[00:00:00] Sé Reed: Like 6.2.
[00:00:07] Jason Tucker: This is episode number 4 47 of W WPwatercooler. What’s new in WordPress? 6.2
[00:00:16] Sé Reed: blocks. , I get it. The visual, it’s a visual pun. You guys really should watch
[00:00:22] Jason Tucker: I’m Jason Tucker. You could find me over on Jason Tucker dot blog.
[00:00:26] Sé Reed: I am, say Reed. Oh look, my link got updated magically by the ferries, at, say, Reed Media on the things except Twitter.
[00:00:33] Jason Cosper: Yahoo. Is this your boy Jason, AKA a Back at it again on the world’s most influential WordPress podcast.
[00:00:40] Jason Tucker: And those podcasts can be found over on Apple Podcast, audible, Google Podcast, Spotify, and come hang out with us in our discord. We’d really
[00:00:49] Sé Reed: come hang. We’re gonna make a new channel this weekend. Come see what it is.
[00:00:57] Jason Cosper: We have a
[00:00:58] Sé Reed: say.
[00:00:58] Jason Cosper: guest,a regular contributor
[00:01:01] Sé Reed: yeah,
[00:01:02] Jason Cosper: to
[00:01:03] Jason Cosper: WPwatercooler
[00:01:03] Sé Reed: to come up
[00:01:05] Jason Cosper: The.
[00:01:06] Sé Reed: better than soup Nazi for sure though, as a
[00:01:09] Jason Cosper: No, she is the Leslie, Nope. Of WordPress. She
[00:01:14] Sé Reed: that is good. Sorry, I’m gonna clap. Is that loud On the yay.
[00:01:21] Courtney Robertson: in at this point.
[00:01:22] Sé Reed: She’s I’ve got keys.
[00:01:25] Courtney Robertson: I’ll just, a guest.
[00:01:27] Sé Reed: of WordPress is actually the best definition. One of the best.
[00:01:32] Sé Reed: There’s many wonderful accolades that you could say, but that one captures a lot of it, and that makes me happy.
[00:01:37] Courtney Robertson: Thank you. Thank you. Hello.
[00:01:39] Jason Tucker: fine.
[00:01:40] Sé Reed: back. Hello. So I wanna say something here real quick. So today we’re talking about 6.2. Everyone’s talking about 6.2. What’s the hottest release on the block?
[00:01:50] Courtney Robertson: Yes.
[00:01:51] Sé Reed: But we got the, I was just saying before the show that there’s like a few people who know like everything about what’s happening in 6.2 and generally in WordPress.
[00:02:01] Sé Reed: And one is Anne McCarthy, who’s like the development. Lead development, I don’t know, th there’s only a few places I would use the word guru. It might be here , like the site editing,sensei maybe. I don’t know what we could use. Someone suggests a word. But anyway, other than Anne, I believe that Courtney knows the most about what is happening in WordPress right now, including what’s in 6.2.
[00:02:24] Sé Reed: She literally is like writing the articles and the summaries,
[00:02:27] Courtney Robertson: I would also include into that same group, FMI and Bik. And Melana over in the Docs team. And it’s Stella too.
[00:02:35] Sé Reed: Oh yeah, that’s true. Docs is,
[00:02:37] Sé Reed: in an exciting move. I think I have heard that the the. Docs being ready for a release. The distance it used to be, docs came out way after a release. And they have been slowly moving that, that benchmark to like closer and closer to the re release.
[00:02:56] Sé Reed: And I believe now they are pre-release preparing docs. Are we there? Are we like at the event horizon of that yet?
[00:03:03] Courtney Robertson: I think the, on the user facing articles, which would be.org/documentation these days, we
[00:03:10] Sé Reed: Ooh, new url.
[00:03:12] Courtney Robertson: to WordPress org slash documentation slash articles.
[00:03:17] Jason Tucker: Did you guys get that redirect? Go into?
[00:03:20] Sé Reed: Yes, the redirects are up. It’s been problematic. The redirects have been problematic as one might imagine, for like literally 10 year olds.
[00:03:29] Courtney Robertson: Oh, and the Codex even older. The codex.wordpress.org. Yeah. So
[00:03:33] Sé Reed: not an easy
[00:03:34] Courtney Robertson: places that all these user materials have been, and this team has taken care of it. Melana especially has been with this team I think that entire time. A Lama, John Ang was a big part of it as well. He was one of our work Camp Asia organizers.
[00:03:48] Courtney Robertson: Yes, the docs, some of the docs are moving. The areas that are at, the dev docs, which is developer.wordpress.org, those, I believe the ones that are human crafted, take a little bit longer to get into. developer.wordpress.org. Often that is done by those that are part of the release squad that are more actually core.
[00:04:08] Courtney Robertson: Not the docs team. And then if you go to the area that is, more of our code reference base, that is WP parser under the hood. And that’s an automated thing based upon the actual code and WordPress. WP Parlor’s job is to like inject. Here’s the code at the top and the description and the parameters.
[00:04:27] Courtney Robertson: That’s what
[00:04:28] Sé Reed: Here’s the new stuff.
[00:04:30] Courtney Robertson: Yeah. Yep. Yep. So
[00:04:33] Sé Reed: The, new stuff, does it distinguish between like big new stuff and little new stuff, or is it all equal
[00:04:40] Courtney Robertson: WP Parser is just a lookup of the code. So when there is new code, part of that is defining what that code is by describing it. So if you land and developer.wordpress.org/reference, under the hood, there’s a tool called WP Parser. If you look it up in GitHub, you’ll find all the stuff you need to know about how to make WP Parcel work.
