[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome once again to the WP Builds Podcast. You have reached episode number 407, entitled At The Core with Birgit Pauli-Haack and Anne McCarthy, episode two. It was published on Thursday, the 30th of January, 2025.
No, wait. Hang on. It wasn't, I never normally segue at this point, but I'm going to because something strange happened. I go to London every month to do the WPLDN Meetup, and this Thursday, as I often do, I pack my bag, put my laptop in there, and I've always got the audio files for the podcast so that I can fiddle with it on the train and what have you.
However, to my surprise and chagrin, I discovered that the podcast episode peculiarly had been deleted from my laptop, and so during my time in London, I was unable to get it to you on its prescribed Thursday schedule. So it's coming out a bit late. It's a couple of days late, and so sincere apologies to Birgit and to Anne McCarthy for that.
It really was out of my control. The files were on my computer, which was at home, switched off, and typically they would be synced to my laptop, but somehow the sync got deleted. I have no idea what went on. But anyway, it was released a little bit late. So apologies to them, and apologies to you.
My name's Nathan Wrigley and I will be joined by Birgit and Anne in just a few short moments. But before then, a few bits of housekeeping.
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Okay. What have we got for you today? Well, as I've said already, we've got Anne McCarthy and Birgit Pauli-Haack. It is the second of our, At The Core shows. We're gonna be joined by Birgit and Anne every three months or so to go over all of the different bits and pieces that have been happening over the last three months. Not entirely exhaustive, but nevertheless, we give it a go.
We spend quite a lot of time talking about all of the different bits and pieces that have been happening with collaborative editing. Birgit has provided a really handy Playground link. It's a one click install of all of the different bits and pieces that we discuss about collaborative editing. So check out the show notes at wpbuilds.com.
We get into the Style Book and Global Styles, what they are and how they all work.
And then we spend quite a lot of time talking about the developer blog and some articles that have come up over there that you might be interested in.
And then finally kind of alluded to it already, we spend quite a bit of time talking about Playground, and all of the different demos and bits and pieces out there in the wild at the moment, which are making Playground a truly remarkable tool in the WordPress space.
So that's all coming up next. Thanks to Anne and Birgit. I hope that you enjoy it.
Hello there. I am joined on the podcast today by two very fine people. I'm joined by Birgit Pauli-Haack and by Anne McCarthy.
Hello both.
[00:05:07] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Hello Nathan. Good to be here. Thank you.
[00:05:10] Anne McCarthy: Hello? Hello. Good to be
[00:05:12] Nathan Wrigley: is. Yeah. It's very nice to have you both genuinely. I'm really looking forward to this. This is one of those shows where we get to cast our eye back over the last three months and, be a bit introspective. What are the things that have happened? what are the things that you might have missed in the news?
I know that we cover a lot of the WordPress news on this weekend, WordPress show. Nevertheless, some of it doesn't land. A lot of the things happening in the project, unless you are really into it, kinda happen in a bit of a corner somewhere and you probably don't hear about them and being it and nana here today to surface some of the more interesting things that have happened.
And I promise you there's loads right at the outset. Quite a lot of it is gonna be visual. And what I mean by that is it would be great if you could pause the podcast, go to the show notes, click the links, inspect it over there, and then come back. 'cause you will get a better understanding of it. So just that caveat, emptor in mind, I.
having said that, some of it isn't. So stick with us. We're doing the audio only, but like I said, go and check out the show notes and do it that way. Intro time. I'm just gonna hand it to big at first. Do you wanna give us your little potted bio in case people don't know who you are?
[00:06:20] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Sure. My name is Pig Paula Hack as you so well pronounced. I'm the curator of the Gutenberg Times and I have, my own podcast. That's the Gutenberg change log, talking about Gutenberg and all the things around it. And I'm also a, contributor to WordPress and I work for Automatic.
[00:06:39] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you very much. That was, perfectly pithy and succinct. that was great. Thank you. and Anne, you've got that to live up to.
[00:06:49] Anne McCarthy: Gosh, I know. Making it hard. I'm Ann McCarthy. I am also sponsored by Automatic. my sponsorship hours have shifted, with the recent announcement, so I want to get that out there in, in the open. but I've been involved in a number of release squads, my titles at Product Wrangler and I've done all sorts of roles, across the releases and previously ran the FSE outreach program at the beginning of phase two.
And so now we're moving into phase three and, getting some testing and some exciting stuff done, which I'm sure we'll talk about here.
[00:07:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, we definitely will. In fact, we're probably gonna just launch straight into phase three. so we'll chunk this into various different bits and pieces, but broadly we'll let you know when we are changing, tack and going onto a different subject. But, the first thing, and I guess this could come under the banner of phase three, is the idea of.
Kind of collaborative editing and moving to something a little bit more like Google Docs. Dear listener, if you're not a nerd about WordPress, like the three of us are, you may not know, but there is a, there is an intention to, make things a bit more like Google Docs in the, WordPress admin editor, the site editor, to be able to do things like, I dunno, see what people are doing simultaneously on the screen.
It's a big ask in all honesty. The idea of. Getting that over the line is pretty hardcore. Google can do it 'cause they own all the infrastructure. WordPress, it's gonna be challenging 'cause who knows what hosting environment you're on and what have you. But the first piece that we're gonna look at today is the idea of, the first and experimental version for in line commenting.
And so by that what we mean is, you go into Google Docs, you highlight a bit of text and then you make a comment. You can app mention people and things like that and they get emails. And now it would appear, and I dunno what state we're in with this, whether this is, I'm looking at a GitHub repo links in the show notes.
if this is something which is reaching maturity, but what I'm seeing is, a settings area where you can enable block comments. And if I get this wrong, forgive me, but it feels like we are binding the comment inside of a block. So you can't go from, you can't highlight, let's say.
I don't know, a paragraph up into a heading and make a comment across those two things. You'd be stuck in the paragraph making the comment, but you enable it. You can then, make a comment. You can at mention people and they appear as little popovers if you like, a little overlay. Very exciting. I don't know what you wanna add to that.
You two.
[00:09:27] Anne McCarthy: I would love to shout out that, the crew at Multi Dots, has done a ton of this work, and so I, Puja in particular has been leading a lot of these efforts and it's been so amazing to have them come in and then partner with longtime Gutenberg contributors. Ella, has been one of the main folks and Yan on the design side, and it's just been a really beautiful collaboration.
But, big shout out to the, the team at Multi Dots who's been driving this. I think it's a amazing example of a kind of contribution that makes me really excited to see, and collaboration. That's exciting to see collaborating over. You know, collaboration. but yeah, it's, it's block level commenting.
It is live in an experiment in the Gutenberg plugin and there is an issue. I'm pretty, let's see if that's what's linked in the show notes. I'll make sure. okay. Yeah, it's not, so there's a, I'll drop another issue. I'll make sure it's in there. There's an inline commenting that issue that goes through like the next iteration and it has a set of designs and some development tasks, to evolve it and step it forward.
And so I'm really excited about this work and I think there's like a ton that can be improved upon here to make sure, like the comments in the sidebar look as you'd expect, you can resolve things in a way that you expect. and it can be something that we can hopefully implement in a release soon.
