This Week in WordPress #356

[00:00:03] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress, episode number 356 entitled, erasing Jonathan's face. It was recorded on Monday the 24th of November, 2025. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today I am joined by Birgit Pauli-Haack by Taco Verdonschot, and by Jonathan Bossenger, whose face we erase many, times.

We start the podcast on a sad note marking the passing of a dedicated WordPress contributor. So we spend a few sad moments talking about that.

And then we get into WordPress 6.9 and the vast majority of the episode is talking about what's coming in WordPress 6.9. All of the different pieces in terms of accessibility, all of the different bits and pieces in terms of performance. There's loads of content helping you through this phase.

But also there are some live events that we talk about, one of which Jonathan is organizing about what it is that you can do to get yourself aligned, getting ready for the new upcoming update.

And then we get into a few different bits and pieces around the community. We talk about the fact that Jetpack has got a new person at the helm. I did a podcast about that.

There's a whole bunch of new blocks, block suites, which have launched over the last few weeks as well.

So there's absolutely loads in this episode, and I really hope that you enjoy it.

This episode of the WP Builds podcast is brought to you by GoDaddy Pro, the home of manage WordPress hosting that includes free domain, SSL, and 24 7 support. Bundle that with the hub by GoDaddy Pro to unlock more free benefits to manage multiple sites in one place, invoice clients and get 30% of new purchases. Find out more at go.me/wpuilds.

Hello, hello, I just did a really satisfying stretch. I don't know if anybody else was stretching whilst the, whilst the music was on, it was very enjoyable. we are on episode number 356 of this week in WordPress. As you can see, I'm joined by a really nice panel of people. We've got, everybody is a, returning.

Visitor. And I have to say that I'm very glad this feels like, one of the, one of the bigger weeks in WordPress in terms of, what Core is bringing out and the, people getting aligned and learning what 6.9 has to bring in more so than ever before, just because of the length of time it has been since the last update, which is, in an unusual cycle at the moment.

Anyway, we will get into that in a moment. The, the first thing that I need to do though is just go round the houses and, say hello to everybody. So let's go, there first, which is Bigot. Bigot, Polly Hack. Yeah. Thank you. Tacho. That's a, oh look, everybody's a pro. how you doing bigot?

I'm very well. Thank you very much for having me. Yes, you are you're so welcome. I am really glad to have you back. I'm gonna read Big. It's, oh. I've already spotted that Ta Tacho. Looks like he's written me a poem. Okay, we'll get to that. bigots, bio reads as follows. Bigot is the creator of Gutenberg Times.

We will see that in a minute, site with news around the WordPress block editor and beyond. She is the host of a podcast, sorry of the podcast, Gutenberg Changelog, which discusses what's new in Gutenberg and more with special guests. She's been contributing to the WordPress Open source project since 2014, and in 2021 she closed her web agency after 20 years and now works as a developer advocate for automatic.

Very nice. Thank you for joining us. Thank you. Really appreciate it. And, down there, there's, there's ta Jonathan, it's so easy to get that wrong. Yes. If you just point in any direction, you one of them will be Right. it's. Yeah. Hi. Nice to have you with us. Okay, so I haven't read Taco's Bio. It only just came into my view, so here we go.

This should be good. Okay, here we go. Ta. So this is what he wrote. Tacho brings ideas to life with calm. Oh, it rhymes. Okay. Okay. All right. So I've gotta do it correctly. Tacho brings ideas to life with calm and care. He builds in tech and finds new paths everywhere at home. In vegan, he feels steady and bright.

His family gives him strength every day and every night. I added a word in there He follows this week in WordPress to stay sharp and on track. WB builds keeps him updated. A secret life hack from WordPress to Amelia. He follows his drive. CIN class smiles and says, your spark keeps dreams. Alive. That's so nice.

Nice. Yes. That had a flavor. There is a reason for this. Okay, go. we've just entered the center class period, which is a Dutch holiday. Yeah. And one of the traditions connected to it is that you write poems in rhyme. Oh. So I figured for each other. so I figured I would do one. For this occasion as Well, you are, I'm shocked. Thank you. Very. Yeah, exactly. Can I just ask, is center cla, would that map to like advent? Is it a thing which begins and then there's a countdown and then it ends at some point? Or what is that? It's like Dutch Santa Claus. Oh, okay. Yeah. Okay. But it's a But it's in the calendar.

[00:05:26] Taco Verdonschot: Different, yeah, it's, December 5th. Okay. Okay. So interesting. There you, but there's, I did not a couple weeks leading up to it, for the kids. So it's specifically a kid kids holidays. Yeah. I'm not gonna say anything about Santa Claus just in case there happens to be somebody watching and there's, children around.

[00:05:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Oh, Santa class comes to Germany on December 6th. Oh, okay. Yeah. Okay. Alright. 24th. You can do two countries in one day, can you? Yeah. 25th of December, in my neck of the woods and down a chimney, as well. he's got all sorts of different techniques by the looks of it. And over here, the last one joining us on the pa.

Over there. look, everybody's a pro. is Jonathan Boer. Hello, Jonathan. Hello. I've gotta say I'm very grateful, particularly to Jonathan because we were supposed to have Seth Goldstein, joining us today. He, unfortunately, is unwell, and so Jonathan stepped in at the very last moment, so I'm very appreciative of that.

I'm really, happy to have you with us, but, get well soon. Seth, I hope all things are, on the, end. here's Jonathan's bio. Jonathan is a developer, educator, writer, and open source advocate from Cape Town South Africa. After a 20 year career in software development, he found his calling in developer relations in 2020 and hasn't looked back.

Jonathan is passionate about supporting developer communities, building awesome developer tooling, and creating engaging educational content for developers. And we will be featuring something that Jonathan has put together. During the course of this week. So that is our little panel. Thank you from me to all of you.

Really appreciate it. We, we of course have the comment thing going and the show is buoyed along very much so by the comments. So if you wish to, to add your comments and if it's WordPress, I think we've yet to have a comment. Oh, as soon as I say this, I'm gonna regret it. I don't, think we've yet had a comment, which was like on.

On, put on the screenable, if Everybody that seems to watch the show seems to have, the right ethics about it, like propelling the show forward and thinking about nice things to say. So keep it like that. We'd appreciate it. The only weird thing is whenever a comment comes in from Twitch, the Twitch platform, it's always just totally off message.

It's just clearly some bot that loves gaming or something like that and just has hijacked our thread. But if you want to, make use of comments, there's a couple of, probably the, easiest way to do it is to go here. So Taco is currently sporting the look what a pro, WP bells.com/live. If you head over there and you are on a desktop, then the embedded YouTube comments are on the right of the video below the video on a mobile device.

But if you don't wanna be logged into a Google account, that's fine. There's a little box inside the video itself, which says live chat. Top I think it's a black button and you don't have to be logged into anything. And none of that data is kept. It just comes in as a comment. And your accounts, there is no account.

You don't create an account. It's just live during the, course of this. So anybody that wants to make a comment, please do. And here are some, comments that people have made. Courtney, joining us. I'm guessing that's a cup of coffee or something, just illustrating that.

cheers Courtney. yeah, exactly. I'm cheers. I'm on the water. Nevermind. and then gets a reply from, Philly Code Hound. Hello? Oh, I think that might be Seth. I'm not sure if it's you, Seth. Get well soon. I hope that you are. Yes. Doing alright. That is Seth. Oh. Oh, thank you for joining us in the comments.

That's absolutely lovely. Reese Wynn is joining us saying, good afternoon from a chili. Newton Le Willows, the local shop had Easter, eggs. What, did you go back in time today? What happened? There? You are way off. da So Fs as, code. that's Seth. We now know. So thank you very much.

And I think there might be a bunch of comments just going backwards and forwards amongst the various people. No. Oh, here we go. No comments that are on honorable on screen Challenge. Accept Marcus. Marcus. Don't do it. Don't give into that. Why do we know you be? Yeah, we know where you, we don't know where you live.

it's in Florida. But do you remember Tom and Jerry cartoons? I dunno if you watched those when you were a kid, but Tom and Jerry, very often they would have this Devil on the shoulder. And on the other side would be the angel. Go with the angel Marcus. don't give in to the devil Out context.

That sounds like a really nasty wish to wish, with the angels. It does. It does. Yeah. he says he's grateful to us all for the show. if there's any that pop up, I will bring those on in a moment. but whoever Code of Joy, joy of code is they're, taking, a few moments to go do the laundry.

That's Bob Crows. Okay. Oh, is it? Oh, of course it is. Joy a wp I see it there now in the Yeah, he's gonna go and do laundry us. We'll see you in a bit, Bob. Yeah. Nice, to have you with us. Let me get rid of those bits and pieces off the screen and we'll get stuck into what it is that we're trying to do today.

Yeah. Thank you. so this is us wp builds.com. If you fancy, keep an update with what we do. Just stick your email address in this field and, you'll receive two emails. One when. Push this out. We repackage this, for a podcast audience. That's why we do it. It's for the podcast episode in the morning.

So you'll get an email alert sort of early tomorrow morning to say that it's come out and you can listen to it in your car while you're doing the vacuuming, whatever. And so you'll get that. And then on a Thursday when we put out a podcast episode, you will get that as well. So can I just, I assume you meant listening to in your car or while you're doing the vacuuming, not in your car.

