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In this episode, John James Jacoby and I are joined by Jill Binder, Founder, and Chief Consultant and Trainer at Diverse Speakers In Tech. We discussed how and why the Diverse Speaker Training group was created, how the training encourages underrepresented people to speak at WordCamps, and how the recent 50% sponsorship funds from Automattic will be used.

We also learned that local communities that have participated in the training at the meetup level have seen a sharp increase in the number of diverse speaker applications submitted to WordCamps. Binder is hoping to be sponsored 100% so she can work on the project full-time. If you’re interested in sponsoring her work, please visit her contact page and get in touch.

Stories Discussed:

Announcing Pantheon Localdev Early Access

WooCommerce 3.6.5 security release

Jetpack 7.5

Discuss This Tweet by John O’ Nolan

Transcript:

EPISODE 359 Transcript

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Next Episode: Wednesday, July 10 3:00 P.M. Eastern

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Website owners have been excluding web crawlers using the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) on robots.txt files for 25 years. More than 500 million websites use robots.txt files to talk to bots, according to Google’s data. Up until now, there has never been an official Internet standard, no documented specification for writing the rules correctly according to the protocol. Over the years, developers shared their various interpretations of the protocol, but this created many different ambiguous methods for controlling crawlers.

Google is working together with Martijn Koster, the original author of the protocol, webmasters, and other search engines to create a proposal to submit to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for standardizing the REP:

The proposed REP draft reflects over 20 years of real world experience of relying on robots.txt rules, used both by Googlebot and other major crawlers, as well as about half a billion websites that rely on REP. These fine grained controls give the publisher the power to decide what they’d like to be crawled on their site and potentially shown to interested users. It doesn’t change the rules created in 1994, but rather defines essentially all undefined scenarios for robots.txt parsing and matching, and extends it for the modern web.

The proposed specification includes several major items that webmasters and developers will want to review. It extends the use of robots.txt to any URI-based transfer protocol (FTP, CoAP, et al), instead of limiting it to HTTP. It also implements a new maximum caching time of 24 hours and lets website owners update robots.txt whenever they choose, without having crawlers overload their sites with requests. If a previously accessible robots.txt file becomes inaccessible for whatever reason, crawlers will respect the known disallowed pages that were previously identified for “a reasonably long period of time.”

Google has also open sourced the C++ library it uses for parsing and matching rules in robots.txt files, along with a testing tool for testing the rules. Developers can use this parser to create parsers that use the proposed REP requirements. It has been updated to ensure that Googlebot only crawls what it’s allowed to and is now available on GitHub.

“This library has been around for 20 years and it contains pieces of code that were written in the 90’s,” Google’s Search Open Sourcing team said in the announcement. “Since then, the library evolved; we learned a lot about how webmasters write robots.txt files and corner cases that we had to cover for, and added what we learned over the years also to the internet draft when it made sense.”

Lizzi Harvey, who maintains Google’s Search developer docs, updated the robots.txt spec to match the REP draft. Check out the full list of changes if you want to compare your robots.txt file to the proposed spec. If the proposal for standardizing the REP is successfully adopted by the IETF, the days of googling and wading through undocumented robots.txt rules will soon be over.

Font Awesome 5.9 was released last month with 421 new and updated icons. The popular icon font library has grown to include more than 5,000 vector icons and is used on 34% of the top million websites. It’s also one of the top open source projects on GitHub and a popular choice for WordPress theme and plugin developers using icons in their work.

Just a month after 5.8 brought in another batch of top requested brand icons, including Airbnb, Salesforce, and Evernote, the latest release adds more Editor icons to help those who are building text and WYSIWYG editor UIs.

Another notable update in 5.9 is the introduction of icon duos, where Font Awesome has taken some icons and put them together with other icons. For example, the update includes combinations like car-bus and burger-soda.

Font Awesome also recently announced that it will soon be introducing duotone colors to the library, which users will be able to customize.

We thought it might be fun to add a little color to our icons. So we did. #duotone #comingsoon pic.twitter.com/9nOyw8pgCK

— Font Awesome (@fontawesome) June 24, 2019

Documentation on the using the duotones is not yet available, but Font Awesome confirmed that users will be able to change the tones of each icon within their own CSS to any combination. The feature will work out-of-the-box by inheriting the current color but users will be able to change the master color or each layer individually. The icons can then be further customized by targeting each layer in CSS. Follow Font Awesome on Twitter for all the latest news on icon updates and the upcoming duotone color feature release.

