


<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: So I participated yesterday, I mean, for 10 minutes maybe, but there was a React conference and afterwards they were doing as well, the session with speakers. So they were discussing some key topics that were covered during the day and discussing how the community fits in, all that pictures, other frameworks and libraries. So that was quite interesting, but I could join only SLD center, but still something that I just joined randomly because it&#8217;s like there was this blue button on the top with all the faces of participants and that caught my attention. So I like that. But as you said, the fact that you don&#8217;t know upfront, that something like that is happening is a bit annoying, I think. Although it has also some benefits because maybe that&#8217;s the whole idea to have it to something that just started because people exchange opinions on Twitter and then suddenly they can just jump in and start talking about the topic.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. So I like it as a more casual way to connect with other people that are in your Twitter stream, or you are part of it. One restriction is that on your desktop, you can only connect as a listener. If you want to be a part of the&#8230; in speaking with the other people and have your input, you would need to be on the mobile app, the Twitter mobile app. So I don&#8217;t know if you said it, but Twitter Spaces is just audio. So that is also a lower barrier than a live stream because you don&#8217;t have to be on video. It&#8217;s almost like a group phone call, so to speak, with other people listening in, and it&#8217;s much less formal. And I like that part. Yeah. Oh, speaking of React conference, I think that we have the link for the recordings in our show notes, if you&#8217;re interested in what&#8217;s happening with React. Are there anything that stood out for you, what WordPress developers would need to know? I know I&#8217;m throwing that at you right now.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: So one thing that they are introducing new features and they&#8217;re introducing many changes, although the way how they approach it is very nice because everything will be backward compatible, so they just follow what WordPress does in that regard, which is amazing. And they had some other plans for the next major version, which is 18, that should be released early next year. And what I found very interesting is that initially they wanted to have some sort of switch for new features that is you need to apply for a whole application, however, they changed the plan. And it&#8217;s very interesting that you will be able to just pick a subset of your application and enable one given feature.</p>



<p>And there&#8217;ll be a few features that you will be able to use concurrent mode, those are very technical things, but in general, they are saying that your application will work exactly the same in 99,999 percent of time, which is great. And yes, I think that there will be a few improvements that the block editor would benefit from. I cannot confirm that because we don&#8217;t have any numbers for now, but I think that in terms of performance, there will be some benefits. And yeah, and also Diego Haz had a presentation about accessibility and he was showing his Reakit library that is used inside WordPress.</p>



<p>So that&#8217;s an interesting part. And he also was presenting the composite component that we use in the block inserter. And he showed how the new APIs will benefit that. And so one thing that I like the most is that there will be some sort of behavior that allows you to show loaders in a very smart way. So for instance, when you show the results for the blocking set, and the block patterns, you will be able to still present the previous set of results while the new is loading and assume that&#8217;s ready, then it&#8217;ll replace that. And it&#8217;s like very nice APIs for us. So that&#8217;s very technical, very deep. And I think the block editor will benefit from that in the next releases in 2022.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. So sounds like everything is really evolving. So now let&#8217;s get back to our immediate release.&nbsp;</p>



<h3 id="what-s-released-wordpress-5-9-beta-2-and-gutenberg-12-1"><strong>What’s Released &#8211; WordPress 5.9 Beta 2 and Gutenberg 12.1</strong></h3>



<p>So what&#8217;s released section in the Gutenberg Changelog is, well first, WordPress 5.9 Beta 2 was released on Tuesday, December 7th and the community is going to yeah, asked to really stress test this because it&#8217;s one of the latest releases and there are not a whole more to come. There is probably a Beta 3 in the works, but it&#8217;s still unclear if there should be a January 4th Beta 4 release before the release candidate comes out. But yeah, so we have the news item, the news page about the release in our show notes. And it gives you great instructions on how you can test things, especially the bug fixes that came in late there.&nbsp;</p>



<p>And that brings us to the Gutenberg plugin release 12.1. So some of the changes were back boarded to the 5.9 WordPress core. But yeah, so what&#8217;s in the Gutenberg, 12.1? Do you want to start us off?</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowsk</em>i: Yeah. I&#8217;m just thinking about that, if everything was back board, I mean, it will be back boarded as far as I understand that, or no, it might be already there. Yes. It it is already, sorry. I had to think how the process goes and because we are using RC of the plugin when we start cherry picking comments. So that&#8217;s like already happened this week on Monday and yeah. So I think the biggest change is that one of the blockers that was right during the time when the release date was postponed, was the experience around picking templates. And now we have a separate page for templates and it contains the list view, that contains the name and the source of the template, whether it comes from the team or maybe whether that was created by the one of the users from the site.</p>



<p>So that shows the list, and on the same screen, there is also a new button that is on the top right side. And it allows you to create a missing template. So let&#8217;s say you don&#8217;t have a 404 page provided by the theme, and you can just use button to create that one, that experience. Yeah. I mean, it&#8217;s like that&#8217;s the biggest change. That was something that was missing. I mean, that was in the plugin to work different in a different way. So there was a sidebar on the left side that allows you to do all those things. However, I don&#8217;t know. Do you remember why it was not included?</p>



<h3 id="enhancements"><strong>Enhancements</strong></h3>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: It was in 5.8. There was a template section in the right hand sidebar. Yes. But that was because the full site editor didn&#8217;t have all the right workflow. So you are only able to edit the template that you were on though, the post or the page template, but now they have this under appearance, the additional menu. And that&#8217;s where you can look at templates as well as template parts. It&#8217;s a separate menu. And that is now available for WordPress 5.9. Another big change is, or what was missing, was that in the site editor, you were able to add blocks as well as block patterns. But now you also can add reusable blocks that you already built to add them to a template. So that was a missing piece right there. And I&#8217;m glad that&#8217;s in there now for 5.9.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: Yeah. I think that for sure was overlooked at some point, because there&#8217;s so many features already in the post content editor that it wasn&#8217;t so easy to bring them to the site editor and it was like, each feature needs to be also evaluated, whether it makes sense in that context.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. And I can understand that, yeah, that some features are not finished until they are evaluated for a broader usage. Like if it works in a post edit, it doesn&#8217;t mean it works that way in the site editor, so some things need to change to actually make it work for the site editor, which also kind of updates the UI or something like that. So it&#8217;s quite a complex system that is back and forth from new features to old features, to new features kind of way. It&#8217;s almost like a feedback loop that you also have with users, and you introduced few new features.</p>



<p>So yeah, in the global styles now it&#8217;s also possible to opt out of the default palette for the interface. So if a theme and theme JSON opts out in the default colors for a site, then those colors are not shown in the site editor sidebar, which, yeah, certainly that was a big complaint that people said, well, I don&#8217;t want users to actually be using those colors. But on the other hand, you need those colors when there is no color palette from the theme. So it, yeah, it kind of offers something, yeah. So it&#8217;s kind of an interesting problem to solve.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: Yeah. But I guess the stats, they still exist because you could change teams and you could be using one of those core colors. So they need to be there in case you use them in one of the overridden templates or template parts, or reusable blocks or whatever. But yeah, I think also on the feature section, it&#8217;s something that is more like a developer experience. So we were talking about the schemas for theme.json that helps developers and designers when they building their teams have this hints, what given property could be, or just showing the list of possibilities. And there was change other that allows to use custom blocks. So not only the core blocks, but if you have a custom block and you could apply some style changes and do the hints, because it&#8217;s now smart enough to figure out that that&#8217;s also a block that could have some styling. So just a handy improvement for-</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: &#8230;that use, because if you are not playing with the block Theme.json generators….</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. And that&#8217;s certainly a challenge for the Theme.json generators, to keep up with the new changes in the schema. And that&#8217;s an ongoing story about Gutenberg development that every person involved in it needs to kind of keep up with it, being theme developers or plug-in developers now, tool developers it&#8217;s&#8230; yeah. I hope it slows down a bit in, I don&#8217;t know, three or four years.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: Yeah. At least because of backwards compatibility, some of the existing features will stay there. So that&#8217;s one good thing, but there&#8217;s so many new features coming every two weeks. So yeah.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: And so there was one other improvement, is the position of the block appenders and the behavior of it, which is really, it was a long ongoing problem for the last two or three years.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: Yes.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: That the layout kind of jumped a little bit when the appenders come in. Appender is the plus sign where you can then add new blocks to it. And now that&#8217;s the little plus button and now you can, they are now, what is it, fixed in their positioning. And then so with the relation to the block, so they&#8217;re not underneath the block where they created those jumps and that alone is a feature that actually makes the block editor less awkward, I say, yeah.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: Yes, yes. I mean also that helps you to, because it&#8217;s now on the bottom right side of the space that the block occupies, the parent blocks that can have blocks inside, which is really good because you exactly know where are you adding this block. Whereas before the plus sign was in many cases it was positioned in a way that you weren&#8217;t sure whether that goes to the block you want to add or just is outside. So yeah. I like that a lot. I must admit when I saw that for the first time I was a bit lost. I didn&#8217;t know what this icon is all about. I was thinking that something is misplaced, but once you learn how it works now, it&#8217;s so much better.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. Yeah. I totally agree. Yeah. Good job everyone. And there is now a keyboard shortcut to double escape unselected blocks.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: No, no. So you need to press escape twice.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Okay.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: So because now alt select all blocks, whereas one escape just makes you go out on the edit mode. So it goes outside of the single block.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Okay.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski:</em> So it just….</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. Does that take care of, sometimes it happens that I&#8217;m not getting out of select. I cannot edit things. And is that….</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: Yes.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski:</em> Yeah, because we have two modes. One is for browsing. I know, it&#8217;s like, what&#8217;s the name, but the idea, yeah. The one is that it&#8217;s for accessibility. When you are contained in a blog that you are editing and then when you tap, it goes to the sidebar. And when you tap it just go to the toolbar, like there&#8217;s a cycle inside the single block, whereas when you escape and you can just use arrow up down just to navigate between blocks. So that makes you faster to move between blocks if you are using keyboard a lot.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. So I&#8217;m going to test this out over the weekend when I do the weekend edition, because that&#8217;s where I sometimes got trapped and I got out of it by just reloading the page.&nbsp;</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: When you keep press enter, then you go again in the edit mode so that&#8217;s&#8230; You need to learn some of those shortcuts and just use mouse and&#8230;</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: So the next thing is adjust the order of theme blocks and reorder the inserted items, the inserter items, sorry. And that has to do with the site editor and the theme blocks that are available. So the order is adjusted so you might find it on a different spot if you have been testing this before.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: There are now so many theme blocks and you know, some of them aren&#8217;t that important. so that&#8217;s why you can see now, like on the top of that is the navigation block or site title, site logo, or the logo that you would rather prefer to use when you start thinking about building the design for your template.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. And also, so it&#8217;s more the, oh, I did not know that it was actually a login logout block there. I just saw that because it&#8217;s now on the top.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: Yes.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, yeah. Awesome. Yeah. What&#8217;s next?</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: Yeah. In the block library, there is now a new block, which is comments pagination blocks. So just to explain, there is now an ongoing quark on the comments query loop, which is like more or less the same concept, like query loop, which is a technical name for the list of posts or pages or whatever post type you pick. And the idea is to replicate the same capability for designing how comments look and that pagination is one of the things that you can have with comments in the classic themes. So it&#8217;s there and the next and previous blocks for the pagination are missing still, but they should land soon. So in general, this comment square look, I would consider that very experimental in the WordPress 5.9. There will be a different block that is just wrapped around on the comment form or comment template. I don&#8217;t remember the name, but it&#8217;s just the PHP function that does everything for you and shows you the comments that you see on the single post page.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: All right. Okay, cool. Yeah. So the comments pagination block and all the other single comments blocks that are in the works, or have been released with the plugin will be in WordPress 6.0, because it&#8217;s still all experimental.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: Yes. I mean, if everything is done, which is most likely, yes.<em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Okay. All right. So then there were some updates on the navigation block and now it shows its changes to the sub menu options to show an error button when relevant and then implement suitable fallback to a navigation block on the front end when there is no menu yet selected. That was something that the team experimented with quite a bit, and there are four or five PRs that are related to that. It certainly is&#8230; that&#8217;s part of the backwards compatibility also for the navigation block that if there is no menu, because it&#8217;s a new site, yeah, you still can use the navigation block and get hints on that. But it also shows you a fall back. I tested this and it was quite interesting to see that it kind of took over and showed me all the pages if I wanted to, the navigation block is coming along quite nicely. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: Yeah. I think they also added PHP filter in case someone doesn&#8217;t like the default behavior for the fallback. So you can opt out with that. The filter name is block under score core underscore navigation underscore render underscore fallback, quite long one. And yeah. And basically you can just opt out or just provide your own way of doing that, which is pretty nice. And also there&#8217;s a technical change, which is less important, but they decided that instead of having the navigation menu ID attribute, there will be a ref which is aligned with how usable blocks work.</p>



