 

When every blog has the same hero section, when every portfolio follows the same grid, when every restaurant site looks interchangeable, we create an echo chamber of sameness. The cost isn’t just visual monotony – it’s the slow erosion of the web’s ability to surprise, delight, and showcase truly individual perspectives. WordPress, with its emphasis on complete ownership and control, offers an opportunity to break free from this convergence of design, allowing creators to build digital spaces that truly reflect their unique voice and vision.

Think of WordPress themes like album covers. They should have personality and create an immediate visual impact. The web has become too sanitized, with everyone chasing the same minimal, “professional� look.

Great themes should:

• Have a strong point of view – like how Kubrick (the classic WordPress theme) defined an era with its distinctive header gradient. Don’t try to be everything to everyone.
• Embrace specific aesthetics boldly – whether that’s brutalist design, pixel art, hand-drawn elements, or distinctive typography. Create themes that excite people rather than just working for everyone.
• Design for specific use cases – like a theme for photographers that’s all about full-bleed images or a theme for writers that treats typography as art or a theme for musicians that feels like an album cover.
• Break some rules thoughtfully – because not every theme needs a hamburger menu. Not every theme needs to be mobile-first. Sometimes constraints create character.

We need more themes that make people say “Wow!� or “That’s different!� rather than “That’s clean and professional.� The web needs more personality, more risk-taking, more fun.

After spending countless hours digging through the WordPress theme repository, searching for designs that break the mold and spark excitement, I came up nearly empty-handed. Don’t get me wrong – there are plenty of well-built themes out there. But where’s the daring? The personality? The unexpected?

If you’ve got a wild theme idea burning in your mind – that portfolio theme that looks like a vintage trading card collection, that blog theme inspired by zine culture, that restaurant theme that feels like a hand-drawn menu – now’s the time to build it. WordPress desperately needs your creativity, your weird ideas, your willingness to break the visual rules. The future of the web shouldn’t be a monochrome landscape of identical layouts. Let’s make WordPress themes exciting again. Let’s make the web weird again.

The Indian WordPress community is set for an exciting start to 2025, with three WordCamps scheduled for January, as per WordCamp Central. India has a thriving WordPress community and  according to the WordPress Meetup global trends report (January 2023 to June 2024), published by the Community Team, Indian cities Ahmedabad and Mumbai recorded the highest engagement for in-person events.

WordCamp Ahmedabad

The fifth edition of WordCamp Ahmedabad will take place on January 3 and 4, 2025, at the AUDA Auditorium in Shela, Gujarat. The first day is dedicated to WordPress contribution and Showcase while the schedule for the second day features a single track of sessions, covering topics such as WordPress contributions, digital marketing, accessibility, and AI.

The event’s mascot, Wapuu, is inspired by Gujarat’s International Kite Festival—Uttarayan—symbolizing the limitless possibilities of WordPress. Adding to the excitement, the organizers have announced a Social Media Contest with prizes for the best photo, reel, and group selfie, encouraging attendees to share their experience creatively.

WordCamp Kolhapur

The first edition of WordCamp Kolhapur is scheduled for January 11 and 12, 2025, at D.Y. Patil School of Engineering and Management, Kasaba Bawada, Maharashtra. As a debut event, it has generated significant interest.

A few sponsorship slots, including Silver, Bronze, and Micro levels, are still open, and limited no-swag tickets are available for those interested in attending.

WordCamp Kolkata

WordCamp Kolkata will return for its third edition on January 18, 2025, at Viveka Tirtha, West Bengal. Previously held in 2019 and 2022, this edition promises an enriching experience.

The event will feature sessions on eCommerce, translation, accessibility, and design, along with workshops on Gutenberg, WP-CLI, headless WordPress, and core contributions, conducted across two tracks.

The event is still accepting Sponsors and Media Partners.

With these three events on the calendar, January 2025 promises to be a remarkable month for the WordPress community in India.

Coming from the girl with the bag: Not here to code. 

The growth and success I have found in my 15 years as a marketing professional has absolutely been impacted by WordPress, more specifically, the WordPress community. 

10 years ago I was working in a corporate marketing environment and I was really coming into myself as a professional. I was figuring out how to batch work and align strategic planning with task blocking while collaborating with sales teams in the field.

I was operating a $750k budget in addition to the $1.5M budget that I co-operated with sales and product dev, and it was amazing what I could do with those resources. Our regional division was leading the company in pre-sales, lead conversion rates, engagement across our digital platforms and I was setting a new bar for marketing divisions across the country. I was helping to drive tens of millions of dollars into our pipeline.

