[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 396, entitled new show, at the core with Birgit Pauli-Haack, episode one. It was published on Thursday, the 31st of October. 2024.
My name's Nathan Wrigley, and before we begin, just some very short housekeeping. The first thing to mention is that if you are in the market for black Friday in the WordPress space fear not, we have got you completely covered.
I'm going to suggest you bookmark this page. It's WP Builds.com forward slash black. That's WP Builds.com forward slash black. Once you bookmark that you're going to be able to return to that page and search and filter all of the WordPress deals. That could be plugins, themes, blocks, hosting SaaS apps, who knows.
If you go to that page, you're going to find a variety of different things to do. The first thing is to look at our sponsor slots at the top. At the moment, we've got two sponsors occupying those cards. We've got WS Form and Gravity Forms. If you have a product in the WordPress space, click on one of the get started buttons in one of the empty tiles, and fill out the form and would be happy to have you pride of place on that page.
The other thing to say is that if you've got a product or service in that the WordPress space, scroll down a little bit and you'll see a row of buttons. Click the add a deal button, fill out that form, and we will get your plugin, theme, block, whatever it may be onto that page free of charge. And it is very popular in the run-up to black Friday, hundreds and hundreds. Typically about 400 deals ended up on there.
And if you're just using it to search for bits and pieces, then don't forget to use the yellow search, filter deals so that you can drill down to exactly what you want. So once more WP Builds.com forward slash black for all your black Friday needs.
The other thing to say is if you would like to sponsor the WP Builds podcast and get yourself in front of a WordPress specific audience that way. Head to WP Builds.com forward slash advertise to find out more. We would love to get you on board. A bit like these three fine companies.
The WP Builds podcast is brought to you today by GoDaddy Pro. GoDaddy Pro the home of managed WordPress hosting that includes free domain, sSL and 24 7 support. Bundle that with The Hub by GoDaddy Pro to unlock more free benefits to manage multiple sites in one place, invoice clients, and get 30% off new purchases. Find out more at go.me/wpbuilds.
We're also joined by Bluehost. Bluehost redefine your web hosting experience with Bluehost Cloud. Managed WordPress hosting that comes with lightening fast websites, 100% network uptime, and 24 7 priority support with Bluehost Cloud the possibilities are out of this world. Experience it today at Bluehost.com/cloud.
And also by Omnisend. Omnisend, do you sell your stuff online? Then meet Omnisend. Yes, that Omnisend. The email and SMS tool that helps you make 73 bucks for every dollar spent. The one that's so good, it's almost boring. Hate the excitement of rollercoaster sales? Prefer a steady line going up? Omnisend today at omnisend.com.
And true, sincere honest things go to GoDaddy Pro, Bluehost, and Omnisend, for really helping out and keeping the lights on over on the WP Builds podcast.
Okay. What have we got for you today? Well honestly I'm staying away from Halloween. There's enough gloomy weirdness going on in the WordPress space already. So today I'm going to introduce yet another brand new show. Over the past few weeks, we've been unveiling, a whole host of new shows with the likes of Courtney Robertson. With Remkus de Vries. With Rae Morey and Tim Nash.
And today I'm joined by Birgit Pauli-Haack. And this show, much like all the other ones is going to be coming out on a quarterly basis, something like that. And we're calling "it at the core". And the idea is that each three months, every quarter or so, we will go over all of the bits and pieces that have been happening in the core code of the project.
What new features are coming, what has already been added in. Anything exciting or new, or maybe experimental. And so today is the first attempt at that show. So we're trying to sum up what's happened in the very recent past. And Birgit Pauli-Haack, who is the person behind the Gutenberg times, well, she felt like the perfect person to join me for this.
I really hope that you enjoy it. Don't forget to go to WP Builds.com. Search for episode number 396, and leave us a comment there. Like I said, I really hope that you enjoy it.
I am joined on the podcast today by Birgit Pauli-Haack. How are you doing Birgit.
[00:05:19] Birgit Pauli-Haack: I'm doing well. Thanks for having me Nathan.
[00:05:21] Nathan Wrigley: You are very welcome. This is gonna be a real timely show. It is gonna be free of controversy because, we're gonna talk today purely about the WordPress project from a. Perspective, that thing that builds your website, not all the other bits and pieces that you may have been consumed by over the past few weeks.
And, Birgits joining me, she's an aian and I'll let her do her bio in a minute, but I'll just, just let you know what the. Purpose of this show is the idea is that, Birgit and you never know, maybe somebody else will join Birgit in the near future. will join us about once every quarter, so every three months, and do a little summation of what's happened in the WordPress project from a code point of view call.
Let's call it that. in the last three months now, because this is the first one. We don't really have a three month boundary, so who knows? Maybe some of the stuff will be brand new. Maybe some of it'll be a little bit older than that. But the idea going forward will be to do this show with three months, looking over our shoulder and thinking about what's happened, and hopefully get you reengaged excited about what's happening in WordPress court.
is that all right with you? Big.
[00:06:34] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I.
[00:06:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. What the heck? Yeah, that's right. No. Birgit, firstly, before we begin, you've been on many shows that I've done before, particularly this week in WordPress, but, if podcast listeners are not familiar with you, would you just give us, I don't know, maybe one minute, something like that, your bio, what you do, what you do at Automatic and so on.
