435 – “At The Core” with Birgit Pauli-Haack and Anne McCarthy – Episode 4

[00:00:20] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 435 entitled At the Core with Birgit Pauli-Haack, and Anne McCarthy, episode number four. It It was published on Thursday, the 4th of September, 2025.

My name's Nathan Wrigley and before we get to the chat with Birgit and Anne, a few bits of housekeeping.

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Okay, what have we got for you today? Well, today I am talking with Anne McCarthy and Birgit Pauli-Haack. This is the fourth episode in our At the Core series, and the idea is that once every quarter, about every three months or so, we hook up with Anne and Birgit and whoever else wishes to join us, and we talk about all of the different things that have happened in court over the last period.

But also looking ahead to what may be dropping in Core. So today we spend a bit of time talking about the roadmap document, all about WordPress 6.9. Anne has put that together.

We discuss the latest branches and what's happening to the WP admin redesign. We talk about things like View Transitions. We talk about APIs, and a whole lot more. And if you're into WordPress on a very deep level, curious to know about the things that are happening in Core, this episode really is for you. And I hope that you enjoy it.

I am joined on the podcast today by two, two wonderful people. I'm joined by Birgit Pauli-Haack, and Anne McCarthy. Hello both.

[00:04:38] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, hello Nathan. Well, thank you for having me.

[00:04:41] Anne McCarthy: Hello, hello.

[00:04:41] Nathan Wrigley: Very nice to have you both. Thank you very, very much indeed. We, we do the show. I, I guess. I guess quarterly, something like that. And, uh, the idea of this show is to sum up what's happened over the, the project, but really focusing on core all of the bits and pieces that you might class as core. There's gonna be a few plugins and things mentioned on this show as well, but we call it at the core.

And, um, in order to, to establish both of your credentials, let's take you one at a time, just a quick potted bio. If people have listened before, you can skip a few seconds because it's the same person, but, uh, you never know. They might have a new job title or something like that. So big it, let's go with you first.

Tell us a little bit about you.

[00:05:18] Birgit Pauli-Haack: So my name is Birgit Pauli-Haack. I'm the curator of the Gutenberg Times and host of the Gutenberg Change of Podcast, and I'm also a workers developer advocate sponsored by automatic.

[00:05:30] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you very much. And Anne.

[00:05:31] Anne McCarthy: Um, I am Anne McCarthy. I am an architecture wrangler working at Automatic. I basically work as an accelerant, a doc connector, a doer across both our engineering groups with an automatic and the core project. So I sit at the nexus of things and love to live in between things and act as the glue.

[00:05:49] Nathan Wrigley: It feels like

[00:05:50] Anne McCarthy: I have a post on my blog if you want to read more about my job.

'cause it's in flux right

[00:05:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I was gonna say, I think your job job role has changed since we probably last spoke, so thank you for that. Um, the three of us, between us, I mean, I think it's fair to say that the pair of you are far more technically in the weeds than I'm, I love to look at this stuff from a 10,000 foot perspective and look down and, and have an anecdotal understanding of everything.

But you two are much more in the weeds and a much more technical understanding of things. So the intention here is to, is to go through the bits and pieces that have happened, let's say for the last three months, something like that, and pick out the top level items that we think are interesting. Just to say, and I said this to you before we started the call, it did feel to me.

For a period of time earlier this year, so 2025, it did feel as if things had kind of slowed down a little bit that the, the breaks had come on. Um, with WordPress in general, I would say, you know, that there was just far less blog posts, far less interest. It seemed however much to my delight and a little bit of surprise over the last month that.

Trend has completely upended itself, and, and I don't quite know what it is. I, and maybe it's to do with some of the stuff we'll talk about today, but it really feels like the, the brick has been dropped on the accelerator pedal and, and we are back, you know, WordPress seems to have some hotness to it again, so that's really nice.

Um, we're gonna kick off things today with a post that Anne wrote. This post is entitled, uh, roadmap to 6.9. It was published on, well, just a few short weeks ago. So July 28th, uh, 2025, and in it, and Soup to Knots goes through absolutely all of the different bits and pieces that you could possibly want to know about, uh, in terms of 6.9.

So we're at 6.8 at the minute. This is a roadmap, things that will hopefully come along. Do you wanna pick out either, either all the items or your top, top tips from here? Top items

[00:07:46] Anne McCarthy: Yeah, this is so hard to do, um, because there's everything from like the Abilities API, which will unlock a lot of cool stuff with, um, AI to things for the average user, like the simplified site editing mode. But yeah, let me pick, maybe I can pick three things out. Um, so I'll cut across a couple different.

Grouping, so to speak. Um, I'm particularly excited about the simplified site editing mode. There's some design thinking that needs to still happen there, but basically what that does is we've gotten a lot of feedback since the, I ran the outreach program, um, the FFC outreach program that dropping into the site editor for a lot of people, it's just too many tools.

There's too many things I was just talking to at back who is in higher ed, and he was talking about that with the students and you know, there's the option to turn things off, but what about if there was this mode that you could turn on, um, maybe even as a preference for a user group. So if you have someone who's just an editor or maybe they're still an admin, but you want them to have less permissions, um, having a simplified mode that just brings to the forefront content and some light changes.

Um, the, the tricky part is what are those defaults. How do we allow that and how do we make sure the site editor, if you wanna get into all the guts you can, you can get into all the different little padding and margin and all these little fun things. Or if you just wanna make content edits, it's super easy to just jump in and jump out and not get overwhelmed.

So I'm really excited about the, by the potential of that. It's been something that's been in progress for a while, and so I'm really hoping we can see it land. I think it'll provide a lot of value for folks who are new to the site editor. Um, kind of similar to if you're working on a slideshow and you're just editing slides versus going in and editing the actual template that is behind the slides.

It's like that kind of level of, of friction that we have been hearing folks need for a while to know that they're gonna go in and edit everything. Um, so I'm very excited about

[00:09:25] Nathan Wrigley: In your post, there's a, a short video, like a 32nd long video where you kind of demo it and it, it feels like at the moment, the, the current understanding of it, at least anyway, from my point of view, is there'll be like a toggle for it, that you'll be able to button it on and button it off again. And, um, but I, I hadn't really come to the conclusion that yeah, maybe you could, for a subset of users, you could switch it off so that it's just really straightforward because I'm in the WP admin all the time.

I kind of, I kind of ignore, I'm kind of completely tuned out of the buttons that I don't need. They're all there cluttering, cluttering up the interface, but I've, my brain has learned to ignore them. But I'm, from what you've just said, the interface is a little bit much for a typical user who's just wrangling content writing blog posts or something like that.

Yeah. So that's a really neat idea. Yeah.

[00:10:12] Anne McCarthy: It's cool. And I like the idea you could tie it to a user in the future. Like there could be ways of actually setting that as like the default experience or, I dunno, there's, there's all sorts of ways anything's possible with WordPress. But that's one of the things that I think whenever I've done testing with the feature previously, um, that's come up is like, oh, this would be so cool if I could assign this to a user group.

'cause like they don't need access to all this stuff. And then also on the flip side, you can have someone who goes in, get in, in and out in the same way we're used to using other tools. It's like, okay, let me go in and make more advanced changes. The tricky part is how much do you expose, what are the defaults?

And like getting that right. And like previously when we've tested it, um, we haven't gotten that right. So I'm really excited about this release in order to kind of move that forward and hopefully ship it. And don't the, the, the video actually was done by Francisco, so I wanna shout him out. Um, he's a designer who helped me with that.

That's why it's so beautiful.

[00:11:02] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Nicely done.

[00:11:03] Anne McCarthy: Definitely not me.

[00:11:05] Nathan Wrigley: Uh, bigot, do you have anything you want to say around that one?

[00:11:07] Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, I, I really like it because it kind of goes, uh, in, together with the zoom out. And so in, uh, view, and then also you can, um, you, you, you can actually as a developer or some, um, an agency developer who does it just for clients, you can actually, um, um, uh, program dramatically, um, assign, um, content only flags to certain sections of the, um, of the canvas.

So that's, um, really interesting because that was one of the big, um, feedback we get from site editor since the beginning. That there are no guardrails, uh, for users to not mock up the design.

[00:11:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:11:52] Birgit Pauli-Haack: And, and that's, uh, um, um. Definitely, um, another step forward into the direction where, uh, a user who doesn't know anything much gets really comfortable with the guardrails that they have and just the little things that they can do or the big things that they can do.

[00:12:09] Nathan Wrigley: It, it's such a curious thing to think about as well, because mostly developers, I, forgive me, this is gonna sound gen, really generalized, but mostly developers are just thinking about adding in new things. Oh, get more new things. And this is a real endeavor to, we've got loads of new things. Let's just calm it down a little bit.