I was always told I had to go to college. I was “gifted” so learning came easy and I enjoyed it.  From ages 6 to 18, I went to competitive accelerated schools designed to churn out college students. It was a narrow path I’d been set on, without encouragement to explore beyond.

Majoring in theater was a no-brainer. It was the only thing I’d done my whole life, so I figured I wouldn’t get bored. My mom was a stage manager so it has always been easy to bring me to rehearsals with her when working a show. I ended up in close to 20 different productions between 5 and 13. Plus, Florida State University had a great theatre program and in-state tuition was cheap. So I went.

But I wasn’t there because I wanted to be. I’d gone simply because I felt I had to go to college, regardless of what I did when I got there. I liked theater a lot, but I didn’t love it the way my classmates did. Self-doubt crept in. Depression overcame me. Anxiety and self-hatred took root. I stopped going to class. I isolated myself from my friends who – going through their own stuff –  were too busy to notice.

At 19, I dropped out.

Straying from the path

With me, I took thousands in debt, a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and a bruised ego. I wandered, directionless for the first time in my life.

I felt like a failure. I did not know who or what I was anymore, I had no community and I belonged nowhere. I was crippled by my concurrent depression and lack of a diploma. What was my path now?

My mother spent her whole life working in the arts and that made her happy. I wanted the same thing. But we were always pinching pennies. I didn’t want that for myself, and I didn’t want my kids to grow up with that burden. So I thought to myself, “What can I do that’s creative, won’t be boring, and can earn me an income?”

I don’t remember if there was a lightbulb moment where I realized web design checked all my boxes. But that was there I landed.

I started getting my toes wet with HTML and CSS, but coding didn’t come easily to me. I didn’t have a computer, so I would write out lines of code by hand in order to memorize syntax. It didn’t click and just swam in front of my eyes. It was difficult, so I gave up.

For a year and a half, I lived in a few different cities, from Ft Lauderdale all the way to Los Angeles, working some retail and food service jobs. I learned about customer service, the balance between maintenance and growth, and found myself more than a little bit fascinated by marketing.  I began to learn how to juggle the depression and anxiety that lived in my head.

No matter where I went, web design was sitting in the back of my brain. I was shut down when I tried to suggest changes to the booking system of a salon I worked at. I found myself sketching redesigns of the website of the bar where I picked up shifts. I started learning again after moving back to Florida. This time, I found online resources like Udemy and CodeSchool and it all began to click.

Finding a new path

While I still didn’t love code itself, I loved the idea of building something from nothing. It all hearkened back to theater: rallying the knowledge and experience of multiple people, laying out a plan, inventing some creative solutions along the way, iteration after iteration until it functions and yields a result, then presenting it as a living and breathing product. I had learned about story-telling via script analysis classes in college as well as spacing and color psychology. I had always been academic, so I found ease and comfort in things like databases and content writing. My intellectual and creative side were merging, dancing together in one elegant performance.

In 2015, I applied for a web design internship at a small agency. It was here where WordPress and I first met. I was amazed that I could easily build websites with limited coding knowledge. I attended my first WordCamp in Miami, where I watched people like Morten Hendricksen and Michelle Schlup live what I wished I could be doing.

I was promoted to a full employee in a poisonous environment. I had to work long hours and was accused of not being a team player if I didn’t. I was guilt-tripped with gifts and compliments. I was asked to do tasks I hadn’t been trained in and was berated when I struggled. I left one day after about a year, in tears. The despair, loneliness and frustration were unassailable.  I had failed, yet again, to move forward on the path I felt I belonged on.

Setting my own path

I had no savings and no car, so I was left with a choice: apply to work at the Wendy’s that was walking distance up the street, or find a way to make money out of thin air. Taking inventory of my skills:

1. I knew WordPress
2. I knew how not to run a business

So I started building small sites for friends and family. I scrambled to learn how to invoice properly, how to handle contracts, how to get taxes paid. I googled a lot and failed often. But it was rewarding and creative, so I stuck to it.

In 2017, I felt confident enough to apply to speak at WordCamp Miami. It had been 2 years since I had attended the first and I was floored when I was accepted.

In the three years that I ran my business, I worked with clients from all over the world. I used WordPress daily to build and break, support and scale websites for other business owners like me. I wore every hat I could balance: CEO, CFO, designer, developer, marketer, and support staff in one.

While I appeared “successful” (whatever that means) I was paddling like crazy beneath the surface and was constantly stretched to my limit. I achieved decent work-life boundaries and found satisfaction in the work, but being depressed while running a business is easier said than done.