[00:06:59] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So yeah, my name is Birgit Pauli-Haack. I, right now reside in, Munich, Germany. I, moved there after 25 years in Florida. and I started, contributing to WordPress in 2014. So it's 10 year anniversary. right now I'm the curator of the Gutenberg Times. It's a weekly newsletter about everything block editor.
And I run a podcast, the Gutenberg change log that's a little bit more in detail of what we're gonna do here, I think, and, yeah, and automatic. I'm also part of the, core contributors, that do documentation developer blog editing. Release support. Yeah, I was, part of the release squad from 6.0 to 6.4 and now I'm taking a break and sometimes, I also be part of the release squad for a good MER plugin.
So yeah, it's a janitorial, curating kind of position.
[00:08:02] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Can I ask, 'cause I don't think I've ever asked you this, did you fall into this or were you very purposeful back in the day before Gutenberg really came around? So in 2014 when you started, I think maybe somebody somewhere had an inkling that Gutenberg was gonna be a thing, but it wasn't until, I don't know, maybe 2016 that I started to hear about it and then really not.
Thing. for a long time it was having happening in a laboratory somewhere, and then it, it dropped into core and what have you. Were you right really focused on that from the very beginning or was it a bit more accidental that you decided to give yourself over to Gutenberg?
[00:08:41] Birgit Pauli-Haack: 2014 was more like, I had a already fourth year training people using WordPress. And 2014 was, I took over the, I was a community organizer. Took over the local meetup. Yeah. Grew it to a few more people. I. And, Gutenberg only came on my radar at, we Camp Europe in Paris 2017, and that's where the first kind of video was shown.
It wasn't even a, wasn't a, life demo like, Mathias did at the WebCamp us, at the same year. But that's where I realized, especially my. My experience with the nonprofits that kind of like the, what is what you get and had trouble. Yeah. I saw the next big thing and I really was very amazed on how modern it looked and how it will change, how we create content on WordPress.
And that's why I, and then of course it was all the. The controversy around it, but I wanted to see what do people do with this? Yeah. There's so much out there that people experiment with. There was a creative, creative, of, yeah, wave of, oh, let's test this new thing. And so I was always picking up on the thing that's happening in the community.
And, in January, 2018, I started the newsletter, on the Good book Times.
[00:10:05] Nathan Wrigley: Perfect. Yeah. Thank you. yeah, I, similar story, I can't remember the year, but certainly long before it was in core. I remember somebody, I think it was a chap called Dog Bell Chamber, said to me, have you heard of Gutenberg? And I was like, no, what is it? And told me about it, and I didn't quite get it, I just thought at that time, okay, so they're trying to build a page builder basically, and.
because drag drop move things around with a mouse, what have you. And it wasn't until much later, in fact, long after it had gone into core, that I started to figure out, oh. Okay. Each of these little blocks can do a ton of extra stuff. And if you know what you are doing as a developer, each of those blocks can do a whole range of things.
In fact, each block could really be like a mini application. And it was at that point that I thought, oh. This is interesting and got into it, and that is now the builder that I use on every single thing it has been for many years. We're recording this in October, 2024, and I know that for some of you out there, you are very happy.
With your page builder of choice, don't switch off. and maybe some of you are in the transition period where you're thinking, you know what, I'll give blocks a go. I'll give the, block editor, the site editor, full site editing. a bit of a go stick around anyway, because some of the things that are happening, if you're not paying close attention.
You, you may miss a few things, and I think some of them are gonna be really profoundly impactful, for your WordPress websites going forward. So with all that said, thank you. Birgit has been very kind to throw a Google Doc together, along with a ton of resources that could get mentioned today. But what we've decided to do is just go through the top items, which Birgit thinks are gonna.
Give the most value. And then after, I don't know, something like 45 minutes, 50 minutes, something like that, wherever we've got to is where we've got to. and the other items will just drop off and either they'll be featured on another show another time, or they'll just, go and we won't discuss them.
But, with that said, being it, I'll put everything that we talk about into our show notes. So do you wanna kick us off? Where do you wanna begin in the myriad of links that you've got?
[00:12:19] Birgit Pauli-Haack: I think, oh, so we are all about four weeks away, maybe even only three weeks away from the next WordPress, release. That's WordPress 6.7. And I think it would be, helpful for anybody who listens in the next three weeks to this show to learn what's going to be in the new version, in terms of, integration and also site building, for, site, editors kind of thing.
I'm. pulling up the source of truth, which is a book of almost all the changes that come with 6.7. Compiled by Ann McCarthy, who's one of the product managers, and you can find it on the Gutenberg Times. It's the first time that the Gutenberg Times kind of houses
[00:13:07] Nathan Wrigley: That's
[00:13:09] Birgit Pauli-Haack: yeah. And, now, so we, have a few priority items for 6.7, and then we have some additional things.
So depending on where you are in the user journey on WordPress, it'll be very. Important to you or less relevant. So either way it goes. We'll see how it goes.