And if you go into dedicated writing apps like that, I've got a few for my Mac that the, the goal there is to have almost nothing. Uh, it's really to strip it back and get it, you know, no sidebars, no nothing. It's just this writing interface. And, uh, yeah. So hopefully, um, especially for in novice users or users who don't have much in terms of the demand to change the padding or the margins or whatever, that'll be really useful.

Okay. So there's the first bit. What else?

[00:12:55] Anne McCarthy: Um, next I'm gonna, I'm gonna try and structure this intelligently. I might do four. Um, block level commenting I think is really exciting. So if you think about just collaboration and finally landing something there, um, I'm super, a lot of work went into that previously from contributors on multi dots. And then Ella also really helped with that as low as yen, um, who both work with me at Automatic and with bgi.

And so I'm really excited about the black level commenting. I'm hoping we can see that land. It also touches on some of the AI stuff we'll talk about later. 'cause you can imagine having an AI writing with you or providing edits as you're writing. Like there's just some really interesting surfaces there.

And that's something previously, whenever I've talked with did some, there's like a research summary I did around phase three outreach. Um, it's just, it's a, it's a big need. It's for small and big newsrooms. I think we've all gotten used to the Google Doc style, so starting to kind of ship that and iterate quickly I think is gonna be really good.

Um,

[00:13:47] Nathan Wrigley: Can, can I ask on that? Was it, was it done on a block level because of technical difficulties? You know, in other words, was the block level way of doing it a good first rom at it? Um.

[00:13:58] Anne McCarthy: The, the word by word is very, you basically need a different kind of server powering that it gets really technically complex very quickly. Um, this is some of the work where, um, the YJS creator came in, Kevin Ys came in last year and was helping on this. There's some really interesting work being done, thinking kind of towards the future.

But for now, like there, I think the block level commenting is just kind of like, you know, WordPress, we're trying to ship things and iterate, get feedback, and move from there. And so we're following the same approach as well, just to kind of narrow the scope and, and get something in place.

[00:14:29] Nathan Wrigley: any block would have that capacity. So if it's an image block, you can comment on the image. If it's, I don't know, a gallery block, you can comment on the gallery and a paragraph and so on and so forth. And, and it surfaces in much the same way that you see in Google Docs over to the right of the canvas.

You get, you know, the usual kind of interface where you can, uh, type a comment and I guess decide if the comment is now fulfilled and tick it off and those kind of things. Yeah, really neat and honestly suddenly turns. Blog posts and things like that into some kind of intranet capability. You know, you can do internal documents that don't need to be public facing or, I don't know, just get halfway to finishing it and get some editorial feedback, which it doesn't have to be done via a copy pasted Google Doc, frankly.

'cause I think that's what many people do, isn't it? Copy the content out into Google Doc, do all the comments over there, then suck it back into WordPress. This will alleviate the need for that, uh, bigot. Anything on

[00:15:24] Birgit Pauli-Haack: absolutely. No, no. Um, you've said it all kind of, yeah. You two on the, um, inline commenting. Yep.

[00:15:31] Nathan Wrigley: Number three out of a possible four

[00:15:34] Anne McCarthy: Yeah. And period. I'm curious to hear from you on this, but the template management, the work that Ella, Ella has this huge PR that's really exciting, that basically will solve a bunch of longstanding pieces of feedback. And the one in particular that I'm excited about is the ability to retain and preserve your custom templates when switching themes.

This has long been a pain point, and what that does is it basically allows you to like activate and deactivate. I don't know you if you've heard from extenders around this or if you, I, I feel like you're probably closer to this now, um, around some of the pain points it solves, but yeah.

[00:16:07] Birgit Pauli-Haack: yeah. There are definitely, uh, a few things that can be improved and that are on the way with Ellis, uh, pr. Um, I, I really like the activation and deactivation because all of a sudden you can have multiple templates that follow the same slug, but then you can decide which one you wanna actually have active.

So if you wanna change it out for seasonal content, or if you wanna change it out for, uh, yeah, different, uh, series or something like that, then that's possible. But with it, you would've. Just switch the template, but you would've need to get to every single post or pages where you wanted to do this, which now you can just override the template and then, uh, have that, have the template deactivated and the other one activated and the content automatically fits in, um, around, across the site.

So that's a really good improvement

[00:16:59] Nathan Wrigley: Was that

[00:17:00] Anne McCarthy: Same with drafting

[00:17:01] Nathan Wrigley: pull off? Was there a technical reason why that was not something which we might have had, I don't know, a, a few years ago?

[00:17:07] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's, yeah, it's, it's also, uh, feedback. Yeah. It's also, uh, that a lot of people kinda say, well, now that we are that here, yeah. I have it so easy to make templates. All of a sudden you wanna kind of retain your work. That's one thing. Yeah. And the other one is, okay, now I can do more. Which before it would involve a developer, go back to the theme and put it all in and do the, do the if, if when, then kind of do this, if that kind of, yeah.

And that's not, um, very inducive to creativity because you always have, you don't know if it's possible. But now when you play with it or work with it, um, you definitely know that there are more things, uh, that should be possible.

[00:17:52] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. Um, was there a fourth?

[00:17:56] Anne McCarthy: I think we'll get to it so we can, we can keep going through the rest of the show and I think

[00:18:01] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. In which case, we'll, we'll move on. Actually no, I'm going to say one.

[00:18:06] Anne McCarthy: Do it.

[00:18:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, the command palette. Um, I think that's really great. The, so it's been there. Um, but in limited, uh, functionality, I use, uh, a variety of different things on my Mac, so Spotlight and Alfred and things like that.

And when I'm in the mood for using it, I heavily use it. I make a lot of use of it because it's ubiquitous, it's available to me literally everywhere. And in WordPress, I haven't made use of it at all because it hasn't been widely used and now it's gonna be much more widely deployed, deployed across a whole range of different parts of the website.

And it's kind of interesting also, there's definitely a need for this because there's a few commercial things that have dropped. I dunno if you've seen, there's a few commercial plugins that have dropped, which do sort of similar things across the entire website. And, um, and so I think there's definitely gonna be great need for that.

And I, once it's there and it's ubiquitous, um, especially once it starts to join forces with AI and help us create content, Vera command, well, a text-based input interface, it's perfect for that. So

[00:19:09] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:19:10] Nathan Wrigley: that was my one.

[00:19:11] Birgit Pauli-Haack: I have one thing that I'm really excited about, but, uh, we're probably, uh, just getting the architectural, uh, foundations for it, but it's the ability to hide and show blocks. Yeah. That, that has been, uh, out there as a, as a, a feature request for a long, long time. And I think, uh, Nick J's block visibility is used by everybody who's using the block editor for site, um, thing.

So I'm glad that it's coming to core and that there are, uh, some ideas on, uh, which, uh, how how integrated it will will be in the first iteration. Um, but I'm really excited about that.

[00:19:50] Nathan Wrigley: So dear listener, just in case you've missed that, this is the capacity to sort of write content on the backend and I don't know, a draft paragraph or something. And instead of drafting the whole post, you can just say, I'm not quite finished on that paragraph, or whatever that piece of content is, and you just switch it off.

It's still there, but when you go to the front end, it's invisible. I mean, it's not on the front end. It's not rendered on the front end. And I know it sounds like nothing, but it's so, it just like so self-evident in a web publishing context in a Google doc. No, no, no. We don't need that. But in this context where things, you know, the world will see it the minute you click, click publish, but something's not quite ready or you may have misspelled the name or whatever it may be.

That's brilliant. And I agree. I think everybody's used Nick's, Nick's solution. Uh, I have

[00:20:40] Anne McCarthy: lays the ground.

[00:20:42] Nathan Wrigley: No, no, no. You, you go.

[00:20:42] Anne McCarthy: Mm-hmm.

[00:20:43] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.

[00:20:44] Anne McCarthy: It lays the groundwork too for some of the responsive feedback that we've gotten. So this release, the scope is probably is not gonna be, you know, hide on this. Whatever media query size, but I think in the future it lays the groundwork for some of that feedback as well.

Um, 'cause that is definitely a co, a couple of things in the release lay some really nice groundwork for 7.0. And so I'm already, my brain is already like thinking about 6.9, the pieces that will hopefully be in place and then kind of like, there's a really exciting next couple of releases. Like, I, I think this is gonna be a huge step forward.

And it was so hard to pick these things when you're like, pick three. I'm like, oh God, how do

[00:21:17] Nathan Wrigley: well between

[00:21:18] Anne McCarthy: do I pick? Like

[00:21:19] Nathan Wrigley: I think we did about six in the end there, so that's

[00:21:21] Anne McCarthy: I know. I.