[00:11:09] Jonathan Bossenger: I suppose you could be vacuuming the car. not driving whilst vacuuming the car. That's totally off piece. No, we're not doing that. that was the, on, that was the on put honorable message whilst vacuuming the car and driving. No. so yeah, so put your email address in there and we'll send you one when we do an episode on a Thursday as well, you can get to the sort of archive of the bits and pieces that we produce.

[00:11:35] Nathan Wrigley: If you click in the little archive thing here. Then, then here we go. And you can see that the most recent episode that I did, was all about checkout summit. I dunno if you've heard about this, but next year in, in Sicily, I want to say where is it? Is it Palermo? I think I've actually forgotten, but certainly it's in a resort.

So if you're into WooCommerce or eCommerce more generally and and you'd like to hang out with some like-minded people, go and check out that episode. There is a, real world event happening in what can only be described as a resort. So you could definitely combine holiday making with going to a WordPress or WooCommerce event.

So check that out and you can find out more about that. Then we have our Black Friday deals page. If you go to wp builds.com/black, we've got a few sponsored slots that you can see at the top. But basically if you start to scroll down, these are all, listings that people have sent to me. there's no affiliate links or anything like that.

but there's 300 and something there at the minute. So there's, yeah, there's, absolutely loads. It goes a bit mental. so if you, it's the season, yeah. You're not gonna be able to cope with scrolling it because I deliberately so that, 'cause in the beginning when I put it out, I had it in the order that there was submitted and I thought, that's not fair.

So now every hour it randomizes and which makes it fair, but equally it makes it like really hard to figure out what's going on. So, if you click, it's like when you go shopping in your favorite store. Exactly. Around, that's exactly what it's like. So if you go in here, click the little search and filter thing.

Then you can either search for a product name or the people who submitted them, submitted the categories that they felt it would, most represented. So you can go and do it in that way. And then also if you, if you would like to add your own deal, it's totally free. Just, you just click that button, fill out a form, and I'll stick it on, as soon as I get round to it, usually within an hour or so.

and it is just loads, and my inbox is mental at the moment, not just because of these deals coming in to go on this page, but it must be the same for you, right? Every single thing of, any description that ever got hold of my email address is currently emailing me. And I'm getting, honestly, since we started this show, I've had 15 emails.

15 Emails in the last eight minutes or so. It's absolutely insane. So I, dunno what to do. So if you're in the WordPress space and you fancy getting away from all that, I probably have it here. and it'll show you, for example, how much they claim their knocking off the price, and what have you go and have a look. WP Bills, I saw a couple at a hundred percent. yeah, so, the weird thing about that is because of the way I set up the form and I had to have a number in that field, some things are like a, it's like free for a year. And so I don't really have a perfect way of encapsulating that.

So yeah, you're right. There are a couple which are a bit weird like that, but I don't know how to Define that otherwise, but mostly the number, works. there's loads of money to be had off, and I know lots of people do that. So anyway, we talked about this before the show, but I can offer progress planner at a hundred percent discount.

[00:14:54] Taco Verdonschot: Okay. It's a free product, right? yeah. yeah, it is. Yeah. In the end you'll end up, you'll end up paying people to, to have, it's oh, a hundred percent off free. Yeah, I know. It's still free. so go check that out and, yeah, that's quite nice. And this is the interview that I did with Rodolfo, Milley all about, the, summit, which is happening next year.

[00:15:19] Nathan Wrigley: So you can check that out. Episode 4, 4, 6, Hope, let's get into the bits and pieces. anybody wanna talk about Black Friday before we move on? Just, in case they do, probably not. No. Okay. Alright. Right then. I was going to lead in a different way, but quite rightly, I was, Tcho requested that we could put this item first.

So I'm going from jovial and banter, which I had in my, in my voice a moment ago to exactly the opposite. And I hope that I managed to do that with the taste and decorum, which it requires. so this is a piece, there are several pieces around on the internet at the moment, but this is a piece which Tacho has selected.

It's WordCamp Asia 2026 website. And, the piece is entitled in Loving Memory of Zeal, aka Now, I confess, I don't, have any experience of working with Zeal or meeting zeal in any way, shape or form. But looking at the list of things which, zeal had been up to in the more recent past, a real. tighten in that part of the world of the community, somebody that was really busting a gut to help drive the community forwards.

But, I don't know, tacho, if you want to take it from here, perhaps you've met Zeal or know a little bit more about Yes. But there is more to this story. I, was lucky enough to meet her at Work Camp Amba in 2023. and then, over the course of the, years after online and at online events a couple of times, like you said, a force for good, very active in the WordPress community.

[00:17:02] Taco Verdonschot: And, at just 24 years old. Which is part of the youth that we really want to get into WordPress. and it would've been fantastic if we'd had her for many more years in our community. unfortunately, there was an incident. she, she was unwell while on stage talking about World Camp Asia, at a world camp.

world camp, and yeah. despite, WordPress doing CPR and trying to save her life, that was unfortunately, yeah. That didn't happen. So she passed away. In the community that she loved and was very active in. Yeah, I, so there's no nice way of sharing this news. Is there? There's only sorrow really.

[00:18:06] Nathan Wrigley: But, but it's amazing that, in that short space of time, a very young life that in that short space of time so much had been achieved in a project that was obviously very, meaningful to her. and, I guess my condolences would just go out to anybody that knows her or is affected by this.

It's, it's brutal and, for it to happen in such a, public way as well is, oh, it's, yeah. Hard to, cope with. I dunno if anybody else has anything to add to that. No. Okay. In which case, unfortunately life always as always has to move on. And, I hope you'll forgive us if at some point we draw a line and become our sort of entertaining selves and jocular selves again.

But, yeah, like I said, to anybody that knew Zeal or Indeed was present at that moment when, when things di occurred at Word Camps are at, commiserations and, yeah, there is at least a testimony there, something great was achieved in such a short space of time. Yeah. And I saw there was already, a mention that she will be added to wordpress.org/remembers, which is the page that.

[00:19:27] Taco Verdonschot: Lists, those in our community who've left us too early. maybe a way to round this off is if I just read the last few paragraphs from the, from the Word Camp Asia piece. The link will be in the show notes if you want to follow this up, but it says it's entitled, remembrance. The loss of someone so bright, talented, and full of promise is deeply painful.

[00:19:48] Nathan Wrigley: Her passion for learning and her desire to help others realize WordPress's potential defined her contributions. She found fulfillment in empowering others to explore what WordPress offers and a collaborative spirit. Spirit touched countless lives. Zell's Legacy will live on through the community. She's built, she built, and the countless contribution she made to WordPress are thoughts and prayers are with Zeal, immediate family, friends, and all who knew and loved her.

And like I said, there are various articles that you can find online, which say more or less the same thing, but, always very painful when somebody in the community which you thrive in, passes away. okay. Yep. Okay. On that note, we will move on and I would imagine it would be, apropos to carry on as normal, if that's all right with everybody else.

So here's another piece which I'll just mention. The WordPress Foundation produced a piece, it's very similar, however, this, not just remember Zeal, but it was a, piece talking about the Kim Parel Memorial Scholarship, which Zeal was a recipient of. And it also goes on to, mention Pujari.

But, given what's happened this week, we will just leave it hanging there. Okay. So let's turn our attention to something entirely different this time. WordPress 6.9. I feel like the rest of this show is gonna be basically dominated by this, the, upcoming WordPress 6.9 release. In the normal cycle of events, we would, we maybe wouldn't have quite as much drop at this one time because the period of time would be smaller between, the last release and this major release.

And so it's felt like over the last couple of weeks, lots and lots has been ramping up. lots of pieces have been written about all of the different pieces that are dropping in, whether that's from an accessibility point of view, from a performance point of view, and being it, bless her life, decided to write a book.

and here it is. It's called the WordPress 6.9 Source of Truth. And I dunno if you can see, can you see my scroll bar? You can, look how tiny the scroll bar is on the right hand side. That kind of shows it, doesn't it? It's massive. there's so many things dropping, and so in order to make this more palatable for a show of this length and scope, I asked bigot just to cherry pick some of her favorite, favorite's, probably the wrong word, some of the bits that were most impactful or most important to her.

So over to you, bigot. thank you. Yes. Yeah, there's a lot of, things to, to go through. and I actually picked my favorites and, I, I really love that we have new blocks coming to core, especially the accordion block and the time to read, block. as well as the math, block and the term query block, they're all, new.

[00:22:41] Birgit Pauli-Haack: and they actually enrich all the things you wanna do with a blog. yeah, the accordion block for your FAQs. the time to read is to, had some major accessibility. Overhaul. so it actually could go into core and it has a time to read. It's really helpful. But the source of truth s stumped me a bit because it's 22 to 33 minutes.

Oh, yeah. and it has, is that, what this article is when you put in the, is that what it said? Yeah. It's not, it's way longer than that. Sorry. Especially when you get to this picture and you spend a bit of time thinking, what does that mean? And if anybody's math is up to that, but I just look at that.

[00:23:28] Nathan Wrigley: I like that. Yeah. I'm really happy that the math blockers now really. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. But that's just my, preference because I, I. had math in school quite a bit, then I wanted to actually be a math teacher. Yeah. But it turned out otherwise. So I, but that's a different story. those two things, four things, new blocks, and then there's this, stretchy text variation that comes in that had a, a went through a.