<h3 id="bug-fixes"><strong>Bug Fixes</strong></h3>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Awesome. Yeah. So next item that we want to point out is the template part block that when you convert it to a reusable block, it kind of removes the color space and layout options of the template block. That&#8217;s very interesting to kind of test out if on&#8230; I&#8217;m kind of wondering, the interesting part is because I&#8217;m wondering about the use case for that, but I think the more you use it, the more you kind of understand it much better, then there is a change to the gallery block. That&#8217;s the refactored gallery block. And now they turned on the auto migration from our version one gallery block to our version two format when the post is edited. So that&#8217;s quite nice so you don&#8217;t have to physically do anything when you open up a post or a page that has a previous gallery version. It automatically converts it to the gallery version that has each image as an image block and uses the inner block. So you have all the features of an image block also available to your gallery.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: Yeah, it&#8217;s interesting. Although, I guess you still need to save it just to make sure that the version two is stored in the database. Although if you don&#8217;t change anything, that&#8217;s probably not that important. So, I mean, when you don&#8217;t change anything in the gallery, so you probably don&#8217;t have to save it. I haven&#8217;t tested that yet. I&#8217;m just wondering whether the save button just immediately marks itself as actionable, but you need to do something, whether just something behind the scenes until you don&#8217;t change any attribute it is just invisible. So that&#8217;s the only thing that….</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. I&#8217;m glad you mentioned that because I&#8217;m going through a few tests for the gallery block just to see how it works. And that&#8217;s certainly something to test some more. All right. What&#8217;s next? We talked about this post featured image to move the width and height controls into the dimension panel.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: Yeah. Although this, this sounds quite technical. I mean, because it was moved to the dimension panel, is like in a different place now, I mean the width and height is just better organized now. So there&#8217;s one important things for the themes. And the change is that when you are creating the structure for the theme, before you would use block templates and the block slash template slash parts folders for your templates and template parts, and the decision was to rename those folder, the old folders you can still use them as long as you use, like you cannot mix.</p>



<p>So you cannot use the new name and old name, as long as you use the old names or new names everything should work as before. And there is, yeah, I think I see that you, I think that there is announcement post for that, that we will link in the notes and yes, so templates and parts, new names, shorter and better. And that is because there are upcoming features coming. It&#8217;ll be possible to have a folder for styles and folder for patterns, which is quite interesting, the patterns part, in my opinion that will be great. And yeah for styles, do you know what the plan is for styles? Would it be in there?</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Well, I think it&#8217;s a separate PHP file where you register them, and then they&#8217;re also talking about variations folders. So yeah. So if you have a block that is an image block, and you want to add additional styles, like frame to it, or a different shape of it, then those don&#8217;t have to be in the functions PHP, you can create for each pattern your own file and then have them be added to the theme rendering kind of part. Yeah. So its styles, it&#8217;s variations, and it&#8217;s block patterns that get a little bit of a better folder structure like that.&nbsp;</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: Yeah. But it&#8217;s far in the future as I understand it.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Right. Yeah. But the only part that is now in Gutenberg is the renaming of the folders for the template parts and the templates, because you don&#8217;t need the block in front of them. Yeah. There was another change that is interesting for those who use the appearance menu, that as soon you use a block-based theme that is built for full site editing, the current theme editor, where you get access to the file system on your site will be under tools. It will not be showing up in the appearance menu. It&#8217;s not disappearing, but they decided it to hide it or move it to the tools subheader so it&#8217;s not confused with the site editor template, editor, it all looks kind of the same. Naming things is really hard. And it was always a little odd that that was actually available for a user to edit the PHP files on your site and kind of render them. If you make a mistake, you render the whole site with a white screen of death, so to speak. So hiding is probably a good, or placing that under the tools menu is probably a good decision.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: Yeah. So I just wanted to also mention from the&#8230; going back to the global styles and changes apply there. So there was one thing that is quite interesting. So there was a change to the typographic panel, so it&#8217;s now better organized. So now they call it elements. So by elements, I means there&#8217;s text, but other elements can be a link. So now they are separated in a way that you can drill down into the link and see only settings related to the link, like colors, like, I mean, in this case it&#8217;s typographic.</p>



<p>So you can change font size, you can change font weight, and so on. And that&#8217;s also a preparation for future changes so you will be able to register your own elements, so let&#8217;s say when you have a blog that contains a few visual parts, so that you will be able to mark that. So let&#8217;s say in the bottom, you will be able to say, I want to have special, maybe for typographic it&#8217;s not the best, but for colors there are a lot of requirements like navigation and then it can have now nested menus. So you could just start differently nested menus. And that would be like using this API. So that&#8217;s really interesting how it evolves.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. And looking at the PR giphy that the designers use there though it has menus and submenu, or panels and then subpanels, so if you want to change the text, you click on text and then you get an additional panel. If you want to change the link, you click on link. So a it&#8217;s a multilevel user interface now, and you need to really know where things are to actually change them. But it&#8217;s going from the top and global thing to the yeah, single element part.</p>



<p>And yeah, it&#8217;s going to be really interesting to see what people do with that and how they find things. I know that the learn team, the learn.webpress.org team is already looking at creating videos for tutorials for all these features. So I hope&#8230; it&#8217;s unclear if they will make it to the release, but shortly after, definitely. Yeah. They will have something. It&#8217;s a whole new way of editing your site. So we all have to learn how to use it. And sometimes you don&#8217;t pick up on the interfaces intuitively unless somebody points you to, well, what was the thinking behind it, you know? So. Yeah, so what else?</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: Yeah. It&#8217;s also so powerful that the organization for that needs to be really, really complex, but it&#8217;s like as long as you use good workflows that are the same for every block, it&#8217;s something that you should learn quite quickly.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. Consistency is definitely key for that. Yes. We talked about things, bug fixes, there are plenty of navigation block bug fixes and also for the gallery block that came out of the testing but nothing really major.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: Yeah it&#8217;s quite expected because the navigation block is the biggest feature that is in there that was also iterated for two years. And yes, it should be in very good shape now. So I think it&#8217;s fine to have those bug fixes because it improves the experience further.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So there&#8217;s one change in the components bug fixes that daytime picker is now setting PM hours correctly. I don&#8217;t know what was wrong with it, but it sounds like times are really hard.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: No, that one is really annoying. I think two weeks ago I ran into this issue that I wanted to post something in the afternoon, but it was published in the future, set in a few days in the morning because it wasn&#8217;t working correctly. So that&#8217;s a very important feature. So I&#8217;m glad that is fixed now.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah. Announcement. Now you don&#8217;t have to double check your times on the publishing things.&nbsp;</p>



<h3 id="experiments"><strong>Experiments</strong></h3>



<p>Yeah. And after, aside from that, there is under experiments, we find an experimental confirm dialogue. Did you see what that was about?</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: Yeah, because the browser, I mean, it&#8217;s mostly from as far as I understand that they want to remove the confirm function. That is the one that blocks you, that shows you a big popup. You need to click yes or no. It&#8217;s like the one that comes from the browser that doesn&#8217;t look good. And I guess that is one of the reasons why they want to remove that and there&#8217;s ongoing work to prepare a replacement for that. I&#8217;m not quite sure if that&#8217;s going to work in exactly the same way, because the good part about this confirm dialogue is then when you have unsafe changes in your editor, when you try to close the tab, it will just prevent that and ask you whether, are you sure that you want to continue, and I hope that this is going to be possible to replicate that using Java script. So let&#8217;s see how it goes.</p>



<h3 id="documentation"><strong>Documentation</strong></h3>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. Yeah, I understand. Cool. And then we come to the documentation piece, documentation PRs that are in Gutenberg 12.1. And there&#8217;s some information about the block gap to theme.json and there have been improvements to the greater block tutorial in the handbook. Well, the developers responsible for the documentation also alphabetized the how to guides section, which is probably an improvement. So you can find things. And then that&#8217;s pretty much, oh, for the tools panel it&#8217;s updated the panel and read me and the stories all have been updated. And there&#8217;s also updated documentation for the pattern block category.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: I see that there are also changes to the history page. Interesting. Just there is just a news section explaining what it is about. But yeah, if you want to check something the block at your handbook, the history page, that could be interesting to learn about inspiration and like some world post explaining the block editor, and you can learn how far it&#8217;ll….</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack:</em> Yeah. It was interesting. We had a discussion when we were at the theme meetup that the interest in the block editor comes in waves. Yeah. And I&#8217;m thinking now we are in the fourth waves of having new people coming into the block editor for the first time. And it&#8217;s hard for those of us who have been with it for four years to kind of go back in three years and kind of think, okay, what was published back then that would help anybody now three years later to get started with a block editor? And it&#8217;s quite an quite a hard thing to solve when you have been so far ahead of those who are just coming in, to kind of think back into the shoes of someone who experienced the block editor for the first time. So yeah. Having a history where people can go back to read those posts is really good and helpful. See anything else that you want to talk about?</p>



<h3 id="code-quality"><strong>Code Quality</strong></h3>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: Yeah. There&#8217;s also got quality section as usual, but that are some minor changes. I think the biggest change is the reorganization in how the PHP files are structured. So there&#8217;s an ongoing effort to move some of the functions to folders that are related to the WordPress major version, because we have so many features that we still support for WordPress 5.8, 5.7, and it becomes a pain to make sure that the same features work in older version, even though the code is not in WordPress core, but yes, that helps a lot. And that help also to catch a few smaller bugs that some features weren&#8217;t fully backboarded to work with 5.9 release. So I hope that this will prevent some surprises.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: All right, well, and this concludes our Gutenberg Changelog, going through the Gutenberg plugin release.&nbsp;</p>