In early 2019, as my bank account began to dry up, I began to seriously consider throwing in the towel.

A fork in the path

I spoke at WordCamp Miami that year. The entire camp buoyed my spirits; this time, there were faces and topics I recognized. I went with my friend, Louise Treadwell, who made the entire experience less frightening.

And the universe was looking out for me. The very first person I met that day was Adam Warner.

He saw my talk and I suppose he saw something in me that he liked. By the end of the conference, my head was swimming with the opportunity he had presented to me: to travel as a GoDaddy Pro Speaker Ambassador.

I felt that electric sensation again of my two halves – academic and creative – merging. It was the first time the community had reached out and taken a firm, confident grasp of my hand. And I was in exactly the right spot to accept it.

The idea of attending more WordCamps was thrilling. I vowed to myself that I would up my Twitter game. After all, all my WordCamp heroes were active on Twitter and I was desperate to be where the action was.

I grabbed as many opportunities as I could to remain visible. I wrote blog posts and made YouTube videos to prove what I knew, to myself as much as others. I wanted to earn my place at the table by giving back into the community that had plucked me out of my despair.

Time to merge

I’d done a podcast episode with Michelle Ames and I noticed she worked for the plugin, GiveWP. Out of curiosity, I wandered over to their careers page and saw an opening for a support tech. I had the job within 3 days.

I’ve done a lot of things out of fear that many people find brave. I was told I was brave for majoring in theater, but I’d done it because I didn’t want to fail at something unfamiliar. I was told I was brave for moving to Los Angeles after I dropped out, but I was afraid to be stagnant. I was told I was brave to start my own business, but I was afraid to work for someone else.

I do feel fear. Fear that I don’t know enough, that I’m too young or inexperienced, that I’ll let down the people who have cheered me on, that I’ll end up vulnerable the way I was in my last job. That I’ll get hurt. That being a black, queer, woman in the tech space will be too challenging.

I’m comforted by the knowledge that most WordPress people don’t care what gender/color/sexuality you are… as long as you keep your plugins updated. Open-source means you’re not here to out-do the next person, but to contribute toward a common goal. I can dive into support at Give with WordPress as my base, my constant. I can finally acknowledge that I am worth being part of a team. It means all the difference in the world.

Who invented this path nonsense anyway?

I don’t have to be on a path anymore. I can let myself remain open to possibilities and say “yes” more. I don’t have to decide what I’m going to be, I can just become it, because I can trust myself and the foundation that WordPress has given me. WordPress, with it’s limitless contributors, versions, and possibilities, reminds us that we should be excited by change, not afraid.

I believe that giving up what I worked for 3 years to build is the bravest thing I’ve done so far. At first, I was furious at myself that I couldn’t make my own business as sustainable as I’d wanted. Moving to Give felt like failing. But Louise called it “failing up” which I think is pretty apt. It was a step forward into something I could grow into and really succeed at, rather than sticking with the familiar like I had always done.

I often remind myself of a quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer which, ironically, I watched for the first time while in some the deepest throes of my depression: “I’m cookie dough. I’m not done baking. I’m not finished becoming who ever the hell it is I’m gonna turn out to be.” 

The post I Am Cookie Dough appeared first on HeroPress.

I have a hard time walking a mile or two let alone 718km, but that’s what Marcel Bootsman did on his journey to WordCamp EU to generate funds for DonateWC.

In this interview, Bootsman explains how he prepared for the journey, what he experienced during his trip, and why he chose DonateWC as the charity to raise funds for.

One of the things that I was curious about was what Bootsman thought about during those long stretches where he had plenty of time to think to himself.

The thing that I noticed is that my thinking had changed during the month. In the beginning, I was thinking about my work, my company, and my family a lot. After about a week my family met me and it was very emotional.

After that week I found a how do you call it, peace or something like a Zen mode. Nothing was on my mind for large parts of the route. While I was walking, I was just looking around at the scenery and checking out the animals that I saw.

Sometimes I got an idea about my work and what I wanted to do differently. I’d write it down on my phone and the trip was mostly calm and relaxing.

Marcel Bootsman

The interview is 31 minutes long and is available in video and mp3 formats. There’s also a transcript available below. In the end, Bootsman was able to raise €8590 for DonateWC and inspire a lot of people. To learn more about his journey, check out his Walk to WordCamp EU summary.