[00:23:56] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Quite a bit different, interface, but it's, how you can transform your headline into a text that fills up the full screen. Okay. Or the full container that it's in honestly about, it was about four weeks ago, we had Steve Burge on this show and we were, and we got into this and none of us knew what strategy text was.

[00:24:16] Nathan Wrigley: And so we were, imagining this sort of fairly elastic coming, text what we put inside. I dunno, you could pull it out. But the, principle is just to clear it up for everybody. The idea is it occup occupy it, it occupies the full space available. which I guess in many scenarios is exactly what you may need to deploy.

You just want it to fill up the available space and not look justified left or right or what have you. Okay. Or you wanna have just a different, yeah. Font, yeah. Design in there and then, and it actually does that when you type it in, and you. Transform it into stretchy text and type further it, it actually, goes smaller, the year longer it becomes.

[00:25:00] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So it's really interesting to see. but it's also, totally responsive. So if, that text is on a mobile, it's, adjusting for that. so it's, it's a really nice, design tool, to have it, lovely. It's available for a paragraph as well as for the heading block. Okay. And those who have custom blocks that are text oriented, they can actually, put it into a support for the black JSON and it's, fit text equals through or something like that.

Yeah. Okay. I think I have it in there. Yeah. So it's, yeah. it's more, things. Yeah. And I'm absolutely in love with the command palette being anywhere because now I don't have to, it's the, you do control K and then a little, Box comes up where you can type a command or say, go to site editor or add a block, add a post or, go to settings.

You don't have to go through the whole menu to actually get to the page. And that's really, streamlining my, contact creation. So, I guess it's a bit like if you're a Mac user, then it's Spotlight. Spotlight. you, hit a command and then, but in the past, the command palette for WordPress has been limited.

[00:26:18] Nathan Wrigley: If I'm right. I don't make he heavy use of it to be honest. Was it limited to the post and page editor and things? there was definite areas. The site editor? Yeah, the site editor as well. Okay. But now it's more or less everywhere or, yeah, and it can certainly get you around inside the admin as well, Okay. And, yeah, plugins can now, add also, commands to it. if they are not in a site edit, they could do that before, but now those plugins that are not, tied to the site editor can also add commands to it. you can, yeah, people can get faster to the things that they wanna do. Yeah.

Yep. Okay. Anything else on that list? B? and then it's, all kind of changes that are incremental, but, I also like the custom social icons that you can create that's more for the developer part, but it's something you can, as a site owner can ask a developer to create you additional social icons, that are for your.

[00:27:18] Birgit Pauli-Haack: yeah, case. So social icons are the profiles for YouTube or Twitter or Blue Sky. Those are in core, but you cannot have every social, network or any network. just put it in core. Yeah. now what it, what the core developers did was opening it up for extensions, so you can, so I, built a plugin where I added multiple podcast directory icons, so I can add them to that.

So that kind of, yeah. Or, Justin Tadlock did a, did a tutorial on the developer blog on how to do this, and he added coffee and other payment stuff or the, movie database kind of icon. So depending on what the site is about, you can. Drill really down into the, the social icons of your space.

[00:28:13] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Very nice. Anything else? For those who are still going for additional CSS, that's the, okay, I can't do this with theme Jason. And I just wanna change one little thing in CSS, the additional CSS has been around for, in WordPress quite a bit, but they moved it so people will search for it. And I wanna warn people.

[00:28:40] Birgit Pauli-Haack: It's going to be, it's in the eclipse menu of the style, the style, section in both sides. Yeah. We have style sections, I don't know why, but on two sides of, the editor, one is directly from the menu of the site editor and then the eclipse menu. Eclipse menus are the three button, three dot.

Menus. Yeah. Yeah, Just, yeah, it's a technical term that I had to look up to here. I'm trying to find that here. Is it this one here, additional CSS Control moved? Is that what you're talking about? Yeah, and that's, yeah. And that's where the places are to look for it. I, know that kind of will trip up a few people, that are site builders.

And so if they listen to it, they get a leg up on finding it. Lovely, lovely, And, I think the last one is more, About the video block. Oh. Because they really like that you can now have multiple subtitle tracks when you upload it. Oh yeah. So you can have a Korean track, you can have an English track, a German track, and you can manage that all through the interface there.

Huh. And then also display it. that's really one of the power features now to get multilingual. So in the past when you uploaded a, 'cause I had to do this for things like the page builder summit. 'cause we use video press and you have to, go into the, you drop your video into the media library, then you go into the block editor, put it somewhere on the website, and you're right.

[00:30:11] Nathan Wrigley: You only have this one option. and it may be that you want to do it in, I don't know, Spanish or Korean or whatever. Now you've got the option to do. That's, very cool. Actually. I didn't know that. I miss that entirely. Yeah. So I'm yeah. And now you can do styling and form elements in theme JSO.

[00:30:29] Birgit Pauli-Haack: That's for all the theme builders out there. A kind of a big, sigh finally. and it's not entirely yet for all the form elements, but it's a good start. Okay. And that's. Pretty much what I had selected for now. So like I said earlier, if you go to big it's piece, which is called, WordPress 6.9 Source of Truth, the link will be in the show notes tomorrow, but it's gutenberg times.com and, go to one of the more recent posts and it will be there.

[00:30:59] Nathan Wrigley: there's literally, I don't know, 50, maybe 60 different things that to look at here, which gives you some indication of the weight of this particular release. and there were just a few that Bigot has chosen, but you can see I'm showing on the screen if you are not able to see what's on the screen.

I'm just scrolling through a list of, anchor tags, which will take you to a different part of the article and there's absolutely masses in there. So please do feel free to go and check that out. I'm gone big. It sounded like you had something else. Oh, I just wanted to mention it's, I had the idea I needed to do everything that's in the block editor, because sometimes that's hard for content creators to find, but there's also a ton of information available for developers, and that's going to be on the bottom.

[00:31:43] Birgit Pauli-Haack: And I only linked, or, only a few things are actually described and the rest are more developer notes to go to. And that list is also quite long. yeah, yeah, There's another like 10 hours of 10 hours of content right there to go and look at. we're gonna concentrate on a few other bits and pieces related to this, but we're gonna move away from this more general approach into some sort of slightly more detailed approaches.

[00:32:12] Nathan Wrigley: Much of it we can't cover in detail because the articles that we're referencing are just technical deep dives, and you will have to, what was that? And they're so long and so detailed. yeah, exactly. You just can't, you can't pause it. So we'll just highlight that it's there. Give you an intuition of some of the bits and pieces that have been mentioned.

the first one, just gonna dwell here just for a moment to read out this text in yellow, and then we'll go and show you where this actually ends up. This is, Western Routers, website. And he's got a piece which he released, I don't know, a week ago or so now called WordPress 6.9 performance Landings.

And as I said, I'll just read it out, WordPress 6.9 includes so many performance improvements, scripts with fetch priority in increased inline CSS minified theme styles on demand, block styles and classic themes, the template enhancement, output, buffer, and much more. And then he says, go and check out a, field guide, which I will link to in the show notes again tomorrow.

This is it. And it's, it rivals your piece. big, not quite as long. But, it's pretty much there. And he goes into basically the code for all of this. And so you can see this giant list of, anchor tags, which you can look at to, figure out, I don't know, fetch priority support for scripts, increased inline style limit, load block styles on demand, and classic themes, some of the things that he mentioned and so much more.

But it's all there. I dunno if anybody wants to actually add anything into that, something that they found curious or interesting. If not, I will just move right along. yeah, maybe good to know is that, Western's piece is very detailed, but like you said, very technical. Whereas as always, Berg's piece can be read by non-developers as well.

[00:33:59] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah, that's true. it's much more descriptive, it's much more accessible to, non devs and we will. Give you that great overview of what's coming. Nice. Nicely said. And I would've said that if you weren't here bi. Thank you. Thank you. I really, like your writing every single time.

And yeah, like you said to yourself, this is probably the most detail or the longest piece you've ever done. It, did take me about 20 minutes to read through. Yeah. Yeah. But none of that feels boring, so it's, definitely worth a read if you're using WordPress day to day. And the check is in the mail.

[00:34:43] Nathan Wrigley: I was sorry. Nice. Very nice of you. Yes, thank you. Yeah. Isn't that lovely? okay, I noticed, I'm just gonna pause briefly to just take a look at a few of the comments. I dunno where we got to. There's not very many, but there's a few, people saying hello. and then Amber Hines drops in, which is.

Interesting, given what we're just gonna talk about. I'm so sorry, Jonathan. it does this, it just, it obliterates the person's face at the bottom. For the next 10 days, I'm going to be deleting triple emails. So we're talking about Black Friday. Okay. But I do it so I can't do it too, so I can't complain.

she says Amber goes on to say so sad about Zeal, as does. Seth there as well. And, Reese also chimes in and says 24 is no age. That's exactly right. Okay. Amber talking about time to read, she says time to read is bs. so much impacts it, abilities, but also from styles, paragraph lengths include, image inclusion, et cetera.