<h3 id="what-s-in-active-development-or-discussed"><strong>What’s in Active Development or Discussed</strong></h3>



<p>There are a few things I wanted to point out in the active development or what&#8217;s discussed. There is the Gutenberg, the themes team on WordPress, they actually, every Friday they publish a weekly roundup of theme-related discussions. And this week they published the 75th weekly roundup edition. So if you haven&#8217;t followed up on that or followed that particular way, Jeff Ong and and Jason Chris picked four topics to highlight in the post.</p>



<p>And so one was the new color picker that&#8217;s coming to Gutenberg. And then the online discussion on how best to add global padding and still allow for full width alignment. There are some ideas that are tested and in the post you find the links to the GitHub issues about that. And also how make the WP block style support available through the theme.JSON, to opt in instead of the functions PHP support, and then contrary to other styling, it seems that global link styles override block level styles.</p>



<p>So they try to find a solution for that as well. And as always the weekly roundup has a list of overview issues for various features that are in the works like the typography tools, the global styles interface, and the default theme, for instance. And then it ends with a general resource section with links to documentation and tutorials. So if you are a theme developer and you want to keep up with the Gutenberg development and the discussions around it, signing up for the theme team make blog would definitely keep you in the loop on that. And of course we have the link in the show notes.</p>



<p>So before we leave, I want to point out that the Twitter bot is called good first bugs, which is maintained by Ryan Welcher and it has been updated. And now you can follow along as it tweets out all the GitHub issues that are labeled good first bugs. And for the Gutenberg group, as well as for the tags in the WordPress track. So if you are ready to contribute to Gutenberg and don&#8217;t know where to start, follow that Twitter handle @goodfirstbugs and it tweets out, yeah, I don&#8217;t know how often, but several times a day, the links to those issues that are good first bugs to tackle.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: Yeah. I&#8217;m seeing those tweets from time to time. I don&#8217;t follow the account, but it looks like it&#8217;s popular because Twitter somehow is deciding to show it. So yes, it&#8217;s a definitely very good way to identify some areas where you could contribute.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. Of course there is a label on GitHub, so we can also share the link to the label. There&#8217;s also a good first review label, if you want to review some code, that you can do that too. You could learn a lot by reviewing somebody else&#8217;s code. And have a discussion with the developer around it. Yeah. All right. So this is the end of our show today. Let me wish you or us wish you wonderful holidays when you celebrate that and a wonderful new year. Prosperity and health to everyone. Yeah.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski:</em> Yeah. I also wanted to wish everyone happy new year and happy release in January and all the best, by using a full site editing experience in 2022 on your WordPress websites.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yes. Yeah. That&#8217;s the big feature for 2022. Yes. So as always, the show notes will be published on <a href="https://gutenbergtimes.com/podcast/">guttenbergtimes.com/podcast</a>. This is the 57th episode. And if you have question suggestions, or news you want us to include, send them to <a href="mailto:changelog@guttenbergtimes.com">changelog@guttenbergtimes.com</a> that&#8217;s <a href="mailto:changelog@guttenbergtimes.com">changelog@guttenbergtimes.com</a>. That&#8217;s an email address. You could also reach out on Twitter, and the links to that are in the show notes. My Twitter handle is @BPH, like my initials, on Twitter. And what&#8217;s your handle?</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: My handle is G-Z-I-O-L-O so if you miss us, because we don&#8217;t record in two weeks, you can just hang out with us on Twitter.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yes.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: Or on GitHub, or WordPress Slack.</p>



<p><em>Birgit Pauli-Haack</em>: Yeah. WordPress Slack, definitely. And my DMs are open. Feel free to contact me. I might not respond right away, but asynchronous, is it. All right. That&#8217;s it for the year 2021. I can&#8217;t believe it&#8217;s over. It&#8217;s not, yeah. It&#8217;s still three weeks, but yeah, it&#8217;s been a great experience. Well, thanks for listening and goodbye.</p>



<p><em>Grzegorz Ziolkowski</em>: Thank you everyone. Goodbye.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Sat, 11 Dec 2021 22:44:43 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:18:"Birgit Pauli-Haack";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:38;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:64:"WPTavern: 10up Releases the Publisher Media Kit WordPress Plugin";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=126899";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:173:"https://wptavern.com/10up-releases-the-publisher-media-kit-wordpress-plugin?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=10up-releases-the-publisher-media-kit-wordpress-plugin";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:3381:"<p class="has-drop-cap">Earlier today, version 1.0 of 10up&#8217;s <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/publisher-media-kit/">Publisher Media Kit</a> went live in the WordPress plugin directory. It is a preconfigured set of blocks and patterns for jump-starting a media kit page for small and medium-sized publications.</p>



<p>When I first noticed the plugin, my mind immediately jumped to press kits and branding pages for businesses. Not enough companies within the WordPress space have such pages, and it can often be hard for journalists and other writers to find information. While this plugin is geared toward publications, small businesses can still get some use out of the plugin with a few changes.</p>



<p>Given that WP Tavern just <a href="https://wptavern.com/wp-tavern-is-sporting-a-new-website-design">launched its new design yesterday</a>, this might be an opportunity for us to lead the way. The plugin does give me a few ideas on what we could do with a similar page here on the site.</p>



<p>Publisher Media Kit has been tested with Twenty Twenty-One, Newspack, and several Newspack child themes. I did run it through most of those to check for compatibility, and the plugin worked admirably. However, I primarily tested it with Twenty Twenty-Two, the upcoming default WordPress theme. Aside from a few layout alignment quirks, it worked well.</p>



<p>The plugin automatically creates a new &#8220;Media Kit&#8221; draft page on the website once it is activated. The content is a set of pre-defined sections built from eight patterns and an accompanying Tabs block.</p>



<img />Partial screenshot of Media Kit page.



<p>This allows users to quickly fill in their own content and make customizations. Once done, it is just a matter of hitting the publish button.</p>



<p>However, end-users can take things into their own hands by using the various patterns on any post or page of their site. The cover, stats, and questions/contact patterns work well as general-use patterns.</p>



<img />The plugin&#8217;s custom block patterns.



<p><em>Note: I deleted a couple of the patterns from the screenshot above. For some reason, they were rendered invalid in the patterns explorer but worked fine when inserted into the content canvas.</em></p>



<p>I would love to see a standalone version of the Tabs block included with the plugin. It is showcased in the rates and digital ad specs patterns, but it is so easy to create new tabbed content that I cannot help but want to use it with other projects.</p>



<img />Tabs block in the editor.



<p>It could become a popular tabs solution with a few design options like colors, borders, and typography. It is minimal at the moment, but its user experience would make for an ideal foundation for a single-block plugin.</p>



<p>One of my favorite things about the block system is that it makes plugins like Publisher Media Kit feasible. In the past, it was virtually impossible to ship a content-focused plugin and expect it to work with most themes, at least not without a lot of custom design work. That meant that solid solutions would often stay in-house with agencies with no ideal way of shipping them.</p>



<p>The standardization of blocks has bridged much of that gap. As the system continues evolving, especially with more design options, I expect to see similar plugins in the future.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Sat, 11 Dec 2021 01:23:57 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:14:"Justin Tadlock";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:39;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:37:"Matt: State of the Word… in person!";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:22:"https://ma.tt/?p=55181";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:50:"https://ma.tt/2021/12/state-of-the-word-in-person/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:1629:"<p>Update: Here&#8217;s the recording!</p>



<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">

</div>



<p>I&#8217;m very excited that <a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2021/11/state-of-the-word-2021/">we&#8217;ll be broadcasting the State of the Word &#8220;live from New York City&#8221; this coming Tuesday, December 14th</a>! There will be a very small &#8220;studio audience&#8221; of community members there in person. </p>



<p>Recording <a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2020/12/state-of-the-word-2020/">the solo version last year</a> was actually one of the hardest things I&#8217;ve done in a long time. It&#8217;s funny, with a live audience I can comfortably present for an hour no problem, but recording that 25 minute presentation, alone in a room staring at a camera, was an excruciating process over two days and dozens of takes. I got the advice afterward that even if you&#8217;re just staring into a camera, it can be helpful to have an &#8220;audience&#8221; of a few friends in the room.</p>



<p>Even more than that, though, I&#8217;m positively giddy to see some of my friends from the WordPress community in person for the first time in several years. Please join via streaming on the 14th, and also <a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2021/11/watch-state-of-the-word-at-a-watch-party-with-your-wordpress-friends/">there will also be at least 20 watch parties around the globe</a> if there&#8217;s one in your neighborhood. Looking forward to catching up, celebrating the community&#8217;s accomplishments over the last year, and hopefully raising a torch for our march toward freedom on the web in 2022.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Fri, 10 Dec 2021 23:08:24 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:4:"Matt";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:40;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:92:"WPTavern: More than 200 Local Newspaper Publishers Are Suing Google and Facebook for Damages";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=126851";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:229:"https://wptavern.com/more-than-200-local-newspaper-publishers-are-suing-google-and-facebook-for-damages?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=more-than-200-local-newspaper-publishers-are-suing-google-and-facebook-for-damages";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:4058:"<p>A group of 30 companies that own more than 200 local newspapers have formed a coalition against Google and Facebook in <a href="https://www.axios.com/1-local-newspapers-lawsuits-facebook-google-3c3dee3a-cce3-49ef-b0a2-7a98c2e15c91.html">a newly consolidated antitrust lawsuit</a>, alleging the tech giants have manipulated the digital ad market to the detriment of local news.</p>



<p>The Charleston Gazette-Mail, a small West Virginia newspaper, was <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/small-west-virginia-publisher-launches-antitrust-fight-with-google-and-facebook-11612453879">the first to file suit in January 2021</a>. Doug Reynolds, managing partner at the holding company that owns several West Virginia newspapers, gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal, comparing Google and Facebook to last century&#8217;s robber barons.</p>



<p>“These companies are more powerful than Standard Oil in its heyday, so no one wants to be the first to take them on,” Reynolds said. “We felt the political and legal climate have moved in our favor and are ready to go ahead.”</p>



<p>In May, the News Media Alliance successfully filed a <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.newsmediaalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/NMA-Brief-JPML-venue.pdf" target="_blank">declaration</a> to consolidate the newspapers&#8217; cases and they were consolidated by a judicial panel shortly after that in the Southern District of New York.</p>



<p>Clayton Fitzsimmons, one of the attorneys representing the plaintiffs, told Axios their objective is &#8220;to recover past damages to newspapers&#8221; and <br />to &#8220;establish a new system going forward in which newspapers aren&#8217;t just competitive again, but can thrive.&#8221;</p>



<p>The newspapers&#8217; collective suit echoes many of the same allegations of the antitrust suit filed against Google by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and nine other state attorneys general. They make a strong case for the myriad of ways that Google and Facebook have had a damaging impact on the publishing industry.</p>