[00:13:32] Nathan Wrigley: I'm just gonna mention the URL for this one actually, because this, maybe I won't mention the URLs not in the future because I'll just point people. But this one I think has so much impact, it's worth mentioning. So it's gutenberg times.com, and then slash six dash seven. So think of 6.7 dash source, dash of truth, of dash truth, if Again, the links will be in the show notes, but go and check it out. This. This post just by itself could be a week long episode because this feels like one of the bigger releases. what are the top level items that you would cherry pick out of
[00:14:06] Birgit Pauli-Haack: So definitely the new default theme 2025 is, something that we, I'm really excited about because it goes at one point back to the roots of WordPress where you can, build sites for a personal blog for a small business as well as for a or photo blog, or a news site. and it has, a lot of.
patterns, that they put together, but also section styles that you can really change the look and feel of your website without having to change the theme. it, that's really the goal of the 2025, to be, quite versatile and also to give a lot of, So it has full page layouts. So if you wanna build a website off of it and say, okay, I need a new page, and then you can get full page layouts.
So from the top header from the. Header hero image to the services image, to the services, price list kind of thing, and put it once in, in your page and then make the changes. you don't have to assemble the pages with the single blocks. Yeah. So you get a collection of blocks and a collection of patterns that kind of drop into your page.
So that's definitely, something very. I, really appreciate that, I, wanna get my work done and, the more design that comes in helps me with the design, the better it is.
[00:15:40] Nathan Wrigley: think it's really nice as well. if you haven't really used patterns, just think of basically clicking a button and then like Birgit said, entire pages or just entire rows. In fact, anything from the tiniest thing to the whole thing, drops in on that page and it's, breathtakingly simple. But the lovely thing as well is you can then go and inspect how that's been done.
So you can go and flick, fiddle around in the settings. You don't need to get your hands dirty with any code. and you can then replicate those in your own patterns, layouts, what have you, and save those elsewhere. But yeah, again, the fact that. It's been mooted to, to satisfy different audiences like a blogger or a, a personal business website or something like that, is really nice.
But patterns for me is the thing now that's almost like the replacement for a theme, right? I know you need an overarching wrapper of a theme, but it feels almost as if, the theme itself is gonna take a backseat a little bit to patterns. in the future, and we've seen quite a few commercial, theme companies leaning into that experience as well.
Okay.
[00:16:50] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And since 6.6, Theme. Also lean into sections more different patterns or single blocks, because then they can define to be following a different styling, So if you have a group block that is, a call to action and it's in a, list of, in, in your page on the third or fourth one, Section there, you can change it through. just go to the style and then look at the styles there. to have a different black background color, have a different font, but you don't have to do it by yourself. You get a, a comprehensive style change. Was just one button. And I, really like that, that when you, that it changes not only the background, but also adopts the text with it, adopts the image with it if you want to.
Yeah. So it, it gives you, a lot more flexibility just for that one section. yeah. That could be, yeah, call to action could be the pricing,
[00:17:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. SS speaking of block-based themes, I know there's a fair bit of inertia. There's a lot of people who really are still hanging around with their classic theme, and that's fine. there's no, that's not going away anywhere. But, it is worth checking out. the UI for all of the bits, is becoming much more stable, much more, familiar, much more usable.
is there a learning curve? Yes. Will it probably frustrate you in part? Yes, it probably will, but it's one of those muscle memory things. I think after you've, oh, where's that? Oh, okay. It was over there. You do that five or six times and suddenly. It all starts to click. It probably won't be settled where it is at the moment.
I imagine it'll still change over the, months and years to come, but
[00:18:38] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
[00:18:40] Nathan Wrigley: definitely worth, checking it out at the moment. and I think we've got nearly a thousand. Block-based themes. Have we hit it? Has that happened now?
[00:18:47] Birgit Pauli-Haack: it today. We hit it today. Yeah.
[00:18:49] Nathan Wrigley: you go. so it's definitely beginning to take off.
Maybe not in the way that everybody, involved in the project had hoped, but we're getting there now. Okay. So that was the theme, 2025 and 6.7. What are some of the other bits about the, 6.7 release.
[00:19:05] Birgit Pauli-Haack: one of the other goals for the phase three was that the admin design changes a bit, or that, the early, adoptions of, new admin design, came into the site editor and the, it's called the data views. That's where you, in the admin see a list of. Pages, a list of templates, a list of patterns, and then, you as a user can really change how those are displayed, on in your admin section.
So if you, there's a grid layout, there's a table layout, there's even a, there's a list layout, especially for pages where you have. you have the list and when you click on the list in this, in the third pane, the window pane, it opens already that particular page. So you don't have to go out and in again.
You can go through, the list of things and see how it all comes together.
[00:20:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:20:04] Birgit Pauli-Haack: that's a really great, enhancement. And there's, you can also filter, any, there's a lot of filtering there. So all the features that you see in the screen options today in the WP admin, have gotten a, much more, much modern look and also a UI that's a little bit more intuitive for, first, first time users.
Pretty much, yeah.
[00:20:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I feel it's really like a nice thing. It's the sort of thing that I've been happy with in WordPress. These data views, there's a list in my post that's fine. I hover over them and I get the edit button and you know what have you. But when you are presented with something with more features in it, so I don't know, you might want to change the order of it in a particular way, filter in a particular way.
You may want to see. Different columns of data, and I'm presuming that in the future, plugin developers will really lean into this and I don't know that you've got a real estate plugin or something. You'll be able to drop in information into those data views about how many bedrooms this house has gotten, that kind of stuff, and be able to filter it in that way.