Then I got fired.

Dealing With The Yuck

Why? I became a whistleblower against some good-ol-boy business practices which interfered with  my ability to be *absolutely* amazing instead of regular amazing. The VP of Sales had a suspicious relationship with one of our marketing vendors, and despite me finding a better solution for more than half the price, I was asked to “drop itâ€� and to leave the vendor securely in our budget (full story available over wine any time if I see you irl). 

Long story short, I was eventually dismissed on the spot, I received a severance package, and I resolved to never let others’ lack of integrity compromise my work again. I used those funds as fuel and started MKConsulting.

What does this have to do with WordPress or the WordPress community?

Nothing, yet.

Finding Something New

Honestly at this point in my marketing career I had actively worked to remove websites from WordPress in a number of jobs I had because it was clunky and ugly, and I didn’t get it.  I had spent 6 years dealing with WP off and on and never even knew the community existed.

I spent the next two years learning how to be a business owner and how to run a marketing agency. Or was I just freelancing? I wasn’t really sure. I got my MBA so I could learn more about entire business operating systems and to break up the exclusive sales/marketing/user lens I had leveraged to date. I spoke at local events, I joined clubs, the hustle was real. 

I found my way into start-ups, as they were a great place for me to really showcase my market research abilities, strategic go to market positioning skills, and love for brand building. 

One particular startup led me to a connection that brought me my first long term retainer customer – a WordPress hosting company. That startup, and the connections that came from it, are still driving major work, joy, and passion for me, bittersweetly and tragically fracturing into different aspects of my life.

Finding WordPress

I followed one of those fellow executives for work, as he was now the CEO of my new client, and he invited me to this thing called a Word Camp. 

I got to travel to Seattle for my first time – and my life changed forever. Bridget Willard took me on an introduction tour at the speaker/sponsor pre dinner and it was so different from anything else I had experienced in my corporate marketing career. 

After the initial shock to my system wore off caused by the sheer number of t-shirts, and the utmost display of casual community I had ever witnessed at a conference (by then I had attended dozens of tech conferences and other corporate industry events), there was something special about it – it was real. These were real humans that cared about being successful in more than one way. And honestly, it really took me getting to my first WCUS before it all really clicked for me. 

For the first time in my career I found an intersection of desire for business growth AND ethical display of integrity and sustainable values, seamlessly co-existing. 

The people were warm and welcoming and cared about my human plight more than my value as a productive professional. 

This was confusing for me. As a people pleasing perfectionist that adorned my self worth with my ability to make money for others and “do a good job� was inherently all I had ever known as an adult, and in many ways as a kid too.

A Time Of Growth

This community opened my eyes to ask questions like, who is my whole person, beyond being good at marketing and business growth strategies? 

The authentic and raw relationships I encountered within the WordPress community showed me that choosing between good business and being a good human could sustainably co habitate. There are good people doing good business, and my corporate experience had not really shown me that side of what is economically sustainable. There was a thirst to do things the right way. 

I began aligning with clients and teams who shared my values, opening doors to remote work and global collaboration.

The access to remote work, remote culture, and the discovery of a global community that shared these values, promoting work life balance as well as viable technology products and services became key skills beyond marketing that I was able to foster and that would help me propel myself for years to come. 

The combination of being good at my job within the reliable ecosystem of web tech provided stability to continue to work in the remote world.

Ultimately this safety gave me the freedom to begin to reconciling my own growth as a person and my growth as a professional, beyond the growth in pipelines for my clients.

When COVID-19 hit, my experience in remote work positioned me uniquely. I was able to niche myself as one of few marketers in the world operating in the US that could go beyond successfully executing smart marketing campaigns in a remote environment – but I could build remote culture, manage global asynchronous teams and empower dozens of others to be successful at marketing, sales, customer support, account management and talent acquisition too. 

I leveraged this to diversify beyond web tech clients and found bio tech, climate tech, and ag tech companies to even further align my passions with my skills and my conscience as an ethical, sustainable marketer. 

My underlying passions for teaching and sharing my expertise continued to serve me as I became a Fractional CMO. I was an early adopter of this framework of employment and the balance it gave me pushed me more and more into my own personal growth.

The Future

About 3 years ago the work-life balance lines blurred further as I got better at managing my time, my passions, my teams, expertise and work product. I was finally ready to grow up as a marketing agency owner. I sunset MKConsulting, and Frameworks MKTG entered the market. We broker marketing, sales, and growth talent off and on as needed for one person marketing departments around the world. 