[00:05:02] Sé Reed: The documentation effort that has been underway, moving from support to documentation, which makes so much sense because support documentation is not support, just, it’s just not, it can be supportive and supportive to your journey in learning how to develop and do WordPress, but it is not support.
[00:05:20] Sé Reed: So I, I applaud this change heavily, or
[00:05:22] Courtney Robertson: We’re aspiring over in training to get closer and closer to that as well. Each release, I feel like we do better.
[00:05:30] Sé Reed: or is it still after?
[00:05:32] Courtney Robertson: It’s good in terms of addressing, logging all of what needs to be done, but there are, I think about four people that are sponsored, full. To do some of that work. And then asking contributors to have an idea of how to volunteer to write educational style lesson plans or create videos and rerecord for each release because, oh, the style button changed.
[00:05:58] Courtney Robertson: And
[00:06:00] Sé Reed: We need to know that
[00:06:01] Courtney Robertson: new users will be concerned that the button doesn’t look exactly the same, though it’s in the same position. So there’s a lot to be done and, we need help. Just the way the docs has been growing in terms of how it handles getting all of its content available at release ready, training is in the same particular situation.
[00:06:19] Courtney Robertson: We work. Closely together as teams. That’s something that ABA really helped initiate. ABA handles a lot of the Markhams, ABA, and Mary for each release. And ABA really helped organize, docs and training teams and marketing teams that all need to look at this like flow of what across olive.org should be ready at release.
[00:06:38] Sé Reed: And remember, most of us are working English first, but then we also need that Transla. and changed in the translations. And so by doing all of that work, that should help alleviate the support forums, which is good. And those are resources. The support forum should know that, hey, there’s updates, and we could send people with those updates to help answer their questions or concerns, but also,
[00:07:02] Sé Reed: Wait. Yesterday, you, speaking of volunteering, and this is really how hands on the making of the actual WordPress is. When you get into it, there’s like a list of stuff going on in core, and Courtney realized that some of the notifications that were going out to, plugin and theme developers about what’s coming up in 6.2 was being kind left undone.
[00:07:25] Sé Reed: And she was able to step up and do that. But I just wanted,literally wrote the letter , to the developers on explaining what to what’s being done. And the fact that’s getting done now and not later or not at release is
[00:07:39] Courtney Robertson: Yeah. Hopefully next time around. Additionally, with that, Anyone that works for a plugin or a themed company or themselves are the ones that receive those emails. I want your feedback. What would compel you to look at these emails and, take note and consider these new features should probably get on our product roadmap, even if they’re on your backlog.
[00:08:01] Courtney Robertson: Just to at least catch up with what the features are. So hit me up with those kind of ideas. I think hosts probably might see some of the same, although we have some process in place from the hosting team for some of that, but particularly plugin and theme email recipients. If you’ve got something in the.org groupo and you receive an email about these updates, what would make that email more compelling to read and take action upon?
[00:08:26] Sé Reed: To actually pay attention to, maybe we should host a contest for the first person or the first, like plugin developer and the first or the first five, and they get to have a one-on-one with the meta team and talk about the plugin repo and just get their ideas out there.
[00:08:43] Courtney Robertson: What I mean?
[00:08:45] Sé Reed: I’m like, people, or just, maybe they win a wampoo. I don’t know. I’m
[00:08:51] Courtney Robertson: That could
[00:08:51] Sé Reed: How do we incentivize people to pay attention to the thing that is powering their business?
[00:08:58] Sé Reed: I don’t
[00:08:59] Courtney Robertson: Wapos
[00:09:00] Sé Reed: know. That’s a hard question.
[00:09:03] Courtney Robertson: Yeah. Also I wanna give it a shout out for those that have joined in on the release parties. They usually happen on Tuesdays, although sometimes we slightly reschedule them. But the release parties are a Slack chat in core. And during the party we don’t publicly talk about any issues that come up.
[00:09:21] Courtney Robertson: We just say Hey, the party’s happening, come join us. And usually there are no issues. We
[00:09:25] Courtney Robertson: We
[00:09:25] Sé Reed: I’ve never really understood what that is like. I see it, like you mention it in the marketing team meeting, I see people inviting and they’re like, party’s happening. And I’m like, I think we have a different definition of party
[00:09:38] Courtney Robertson: Actually, no, it’s a B Y o everything, and you’re just in a Slack chat. So what happens during that?
[00:09:46] Sé Reed: do we mean by party? Exactly.
[00:09:48] Courtney Robertson: Yep. During that process, I actually have a post over on the training team, from, I recorded one of the release parties the other week to help other people learn what it’s like to ride along for one of them.
[00:09:59] Courtney Robertson: The people push the changes to the beta or RC version and the zip file of that version of WordPress becomes available for people to download and put on two things and test. And what
[00:10:10] Sé Reed: Wait. Is this basically a bunch of people getting a room and going, push the button. Push the button.
[00:10:16] Courtney Robertson: Yes.
[00:10:17] Jason Tucker: Right click. Great Zip.
[00:10:18] Courtney Robertson: there’s multiple buttons to push. But yes, it, but it can also be like
[00:10:25] Sé Reed: actually
[00:10:25] Courtney Robertson: a release party could be like our own, we could pretend that we’re at a NASA release party where they send a something into space. It’s a little less. Dangerous, I think, but 43% of the internet is still something.
[00:10:40] Courtney Robertson: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:10:44] Sé Reed: And a lot
[00:10:44] Courtney Robertson: a plugin.
[00:10:45] Sé Reed: update, so you know, it’s not like it’s out there.
[00:10:50] Courtney Robertson: It is. We need testers, folks. And one of the things that I feel safe in saying is that, when I look at how many people that the folks in that particular release party were saying, how many people pulled the beta version of the software to test it out, the number was not at all where I thought it should be.