<p>The <a href="https://wptavern.com/unredacted-antitrust-complaint-unsealed-google-internal-documents-show-amp-pages-brought-40-less-revenue-to-publishers">recently unredacted complaint</a> references internal Google documents which show that AMP pages brought 40% less revenue to publishers. The documents show that Google acknowledged that its fees are very high but the company can demand them because of its market power. One Google employee explained that &#8220;smaller publishers don&#8217;t have alternative revenue sources,&#8221; when commenting on the lack competing ad networks. The suit also alleges that Facebook and Google colluded to manipulate header bidding auctions, among many other anticompetitive practices.</p>



<p>Many of the small newspapers among the 200+ included in the consolidated antitrust lawsuit are using WordPress, such as the <a href="https://bcdemocrat.com/">Brown County Democrat</a>, <a href="https://www.delgazette.com/">The Delaware Gazette</a>, <a href="https://wrcitytimes.com/">Wisconsin Rapids City Times</a>, <a href="https://waupacanow.com/">Waupaca County News</a>, and the <a href="https://www.fairborndailyherald.com/">Fairborn Daily Herald</a> — to name just a few. They are doing important work, keeping their elected officials accountable and their communities informed. </p>



<p>As the slow death of the American newspaper <a href="https://wptavern.com/finding-wordpress-in-the-post-print-news-era">forced more publications to go online-only</a>, digital advertising was the only lifeline for these outlets. The effects of collusion and manipulation of the digital ad market fall heavy on the already beleaguered local news industry. </p>



<p>The consolidated cases are currently pending and could go a number of different ways. Fitzsimmons said the court could select some as bellwethers, opt to test all cases for the individual claims, or send them back to the states of origination to be tried. </p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Fri, 10 Dec 2021 22:37:01 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:41;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:64:"WordCamp Central: WordCamp Sevilla 2021 in-person! Last Tickets!";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:39:"https://central.wordcamp.org/?p=3143567";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:90:"https://central.wordcamp.org/news/2021/12/10/wordcamp-sevilla-2021-in-person-last-tickets/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:2437:"<p><span>Only 2 days left for the first in-person WordCamp after pandemia!</span></p>
<p><img class="aligncenter" src="https://sevilla.wordcamp.org/2021/files/2021/12/Screenshot_37.png" alt="" /></p>
<p><span>At WordPress Sevilla, we have put hands-on work to get back together and fill the space and distance that has left us this big parenthesis opened by the pandemic.</span></p>
<p><b>On next December 11 and 12, the WordPress Sevilla community invites you to participate in the first in-person WordCamp, an event to meet again.</b></p>
<h2><span>Requirements to attend</span></h2>
<p><b>To attend </b><span>WordCamp Sevilla 2021</span><b>, you must meet at least one of the following requirements:</b></p>
<ul>
<li><span> have </span><b>a complete vaccination schedule</b><span>,</span></li>
<li><span> have </span><b>a recent negative PCR</b><span>,</span></li>
<li><span> </span><b>or having passed the COVID-19 less than 3 months ago.</b></li>
</ul>
<h2><span>The program</span></h2>
<p><span>On this occasion, our program is designed to take a look at the community&#8217;s past, to see how this time of pandemic has affected us, and how we have adapted to this new future.</span></p>
<p><span>We will discuss in an informal way, giving the word to anyone who, from their experience, wants to contribute new ideas for the relations, meetings, and spread of WordPress and its community.</span></p>
<p><img class="aligncenter" src="https://sevilla.wordcamp.org/2021/files/2021/12/Screenshot_38.png" alt="" /></p>
<p><span>But the highlight of this first in-person event is the special Community Day that we have prepared for Sunday, December 12. The details are yet to be defined, but if I were you, </span><b>I wouldn&#8217;t miss it!</b></p>
<h2><span>Your ticket</span></h2>
<p><img class="aligncenter" src="https://sevilla.wordcamp.org/2021/files/2021/12/Screenshot_39.png" alt="" /></p>
<p><span> </span><b>For only 18 €</b><span>, you will enjoy:</span></p>
<ul>
<li><span>Breakfast, lunch, and even dinner.</span></li>
<li><span>Live an authentic after-party.</span></li>
<li><span>Great gifts.</span></li>
<li><span>And the human and professional warmth from the members of one of the best technological communities.</span></li>
</ul>
<h2><a href="https://sevilla.wordcamp.org/2021/entradas/"><b>BUY YOUR TICKET</b></a></h2>
<p><b>Welcome to the first in-person WordCamp since the beginning of this pandemic!</b></p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Fri, 10 Dec 2021 08:51:48 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:14:"Ana GavilÃ¡n";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:42;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:78:"Post Status: Post Status Excerpt (No. 36) — Help Needed: WordPress Docs Team";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"https://poststatus.com/?p=90881";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:34:"https://poststatus.com/excerpt/36/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:3991:"<h2>&#8220;The best documentation is written by people who are using it.&#8221; —Milana Cap</h2>



<p class="has-drop-cap">In this episode of Post Status Excerpt, <strong>Milana Cap</strong> tells David about the stark reality of the near-overwhelming workload facing the <strong>WordPress Documentation Team</strong>. Currently, about four sponsored volunteers and fewer than 10 volunteers in total make up the Docs team — a team that is assigned to manage documentation for software that powers over 43% of the web. If you have ever complained about outdated documentation or a lack of documentation for WordPress, listen to this episode.</p>



<p><strong>Also</strong>: Milana shared some encouraging projects and efforts — much of which is recent and associated with the upcoming <strong>WordPress 5.9</strong> release. Writers &#8220;shadowing&#8221; developers could be one of the keys to improving the quantity and quality of documentation in the future.</p>







<p class="has-background">Every week <strong><a href="https://poststatus.com/podcast/the-excerpt/">Post Status Excerpt</a></strong> will brief you on important WordPress news — in about 15 minutes or less! Learn what's new in WordPress in a flash. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/13.0.1/72x72/26a1.png" alt="⚡" class="wp-smiley" /><br /><br />You can listen to <a href="https://poststatus.com/podcast/the-excerpt/">past episodes</a> of <strong>The Excerpt</strong>, <a href="https://poststatus.com/category/post-status-podcasts/">browse all our podcasts</a>, and don’t forget to subscribe on <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/1m3xwXbe0MG5BzFVPtB0A7">Spotify</a>, Amazon Music, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS8ySkU5c2M4UA">Google Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/post-status-draft-wordpress/id976403008">iTunes</a>, <a href="https://castro.fm/podcast/c53552c6-1ee0-4fc4-9de4-08ed6bf1ee4d">Castro</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/PostStatus">YouTube</a>, <a href="http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/krogsgard/post-status-draft-wordpress-podcast">Stitcher</a>, <a href="https://player.fm/series/wordpress-post-status-podcasts">Player.fm</a>, <a href="https://pca.st/05rR">Pocket Casts</a>, <a href="https://wordpress-post-status-draft-podcast.simplecast.com/">Simplecast</a>, or by <a href="https://feeds.simplecast.com/2JE9sc8P">RSS</a>. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/13.0.1/72x72/1f3a7.png" alt="🎧" class="wp-smiley" /></p>



<h3 id="h-mentioned-in-the-show"><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/13.0.1/72x72/1f517.png" alt="🔗" class="wp-smiley" /> Mentioned in the show:</h3>



<ul><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/docs/handbook/">Docs team handbook</a> (if anyone wants to join)</li><li><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/docs/handbook/">Developer Docs (DevHub)</a></li><li><a href="http://wordpress.org/support/">End user docs</a> (also known as HelpHub in Make teams)</li><li><a href="http://twitter.com/djevaloperka">Milana Cap (Twitter)</a></li><li><a href="https://twitter.com/dimensionmedia" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">David Bisset (Twitter)</a></li><li><a href="https://twitter.com/post_status" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Post Status (Twitter)</a></li></ul>



<h3><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/13.0.1/72x72/1f64f.png" alt="🙏" class="wp-smiley" /> Sponsor: <a href="https://poststat.us/sandhills" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener sponsored nofollow">Wordfence</a></h3>



<p>Who can afford downtime, a black mark on their brand’s reputation, or the SEO impact of getting hacked? That’s why so many WordPress sites rely on the real-time protection provided by <strong>Wordfence Premium</strong>. Now, <strong>Wordfence</strong> Central offers Premium subscribers a powerful and efficient dashboard to manage security for all their sites from one central location. Try <strong>Wordfence</strong> today!</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Fri, 10 Dec 2021 07:00:10 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:12:"David Bisset";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:43;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:52:"WPTavern: WP Tavern Is Sporting a New Website Design";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=126832";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:149:"https://wptavern.com/wp-tavern-is-sporting-a-new-website-design?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=wp-tavern-is-sporting-a-new-website-design";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5761:"<p class="has-drop-cap">We are back with a brand-new edition of WP Tavern. Technically, we have a spiffy new coat of paint that I hope you all can see if viewing from your browsers. If you are reading this post via a feed reader, email, or something else, hop over to the site and check it out.</p>



<p>The Tavern received a few updates under the hood too. I will not go into those details, but some of you may have noticed that we are now hosted on <a href="https://pressable.com/">Pressable</a>, a hosting service owned by Automattic. Thus far, things seem to be going off without a hitch.</p>



<p>For posterity, the following is a screenshot of the old homepage design along with the new one:</p>




<img />



<img />
Old Tavern design vs. new design.



<p>This is as much your home as it is ours. We just write the articles, but you are the ones who spend time browsing the front end &#8212; actually using the website. Constructive feedback is always valued and taken into account.</p>



<h2 id="a-yearlong-design-project">A Yearlong Design Project</h2>



<p class="has-drop-cap">It is hard to imagine the last time WP Tavern was not running a WordPress theme that I built. Before joining the staff here in 2019, the website had almost always had a little piece of me tucked in.</p>



<p>I would have to dig back into the archives, but I know for sure it used to run a modified version of the Hybrid News theme I released in 2009 and eventually a custom child theme on top of Stargazer years later.</p>



<p>I created our last theme in the middle of the early block editor days, and the changes over the past two years have been like running a stress test against my skills as a developer and designer. For the most part, it held up well as we ran the latest version of the Gutenberg plugin in production. I had to fix a <s>ton of</s> few things here and there, but I am happy to say that the site kept chugging along.</p>



<p>Our last theme was aging, though, and we needed to freshen up the place. We had ideas dating back to late 2019 that we had not implemented, and it is always tough to squeeze in the time for a full-blown redesign when there is so much going on in the WordPress world. Our first priority is always sharing the news.</p>



<p>We were fortunate that the WordPress.com Special Projects team contacted us in November 2020 with a proposal. Their mission:</p>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-style-default"><p>We help interesting people, organizations, and projects to have an excellent experience with WordPress.</p></blockquote>



<p>It did not begin as a new site design project. The team had actually reached out about building a feature that I would like to bring back to the Tavern. That part of the project is not quite ready yet, so we will hold it as a surprise for the new year. Folks are gearing up for the holiday season, and there is no reason to rush it.</p>



<p>Our team had planned on redesigning the site ourselves. We were just waiting for Full Site Editing to launch alongside WordPress 5.7 &#8212; <em>so, that did not happen at all.</em></p>



<p>After some back-and-forth, a group call, and a leap forward to January 2021, we were looking at design tiles. Our plans had changed. And that is part of the magical process of keeping communication open. When you surround yourself with smart people who excel at their jobs, you can end walking a path far better than the one you first set foot on.</p>