[00:10:44] Nathan Wrigley: In Google Doc. I'm gonna keep mentioning Google Doc. 'cause I feel like it's the North star of what really, the whole collaborative editing is trying to get to. Perhaps it's not, but it feels like it is. You can, highlight a portion of text so you know just a particular word or what have you.
Does this, do you know, does this have that capacity or are we literally, clicking into the block and then making a comment about the entirety of the block? Big. It's nodding there. What, do you have something to add to that?
[00:11:10] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, so there is a, in the toolbar there is, a menu in the drop, the three.menu, and the drops down is that add a comment, and then it opens up on the right hand side in the, where normally the sidebar is, a little field where you can, add your text. It's not particularly formatting you, you can't format it, but it actually attributes it to the user.
So it has a little avatars. It's quite nicely to see, to go through a series of comments. And then it, it's threaded so if somebody answers to it, people can, see it as well. But it is, tied to the block. Through the toolbar, and that's also where you see a little icon. Yeah, there are, even if the sidebar is not open, you see a little icon that there are comments there, and then when you click on it, it opens the sidebar with the comments.
so it's actually straightforward I found. and yeah. If you have something to add to the other block as you go down and do the same thing over and over again, there is an issue I thought, but that's just, that just needs to be taken care of when the, feature is, more finalized or more refined is when you look in the list of your posts and you see the comments.
There's a little button there or a little, circle there with a number in there that is totally random. what's in there and that will be fixed.
[00:12:47] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah.
[00:12:48] Birgit Pauli-Haack: when it might made it. Yeah. But it's, also not,
[00:12:51] Anne McCarthy: Oh.
[00:12:53] Birgit Pauli-Haack: it's not, particularly, because I, the blog post also needs to differentiate between the comments that are in the editor and the comments that are actually on the front end.
And right now, the, that little. But, circle takes care of both of them. So that's a little, random, but yeah. inside the editor it's just smooth sailing. It's very, nicely done. yeah, ur to the multi dots, people who, and the, all the contributors and the join people to, work on that, it, it's, a great experiment to enable and work with it.
Yes.
[00:13:33] Nathan Wrigley: This is gonna seem like a bit of an inane comment, but the fact that WordPress has a right hand sidebar. Where you do all of the editing already actually lends itself really well to, it just drops into there, doesn't it? When you're looking at the comments, it drops into there, so it occupies that same space.
Whereas in something like Google Docs, it's this weird ui, almost like a sort of a, I don't know, it looks like a thought bubble or something, which sort of floats by the side. So you never know that the comments are there until you click on the highlighted text. I will add, it looks almost like the comments at the bottom of a blog post.
So you've got, you've got, the icon of who it was, the, username of who it was, but you also have the ability to, resolve things and edit things and bin things and what have you. But this, the question around this for me is what's the point? And I, I don't mean that in a sort of negative way.
What, I'm trying to ask is, are we, trying to take WordPress here to something, I don't know, more of a. is it around content or does WordPress suddenly become a bit more of a utility that you might even use in an office to collaborate on a work document or something? A little bit more Google Docs, because at the moment, WordPress is a publishing platform.
To me, that's the whole point. You write a blog post, you publish it, everybody gets to see it online. This feels like we're entering into more for want of a better word, Microsoft Office territory, where you might never wish to publish it, but it's a great space to collaborate. You own that data. It's not going backwards and forwards.
It could be done on a service sitting under your desk, what have you. I don't know if you've got any intuitions around that. It's a bit of a peculiar thought
[00:15:11] Anne McCarthy: I, I mean that's something that, I have written a summary of this, I think last year, talking to various, like new like enterprise newsrooms, medium sized newsrooms, like all that sort of stuff. Like there's all this work. Initially when we started phase three, I went around and did like a bunch of interviews with folks, like, how do you use WordPress right now?
What tools do you use? How do you collaborate? And then pulled those together into some insights. And so you'll actually see on, the link that will be in the show notes. There is someone from Gant, who took the time to share feedback and kind of say like, on this inline commenting feature, like what we'd need or what they would need to actually use it.
And so one of the things I wanted to encourage folks, if anyone's in like the newsroom setting. Is to comment on this and share your feedback. Like try it out and test it because this is the exact kind of feedback we need. at this stage of things. It's like, this is cool, but we would use it when X, Y, and Z is done.
And in this case, a lot of times they said they need text level. and being able to assign a section to have someone review. So similar to Google Docs where it's like, so here's the scenario that, that I heard time and time again. It's like someone's writing a post. We have someone who's a writer, they now need the editorial team to come through.
Editorial team comes through and makes changes. And a lot of times this all happens before they ever get to WordPress. So a lot of times they're using Google Docs or they're literally emailing copies back and forth to each other, which was my favorite,
[00:16:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:16:30] Anne McCarthy: which I was just like, oh man, that's wild. when it's finalized, that's when they enter WordPress.
And so what this does is it takes some of that collaboration and has you start in WordPress, which allows you to see what the post will look like, decide have multiple people working in it, and when real time collaboration comes in and multiple people can be in there, you can imagine a world where it's like.
A post is set to ready for editorial review. The editors start going through and at the same time, once it's ready for editorial, the media team knows, okay, we need to start getting images ready, to slot them into places. 'cause a lot of times these giant newsrooms or even smaller newsrooms, there's someone who's in charge of like media and placement.
and then you can imagine someone's tracking that and it's like ready for legal. So like legal needs to review, but let's say legal, rather than having full editorial control, let's say we just give legal comment control. So instead of them actually getting in and like messing up the words after editorial, like finalized it, you can imagine legal coming through and it's set to like pending legal review.
Legal comes through, they can just comment. So they go through and they go, Hmm, don't say data like that, that's concerning. That can get us in trouble. Please remove this. And then they can resolve that comment, work through it again with editorial. And you can imagine this all the way through publishing.
And so that's kind of the scale of things. And a lot of times it comes down to like. either there's multiple teams or cross function to deal with, like things like placement on the site, SEO, layout, media, editorial, legal, or they have like third party experts. So like, another piece of this is something to keep in mind is like, a public preview link.
So let's say I'm working with a, someone with a PhD and I'm talking about snowfall and the change in snowfall due to climate change. Like I need a way where I don't necessarily wanna add 'em to the site, but I need them a way to see the posts and actually give, give feedback. And so there's all these different kinds of ideas similar to Google Docs that touch on permissions, access level, and the base experience of how can we get folks collaborating in the WordPress editor in a way that feels safe.
I also have a lot of like existential philosophical thoughts around like, kinda like before Uber became a thing, you've just got in someone's car, it's like to move to the WordPress. Dashboard is psychologically heavy. There's a lot of connotation there. So I think we're gonna have to have some like pretty clear safeguards in the UI to make sure folks know, like, you're in here, but don't worry, you're not about to just like publish something live.
Because in these giant newsrooms, they deal with lawsuits. If they publish the wrong thing, there's some very severe consequences. They could announce someone's death and appropriately if they publish the wrong thing. Like collaborating is not neutral. It's not just like fun. Sometimes there's like very real stakes involved.
So that's, that's like kind of all of that is to say this is one piece of that. It's like how do you allow people to renew, like review and collaborate and leave comments at different levels of access. And we're not there yet. Right now it's just like block level. And you'll see a comment from Janet saying like, when you get to the point of text level, that's when this will be useful.
