WordPress 6.2 Beta 2 is now available. Help test the latest features before the next release. Apply now to attend Community Summit. Take a look at the new Theme Directory redesign progress.
WordPress 6.2 Beta 1 is out now and you can help test it before final release on March 28. With that comes the end of Gutenberg Phase 2. WordPress considers a mentorship program focused on onboarding and assisting contributors.
What happens when we reach the end of a phase in Gutenberg? Josepha shares what this means for additional features and requests in the WP Briefing. Josepha also posed a few questions at how we prioritize doing the work of contributing while onboarding new contributors and ways to simplify the experience new contributors have. Finally, get an early look at the design changes coming for Hosting, Jobs, About, and Dev Blog.
Where is WordPress going in 2023? Read Josepha's Big Picture Goals for the year. WordPress certifications are in the planning phases, and the foundation will include LearnWP. The Training Team is conducting a Needs Analysis. Help gather the community's input. Plugins Team is seeking intentionally wrong plugins, and Core has the 6.2 Planning Roundup.
Share your feedback about how to improve the Five for the Future contributor journey. Check out work underway on how to make interactive blocks easier to build, and take a walkthrough of layout classes in WordPress 6.1. It's time to start planning; how will you celebrate WordPress' 20th birthday?
WordPress 6.2 is set to reach feature freeze on February 7 and final release on March 28. Take a look back at Core contribution stats from 2022. Read the recap of everything that happened last year that developers need to know. Meet the members of the Incident Response Team.
What are the four freedoms of open source and how do they impact us? Get a look in the Celebration of the Four Freedoms of Open Source. Try out the new WordPress Playground to run WordPress in the browser. Plugin and Theme developers note the new categorizations: Canonical, Community, and Commercial.
Tune in Thursday for Matt's annual State of the Word address. Check out the WordPress Playground now. It brings key platform dependencies into the browser that you can embed in your own site today. Your feedback into the annual WordPress survey helps shape the project, so fill it out as soon as possible.
It's time once again to share your feedback about all things WordPress in the 2022 survey. Tune in next week to hear Matt Mullenweg during is annual address: State of the Word. When submitting issues in the WordPress forums, you'll soon find several blocks to use in the editor. #LearnWP has site updates and a new block theme course for developers.
James Farmer’s WordPress story goes all the way back to his launch of the first hosted WordPress multisite blogging platform — just a few days ahead of WordPress.com. Edublogs currently hosts millions of students’ and educators’ blogs. James talks about successes and failures, his views on Gutenberg, how he stays competitive with Squarespace, and how he thinks the WordPress business community should respond to the loss of active install growth data at WordPress.org.
This week was all about revisiting and continuing conversations that have special value and maybe for that reason tend to continue on with a life of their own. Tom Willmot dropped a fine Twitter thread about the challenge all enterprise WordPress agencies face. This came in response to Magne Ilsas' featured post here last week, The WordPress Enterprise Paradox. In a similar theme of industry peer cooperation, Eric Karkovack asks if WordPress product owners and developers can see a common interest in "voluntary standards." Could this clean up the plugin market? James Farmer thinks the WordPress business community can do more for itself too — by sharing data. In Post Status Slack we're learning the tricks and trials of ranking in the WordPress.org plugin repository. How about plugin telemetry? Learn from the voices of experience.
Building, Supporting, and Selling a Winning Product — With or Without WordPress.org • Are Active Install Counts Relevant to Your Business's Success? (Even if they are accurate? And they haven't been.) • Let's Fix What's Broken (The Plugin Repo) Not What Isn't (The Freemium Model) • Follow Leaders, Adopt Standards • Tools and expertise from rtCamp • Some great and "doable" ideas for the future of plugin business metrics on the .org repo. Could some of them help put an end to intrusive and manipulative dark patterns in the WordPress Admin dashboard and notifications?
Good ideas for the future of data disclosed to plugin authors using the wordpress.org repository:
1) Identify surges of unhappy users reacting to a bad release — and the opposite, happier outcome.
2) Use pageview analytics to estimate total potential user interest and conversion rates.
3) Assess a plugin's performance with the .org search algorithm, the quality of releases, and plugin incompatibility as well as PHP compatibility issues.
4) Collect significant user behavior data anonymously without phoning home.
5) Just reveal all the raw data with privacy options for individual authors — no interpretive analysis on wordpress.org.
Decision-by-committee is difficult enough, and decision-by-community is called an election. Surely there must be a way that we can gather information, keep the community informed, and move forward in a mutually-beneficial way.
Here’s a glimpse of what’s going on in the world of design and development in the WordPress space this past week. As I look around the Post Status Slack and the chatter on Twitter, this week has been filled with conversations emphasizing the struggle of running a business as a solo devpreneur.