<p>Let us fast forward beyond logo decisions, design mockups, and the constant FSE changes throughout 2021. It was a long journey, but we finally arrived at our destination of a new and improved version of WP Tavern.</p>



<p>From the Tavern to the WordPress.com Special Projects team: thank you for your work and professionalism throughout this entire process.</p>



<h2 id="from-the-outside-looking-in">From the Outside Looking In</h2>



<p class="has-drop-cap">Admittedly, I had reservations about the project from the beginning. I look at other developers&#8217; code almost every day, and I usually prefer to do my own thing. It is one of the reasons I never took any of the dozens upon dozens of agency job offers over the years. I would be that one employee who would want to uproot everything on Day #1. By the end of the first couple of weeks, I would be &#8220;let go,&#8221; my employee file labeled with &#8220;does not work well with others.&#8221;</p>



<p>The team provided me with committer access to our development repo and used my preferred commands for the build process. It was a welcome gesture, and I was happy to know that I could change anything I needed.</p>



<p>But, I have not once used any of the power at my disposal.</p>



<p>I was comfortable feeling like we were in a partnership. Plus, every ticket I opened in the repository was handled &#8212; <em>and I absolutely opened plenty of issues</em>.</p>



<p>Relinquishing development control was a weight off of my shoulders. I quickly learned that this was a team of professionals who knew what they were doing.</p>



<p>Sure, there were some things I would have done differently with the code, such as modernizing some of the PHP (something that was unnecessary in the context of the project). I would have probably reorganized a few folders too. At the same time, this was an opportunity for me to learn, and I absorbed as much as I could.</p>



<p>Aside from wearing my student hat, I also kept my client cap on. This was the first time I had ever gotten to play that role. There were moments where I worried whether everything would work out as I scanned an unfinished project. However, most of the time, I was able to sit back and watch in awe as the team put this whole thing together.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Thu, 09 Dec 2021 22:59:42 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:14:"Justin Tadlock";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:44;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:24:"Gary: WordPress and web3";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:25:"https://pento.net/?p=5539";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:48:"https://pento.net/2021/12/10/wordpress-and-web3/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:20381:"<p>Blockchain. Cryptocurrency. Ethereum. NFTs. DAOs. Smart Contracts. web3. It&#8217;s impossible to avoid the blockchain hype machine these days, but it&#8217;s often just as difficult to decipher what it all means.</p>



<p>On top of that, discourse around web3 is extremely polarising: everyone involved is very keen to a) pick a team, and b) get you to join their team. If you haven&#8217;t picked a team, you must be secretly with the other team.</p>



<p>Max Read made a compelling argument that the web3 debate is in fact two different debates:</p>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-style-default"><p>But, OK, what is the root disagreement, exactly? The way I read it there are two broad &#8220;is web3 bullshit?&#8221; debates, not just one, centered around the following questions:</p><p>Can the blockchain do anything that other currently existing technology <em>cannot</em> do and/or do anything <em>better or more efficiently </em>than other currently existing technology?</p><p>Will the blockchain form the architecture of the internet of the future (i.e. &#8220;web3&#8221;), and/or will blockchain-native companies and organizations become important and powerful?</p><cite><a href="https://maxread.substack.com/p/is-web3-bullshit">Max Read — Is web3 bullshit?</a></cite></blockquote>



<p>I&#8217;m inclined to agree with Max&#8217;s analysis here: there&#8217;s a technical question, and there&#8217;s a business/cultural question. It&#8217;s hard to separate the two when every day sees new headlines about <a href="https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/126367/crypto-exchange-bitmart-reportedly-hacked-for-100-million">millions of dollars being stolen or scammed</a>; or thousands of people putting millions of dollars into <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConstitutionDAO">highly optimistic ventures</a>. There are extreme positives and extreme negatives happening all the time in the web3 world.</p>



<p>With that in mind, I want to take a step back from the day-to-day excitement of cryptocurrency and web3, and look at some of the driving philosophies espoused by the movement.</p>



<h2 id="philosophies-of-web3">Philosophies of web3</h2>



<p>There are a lot of differing viewpoints on web3, every individual has a slightly different take on it. There are three broad themes that stand out, however. </p>



<h3 id="decentralised">Decentralised</h3>



<p>Blockchain-based technology is inherently distributed (with some esoteric caveats, but we can safely ignore them for now). In a world where the web centres around a handful of major services, where we&#8217;ve seen the harm that the likes of Facebook and YouTube can inflict on society, it&#8217;s not surprising that decentralisation would be a powerful theme drawing in anyone looking for an alternative.</p>



<p>Decentralisation isn&#8217;t new to the Internet, of course: it&#8217;s right there in the name. This giant set of &#8220;<strong>inter</strong>connected <strong>net</strong>works&#8221; has been decentralised from the very beginning. It&#8217;s not perfect, of course: oppressive governments can take control of the borders of their portion of the Internet, and we&#8217;ve come to rely on a handful of web services to handle the trickier parts of using the web. But fundamentally, that decentralised architecture is still there. I can still set up a web site hosted on my home computer, which anyone in the world could access.</p>



<p>I <em>don&#8217;t</em> do that, however, for the same reason that web3 isn&#8217;t immune from centralised services: Centralisation is convenient. Just as we have Facebook, or Google, or Amazon as giant centralised services on the current web, we can already see similar services appearing for web3. For payments, Coinbase has established itself as a hugely popular place exchange cryptocurrencies and traditional currencies. For NFTs, OpenSea is the service where you&#8217;ll find nearly every NFT collection. MetaMask keeps all of your crypto-based keys, tokens, and logins in a single &#8220;crypto wallet&#8221;.</p>



<blockquote><p>Centralisation is convenient.</p></blockquote>



<p>While web3 proponents give a lot of credence to the decentralised nature of cryptocurrency being a driver of popularity, I&#8217;m not so sure. At best, I&#8217;m inclined to think that decentralisation is table stakes these days: you can&#8217;t even get started as a global movement without a strong commitment to decentralisation.</p>



<p>But if decentralisation isn&#8217;t the key, what is?</p>



<h3 id="ownership">Ownership</h3>



<p>When we talk about ownership in web3, NFTs are clearly the flavour of the month, but recent research indicates that the entire NFT market is massively artificially inflated.</p>



<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Analysis of 6.1 million trades of 4.7 million NFTs shows that the top 10% of traders have traded 97% of NFTs which definitely puts meat on the bones of the hypothesis that a lot of NFT trades are wash sales intended to artificially boost prices. <a href="https://t.co/ufgmhE2iBi">https://t.co/ufgmhE2iBi</a></p>&mdash; Dare Obasanjo (@Carnage4Life) <a href="https://twitter.com/Carnage4Life/status/1465811132954800131?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 30, 2021</a></blockquote>
</div>



<p>Rather than taking pot-shots at the NFT straw man, I think it&#8217;s more interesting to look at the idea of ownership in terms of <em>attribution</em>. The more powerful element of this philosophy isn&#8217;t about who owns something, it&#8217;s who created it. NFTs do something rather novel with attribution, allowing royalty payments to the original artist every time an NFT is resold. I love this aspect: royalties shouldn&#8217;t just be for movie stars, they should be for everyone.</p>



<p>Comparing that to the current web, take the 3 paragraphs written by Max Read that I quoted above. I was certainly under no <em>technical</em> obligation to show that it was a quote, to attribute it to him, or to link to the source. In fact, it would have been easier for me to just paste his words into this post, and pretend they were my own. I didn&#8217;t, of course, because I feel an <em>ethical</em> obligation to properly attribute the quote.</p>



<p>In a world where unethical actors will automatically copy/paste your content for SEO juice (indeed, I expect this blog post to show up on a bunch of these kinds of sites); where massive corporations will consume everything they can find about you, in order to advertise more effectively to you, it&#8217;s not at all surprising that people are looking for a technical solution for taking back control of their data, and for being properly attributed for their creations.</p>



<blockquote><p>The interesting element of this philosophy isn&#8217;t about who owns something, it&#8217;s who created it.</p></blockquote>



<p>That&#8217;s not to say that existing services discourage attribution: a core function of Twitter is retweets, a core function of Tumblr is reblogging. WordPress still supports trackbacks, even if many folks turn them off these days.</p>



<p>These are all blunt instruments, though, aimed at attributing an entire piece, rather than a more targeted approach. What I&#8217;d really like is a way to easily quote and attribute a small chunk of a post: 3 paragraphs (or blocks, if you want to see where I&#8217;m heading <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/13.1.0/72x72/1f609.png" alt="😉" class="wp-smiley" />), inserted into my post, linking back to where I got them from. If someone chooses to quote some of this post, I&#8217;d love to receive a pingback just for that quote, so it can be seen in the right context.</p>



<p>The functionality provide by Twitter and Tumblr is less of a technologically-based enforcement of attribution, and more of an example of paving the cow path: by and large, people want to properly attribute others, providing the tools to do so can easily become a fundamental part of how any software is used.</p>



<p>These tools only work so long as there&#8217;s an incentive to use them, however. web3 certainly provides the tools to attribute others, but much like SEO scammers copy/pasting blog posts, the economics of the NFT bubble is clearly a huge incentive to ignore those tools and ethical obligations, to the point that existing services have had to build additional features just to detect this abuse.</p>



<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="wp-embedded-content"><a href="https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/art-theft-nfts">Digital Bandits: The New Art Thieves Selling Stolen Works As NFTs</a></blockquote>
</div>



<h3 id="monetisation">Monetisation</h3>



<p>With every major blockchain also being a cryptocurrency, monetisation is at the heart of the entire web3 movement. Every level of <a href="https://web3.foundation/about/">the web3 tech stack</a> involves a cryptocurrency-based protocol. This naturally permeates through the entire web3 ecosystem, where money becomes a major driving factor for every web3-based project.</p>



<p>And so, it&#8217;s impossible to look at web3 applications without also considering the financial aspect. When you have to pay just to participate, you have to ask whether every piece of content you create is &#8220;worth it&#8221;.</p>



<p>Again, let&#8217;s go back to the 3 paragraphs I quote above. In a theoretical web3 world, I&#8217;d publish this post on a blockchain in some form or another, and that act would also likely include noting that I&#8217;d quoted 3 blocks of text attributed to Max Read. I&#8217;d potentially pay some amount of money to Max, along with the fees that every blockchain charges in order to perform a transaction. While this process is potentially helpful to the original author at a first glance, I suspect the second and third order effects will be problematic. Having only just clicked the Publish button a few seconds earlier, I&#8217;m already some indeterminate amount of money out of pocket. Which brings me back to the question, is this post &#8220;worth it&#8221;? Will enough people tip/quote/remix/whatever me, to cover the cost of publishing? When every creative work <em>must</em> be viewed through a lens of financial impact, it fundamentally alters that creative process.</p>



<blockquote><p>When you have to pay just to participate, you have to ask whether every piece of content you create is &#8220;worth it&#8221;.</p></blockquote>



<p>Ultimately, we live in a capitalist society, and everyone deserves the opportunity to profit off their work. But by baking monetisation into the underlying infrastructure of web3, it becomes impossible to opt-out. You either have the money to participate without being concerned about the cost, <em>or</em> you&#8217;re going to need to weigh up every interaction by whether or not you can afford it.</p>