It would be much better to show, and I'll just read what she says, the word count rather than minutes. Do you know, that's interesting. You get an option in that block though, don't you? Wasn't there a word? Yeah, there was a word count as opposed to a time to read. Yeah. Yeah. I've always been a fairly I've been medium to fast reader, never like very, fast, but certainly not very, slow.

And I've often found those things. I, usually take off a couple of minutes. If it says 30 minutes, I'll probably manage it in 25 or something like that. So it never quite jives, but I think the word count also, I don't know, there's something about that would freak me out if I saw it was 10,000 words.

I'm heading off, it's 20 minutes. I could do 20 minutes, 10,000 words. Oh, I'm not sure. Sounds like an essay. so I'm with you. That's the beauty of the time to read it. We had a similar conversation in the l the lone WordPress courses we used to have. a percentage of people that have completed the course and we remove that because if that percentage looks massively high and it's something you're struggling with, you might think, oh, everybody can do this and I can't.

[00:36:41] Jonathan Bossenger: Yeah. Yeah. so I feel like time to read it just gives you a bit of, oh, okay, this is 30 minutes of my life. It's no big deal. Yes. 'cause if I see 4,000 words, I'll be like, no past. Do you know what's curious about it? I wonder, how much, like nobody has any metrics for this. I'm sure nobody can answer it, but anecdotally, I wonder how much of a put off it is as opposed to a welcome in.

[00:37:02] Nathan Wrigley: 'cause obviously the intention is to give you some intuition as, yes, I can manage this now, but I wonder how much of it ends up in, no, I can't manage this now. And then you never get back to it. It's curious, isn't it? Yeah. if, it doesn't have the timing, I'll just scroll down and see Yeah.

[00:37:19] Taco Verdonschot: How long it's and how long, if I estimate that I have the time to read this now, yeah, I am. Even if it's off by 50%, I will still. Attribute some value to the time to read? Yes. Yes. I, do what I did a minute ago. I look at the size of the scroll bar, and if the scroll bar's really tiny, then, that's a bit of an indication to me.

[00:37:44] Nathan Wrigley: The other thing I do, and I don't know if anybody else does this. I have, I'm, currently using the Vivaldi browser and it's got this button inside the browser where you click it and it, it just, it called reading mode. And, there's extensions and all sorts of things that will do the same thing, but Vivaldi is, it's right in the browser.

You click the button and it just gives you the text. And something about that makes, even if it was way too long for me, something about that means I'm gonna embark on it. Just the fact that it's black on white. The, images in some cases have gone. Certainly things like advertisements have been maybe pulled out and things like that.

Menus might have disappeared. It's just the text itself that, that helps me get over the hump of Of reading those kind of things. Yeah. Gro has that too. I but it, opens in a sidebar, not in the whole browser and for the time to read. I think that wa that was one of the accessibility, improvements, is that you now can display a range.

[00:38:46] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. oh, okay. It was 22, 3 minutes or so. 2023 to 32 minutes I went Okay. That's interesting. yeah. To offset that. Yeah. Oh, if I'm not taking it. Yeah. Yeah. Do I know, maybe you should ask some questions like, did you have a drink last night? if yes, we're gonna double the amount of time we, this, is this a technical piece?

[00:39:08] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How good are you with PHP? Are you English native? Yeah. yeah, for sure. Yeah. So what could already help is if you'd be able to set an, average reading speed in your browser, where I can say, look, in English on average, I do so many words a minute, and I'll figure that out over time.

[00:39:29] Taco Verdonschot: Do you know, that's and inly twice as fast. That's genuinely a great idea. Like that, should be a thing that the browser ship with. There should be a, flag somewhere where you could say in the browser, like somewhere inside of chromium or whatever it may be. I typically read a hundred words a minute or whatever it, that would be really great.

[00:39:48] Nathan Wrigley: And then the, website, the real great thing would be if the browser would detect it. Yes. oh, so it mo it detects scroll. Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. I dunno if you've, if any of you have an ebook reader, I have a Kindle and at the very beginning of every book it does this process and it, so normally you, it can show you how many minutes is left in the chapter and what have you.

And it does exactly that. It for a few minutes. It figures out how many times you're flicking through the pages and how many words that is. And it's. It's really accurate. and and it gives you a real, it's just great. how long before, before I get in trouble for reading? The next chapter is basically what I have to figure out.

And as expected, the Twitch meaningless comment drops in. There we go. There you go. Thanks for that. Whoever, wrote that script, appreciate it. Amber's back with a comment about that. The time to read plugin accounts for images. Okay, great. Thank you. The block. Oh, does it or doesn't? Yes, it does. The block doesn't, which makes me think it's less accurate.

Okay. So this is a plugin versus the core block. Alright, thank you very much. and then we have, AKI ano. Hello. Nice to have you with us. Yay. there's a lot of discussion before shipping this block to core. The initial display is a range view and the word count option is provided to, and it's got truncated, I'll read it, to mitigate, accessibility concerns as much as possible.

Isn't this great? We've got two people in the chat who would like, like really on it with this. So we've got Amber with the accessibility side, and we've got AKI on the developer side, and then we've got Jonathan and yeah, it was on it goes. this is fabulous. I'm really enjoying it. So yeah, it's there anyway.

Make, make use of it if you want. It's available to you. if you want. I didn't know we'd have the, the time to read. Now it'll be time to listen. We need that inside of a WordPress. How long is the section about the time to read? okay. Anything else about that before we move on to the next bit?

Okay, in which case we will do just that. Let me pop it back on the screen one more time. This is big. It's, oh, no. Big it's piece we've done with apologies. So here we go. Better. We're back with Western, WordPress 6.9 frontend performance field guide, as Teco said, is complicated and what have you. go check it out.

But, I'll link to it in the show notes, but lots and lots is the answer. I, feel like I should probably read some of these things out rather than just be quite so clear. Okay, here we go. 6.9 is the second and final major release of 2025, including numerous improvements to the performance of loading pages on the front end.

The reason I want to mention it, and not just glibly move on, is because the performance team, oh. What, a great thing that was making that team and how much we've all benefit benefited from it. So here we go. This is what they've been up to lately. Scripts improve script loading performance by adding support for fetch priority printing script modules in the footer, and optimizing the emoji detection script styles.

Optimized local, sorry. Loading of style sheets by loading block styles on demand in classic themes. That's actually really cool. emitting styles for hidden blocks. Again, very cool. Increasing the inline style limit from 20 to 40 k and inlining ified style sheets in block themes. Introducing the template enhancement output buffer to implement optimization is previously impossible.

And then there's a more section spawn WP chronic shutdown. Eliminate layout shifts in the video block. Fix RSS feed caching and so on. There's way more than that, but they were the high level item and yeah. Great. Thanks to the performance team for amazing work. I, just, I always do wonder how will they ever run out of things to make better?

Is there gonna be a moment where they go, no. We've done performances for as long as there are developers adding new features, they will always be other developers improving performance. Yeah, I, I, on a, on a pet project, the other week, implemented View transitions and, I know that's bundled inside of the Performance Labs plugin, so I just find that so great.

I just, I dunno what it is. There's just something super cool about navigating from one thing to another and it doesn't, I've just got it on its typical settings and it doesn't just do that sort of cross fade where one thing seems to just fade out and then come in. It does things like it, it knows that the link you've clicked on the H one now belongs up there.

And so it it's almost like it's zoomed into place and it's just cool. and very much like what the, I guess the kids on mobile phones are expecting in their UIs these days with, core animations in iOS and things like that. So anyway, the performance team doing great work.

Anybody wanted to add anything before we move on? Okay. In which case, handy that Amber is in the comments. We've got, Joe Dawson here, having to chat with Joe tomorrow. I'm quite looking forward to that. Accessibility. Accessibility is what's under the microscope now. accessibility improvements in WordPress.

6.9. Same rules apply. It's a very, long article. The article itself isn't long, but it links out to a whole bunch of different things, if WordPress 6.9 brings extensive accessibility improvements across WordPress core and Gutenberg, I'm paraphrasing, so excuse me. These updates include changes to administration, customization, login, and registration bundle themes, and the block editor.

and then in terms of core, the improvements to WordPress core include 33 accessibility enhancement and bug fix bug fixes, which include numerous new or improved screen reader notifications. A complete update of CSS generated content to ensure no excess content is spoken and code changes to ensure proper semantics and improved focus management.

Amber, forgive me because I'm not an expert when it turns to. In terms of accessibility, I hope I'm not missing out anything important here. And then in terms of Gutenberg, Changes has, 43 44 accessibility fixes and enhancements, including the addition of new blocks and the block notes feature.

There we go. Jonathan. There it was, the new block notes feature that have undergone accessibility reviews as well, and then there's a whole load of other things if you're curious, that you can link to. Should we just get into the notes thing right now? Whilst, yes. Before we forget about it. in WordPress 6.9, we're in phase three of the Gutenberg project, and the intention is to, I guess the, North Star is Google Doc style, collaboration.

The idea that you can collaborate and, other people can log in and perhaps you'll be able to see the, cursor moving around and things that are highlighted will be visible to other people. That is an incredibly hard technical challenge. Given that we don't own the Google data centers for each WordPress website and notes is like a first pass at this, really.