All of that is, it just brings it into line with. All the SaaS apps in the world out there, that have been doing this kind of thing forever. And you'll be able to select, your clients will be able to ask you to select on their behalf what data they wanna see. And yeah, that's really big. it need to happen?
Probably not right away, but is it way better? Yes, much better. Okay. Data views, what else?
[00:21:31] Birgit Pauli-Haack: the next thing that I have on my list here is the, the consolidation of the design tools for each block. So there was a, a time where you, had a paragraph block and you had a background and I text it, but you couldn't do bar. Orders around it, you couldn't, control the dimensions of padding or the margin.
and, for 6.6 as well as for 6.7, the team did a concerted effort to get most of the design tools to most of the blocks so you can. You have, excuse me, you have a, a standard interface for, you don't have to think, oh no, I can't do, borders for heading, but I can't do it for the side title or something like that.
You, it's just there. and that, makes it a much more intuitive, situation there.
[00:22:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it also feels like this was probably a fairly legitimate, complaint in inverted commas from people who were moving from other third party tools that, the design options, weren't there. And fair enough they weren't, and now they're beginning to creep in. So you'd be able to do all of the different bits and pieces.
will it have everything for everybody? No, probably not. But there's more than there ever was. And so things like padding borders, as big it said is all gonna be there on a. Block by block basis. Yeah. Shadows and things like that. Yeah. So there's loads coming in. So you, and this is, by the way, we should say this is all your, this is all your core blocks.
This is not, the third party tools that you've been using. they're doing their own thing, okay. Anything else in the 6.7?
[00:23:11] Birgit Pauli-Haack: yeah, but that's part of the development, process that first to do it for one block, see how it works and how it doesn't work, and then you replicate it for the other block. that's where they're catching up. there's now a, so the, query, rule loop block is something that has, What comes with the site editor to WordPress users is that there are some concepts that haven't been there before and it takes a little bit of a practice and testing out to, to get the. To get what it does. Yeah. though the query loop is pretty much your post list on an archive page or on a, on the front page or even on the sidebar when you have a list of other, posts about that topic or the category, and the query loop.
Block has, has gotten quite a few, additional settings now, with the 6.7, it's all organized now, from into the sidebar so you have it all in one place. it was, some of them was. Some of the controls were in the toolbar. now you can filter it by custom post type. You can filter it by category, you can filter by author, by tags.
That's, one thing. You can also say, okay, I have some offsets. And that quite nicely in. homepage for a news websites. There were, there are actually five different query loops in there, depending on the offsets and how many category or which categories they're in there. So it's actually quite, nicely to see actually in the 2025 when you go, into the backend of a, a template, to see how it's assembled.
[00:25:10] Nathan Wrigley: It really does bring, if you were to rewind the clock five years or something, this sort, this block is superpowers. it was the kind of thing that really was in the purview of developers only, if you wanted to put that thing. Together if you wanted to be able to say, okay, show me a list of all of the, I don't know, the posts with a category of this, but leave, ignore the first one 'cause I've got the first one somewhere else.
So let's start at number one, beginning at zero. and all of that would've been a phone call to your developer who then would've put some sort of. Template together. But now it can be done trivially again, you'll, probably get it wrong the first time you do it, but opening it up and playing around, and then you can style it, make it how you like, so it not, the default way, it's all laid out.
Do it in different, different grids and layouts and things like that. So again, just brilliant, like I said, superpowers, for mere mortals. That's,
[00:26:04] Birgit Pauli-Haack: there were two things that, so I had an agency for 20 years and 10 of them were, built on WordPress. the sites were built on WordPress, and one of the most frequently asked questions was, can you remove the word category in front of the archive
[00:26:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:26:22] Birgit Pauli-Haack: That needed a developer touching code.
Yeah. Or, can we remove the date because people are not clicking at it because the poster seems to be outdated or, everybody knows that I am the author of this website. Can we remove the author on every page kind of thing? Yeah. Those were all things that had to be done by a developer before and now it's, coming Yeah.
With a query block to you.
[00:26:48] Nathan Wrigley: Now it's a teeny tiny toggle. you just switch. And honestly, the power that brings, it's, and the news WordPress website is the perfect example, isn't it? 'cause the content's constantly getting updated. people are gonna be searching for the different kinds of news that they wanna drill down into.
And you can throw multiple of these onto a page and, and the results are remarkable style. 'em how you like. okay. Brilliant. That's great. What else?
[00:27:15] Birgit Pauli-Haack: really, that's the query. What else? part of it, the fund management. if you wanna really get into the nitty gritty of your website, you also have, and you have an opinion about funds. You can actually download the funds and manage them on your website without having a theme developer helping you out with that.
and the, the tools have gotten really, Better now in terms of, editing and apply fund, size presets that you can add to it. So you can, when you create, you can actually create your own theme, with the site editor and there are tools to download it. That's actually
[00:27:57] Nathan Wrigley: That's pretty cool. Yeah.
[00:27:59] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, so you can use the interface that WordPress gives you, and then, there's another plugin that's called Create Block Theme, where you can, bring everything, into the file, the files and directory, download the theme and upload it to a new website. Yeah. And, it will download all the funds, it'll download all the assets, and it'll download all the patterns and, and templates.
it's a really good, I got away from the fund
[00:28:31] Nathan Wrigley: no, it's okay. I was just gonna say that the whole font manager thing is, I guess the closest description really would be something a bit like the media library or something like that, only for fonts. And it's, it feels like the kind of thing that you'll go into a little bit. probably not as much as the media library, but again, really nice to have that in core because again, probably a, number of years ago, this would've been.