<h2 id="web3-philosophies-in-wordpress">Web3 Philosophies in WordPress</h2>



<p>After breaking it all down, we can see that it&#8217;s not all black-and-white. There are some positive parts of web3, and some negative parts. Not that different to the web of today, in fact. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/13.1.0/72x72/1f642.png" alt="🙂" class="wp-smiley" /> That&#8217;s not to say that either approach is the correct one: instead, we should be looking to learn from both, and produce something better.</p>



<h3 id="decentralised-1">Decentralised</h3>



<p>I&#8217;ve long been a proponent of leveraging the massive install base of WordPress to provide distributed services to anyone. Years ago, I spoke about an idea called &#8220;<a href="https://wordpress.tv/2016/07/02/gary-pendergast-connected-wordpress/">Connected WordPress</a>&#8221; that would do exactly that. While the idea didn&#8217;t gain a huge amount of traction at the time, the DNA of the Connected WordPress concept shares a lot of similar traits to the decentralised nature of web3.</p>



<p>I&#8217;m a big fan of decentralised technologies as a way for individuals to claw back power over their own data from the governments and massive corporations that would prefer to keep it all centralised, and I absolutely think we should be exploring ways to make the existing web more resistant to censorship.</p>



<p>At the same time, we have to acknowledge that there are certainly benefits to centralisation. As long as people have the freedom to choose how and where they participate, and centralised services are required to play nicely with self hosted sites, is there a practical difference?</p>



<p>I quite like how <a href="https://solidproject.org/">Solid</a> allows you have it both ways, whilst maintaining control over your own data.</p>



<h3 id="ownership-attribution"><s>Ownership</s> Attribution</h3>



<p>Here&#8217;s the thing about attribution: you can&#8217;t enforce it with technology alone. Snapchat have indirectly demonstrated exactly this problem: in order to not lose a message, people would screenshot or record the message on their phone. In response, Snapchat implemented a feature to notify the other party when you screenshot a message from them. To avoid this, people will now use a second phone to take a photo or video of the message. While this example isn&#8217;t specifically about attribution, it demonstrates the problem that there&#8217;s no way to technologically restrict how someone interacts with content that you&#8217;ve published, once they&#8217;ve been granted access.</p>



<p>Instead of worrying about technical restrictions, then, we should be looking at how attribution can be made easier.</p>



<p><a href="https://indieweb.org/">IndieWeb</a> is a great example of how this can be done in a totally decentralised fashion.</p>



<h3 id="monetisation-1">Monetisation</h3>



<p>I&#8217;m firmly of the opinion that monetisation of the things you create should be opt-in, rather than opt-out.</p>



<p>Modern society is currently obsessed with monetising everything, however. It comes in many different forms: hustle culture, side gigs, transforming hobbies into businesses, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme_stocks">meme stocks</a>, and cryptocurrencies: they&#8217;re all symptoms of this obsession.</p>



<p>I would argue that, rather than accepting as <em>fait accompli</em> that the next iteration of the web will be monetised to the core, we should be pushing back against this approach. Fundamentally, we should be looking to build for a post scarcity society, rather than trying to introduce scarcity where there previously was none.</p>



<p>While we work towards that future, we should certainly be easier for folks to monetise their work, but the current raft of cryptocurrencies just aren&#8217;t up to the task of operating as&#8230; currencies.</p>



<h2 id="what-should-you-do">What Should You Do?</h2>



<p>Well, that depends on what your priorities are. The conversations around web3 are taking up a lot of air right now, so it&#8217;s possible to get the impression web3 will be imminently replacing everything. It&#8217;s important to keep perspective on this, though. While there&#8217;s a lot of money in the web3 ecosystem right now, it&#8217;s dwarfed by the sheer size of the existing web.</p>



<p>If you&#8217;re excited about the hot new tech, and feeling inspired by the ideas espoused in web3 circles? Jump right in! I&#8217;m certain you&#8217;ll find something interesting to work on.</p>



<p>Always wanted to get into currency speculation, but didn&#8217;t want to deal with all those pesky &#8220;regulations&#8221; and &#8220;safeguards&#8221;? Boy howdy, are cryptocurrencies or NFTs the place for you. (Please don&#8217;t pretend that this paragraph is investment advice, it is nothing of the sort.)</p>



<p>Want to continue building stuff on the web, and you&#8217;re willing to learn new things when you need them, but are otherwise happy with your trajectory? Just keep on doing what you&#8217;re doing. Even if web3 does manage to <a href="https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3887767/understanding-gartner-s-hype-cycles">live up to the hype</a>, it&#8217;ll take a long time for it to be adopted by the mainstream. You&#8217;ll have years to adapt.</p>



<h2 id="final-thoughts">Final Thoughts</h2>



<p>There are some big promises associated with web3, many of which sound very similar to the promises that were made around web 2.0, particularly around open APIs, and global interoperability. We saw <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal">what happened when those kinds of tools go wrong</a>, and web3 doesn&#8217;t really solve those problems. It may exacerbate them in some ways, since it&#8217;s impossible to delete your data from a blockchain.</p>



<p>That said, (and I say this as a WordPress Core developer), just because a particular piece of software is not the optimal technical solution doesn&#8217;t mean it won&#8217;t become the most popular. Market forces can be a far stronger factor that technical superiority. There are many legitimate complaints about blockchain (including performance, bloat, fit for purpose, and security) that have been levelled against WordPress in the past, but WordPress certainly isn&#8217;t slowing down. I&#8217;m not even close to convinced that blockchain is the right technology to base the web on, but I&#8217;ve been doing this for too long to bet everything against it. </p>



<blockquote><p>Markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent.</p><cite>—A. Gary Shilling</cite></blockquote>



<p>As for me, well&#8230; <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/13.1.0/72x72/1f604.png" alt="😄" class="wp-smiley" /></p>



<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Web3? Pass.<br /><br />I’ll wait for Web 3.11 for Workgroups, thanks. <a href="https://t.co/bauv3rH4bh">pic.twitter.com/bauv3rH4bh</a></p>&mdash; Gary (@GaryPendergast) <a href="https://twitter.com/GaryPendergast/status/1467017336121004035?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 4, 2021</a></blockquote>
</div>



<p>I remain sceptical of web3 as it&#8217;s currently defined, but I think there&#8217;s room to change it, and to adopt the best bits into the existing web. Web 1.0 didn&#8217;t magically disappear when Web 2.0 rolled in, it adapted. Maybe we&#8217;ll look back in 10 years and say this was a time when the web fundamentally changed. Or, maybe we&#8217;ll refer to blockchain in the same breath as pets.com, and other examples from the dotcom boom of the 1990&#8217;s.</p>



<blockquote><p>The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.</p><cite>—John Gilmore</cite></blockquote>



<p>This quote was originally referring to Usenet, but it&#8217;s stayed highly relevant in the decades since. I think it applies here, too: if the artificial scarcity built into web3 behaves too much like censorship, preventing people from sharing what they want to share, the internet (or, more accurately, the billions of people who interact with the internet) will just&#8230; go around it. It won&#8217;t all be smooth sailing, but we&#8217;ll continue to experiment, evolve, and adapt as it changes.</p>



<p>Personally, I think now is a great time for us to be embracing the values and ideals of projects like <a href="https://solidproject.org/">Solid</a>, and <a href="https://indieweb.org/">IndieWeb</a>. Before web3 referred to blockchains, it was more commonly used in reference to the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web">Semantic Web</a>, which is far more in line with WordPress&#8217; ideals, whilst also matching many of the values prioritised by the new web3. As a major driver of the Open Web, WordPress can help people own their content in a sustainable way, engage with others on their own terms, and build communities that don&#8217;t depend on massive corporations or hand-wavy magical tech solutions.</p>



<p>Don&#8217;t get too caught up in the drama of whatever is the flavour of the month. I&#8217;m optimistic about the long term resilience of the internet, and I think you should be, too. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/13.1.0/72x72/1f973.png" alt="🥳" class="wp-smiley" /></p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Thu, 09 Dec 2021 21:16:29 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:4:"Gary";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:45;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:87:"WPTavern: Surge: A New Page Caching Plugin for WordPress with No Configuration Required";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=126693";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:217:"https://wptavern.com/surge-a-new-page-caching-plugin-for-wordpress-with-no-configuration-required?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=surge-a-new-page-caching-plugin-for-wordpress-with-no-configuration-required";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:3597:"<p>WordPress Core Contributor Konstantin Kovshenin has <a href="https://konstantin.blog/2021/surge-page-caching-plugin-wordpress/">released</a> a new page caching plugin called <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/surge/">Surge</a>. Searching the WordPress plugin directory, you will find hundreds of caching and cache purging plugins, but this one stands out from competitors in that it requires no configuration. The plugin starts working as soon as it&#8217;s activated, and there are no options. </p>



<p>What kind of performance improvements can you expect with Surge activated? Kovshenin&#8217;s tests indicate that WordPress site performance on cheap hosting can be significantly improved with the plugin:</p>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>Surge stores cache files on the filesystem, leveraging the Linux kernel page cache for efficient in-memory caching and invalidation. In various load tests, Surge has shown to easily handle 1000-2500 requests per second at 100 concurrent, on a cheap single-core virtual server with only 1 GB of memory. That’s over 70x faster than a stock WordPress install with a default theme and no plugins. </p></blockquote>



<p>Kovshenin built Surge because he could not find a suitable plugin to work well with <a href="https://wptavern.com/konstantin-kovshenin-launches-sail-a-cli-tool-for-deploying-to-digital-ocean">Sail</a>, the CLI tool he has been developing for deploying WordPress apps to DigitalOcean.</p>



<p>&#8220;The biggest blocker for me was the configuration, screen after screen after screen, the amount of hoops I had to jump through just to get things working,&#8221; he said. &#8220;And sure, there are on-screen guides and wizards, video tutorials, hundreds of documentation articles, but all I wanted was a page caching plugin, not a rocket (no pun intended). I had to roll my own.&#8221;</p>



<p>In the interest of simplicity, Surge doesn&#8217;t even come with a &#8220;clear cache&#8221; button. Kovshenin said the plugin will automatically invalidate cached entries on various different events, such as when content is updated. He said you can toggle the plugin off and on if for some reason you need to clear the page cache. </p>



<p>&#8220;If you have to flush the cache, it means my invalidation is not good enough for you,&#8221; Kovshenin said in response to Twitter inquiries about no button to purge the cache. &#8220;If you do find yourself flushing the cache every once in a while, do let me know why. I&#8217;m sure there are plenty of cases I haven&#8217;t considered yet.&#8221;</p>



<p>When asked if Surge works with sites that have lots of dynamic content, Kovshenin said only anonymous requests are cached right now. Surge also forces some requests, such as robots.txt and favicon.ico, to be anonymous for better cacheability. </p>



<p>&#8220;Expanding into logged-in territory is something on my list to look at, but not going to make any promises,&#8221; he said.</p>



<p>I tested Surge on a few simple blog sites and found that it works as advertised. On one site it took the GTMetrix Performance score from 91% to 99%. Please note that the plugin requires PHP 7.4+.</p>