And it's the idea on a per block basis. So you don't get to highlight a bit of a paragraph, you just making a note on the paragraph block, you can put a little note in the sidebar. those notes can then be viewed by other relevant people with the correct permissions and they can be assigned to people and they can be checked off as complete and those kind of things.

And it's a really, nice first pass, which doesn't require a great deal. I wouldn't have thought of server grunt or hosting, hosting on a super duper web sockets enabled, infrastructure. It's a little bit more low key than that. But, Jonathan, was there more that you wanted to add?

[00:47:42] Jonathan Bossenger: So I'm probably not actually the best person to talk about this. probably bigot knows more about this than I do. would, that be correct? Bigot? I dunno. I don't know what, I dunno, Much spill. so yeah, I just mentioned it as part of the discussion I was having around some of the changes coming to, Gutenberg with the notes feature.

so big I think you have a better view of what's happening. It might be better if you share the, notes are in Yeah. And WebPress core and they're coming, as Nathan described, you, little bubbles coming up and, on the right hand side, the sidebar, there's an additional sidebar.

[00:48:23] Birgit Pauli-Haack: we might run out of stack. a room for how, often we stack the, sidebars. But yeah, the block notes are in there. the, notes are in there. so if somebody has access to a post, they can leave notes. any author can leave notes from on their own, but every editor can leave notes on every author's, post.

And an admin can leave notes everywhere. and, you can resolve them. You can, open and reopen them, and then they, yeah, you have little bubbles. You can thread them with replies. It's, actually quite nice, interface. And in the block toolbar if there are actually, notes. Because there are some avatars, appearing, if the sidebar is not open.

how would you know that there are notes? that's one, one thing. Yeah. so is it a little bit like the, I don't know, let's say for example, you've got jet pack installed or something, over at the top you get that green jet pack icon, which is near, very close to the publish button.

[00:49:37] Nathan Wrigley: or the update button or whatever it may be. Do, we get like a little speech bubble there or something? Yeah. Say and that demonstrates, okay. There's stuff and does it have like a little, red nag or something like you might find in Google Docs where No, There were there were discussions about the redneck red nag.

[00:49:54] Birgit Pauli-Haack: not redneck, They were, entirely different discussions. Little redneck in, but that's where my brain rose. Sorry. I was in the south of America for quite a bit. and, that they haven't find the right interface for that yet. Okay. Yeah. okay. So it's, like, a sidebar, but it lives, it's not like occupying space in another sidebar.

[00:50:19] Nathan Wrigley: No. Like an accordion on top of it. Yeah. It's, got its own side. Yeah. That, is getting, that has the capacity, that sidebar to get very busy, doesn't it? There's a lot going on, but it feels if you've got it, if it's got its own generic Sidebar. And also, I suppose if it gets invoked when you interact with the, let's say the, the, comment which is in the, editor itself, then Yeah.

Anyway, it's coming. you'll be able to make use of it in 6.9. 6.9, yes. In just a few short days. And try it out for yourself. wordpress.com, no V IP WordPress. A couple of weeks ago released a post where, I dunno how they did it. I don't know what I mean. Presumably they were on the.com infrastructure.

I'm not entirely sure, but they appeared to have pulled off a fairly, pretty much. Faithful, what's the word? Faithful version of Google Docs inside the block editor. Yeah. Real time. I think there's probably a lot of heavy lifting. I'd be curious to see if that turns into a, an enterprise level feature where you pay for some additional.

I don't know, server somewhere, which is holding, the comments. Maybe a jet pack feature or something like that, if I think the biggest part is actually the server infrastructure. Yeah. Because you need some web rt, Yep. socket thingy. And that has on shared hosting definitely lag.

[00:51:43] Birgit Pauli-Haack: So you need a different infrastructure for that. you can do it on any VPN server hosting. they, the plugin, it's actually, the testing of the collaboration feature that will come, they're aiming for 7.0 and, this is pretty much a, live testing. They have a few things that are VIP only, section there, but, it's definitely, they have a new plugin for that.

And, the, yeah, It's a work in progress and you can check it out. Absolutely. So Amber makes an interesting point. So she mentioned, did we do that one already? Yes, we did. sorry Jonathan, your face just disappears. That's fine. Amber says you can only have one note on any block though. We thought about having the accessibility checker flag issues on blocks in this way, but then no one else can create notes on that block.

[00:52:39] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That's interesting. Yeah, I hadn't really thought about that. So if somebody has already put a note on a block, is the current implementation, Amber is what you're saying that block is now it's allocation of notes is consumed. reply. Okay, good point. But you can't start another thread about thread, let's say.

I don't know, there were two subjects covered in that paragraph. Okay. That's an interesting point. and then maybe that's work to be done. And then Amber says it's irritating that notes are block level also, you can't have different notes on different parts of a sentence. Yeah, that was what I was trying to say.

in the Google Doc thing, you just highlight a word or something, couldn't you? Yeah. But definitely outta scope for now. It's definitely on the, I think this will, yeah. I, think though that this will have a very positive effect on, the readability for posts in WordPress because now people will finally start writing shorter paragraphs.

So more common so they can options. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. It's a good point. And, AKIs popped up at just the right moment, hopefully to, assuage, Amber's worries there. Inline level notes a plan for the future. And by that, AKI that you are meaning, a bit of a paragraph or whatever it may be, right?

So, here's a curious example, right? So for this show, I put together some show notes, and I cannot do them in the block editor, which would be the perfect place to do them. We're talking about WordPress. I create a post in WordPress so that all, so I've already created the post. All of the links are in there, but it, would be a total hot mess.

So I, this week it went into a Google Doc. This show could easily skip that step entirely. and maybe now with the notes feature, maybe that'll be enough actually. 'cause typically we don't have too many people commenting on one particular inline bit. So we'll wait and see. and Amber says, good point, tacho.

I can't make that one go away. There it is. There you go. You should Photoshop that. That's a good one. Good point.

[00:54:50] Jonathan Bossenger: Sorry, we might not have, Google levels of a collaboration yet, but I can control via link and paste it over some sticks, so Yeah, You can't do that in Google Docs. No, that's true. Oh, and that messes me up every single time that I'm in Google Docs. Yes. Especially the fact that it's control K and the command ballots.

Control K links are rubbish in Google Docs. Like it's way superior in, in the block editor. I dunno, maybe, but it is, I don't know why they haven't figured that out. Maybe their typical user isn't doing links, it's just text, they're running well. my favorite thing about that is even GitHub allows you to control via link and then it turns it into a markdown link.

Yes. So even GitHub figured that out. Yeah, Okay. Come on Google, you've got billions. Do the links. okay. So that was the, accessibility piece. in terms of that, Amber, if there's anything that we missed. please let us know. really, I'm just pointing everybody in terms of Joe's PC accessibility improvements in WordPress 6.9.

[00:55:51] Nathan Wrigley: You can go and check that. I think where you asked, are we ever running out of performance optimizations? Yeah. we can ask the same question Yeah. For accessibility improvements. Yeah. And, Jonathan's reply is still valid. As long as developers create code Yeah. We will have accessibility improvements because that's tough.

[00:56:12] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah. Unfortunately, too many developers are lacking accessibility. Knowledge. Do you know what though? Like the more that WordPress does in this regard? The, so this is, gonna sound wrongheaded because I'm not advocating that people willfully don't know what they need to do in terms of accessibility, but the more heavy lifting that WordPress core can do to make that job easily available and right there at the po, so you're in a paragraph or you've uploaded an image or what have you, the more that the block editor can do to say, hang on.

[00:56:46] Nathan Wrigley: This bit needs to do before you progress to the next step, the, less likely those things are, gonna be wrong. So Yeah. At, user level for sure. Yeah, exactly that. Yeah. Yeah. Developer level, it's slightly different. Yeah. Although code style and stuff like that, really do help as well.

Yeah. Thank you. A good clarification point. Okay. So that was that. And then I'm gonna move on to here. So we're over, I was gonna mention this anyway, but Jonathan's joining us. so he might as well take it over. It's, what's new in Gutenberg 22.1. Let's just do it. Give it the scroll bar test. it's pretty big.

It's still pretty big. and because I knew Jonathan wasn't gonna be on, I didn't highlight anything. What I did say to Jonathan prior to the call was, pick the bits that you are most intrigued about that are dropping in Gutenberg. over to you, Jonathan. What are you in? What do you wanna mention from this?

[00:57:42] Jonathan Bossenger: So the first big thing is just the new tabs block. And, one of the main reasons I wanna highlight it is because the tabs block was actually something that was added to Gutenberg by, Seth Rubenstein from Pew Research. it's something that they developed internally for their customers and then they brought it over to call.

and I just think it's one of those really cool stories of an external company, an external agency, finding a solution that works and putting it in. So you can now have a tab block that you can pop in your posts, your pages, you put your templates, you can add tabs. you can add content within those tabs.

The tabs can have styling different colors, different backgrounds. You can also, and the video doesn't show this, you can also add a tabs block within a tabs block, oh, tab. So you can have tab one and then tab section, and you can get crazy, I dunno how far it goes. It's all the way down. At least don't do this.

It just, it's a really cool example of what's possible with this whole, collaboration and open source environment. So do check that out. May I just ask a quick question? in the very short video that we're watching, there's this 33 second video where you can see, the, bare essentials of what you've gotta do.