Some developer work, if you wanted to somehow, get those different fonts into, your website, you would probably would've needed to make a phone call if you weren't experienced. really nice. Okay. Anything else? In 6.70, there's a lot.
[00:29:08] Birgit Pauli-Haack: much do
[00:29:09] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, we're, good. We can keep going on 6.7 until the cows come home.
It's fine.
[00:29:19] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, there is a, we talked about patterns before and that you can, assemble a page, just with a, a couple of patterns or several patterns that have different, use cases in there. and you are supported by a new zoom out view.
[00:29:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:29:39] Birgit Pauli-Haack: that is, it's a toggle in the top toolbar, and then you click on it and then you see a, Like a bird's eye view of your, of that particular page. And then you can open the pattern, inserter and just drag and drop the pattern over where you need it. And, it's so much easier to assemble that because you have a better overview on your page and you're doing just that particular thing.
You don't have to deal with design or design tools or any styles or
[00:30:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it feels a bit like when you're using something like Figma and you've created a whole page design and, so it's a, it's almost like a skyscraper kind of view. it's long tall, you click the button and you're suddenly zoomed out. So even on a little 13 inch laptop, you can suddenly see all of it.
And, then it becomes almost I don't know, something like MailChimp or something like that where you, drag a block in and then all of the bits separate out and you slide it into the remaining gap and you build from, it's like Lego blocks at that point. And, it's just, really nice to see the whole design.
Whereas if, again, like me, if you're car carrying around like a little laptop, you can't really see a lot. You've got this tiny little square view by the time you've got the left and the right sidebars. And so you scroll up, scroll down, and you think, do those two things look nice together? I'm not really sure.
Does the color of that one go with that one? I can never see them together 'cause they're miles away. and then you click the, and there they are all together and it's, magnificent. really, nice. Yeah.
[00:31:12] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And you get a really, what is what you get. feel it. You don't have to save it and look over to the, front end to see if it really fits.
[00:31:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and it, so all of a sudden it goes from like a building tool to almost, it feels like a design tool at that point. Like I said, a bit more, a bit more like Figma. You're concentrating on the whole thing rather than the little bits of the thing, It's does that whole design look good?
Yeah, it does. Okay. You zoom out again. okay. Brilliant. Anything else on that list? I know we're having to be picky, aren't we here?
[00:31:45] Birgit Pauli-Haack: we have the, yeah, but I wanted to point out that, a lot of blocks now also have background image support. and the full side as well, when it could get to a situation where the, are the GeoCities of the nineties kind of thing where you have all kind of different backgrounds on different places.
But, you can now have a background image for the group block for a, For the site. Yeah. So if you want, some, colors behind, some clouds behind your, your site or some, wood pattern or something like that for the bits that don't display well, on a screen. So that is really nice.
Yeah, I like that. Yeah.
[00:32:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I feel that. There's a lot of interesting things that have happened, have been happening in the community at large with other projects. the, other sort of block suites that you could mention. And, we're at that point now where they've pushed in certain directions and done their own thing.
And it feels almost like some of those ideas are now, oh, okay, that's popular. Is it? Okay, let's, let's drag that and make that in the 80% of core users. And it's lovely to see that sort of symbiosis. really nice.
[00:32:56] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, it's definitely if you have, relied on these block collections that came out the first three, four, or five years of the block editor, I think it would be worthwhile for once, for one or other, block to look at core what it does to see if you wanna switch or do you wanna see a different take on things, than before.
yeah,
[00:33:23] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. There's a lot more design options in there. A lot more stability, a lot less uncertainty about. How it's gonna look six months from now than how it does now in terms of its functionality? yeah.
[00:33:34] Birgit Pauli-Haack: It'll be a little bit, difficult if you do decide to switch from one block to the other to update the rest of your website as well. So there is, plugin in the plugin repository, it's called Find my Blocks,
[00:33:49] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. Oh, yeah, yeah.
[00:33:52] Birgit Pauli-Haack: where you can kinda get a list of all the blocks that you have and how often they were used.
And then you can say, okay,
[00:33:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Make a judgment 27,000 times. Okay. We'll leave that one alone. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:34:05] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. There's also a, a media library, update. Is that, it. Auto sizes, WebPress. Now auto sizes, your lazy loaded images. So there is this lazy loading feature. but now, WebPress also takes it and auto resizes them. So it definitely, lazy loads and other places as well. So it's more like a speed thing.
A A performance thing.
[00:34:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:34:35] Birgit Pauli-Haack: but it, it's really important, to point out because it took a while to, to get it to that place
[00:34:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, a lot of work being done by the performance team, transformational work, really bringing WordPress really, into the year 2024. Really. There's so much work over the last two years. It's been brilliant. hat tip to, that team who, who have been every month, more or less, it seems like they've.
Come out with something new. thank you very much to them. next. Now I don't really get this next one. I have to say if it's the one you were gonna mention this, I framing of meta boxes,
[00:35:11] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh.
[00:35:11] Nathan Wrigley: I'm not sure. I, don't quite understand it, so you're gonna have to school me. b.