Watch and Listen:

Listen:

Interview with Marcel Bootsman

Transcript:

msgWP piqued public interest this week with a demo of its new microblogging product that allows users to publish text messages and photos to WordPress sites using Telegram. Although the plugin hasn’t officially launched yet, a live demo on the website allows people to anonymously publish a post to msgWP’s demo blog from their own Telegram accounts by launching a Telegram bot.

The plugin’s creator, Róbert Mészáros, said he plans to launch it in late summer or early fall, after collecting more feedback from beta testers and polishing the website. Mészáros is a developer who mainly works on a contract or freelance basis. Although msgWP isn’t is first WordPress plugin, it is the first one he has created as a product to promote.

“It’s highly unlikely that I’ll make msgWP available on the WordPress.org Plugin Directory, but it’s going to be GPL licensed,” Mészáros said.

“Support, automatic updates, and restricted content will be available only for those who buy a plan. Since I’m using msgWP myself and I plan to donate a part of profit back to the community, to the WordPress Foundation.”

Most of the plugins available that integrate Telegram with WordPress either broadcast to a channel or display the feed of a public channel in a widget. This is the first plugin that sends Telegram user-generated content into WordPress.

I tested the demo last night and successfully posted a text to the demo blog. Images do not yet appear to be working on the demo or may be disabled for now. Mészáros said the demo implementation unhooks some of the checks that are enabled by default on the plugin.

When the msgWP plugin is used on a site, administrators need to allow a Telegram account to create posts explicitly. This setting is available in the admin screen where you can enter the username of a Telegram account. Adding multiple usernames to the whitelist opens up some interesting possibilities for group blogging.

“Since every Telegram message contains information about the Telegram account, we can filter out those who are not whitelisted,” Mészáros said.

“Also, the fact that users are explicitly whitelisted opens up the way to have user level settings. For example, you can set a specific category for a Telegram account or only give them the option to create draft posts.

“If you whitelist yourself you have a microblog; if you whitelist 20 users with various settings, you can cover a live event with Telegram and msgWP.”

The msgWP plugin also checks the IP of the request. If it falls outside a particular IP range, msgWP can recognize that it’s not from Telegram and block it.

Mészáros’ inspiration for the plugin came from his principles regarding centralized social media. While he maintains a private blog where his friends follow him, Mészáros’ doesn’t use platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

“I feel strongly about blogging and microblogging,” he said. “It’s not all rainbows – if you have one, you know that it takes a certain kind of commitment and effort.”

Mészáros said he was also inspired “by an almost forgotten history of WordPress,” wherein many took advantage of its support for XML-RPC to blog from desktop blog editors, like MarsEdit, BlogJet, and BlogDesk, without ever logging into the admin. He contends that third-party tools like this demonstrate that WordPress is more than the editor.

Since msgWP is already integrated into the messaging workflow for Telegram users, it may inspire some to blog more often. Posting is faster than using Twitter, Facebook, or even the WordPress mobile apps, albeit with far fewer features.

“Paradoxically we want to encourage people to use WordPress by not reminding them that they run their sites/microblogs on WordPress,” Mészáros said. “A messaging app has some informality to it, and that will help a lot. All you need is to write and press send. After all, you are sending texts, and not publishing structured articles on your blog after too many glasses of wine. For this reason, we don’t see msgWP with Telegram as a replacement for the WP Mobile Apps.”

Despite the convenience promised through various apps, the concept of microblogging on one’s own website does not seem to have taken off yet. Services like micro.blog, which integrate with existing WordPress blogs, are still used by a fervent few and have not yet gained mainstream adoption. Even the “Press This” feature that was included in WordPress core prior to 2017, was retired in favor of a canonical plugin, with discontinued support for the bookmarklet feature. It hasn’t been updated for two years and is only installed on approximately 10,000 sites.

Postcard, a social sharing and microblogging app that integrated with WordPress, is another tool that was aimed at fundamentally changing how people use social networks. It was discontinued due to the development burden of supporting multiple apps.

There are many different solutions that have popped up over the years for enabling quick posts or microblogging, all with vastly different approaches. msgWP has an advantage in that Mészáros can leverage the power and speed of Telegram, along with all of its mobile and desktop clients, without having to maintain that aspect of the publishing interface. Even if it doesn’t spark a wildfire of microblogging across the web, it may offer users a convenient alternative to posting content inside social media silos, especially for niche use cases like group microblogging for live events.

I had an interesting conversation with David Perrell on his North Star Podcast that I recommend checking out. He’s also leading a really interesting program called Write of Passage which is an online course which helps people grow their career by writing and sharing online, which I think is brilliant and a big source of my career growth over the years. I’ve heard he has another coming soon around information organization. David is someone to watch and follow.