[00:58:49] Nathan Wrigley: And, you add a tab, you can create some paragraph text. Are there constraints upon what can go in the tab so we can see paragraphs? Would I, for example, be able to put, I don't know, images? I don't remember to be honest. I, think it's just possibly a paragraph and a hit. Yeah, I'm not sure. 100%. Okay. I think it's easy in the, notes, about what can be added.

[00:59:10] Jonathan Bossenger: Okay. Okay. And the other thing to point out, I'm glad you've zoomed in there. If you've got Gutenberg installed on your WordPress site, you do need to enable the, experimental block setting to see this block. Yeah. So it won't just be enabled by default. So it's currently an experimental phase. Obviously all of the, Gutenberg versions that come out between major WordPress releases, you need to have the plugin installed to try them out.

so that was that. Nice. And then the other one that I thought was really cool was the H TM L block now supports JavaScript and CSS within that HTML. They're very cool. that's so wild. Yeah, As a developer, thinking about the concept of having CSS and JavaScript inside, essentially a JavaScript block, it all just works.

It's all just magical. What I also like about this is if we talk about, we were talking about additional CSS earlier. One of my biggest pet peeves as a developer working on any project where I join the project halfway through, or pick it up from someone else, is when you've got 700 different places where additional CSS is or additional JavaScript has been added.

Oh, and now you have to hunt down all these places. Yeah. So I love the fact that additional Cs s, for example, is in the editor where you can find it. If you've got a custom HCML block and you need some custom CSS and JavaScript for, it's in that block. It's part of it. So you don't have to go hunting around finding it out.

so that's just a really cool, as, a, developer, it excites me to see these things coming to blocks and coming to, call because I wanna try and be accessible. I'm just gonna describe what we've just talked about. And that is that, there's, let's imagine you're in a paragraph or something like that.

[01:00:39] Nathan Wrigley: The, on the toolbar there's an edit code button, and when you click that edit code button, you invoke a modal. And the modal has, I think it was three choices. yeah, three choices. H-T-M-L-C-S-S, JavaScript. You put it in whatever it is that you want to do, I don't know, you wanna change the H tag to something else and then click update and then it's done.

And so it of it lives inside the, it's in a modal popup. Within the block itself. So it's right where the content is, which is cool. Sorry, Jonathan? No, All good. And then the last thing I just wanted to mention is, going along with, the notes we mentioned earlier, there are a whole bunch of bug fixes for notes that are coming through in this new version.

[01:01:19] Jonathan Bossenger: so you know, that's one of the big focuses right now. So it's cool to see some of these things coming through. so I think if you scroll down towards the bottom there, just below, their collaborate, collaboration, there we go. That area. So a whole bunch of fixes for, the block stuff. so yeah, it's just cool to see, we've.

We've been talking about collaboration for I don't know how many years now. Yeah. and it's cool to see it happening. It's cool to see the things coming. So yeah, if you wanna be at the cutting edge of what's coming to the block editor, install the Gutenberg plugin, enable these experimental features, go and play with 'em, go and test them.

most of the stuff that's being shipped in Gutenberg between now and whenever 7.0 comes up, we'll probably eventually get merged in 7.0. So it's a good way to keep up to date with what's coming, and start, influencing it and start giving your feedback as to how all these things work. Yeah. And, there's absolutely loads here.

[01:02:07] Nathan Wrigley: So for example, just on the collaboration piece, there's must be, what, 18 or something there? Most of them bound to the, notes feature that we've just been describing. if memory serves, I think we're on. Release candidate two at the moment. I could be wrong by a day or two about that. yeah, so we're on release candidate one, two, sorry.

meaning that we're fast closing on the official date, 2nd of December, I want to say. Yes. if you've got any burning issues, now is the time to, to bring them to people's attention. But, hopefully within, 10 days or so from now, we'll have the, the brand new version of WordPress in everybody's hands.

I think. Oh, no, I was gonna say, I think that was all the 6.9 stuff, but I don't think it is. Okay, so this is a little beyond my pay grade and it's also something for some reason I haven't really paid all that much attention to. And, we have Aki in the comments. so this is, over on the repository website.

so it says, core contributors prepare to iframe the post editor in 7.0 prompting backward compatibility concerns. Let's ignore that last bit for the moment. The backwards compatibility concerns. Let's just focus on why you would even wanna do this. my understanding is it's just a, it's just a neat, simple way of isolating, let's say admin CSS from the editor.

Is that literally it, is it as simple as that? Or am I missing some major thing? Nobody knows. It's, essentially as simple as that. Okay? Yep. Great. So that, horrible experience you get where you go into the block editor and everything is wildly different because there's just a whole range of other CSS that you can't quite figure out where it is.

and so when you go into the front end, you've got this, difference, as you probably know, iframes little containers. They, live in their own little universe, if you like. And so the CSS can't be injected into it now. So that all seems good, right? In fact, that seems like, why didn't we do this like a decade or more ago?

And, and so that I guess is something, but the technicalities of it mean maybe it couldn't have happened in the past. And we've got Aki in the comments, but I'll just read a few bits and pieces out here. So it says it's a change name that modernizing the editing experience and reducing interference from admin styles and third party scripts.

The plan outlined last week by aki, in a developer note, which will be linked to in the show notes. The transition begins in a few days time, and then it explains the technicalities of how that works with API version two or lower. these changes are intended to prepare developers for the switch in full coming in seven, so 6.9.

No, that's, this is just really for developers. So nothing is changing in 6.9 blocks will continue to work as before. It's just that if you are, a developer and you are playing with blocks and you want your, the people using your block to know what's going on, now you are gonna get some. Warnings to say that there is something afoot that you need to take care of.

And apparently it does go back. AKI says to, years 2023, so not that long, in all honesty. And then, it's WordPress because, so we have a variety of different opinions and what's makes, what's, makes the project so interesting. Some people are saying, maybe not a great move. So for example, Ika Epstein is saying that maybe there hasn't been enough time for developers to react to that.

And I guess the, thing would be, let's point you to the fact that it's 7.0 and not 6.9 where this is gonna happen. And, another thing here, this is, Timmy Wahala, I am so sorry Timmy. For butchering your name. many developers who maintain client sites don't follow the make WordPress call blog closely and risk being unaware of the upcoming changes.

Yeah, I guess that's gonna be the case. anything to add to that? You, panelists, you, so I'm very much not a developer, but I remember from 20 years ago that we stepped away from iframes for a whole bunch of different problems. I didn't know what's changed in the last 20 years that this is the better solution again.

[01:06:32] Taco Verdonschot: Absolutely. so I'm, curious. At the same time I've heard some conversations that I can verify because I don't have the necessary knowledge that if we would move to modern CSS and that we might not need this, solution because CSS is well capable of separating this if we just do it right.

But that's all hearsay because. I don't know enough about this. Yeah, I'm in your camp as well. tco. There I am. It. I'm just following along for the ride and Courtney's got a little bit extra to add here. So she says eye framing. There is a good chat in post status if you're involved in that, involving Joe Dolson and Will William Patton regarding concerns for eye framing, more for accessibility.

[01:07:24] Nathan Wrigley: sadly I don't have the capacity to. Elucidate on that, but, okay. Thank you Courtney. That's really helpful. and then she goes on to say a little bit more, there are two separate documents that, and that increases the overall veracity of the interface. So there are two separate documents. Are you meaning in order to implement the iframe?

There's like the iframe version and the like, it's, essentially as the page and then the I frame within that. That's what I mean the I frame sitting inside of what would've otherwise always been just the content anyway. Okay. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. I'm gonna have to let this percolate a bit. And Courtney, again, it says, I would love to have a recorded experience from a screen reader user before and after using the I frame approach.

[01:08:08] Taco Verdonschot: And I think you should also highlight Amber's comments. Oh, on this. Oh yeah, I did miss that. Sorry. When the editor becomes, yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Amer, you can read it out te if you like. Yeah. So Amber said when the editor becomes an iframe, accessibility browser, extensions will no longer be able to test it.

Oh. And this makes accessibility harder. Oh gosh. That is interesting. Okay. And I imagine for that comment you could substitute quite a variety of different things. Okay. That is fascinating. Okay. Food for thought. most of the blocks are already I framed, I think the, concern is valid Yeah.

[01:08:51] Birgit Pauli-Haack: About backwards compatibility because version one and version three, of the block. Block, standards, has been not iframed, but all those that were version three and most of them are, have no trouble with the iframe. I think it's more a concern of if I have installed or created a custom block, in 2020, it was a custom block and it wasn't ready for a site and Oh, I see.

Then it's pro and the developer is not there anymore then. Block doesn't work anymore and that's a big, maybe, because Ella. was also in the GitHub, chat there, or, issue, tracking, comments there and said, we don't really know what, what wouldn't work.

We just need to test a few plugins to make sure that an older version of, certain blocks are still, yeah. Still, yeah. Rendering. Okay. In the block editor, after everything is eye framed, I'm. I'm not one or belittle all the concerns. that's, that's not what I wanted to do. But I'm also wanna take a little bit the temperature out of it to say, okay, there is the last three years or four years even, there were, most of the blocks were all in version three.