Through it all, I’ve had my heart broken while working with climate tech and bio tech clients. But web tech has been a great home to grow in, and that is largely because the WordPress community connecting me to amazing humans, all around the world.

I’m more confident than ever that showing up as my fully authentic self is what keeps me happy. When I can keep my family, friends, clients, teammates, and investors happy we all stay much more aligned to thrive. Thriving is a natural byproduct when I get to be real, and to maintain my stress levels and just do what I do.  

Coming to this clear view of what my professional timeline can be is once again, life changing.

I will not waste the opportunities afforded to me, I am determined to become the best version of my whole human self. I’m determined to continue being a part of proving how sustainable business growth is possible and reliable.

So thank you, WordPress community.  You are the fertile soil in which I got to grow. 

Love yall. See ya in Slack.
Or maybe another WC somewhere.
Or maybe come visit me in Texas. 

The post Growing Up in WordPress appeared first on HeroPress.

The WordPress Community Team has proposed hosting women-centric events on International Women’s Day through local WordPress communities to celebrate, empower, and inspire women. These events are envisioned as platforms where women can connect, share experiences, and enhance their skills in an inclusive and supportive environment.

These events could take various forms, such as networking sessions, workshops, talks, learning activities, or mentorship opportunities. Local communities interested in organizing such events can apply through the  Creative WordPress Events Form. Approved communities will receive a dedicated website and a stipend of $100 – $500 USD to support the event.

The team is also seeking volunteer designers to create a banner and logo for the event, as well as a sticker sheet featuring female Wapuu designs.

Pooja Derashri shared the vision of the team regarding this event: “By organizing women-centric WordPress events on International Women’s Day, we can spark meaningful conversations and encourage more women to join, lead, and contribute to WordPress. It’s an opportunity to strengthen our community and amplify women’s voices in open source.�

The WordPress community has a history of organizing women-only events/initiatives. Notably, WordPress 6.4 and WordPress 5.6 were led by teams composed of women and underrepresented gender groups.

Chris Christoff of the Plugins Team has published the roadmap of Phase 2 of the Plugin Check plugin. According to the statistics shared at this year’s State of the Word, 41% fewer issues were reported per approved plugin after launching the Plugin Check tool, enabling the team to approve 138% more plugins each week and significantly reducing the review queue length. 

In the words of David Perez, “Plugin Check is a tool for testing whether your plugin meets the required standards for the WordPress.org plugin directory. With this plugin, you will be able to run most of the checks used for new submissions and check if your plugin meets the requirements.�

David Perez also shared that the Plugin Check plugin significantly reduced the time for reviews, bringing the average wait time down from 37 weeks to 9 weeks,Â?even as plugin submissions have almost doubled.

In Phase 1, Plugin Check was released to the community as a plugin available through WordPress.org. It currently has 2000+ Active installations. In October this year, it became a requirement for new plugin submissions to the Plugin Directory and for relisting plugins that were removed due to security issues.

Phase 2 of Plugin Check will expand its coverage to include updates made by plugin authors to plugins already listed in the Directory. Planned improvements for the second phase include enhanced documentation, more intuitive messaging, a revamped UI, conditional rule application, the addition of an experimental checks feature, easier output customization for better integration, and retroactive directory integration.

The Plugins Team revealed that the Plugin Check project also aims to help plugin authors keep up with the latest best practices by allowing them to quickly scan their plugins for performance improvements and best practice opportunities. The PCP team will also collaborate with other teams to support plugin authors.

Currently, Plugin Check evaluates plugins based on best practices across five categories: General, Plugin Repo, Security, Performance, and Accessibility. The Plugin Team encourages all plugin authors to integrate Plugin Check into their development workflows. 

Specific rollout timelines and processes for Phase 2 will be shared in a future Make Plugins post as its release approaches. Those interested in contributing to the plugin can do so on its GitHub repository.

Details on the specific timeline and processes for Phase 2 will be shared in an upcoming ‘Make Plugins’ post as the release date approaches. Those interested in contributing to the project can do so through its GitHub repository.

Also check out Pascal Birchler’s post on Why you should start using Plugin Check.

James Kemp, Core Product Manager at Woo, recently shared updates and plans for the platform during a Q&A episode on Woo ProductChat. His insights shed light on the current direction of WooCommerce and its commitment to empowering both merchants and developers. Integrating Premium Extensions into WooCommerce Core To simplify the experience for users, WooCommerce is […]