[00:35:17] Birgit Pauli-Haack: So at the early days of the, block editor, the, you could, it was only a post editor. So you had the post and then underneath you see from all the plugins, the meta boxes, the ghost ones or the newsletter ones or, and the. The block editor wasn't loaded in an iframe, but the site editor needed to be loaded into an iframe to do all the good things, like the zoom out or the data views and all that.
But, then, earlier this year. even last year they started to think, okay, if you have a post editor and a site editor and they do all the same things, why don't we unify them and only have one component for that to, modify and do only change, manage what's different. but that's not.
Possible to load the post editor into an iframe when the meta boxes are there.
[00:36:16] Nathan Wrigley: Got it.
[00:36:17] Birgit Pauli-Haack: yeah, there were quite a few iterations on what to do with the meta boxes to get the post editor into the, iframe. It's also better to style it. the, biggest advantage is that, you can, you don't have to separately.
style, the block editor, blocks or sections, for the post editor, when in, in comparison to the front end, because now, the styles apply one-to-one in, the editor as well as in front end. That is not possible. when the, editors loaded in the I frame.
[00:36:57] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So it's one of those features that is, important, crucial for the development of the project going forwards, but not necessarily one that will be able to notice all that much. It's just happening in the background, but it's
[00:37:10] Birgit Pauli-Haack: it's more important for the plugin developers to look at their, implementation of the meta boxes that it still works because it has now two iframes. Yeah. I know that, yo SEO has already adopted, some others haven't yet. You see it when, things are centralized or on the left hand side Yeah.
Underneath the post editor or page editor, for that.
[00:37:36] Nathan Wrigley: Okie doke.
[00:37:37] Birgit Pauli-Haack: So that's important for backwards compatibility for the third party, for the plugins.
[00:37:43] Nathan Wrigley: we do a couple more on 6.7? I know that's a tar tall order, but should we just limit ourselves to a couple more and then we can
some of the other bits? I know you're gonna have to cherry pick, aren't you? It's not easy. This, there's a whole lot. Do you know what I'm gonna do? Birgit? I think I'll just copy and paste these show notes.
so they'll have all the links and the ones that we, cover, we cover and the ones that we don't. You can go and explore
for there. Yeah.
[00:38:05] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, you, I'm reading off of the, source of truth, so that's pretty much the one post to share. yeah. there's also, one thing I wanted to point out is a improvement in writing flow, so the right hand side on the publishing. Or the post, has, changed a bit. you might not, see where the revisions are because, the, or the delete button or something like that, that has changed a bit.
so take, a, few moments to, to, get yourself acquainted with it again. because, some of the, all the features are still there. they're just not as prominent as they used to
[00:38:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Little things like the featured image has now found its way to the top. It's now a button as opposed to a separate section, all of its own.
What else? one that I
thought
[00:38:59] Birgit Pauli-Haack: It, also has a, excerpt. You
[00:39:01] Nathan Wrigley: That was it.
[00:39:02] Birgit Pauli-Haack: on the excerpt. Yeah. And then you also see some of the information, like how many words are in the post right next to the featured image. There's a little summary there. So I'm thinking maybe it'll re will be removed from the outline at one point on the list view.
but I'm, yeah, we are not quite sure. developers are waiting for user feedback on
[00:39:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Anyway, needless to say, a few things, in this right hand sidebar have moved around a little bit, and, if you don't see it, my advice would be head to the top and then work your way down. and things that might have been buttons or whole sections might just now be a link. so just have
[00:39:43] Birgit Pauli-Haack: or hidden in the three.menu kind of thing. I always overlook the three dots, Oh,
[00:39:49] Nathan Wrigley: that's the other thing. If I can't find it, that's where I go. And then usually discover there's a whole load of new stuff in there
that yeah. Okie doke. Should one more? One more.
[00:40:01] Birgit Pauli-Haack: one more. so
[00:40:08] Nathan Wrigley: or not?
[00:40:09] Birgit Pauli-Haack: done. We're done. The, rest that I'm looking at are really, developer focused, things yeah, that are, important for a few, but definitely, check them out. There's also, the WordPress 6.7 release candidate. One should be out by the time you listen to.
[00:40:33] Nathan Wrigley: It, yes. Yeah.
[00:40:35] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes, and with it comes the field guide, which has all the developer notes, and all the, the changes that, are more developer related, to check them out.
So that's definitely place to go. If you want, to have, somebody walk you through those with a demo and not on audio. Because it's always a little harder.
[00:41:00] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
[00:41:03] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Save the date. There is November 5th. Is a live stream on WordPress, 6.7 highlights with a q and a, on the YouTube, on the WordPress YouTube channel at 1700 UTC. and that's with Jamie Moss and Rich Tabor and Nick Diego. just put it on your calendar,
[00:41:28] Nathan Wrigley: Nice.
[00:41:29] Birgit Pauli-Haack: yeah, so you can see all the things that we talked about and, more in a demo.
[00:41:35] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Perfect. Yeah, a lot of this stuff will make a lot more sense when you actually see it, and they'll probably manage to achieve that in, in short shrift by clicking on things and what have you. Okay, let's, so that's 6.7. there's a load in there and like I said, there'll be a load, more links in the show notes that we haven't been able to cover.
but the source of truth over on the gutenberg times.com website is. Probably the best place to land. Go and explore that. And then should we just go back to the top of our Google Doc and talk about what I think at the minute is one of the most exciting things in the WordPress space. So it's not core, necessarily, but it's, playground, and playground.