[00:11:08] Sé Reed: Like so much less that you don’t wanna say it out loud,
[00:11:12] Courtney Robertson: Yeah. Yeah. It’s still a lot of people. Still a lot of people, but it’s not enough
[00:11:18] Sé Reed: Not 43% of the internet. A lot of people
[00:11:21] Courtney Robertson: Oh, in my, my, my job, I am advocating internally like we need to get people on testing and give more numbers. There are some automated tests and tests the devs love to do, but there’s also some manual stuff that you don’t find out until you go poking things around manually.
[00:11:37] Courtney Robertson: And I would love to get those same theme and plug-in devs to also test.
[00:11:43] Jason Cosper: Yeah. And, I was gonna say also, especially with, what, 40,000 plus, plugins and everything else, testing, release candidates and testing. You can test on the betas, that’s fine, but I, spent a little bit of time yesterday,updating. It wasn’t that much time cuz it was just hitting a few buttons.
[00:12:06] Jason Cosper: But, updating a number of my sites to, to release candidate one. When that dropped. It, I’m, I mean I remember, back in the day when, Nathan and that whole cohort, would just be like, I run my site on trunk and,
[00:12:25] Sé Reed: Yes, and Okay, but fun fact. Wait. Yeah, the fun fact the WB collect community collective.org is running on bleeding edge release cuz I figured if there was any site to put. on bleeding edge, like why not the one that’s literally just text And also, you know
[00:12:42] Jason Tucker: Donations don’t actually run off of it.
[00:12:45] Sé Reed: Yeah. Nothing is running off of it so much.
[00:12:46] Sé Reed: So it’s like an experimental site. It’s bleeding. It’s
[00:12:50] Courtney Robertson: Yep. Here go.
[00:12:52] Jason Cosper: It’s,the beta testing plugin makes it really easy. You can lock it down to just, update to release candidates. And then once the actual, version six two ships, then you don’t see anything again until the next stage of release candidates comes through for six three. I.
[00:13:13] Sé Reed: that’s that’s even better. If you’re doing it on something that like might. Little bit like, it could impact something like, anyway, there’s so many ways to test it.
[00:13:25] Jason Cosper: Yeah. Now that we’re now,
[00:13:28] Sé Reed: Speaking of testing it, I know you wanted to say something Cosper, so if you didn’t wanna say this that I was just gonna say I really want, to see this, I really want us to do the live.
[00:13:39] Sé Reed: Testing link. Cause we’ve actually had, we had the Yeah. Live demos on the internet. But we had, I just love this because we had the, founder creator of Insta, WP on the show. Yeah.
[00:13:55] Sé Reed: Yeah. Who’s, what was the name? His name I can’t remember.
[00:13:58] Yep. Big.
[00:13:59] Sé Reed: Okay. And,showed us that, this relatively new technology and to see it being, Baked into this process, which makes it so much easier to launch a beta site.
[00:14:11] Sé Reed: You don’t even have to do anything on your own sites. I just think it’s really cool and, I’m really happy that it’s, that they’ve made that available. So
[00:14:19] Courtney Robertson: so here we
[00:14:20] Sé Reed: look at it. Woohoo.
[00:14:21] Courtney Robertson: from my purple theme. I’ve just hit enter. You’re watching in real time. Magic login. We could close out this tab. And now I’ve got a working WordPress site and we’re gonna go take a look at what 6.2 is. You,
[00:14:37] Sé Reed: On beta.
[00:14:38] Courtney Robertson: you were mentioning the, sorry. The beta testing plugin that’s here.
[00:14:42] Courtney Robertson: You see it injects a little dashboard widget. The beta testing plugin is one of the few that I have installed, so this link is, I will say it slowly, but it’s available through Twitter and ask me and I’ll get it to people. App Dots wp.io/launch. Question mark T equals beta rc. So every release when we have a release party, I go update the site that this clones from.
[00:15:08] Courtney Robertson: There is one site that this clones from, and then this site will expire within four hours like an Inspector Gadget envelope. I’ve got a lot of the. Dev plugins that are in here in case you want to make use of any of. They’re already set for you ready to go, including things like faker press and whatever.
[00:15:26] Courtney Robertson: But the beta tester is really the only one that is on and active. And what that allows us to do is that if I am in tools, is it tools? Beta testing that gives us some beta tester settings. Now this should be all configured to whatever the latest beta or RC is, based upon the configuration of this. But I also run a bleeding edge version and a current stable.
[00:15:47] Courtney Robertson: So I’ve got all three variations that people can. and get testing with things. I have taken liberty on this to already inject the theme
[00:15:56] Sé Reed: wow. Look at you.
[00:15:56] Courtney Robertson: data that has all of the, if you go into posts, it’s the theme unit test data that we’ve had around for ages. So there’s a pile of fake posts already to go for you and in media.
[00:16:07] Courtney Robertson: You could see that the media library has stuff in it too. So you’ve got a fairly functional website with all the default WordPress Things make use of this. This is available originally we were gifted this from Insta, WP for use in the training team for our online trainings. But, given that Vacas has shared that information through Twitter, I’d imagine he’s pretty okay since he’s the one sharing it with a lot more people making use of it.
[00:16:30] Courtney Robertson: So have at it. And each release party, I will continue to update it. There’s a lot
[00:16:37] Sé Reed: you pick these photos, by the way, in this media library,
[00:16:40] Courtney Robertson: Some of them are from the unit test data. There are one or two, like a lot of these are the unit test data defaults. One or two of them came from the WordPress photos library, or there was another, there was something else similar to the unit test data back in the day that it could have come from that too.
[00:16:57] Courtney Robertson: Sorry, not media appearance editor. Let’s go there.