If you use Firefox and manage multiple websites that use different Content Management Systems and have a hard time keeping track of the various URLs to their backends, consider using the CMS Backend Opener Firefox extension created by Andy R.

Once installed, you can use either a keyboard shortcut (Alt + Y) or press a button within the browser and it will automatically open the login page for the detected CMS in a new window.

The extension uses the CMS meta-tag: Generator to detect which CMS is being used. The following CMS’ are supported:

• Typo3
• Typo3 Neos
• Joomla
• WordPress
• Django
• Shopware (beta)
• Magento (beta)
• Drupal
• Contao
• Weblication
• WebsiteBaker
• CMSQLite
• Oxid

Although the extension has not been updated in two years, I tested it on Firefox 67.0.4 on my MacBook Pro and it worked without any issues. I typically use a bookmark to browse to WP-Admin but this is more convenient, especially on WordPress.com.

I’ve also learned that if you have Pretty Permalinks enabled in WordPress, you can type /login or /admin after your domain and it will typically load the login page.

Honeypot, a tech-focused job platform based in Europe, has produced a documentary that offers a fascinating look at the origins of GraphQL. The 28-minute video explores how quickly the project began to have an impact on the wider tech industry after Facebook publicly released it as an open source project.

GraphQL co-founder Nick Schrock, who was interviewed along with fellow co-creators Lee Byron and Dan Schafer, said the documentary “captured both the urgency and joy of the early months of the GraphQL.” It was filmed over two months in San Francisco and Berlin, where Honeypot runs the GraphQL Conf in cooperation with Prisma.

GraphQL began as an internal project at Facebook that was born out of necessity as the tech industry began to shift towards providing better mobile experiences for users. At that time, Facebook’s native apps were just a thin wrapper around the mobile website.

“The inability of a large technology company to adjust to a technology shift as big as the mobile shift is the type of thing that will consign a seemingly unstoppable empire to the grave in a matter of a few years,” Schrock said.

Facebook decided to re-write the Facebook iOS app but the APIs they had at that time were inadequate for creating the Newsfeed. A new Newsfeed API was written simultaneously to be used with the new mobile app. Facebook for iOS 5.0, released in 2012, was a native re-write of the app and also the first time GraphQL was deployed in the wild. Following that release, its use was expanded beyond just the Newsfeed to encompass most of the functionality offered in Facebook’s iOS app.

Facebook shared GraphQL with the world at React Europe 2015 and published the GraphQL spec later in 2015. They explained that their goal was to design what they thought was the ideal API for frontend developers and work backwards with the technology.

GraphQL’s creators were surprised at how fast the uptake was after making the project public. Engineers at Airbnb, Twitter, and Github were early adopters and their experiences are shared in the documentary with interviews from the community. The problems GraphQL’s creators encountered in scaling their mobile experience were not specific to Facebook. Other companies had similar problems and the demand for GraphQL in the industry was already there. Within six months, the team saw implementations of GraphQL in many of the major programming languages. They realized how important the project was to the industry after GitHub announced in 2016 that its public API would be a GraphQL API:

Using GraphQL on the frontend and backend eliminates the gap between what we release and what you can consume. We really look forward to making more of these simultaneous releases. GraphQL represents a massive leap forward for API development. Type safety, introspection, generated documentation, and predictable responses benefit both the maintainers and consumers of our platform.

The documentary tells the story of how GraphQL began the first three years as a solution to internal problems at Facebook but expanded to become a community tool that was initially adopted by hobbyists and then incorporated into the products of large tech companies. GraphQL co-founder Lee Byron predicts that the project is entering the next phase of its life and “heading towards becoming an industry standard and one that’s collaborative.”

There’s no way to measure the number of APIs that are being built around GraphQL, but the query language is now used in both internal and external APIs at major companies like Pinterest, Intuit, Coursera, Walmart, Shopify, PayPal, KLM, NBC News Digital, Credit Karma, Wayfair, and Yelp. Since it can be used in combination with REST APIs, GraphQL’s rapid adoption is not necessarily a good predictor for the end of REST architecture, but it’s a trend that is worth following. This widespread adoption began with just a handful of engineers who saw GraphQL’s promise at React Europe 2015, built tools to optimize development, and advocated for using GraphQL at their companies.