<p><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/surge/">Surge</a> is available for free on WordPress.org. If you are already using a page caching plugin, you will need to deactivate it if you want to try Surge. Kovshenin cautioned in his announcement post that many managed WordPress hosts already have some built-in caching in place, so it may be a good idea to check with your host before adding a caching plugin.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Thu, 09 Dec 2021 02:22:30 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:46;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:112:"WPTavern: Gutenberg 12.1 Fixes Block Appender Layout Shift, Adds Template List Views, and Enhances Global Styles";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=126698";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:265:"https://wptavern.com/gutenberg-12-1-fixes-block-appender-layout-shift-adds-template-list-views-and-enhances-global-styles?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=gutenberg-12-1-fixes-block-appender-layout-shift-adds-template-list-views-and-enhances-global-styles";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:7784:"<p class="has-drop-cap">Earlier today, Gutenberg 12.1 landed in the WordPress plugin directory. The <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2021/12/08/whats-new-in-gutenberg-12-1-8-december/">latest release</a> was heavy on improvements to the user experience, including a fix for the block appender layout shift, new global styles features, and improved templates list view. Theme authors also have a new flag for enabling all appearance-related tools.</p>



<p>WordPress 5.9 was slated for launch today, but it has been <a href="https://wptavern.com/wordpress-5-9-revised-release-date-confirmed-for-january-25-2022">pushed to January 25, 2022</a>. Contributors needed more time to refine the site editor and related tools bundled alongside the release. Thus far, they are using the extra time by fixing bugs and creating an overall better user experience.</p>



<h2 id="no-more-layout-shift">No More Layout Shift</h2>



<p class="has-drop-cap">If this was the one and only change in Gutenberg 12.1, I would have been the happiest user in the world. Fortunately, there are other nice-to-have items, but my biggest pet peeve in three years of using the block editor has now been fixed.</p>



<p>The block appender (those little <code>+</code> buttons) in the content canvas are now <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/36605">shown using fixed positioning</a>. This means that when you select blocks, particularly those nested within others, the screen no longer bounces around, shifts the layout, or leaves gaps of whitespace in an otherwise-perfect section.</p>



<img />Appender button does not shift layout.



<p>I know from talking to others that this has been a pain point when building complex layouts in the past. For some, they would not use the block editor at all because it was so irritating. If you fall into this camp, it is worth giving it a try once again. It is a marked improvement in the user experience.</p>



<h2 id="global-styles-improvements">Global Styles Improvements</h2>



<p class="has-drop-cap">Users can now <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/36820">define custom gradients</a> via the color palette section in the global styles sidebar. These will be available throughout the site and are not tied to the theme.</p>



<img />Creating a custom gradient.



<p>The palette also <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/36920">shows duotone colors</a> under the same gradient section. However, there is not an option for creating custom duotone filters yet.  It is a read-only section.</p>



<p>The global styles panel also <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/36718">splits typography options</a> between text and link elements, opening the door for other HTML elements in the future.</p>



<img />Link typography section.



<p>Users probably should not change this for links. Instead, they should generally match the surrounding text. If we get text-decoration or similar options in the future, the separation might make more sense. However, altering settings like the font-size or line-height would likely be detrimental to the design.</p>



<h2 id="templates-and-template-parts-views">Templates and Template Parts Views</h2>



<p class="has-drop-cap">Gutenberg 12.1 introduces a new templates and template parts list view from the site editor. The UI for this feature has jumped around over the past few plugin versions. The list was available via the left slide-out panel in the editor for months. Then, it was removed altogether in 11.9. It reappeared between that release and 12.0.</p>



<p>The panel has now been scaled back to include three links for Site, Templates, and Template Parts. The first link brings up the site editor. The others display tables of existing templates.</p>



<img />Templates list view.



<p>Switching between the screens feels slow at the moment. However, this is the 1.0 version of the site editor that WordPress users around the world will see. It will likely change over time. &#8220;The current iteration of the design favors simplicity and usability,&#8221; wrote Riad Benguella in the announcement post. &#8220;Iterations implementing client side navigation and mosaic view might be added in the future.&#8221;</p>



<p>There does not seem to be a way to add custom templates, such as a category or author archive. Clicking on the &#8220;Add New&#8221; button presents options for a Front Page and Search template when using the Twenty Twenty-Two theme.</p>



<p>However, adding a new template part is a much more refined process. After clicking the button to create one, users are presented with an overlay and form as shown in the following screenshot:</p>



<img />Creating a custom template part.



<p>Users can give it a custom name and choose between three allowed areas: general, header, and footer. After creating a new part, users are taken to the editor.</p>



<p>When viewing the template part list again, it displays the user who created it and has an options dropdown (ellipsis button). Currently, the only action is to delete the part.</p>



<img />Template Parts list view.



<p>I would love to see top-level templates receive the same treatment as template parts when creating a new one. While there are some slight differences between them, both are templates at the end of the day. The user experience would benefit if the creation processes matched.</p>



<p>Creating custom templates outside of the default list from this screen would also help designers build themes visually from the site editor.</p>



<h2 id="empty-navigation-fallback">Empty Navigation Fallback</h2>



<p class="has-drop-cap">The latest release introduced a fallback for empty Navigation menu block. Ultimately, if no menu is found, it will <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/36724">display the Page List block</a>. Depending on how many pages a user&#8217;s site has, this can quickly get out of hand, as shown in the following screenshot of Twenty Twenty-Two:</p>



<img />Navigation block fallback with long page list.



<p>Theme developers can <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/36850">overwrite this fallback</a> via the <code>block_core_navigation_render_fallback</code> filter hook by either returning a <code>false</code> value or a set of valid child blocks for the Navigation parent. Theme authors, I invite them to make generous use of this filter hook.</p>



<h2 id="noteworthy-block-theme-items">Noteworthy Block Theme Items</h2>



<p class="has-drop-cap">For block theme developers, the standard <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/36647">template-related folders have been renamed</a>. The old names will continue working, but authors should update the following in their themes:</p>



<ul><li><code>/block-templates</code> renamed to <code>/templates</code></li><li><code>/block-template-parts</code> renamed to <code>/parts</code></li></ul>



<p>This change cleans up the top-level theme directory, but it also creates a <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/36548">path toward more standardization</a> in the future. There is already an open ticket for <code>/patterns</code>, and a <code>/styles</code> folder is possible.</p>



<p>Gutenberg 12.1 also <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/36646">introduces an <code>appearanceTools</code> flag</a> for <code>theme.json</code>, allowing theme authors to enable support for all current and future border, color, spacing, and typography options. I covered this in more detail in the <a href="https://wptavern.com/gutenberg-12-0-focuses-on-cleanup-and-minor-enhancements">Gutenberg 12.0 post</a>, which had erroneously marked the feature as bundled with the last release.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Thu, 09 Dec 2021 01:03:45 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:14:"Justin Tadlock";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:47;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:74:"WPTavern: Ask the Bartender: Is There a Starter for Building Block Themes?";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=126654";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:189:"https://wptavern.com/ask-the-bartender-is-there-a-starter-for-building-block-themes?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ask-the-bartender-is-there-a-starter-for-building-block-themes";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:6328:"<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>I read some posts from &#8220;Ask the Bartender,&#8221; and I appreciate it a lot! Thanks. I have a question now. :)</p>

<p>I want to refine my WordPress theme development process, which is:</p>

<ol>
<li>To make a unique-creative design with Adobe XD or Figma.</li>
<li>To convert it to static HTML using VS Code with Bootstrap.</li>
<li>In WordPress, create custom post types with PODS.</li>
<li>To convert the static HTML in WP templates with Timber.</li>
</ol>

<p>Based on my experience, this process is the best for me, but I want to integrate my themes better with WP-Blocks.</p>

<p>So, my question is: is there some starter-theme ready to use with blocks as the main theme and later extend it with a child theme with my custom theme?</p>

<cite>Federico</cite>
</blockquote>



<p class="has-drop-cap">This question depends on one of two things: Do you want to build classic themes with block support or full-blown block themes? How you approach projects going forward will depend on the answer to that. It was unclear which direction you prefer from your question, so I will tackle both.</p>



<p>It also seems like you are more interested in child theming. For clarity, I consider &#8220;starter&#8221; themes a starting point for building standalone or custom parent themes. My guess is that you want something closer to a blank canvas parent theme that does not have an opinionated set of default styles.</p>



<p>As for your tools, I have almost zero experience with any of them. I suspect you can maintain a similar process by sticking to classic themes with block support. However, with block themes, you will likely want to switch over to visually designing in the upcoming site editor and exporting the templates. It would cut out a lot of the steps you usually take.</p>



<h2 id="classic-with-block-support">Classic With Block Support</h2>



<p class="has-drop-cap">I tend to hype WordPress theming with blocks, but let us be realistic. Most theme authors will not take that step forward when WordPress 5.9 rolls around. And, there is no reason for everyone to dive face-first into something that is not 100% on par with what you can build going the traditional route. So, classic themes are the safest bet for a while.</p>



<p>Starter themes or frameworks are a dime a dozen in the classic theming world. My advice is to continue using what suits you best. Adding block support is mostly a matter of some style adjustments and possibly a <code>theme.json</code> file.</p>



<p>If you want to ease yourself into integrating with blocks, start learning the <a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/block-editor/how-to-guides/themes/theme-json/">global styles and settings system</a> (i.e., <code>theme.json</code>). It works with any type of theme, so you do not have to transition entirely over to block theming if you are not ready. This also allows you to continue using whatever setup you are accustomed to with one additional file. It has also been a part of WordPress since 5.8, so you can use it now without relying on the Gutenberg plugin or waiting for 5.9 to launch.</p>



<img />GoDaddy&#8217;s Go theme.



<p>If you really need a starting point or parent theme in the classic + blocks space, I recommend <a href="https://wordpress.org/themes/go/">Go by GoDaddy</a>. The block-first project gets routine updates, supports CoBlocks and WooCommerce, and has a large enough user base to keep the ecosystem around it going.</p>



<h2 id="building-block-themes">Building Block Themes</h2>



<p class="has-drop-cap">If you want to move forward and put yourself in a solid position for WordPress&#8217;s future, block theming is the way to go. Sooner or later, almost every theme author will need to build on top of it. In this context, it also makes it easy to answer your question. And, I have two options for you.</p>



<p>The go-to choice for many theme authors is to learn and build from the latest default WordPress theme. In this case, it is <a href="https://wptavern.com/first-look-at-wordpress-upcoming-twenty-twenty-two-default-theme-the-most-flexible-default-theme-ever-created-for-wordpress">Twenty Twenty-Two</a>. It was supposed to be ready by December 8, along with WordPress 5.9. However, the official release date is now <a href="https://wptavern.com/wordpress-5-9-revised-release-date-confirmed-for-january-25-2022">January 25, 2022</a>.</p>



<img />Twenty Twenty-Two screenshots.