[00:17:01] Sé Reed: started on the media
[00:17:02] Courtney Robertson: Yeah, no, I know the history of saying the media library,
[00:17:05] Sé Reed: header for design. That’s amazing. That’s new. See, this is what we’re talking about. It’s these tiny little things.
[00:17:11] Courtney Robertson: First little thing when we get in here, most of these are going to be, most of what I have time to cover today will be in, the user oriented side of it, which there are very specific test steps for this in the.
[00:17:25] Courtney Robertson: Called help test WordPress 6.2. That is on the make test teams site. Devs, you’ll wanna find the field guide and do some reading. There are links to all sorts of track and Gutenberg issues from this. This is a roundup, posts of posts, right? So devs go to the field guide folks that are more user facing oriented, and what a test out user features go to this article that’s about the help test features.
[00:17:49] Sé Reed: so we have to stop for a second. This is the problem. We, and I was talking about this in the Slack channel. I think that, when you’re just like so involved and I’ve gotten so much more involved, actively just this year as, because I’m, taking on a team rep role or team, yeah. Team rep role.
[00:18:07] Sé Reed: But. When you just, living your life, operating your business, doing your thing, the amount of information that it is like needed to consume in order to not just respond to the new stuff. your clients or your site if it’s something that you’re running, but to go that extra step and to read about things that may not necessarily, impact just what you’re doing.
[00:18:37] Sé Reed: That would be one step just to test the things that do impact you. But it’s so hard to parse. Not like the parser, but it’s so hard to parse out. what all of those things are. And I say that as someone who, a, is involved and b is a reactor to the releases. Like I don’t, I’m not a, I’m not an early tester.
[00:18:57] Sé Reed: I’m not an early updater. I’m like a 0.1 updater. That’s, this is just the truth of the matter. Maybe sometimes a 0.2 updater,and I know I’m not alone in that and I know that there is this balance between. Using the software and the building of the software and that, that, that gap between those things.
[00:19:22] Sé Reed: So part of my mission, and I, we’ve, I think we talked about this in some Slack or GitHub or somewhere, is to really make it easier to test, like test one thing or to,here are the things we need to test in a checklist. You can spin this up, do that thing, and then give your feedback. If anyone’s listening,
[00:19:43] Courtney Robertson: that’s what this post is for. That is exactly the things that you’re mentioning. I think that this would be the area to focus in on if you’re not the one that is, digging into the, to the react code of your own themes that you’re making or something like that.
[00:20:00] Who has the time?
[00:20:02] Courtney Robertson: And react based programming might not be for everybody in terms of WordPress theming, and that’s cool too.
[00:20:08] Courtney Robertson: So I would direct people to this particular checklist, help test WordPress 6.2. There was pretty much the same in the demo post that is on wordpress.org/news. , that’s the replay of the demo that we had the other week. It’s out on the slash news site. I would take folks through this where it walks you through and shows you, here’s the thing, now you try it too.
[00:20:31] Sé Reed: How the nav
[00:20:33] Sé Reed: is, don’t the things that are in the, it’s not the stuff that’s in the post.
[00:20:39] Yes.
[00:20:40] Sé Reed: That stuff feels like it’s been tested. Like I feel like the
[00:20:45] Courtney Robertson: not enough.
[00:20:46] Sé Reed: that we need to test is like the stuff that’s not like the main features, right?
[00:20:51] Jason Cosper: I’ll go back to saying the 40,000 plugins thing,is you end up with a lot of different variables. So like these are the focus areas. Yes. That is something that has had a lot of eyes on it, but when you get those 40,000. Other variables that’s not even taking into account all the themes that are out there, and the stuff that’s not in the repo.
[00:21:18] Jason Cosper: Things like that. Having as many of those variables covered as possible. Still a good thing.
[00:21:27] Courtney Robertson: One of the things that pushed, we had a beta five
[00:21:30] Sé Reed: sorry, hold on. But that would require testing on sites that had, the variety of. Plugins, and themes installed. Also, not just poking this thing, right out of the box in a fresh install. Cause that is really different than putting it on the site. So is why I.
[00:21:51] Courtney Robertson: Insta WP button, you’d have to go install the beta version. But if you use the Insta WP button, that you get with a Chrome browser extension, it will launch a site that has that plugin installed. Ah, there you go.
[00:22:04] Or.
[00:22:04] Sé Reed: for testing, testing your plugins individually with a temporary install that has a plugin that you use, and maybe what, like importing the data or something and just being like, here’s all my data. Oh, where’d Courtney go? she closed herself out of the box.
[00:22:20] Jason Cosper: We’ll let her back in. Oh, you, you can,you can also do the completely,suicidal thing. It’s not really suicidal, but,you can do the, totally wild thing of, testing. testing like I’m testing, which is, putting the release candidate on, my personal sites on a few things that are,in some cases.
[00:22:42] Jason Cosper: My personal site, just Jason Cosper dot com, has been running since 2006. . Yeah. I don’t, I haven’t updated in three, put any posts up on it in three years. That’s fine. But, it still has a bunch of legacy crap on it that,it’s useful to see okay, what’s the latest,what’s this gonna do on the latest release candidates?
[00:23:08] Sé Reed: Because that’s what a lot of sites look like actually, right? Like stuff that hasn’t been updated in three years or something that’s over there that has like some plugins that are like a couple releases old or something like that. And so I, there is definitely value in testing it in that environment.
[00:23:25] Sé Reed: Cause I don’t think that is as edge case as it. might want to be as best practices would dictate. I, as we all know, logging into new clients, backends, which I love that phrase, but, logging into new clients’ backends, we get to see, just the neglect or the plugins that have been installed or the duplication.