“I totally underestimated the power of these open source communities,” Schrock said. “We had to rely on this community of poeple to form spontaneously and then build implementations of this in different languages and then actually productionize it and build an entire tool ecosystem around it. I didn’t think that was ever going to work, and I was totally wrong. If an idea makes sense to people and it clicks with their mind and they can see the vision, they are actually willing to do a lot of work in order to see it executed and share their work, and it’s a pretty remarkable thing to see.”

The energy in the GraphQL documentary is inspiring and the story shares many parallels with other open source projects that have gained widespread adoption through passionate communities. Check out the full documentary below:

All the talks and panels at WCEU were planned and executed well, but there were a few standouts we’ll highlight, in case you weren’t able to watch the entire livestream.

Friday Highlights

• Jenny Beaumont’s “Doing It Wrong” was an encouraging talk that set a good mood for the whole conference. Jenny’s interview with Torque at WCEU is worth a listen too.
• John Jacoby’s talk on “Advanced Database Management For Plugins” explored the pain of dealing with databases when you’re writing plugins. He also announced a stand-alone open source library for better WordPress database management that will be released in July.
• Josepha Haden‘s talk entitled “Change your socks, change your mind: A no-fuss primer on change management” focused on the things group and community leaders should attend to most during periods of significant change. That’s a timely subject, given the events of the past year, and Josepha’s points apply to many parts of the WordPress community.

Matt’s talk after lunch on Friday was more of an update on Gutenberg. Matt presented some Gutenberg stats and then put the spotlight on some new block editor plugins and experiments. Matt reminded everyone that Gutenberg is in phase two, “where we are working with widgets (old school blocks), customization, and menus.”

Matt’s Session

• Matt showed off the Grid block plugin from Evolve that generates any layout style with a slick UI. You have to see it in action.
• Gutenberg is now available for Drupal.
• There are about 150k posts published each day with Gutenberg. That’s about two every second, and ta rate is increasing.
• Gutenberg will soon have:
  • A block directory that’s accessible from the “top-level navigation” on the .org site.
  • Footnotes and improved “micro” animations.
  • Special attention placed on the mobile experience. Matt noted that “Gutenberg for mobile is live, and the ability [to use its features] is increased now in the mobile apps.” He also mentioned they “had to write the codebase separately for this experience.”

The initial questions Matt got from the audience were somewhat aggressive and prolonged, so the moderators found it a challenge to keep things moving. At one point, a moderator broke in to say, “This isn’t a question; it’s a blog post.” I’m wondering if in the future at WCEU (or the upcoming WordCamp US) if a different moderation process might be considered.

If I had to choose one question of note, it would be the one asked about Matt’s (and WordPress’s) commitment to accessibility. Matt replied, “Accessibility is hard. We will get there. I believe we can make every release of WordPress better, but it’s challenging with Gutenberg because there might not be previous examples to work from.” He acknowledged the excellent work that WPCampus recently did with its accessibility audit.

Saturday Highlights:

Saturday’s talks, like Friday’s, were well done, although the panel on Gutenberg might have had more diversity in its composition, as a few people noted on Twitter.

Two especially notable talks:

• Brian Teeman, one of the Joomla co-founders, defined what counts as truly free software. (Slides) If you have begun to wonder how cloud services and Jetpack challenge the concept of “free,” check out Brian’s talk. Brian also has a recent post on his blog with some good advice for conference goers: attend sessions randomly or pick ones with unfamiliar topics if you want to learn the most.
• Marcel Bootsman gave an inspiring account of his 700km walk to Berlin to attend the conference. It tied in well with Ines Van Essen’s talk later that afternoon about bringing peophttps://2019.europe.wordcamp.org/session/bringing-people-to-wordcamps/le to WordCamps and how much it typically costs for someone to attend.

The conclusion of WCEU came with the usual display of conference statistics:

• 3,260 tickets were sold. (800 more than last year!)
• 2,734 attendees. (610 for contributor day!)
• 1,722 or 56% were attending WCEU for the first time.
• 11,700 meals were served.
• 60 speakers gave talks.
• 60 interviews took place.
• 60 sponsors — and 150 micro-sponsors helped make it all possible.
• 2k photos / 1m Tweets — YOU ARE WELCOME!
• 97 countries were represented by attendees.
• 166 square meters of printed banners and materials were produced this year, which will be repurposed by being made into bags.

Since I was not physically attending WCEU, I asked people who were there in Berlin what they most appreciated — especially if it wasn’t observable through the livestream.

I got some good answers on Twitter from Topher, JJJ, mor10, Matt Cromwell, Pierre Mobian, and Yvette Sonneveld, among others.