And I framed. Interesting. what was so curious about this? To me, it is exactly what Tacho said. I'd forgotten that iframes were even a thing. It was one of those things that people stopped talking about. Ages ago. And, yeah, so when I saw WordPress, I frame what, what's going on. okay. I'll be curious to see in which direction this goes and if, concerns about accessibility like Amber's just mentioned, bring things, change the path that we're moving on.

[01:10:50] Nathan Wrigley: actually's back in the comments. Thank you. Many editors such as mobile or tablet preview and the site editor already work in iframe, so I think that's maybe what big it was just, alluding to. Yeah, so that conversation happened over on the, or at least that piece happened over on the repository. So go and check it out over there.

We got a further piece from, Ray. as well. I don't know why I've got this little picture in picture thing here that's in Oh, you don't see it? It was only me. That's cute. Oh, maybe there was a video or something. The WP Community Collective celebrates contributor day with table. Sorry. Contributor day table leads with a appreciation campaign.

And there's a always, Ray does a summary just right here at the very top, which is always very cool. the WPCC and GoDaddy are spotlighting volunteer table leads from this year's flagship word camps and offering stipends to those who paid their own way. So if you read through this, I, I don't know if this is something that I've heard of before.

It's curious. The, what It's like posthumous work. They, it looks like the WPCC too many Cs there. I think WPCC have gone back and looked at who were table leads and how they were funded and whether they f paid their own way and then posthumus. for work already carried out, going back, and giving stipends out.

I dunno what the, value of those stipends is, or whether it's on a, maybe there's a different value for different ones, but certainly, that's what's happening and I think that's quite interesting and I'd not heard of that before. I dunno, tacho, I don't know if you are more familiar with this than I am.

I, I imagine Courtney in the comments will be, but, we have Courtney in the comments and she's on the board of the WPCC, so let's see what she comes up with. Maybe she can chime in, but yeah, that would be, no, I, don't, no. Okay. Okay. I think it's, interesting that we're, sponsoring retroactively, a subset of volunteers.

[01:12:50] Taco Verdonschot: I wonder if it's, nice again, if, Courtney Pop pops up. I, the curious thing about that is it's work which has already been done, which is like, there's something slightly different there isn't there. Normally we're sponsoring people to who are about to do the thing. Like you, you hear about scholarships and things like that, and so somebody gets a stipend to go to an event and what have you.

[01:13:11] Nathan Wrigley: This is mopping up the stuff that's already happened in 2025. And so yeah, very curious in, in that sense, it's very similar to the, Yost Fund. Oh, is that how that works as well? Yeah, it, oh, I didn't know that it celebrates, people who have been active or are active in the community. but it's not, I.

[01:13:34] Taco Verdonschot: Before, it's always in hindsight, like you, you have been working on a team for x, y, z time. I did not know that. Okay, here we go. So Courtney, as always is oh, I'm sorry, Jonathan, I'm gonna. Get better, I promise. in the year 2026, my New Year's resolution is to erase Jonathan's face less. That's gotta be the show note.

[01:13:58] Nathan Wrigley: Sorry. The show title Erase Jonathan's face less. Anyway, back to the comment. 'cause somebody write that down so I can remember it because I'm about to say something. the WPCC and GoDaddy did a similar campaign last year for w word camp us on the day of the event. I did not know any of this. It's fascinating what passes you by, isn't it?

there is a set amount divided among all who did so on? Sponsored. Okay. Okay. So there's a fixed. A bit of cash and everybody gets a slice of that pie. Doing so on the day of the event, as a surprise, was a blast, but not sustainable for those organizing. Oh, okay. Oh yeah, no kidding. I bet that was really fun for especially the recipients of that.

Courtney's available, I'm sure for comments, but, if you want to go and read more about that, this cu this curious thing that I'd not heard of before, this idea of paying for work already done at those events. WP Community Collective celebrates contributor today with table leads with appreciation campaign.

You can find that on the repository. Yeah, I like that. Oops. Yeah, I like that acknowledging of, work, I see you, it means I see you or we see you Yeah. And you did good work. And then here's, something, yeah. It'll never make up for hours or something like that, but it's a, really, a token of big appreciation.

[01:15:21] Birgit Pauli-Haack: I love, and we should have more of that, I guess the curious. The curious slight change, which is a big change, is that if you've got the pot of money. Because you haven't assigned it at the beginning. And let's say that you were gonna assign it, and you, thought to yourself, I can only afford these three individuals, now you could maybe do these seven individuals who did these things because they've already done it.

[01:15:45] Nathan Wrigley: So it it, it's just manages it in a different way. Plus you get that nice surprise of somebody showing up and giving you some money, which is very pleasant. okay. So there we go. Go and check that out on the repository. Okay. I will, put this back up. I wanted to, just to tell you, it, sorry.

It feels a bit like self-promotion, but it's not. It's really all about jet pack and about, Devin Walker. Devin, it's your podcast. You're allowed to self-promote. Oh, okay. Great. Okay. Thanks. Your podcast. On your podcast. Yeah. Thank you so much. I always feel bad about it though. I don't know what it is.

It's terrible. okay, so Devin Walker came onto, oh. I'm nearly at 200 episodes. That's gotta be a thing, hasn't it? Wonder what? Yeah. Oh, wonder what I should do for that. Yeah, maybe I'll just skip it and go straight to 2 0 1, something like that. The missing episode. Yeah. Just missed one out. Yeah. Yeah.

Anyway, so Devin Walker has just, been appointed as the lead for Jetpack and, Devin previously has been involved in all sorts of ways over the WordPress space. Probably most famously as the co-founder with Matt Cromwell of Give WP and, was having a bit of a moment out of being the lead of a product and was figuring out what his new path would be.

And, and Matt Mullenweg popped up in his feed somewhere and said, I've got a project for you d Fancy have dancy taking on jet pack. And, it's. It's a project. Let's just say it like that. Yeah. Devin's very, frank about it. in the podcast episode, you know how Jetpack is not everybody's favorite thing.

In fact, I'm gonna go further than that. I'd say that Jetpack is some people's least favorite thing. They really rail against it. and yet it does so much. Maybe that's the problem. It's trying to do lots and lots of things. So he says the phrase, Jack of all trades, master of none. Anyway, he's now at the helm.

He's got the, capacity to really shake things up a little bit. I think AI is gonna be a big part of that, plus a reorg of how the, team is gonna be structured and where the, where the bodies are gonna be and who's gonna be doing different things. Exciting times, I would hope in the Jetpack space.

So yeah, if you're a Jetpack user, you've got things to look forward to. If you're not, maybe in a few months time it'll be, something that you wanna look at again. Because yeah, when I got into the WordPress space, there was just lots of, how to describe it, lots of people having strong opinions about Jetpack, let's put it that way.

And, there is a lot going on inside that plugin for sure. Does anybody wanna add anything to that? I think they already made a huge change since the time that you joined the WordPress community because Jetpack used to be one thing with a whole bunch of features. Yeah. And is now a lot of smaller plugins working quite well together.

[01:18:49] Taco Verdonschot: all on the Jet Pack brand. Yeah. There's a lot of overlap as well though. for example, you can, it's not inconceivable to be in Jet Pack and realize that you've somehow got to the exact same space. Through a completely different route. just things like that, like having a unified ui and also, just curious things like the fact that there's a whole.com sort of side to it where, if you wanna view stats and things like that, you might have to be logged into a.com account.

[01:19:18] Nathan Wrigley: It's very, it's not straightforward. We're used to signing up to a, what feels like a bit of a SaaS product, if you sign up to the SaaS product, you've got one login, and the menu item is the same for everybody and it's straightforward to follow. Anyway, he takes all of that and explains what his plan is.

So it's definitely worth. Absolutely. yeah, Okay. There we go. Okay. Let's move on. speaking of, platforms that, not everybody love. Oh, yeah. I don't know if anybody loves me, doctor. Okay. Yeah. let us know in the chat if you like me. top.com. Yeah. Yeah. Tell yeah. Tell us in the chat if you love me.

top.com. they've got a, it looks different. They've got a nice new shiny coat of paint, but, underneath it's still the same. me top.com. Forget all that. What we, want to tell you about is the event that's happening. There's a couple of things to notice this week. much of it tied to WordPress, 6.9.

If on the 27th of November you are looking for things to do, there's a couple of things which might be of interest to you. so the first one is, mati. M I'm not sure of Baruch's surname apologies. Mohanty, as you can see on the top right, because Oh, confusing interface. Yeah. There you go. Mohanty.

That's right. Yeah. Look, it's there. And also there. I Okay. You're right. how to prepare your WordPress site for WordPress 6.9. it does what it says on the tin. Is there anything else to say about that? No, but I. What's going on here? Do I get accept or settings? What? oh, yeah. And now, oh, I don't know.

Reject all. Reject all is the button. You reject all. Yeah. so there you go. That's happening. at 10:00 AM GMT, which is this Thursday, the 27th of November. And another one if you would be interested, some. Jonathan, I don't know. John only says Jonathan BI don't know who he is. No, John top it says Jonathan Boer.

Oh, yeah. It says it on the right. Yeah. Look, oh, no it doesn't. It says share a flyer. Is this conspiracy to hide

[01:21:33] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Jonathan? Yeah. Yeah. That's it. Every, that's hysterical. Juanmar and Jonathan Van, margarita and Jonathan are doing, a developer hours 6.9 developer updates, to get you in the mood if you're a developer. Do you wanna mention anything? I can see block bindings and interactivity APIs under discussion, but yeah, basically we just, we decided to run a couple of developer hours just focusing primarily on the developer updates that are coming.