[00:23:47] Sé Reed: So we all know that is a reality of live production sites. So
[00:23:53] Jason Cosper: Yeah.
[00:23:54] Sé Reed: there’s value in testing it on old stuff, so don’t update your sites. You heard it here.
[00:23:59] Courtney Robertson: Okay.
[00:24:00] Sé Reed: Okay, wait. I also have one more thing to say. Does this not look just like 2010? Cuz it does remember the 2010 theme.
[00:24:06] Courtney Robertson: No. All right, so launch into site editor. We see that this is a little different. We don’t have the dashboard. You can get back out there with this option or with this logo, your site logo, which that WordPress icon will change to your site logo if you upload one. Both of ’em will take you back to the dashboard.
[00:24:24] Courtney Robertson: But what we saw in betas one through four is that if somebody were to hit the back arrow, there was like white screen of death going on. And that’s why we. Because nobody thought to hit the back arrow in the browser. So we need more testers to find fun things like that, which is why we had a beta five.
[00:24:40] Courtney Robertson: It was quickly fixed and RC one is out and not a problem. You see the breakdown of these, and this is organized by, I believe, is it alphabetical. There is some thought about organizing it based on template hierarchy. That was one of the discussions. I don’t know. The way that we organize this could be different.
[00:25:00] Courtney Robertson: So you have to click into one of them before you start editing. You could go in and edit it, and then that way you know that you’re in edit mode. If I
[00:25:08] Sé Reed: Ajax I saw right there smoothing it out.
[00:25:12] Sé Reed: Little bit of job. I don’t know what that was, but it was nice and smooth.
[00:25:16] Courtney Robertson: There is a header block, that you see by default in there, and that header block now has a bright purple outline around it. I hope that it works for those that have color vision kind of stuff, but in that header block, if I were, this is a little bit fussy yet, but if I were to, it’s not ideal, we’ll just say that, but if I were to toss the header into a group, which I know to do, then I could go over to position.
[00:25:42] Courtney Robertson: and say, let’s make that navigation area sticky because sticky nap bars are what people like. It’s a little bit janky this time around. I’ll say they already have a fix in the works for it in the future, so you can make sticky nap bars. Other things that are pretty interesting is that if I go into my, let’s turn on Style, view, the global, formerly global styles.
[00:26:06] Courtney Robertson: It’s just styles. Now we have the style block, or I’m sorry, the store. Style book? Yes. Say my words. Store. The style
[00:26:16] Sé Reed: I read about this. I haven’t seen it yet.
[00:26:18] Courtney Robertson: so it gives you, there’s a navigation kind of thing across the top. It gives you the preview. Of all the kinds of default blocks that are in here, I don’t know yet if plugins that create a block will toss something in here.
[00:26:31] Courtney Robertson: But this way when you’re in, yeah, when you’re in and changing your, let’s go into typography for headings and if I change the font on that one to something else, then you could see that all my heading fonts just changed somewhere that I can view what’s going on there. The style book is No, it’s not. Is it like the customizer in a way? It’s like the new, the Customizer 2.0. Because you’re changing global styles and you can see it, but it’s not on page. So that’s an, it still holds
[00:27:09] Courtney Robertson: It’s the demo of everything.
[00:27:11] Sé Reed: Yeah. It still holds to the kind of templatey concept as opposed to, This is funny cuz it is another layer of abstraction, for styling, which is what in theory site editor is all about doing.
[00:27:24] Sé Reed: Is like putting it on the page. But this kind of re abstracts it, which I’m not saying is wrong because they also, and I think it didn’t come out yet, but the navigation bar with the side, sidebar. Is that this one
[00:27:40] Courtney Robertson: I can show it in a moment. So also in the same kind of area. Yeah, mark, Andrew likes the style book. That’s awesome. So this additional c s, hey, we can put custom CSS back in here.
[00:27:53] Sé Reed: Oh my God,
[00:27:54] Courtney Robertson: yay.
[00:27:55] Sé Reed: this was, I have been waiting for this. I’m like, what? How? I was
[00:27:59] Courtney Robertson: Okay. Now the other.
[00:28:00] Sé Reed: we live without this box? I
[00:28:03] Courtney Robertson: So that is under the kebab menu. Let’s learn our proper terminology.
[00:28:07] Courtney Robertson: The kebab menu is our three dots, and we see additional CSS here,
[00:28:11] Sé Reed: the hamburger.
[00:28:12] Courtney Robertson: right? No, a hamburger is the lines.
[00:28:14] Sé Reed: So there’s a
[00:28:16] Courtney Robertson: The kebab menu. It’s actually, it’s a term. It’s a term if you look it up.
[00:28:19] Sé Reed: I know, but what are we
[00:28:21] Courtney Robertson: so Lynn, if you say,wait. I don’t want to apply my custom CSS to everywhere. Maybe I just need to apply my custom CSS to a singular button.
[00:28:31] Courtney Robertson: Let’s turn the style book off for this one. and down here in the singular button, I could go in and make custom c s just for the singular button. So there is already a ticket that I saw. It won’t ship this time, but I saw there’s a ticket that will output a list of where, which blocks you have put your custom c s in, because every page builder has paid.
[00:28:52] Courtney Robertson: Same issue. So 6.2 won’t see that, but 6.3 might. So you can put custom CSS into a singular block. You also get this better preview of what the individual items look like when you are styling a specific block. And what you also get in buttons, it will come soon to other versions, is you get a shadow option.
[00:29:15] Courtney Robertson: So in my shadow, I could
[00:29:17] Sé Reed: is all MailChimp’s fault, this stupid button shadow. Did anyone notice this? The MailChimp change their buttons and
[00:29:23] I wanted box shadows.
[00:29:25] Sé Reed: with Yeah, that exactly.