'cause you imagine thinking about an editorial team, like they need to say like, don't use this word. And they, if they highlight the whole paragraph block, I mean that's like useless. You know, they need, they need more granularity. but we're marching down that path.
[00:19:26] Nathan Wrigley: I remember the first time I saw Airtable, I thought, do you know that software? Airtable? I remember the first time I saw Airtable, I thought, wow, spreadsheets just got really clever. and then, but looking at this and thinking about this some more, the block editor, it makes me think it's like Google Docs, but clever because imagine an editing interface where no longer do you have to, I don't know, like it's really hard to do anything apart from text and images in a Google Doc, but with WordPress.
Just literally think of all the million things that you can do with all the blocks that you can drag in. And I know this is probably a, bit of a stretch, but it does seem like quite a credible interface for carrying out stuff, which will never be published for public consumption. Just the, kind of intranet bit.
here's our collaboration of document space, but instead of it looking really ugly, we're gonna make it look really nice. But also we're gonna have, block quotes and we're gonna have paragraphs and we're gonna make the images look nice and dah, dah, and all of the different things that you can do with WordPress, that's fascinating and obviously comments is a big piece in making that effective.
okay.
[00:20:41] Anne McCarthy: I really zoomed out
[00:20:42] Nathan Wrigley: No, that really interesting and brilliant. Yeah, no, that's brilliant. Thank you so much. okay, let's move on. Oh, I should probably say again, links in the show notes, but if you were interested in that, this is, you'll find this in the Gutenberg, GitHub repository, and the number that you're looking for is 6 0 6.
Two, two. let's move on and we're gonna go to a piece that Ann wrote. I dunno if this is actually the piece that you were discussing. and this is Reliable Sync Protocol, PR live demo and discussion for collaborative editing. So this is absolutely fascinating. You had somebody on the, line whose name I've forgotten.
Kevin, I believe. Yeah. so Kevin Yans, who is behind YJS, which you say is a, popular framework for building collaborative applications. And that video you, you just hanging out, riffing on how to make it all work and how, it gets updated in the database and where it's all stored. Did you come away from this session?
The session's about 48 minutes long. By the way, did you come away from this session? bamboozled, this'll never happen. Or was it more, whoa, this is within reach. We can do this.
[00:21:49] Anne McCarthy: a bit of, I mean, both, like, I think there's like, it depends on, one of the things I really appreciate about Kevin, he's, so just for context and transparency, automatic, sponsored him to work on real time collaboration to kind of push us forward. We were using the YGS framework. He created the YGS framework.
It's like, let's bring the creator in and have him work on this. And there's so many like, unbelievable technical discussions that are out in the open about this. And it's a huge, hugely concave problem because WordPress's database structure did not expect real time collaboration. So, and that really broke his brain.
Like it's really like fun to watch the back and forth there. And, and he's just like a brilliant kind. Yeah. Like he is, he is a really wonderful, Yeah, I would love if he, I hope he continues in the WordPress project, I'll put it that way. I think he's just a really wonderful, brilliant person. But yeah, there's a lot of stuff to solve.
It's like, do we, if we implement this in a certain way, is it acceptable? If we have breaking changes, who determines that? How do we determine that? What kind of breaking change? Like there's a lot of like really interesting things. There is some work being done. like I won't go into the technical details.
I'm gonna try and he basically demoed a couple different ways, like basically three different ways that this could work. One is like, it could work across all instances, relying on like HTT P requests. And so like there's a certain point where it's like, this is safe, this would work. it's a bit slow and you can change how quickly the intervals are between sinking between two sites.
So it's basically like this protocol works. I'm trying to think of an example of what would be, I know it'd be like taking a train, like it'll take longer to go there versus like a bullet train where it's really fast. You're still taking a train, right? So you can change the interval, how long it takes to get from place to place.
Then there's an implementation that requires, a more advanced setup, basically, that not all hosts might have, or not all, like, you know, where press sites exist across many different kinds of, servers. And so there's this like bonus way that is actually really reliable, really fast, really robust, but it's not gonna necessarily be reliable for the most people.
And so is there a way that we can build this reliable method for many, then have this optional, more advanced? if you have access to the resources and you wanna like, set this up, it would work with this. And so that's like the high
[00:24:04] Nathan Wrigley: I just interrupt there? Just very briefly. Are the resources that are required to do this bonus, I love that we got this bonus sort of way of doing it. are the resources that you need to bring to bear, are they, is it like a cost problem? are they extortion expensive or is it just a, I don't know.
Modest hosting just would never have that kind of thing.
[00:24:24] Anne McCarthy: It's, it, it has to do with lack of web socket
[00:24:28] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. Got it.
[00:24:29] Anne McCarthy: across like, yeah, it gets real. I'm like, I'm trying not to just bore everyone technically, because like
[00:24:34] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Go to the article if you want to get in the
[00:24:36] Anne McCarthy: Yes. Yeah, yeah. Get in the weeds. There's a reason I named that a really technical post. 'cause I was like, I don't want people looking at this thinking they're gonna be wowed by some demo when it's like very technical.
and so there it was cool on the call. We actually all got into a document and were like messing with stuff and there's some limitations around certain blocks, like I think image blocks. I kept trying to upload images just 'cause I thought it was fun. And sometimes they showed up, sometimes they didn't.
And so there's, there's weird like, gotchas right now. but I think what he is working on and the method, the way he's thinking about it across the spectrum of experiences where it's like if you are an enterprise newsroom and you need to set up this, like go for it. we could build it in a way where that could happen.
But if you're like an everyday user, how do we still, like, that's the beauty of WordPress, right? Like you can use the same thing that the New York Times is using for, I'm making that up. I don't think New York Times uses WordPress, but like you can use the same thing that like the biggest enterprise uses with WordPress on like, you know, a simple server.
And so like how do you maintain that promise with this stuff?
[00:25:30] Nathan Wrigley: It feels like a, it feels like a discussion maybe to be had with hosting companies. In other words, it's almost like an upsell. To the WordPress site? I guess the closest example would be something like Jetpack, where, if you want this functionality, you can go the Jetpack way, and if you don't, you can, install plugins, but it's done on your, infrastructure.
What if there was a conversation where, I don't know, a host could enable a tick box in your interface? Okay. Do you want our hardcore bonus collaboration capability? Click here. We'll add, I don't know, $15 a month to your hosting bill or something big. It looks like you're ready.
[00:26:08] Birgit Pauli-Haack: It seems, more a matter of speed. Yeah. And a matter of, how many data in many seconds you can have. Yeah. And he had this, I liked that. I watched it, too, and I remember that, yarn said that, this, Oh one technology had a problem because it's peer to peer, so it's mobile, phone to computer or mobile phone to server.
And sometimes that doesn't work because there's security in there. So it needs to be updated, in that way. And, that is definitely something that the hosting company would need to do. There's really nothing that a plugin could do, I think. so yeah, it would be, an opportunity there for a hosting company to say, okay, we enable the whole, collaborative editing, real time for you and put a lot of oomph.
Yeah. Technical term is oomph against the servers.