[00:21:22] Nathan Wrigley: Um, but what I'll do, as I always do, um, if you head to wp builds.com search for this episode, probably the easiest way is to just go to the little, um, magnifying glass icon at the top of the site, search for at the core.

And this will be, you know, the most recent version of that. And, uh, the links will all be in the show notes. So Ann's piece, which as I said at the top was called Roadmap to 6.9. It's on make wordpress.org. You could probably Google it. It's probably quicker than going to my site actually thinking about

[00:21:50] Anne McCarthy: There's a ton of people who helped with it too. So I wanna, I wanna make sure to give credit to them as well, where it's, it's a group effort. A lot of it is, um, I know my name is on there, but there's a lot of props to give to people who came together, contribute, who are doing the work, or creating, um, you know, issues, iteration issues for the release and all that sort of stuff.

There's a lot of moving pieces and a lot of people who had to come together to get this out as, as soon as we did before the release squad was even announced, which, um, is kind of an exciting thing. I think it helps people who might be interested in that to raise their hand.

[00:22:18] Birgit Pauli-Haack: the release, what hasn't been announced yet, has it?

[00:22:21] Anne McCarthy: Not yet. No, I think it was just closed to people being, um, I've been out for the last week, so I might be missing information. But yeah, that's one. I I previously have done this before with, with release roadmaps where it's getting it out early, building some excitement. Um, and I've done both where I think at the stage of where we are, and it's something I do wanna mention is originally a release was not planned.

A, a second release was not planned for this year. There was change in contributor capacity, especially from the automatic side. And so that, um, that project leadership reconsidered and that was part of a conversation that Core Committers had with Matt. That, so that's part of also why we went from one release per year to now two.

And so I mentioned that at the top, but that's another thing to to point out for folks who are preparing for this. This will be released in 2025 on December

[00:23:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. December 2nd. Yeah, so it is fast approaching. Um, just so, just so that you feel good, Anne, um, having written this, not only was it incredibly easy to read and we'll get onto some more technical things later, which I frankly find difficult to pause 'cause I'm not in the weeds of it all. But also, uh, this got picked up everywhere.

I, I consume all the, the content from all of the, the WordPress, you know, media people. So, you know, I get, I get the Gutenberg Times and all of the other different emails that dropped during the week. And this was like the, the thing, uh, in all of them on that. The

[00:23:42] Anne McCarthy: Oh, it's always vulnerable. Yeah, it's always vulnerable to do. I'm still not used to that. Yeah. No, I appreciate, I'm glad it was

[00:23:47] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

It was really you,

[00:23:48] Anne McCarthy: part of why it felt

[00:23:49] Nathan Wrigley: everybody was riffing around it and coming up, you know, you created a lot of excitement as you said. So that's really nice.

[00:23:55] Anne McCarthy: Good.

[00:23:56] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so that's our roadmap, 6.9 bit. Then we get into some more technical things. The next three bits and pieces, uh, we might summarize as WP admin redesigns and getting things in front of people.

So this is very much experimental territory. There's gonna be three different bits and pieces linked to from GitHub. Uh, they are all, now, they're not, two of them are written by, uh, Mattia. So we'll cover off those two first, as I said, I, I, oh, I said this to you before we hit record, I got a little bit confused by the, the first one, the admin materials and surfaces, because I think it's kind of casting right into the future about what things might look like.

And I kind of got fixated on the, the, the drawings that he'd made, you know, the graphics that he'd made and was trying to figure out where these would fit into the UI and so on. Um, but does somebody want to try and take this, take, take this apart and explain to me the concept of materials, concepts, and screens.

'cause that was where I got lost.

[00:24:55] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, I can try if you let me and, uh, yeah. Interrupt me if I get things wrong. So the, um, admin materials and surfaces is pretty much how you organize the, the screen. Um, or the, the, the pages and one, the materials are like the. The foundation of it, main areas, pop-up spaces, uh, and, um, how a a room, kind of the, the walls around the room.

Um, and then the concepts. Um, he talks about, uh, um, more like furnitures or appliances that go into those rooms, like navigation, menu content list forms, blocks on those. And then the, um, and um, and then the screens are for, okay, I have my furnitures for the living room, and then I have my furnitures for the kitchen.

And then I have, uh, um, yeah, uh, an office. Um, and then the are rearranged, um, the screens are pretty much a four pane window. Does it work?

[00:25:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I was just thinking to myself, I wish, I wish somebody had explained it to me in terms of rooms and furniture, then I would've Totally got it. So you've, you've managed to, you've managed to completely encapsulate the whole

[00:26:10] Anne McCarthy: That would be a good comment on

[00:26:12] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, yeah,

[00:26:13] Anne McCarthy: like just to kind of be like for folks who are trying to read this and

[00:26:16] Nathan Wrigley: So I was

[00:26:17] Anne McCarthy: I always love

[00:26:18] Nathan Wrigley: you totally op immediately I was like, okay, I, I pause it now.

That makes sense. So carry on. Sorry.

[00:26:23] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So, um, for, um, the, the screen that it, it, it looks like the site editor that we have now for the admin design, but it has additional ways to do quick edits. So you have four panes. Uh, one is the navigation, then there's a, a middle section, uh, two middle section, and a left section. And, um, they are combined differently.

Whatever the developer thinks is useful for a certain, um, screen. Like if it's a list for media, um, you have a, a great view if you have a post, a list of posts for the post. View. Yeah. Uh, that's better in a list. And if you have a a page view, you have a list of pages when you click on it, and you have on the right hand side a preview kind of, of the page.

So, uh, that is, that can all be, uh, combined as it's sits, uh, the developer, or at least the content, uh, best, um, displayed for the, for the user. There's also another one that I really like is the quick edit part. Um, I, I don't think it's yet, um, came really out. Um, there's, it, it's in a, it's in an experiment on Gutenberg, I think, uh, partially where you can change things, um, in a more bug edit, kind of what we have in the current WP admin.

Um, yes, all these kind of things need to fit in. Um, and yeah, so let I, I'm, I'm gonna end there now.

[00:27:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's, no, that's, that's been really helpful. I mean, if, if you go to the article, you'll obviously see, and you can now pause it in terms of room and furniture and things like that, which might help. It's certainly got me along. Um, but that makes, that makes way more sense. And, and also this feels like a UI way you can kind of mix and match, you can put things on top of other things or by, by the side of other things.

So instead of it being, I don't know, maybe you go into the post and the post is now the thing. This could be a a, a kind of confection of, well there's the post and another thing happening at the same time. You could have a sidebar with, well, there's something which looks a little bit like a, almost like a chat interface.

So that's maybe where those comments that we were talking about earlier could fit. Um, okay. Anne, anything on that?

[00:28:42] Anne McCarthy: I just to, to zoom back out again and thank you, Barry. You did a great job of explaining that. Um, it's, right now the work is being done at an architecture level, so it's, it, it's really tough not to get distracted by design and to say like, this is what it's gonna look like. This is what's gonna be, and like, I just wanna encourage folks to, to, there's a reason these GitHub issues are so technical is because we are thinking about building reusable pieces that can be combined and that are structured and in different ways to both reimagine.

The current IP admin, but also think about things like backwards compatibility. Um, and so just remember that the focus is on the architecture side. Uh, I think it's, at least for me, I can get really distracted by visuals and so I just wanna encourage people to kind of look at those different issues and think about it as building the foundation.

Um, and so that's being done right now, and this is mentioned in the 6.9 post, but that's some of, that's the work that's being done right now alongside 6.9. Um, and hopefully we'll get to a place where that can be even as like a demo can be seen, um, alongside 6.9.

[00:29:42] Nathan Wrigley: so again, links in the show notes, but if you do go there and unlike me, you get completely upended by the visuals and concentrate on those at the exclusion of almost everything else. Then, uh, then caveat or just be a little bit aware, there's also this whole base layer. Uh, which is mentioned at the top, which is kind of like, you know, that feels almost like the bit that we've got at the moment, but, um, sort of slightly modified, but this, this bit that maybe doesn't ever go away where you've got this sidebar on the left or something like that.

Okay, so admin materials and surfaces. That's GitHub. So it's within the, uh, if I, yeah, I am right. It's, it's within the WordPress slash Gutenberg. And the issue there is 7 0 9 1 3, if that's helpful to you. The next one, uh, again, same repository, but 7 0 7 1 oh. Look how nerdy we are. We are reading GitHub issue numbers into a podcast episode.

Oh, Lord. Um, this one again, by Mattias Abilities and Workflows overview. I am not even gonna pretend to have understood this. I read it, I read it again, and I was, I got lost fairly quickly. So please help me out of my morass. One of you.

[00:30:51] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Do you wanna try it?

[00:30:53] Anne McCarthy: Yeah, I'm happy to. So this ties into some of the command palette everywhere work too. So if you think about it, it's basically just unifying, um. All the pieces of this new admin experience, but then adding in the ability to create things like workflows using the Command Pal. So the Command Pal is a pretty essential piece to it.