The WP Cafe was a new feature for WCEU that provided “space for our attendees to meet, connect, and chat about a range of topics.” It’s an evolution of the previous year’s “Tribe Meetups.”

After the event, the WordCamp Europe team addressed some issues that came up at the afterparty — around the entertainment that was provided, and in regard to water availability.

WCEU 2020

WordCamp Europe is always held in a different city in Europe every year, and it was announced at the end of the event that the 2020 conference would be held in Porto, Portugal. (There’s a trailer.)

Porto seems to be a popular destination, and WCEU reported that just 24 hours after opening the #WCEU 2020 Call for Organisers, over 30 applications were already received.

Photo credit @WCEurope

June has certainly been a busy month in the WordPress community — aside from holding the largest WordPress event ever, the project has hit a number of significant milestones and published some big announcements this past month.

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A Wrap for WordCamp Europe 2019

WordCamp Europe 2019 took place on June 20-22. It was the largest WordPress event ever, with 3,260 tickets sold and 2,734 attendees. The attendees came from 97 different countries and 1,722 of them had never attended WordCamp Europe before.

The event featured 60 speakers who delivered talks and workshops on a variety of topics over two conference days, most notably Matt Mullenweg’s keynote that included an update on the current status of WordPress Core development, along with a lively Q&A session. The full session from the live stream is available to watch online.

For its eighth year, WordCamp Europe will take place in Porto, Portugal. The 2020 edition of the event will be held on June 4-6. If you would like to get involved with WordCamp Europe next year, fill out the organizer application form. 

Proposal for XML Sitemaps in WordPress Core

A proposal this month suggested bringing XML sitemap generation into WordPress Core. This is a feature that has traditionally been handled by plugins, which has resulted in many different implementations across different sites. It also means that many sites do not have XML sitemaps, which can be a problem because they are hugely important to having your site correctly indexed by search engines.

The proposal details how core sitemaps would be structured and how the team would build them, as well as what aspects of WordPress would not be considered appropriate information to be included.

Want to get involved in building this feature? Comment on the proposal, follow the Core team blog, and join the #core channel in the Making WordPress Slack group.

Translation Milestone for the Spanish Community

The WordPress community of Spain has worked hard to make the es_ES locale the first in the world to fully localize all of WordPress Core along with all Meta projects, apps, and the top 200 plugins. This is made possible by having the largest translation team out of any locale, consisting of 2,951 individual contributors.

Want to get involved in translating WordPress into our locale? Find your locale on the translation platform, follow the Polyglots team blog, and join the #polyglots channel in the Making WordPress Slack group.

WordPress 5.2.2 Maintenance Release

On June 18, v5.2.2 of WordPress was released as a maintenance release, fixing 13 bugs and improving the Site Health feature that was first published in v5.2. If your site has not already been automatically updated to this version, you can download the update or manually check for updates in your WordPress dashboard. Thanks to JB Audras, Justin Ahinon, and Mary Baum for co-leading this release, as well as the 30 other individuals who contributed to it.

Want to get involved in building WordPress Core? Follow the Core team blog, and join the #core channel in the Making WordPress Slack group.

Full End to End Tests for WordPress Core

On June 27, e2e (end to end) testing was introduced to WordPress and included in the continuous integration pipeline. E2e testing, which has been successfully used by Gutenberg, is used to simulate real user scenarios and validate process flows. Currently, the setup requires Docker to run, and a number of e2e test utilities are already available in the  @wordpress/e2e-test-utils package, in the Gutenberg repository. 

Want to use this feature? The more tests that are added, the more stable future releases will be! Follow the the Core team blog, and join the #core-js channel in the Making WordPress Slack group.

Feature Packages from the Theme Review Team

Following a proposal for theme feature repositories, an update to the features package was announced. Two new packages have been created that require code review and testing. The first is an Autoload Package, a foundational package for theme developers who are not currently using Composer (although Composer is recommended instead of this package). The second is a Customizer Section Button Package that allows theme authors to create a link/button to any URL.

There are other proposed ideas for packages that require feedback and additional discussion. Want to add your suggestions and thoughts? Join the conversation on the Theme Review team blog and join the #themereview channel in the Making WordPress Slack group.

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Further Reading:

• Development continues on the Gutenberg project, with the latest release including layouts for the Columns block, Snackbar notices, markup improvements, and accessibility upgrades.
• The Community team published the results of their work at the WordCamp Europe contributor day.
• The Polyglots team has put together a proposal for a new way to handle PTE requests.
• This year’s recipient of the Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship for WordCamp US is Carol Gann.
• The Amurrio WordPress community hosted their first “mega meetup” – this is a great event format that bridges the gap between regular meetup event and WordCamp.