[00:27:05] Nathan Wrigley: do you wanna purchase the oomph package with collaborative editing? Yeah, I
[00:27:09] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, because it, it takes a real, yeah. The, internet needs to be really fast and the server needs to fast because the signaling and all that, and how many connections you have when you have 15 people in there, there's a lot of, connections times 15. Yeah. So it's maybe millions in a, blog
[00:27:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it makes the website into a kind of moving a, much more fluid kind of hosting environment. So I, don't know, maybe it's something which is metered, let's say for example that, okay, we're a hosting company and we detected that, we had this throughput and, we noticed there were 15 people collaboratively editing.
there's a, there's an incremental fee of $2, which, you know, a bit like your data on your mobile phone when it runs out, you can go into overage territory. Something a little bit like that. yeah, that's absolutely fascinating. Our,
[00:28:03] Birgit Pauli-Haack: some hosting companies do that now with bandwidth, right? Yeah. And,
[00:28:08] Nathan Wrigley: But you could do that with for want of a better word, CPU or the number of web sockets you've got or Web RTC or what have you.
interesting. The, I, remember the first time I ever saw collaborative anything on the internet was Google Wave. Do you remember that?
[00:28:22] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes. I know. I
[00:28:23] Nathan Wrigley: like the precursor it, whatever Google Wave was got dropped and got built into Google Docs. So Google Docs then became what
[00:28:30] Birgit Pauli-Haack: yeah. Or chat or something like
[00:28:32] Nathan Wrigley: And I remember seeing it, and I actually dropped the thing I was holding. it literally, like I, I went and dropped the object that was in my hand and I got a bit of that from the video. I got that same sense of there's no way what I'm looking at should be possible. And yet there we are, there's eight or nine different things going on, and, Jans is scrolling up and new things have appeared and other things have been deleted and what have you.
And it's feel like that's in a. Blog posts. That is so weird that's happening. And then we get to see the, he opens up my sql and we get to see how things are happening in the database. And if, you've got any interest in real time collaborating, and obviously we talked a little bit ago about how, WordPress could become like an office suite for one of a better word.
This would be a crucial part of that. So the, piece that Anne created here was called Reliable Sync Protocol, PR live Demo and Discussion for Collaborative Editing. And it was a few days ago, January the seventh, the other day. Anything to add to that, Anne, before we move on?
[00:29:36] Anne McCarthy: no, I would just dig into it. Like, I think it's, like it can, we can go, we could talk about that for like three
[00:29:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, yeah,
[00:29:42] Anne McCarthy: so yeah. That's perfect.
[00:29:44] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, great.
[00:29:44] Birgit Pauli-Haack: yeah. We, could put in the show notes a, a playground link with all the, with to the PR that, Jan had, so people can check it out and enable all the, experiments so they can
[00:29:58] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, neat. if, you've got the, if you've got the bandwidth to do that, I will definitely post it. ladies and gentlemen, if you wanna play and, that comes to pass, go to wp build.com, search for the episode, and I will make sure that link is, front and center. That would be great. I would really
[00:30:14] Anne McCarthy: a great idea.
[00:30:15] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. Okay, so the next piece that we're moving to in the same arena. it's called, basically we're talking about the same thing. It's, Ann, this was back in November though. November, 21st, 2024. And this was, yeah, it's update on phase three collaborative efforts. And, I remember reading this at the time and watching the video and, it was encapsulating what Jan probably ended up doing in the video a little bit.
what did you want to bring to bear out of this? Was there anything particularly you wanted to highlight out of that piece?
[00:30:48] Anne McCarthy: I'll just say like, I, I shipped this mainly because I think it's like an important thing for the WordPress community to hear regular updates about. And so like, all of this is like in GitHub, but if you want like a snapshot, of like, where are we at with phase three? Like, that's the question I wanted to answer.
what are the pieces, what's being worked on? Where can I follow more deeply? And, and the last thing I'll mention on there, I mean, we covered like async collaboration with online comments, real time collaboration. There is work being done around data view and data form, components.
[00:31:17] Nathan Wrigley: yes.
[00:31:18] Anne McCarthy: And like there's a ton of stuff and like both of these components are being built with extensibility, like the heart of everything they're doing, it's meant to be.
So that's widely adopted. And so I always just wanna put a plug out there for folks to test it out and try it out and see what's going on.
[00:31:33] Nathan Wrigley: So for, those of you who aren't inside the, I, think inside the baseball, is that a thing? Is that a phrase inside baseball? Something like that.
[00:31:41] Birgit Pauli-Haack: only Americans play
[00:31:42] Nathan Wrigley: okay. no, I'm not American. I tried, I failed. for those of you, yeah, for those of you who aren't, yeah, it's, I, for those of you who aren't nerdy about it, Ann says the word data views and you might think, what the heck?
What is that? So data views is basically any place on your WordPress website where I guess a list of data is exposed. So a perfect example would be, think about when you go to the. Posts page and you've got a list of all your posts and you can sort it chronologically and you can, sort it by name and there's, but there's a very small amount of data exposed there.
and it's a frustratingly small amount of data sometimes and it goes into plugin territory. They can add things in or you do that with a bit of code or what have you, but data views is gonna bring a core capability to drop whatever the heck you'd like in there. I dunno, an example that just comes into my head might be, if I've got a real estate website and I'm selling houses, might be nice to have a column of the number of bedrooms, the price of the house.
And so you wouldn't need custom coding to show that. You'd just be able to drop that into the data view. But then that would extend across, I don't know, users. it would extend across pages, Yeah. Okay. Media library and, but this, a lot of this stuff is now live and ready to go.
[00:33:00] Anne McCarthy: a lot of it is, it's still being iterated on, but you can actually use the data use component to, display and interact with stuff in plugins. So if you're a plugin author, it's something you can package and reuse. I don't if you're good, if you wanna talk about that, just 'cause I know that's like, so,
[00:33:15] Nathan Wrigley: It's, that might be a little bit difficult, but Yeah. Okay. But yeah, you can, but, it is very exciting. For the longest period of time, I always thought that the WordPress admin, the ability to look at that, I always thought it was excellent. But then the slow inexorable march of SaaS platforms in the recent past has really s much more recently made it feel like there's n there's nothing in here really that's keeping up.
There's not enough capability to search, to filter, to do that sort of faceted search where you want to combine, okay, I wanna see categories only, but I also wanna see this only, I wanna see bedrooms over two and I wanna see prices under $3,000 per month or whatever. All of that kind of feels like it's in SaaS now, and it, we probably need it.
[00:34:05] Anne McCarthy: Yeah.
[00:34:05] Birgit Pauli-Haack: definitely a modernization of the atmosphere and also, yeah, much more flexible than, the one that's there now. Yeah. With, different layouts, there's a grid layout, there's a table layout. There's a layout where you have a list in the middle, and then when you click on it, it automatically changes on the right hand side.
there are also, screens where you can, just. add data to it. Yeah, like a data input kind of screens, are available in the component. And I think the, there are quite a few plugin developers who actually, are ripping out some of their, interfaces that they themselves built and maintain for many years to, base their, future versions on the core a w because it's so flexible and they don't have to, come up with your own interfaces.