It's part of why work is being done to expand it and with this context in mind. And you can think about it as, as basically using the Abilities API, which is a list of all the things that you know, a site can do. Basically, I'm trying to use a really high

[00:31:24] Nathan Wrigley: No, that's good

[00:31:25] Anne McCarthy: understanding of this.

[00:31:26] Nathan Wrigley: Put a pin in that. We'll come back to that later. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:31:29] Anne McCarthy: Combined with like a new idea of a workflows API, which you can chain commands together, and then to bring it even all the way further to another level.

So you have a Command Pal, you can do one thing, there's workflows, API, you can chain commands together. Then how about if you could actually create your own? Workflow. So you could actually have a visual editor that allows you to build customized workflow. So maybe there's something that you're doing with an editorial team that you wanna have a customized workflow for you up in the command palette and you, you've already set up this workflow in place.

And then let's say you need to tweak it. There'll be a visual editor where you can actually tweak the workflow and tweak the command. So it's very far reaching, um, and touches a lot on the Command Pal and a lot of work that's being done within the AI group. And it's essential part of how we think about the future of how WordPress is gonna be interacted with.

So instead of people that might be people's main way of interacting is through the command palette, for example. Um, similar to what we see with like chat interfaces right now with ai. So that's, that's kind of thinking about this. Again, it's from like a very technical, it's breaking it down into like Abilities API workflows, API, the workflow editor.

It's breaking it down in technical pieces, but if you put 'em together, you can kind of see this vision of a more way more interactive, dynamic, personalized, um, extensible admin experience.

[00:32:42] Nathan Wrigley: So the abilities API is kind of like an API, which, which, uh, allows you to, to get more or less everything that WordPress can do. If you, you know, if you can find it somewhere in WordPress, click a button, do a setting, whatever it may be, that'll be available as an API. So it could be, I don't know, create, post, make, make a post, uh,

[00:33:02] Anne McCarthy: plugins too can say like, here, here are the things we can do. And then basically, if everyone does it in the same structured way, you can walk up to any WordPress site and say, what can you do for me? Here's, here's, here's all the stuff. And kind of have it be in a way that AI can understand and can act upon it.

When you think about like a Gentech

[00:33:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And then, so all of those abilities then can be chained together in a workflow. And I think this is where the, it kind of broke down for me, this piece, 'cause I couldn't imagine a workflow. That, that was basically where I, I could, my brain couldn't go anymore. I mean, I can imagine in, in the abstract that you could chain things together, but I was thinking, what, what could I chain together and, and usually I'm dotting around, pressing a button, waiting for something to load, then pressing another button, then waiting for that to finish, then typing, for example, and then clicking publish.

So my workflows are all about, I do the thing, click the button, do the next thing, click the button. So I couldn't really imagine, but then I'm no developer. So I imagine developers would be able to do this. And then presumably when you've come up with these ingenious workflows, you give it a name, bind it into the command palette, so next time you can just recall it with a few keystrokes and that

[00:34:07] Anne McCarthy: Or a user can too, like you pan it off a site and it's like, here are some customized workflows

[00:34:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. Okay.

[00:34:13] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well think, think about of a business directory. You have a new, you have a new entity that you wanna put in a business directory. There are 15 different steps that you have to do. And if you give that workflow, um, just the basics of that business, yeah, it can go out and, and grab some stuff, grab some, uh, Google Maps, uh, location and, and do all that.

And you can all put that together in a workflow. So what you normally take about 20 minutes to finish on your website can be done faster. Yeah,

[00:34:45] Nathan Wrigley: be it. The explainer Powerly hack that's, she's got this, she's got this new role. She just takes the difficult thing and makes it easy. That's so helpful. Thank you. Yeah, that works. I get it now. Okay. That's brilliant. Can I, can I do this every week so

[00:35:04] Birgit Pauli-Haack: sure. Sure.

[00:35:05] Nathan Wrigley: I can understand the, the WordPress project on a more or less weekly basis?

That's great. Uh, okay. So there's ability, some workflows, overview. Are we done with that one? I think we're done with that one, yeah. Okay. In which case we will go, um, to the next one. This is Riyad. Uh, so it's no longer Mathias. This is 7 0 8 6 2 admin redesign a solid, I'm gonna say routing 'cause I'm from the uk uh, uh, foundation.

So again, kind of got lost on this. One of you two is gonna have to do the explaining for me.

[00:35:38] Anne McCarthy: do it you. I can do it too. Yeah, so like underpinning all of this is like, how do the pieces stick together? How do you actually route these things together? And it touches on backwards compatibility. Like he outlines all these things from like developer experience to internationalization, to lazy loading, um, to different editor APIs, preloading.

So some of the stuff that with performance optimization, transitions and animations, it's like, how does this all glue together and how do you actually navigate between everything? And there's a lot of technical pieces around this, including things like deep linking, like what can you actually like link to from the site editor?

Like, that's been another point, point of feedback that I've seen come up is like, why can't I link to this specific part and the styles experience, experience and then pass it on to someone else. So a lot of this is, again, when we think about this work that's happening right now, it's very technical and it's about creating that foundation, um, for the admin redesign based on some of what's been learned from building up the site editor and making it.

As easy as possible so that developers and third party developers don't have to recreate the wheel. There's like a, you know, known conventions and ways to build these and register routes without needing to recreate a bunch of stuff or do it differently, and then nothing works well together. And so you can imagine a, a third party developer who wants to adopt this stuff could use this routing foundation to have their, their stuff preload or work really well and integrate well in a way that feels native.

Um, but yeah, again, very technical.

[00:37:07] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yep.

[00:37:08] Anne McCarthy: So yeah. Pge, if you have anything you wanna add.

[00:37:10] Nathan Wrigley: that little bit. Sorry, just to interrupt there, that little bit that you just mentioned about things being, I, I know WordPress has always had this thing of, you know, we, we do it, we do it the WordPress way and what have you, but it does feel, especially as when we get onto the AI stuff in a minute, that sentence seems to be getting repeated more and more out in the open about we're gonna build this way in WordPress for everybody else to hook into it.

I don't know if I'm just picking up on that for some reason, but it does feel like everything is being built with that very much in mind. The assumption that the, the third party developers, AI, and all of these other things are gonna want a standardized way of doing things. And um, I don't know, maybe that's just me, but I've got a

[00:37:49] Anne McCarthy: I think it's been in the project for a long time. Like I think that has been the sentiment is like if we see developers building a bunch of similar stuff, it's like, let's solve it at the root. Because if people do their own implementation, it's hard to maintain. It's hard to, you know, run into edge cases when you upgrade software, like it becomes this whole, you're not getting good feedback.

So I think it's a similar, it's in line with that kind of idea.

[00:38:11] Nathan Wrigley: Uh,

[00:38:11] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. And I, yeah, I think that the WebPress is now at a point, especially with the block editor, site editor, and, and content editor, um, where. Um, who has to think about extensibility, because that was one of, is one of the things that a lot of plugin developers are kind of holding back an adoption of plugin, um, uh, blocks and, and block themes is the extensibility has still a little bit been.

Oh, how do I say it nicely? It, uh, was a little, um, fragmented. Yeah. So it was not A-A-A-A-A clean API because the, the core, the, the foundation wasn't done yet. Yeah. So you cannot extend something if you don't know how it's gonna be, uh, when a user uses it. Yeah. And I think WordPress has now gone become to that point where that is actually in the forefront because we have all the APIs in and we're building new APIs, but those structural things, the architecture knows now more about, um, both of it.

Yeah. The new JavaScript React, uh, part of it, I say new, it's 10 years old now, but, um, um, and, and then what comes out afterwards and how, how everything can fit together. Yeah.

[00:39:27] Nathan Wrigley: Um, I, I would e entirely reflect that sentiment. Again, from the 10,000 mile view. I'm getting a sense of that being a, a much more publicly stated position. It was probably always thus, but it does feel that now that that foundational work on all of these different editing experiences in WordPress is being kind of rounded off a bit, then these pieces can come to the forefront.

And, um, I, I didn't see this when I initially, uh, looked at the Google Doc, but we've got another one in there as well. Data views, quick. Editing. Yeah. Nice.

[00:39:58] Anne McCarthy: about quick

[00:39:59] Nathan Wrigley: No, that's brilliant. Do you want to mention what's going on in there? So this is, um, this is again, a queue, sorry. Um, uh, uh, I've forgotten the word in GitHub.

A what is it called? A, an issue. Thank you. Uh, 5, 5 1 1. Um, data views, quick editing. You dropped it in. Do you wanna just tell us what's going on here?