[00:29:28] Courtney Robertson: I wanted box, shadow c s box shadows for other elements on my own site. When I re over, when I redid it, like last summer. And
[00:29:36] Sé Reed: shadows are very in right now though, so I’m glad that we have that because they’ve, they’re, they’re, I’ve been using them myself, but
[00:29:43] Courtney Robertson: They only work at this time, I believe, on a singular button, not buttons, plural. So when you have,
[00:29:49] Sé Reed: have multiple buttons next to each other, you
[00:29:51] Courtney Robertson: you style the singular, you style the singular buttons, plural is about how multiple layout together buttons singular is about the element of that singular button, right?
[00:30:04] Sé Reed: I’ve gotten a, I’ve been doing a site for a client that is using a site editor, like it’s an actual, like full on site. And man, the The layers deep that you get into the list editor, the list view there can get a little extreme. I’m like, what if I feel like I’m in like, you’re like if you had an outline with the Roman numerals, you’re like in some weird symbol from like wing dings cuz it’s so far indented
[00:30:31] Courtney Robertson: So another place to show off a couple new features all at once is the navigation
[00:30:36] Sé Reed: over time.
[00:30:37] Courtney Robertson: Yeah, we’ll keep it short. So the navigation block, I am using the list for you to get at the navigation block because that is, like a di and a di and a dive. Or a table. And a table. And a table.
[00:30:47] Courtney Robertson: And a table, right? Yep. So we got into the navigation block. Through the list view because I can that way easily. And on the right hand side that I have, this is our new instead of the cog for settings. This is the new look and it is supposed to indicate that is a panel sliding out, but we are not applying the same effect to the list view button.
[00:31:12] Courtney Robertson: That is also a panel sliding. I don’t know. So this is the new settings option. But in the settings option, that there are three tabs here. This
[00:31:23] Sé Reed: Yeah. Now, so that’s why we couldn’t use the cog for the settings, the block settings anymore, because now we have to use the cog for the block settings inside the block.
[00:31:31] Courtney Robertson: but the list view staircase is the same in both places. So I don’t know. So before I show you these three tabs, I will
[00:31:39] Sé Reed: Wait, there’s a list. Few. Is that only in navigation that there’s a list? Few inside the block. Oh,
[00:31:44] Courtney Robertson: Let me show you. This is new. So before I can show you what that list for you does, let’s import, Few.
[00:31:50] Courtney Robertson: since I have theme unit test data in here it says my menu is currently empty. I forget this sometimes. Let’s see, I am trying to import, oh, here it is. Import the kebab menu. Let me import, since I have theme unit test data that comes with all these prebuilt.
[00:32:08] Courtney Robertson: So I could say, let’s import the short menu that came from, maybe I had a different version of a theme or something on my site, and so I have old menus, so I’ve just imported a menu.
[00:32:16] Sé Reed: Wait. Quick question. Old menus just hanging out in the database or old menus somewhere else.
[00:32:22] Jason Cosper: Yeah.
[00:32:22] Courtney Robertson: Hi. Yeah. Database.
[00:32:24] Sé Reed: out in the database.
[00:32:24] Courtney Robertson: Yeah. So it will remember these
[00:32:27] Sé Reed: la lagging around. If you were to clean your database and you didn’t have, would that strip your old menus? No. Just leave that alone.
[00:32:37] Sé Reed: If you’re cleaning, let’s just leave your menus alone because you don’t have it Enga like I,
[00:32:42] Courtney Robertson: Unless you’re dropping the tables where the menus are . Yeah. Like in theory you could delete them. Yes. So I have imported an old menu and then here are, this is the list view of getting to those items. So people might like. Getting to that because this is what happens, right? Like why is this toolbar hanging out over top?
[00:33:03] Courtney Robertson: So this was fixed and then it was not fixed. What I like to do with this,
[00:33:09] Sé Reed: iterations. We are moving like, progressively iterating. I think this sidebar, menu navigation is really a response to people’s feedback about the. Just non-friendly UI that was originally part of site editing. So I think I just wanna, to tie back to the beginning of the show, feedback really does shape the path of this.
[00:33:38] Sé Reed: Like people are, the people who are building this are listening to feedback,
[00:33:42] Courtney Robertson: So we don’t like this here. So to temporarily get rid of it, I use the top toolbar. And then, after that I need to go back to my styles area there. My, I’m sorry, my settings area. And when I was on nav.
[00:33:55] Sé Reed: panel.
[00:33:55] Courtney Robertson: Yeah, nav. The terms.
[00:33:57] Sé Reed: why we need a glossary people.
[00:33:59] Courtney Robertson: We do so navigation right here, we have three different tabs coming across. Some blocks will have two, some may only have one plugins, plugin depths.
[00:34:09] Sé Reed: For people who are listening, you need to know that the styles tab is duotone. That’s all you need to know. That’s really
[00:34:16] Courtney Robertson: Okay, so we have three tabs inside of the, for our audio listeners, three tabs inside of the settings sidebar. And when you’re in the navigation block, there are three tabs. Other blocks might have other amounts. Plug-in. Devs. You can now start hooking into these and inject I want some things in. I want some things in the settings.
[00:34:35] Courtney Robertson: Settings, . I want
[00:34:37] Sé Reed: gonna get hijacked though? Like the theme options pages? Is this side panel gonna get, just is it, are there gonna be ads in here? Like how do you know if there are any
[00:34:47] Courtney Robertson: No, there won’t be ads. This is only for settings about your plugin.
[00:34:51] Sé Reed: it’s like strictly limited to
[00:34:52] Jason Tucker: accepted.