They don't have to come up with, maintain their, code. So I think it's, it's a great win for WordPress. I also know that there's a lot of iteration coming up, especially with the forms still, how to, work with custom fields. So if, can the custom field be a column? Yes, it can.
can a user change the layout? can add other things in there? Yes, they can. but it's all, in the. In the early stages of, those custom customizations, it's gonna be a little bit, yeah. hesitant, rolled out. Yeah, I would think because, a lot of plugin developers have some extension, on the current, interfaces and it's hard to figure out, yeah, what needs to come in into the new data views without testing it so much and have the feedback loop with the plugin developers who are sometimes just waiting what comes into core and then start, figuring it out.
But this needs to be a more closer collaboration to get it really good, at the beginning
[00:36:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it'd be interesting to see how people do implement it and whether or not it makes one person's WordPress look absolutely nothing like another person's WordPress. And I, guess it's surrounded, encapsulated in the same ui, so probably not. We're gonna shift a tiny bit. speaking of that to, dedicated style screens.
So again, links will be in the show notes. And, so the piece that I'm looking at is, it's, a closed GitHub issue. It was number 6, 6 4 9 9, very nerdy. and this is the Global Styles style book. I guess maybe a good way to describe it. I've, I. Don't usually find myself anywhere near here to the point where it was a bit of a struggle for me to find it in all honesty.
And that's that. I admit that's the first thing, but what's the purpose of this screen? I'm guessing it's to be able to encapsulate all the things in one I don't know, content agnostic way. and to be able to get a more global impression of what the site can offer you, what the paragraphs will look like.
Maybe I'm getting that
[00:37:21] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Exactly. Yeah. No. but that was the, when Gutenberg started to be rolled out with blocks and all that, to test how a design or a theme works with a block, you needed to create a post with all the
[00:37:37] Nathan Wrigley: it up with all the stuff.
[00:37:39] Birgit Pauli-Haack: there, with all the, changes that you wanted to do and see how it works on the front end.
And that's a testing thing. And it took a while to get this into core, but it's, part of the, design tools for designers that work within the set site editor to create their themes. So now they have the, general global, they have the typography, they have the. The colors, they have their spacing right.
And now they, wanna see how does it work with each blocks or they have their style variations and have maybe 15 style variations, like the 2024 theme, 2025, default theme. Yeah. How do each, how does the block work or each blocks work? Yeah. So there's a list of media blocks. There's a list of, yeah, pair text blocks and there's a, embed blocks and all that.
And you wanna see how that all works with your theme. So you have one style book to go through and update that. And it actually has editing capabilities, which you didn't have with the other thing. But yeah, it's that, control, on how the designs look throughout the website. Yeah.
[00:38:57] Nathan Wrigley: I feel this is a really difficult tightrope to walk this UI and, where to put it and where to expose it and how front and center to put it and how interactive to make it. And, I feel that it's just really difficult to get because it's, all the visuals. It one go and the like. Should you be able to edit things in there or is it just a visual thing?
Can you go in there and add, I don't know, a custom style for a button or something and then add another one and another one? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. but does that belong in that interface or should it belong somewhere else? Should it just be a view only kind of thing? And, I've had a good long play with it over the last few weeks, and it took me a, it took me more time than I thought it would do to get used to where everything was and how it all worked.
But once I'd spent the time doing it, I'm now really happy that I know where it all is and I'm just now praying that it won't move somewhere else. I won't be able to.
[00:39:53] Birgit Pauli-Haack: that's it. It's not gonna move. Yeah. I'm sorry. but it's, what I find is, that, there's a lot of, there, we have a lot of plugins that have custom blocks and those blocks appear there too. Yeah. So even if, they're not from the design, they wanna control how they look in that, theme.
So they make it into the Steinberg as well. And that I find really preparing a website for going live for the last test through it. I find it's really, helpful. Yeah.
[00:40:25] Nathan Wrigley: Can you zoom out on that style book?
[00:40:29] Birgit Pauli-Haack: I think,
[00:40:30] Nathan Wrigley: like in the same way that now when you drop a pattern in the, everything zooms out, can you, zoom out on, on it so that you can take in I don't know, 12 of the patterns, sorry. Or the blocks at the same time? I don't think you can on, yeah. Anyway, that's an aside.
And were you gonna say something? Sorry.
[00:40:46] Anne McCarthy: Yeah, I just, I was gonna say the only coming from the outreach program experience like this was something that caused some confusion because you'd land in the site editor, there would be the styles interface. And it was different than the styles and interface you got when you're in the editor. And right now both of those experiences are now basically duplicated.
So when you're in the editor, you can also still access the same style screen, but now at the top level you can also access that. And part of the reason why I am so excited to see this at the high level is because, in user testing, I'd watch folks style things block by block and they wouldn't often find that top level global styles experience.
And that becomes an issue when you style things block by block because that takes precedence in the hierarchy where if you style things globally and then you switch the style variation to something else, everything will update magically. And so there's a level of like not getting too deep into the style hierarchy stuff.
but it's important that we set people up for success. Understanding that like if you wanna impact your entire site or sell your entire site, it's best to do at the global level. start globally, change your background color, do whatever, change your color palettes, change your font sizes, like do it at the global level first, for the long term, like ease of maintenance for your site going forward.
And so bringing this into a dedicated screen and then leveling up, design wise in terms of what we're, what's called the style book. There's a way to see your site and there's a way to see, the style book and like the components that make up your site. I think is really exciting and will hopefully make it easier in the, in the long run.
I personally think I have an issue open about this. This is like a personal gripe of mine. I think while it might be beneficial to have the style screen available while you're in the editor editing a template or a page, I actually think this causes more confusion, and so I actually think that should be removed and we should only rely at the top level.
And then maybe if a block them wants to, like a use case for that is like a block theme. Editing a template, wants to push things globally, or wants to do things globally, put that in the c create block theme plugin. Have to expose there, but that's my personal preference. At some point, we need to rectify those experiences because a user could also look at this.
I haven't done user testing on this, but I could imagine a user seeing both and being like, wait, do I have to do the same thing in
[00:42:55] Nathan Wrigley: that's exactly what I thought. That's
[00:42:57] Anne McCarthy: yeah,
[00:42:58] Nathan Wrigley: what I thought,
[00:42:59] Anne McCarthy: yeah. Like what's the difference
between when do I use this versus this? Like,
[00:43:03] Nathan Wrigley: over here, so it must be different to over there. And it was only upon really digging in and thinking, hang on, the change I made. Okay. It's
[00:43:10] Anne McCarthy: looks the same,
[00:43:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. It's
[00:43:12] Anne McCarthy: but that's not good. Right? Like we don't want people to be like, oh, I do my font changes and this one and the editor, but then I do my color changes, or it's like, no, no, no, no. It's the same thing.
And that's,
[00:43:22] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Be, because it was on my agenda to explore what was going on. I persevered. But I, IM, I would imagine that in the case of a client, of a website developer, that would immediately be a phone call. you're like straight onto the developer, why is it, why have I got these two? I don't know which one.
Oh, okay.
[00:43:38] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Stay out
of is the one answer. Stay totally out of there.
[00:43:42] Nathan Wrigley: okay, so there's, interesting work going on there, and I will point you to a couple of other things. again, in the show notes, we probably won't delve into them, but the, there's this ad color tab, GitHub issue, and also style book for classic themes.