[00:40:20] Anne McCarthy: Yeah, it's basically part of the admin materials and services. So if we're zooming into like a specific one, this is one of those reusable pieces. So you can imagine quick editing. Let's say you're in the media library and you want to quickly edit, um, something about the image, it'll open that panel. And so it's providing a standardized way to do that.

Or you can imagine if you're editing a product or maybe you're editing a custom post type and you wanna have just a way to quickly edit those things, or a post or a page, that quick editing experience is consistent across, um, both when you're using WordPress now, and then if you add in, you know, plugins.

So having a unified way to have this quick edit feature, um, is part of what's being worked on within the data view side and just getting that experience right. This is a much more visual. Uh, issue, which is like helpful to see and helpful to see what's being thought of. And you can see how it's trying to match the quick edit experience in JP admin right now and basically replicate that.

But it's one of those kind of admin materials and surfaces. Like it's in that grouping of how do we think about this? Including if you have something that could bulk edit. So you can imagine selecting a bunch of posts and you wanna delete them or selecting a bunch of images and wanting to download them.

Like, what does that look

[00:41:32] Nathan Wrigley: This, um, this is gonna sound like a really churlish comment, but a, a lot of these kind of quick edit type of things at the minute, they're not that attractive. They're, they're like fairly, like it's a bunch of little fields and they kind of all mashed together and there they all are. And it's not that, not that nice to look at.

This looks nice, which is so kind of on one level really unimportant, but on another level, if you're in the software all the time, all day, every day, having the UI look great, really matters. And this looks great. It looks, it just looks totally modern the way you might see, I don't know, a SAS app or something like that, doing it.

So it's a silly throwaway comment really. But I, I hope you understand where I'm coming from there. It just, the, the way it looks is important, I think. Yeah.

[00:42:19] Birgit Pauli-Haack: If, if you spend all day in the, in that interface you wanna have Nice, yeah, of course. Yeah.

[00:42:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yep. It's the difference between, no, I'm not gonna say that. No, I'm gonna say it and then I'm gonna regret it. It's the difference between Drupal and WordPress.

Oh. Yeah, I dunno. I'll never be forgiven for that. But, uh, WordPress, WordPress looks nice and Drupal is hard to look at on the backend, and so there's that right? With regret for having said that. Let's move on. Some really profoundly interesting stuff happening and um, and, and the first one that we're gonna raise is a, a plugin, um, it's called View Transitions.

It's written by Felix anz, who's on the performance team, I believe. Uh, he's a Googler and so you know that there's a lot in the wheelhouse of Google trying to make the web quicker and all of that kind of stuff. And, uh, view transitions, how to describe it. I imagine you're on your phone and you've downloaded a really nice modern app and you, I don't know, let's say it's a music playing app or something like that, and you press play on a song.

You don't expect the song page to in front of you on the phone to kind of. Pause for a minute and then completely refresh, and, oh, I'm on the song now. What you expect is some beautiful gliding featured image of the song to happen. Then the plugin, the little player will fade in and, and it will all happen seamlessly.

And the web has not been that. The web has been a collection of little siloed places where one thing is disconnected from the other. You click a button, you wait to load, you click a button, you wait to load. View. Transitions is, um, is levering features, which I believe are in the browser. Um, so you know, a caveat mTOR, there might be different implementations across different browsers.

Um, but it's the capacity to bind, let's say a title in an archive view. You could take the title and say, when you click on that title, make it Grow and expand to become the title of the main post. I am never gonna do it justice in words, not in a million years, but when you see it, you're like. Why didn't we have this for a decade or more?

Because it just turns the web from this janky experience of load, do something, load, do something into this gliding through. And so Felix has got a plugin to achieve that. And I, I feel like I've sucked up all the oxygen in the room. I dunno, dunno what else there is to say there, but please, over to you.

[00:44:50] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, we had this before. Yeah, it was just done in CSS, it was not a browser kind of thing. And there there was no API, so everybody implemented any kind of transitions with their own libraries or with maybe a, yeah, a, a library from this corner of the internet and then 15 other libraries from the other corner of the internet.

And now we have actually a transitions API where, um, a CMS, like we can tap into. Make that available for all websites still. Um, yeah. With a plugin, um, user controlled. Yeah. But it's now you, you don't have to worry about other libraries. You don't have to worry about, uh, coding about that. So, um, I think it's really grand.

Yeah. That we have that now, but it, it took the browser, uh, community to, to step up and, and find a, API for that.

[00:45:45] Nathan Wrigley: And I think I'm right in saying that it's a progressive enhancement. So if, um, if your browser, let's say you're on a phone or something like that, and your browser does not support the particular transition, which is in play, then you just, where you were last year, you know, it just looks the same as it ever did.

But, um, I'm imagining that this, this is gonna ship across every browser in every possible way in the, in the next, in the next

[00:46:11] Birgit Pauli-Haack: yeah, I haven't looked yet, but I think there's already a 90% of, um, coverage already,

[00:46:18] Nathan Wrigley: I think so. Is it baseline you can go to, I think baseline or something like

[00:46:21] Birgit Pauli-Haack: I, I forgot. I hardly do those searches

[00:46:25] Nathan Wrigley: No, that, well, it's, it is kinda curious if you do, sometimes you do get a little bit of lag. Um, it often seems to be Firefox that, you know, is, um, is causing the, the, the difference, if you know what I mean. But, uh, and anything on that,

[00:46:41] Anne McCarthy: I'm curious to see how it develops. Like I love that. This is where I love the plugin model where people can experiment, try things, get feedback. I mean, you can notice it has all five star reviews. People seem to really like the feel of it. I think it does a good job of mimicking like a SAP experience, you know, like there is, there's something about that.

Um, and I'm, it's, it's helpful to see what resonates with folks. Like that's always something that folks working in Core are looking at. And Felix is one of those people working in Core. So it's really neat to see, and I'm curious to see how it lands and continues to get good feedback.

[00:47:13] Nathan Wrigley: One thing, which has just occurred to me and I, I had an interview with Felix about this and, and I forgot to, I didn't even think about it. I'm just wondering what the, um, accessibility, uh, uh, you know, whether or not the dom being recreated. Where does the title, for example, end up? And so where do screen readers end up at the beginning on the new page, but also a lot of it seems to be tied to motion.

So, you know, you get an image which grows and ends up in the middle of the page as opposed to, as a small, small image. And whether or not it does things like, I don't know, prefers reduced motion, that kind of thing. Um, so there's little things around the edge of this project which might need tweaking over the, the days, weeks, and months to come.

But it, it's profoundly cool. Um, and as you say, big, it's been around forever, but it's been around forever in 4,000 different JavaScript libraries that, you know, make it, make it difficult to, uh, for everybody to use the same one. Uh, it looks as if, um, Jamie Marsland did a video about this, so I'll

[00:48:16] Birgit Pauli-Haack: He did,

[00:48:16] Nathan Wrigley: to that in the show notes.

So that's probably the best way to, to actually conceptualize

[00:48:21] Birgit Pauli-Haack: He did a great job in,

[00:48:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:48:23] Birgit Pauli-Haack: uh, demoing that. Yeah.

[00:48:24] Nathan Wrigley: That video was called This Free WordPress Plugin is a must have for every website and View Transitions is the name of the project over on wordpress.org. That's where you can find that plugin. Okay. Shall we move to the next one?

In that case now, I, I maintained my ignorance a lot about some of the previous ones. This one, I'm entirely ignorant. I only caught sight of this when you drop this into the show notes. So we're, we're back with the profoundly, um, what's the word? He's got a good work ethic, let's put it that way. It's Mathias again.

Um, new block

[00:49:00] Anne McCarthy: His name is Mathias, by the

[00:49:01] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. No, no, that's good.

[00:49:04] Anne McCarthy: I, I meant to say something earlier and I was like, I gotta just say it

[00:49:06] Nathan Wrigley: I apologize, Mathias, for every, every time, honestly, I must have said that a thousand times in my podcast. And I always say, Mathias. Uh, Mathias, um, new block editions for the block library. 7 1 0 2 6. Tell us more. There's a lot in here, I think, but I don't understand it.

[00:49:26] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, rivers has always, um, um. Fall back that, um, purpose Core does the, the, the minimum and all that, but that, uh, doesn't really apply to the blocks, um, block editor because people wanna have, um, additional features. And what they did at the beginning, since the first, uh, I dunno, two months or so that it came out, is adding blocks to the block editor from plugins.

And all of a sudden they came up with, they, they ended up with 40 or 70 blocks that were installed on the block editor, but there's no. Uh, yeah, no standard way to have all the things that people need to build websites, and that's why the block, um, plugins, um, and, uh, ecosystem has kind of grown so much.

