Lots of core news this week! š WCUS calls on companies to support inclusion. šŖ Plus the latest cool finds, learning guides, and good ideas. š„
Core News
WordPress 6.0 Beta 2 is available for testing. You are encouraged to help test it and give feedback.
In WordPress 6.0 we will be able to register blocks with block.json from a theme. Milana Cap wonders “how long will it be before theme authors find this out and try to use it.” Hint hint.
Anne McCarthy highlights some of the ways accessibility will be improved and further addressed in WordPress 6.0, including areas such as the Navigation Block, list view, login/registration screens, and media enhancements.
Daniele Scasciafratte shares some results of his data analysis of WordPress Core Trac Tickets. While the data is not complete, Daniele estimates tickets take an average of 2-3 years to be closed when a first patch becomes available.
Daniele also concludes core development has stalled since the arrival of Gutenberg, and it “is not possible with the actual numbers of advanced contributors [to] keep up with the amount of tickets and patch[es] made every day.”
The first stable version 1.0.0 of the Performance Lab plugin has been released. It covers WebP uploads and support, a Persistent Object Cache Health Check, experimental enqueued asset audit features, and experimental autoloaded options.
Mika Epstein notes a significant change for plugin owners at the WordPress.org repository: you will no longer be able to add or remove committers or change ownership on beta or featured plugins in the repo.
On Twitter this week, Taco Verdo started a great thread about the difficulty of getting a WordPress dev environment working for someone who wants to contribute to WordPress Core.
Taco ended up going with wordpress-develop. GitPod was brought up too ā its what Drupal uses for DrupalPod. There are a few “spin up” dev solutions maturing, but a simple universal setup and onboarding tool for contributors (especially at WordCamps) has always been a challenge.
WordCamp News
WordCamp US is encouraging companies who want to help make WCUS a more inclusive conference to serve as a “connecting point” between WCUS and underrepresented speakers or attendees. This is being done in the spirit of Winstina Hughes‘ post earlier this month. As she mentioned in Post Status Slack yesterday:
My desire is to see this become a part of WCUS for us here, and that this expands beyond our borders. Underrepresented groups exist in every country… It’s beyond ethnicity, color, gender identity, perceived divergent physical characteristics and abilities here in the US. But we have to start somewhere.
Following this announcement, MasterWP has announced its own sponsorship program, and I expect others to make similar announcements.
Updated COVID-9 guidelines have been released for WordPress events. Organizers and attendees are still highly encouraged to wear masks and follow local guidelines. Organizers will receive masks and be able to request supplies like stickers to indicate to others to please wear a mask. WordCamp Europe and WordCamp US will be requiring masks indoors and planning for outdoor lunches.
Learning Together
Mike Davey shows how Sam Kent used Advanced Custom Fields Pro to build a customized Gutenberg block.
If you want to learn and work with the terminal, Josh Comeau has a new blog post that covers the key fundamentals, tips, and tricks.
Shiny New Things
httpstat.us is a super simple service for generating different HTTP codes.
If you like using Lorem Ipsum text but get tired of explaining it to clients, Kyle Van Deusen has come up with Website Ipsum. Since it’s in readable English, it’s a more realistic mix of how common words will be distributed and flow through your layout.
This simple, lightweight icon separator block by Phi Phan is really outstanding.
Good Ideas
The Brave browser has announced they will “De-AMP” and bypass Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) so that users will be prevented from visiting AMP pages altogether.
Richard Rutter says there are five “levels of pace” in the changing requirements of any profession over time. Thinking about career development through pace layers “forms a framework to help people judge where they are in their career, and where they should or could get to.” It’s a useful tool for HR folks and anyone assessing their own career path.
New Moves
Chris Lema is changing gears a bit. He is leaving Nexcess and WordPress in his day-to-day work. What’s next for Chris? He’ll be leading teams that are building mobile and SaaS apps for churches and religious ministries. Best of luck to Chris on his new path.
We also send our best wishes to Jonathan Bossenger, who is joining Automattic, and Remkus de Vries on stepping down at Servebot to focus on his agency.