[00:34:52] Sé Reed: that
[00:34:54] Courtney Robertson: Okay, let’s run Tucker’s plugin. And then the final tab is your settings styles. Oh goodness, this is hard to say. So it’s tucking more things behind, more spaces to clean up that. It was a really long scroll for that right. Sidebar. So we’ve broken it down into some different tabs now.
[00:35:13] Sé Reed: Are those, style menus going to be open by default because they were open just now when you landed on them, but right now in, the existing, version, they are closed. Not that’s like super important, but. I don’t like it. I like them being open. personally.
[00:35:31] Courtney Robertson: yeah, so if you open your settings icon, This is what default is landing on is that list view, and that lets you drag things around. It looks almost the same as the list view on the left side, but let’s say that you might not have that left side list view open and so there are some settings.
[00:35:49] Sé Reed: So you
[00:35:49] Jason Cosper: I was gonna, I was gonna say,
[00:35:51] Yeah.
[00:35:52] Jason Cosper: Sorry, say,I was gonna ask Tucker because I know that Tucker had, some complaints about how,
[00:36:01] a few.
[00:36:02] Jason Cosper: Just a few. When he started redoing the WPwatercooler site in, Gutenberg, the menus were like one of his biggest, like nitpicks, like Tucker.
[00:36:14] Jason Cosper: How do you feel about this new, menu or navigation setup?
[00:36:19] Jason Tucker: I think it’s good. It, I think it’s gonna work well. I think the one thing that, and I don’t know if we’ve solved this yet cause I haven’t played with this version of WordPress yet, but editing a template on a page that you’re currently on where the template is being applied to that page, and then you hit site edit.
[00:36:39] Jason Tucker: that darn thing should take you to the template so you can edit the template that you’re looking at instead of the homepage. I don’t know if they fix that yet, but if they have fixed that, then I’ll give them all the tokens, but if not, then no tokens are given because I don’t understand why this logic is the way that it is.
[00:36:54] Sé Reed: But here’s the thing. Okay,
[00:36:56] Jason Tucker: we are on the page.
[00:36:57] Sé Reed: Here’s my conclusion of this. This is, I think, really edging, six,WordPress core WordPress into legitimate page builder territory. Obviously, there’s a lot of add-ons that can, involve dynamic content and whatnot, but we’re not actually that far away from that, and you can see where it’s going.
[00:37:21] Sé Reed: And now we’ve got a framework for. The editing component. There were a lot of, short or, missteps possibly in the beginning, like with the navigation menu, but cause of folks feedback and the community responding, those things have been addressed. And so I think you can really see where it’s going now.
[00:37:47] Sé Reed: And I, it. It always had potential, but now it has,you can see the reality of it, and I just think that the feedback doesn’t, the feedback is so important because this has been, the feedback has been shaping this project since it was announced. Like I do not think that where some of the project leadership thought this would go is necessarily where it has gone or the things that have been added or changed.
[00:38:14] Sé Reed: They’re not necessarily what were planned at the beginning, and I just cannot stress enough how much this software and the people who are building this software are part of our community and are part of WordPress no matter who they’re sponsored by. They’re building this tool that we’re all using and all, in theory, making a living off of or enjoying in some way.
[00:38:38] Sé Reed: And it’s really. It’s really miraculous that it does exist like this. And then we all do have this opportunity. So I just, it’s, we should not take it for granted how useful this tool is and how few people really do create it and how important it really is and how much we all. Tend to it and pay attention to it and give it our love and affection and our attention because it, I love that you have Wahoos on the
[00:39:16] Courtney Robertson: So I was gonna show like two, three more things in the posts. I was gonna show two more. Drink 2, 2, 3 more quick
[00:39:24] why not?
[00:39:25] Courtney Robertson: Alright. So in the post editor,
[00:39:28] Sé Reed: on my heartfelt note about WordPress contribution, yes, we need more contributors, but I also want people to be oohed and awed by, here are the posts. So if you go to add a pattern, the new area of patterns, this is organized a little better.
[00:39:41] Courtney Robertson: much better. Wow, And there’s a way for, if you are a theme dev, there’s a better way to hook into the way that those patterns appear.
[00:39:49] Courtney Robertson: There’s also an H T M L api, so check that out. In the field guide, in the media area, that we can embed our media a little bit differently than we did in the past. So you can like, look at the images or videos or whatever that are in your thing.
[00:40:06] Sé Reed: Abso freaking lutely a big step towards, I know now why you wanted to show this to me, towards media library,upgrading that is
[00:40:14] Courtney Robertson: You can open the media library, but the, I like where this direction’s going. I did a search in open verse.
[00:40:21] Sé Reed: in there. Is that a plugin or is that
[00:40:23] Courtney Robertson: Nope. That’s baked in. And there is a way, devs, there is a way to turn it off if you don’t want your clients to get it. Read the field guide. There is a way to turn off the
[00:40:32] Sé Reed: I would anyone not want their clients to have stock
[00:40:34] Courtney Robertson: Because it will hot link, so I can’t demonstrate since it, I think it already did it once. Hold on. So I’ll show you. I did a search for open verse. Here is my friend’s. Yes. Here is my friend Sandy dressed up as Wampoo. I know where that photo came from. Here is the hot link. Hey, we are going to pull this in.
[00:40:52] Courtney Robertson: We are embedding. The image into your site, but we are not uploading this to your media library at this time. This was a little controversial. So if the image is in a creative common zero licensed space, publicly sourcing it from there might be a better choice than hosting it locally because we’ve seen some people download something from getting images, stick it on flicker and claim that it’s opens open like CC zero licensing.