Yeah. And, um, I think there's a revisit of that, uh, thing that, that, uh, dogma so, so to speak, uh, that only the basics are in core and everything else is plugin territory. So I, I think we all, um, many of us need an icons block, need a, a slider carousel block out of. Out of the box for the editor, like, or air tabs, block and Accordion block and mega menus.

I think there was a, um, uh, a real period of at the block editor where, um, there were different mindsets, um, kind of looking at that. So I'm glad that Mathias kind of came around and, um, put the feedback that came from a lot of, um, agencies and, uh, uh, um, news people. Yeah. That they don't wanna install 15 plugins just to get a, uh, a good, uh, set of blocks that they can use for their content.

[00:51:17] Nathan Wrigley: So, so the ones that, so he's basically gone around and just looked at the previous, I don't know how long he's gone backwards and forwards, but he is tried to kind of corral all of the ones, which he feels have been mentioned enough times to make this list. The top of the list is the icons block. Can I just say please?

Yes. That, yeah. Can we all have that one because I, I don't know any website which doesn't need that. Uh, playlist block, slider, stroke, carousel block, stretchy text, interesting tabs. Block. Hmm. Uh, accordion Block, mega Menus. Maths M, math ml, marquee Block. Time to Read Block bread com. Block Dialogue Block.

They're not in alphabetical order, so I wonder if they're in order of some perceived importance. I don't

[00:52:00] Anne McCarthy: They're, they're not, no. He would say something if it were, yeah.

[00:52:04] Nathan Wrigley: but there's, there's a little laundry list there of things which might make your WordPress website a whole lot easier out of the box, you know, if you installed vanilla WordPress and you've got all of those bits and pieces, they seem to be functional in nature, don't they?

They, uh, I suppose the slider one and the stretchy text one there, there's, you know, there's a bit of design in there, but there's quite a lot of layout options in there. Things like tabs, menus, accordions, things like that. That's interesting. Breadcrumbs, lots of ways of just sort of making things go onto the page in a, in a nice way.

Is there anything from that list that you think would be more important or is indeed missing?

[00:52:44] Anne McCarthy: Oh, there's a bunch of stuff that I think is, I mean, there's so many other conversations that have happened around like, what's missing? But I mean, to me, I think, so like one of the things that's really tricky that I think Joe Docent says something later around, like, because so many people recreate these, there's dozens of these type of blocks available and a lot of them are inaccessible.

So if we can provide something that is like core, that is up to a certain standard, like this would help with a lot of different use cases there. And like the slider carousel comes up in particular, um, to me as well as, uh, table of Contents is not on here.

[00:53:22] Nathan Wrigley: Mm.

[00:53:22] Anne McCarthy: right?

[00:53:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:53:24] Birgit Pauli-Haack: But, um, I think we already have that, uh, as a to-do list to stabilize the table of

[00:53:29] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:53:29] Anne McCarthy: Oh, I have, I have updated that issue for so many releases. It's just this is, you have a lot of patients working in core. Um, but like that's one that I remember. Look, I looked at this and I was like, oh, interesting. Table of contents isn't there? So that's another one that I think has come up a lot that is missing.

But like there's a certain point where you have to draw a line. And, um, I will say, I think for folks who are listening to this and have wanted to contribute back to core two, I think this is a great way to have a contained, um, play impact way to, to, to get experience contributing core. So if this is something you're interested in, compared to a lot of other things, these are just distinct one-off.

There's not a lot of dependencies. It's pretty straightforward. Like, like I would love to see community contribution here. Like this is something that, um, I would much rather have folks who are longtime committers working on things like. Inline block comments and, uh, the ability to hide a block. And then people who have maybe built these, maybe you've, you're an author of, of a, you know, plugin that bundles this, or if you've built this kind of stuff, um, as an agency, like, please contribute back in these ways.

This is a huge cool way to get involved in the project, to like address real need. And, um, I just wanted to call that out. As you know, sometimes people are like, I don't know how to contribute. I'm like, here you go.

[00:54:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:54:46] Anne McCarthy: super obvious, super great

[00:54:47] Nathan Wrigley: I think it's fair to say that many of those blocks have been done four or five times over by third

[00:54:52] Anne McCarthy: Oh my gosh. Yeah.

[00:54:53] Birgit Pauli-Haack: yeah,

[00:54:53] Nathan Wrigley: You know, that we, none of those seem mysterious, do they? So there's definite like roots to doing it. Maybe the marquee block. Yeah, I think, yeah, I think you're right about that.

The other ones though. But yeah, Joe Dawson's point, he makes a comment later down, uh, further down about, you know, uh, he says he's largely in favor of adding laws in bot. Uh, if we're gonna do it, let's make sure that they are accessible and it's a sure fire way to make them accessible, right? If, if, if it's in core everybody can put their 2 cents in and, and what have you.

Interesting things like the slider and carousel. I know that modern CSS is getting to the point where it can handle all of that without any Java script as well. So the accessibility of that whilst not perfect is certainly in view. Okay, that all makes more sense to me now. Thank you so much. Alright, shall we move on to the next thing?

Uh, dare I say it? I've been doing this podcast for far too long and since 2016, I've spoken a lot of words about WordPress. This is one of the most important things I think I'm not that interested in. I'm doing air quotes, interested in ai. I don't find myself using it a lot. I'm not a developer, so I'm not, I'm not writing code with it or building, you know, plugins or what have you.

So, and I know it's profoundly interesting in that sense, and I don't tend to find myself wandering into it and creating content. So my exposure to AI is not that great. However, I can't ignore the fact that everybody seems to be falling over themselves with excitement about it, and I couldn't make the leap where WordPress fit in.

I just couldn't do it. All the bits that I'd seen about AI in WordPress felt to me like just. Sticky tape. You know, you were adding a thing in which achieved a task, but it was proprietary. It might, I don't know, create excerpts or write the alt text for your image or something like that. Now with this piece by James LaPage and a bunch of linked pieces, the penny has begun to drop and the excitement is palpable in me now as well because what, what we're looking at here is basically how to describe it.

Almost like rebuilding, no, that's the wrong word, rethinking all of WordPress for the next generation who are gonna be using AI as like the baseline. You know, I think it's fair to say that you and I, it's probably still quite novel, but my kids, it's going to be how they communicate with everything. You know, they're not gonna want to press buttons and use a mouse and a keyboard if they can get away with just saying it out loud or what have you.

Um, and so this is called AI building Blocks for WordPress, profoundly important. And it's linked various different subsections, PHP, AI client, SDK, the Abilities, API, the NCP adapter and the AI experiments plugin. They internally lead off to different, more complicated articles where they, you know, the, the weeds are drawn back and you get into it.

But the, um, but what it presents to you is this overarching thought process of how can we get AI into everything in a standardized way so that you don't need to think about. The plugin that you need to download. You just need to stick an API key in somewhere, and that's it. Because the AI will then know, because of what has been built and described here, if you say, make me a post with three featured images about dogs, I want you to think about the SEO.

I want it to be published next Thursday at three o'clock and blah, blah. It knows how to do all of those different pieces because that's been exposed through the abilities API, and that was the bit that was missing. It was, it was just little discreet bits, which enabled you at the moment you were in the interface to do that one thing better.

This feels like suddenly WordPress is a first class relation to the ai, which is kind of weird. I don't really know, but am I summing that excitement up about right? Do you think? Okay. I'm getting a couple of nods. That's good. Yeah.

[00:59:05] Birgit Pauli-Haack: I, I think you got it really good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, um, uh, if you on the post and you go read through it, um, each one of the other postdoc have kind of a little summary and then, um, you end up, uh, the fourth plugin is actually the AI experience experience plugin, and that brings all the building blocks together in a, in kind of a, an example view.

Yeah. So it's, uh, serves, um, as, um, powerful tool how to get the PEHP AI client, S-D-K-S-D-K software development kit. Um, and that's actually, uh, aptly named because it's not for workers alone, it's for anybody who works with A PHP and that's a, a full. people more. Um, and then, uh, bring all these three things together and see what you can do with it.

Yeah. At, uh, and how the, uh, integrates with W-P-C-L-I and the visual workflows and all that. I haven't, uh, gone into it yet, um, very deeply, but I know that Jonathan Bocher has, and I also know that, um, in pieces Ryan Welcher did, um, and he's, uh, coming around again. Um, but all these plugins will not end up in core for now.

They're all Canon plugins. Uh, but there also will, um, be. Pieces that are used by WordPress for the, uh, workflows, for the command palette, for the, um, yes, some other tools that we, we are gonna build, but there will be canonical feature plugin because the AI space is moving so fast that you cannot guarantee backwards compatibility.