If you haven't had a play with playground, Honestly, it's gonna change your life if you're building WordPress websites or I don't know, you wanna try out a plugin or you want to just, spin up a WordPress website quickly. this is fabulous and there's a lot of, a lot, changing, a lot of more functionality being added in.
And again, we just a couple of minutes on this. What have you got to add about that?
[00:42:39] Birgit Pauli-Haack: so Playground has a new app design. it, follows the data views, list view kind of thing. And now you can actually have, use it for, multiple sites so you can spin up multiple sites in one browser and not have. 15 tabs often open on getting lost because the tabs look all the same.
So playground, you can either follow a blueprint, that is provided to you or you can write it yourself or you can just gonna say, playground.webpress.net/question mark. plugin dash, Plugin equals Gutenberg, and that gives you a, a new WebPress website in the browser with the Gutenberg plugin installed with the latest version of the Gutenberg plugin.
So if you haven't, if you don't use the Gutenberg plugin, on your live site, because it's still a little bit beta, but you wanna see what the newest, version it looks like, that's how you can, use it. Or when you say, okay, I wanna, I see a theme in the repository and I wanna see how that's gonna work, or if it, helps me, you can say playground WebPress net slash question mark theme equals
[00:44:05] Nathan Wrigley: Whatever. Yeah,
[00:44:06] Birgit Pauli-Haack: whatever.
I don't think that theme is there, but yeah.
[00:44:11] Nathan Wrigley: there should be. Yeah, there really should be. Yeah. It's the best one. Yeah.
[00:44:18] Birgit Pauli-Haack: But one of the thousands that you
[00:44:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,
[00:44:21] Birgit Pauli-Haack: that's how you can use, playground, you can also use playground, from a list of blueprints. where you say, okay, I don't, I want, a playground that has, that lets me, add, More, more posts to, to the site. and there's a blueprint there that, shows you how to do this or that you can test out there.
there's a blueprint gallery there, that you can, Browse and figure out, there is, there's a blueprint there, how to, show off WooCommerce with products, how to show off, a theme demo or testing a theme with, some content in there. yeah, lots of different things
[00:45:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's really profound. it's almost akin to me to, like when plugins came to WordPress, this is like whole websites. Coming to WordPress in this blueprint metaphor where you'll literally click a button and you could just have any variation of a website. And we're just at the beginning of that journey and figuring out what that looks like.
So at the minute, everything's a bit experimental, and maybe in five years, two years, whatever time, we'll have more utilitarian things, but. For now, just the profundity of the technology itself is pretty amazing. Click a button in the browser. The you get a WordPress website and everything's local, and
[00:46:02] Birgit Pauli-Haack: don't need, you don't need a database.
[00:46:04] Nathan Wrigley: anything? No. yeah. you,
[00:46:07] Birgit Pauli-Haack: you need browser?
[00:46:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, but you don't need, you don't need a hosting company to just check stuff out. you can go and just have it open in your browser and interesting, and I can't remember when this happened or if it's still to happen, the idea of permanence of that as well.
So if you close the browser tab, the blueprint, that you may have used or the, playground that you may have used will stick around. So you can come back to it at a later date, which is, Amazing. and what I was hoping it would get to, and it now appears to be there, so
[00:46:38] Birgit Pauli-Haack: And, there is actually, a, movement or a research project to integrate playground with the data liberation project.
[00:46:47] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. yeah.
[00:46:49] Birgit Pauli-Haack: yeah, so that you can, load the website, into a playground. having a plugin on your website that says, okay, load this site in a playground. It takes, makes a copy of it into playground, and then you can move it to another host.
that would be really
[00:47:06] Nathan Wrigley: It's like the middleware for migration. It suddenly becomes this kind of like inbuilt thing. It's just happening in the browser. you say you, you put it into the browser, there it is. And then go to your other hosting company or whatever it is that you're working with and then say, right now, take it from there and put it there.
And, and everything should just work. It's a, such a great mechanism.
[00:47:27] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Another, idea that they, are, really pursuing and researching the, team working on it is to go to a non WebPress website. click on, a browser extension that is built with word, a playground and playground. goes out and grabs things from the website, puts it into a WordPress site, and then you can.
Added to a hosting company. so that's the, big idea about it. And, yeah, people are really working on that. That's, to grab a static website, for instance. Yeah.
[00:48:03] Nathan Wrigley: So I, know that it's not part of core, but it is, to me at least, anyway, it's one of the most profoundly exciting technologies in the WordPress space at the moment. I, just think it's unimagined what people will come up with, and I keep using the metaphor. It's a bit, to me, it's a bit like. when the iPhone came out but didn't have the app store, I feel that's like the app store is playground and it'll just be phenomenal what people will be able to do to it.
And we just haven't imagined what that will be. But the ability to, I don't know, download variants of websites, have an entire website built. Just experiment with it. Play with it, and then decide to, I don't know, buy it or something like that. and you're off to the races. Okay. So that's playground. It's very exciting.
Gutenberg experiments page, do you want to get into a couple of bits on there? Time is now growing short.