<p>While it has not officially launched yet, it is a solid starting point if you want to release a child theme in the next couple of months on top of the latest default.</p>



<p>The goal is for Twenty Twenty-Two to ship with <a href="https://wptavern.com/skins-are-back-in-style-proposal-for-themes-to-bundle-user-selectable-design-variations">alternate color palettes and fonts</a>. However, this feature is not ready yet. In the meantime, these custom designs are <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/theme-experiments/pull/292">available as child themes</a> that you can tinker around with. They are just as good of a starting point as any.</p>



<p>However, you may be looking for something a bit more mature &#8212; as mature as anything can be for something yet to officially launch. Automattic&#8217;s <a href="https://wordpress.org/themes/blockbase/">Blockbase parent theme</a> is the easy choice.</p>



<img />Custom Blockbase child theme.



<p>Blockbase has a low-key design that makes it easy to overwrite via child themes. It was literally built for this purpose. The Automattic Theme Team rolled out the <a href="https://wptavern.com/videomaker-block-theme-targets-film-directors-and-video-creators">Videomaker child theme</a> for it yesterday. That makes six altogether, which are available via the company&#8217;s <a href="https://wordpress.org/themes/author/automattic/">WordPress.org profile</a>. Not only is it a good starting point, but it has plenty of examples to learn from.</p>



<p>Plus, you do not need to dirty your hands with code if you do not want to. By installing and activating the accompanying <a href="https://wptavern.com/automattic-theme-team-releases-a-plugin-to-build-blockbase-child-themes">Create Blockbase Theme plugin</a>, you can build child themes directly from the site editor and export them.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Wed, 08 Dec 2021 00:42:21 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:14:"Justin Tadlock";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:48;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:154:"WPTavern: Vizio Responds to Software Freedom Conservancy’s GPL Compliance Lawsuit: Will Not Release Source Code, Files to Move Case to US Federal Court";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:30:"https://wptavern.com/?p=126529";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:341:"https://wptavern.com/vizio-responds-to-software-freedom-conservancys-gpl-compliance-lawsuit-will-not-release-source-code-files-to-move-case-to-us-federal-court?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=vizio-responds-to-software-freedom-conservancys-gpl-compliance-lawsuit-will-not-release-source-code-files-to-move-case-to-us-federal-court";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:3735:"<p>In October 2021, the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) <a href="https://wptavern.com/software-freedom-conservancy-takes-on-vizio-in-lawsuit-alleging-gpl-violations">initiated a lawsuit against Vizio</a>, an American TV manufacturer, for shipping products with copyleft licenses but refusing to provide the source code after multiple attempts at contact since 2018.</p>



<p>The lawsuit is historic in its approach, because it focuses on consumer rights conferred by copyleft licenses and SFC is filing as a third-party beneficiary.</p>



<p>Vizio has responded by <a href="https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cacd.837808/gov.uscourts.cacd.837808.1.0.pdf">filing a request to remove the case from the California State Court</a> and move it into US federal court. The company contends that the computer programs and source code at issue in VIZIO’s SmartCast operating system &#8220;fall within the &#8216;subject matter of copyright.'&#8221; </p>



<p>Vizio&#8217;s legal representation cited several past cases involving open source licenses that were litigated within the scope of federal copyright law:</p>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>&#8220;Although plaintiff asserts claims against VIZIO under the guise of a breach of contract claim, that claim is based solely on rights that are qualitatively equivalent to those protected by federal copyright law. It is well established that exceeding the scope of a license by violating its &#8216;conditions&#8217; gives rise to a claim for copyright infringement.&#8221;</p></blockquote>



<p>The Software Freedom Conservancy published an <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/nov/30/vizio-update-0/">update on the lawsuit</a>, speculating on Vizio&#8217;s intent based on its initial response:</p>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>Vizio&nbsp;<a href="https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cacd.837808/gov.uscourts.cacd.837808.1.0.pdf">filed a request to “remove” the case from California State Court (into US federal court)</a>, which indicates Vizio&#8217;s belief that consumers have no third-party beneficiary rights under&nbsp;<a href="https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/glossary.html#copyleft">copyleft</a>. In other words, Vizio’s answer to this complaint is&nbsp;<em>not</em>&nbsp;to comply with the copyleft licenses, but instead imply that Software Freedom Conservancy — and all other purchasers of the devices who might want to assert their right under GPL and LGPL to complete, corresponding source — have no right to even&nbsp;<strong>ask</strong>&nbsp;for that source code.</p><p>That’s right: Vizio’s filing implies that only copyright holders, and&nbsp;<strong>no one else</strong>, have a right to ask for source code under the&nbsp;GPL&nbsp;and&nbsp;LGPL.</p></blockquote>



<p>SFC Executive Director Karen Sandler and Policy Fellow Bradley M. Kuhn, who co-penned the update, said they expected Vizio held this position since the company ignored their requests during discussions in the past years. They characterized Vizio&#8217;s recent filing as &#8220;a disturbing step further.&#8221;</p>



<p>&#8220;Vizio’s strategy is to deny consumers their rights under copyleft licenses, and we intend to fight back,&#8221; SFC representatives said.</p>



<p>If you want to follow the progress on the case, <a href="https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/61578720/software-freedom-conservancy-inc-v-vizio-inc/">the filings are public</a>. SFC has paid the Pacer fees and used <a href="https://free.law/recap">the Recap</a> browser plugin to make all the documents in the case freely available via <a href="https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/">the Recap project archives</a>.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Tue, 07 Dec 2021 22:53:31 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:49;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:40:"WordPress.org blog: WordPress 5.9 Beta 2";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:35:"https://wordpress.org/news/?p=11794";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:56:"https://wordpress.org/news/2021/12/wordpress-5-9-beta-2/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:6101:"<p>WordPress 5.9 Beta 2 is now available for testing!</p>



<p><strong>This software version is still under development.</strong> Please do not run this software on a production site. Instead, install it on a test site, where you can try out the newest features to get a feel for how they will work on your site.</p>



<p>You can test the WordPress 5.9 Beta 2 in three ways:</p>



<p><strong>Option 1:</strong> Install and activate the <strong><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-beta-tester/">WordPress Beta Tester</a> </strong>plugin (select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream).</p>



<p><strong>Option 2:</strong> Direct download the beta version here (<a href="https://wordpress.org/wordpress-5.9-beta2.zip"><strong>zip</strong></a>).</p>



<p><strong>Option 3:</strong> When using WP-CLI to upgrade from Beta 1 to Beta 2 on a case-insensitive filesystem, please use the following command sequence:<br /></p>



<p>Command One: </p>



<pre class="wp-block-code"><code>wp core update --version=5.9-beta1 </code></pre>



<p>Command Two: </p>



<pre class="wp-block-code"><code> wp core update --version=5.9-beta2 --force </code></pre>



<p>The current target for the final release of 5.9 is January 25, 2022, which is just seven weeks away. Your help testing this version is a vital part of making this release as good as it can be.</p>



<h2 id="some-highlights"><strong>Some Highlights</strong></h2>



<p>Since<a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2021/06/wordpress-5-8-beta-1/"> </a><a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2021/11/wordpress-5-9-beta-1/">Beta 1</a>, <a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/query?status=closed&changetime=11%2F30%2F2021..12%2F07%2F2021&milestone=5.9&group=component&max=500&col=id&col=summary&col=owner&col=type&col=priority&col=component&col=version&order=priority">24</a> bugs have been fixed. Here are a few of the changes you will find in Beta 2:</p>



<ul><li>Block Editor: Remove navigation areas (<a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/54506">#54506</a>)</li><li>Block Editor: Navigation block view JavaScript error (<a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/54456">#54456</a>)</li><li>Block Editor: Block template theme error related to child themes (<a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/54515">#54515</a>)</li><li>General: Fixing existing links to Customizer when the Site Editor is enabled (<a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/54460">#54460</a>)</li><li>Media: Media library showing only the selected image (<a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/53765">#53765</a>)</li><li>Media: Fatal error uploading media on PHP8 (<a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/54385">#54385</a>)</li><li>REST API: Add Global Styles REST API endpoints from Gutenberg into Core (<a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/54336">#54336</a>)</li></ul>



<p>Also, note that some users testing 5.9 Beta 1 faced some fatal errors upon upgrade. In turn, these errors revealed the need for some extra work on the filesystem and upgrader.&nbsp;Those fatal errors are no longer a problem, and the enhancements will be part of version 6.0.</p>



<h2 id="how-you-can-help"><strong>How You Can Help</strong></h2>



<p><strong>Do some testing!</strong></p>



<p><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/testing/beta-testing/">Testing for bugs</a> is vital for polishing the release in the beta stage and a great way to contribute.&nbsp;</p>



<p>If you think you’ve found a bug, please post to the <a href="https://wordpress.org/support/forum/alphabeta/">Alpha/Beta</a> area in the support forums. If you’re comfortable writing a reproducible <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/reports/">bug report</a>, file one on <a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/newticket">WordPress Trac</a>. That’s also where you can find a list of <a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/tickets/major">known bugs</a>.</p>



<h2 id="where-can-i-get-more-information">Where can I get more information?</h2>



<p>In the coming weeks, follow the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/">Make WordPress Core blog</a> for <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/tag/5-9+dev-notes/">5.9-related developer notes</a> that cover these items in detail.</p>



<p>So far, contributors have fixed <a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/query?status=closed&group=component&milestone=5.9&resolution=fixed">305 tickets in WordPress 5.9</a>, including <a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/query?status=closed&status=reopened&changetime=..12%2F07%2F2021&type=enhancement&type=feature+request&milestone=5.9&group=component&col=id&col=summary&col=type&col=status&col=milestone&col=changetime&col=owner&col=priority&col=keywords&order=changetime">110 new features and enhancements</a>. More bug fixes are on the way with your help through testing.</p>



<p><em>Props to</em><a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/chanthaboune/"><em> </em></a><em><a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/psykro/" class="mention"><span class="mentions-prefix">@</span>psykro</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/estelaris/" class="mention"><span class="mentions-prefix">@</span>estelaris</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/hellofromtonya/" class="mention"><span class="mentions-prefix">@</span>hellofromtonya</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/marybaum/" class="mention"><span class="mentions-prefix">@</span>marybaum</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/webcommsat/" class="mention"><span class="mentions-prefix">@</span>webcommsat</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/cbringmann/" class="mention"><span class="mentions-prefix">@</span>cbringmann</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/davidb/" class="mention"><span class="mentions-prefix">@</span>davidb</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/audrasjb/" class="mention"><span class="mentions-prefix">@</span>audrasjb</a>, and </em><a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/pbiron/" class="mention"><span class="mentions-prefix">@</span>pbiron</a><em> for contributions to this post.</em></p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Tue, 07 Dec 2021 22:02:19 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:18:"Jonathan Bossenger";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}s:4:"type";i:128;s:7:"headers";O:42:"Requests_Utility_CaseInsensitiveDictionary":1:{s:7:"*data";a:8:{s:6:"server";s:5:"nginx";s:4:"date";s:29:"Thu, 30 Dec 2021 08:35:05 GMT";s:12:"content-type";s:8:"text/xml";s:4:"vary";s:15:"Accept-Encoding";s:13:"last-modified";s:29:"Thu, 30 Dec 2021 08:15:06 GMT";s:15:"x-frame-options";s:10:"SAMEORIGIN";s:4:"x-nc";s:9:"HIT ord 1";s:16:"content-encoding";s:2:"br";}}s:5:"build";s:14:"20201016172007";}