So it needs to be in a feature plugin, uh, and not going core because CORE has and still has very firmly a backwards compatibility

[01:01:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Um, just dear listener, if you don't know what a canonical plugin is, it is, think of it like something that could easily just map straight into core. You could dump it right into core tomorrow, really. But it's not, it's not in core, but it's gonna get the same security posture, it's gonna get the same updating and all of that, but it does feel like something like this big.

It, it kind of, I don't know if it'll ever belong in core, if it's easily discoverable. Some people, I guess, will just not want anything to do with ai, so maybe it won't be for them, but, but yeah. Um, thank you for that. That was really helpful. Uh, and anything on that? Yeah.

[01:01:43] Anne McCarthy: The only thing I'll add is that the focus at a high level is on building tools for developers in a way that is user first. So it's, it's, it's not, again, it kind of similar thing to what we've been talking about before, but rather than every developer who wants to integrate AI rebuilding the AI infrastructure and making sure it works correctly, this just creates some standardization and shared tooling, um, that can do things in a way that is in line with how WordPress has been built.

Um, and with that in mind, as well as just simplifying, you know. At the user level, if someone wants to switch between providers, it becomes very simple. You're not getting in stuck into vendor lock-in. And so it honors WordPress's history and our approach, as well as opens the door and paves this path. Um, for AI integration in the future that becomes much more simpler and that frees developers up again.

So not recreate the wheel every single time, every single time you're doing it. Um, and provides just kind of shared pieces. And it's intentional that it started with developers first because of kind of, you know, folks are saying backwards compatibility like Brige brought up. And also just some people may not want AI in their site.

So like you can provide the plumbing for it, the infrastructure for it, and then people can opt in or out, um, and respect kind of user desires on that. So I think it's really exciting. I think it's a really neat, um, approach and I think it makes sense for where we are in terms of preserving the open web.

So if we can, if we can shift WordPress in order to. well with this. Um, I think, you know, we, when we zoom out for your, your, your kids in our future, um, I want the open web to be part of this and to be, um, something that can be, uh, at the forefront as well and not left behind where we're stuck into vendor lock in and, and we're paying a hundred dollars a month to have access to whatever nonsense, you know, like I'd much rather have it where it's, it's open

[01:03:28] Nathan Wrigley: So again, I sort of underline the fact that we've said what we said earlier, which is that we've got all these foundational pieces where it feels like we're building bits that are just standardized, that other people can get their teeth into the, the developer. We don't need 50 developers making ai, the, the, the pipe work for the ai.

We, we will have WordPress do that, and then the developers can get on with the, the more exciting bit of making the AI do whatever it does. And, um, and maybe, maybe this kind of, I don't know, maybe this will create a bit of excitement out there in the, in the wider world, maybe that was the bit that I was describing right at the top of the show where it felt like things had slowed down a little bit.

I feel like the AI piece, this team that have, that have obviously been doing this work, this newly formed team with James LaPage at the, at the helm. I guess, um, maybe that's responsible for it. It does certainly seem out there in the world that AI is all the, is all the hotness. And curiously, it's, as far as I know, the AI team is the first team that have been housed in the same physical location.

It's the first non distributed team in WordPress. And I, I dunno what that says about the profundity of,

[01:04:40] Anne McCarthy: Well, yeah, let me correct

[01:04:42] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, thank you.

[01:04:42] Anne McCarthy: It's, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So automatic, this is separate from WordPress project, but Automatic Matt is experimenting with having some folks work on AI for Automatic out of, out of our New York office. And a lot of that is actually separate from, um, what, what will be happening in

[01:04:58] Nathan Wrigley: Oh,

[01:04:59] Anne McCarthy: So those folks will be working more broadly within Automatic's products. And, you know, of course there'll be alignment around different things, but we Automatic has a ton of things from Tumblr to beeper to day one to, you know, like we have tons of stuff, um, as part of democratizing,

[01:05:14] Nathan Wrigley: I, I saw the, um, I saw the beeper event actually the other day. I dunno if you watched that, but I felt like I was watching like an Apple thing. Uh, do you, do you know what I mean? I, I really got a sense of, gosh, I mean, I just associate auto, I know they've got these things right? And I use many of them. So I use beeper, I use pocket casts.

I have used day one, so I know they're there, but I kind of forget that automatics responsible for those and, and to see automatic. That kind of Apple presentation mode was really curious to me, and I thought it was really great. You know, this jazzy venue and like, you know, and they brought somebody onto the stage and it was all, oh, it was lovely.

It was really, really great. That was, that was

[01:05:54] Anne McCarthy: I also loved Beeper was so, like, I had been, I've beta tested early stuff when we first acquired Texan Beeper, and I haven't used it in a bit. And so whenever this launch happened,

[01:06:03] Nathan Wrigley: I haven't stopped using it since the day it was

[01:06:05] Anne McCarthy: unbelievable. Yeah, I, well I ran into a bunch of connection issues. Like I, I love, I find bugs, I'm like attracted to bugs.

So like, I ran into all these bugs and was like, I'm not using this, this isn't working for me. I reinstalled it whenever this launched. Um, 'cause before I was using text and immediately deleted. Four different apps from my phone, and I was like, oh, bless it. Like one of my best friends loves WhatsApp. I hate WhatsApp.

Now it's all just integrated into beeper. And I can message him whenever and it's like, I'm like, oh, sweet relief. Like I'm such a minimalist that I'm like, oh yes.

[01:06:36] Nathan Wrigley: quite annoyingly, the one that seems to fail, and I think it's on Facebook side, is WhatsApp. That one kind of dis gets

[01:06:43] Anne McCarthy: Oh really?

[01:06:44] Nathan Wrigley: periodically. It's much less now, but when the app first came out, it was like every three days. Now I think we're on a much more solid kind of two month cadence, something like that.

But, but occasionally you have to put WhatsApp back because there's some handshake that needs to happen. Or q there's something you have to scan a QR

[01:07:00] Anne McCarthy: one day.

[01:07:01] Nathan Wrigley: blah, blah. But, um, it's brilliant. Like it's the, it is the only communication tool I now use part, I just

[01:07:08] Anne McCarthy: That's so cool.

[01:07:08] Nathan Wrigley: sky.

Uh, anyway, we're getting off piece. Um.

[01:07:12] Anne McCarthy: but I just to clarify like that, yeah. The AI team in New York, that is a totally separate, automatic only weird one-off thing that we're trying and experimenting with, which I think is really cool. Like, don't, you know, one of the parts of our creed is, um, you know, there is no such, such thing as a status quo.

Like challenging the very foundations of how automatic works, I think is really, it's part of why I've worked here for almost 11 years is like, everything's always changing. It's always interesting. Nothing is precious. Um, how do we, how do we ship, switch up what we're doing? And with the age of ai, I think it's gonna be interesting to see what happens with that team.

I actually haven't been to New York office either, so, um, it's kind of funny where that Yeah. Yeah.

[01:07:51] Nathan Wrigley: nice, nice, nice. Um, so we were talking earlier about Mathias. Did I get that right? Um, Mathias being a hardworking person, well, another one we've mentioned him before, we're gonna mention him again, is Felix Ants. And, uh, this time we're moving into something which has already shipped in, uh, 6.8.

Chances are you don't even know. That it's there 'cause it's just kind of in and it's on and it just does what it does. It's, um, speculative loading, so I'll try and summarize it. So speculative, it's voodoo basically. It's kind when you describe it. Yeah, there's like a little gremlin there somewhere inspecting what you do.

So this is the capacity to kind of preload, pre-render prefetch actually, um, different resources. So on different pages, for example. And you can set different aggressiveness to it and set certain actions to it. But a typical use case might be, I've got my mouse and my mouse is going to hover over a link.

And let's say for example, if I hover over that link for a period of time, perhaps that's an indication that I'm gonna click on that page. Well, WordPress has got a fairly conservative version of that, so it's gonna go and pre. Render or prefetch, I can't remember which one it is based upon the click event.

So essentially when you click it will go and get that page. Um, and normally there'd be this whole, you know, lift the finger off and what have you. What I'm basically trying to say is it's gonna speed the web up. It's kind of making predictions about what you're gonna do. Um, if you download the plugin and install it, you can change the.

Prediction engine, if you like, so that it will be more aggressive. You could have it preload everything when your mouse rolled over. You could preload the whole site probably if you wanted to, but don't do that 'cause we have an environment and we like the trees. Um, but the, the point is it's in WordPress 6.8.

You may not have noticed it. I dunno if it, I don't think it does anything on the backend, but on the front end it should be fairly profound and, uh, yeah. And it's in a fairly conservative motor. It won't be eating up your CPU cycles too much. I think I've done that one. Uh, did I get, was there anything else to add?

[01:10:02] Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, I really like it. I'm kind of really happy that that, that some AI or prediction algorithm is

[01:10:09] Nathan Wrigley: It's a gremlin.