[00:48:53] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Okay. Alright. I think there's, two, two experiments that I wanna point out that are, on the Gutenberg experiments page. When, so when you install the Gutenberg plugin, on the menu, on the right, left hand side, there is, an experiments menu item. When you click on that, you get a list of all the experiments that are.
In Gutenberg and, one of them is, enable full page client side navigation, client side media processing or live collaboration, offline persistence or data views or forms. and some of them, and those experiments are in their different stages of, viability. that's why they're called experiments.
And there's one, that's about, data views that, where you can see a redesign of the post dashboard. so the posts are not yet in this new WP admin view. You still have to go to your, post sections there. But, it has already started to see if that can be migrated to that too, and how that works.
you'll find there. and another one is the quick, editor in the date of use. that's where you can rename a post or, change the categories and all that. So, that's, that part. and then there is the grid interactivity. and we. Couple of months ago, actually about that with Isabel Bryson, who has drag and drop with the grid, layout that is really exciting in, in, to come to, to WordPress in 6.8, hopefully.
and how that's going to work and how you can assemble pages and design them. that's really, cool.
[00:50:55] Nathan Wrigley: There's a, there's an absolute ton in here as well that we, are not even gonna be able to get to. And maybe next time this will be something that we could focus on would be the whole, real time collaboration, which is a big focus, but it al almost seems like that bit has gone quiet just for now.
Whilst a lot of other things are happening, I'm sure that's not the case, but it's, not making all the headlines, but the idea of Google Docs style collaborative editing coming to a. A WordPress website near you. we've reached 46 minutes and we did say at the outset that once we'd got to that milestone, we'd just knock it on the head regardless.
that okay with you? I know you had a lot more on that list.
[00:51:33] Birgit Pauli-Haack: I can talk about.
[00:51:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. We, we could have done a. four hour episode all about the bits and pieces. Okay. So all I'll say is this, big, it put a whole ton of links that we didn't get to. I would say there's probably three times as many things that we didn't talk about as well.
Maybe not, maybe that's an exaggeration. Double the amount that we talked about than we. than are on this Google Doc. So there's loads more to inspect. And, and I'll place those into the show notes. So if you go to, wp builds.com and search for this episode, I dunno what the episode number will be yet, but I'll have padded it out in the audio that prefaces this.
So search for this particular episode and you'll be able to see all of the links in there. honestly, big it. Firstly, thank you for all the hard work you, do and also the teams that you are surrounded with over at Automatic. Really appreciate that. And, thank you for joining me today and elaborating what has happened in the recent past, and hopefully we'll do this again in a, few months time.
Thank you very much.
[00:52:35] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes. thank you Nathan. And just for one more word, if I may, if you are a site builder and you build sites for others and you test some of those, good features and especially the query loop and the templating things, and it all comes a little bit too, confusing. There is, in the WordPress Slack, there is a channel called Outreach.
And that's where other site builders hang out. And that's also where, Nick, Diego and myself and, Justin Tadlock hang out to answer questions to make sure that things are understood even or, we, find it's a bug and, out of the discussion and then we, let the developers know. But it's definitely a place for you to get your questions answered.
if something is confusing and you didn't get, to move forward or, yeah.
[00:53:28] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so that's, go, and search for the make WordPress slack. And then once you're in there, the outreach channel. hashtag outreach, go and check that out. Yeah. Yeah,
absolutely. Birgit, pally, hack, thank you so much for joining me today. Hopefully we'll see you on this week in WordPress before the next episode of this, but if not, I will see you in an episode, sometime soon, talking about the next three months or so of WordPress.
Thanks so much.
[00:53:54] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Alright. Thank you very much for having me, Nathan.
[00:53:58] Nathan Wrigley: Well, I really hope that you enjoyed that. Fascinating chatting to Birgit Pauli-Haack all about the bits and pieces that have been happening. Don't forget that if you've got a comment to make, head to WP Builds.com search for episode number 396 and leave us a comment there. We would love to hear from you.
The WP Builds podcast is brought to you today by GoDaddy Pro. GoDaddy Pro the home of managed WordPress hosting that includes free domain, sSL and 24 7 support. Bundle that with The Hub by GoDaddy Pro to unlock more free benefits to manage multiple sites in one place, invoice clients, and get 30% off new purchases. Find out more at go.me/wpbuilds.
We're also joined by Bluehost. Bluehost redefine your web hosting experience with Bluehost Cloud. Managed WordPress hosting that comes with lightening fast websites, 100% network uptime, and 24 7 priority support with Bluehost Cloud the possibilities are out of this world. Experience it today at Bluehost.com/cloud.
And also by Omnisend. Omnisend, do you sell your stuff online? Then meet Omnisend. Yes, that Omnisend. The email and SMS tool that helps you make 73 bucks for every dollar spent. The one that's so good, it's almost boring. Hate the excitement of rollercoaster sales? Prefer a steady line going up? Omnisend today at omnisend.com.
And true, sincere honest things go to GoDaddy Pro, Bluehost, and Omnisend, for really helping out and keeping the lights on over on the WP Builds podcast.
Okay, that really is all that I've got time for. We'll be back with an interview next week. So join us for that. Don't forget the this week in WordPress show, which happens live every Monday. WP Builds.com forward slash live. Join us then 2:00 PM UK time. So you're there. If not, we'll see you for the podcast next week.
I'm going to fade in some cheesy AI generated music and say, stay safe, have a good week. Bye-bye for now.