Is there anything in there you wanted to go into? I know we gen we really could, but basically you've got the, style book for classic, it's a classic theme. It's not a, a, a, block based theme, but now you can do the same sort of thing over there.
[00:44:10] Anne McCarthy: This was a request from the comm from community members. So that's the one thing I'll call out is like, this was something that was very much requested, especially from like an agency and theme background, because it basically exposes like a style guide of your theme. And it's an easy way to like communicate to clients, communicate to users.
Like this is what comes with your
[00:44:27] Nathan Wrigley: So this one's not, there's no interaction here. This is just, this is what it looks like. Here's your headings, here's your paragraphs, here's what your images will look like, and so on.
[00:44:34] Anne McCarthy: for now. There is an issue open as well that we need feedback on of like, how do we roll this out? If there's something that someone can edit, what does it look like? What's the parameter for a classic theme to get exposed to this? Do, do they need to be using a theme json file? Do they need to have, you know, editor styles?
Like there, it gets into a very complicated like adoption pathway and this is something to figure out ahead of 6.8. There's also an issue open on that where we need, feedback on.
[00:45:00] Nathan Wrigley: a developer, that is a pretty neat resource to send to your client, isn't it? Okay, here's what your site will look like. There's all the bits, if you've got any queries, say now. otherwise we're just gonna lock that style bit down and move on to the next piece. okay. Okay. There we go. sorry, we're taking absolute ages to get through this, but it's very exciting.
[00:45:18] Birgit Pauli-Haack: good.
[00:45:19] Nathan Wrigley: now we've got something that I just mentioned, which is something that I, I think Rich Table began, I don't know, mid 2024, this idea of this zoom out for patterns. the first time I came across, this was not that long ago when I dropped in. It must've been the, latest point release of WordPress when it came.
I dropped in a pattern and for the first time it was like, whoa. What just happened? Did my chair move backwards? everything got zoomed out and I looked at it for a second. Quickly noticed there was a button to unzoom it out. So toggle that a few times and then ended up thinking, what's, why do I want this?
And then, the penny dropped and I thought, okay, I can see all the patterns. In my long blog post at the same time, I know how that bit feeds into that bit and this bit down here now. Okay. That doesn't quite work with the bit higher up and I get it. And it felt and I hate to use it because it's not the right metaphor for it, in MailChimp it's a fairly, you can just drag whole sections up down.
It felt a bit like that ui. It was just, okay, and here's a, we're standing a mile back and we're just looking at the entire thing. And now I love it. It's one of my favorite things that's happened in WordPress in a very long time. I think it was Rich that suggested it, and lo and behold, six months later it exists.
Anything to add to that?
[00:46:49] Birgit Pauli-Haack: I, just love it because I can assemble a page with all the patterns in there and then start, editing the content and without having to think about patterns anymore.
[00:46:59] Nathan Wrigley: if you are, sorry. Sorry.
[00:47:01] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And I also like that you, can see the styles for, the group styles, the style variations, and then just change them.
And you see it, how it feeds in the whole page. Yeah. So you have the li the, purple one, the yellow one, the black one, and then the white one again, and then the black one. Yeah. It's you can assemble the whole page without thinking about content. And then do the design. Yeah. Be done with the design and then start.
Okay. Changing headlines, changing pictures, changing paragraphs, and focus on that. You don't have to do it on, design anymore, and I love
[00:47:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I've got a couple of things to add and that is, I think patterns are encouraging us to be a bit more, adventurous with our designs. So we're probably putting more pixels on pages, and so because of that, instead of just adding a little bit here and there, we might be adding. Really, I don't know, whole square sections with one click that take up the full view port.
And if you're on, let's say a, small computer, a small laptop, the Gutenberg, the, WordPress UI and the Gutenberg ui both left and right is taking up quite a lot of that screen real estate. And if you drop in a fairly large pattern and then another one, and then another one, you have no idea how they're gonna look together.
So you toggle that little button and alright, it look might look like you're on a mobile phone or something miles away, but nevertheless, there it is. You get this bird's eye view of everything and it's really neat. So if you haven't experimented that next time you drop a pattern in, if it doesn't automatic, oh, and that is another question.
if it doesn't automatically invoke itself, it looks like two, I don't know, arrows pointing in opposite directions, top why does it invoke itself automatically for me? Almost nobody else. What's going on? Why do I, why when I drop in any pattern these days, does it invoke itself? Have I checked a box somewhere?
Is it just me?
[00:48:56] Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, it's, happening for me too. Yeah. and I fairly, I rarely do page layouts anymore with single but, single blocks. I always look for
[00:49:08] Nathan Wrigley: patterns in, right?
[00:49:09] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Because then I have a whole assemble thing, so that it, evokes right away when I,
[00:49:14] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, so
[00:49:15] Birgit Pauli-Haack: if I did just parents
[00:49:16] Nathan Wrigley: The intention is for it invoke right away. Okay. So maybe the people that I asked about it were just not telling me
[00:49:21] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Just switch it
[00:49:22] Nathan Wrigley: they said to me, no, it doesn't do that for me. Maybe they're dropping in blocks and not patterns. Maybe that's what it
[00:49:28] Birgit Pauli-Haack: But, yes.
[00:49:29] Anne McCarthy: Whenever you use the pattern inserter, it'll automatically invoke it. that's like by, that's by design. I will say there are some. I think this has been like, started to be fixed, but there, I mean it has been greatly fixed. But there were some issues with some themes where depending upon how they set their main content, zoom out kind of got a little wonky and there've been some full requests.
So if you're using a theme and you're not seeing that experience, it could also be related to that.
[00:49:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yep.
[00:49:54] Anne McCarthy: yeah.
[00:49:54] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So that is the intended behavior. Anyway, another lovely feature, this sort of zoom out mode. Okay. Then we're gonna go to the developer blog. and let's begin with a piece in, just in Tadlock January, 2025. What's new for developers. I did feature this on the show the other day, but it was not, for very long.
And so I didn't really get into this, but did you drop this in bigger, and if so, what were the highlights on this piece?
[00:50:21] Birgit Pauli-Haack: the highlights are what's coming into, what's interesting for theme developers and plugin developers, and also what's new in, in playground. And, yeah, so that's just a roundup post. If you haven't, been up to date with what the Gutenberg plugin, releases are, what, some of the updates in core are or what they should pay attention to just once a month.
The what's new for developers, gives you a good overview, with some snippets, or. short explanation what's act, why that's interesting to you. and then you can de de dig deeper into the material. Yeah. So that's why it's always good to look at that developer blog under What's for Developers.
because it's January, it also had of course, state of the word in there, but it also, talks about new blocks. Yeah, that's the, I really like the New Query total block. So
[00:51:25] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah. That's neat, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:51:29] Birgit Pauli-Haack: and it gives you total results and also 12 results found or displaying one of 10 of 12, different kind of ways on, on the pagination.
Then of course we talked about the style book for classic themes. And then, the tools update for WPN as well as for the create block scaffolding tool that, and then, the block hooks updates, which you can now use, for sync patterns and post content, of, custom blocks as well.