[01:10:10] Birgit Pauli-Haack: where I'm

[01:10:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's def there's a little man in my mouse who's looking the whole

[01:10:16] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Before I know that I'm going there. Yeah.

[01:10:18] Nathan Wrigley: that's right. Yeah. Um.

[01:10:20] Birgit Pauli-Haack: I,

[01:10:20] Nathan Wrigley: The, the thing to say is it's your, your WordPress is not doing this for you. This is a, this is a browser, API. So WordPress is just building on something, which now the browsers allow you to do.

So again, your mileage may vary. If you're on some kind of curious, you know, browser used by four people, um, then it might not work. But in things like Chrome, it's definitely gonna work. Chromium, derivatives, that kind of thing. It's definitely gonna work. I think Safari is definitely working. I think again, it might be Firefox, which is just what holding out a little bit there.

But, um, yeah, it, it is on, in WordPress and you, you cannot change it unless you download the plugin. You need to go download the plugin. Then you can get some additional settings if you wish to fiddle with it. But, uh, even on a cheap post, it's gonna, it's gonna help you out the box. Uh, and anything about that?

No.

[01:11:11] Anne McCarthy: No, I just love seeing this sort of stuff. I, I think it's really neat to have intruders from different backgrounds in the WordPress project too. Like having folks from Google working on this or folks on the performance team, or folks on the I team, having folks from agency background, like all that sort of stuff just makes WordPress better.

And so I love whenever I see these sorts of things happen, and I think it's really easy to miss this stuff. Um, especially when it's like a dev note. You're like, what? What is this?

[01:11:33] Nathan Wrigley: What voodoo is that? The, um, I did a podcast episode with Adam Silverstein, who I, now I understand is now not with Google. Apologies, Adam, if you are no longer, if you are still with Google. But, um, we talked about I think eight different browser APIs that have dropped in the more recent past and some of them things like the popup, um, and overlays API, things like that, which no doubt will WordPress will start to take advantage of in the future.

The browsers are basically starting to do a lot of work that JavaScript did, and, uh, thank the Lord, uh, for that.

[01:12:05] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. Um, Adam Silverstein did a, a great, um, talk at WebCamp Europe about these, all these APIs, and he will do another one in we, um,

[01:12:16] Nathan Wrigley: snagged him, like literally collared him as he was coming out the, uh, as he was coming, coming out the presentation. So we got him hot off the presses. It was all in his head still. Um, however, I was just saying if you wish to, if you wish to fiddle with your speculative loading, if you want to just, or tweak it a little bit, there is a, uh, a plugin.

It's called Speculative loading. It's by the WordPress Performance Team. Uh. The notes will show you where the URL, uh, for that is. And then this one, I dunno who put this one. And it was either Anne or Bigot. Um, this is cool. So the, the WordPress version of this doesn't do anything on the admin side of things, or at least that's my understanding.

You know, you're still gonna have to wait your, however many plugins you've got, you're gonna wait anywhere between one and 50 seconds to make the next page load for your admin. However, Western Rotter has come up with a lovely variation on this. Um, and it's called Speculative Loading Admin. And it takes that, um, conservative approach and, and ops the ante.

It makes it more, I love this word, eager. It, uh, it makes it more eager. And so I, I am not. There's no way I'm not gonna use this because I'm the only person in the back end of my WordPress admin. I'm not gonna increase the CPU cycles because it's just me. Alright. I might do a teeny, tiny bit, but only a teeny tiny bit.

So I, I presume that's what it does. And, um, sorry. Be it, or, and whoever dropped this one, and it just, it allows that to happen.

[01:13:49] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Um, yeah, just one note, it's still experimental

[01:13:52] Nathan Wrigley: I won't be downloading it and installing it across all my sites. Okay.

[01:13:57] Anne McCarthy: Also added it, so props to her on that.

[01:13:59] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah,

[01:13:59] Nathan Wrigley: Uh, yeah.

[01:14:01] Birgit Pauli-Haack: I kind of, yeah. Like the speculative floating things and watching the space and Yeah. Has been a, a long time core committer, so, um, I also trust what he brings out.

[01:14:12] Nathan Wrigley: I I have a memory that like a couple of weeks ago he did a, he leveraged I, again, I dunno if it's a browser thing, this backwards and forwards navigation plugin that he came up with as well. I dunno if you saw that. I'll put that in the show notes as well because he came up with something else probably related to this in all honesty, uh, which allows you to prefetch or pre-render the, the, the, you know, when you click back in your browser and forwards in your browser, it will enable that to, to happen instantaneously as well.

Um, um, in that case, dare I say it, did we get to the end of, is that it or have we missed

[01:14:47] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yes, I think that's it. It was a ton of

[01:14:52] Nathan Wrigley: So.

[01:14:53] Birgit Pauli-Haack: that we dropped on everybody.

[01:14:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Anybody who says that WordPress is not like on fire at the minute, it, you're just wrong. Um, 'cause there's loads going on. If we'd have done this show a few months ago, I think we'd have struggled to make it quite as exciting as that.

But honestly, all that stuff has dropped in the very, very recent past. Um, and obviously from the article that Anne's produced, there's a heck of a lot coming around in the 6.9 cycle

[01:15:16] Anne McCarthy: And that was curated.

[01:15:18] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You had to

[01:15:19] Anne McCarthy: a lot of stuff. Like I don't think people realize that. Like, wow, there's so much in this. And I'm like, oh my God, I had to remove so many

[01:15:27] Nathan Wrigley: I'm so glad

[01:15:27] Anne McCarthy: so that's a

[01:15:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Um, in which case, if we have, uh, if we have done it, is there anything that you guys wanna mention that was out outta cycle for this? So, firstly, go to Anne. Is there anything you wanna say or mention or,

[01:15:41] Anne McCarthy: Well, I'll say I'm really excited about the WordPress Campus Connect. This is just kind of. Somewhat of a non-sequitur, but I, I, I got my start in university. I worked in a multi-site at UNC Chapel Hill, and they happened to be a VIP client of automatics and it ended up working out where I ended up joining Automatic.

But I absolutely believe in that and like, as someone who. Joined quite young into that scene, like I think it's a great way to have like a pipeline for folks. I'm really excited about it. I think it's a really cool, um, program. I'm really, I think it's really interesting. I would've loved to do something like that when I was a student.

I think it's a very powerful idea to kind of start getting people interested in the open web. I've always been fascinated about how do you communicate the value of open source to people like my partner's, a lawyer, and I, I've had to explain to her why open source matters and if we can get folks thinking about that sooner and kind of see the value of, um, you know, we were talking about woodcarving earlier, like there's something so cool about seeing something on WordPress and then being like, this could be better.

Opening an issue and getting it fixed. Like that feedback loop is like almost intoxicating. Like, I, I still love how much you can have discussions and how people open things and how you can directly, that empowerment in a world where everything can be so overwhelming, I think is really neat when it works.

And so I'm very excited about. What's happening with that and just want people to keep an eye on it. And also, if you're interested in mentoring, um, keep that in mind. We also need to have people on the other side who are helping them, um, get up to speed there. And so I, I just am watching that with a lot of excitement and, um, a lot of appreciation for the folks who've paved that, paved that way, so.

[01:17:12] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, I like to have that being the ending of that, uh, that podcast too, because it's really a, a totally remarkable program. And it has mushrooms Yeah. From, um, from South America to Philippines and all, all the places in between, and I'm really excited about that too. Yes.

[01:17:30] Anne McCarthy: Yeah. And the work with WP Campus as well, like, they've been in the higher ed space for so long, like, I just think there's so many neat parts of the community there where we can get, catch people where they are, um, and get feedback coming in from both, you know, folks from community, different angles. So I'm, I'm just really excited about it and just wanna call out like how much is being done there, um, on the education side. So, yeah.

[01:17:50] Nathan Wrigley: Well, thank you for that. I appreciate you both giving us those comments right at the end. Thank you. The only thing I have to say is, firstly, thank you very, very much for the, the time that you've given to us today. I know that your time is very, very precious and I appreciate you helping me to understand, but also hopefully helping the audience members to understand all of the different pieces that have been happening in WordPress core over the last period three months or so.

Hopefully we'll catch you again. In three months time, we'll be able to talk about the different bits and pieces that have kinda shipped in 6.9, possibly those roadmap items that we just mentioned maybe will be part of WordPress at that point. So Birgit, the explainer Pauli-Haack, and Anne McCarthy, thank you so much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.

[01:18:37] Birgit Pauli-Haack: thank you so much for having us.

[01:18:38] Anne McCarthy: Ditto, thank you.

[01:18:40] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that's all we've got time for this week. Just before we go, a big shout out to Anne and Birgit. Thanks for joining me. Thanks for putting together such comprehensive show notes so that I could follow along. Really appreciate that.

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