[00:41:18] Courtney Robertson: that’s a problem. So people are ethically torn. Do I download it and host it myself because, but or do I attribute it to where it came from? That claims that it is CC zero. And so the compromise is a warning message to let you decide,
[00:41:32] Sé Reed: that a ton of, Bandwidth. Then though, pulling from then o the open verse site because maybe this is a topic for another day, because I know Airbnb, not Airbnb, freaking air table,has taken active measures to prevent them from being used as a cdn. So in a way, open verse would be like this, like global c D N for images, if that’s happen.
[00:41:55] Courtney Robertson: So open verse already. Open verse is only a search engine.
[00:41:59] Sé Reed: We should really
[00:42:00] Courtney Robertson: It’s not storing media.
[00:42:02] Sé Reed: 15 minutes over and we’re
[00:42:03] Courtney Robertson: Okay. Okay, so open verse is a search engine and open verse does not host any files, really, it doesn’t host the media, so it just searches where the media is stored and it’s giving it back to let you in. So I’m gonna copy my styles because everybody thinks that this is magical.
[00:42:20] Courtney Robertson: I’m gonna go down here and say, Hey, on dressed up Sandy, hiding in a wpu. I’m going to paste my styles and yes, we’ll allow that paste and ta-da. So now on a block by block basis, you can copy, paste, your styles
[00:42:35] Sé Reed: Narrator says it pasted
[00:42:38] Courtney Robertson: So yes, so there’s a
[00:42:40] Sé Reed: listening at home, it pasted correctly.
[00:42:43] Courtney Robertson: We are way over. There is so much more devs.
[00:42:45] Courtney Robertson: Please read through the field guide and devs if you have an idea about how to make the field guide more fun to look. Let’s talk about you offering your ideas and time to make that possible. , so
[00:43:00] Sé Reed: easier for all of us to make the product better that we all share and that we’re all working on.
[00:43:06] Courtney Robertson: So that was a lot of the user side of
[00:43:08] Sé Reed: get hyped about and then we can all go to the parties.
[00:43:10] Yes.
[00:43:11] Sé Reed: to the next party. I’m
[00:43:14] Courtney Robertson: Okay.
[00:43:14] Sé Reed: I’m coming to the party.
[00:43:15] Courtney Robertson: That’s a lot of the user days.
[00:43:17] emoji
[00:43:18] Jason Cosper: We showed off a lot of, stuff that’s going on around the block, editor around all of that. I do want to give a very brief message, like mention of, something that I am ridiculously excited about, that now we have,moved her. In WordPress core, which, only means stuff to a lot of plugin and theme, devs, but also plugin and theme users.
[00:43:46] Jason Cosper: Sometimes especially in shared hosting environments, it, in places where, your resources might be a little constrained. The traditional way of updating a plugin, it copies. The files between a directory, it can be slow. Andy Frain and, a bunch of other folks have worked really hard, on getting, move D like instead of copy d added to, WordPress.
[00:44:15] Jason Cosper: So the, it’s a silly name if you have to say it out loud, because so is so our hamburger and kabob, who are we? What are we working with here? People,
[00:44:28] Jason Cosper: But, the at the end of the day, plugin theme, et cetera, updates, will go faster. When you do, and set up like automatic, plugin and theme updates, this will make, failing back.
[00:44:43] Jason Cosper: to the old version of a plug iner theme that doesn’t update correctly. It will make it easier to roll back to that and not completely brick your site. I am excited about this. It will make the update process a lot more like updating Firefox or Chrome or whatever. It’s oh, this thing broke. You don’t have a non-functional thing now it’s just, Hey, this update didn’t go as planned.
[00:45:12] Here’s
[00:45:13] Sé Reed: We put it back. Yeah. It’s like a chess move. If you’re playing a chess game and you don’t take, it doesn’t take its finger off of the chess piece until it sees it that’s oh, okay, it’s good . So then it could still take it back. It’s just like that.
[00:45:30] Sé Reed: Everyone got my chest analogy, yep.
[00:45:32] Sure.
[00:45:33] right. So
[00:45:35] Jason Tucker: Here’s the important part here is I want you to give me a ten second. Where you’re gonna say something that I’m going to play at the beginning of every show
[00:45:45] Sé Reed: Wait right now. We’re doing that
[00:45:47] Jason Tucker: Give me a ten second clip right now. No one talk mute if you like,
[00:45:51] Sé Reed: I don’t
[00:45:52] Jason Tucker: then we’ll use this later.
[00:45:54] Sé Reed: You are, nope. We can’t do that right now. We will do
[00:45:59] Jason Tucker: Oh, we’re doing it right now
[00:46:01] Sé Reed: No, we’re not
[00:46:02] Jason Tucker: We’re doing it live. Let’s do this. Come on. We’re doing it live.
[00:46:04] Sé Reed: is about the W P C C.
[00:46:06] Jason Tucker: This is about the W pcc. How.
[00:46:08] Sé Reed: I joined the W P C and be a part of the community. Fun. Let’s fund contributors.
[00:46:14] Perfect.
[00:46:15] WPP WP C Fund contributors.
[00:46:18] Jason Tucker: Sweet. I’ll make that happen. All right, folks.
[00:46:22] Sé Reed: Fun.
[00:46:23] Jason Tucker: I was
[00:46:25] Sé Reed: Sorry. We are fun contributors. Come on.
[00:46:29] Jason Cosper: A shaggy ending to a shaggy show, Jason throw to the outro.
[00:46:34] Jason Tucker: here’s our outro.
[00:46:43] Sé Reed: Got
[00:46:44] Jason Tucker: WPwatercooler dot com slash subscribe and subscribe to this content over there. We’d really appreciate it. You can go over to Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Stitcher, Spotify. You can even watch us on YouTube. We’ll see ya there. Bye-bye.
[00:46:57] Sé Reed: I’m glad no one’s here for the professionalism. Just for the cool.
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