[00:52:05] Nathan Wrigley: I will, I'll give you the URL for this developer blog. 'cause if you, if, even if you're not a developer, even if you're just a tinkerer in WordPress, it's definitely worth checking out. 'cause it spans every subject. So the, quickest way is just developer.wordpress.org. But then, if you wanna keep up to date with the blog posts on there, developer.wordpress.org/news, you can put that into your RSS reader, if you want.
And all of the bits and pieces will drop. I really hope that Receives the same attention that it's been getting, because if we rewind the clock two or three years, I, feel that there's been a huge improvement in the, in the way that the developers are committing stuff into the public domain.
And I hope that, I really hope that continues. yeah. That's lovely. next piece then, unless Anne want me to say something there. No. Okay. No, Okay. In which case, mastering light and dark modes in styling in block themes. So again, this came on the developer, blog. Again, it's just in tadlock.
And, it's, an explanation really of how you may, create the, option to have a, light and dark toggle. I feel like no website in the future probably should be built without this. I will curse heavily if I can't have my dark mode. I just, everything's gotta be dark. I dislike anything that's light.
[00:53:32] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. the beauty of that, tutorial is that once you get through it, it's very easy to implement because there are, the browser CSS have, caught up with all those new features that you can, do it in, in theme Jason, as well as in CSS. And it's relatively, because it reads out the system variation.
So if you have your browser set to dark, it will show the dark mode of that website that implements it, or on the same, on the mobile. it's really a, a, good tutorial to really, yeah, do a great job, and great service to Nathan Wrigley.
[00:54:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Enforce the preference.
[00:54:19] Birgit Pauli-Haack: and me too, to force the preference.
Yeah, I just put the list of, developer blog, post India, to make sure that. If there's something in there that we wanna talk about, that we have a, good place, a, good article that we can share in the show notes. yeah. but it's also a, good place to learn, more about, what are hybrid themes?
It's one of the other article Yeah. Is, bridging the gap. What can you do on a classic theme that fields block, theme wise and, yeah. How you implement that. That was actually, a fairly long article, but it, has a few, use cases for that. and then the content only support for a block that came with WordPress 6.7, I think.
how, do you implement that as a theme developer and as a plugin developer and how you deal with it, and then the block bindings, Article is, really helpful for those who wanna, use custom fields with their, themes and, yeah, use them in their templates.
[00:55:33] Nathan Wrigley: there you go. four or three or four articles. Cherry picked by Birgit on the developer blog. So one about LA Light and Dark Mode. Justin Tadlock one about, bridging the Gap, hybrid things, which I, confess is something which I've entirely ignored. It's interesting. I was talking to Tammy Lister just yesterday, and she's very interested in these.
and that was by Troy Chaplin. That was the 3rd of December. Then, what else was there in there? There was bridging the gap. Hybrid things just mentioned that, how to add content, only editing support to a block that I believe if memory serves was Nick Diego. That's interesting. So handing
[00:56:14] Anne McCarthy: I touch on that
[00:56:15] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.
Lovely idea, isn't it? Yeah.
[00:56:18] Anne McCarthy: Yeah. So this is actually, if you look up, issues related to right mode, W-R-I-T-E, That is like a new exploration that's happening of basically providing a simplified editing experience when it comes to content editing for the site editor. So like, when you're like landing in the site editor, you can imagine this option and the name needs to be worked on.
'cause to me, write mode, I think of like writing a blog post or page, or this is actually making content changes to your site. but the idea is just like, how can we provide a simplified editing experience for the site, just not touching all the, all the other like settings and font size and color and all.
It's like, what if you're just focusing on content updates basically? And so the reason that expert, explanation on the developer blog is so important is like, if this mode rolls out further and we, we continue pushing on that, Content only. The content only method is a way of, of implementing that option for a simplified editing experience.
And it, so it's kind of to be determined which direction. But I'm really glad to see that tutorial out there. 'cause I also think, as you were about, probably about to say, is like it's a great idea in general to provide, if you want to kind of provide a more like, curated experience of something that you're building.
So I think either way it's a great thing to know about. I think content only, editing is, is a great tool in the toolbox and like another way you can curate the interface and the experience of creating with WordPress. But there's a larger vision there, related to potentially this other
[00:57:52] Nathan Wrigley: the way that I think it would've worked best in my former life with working with clients would be, I, dunno, I can just lock down every instance of this block to, for example, a any text based stuff, go for it. that's, you paid for the site, it's yours, alter the text. But you are not getting the color palette out of my cold dead hands.
it's that's, not to be fiddled with by you. So you can have the content, but nothing else. And, this ability, and I know it's probably a lot of overkill in a lot of scenarios, but the ability on a sort of global level to say, oh, I dunno every, image block unless otherwise specified, you can do this, but not this and not this.
all of that granularity would be so nice. whether or not most people would use it, I don't know, but fascinating idea. especially once you get your hands around, it just makes that whole handover to the client. easier, the, guy wearing the boxing gloves typing, it's fine.
Go for it. But you're not muck mucking about with the hex colors.
[00:58:58] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. it was one of the early feedback that we got from, block themes. Yeah. That it opens up everything and I have to close it down and I, dunno how often I had this question. I do, I remove this, how do I remove that? How do we remove that? Yeah. From a client, they needed guardrails, for, the editorial team.
Yeah. And if that helps to, and this is the next fixed phase of it, to do that and, provide those guardrails and make it flexible and extensible for, plugin developers and theme developers.
[00:59:36] Nathan Wrigley: the long and the short of it is, there's a lot going on the developer blog. There's tons happening. yeah, there's several pieces linked in the show notes cherry picked if you like. but let's move on. There's a couple of bits that I've just scraped over 'cause I'm really eating into your time, the pair of you now.
So let's move on to playground, which is about the most exciting thing ever. no, really exciting. genuinely exciting. I keep saying to me, it feels like when Apple put the app store on the iPhone, it turned what was a very interesting thing. Into a really interesting thing that could do a ton of other things.
And I feel like with playground, nobody has any intuition about where it's gonna head. And in a year's time, somebody will have done something utterly remarkable with it. And and yeah, we've got a few bits and pieces. Birgit, did you wanna launch into this? I dunno who added those into the show notes.
Yeah.
[01:00:36] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. yeah, the playground interface that you saw in summer has changed now in, in fall, where it looks more like a data view, interface. the layouts are three, three pane and what's also new is that you can actually save the site that you're working on,
[01:00:59] Nathan Wrigley: hoo.
[01:01:00] Birgit Pauli-Haack: with a button there, before it you reloaded the browser and all the things that you worked on are gone.
if you weren't careful. And, now you can save them. You can have multiple sites in one interface, so your browser or, you could even save them to your local computer. that's good. And then also you can use, playground can now also, create multi-site, environments. So the broader.
Aspect of things. the application of how to use it or for which use case to use, it's, we are much larger now. And then, what it also, the interface also gives you is the blueprints gallery that was rolled out just before, AMP Europe, where you have a set of, I think it's 15 of them or maybe 16 different ways.
How you, so blueprints are the configuration, the app, so to
[01:02:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.
[01:02:06] Birgit Pauli-Haack: of the playground. So if you need a, demo site for, For a theme or, yeah. Do you wanna see how, the data of use experiments in Google work in Google work, or if you want to study how you can, add additional side options to your playground that you use for a client demo or something like that?