[01:22:00] Jonathan Bossenger: So we had one, two weeks ago where we covered, data views and data form, and the Abilities API that's on WordPress tv if you wanna check that out. And then this week we're covering, the block binding updates that are coming. And the interactivity updates that are coming. So we'll have some live demos, we'll have some code walkthroughs.

so if this is something you're interested in, if you're a developer and you wanna work with these things or you wanna learn what's coming in workplace 6.9, you can come and join us if you can't make it at the time, which I know the time is difficult for a lot of folks in, sort of the Western Americas.

We are recording this and we'll be on WordPress TV a couple of days later. nice, So coming up this Thursday at 12:00 PM GT as well. Okay. we've got a piece here. Let me just go through, I. Because we're very short on time. I'm gonna miss out the AI piece, if that's all right.

[01:22:50] Nathan Wrigley: but I'll quickly show it to you if you're interested. a apparently you can find this on, on Jamie Marlin's blog, but I found it on LinkedIn and didn't find a link out to it. So I'm just gonna mention it here. This is really curious. Jamie is very pro AI and, but I think has had his, concerns around it in the same way that everybody else, how will WordPress fit into that landscape in the future?

Will it get to the point where, WordPress is basically obsolete? 'cause you can just talk to an AI and it'll build you a website. that, that is, having read some materials recently, that very much is not the case. He's much more sanguine about it. So go and check it out. It's called Why I'm now convinced AI won't kill WordPress.

You too can learn all about the child that kicks him on the plane, repeatedly in the back. And then a couple of plugins. Let's end this way. A few plugins that I have come across during the course of this week, I think they're new. if they're not new, they're certainly fairly new. So here's the first one.

This is called Design Set Go by, Justin Neely. And it's a, suite of blocks and, it's, it's really new. So it's got very few reviews and what have you. But Man Alive does he have a lot of blocks and 47 blocks he's launching with all sorts, icons, modal triggers, countdown timers.

Sliders. You'll, you get the idea maps, the usual array of things. It's on the wordpress.org repo. I don't know if there's a paid version coming in the pipeline, but it's there now. So that's the first one. where's the second one? There we go. This is the next one. Don't fully understand this in all honesty, but let's just give it a mention anyway.

It's called the content area Block, and it says this block allows you to add a, an additional content area to a site editor template and store the block output inside of a meta field. Yeah. Okay. So far, so good, and I'm thinking. Does this then allow me to basically have two content areas inside the UI of the block editor and how does that work?

How do I know which one I'm in and things like that. Anyway, there it is. Does anybody wanna, you wanna guess how that works or what that does? No, but I do wanna install it after this and check it out. Yeah. Isn't that curious? Like just the idea of two, like I'm so used to it being meta, you go and fill out that other thing.

But having two, I can really see examples of where I would love that, but also I'm curious as how come much I'd mess things up. Anyway, there it is. It's brand new version, oh 0.1 0.0. So it's, oh, it's four, four months old, but it's new on my radar. And here's the last block, which I wanted to mention.

Dynamic Head, I think, so that, that plugin, maybe because of the fact that it's fake, but, we saw the same for Justin Neely's. This plugin's four months old and it has less than tens. We saw the same from Justin Neely's plugin. It's, yeah, it was at version 1.2, which was a couple days old. a couple weeks old.

[01:26:07] Taco Verdonschot: Days old. so probably the 1.0 release was a couple months, weeks, or months ago. And it still has less than 10 installs. And that is a problem for the plugin repo. Yeah. Yeah. I know you got new plugins well enough. Yeah, it's interesting, like a show like this, you can't really spend the entire thing, but there is some part of me that would love to do, just to show about exactly that.

[01:26:37] Nathan Wrigley: Just like 10 minutes on a new plugin, then another 10 minutes on another new plugin and just have a little poke around and see exactly what it does. I'm not sure how engaging that would be, but anyway. Thank you. That's a good point. So that was the. Second one. And then the third one was this one. dynamic hetero navigation block themes.

it offers you the capacity to amend, things like headers and navigation and things like that. So you can change the, size, whether it's sticky and stuff, and presumably it all works with core blocks. That's all I've got really about that one. So I'll link in the show notes. Nice. And was that it?

Have we got everything? Or Tacho? I've got this, I've got this. This one? Was that something you wanted to mention or was that 'cause we, yeah, so basically this came up in our conversation, before starting the show. and it's all about, it's supposed to, Marika wrote, about the challenges that she has living with an early adopter, this case Yost of technology.

[01:27:43] Taco Verdonschot: And yeah, Yost is definitely an early adopter of pretty much anything he can get his hands on. so she describes a. Perfect example of a doorbell that keeps ringing for half an hour because it crashed, had a bug. and so annoying. yeah. 30 minutes. Yeah. and stuff like that obviously always happens when he's not at home.

my wife could probably have written a similar post because Yeah. although I'm not that early in things, I do try to be at the forefront of some of the technological advancements. and that doesn't always work out. No, I can totally sympathize. I've got a set of outside lights and I say the G word, the, Google word?

[01:28:40] Nathan Wrigley: I use that phrase to trigger Google, and then I just say, turn on the outside lights. And on come the outside lights 100% of the time those lights come on. It doesn't matter how many times my wife says the exact same collection of words, no, they don't come on. And then the same thing turning them off. So I'll turn them on, I'll come back in and say the exact sentence in reverse, turn off the outside lights.

And they go off reliably. A hundred percent not, I have no idea why. And that is partially a problem because we've been training a lot of voice recognition on male voices only. Yeah. So women and children will be, not be, will not be recognized as easily as male voices because of training sets.

[01:29:35] Taco Verdonschot: which is a, problem that, we see a lot in AI now where the training sets have. A real world impact on their use. but yeah, that goes for little things like voice recognition and yeah, stuff like that as well. I'm gonna, you've just given me some ideas. I'm now gonna deliberately come up with some things which are really annoying.

[01:30:00] Nathan Wrigley: have, I don't know, just like a speaker. Come on. and just be on turn off a ball. Just when I'm not, as soon as my car gets a mile away from where I live, just play loud music or something. Something like that. Hide a speaker in a locked cupboard or something. I think there's other ways to end your marriage, Nathan.

[01:30:22] Taco Verdonschot: Yeah, there are. If that's what you're looking for there. Yeah. Oh, no, it's definitely gonna come back though. I'll, have to, there'll be retribution, but I love stuff like that. Keeps me going. okay. So I think that's it. it's a fun post to read. it's very recognizable for a lot of people, Thank you very much. I'm just seeing if there's any more comments that have come in. Not really, except thanks for the plug. Oh, okay. So thanks for the plugin. Shout out. Oh, that was your plugin, was it? Oh, okay. That's great. What, how great. I'm pleased that we mentioned it. That's lovely. New plugin show would be cool indeed many.

[01:31:01] Nathan Wrigley: First test the plugin to see if it's worth a mention. Okay. Yeah. Okay, maybe I'll bear that in mind actually. I think it's equally fun if you test it for five minutes and it's most definitely a waste of time. Okay. I could make land much more

[01:31:20] Birgit Pauli-Haack: Nathan, but Nathan is too nice for that. No, I can, Oh, I'll join you on the show. Don't worry. I had this thing when I was a kid and it was called the hardware Hammer, and it was like this massive, really massive, it was about two foot, three foot long hammer, but it was made of the most like foamy foam and it, and so you could smack the heck out of everything and it was like just gently patting it.

[01:31:45] Nathan Wrigley: And so I used to get my anger out on all of my technology with the heart You stupid thing. You and everybody should have a hardware moments when the plugin doesn't do what you want. Okay. Maybe there's a thing. Maybe we need to do that. That could be hilarious, right? That is, I believe it. thank you. Ooh.

There we go. I wanted to get rid of that, and I wanted to get rid of that. Okay. That's it. Thank you for joining us. Thank you. Firstly, that's let's go round the panel. Thank you to being it for joining us. thank you. Yeah. Thank you to Jonathan, whose face just kept kinda going away. just to emphasize the point.

let's just do that. Where did he go? Yeah.

I can't do what I wanna do because we're on a public podcast on it. Hammer show. Jonathan, you need a hardware hammer. so thank hardware, hammer. Thank you to Jonathan being a good sport and having you said covered up lots of times. And thank you to Tacho for joining. As well and thank you to you. If you came into the comments and you put something down in writing that's great.

Apart from you bot on Twitch. Stop it. Go ahead. Stop it. It's not clever. Nobody thinks you's clever. It counts as a view, Nathan. It counts as a view. Yeah. Okay. Alright. It's great. We'll, take it in that case. okay. In which case we will probably let some say goodbye. Let some hands. We need to do the hands, okay.

Give us your hands. Let's give it wave, give us a smile. Thank you. We'll be back this time next week. Stay safe. Have a good week. It's good to see you. Ta Yeah. Thanks Nathan. Good to see you all take to see you all. I see you later, Jonathan. Stick around if you wanna have a chat. You three. That'd be quite nice.

We'll see you in a second. Bye bye. Bye bye.