The Blueprints Gallery has a lot of examples, working examples that you just, and they're listed there. You click on view and then it automatically, loads them. and you can also study the blueprints there. So at that's, a great feature to dive into whatever playground can do for you. Yeah, that's kind of one, one small,
[01:02:57] Nathan Wrigley: Adam. Zelensky claims to come from Poland. I think he's from an entirely different galaxy. like it's really like, how the heck did he get this stuff into a browser? It's pretty remarkable, but it speaks to what we were talking about earlier. All of a sudden, like WordPress has become this thing which you can deploy.
In under a second. maybe that's an exaggeration, it's approximating a second. And can you imagine, honestly, I'm just making it up as I go along, but can you imagine how this could be deployed in so many interesting scenarios? okay,
[01:03:35] Birgit Pauli-Haack: okay,
[01:03:35] Nathan Wrigley: here's a classroom of primary school children.
Dear children, click on this link. here's a bunch of pre-prepared science resources, for you for today. go and check those out and you can add any comments in, 'cause we've got a commenting system in there. You can amend it, you can adapt it. just, it's just remarkable. I genuinely am, as you probably tell, I'm excited, about what playground, is gonna order in the future.
And, again, I don't really have any intuition about what that is, but it's almost like somebody's taking the lid off WordPress.
[01:04:11] Birgit Pauli-Haack: What the team is focusing on now is the data liberation part. Yeah. It's the playground is used to, import sites, from WebPress owned also that right now they're working on, all the parcels to import sites that are in HTML or from a different, content management system that comes in, in, seeing just the front end of it.
And then building it in WordPress meant that's just the future, but that's what they're working on. And this is absolutely fascinating for me because the underlying, technology that needs to come together. Is only now possible to use it in a browser. Before you had to think about servers, you had to think about databases.
You think of different programming languages and parsing content, and HTML was never a sure source of structured data. So you always have, scrambled websites when you do web scraper kind of thing. But, this playground, feature or the team that's working on, it's really fantastic. fantastic.
[01:05:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I'm so glad that it got picked up as a thing almost immediately, and then it feels like a bunch of resources got thrown at it because, the, intuition was, oh, this is exciting. And, yeah, the, whole, Drupal to WordPress, I don't know, Shopify to WordPress, that's interesting.
But for me, just being all in on WordPress, that's not quite as interesting as WordPress to WordPress. And I love the idea of it becoming a basic, I don't know, like a migration tool or something, or. Okay. You want to, you want just a staging site for a few hours? Here we go. And the ability to save it, but then the ability to save it and then just demonstrate it over the internet to other people.
Oh, just so,
[01:06:05] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Just phenomenal. And, if you're working on the site and you have a, prototype Yeah. You can make a copy and put it in a playground Yeah.
[01:06:13] Nathan Wrigley: Over and over again. We live in,
[01:06:15] Anne McCarthy: see agencies use it. I'm like, 'cause you can have so many starter sites where it's like, oh, here's a link. Do you like this? This is where we can start with, you can fill in your content.
[01:06:23] Nathan Wrigley: Oh
[01:06:24] Anne McCarthy: I build a site for someone recently and just for fun, I like to do, I like to build sites 'cause it helps me stay in touch with like, you know, the experience of it.
Even though I run a couple sites. and I was able to send her a replica of her site and be like, this isn't live. It's literally in your browser. You can go wild, you can explore it, you can actually feel it. And if you, if you like it or you wanna make changes, like we can, we can export from there. But it was amazing to be able to send it to her where it's like, your site's not live.
You don't even need access. It's totally safe for you to break. You can break all of this and it's totally fine. Just literally refresh your browser and it will come back and it'll be all get, like, to have her actually get to know WordPress and like break things safely and like, and, and experience it live, you know, like it was a really cool one she understood that's like, oh, her changes won't be saved unless she goes and saves them.
it allowed her to like really get a grasp of things really quickly. And I, I, I don't know, I used to build sites for people and if I were in that space, so, and getting paid for it, I would be using playground I think constantly.
[01:07:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
[01:07:23] Birgit Pauli-Haack: I, would showcase all kind of different layouts that you can do with the playground. Yeah. If you have the, Jamie Marshall has a video out the 10 top layouts or something like that, I would just replicate them, put 'em in playground and just say, do you like this? Do you like this? Do you like this?
Kind of,
[01:07:39] Anne McCarthy: Play with it. What do you think? Yeah, yeah,
[01:07:42] Nathan Wrigley: I think it's all voodoo. I'm sure that there's a little person inside the browser somewhere with a cog and some wrenches and things like that. There's no way this is happening. it's too weird. and then a couple of things to, to round it off, a couple of, hallway hangouts, which we will, link to in the show notes.
over at the, yeah, make wordpress.org/playgrounds. There's a couple of, hallway hangouts where you can watch the sort of latest things. One from December 24, and I can't remember exactly when the other one was. Yeah, a week later. Okay, so just before Christmas. so we'll link to those as well.
You can see what's going on. And then finally, Anne, I don't know if we covered off the one that you added in as a comment, there was a GitHub issue 6 8 0 3 6. That's a bit nerdy, isn't it? which was feedback on adoption approach for exposing editable UI for Starbucks. So it feels like we're going backwards
[01:08:40] Anne McCarthy: We're going back, but yeah, that, that's a, yeah. Yeah. I was gonna say we covered that, so, yeah. Sorry about putting that in there
[01:08:45] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that's fine. In which case, we will leave that and we will say, I think we've done it. It's a wrap. we got quite excited at times there, didn't we? It just goes to
[01:08:54] Birgit Pauli-Haack: and I like how you do GitHub issues like a phone
[01:08:58] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, that's right. Yeah, Just, yeah, say it out loud because, so honestly, I think the majority of the people that listen to the podcast won't open the website, and so it is quite nice giving it as a, as an audible thing, even though it will be available in the show
[01:09:13] Birgit Pauli-Haack: No,
[01:09:13] Nathan Wrigley: get go
[01:09:14] Birgit Pauli-Haack: I got the
technique,
[01:09:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,
[01:09:16] Birgit Pauli-Haack: it, yeah.
[01:09:17] Nathan Wrigley: so all it remains for me to do is to say a massive thank you to Birgit and to Anne for putting in the effort on the show notes there and just generally putting in the effort in the community and on the product side. And big, shout out from me.
I really appreciate all that you've done. Thank you so much.
[01:09:34] Birgit Pauli-Haack: thank you for having us
[01:09:35] Anne McCarthy: always good to chat.
[01:09:36] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you.
Okay. That's all we've got time for this week. I hope that you enjoyed that.
As I said at the top of the show, I apologize for the late arrival of this episode. Really was out of my control on this occasion. But thanks to Anne and Birgit for joining me and discussing all of the bits and pieces that have been happening with WordPress Core over the last three months.
If you've got anything to add, please go to wpbuilds.com, search for episode number 407, and leave us a comment there. We'd really appreciate it.
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Okay, that truly is all that I've got time for this week. The only thing that I suppose I could mention is forward slash subscribe to subscribe. Forward slash advertise if you're interested in getting on the show as a sponsor. And forward slash schedule, if you'd like to keep up to date with all that we are doing.
Okay, here comes some AI generated cheesy music. You have a good week. Stay safe. Bye-bye for now.