Have a story that we should include in the next “Month in WordPress” post? Please submit it here.

The second edition of the JavaScript for WordPress conference will be streamed online July 11-13, 2019. Based on the success of the 2018 event, which had 1,200 attendees watching live, organizer Zac Gordon decided to expand the event to feature three free days of talks, workshops, and a contribution day focused on JavaScript and WordPress.

The conference will run from July 11-13, and includes educational content for a whole range of Javascript capabilities, from beginner to advanced:

• Day 1 – Workshops for JavaScript Beginners
• Day 2 – Three Tracks of Intermediate and Advanced Talks (plus One Non-Technical Track)
• Day 3 – Contributor Day to help improve the JavaScript-related documentation for WordPress

Gordon has published the finalized schedule for the 36 sessions and speakers that will be streamed on Friday, July 12. This year the event will feature one track devoted to exploring topics surrounding “headless WordPress,” an approach that eschews WordPress’ traditional architecture in favor of decoupling the front and backends, allowing developers to integrate different stacks. The track includes presentations like A React Theme in 30 Min, SEO for Headless WordPress Themes, Gatsby & WordPress, and Headless E-Commerce with BigCommerce. Other tracks feature more general JavaScript and Gutenberg topics.

Thanks to more than a dozen sponsors, registration is free, but viewers must sign up on the conference website in order to attend online.

photo credit: Night Moves – (license)

There’s a lot of great WordPress content published in the community but not all of it is featured on the Tavern. This post is an assortment of items related to WordPress that caught my eye but didn’t make it into a full post.

Carol Gann Awarded the 2019 Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship

Carol Gann, who is a Meetup coordinator in the WordPress Orlando Community, has been awarded the Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship. The scholarship is named after Kim Parsell who passed away in 2015 but her impact on the WordPress community is still felt today.

“My proudest contribution to the WordPress open source project is training small business owners and bloggers to be comfortable and conversant with their own WordPress websites. WordPress empowers people. Many end users of WordPress are not technically minded. As a WordPress Meetup co-organizer, I contribute to the coffee help desk, assisting others in finding solutions to their WordPress problems. I also host another help desk opportunity, ‘Coffee With Carol,’ to empower WordPress users,” Gann said.

I can tell from the quote above that Kim and Carol would get along well as Kim was also the type of person who would do what she could to help others.

GravityView Diversity Grant to Attend PressNomics 6

The folks over at GravityView are offering a grant to recognize the challenges certain groups of people face succeeding in technology fields and to promote inclusivity and diversity. The grant includes a ticket to PressNomics 6, a flight to Tuscon, AZ, lodging, transportation via a Lyft gift card, and a one-on-one business consultation with Zak Katz, Co-founder of GravityView. The deadline to apply is 11:59 PM MDT on June 30, 2019.

10up OpenSource Project Scaffolding Suite

10up has released a project scaffolding suite that includes a WordPress starter theme, starter plugin, and NPM package. The purpose of the suite is to streamline repetitive tasks, encourage community contributions, and provide a starting point that includes 10up’s engineering best practices.

End to End Tests Added to Core

Introducing the WordPress e2e tests

WP Tavern Turns 10 Years Old

I was looking back through the Tavern archives and realized that this past January, WP Tavern turned 10 years old. It’s been quite a journey and it’s not over yet. Check out the first post I published on the Tavern announcing its opening.

Matt Mullenweg Announces That Automattic Is Sponsoring Jill Binder’s Work

Diversifying WordPress

John James Jacoby Releases A Plugin That Cryptographically Signs Posts

John James Jacoby has released a small plugin on GitHub that cryptographically signs posts. The plugin splits the content of posts in words and then stenographically inserts zero-width characters between them. These characters then form a unique, invisible pattern that can be used to detect plagiarised content. This plugin sounds like it would pair well with WordProof.

What does DXP Mean?

I asked on Twitter what does DXP or Digital Xperience platform mean? It comes across as fancy marketing lingo. Here are a few of the responses I received.

Matt Mederios – ‘DXP’ or in other words, how we want our customers to experience WordPress in our controlled ecosystem. All your solutions in one place, possibly to the point you don’t recognize it’s WordPress.

Stephen Cronin – DXP is an enterprise thing and has been around for ages in various guises. WordPress is not listed by Gartner, but Drupal and SharePoint are, along with other enterprise CMS’s. If people want to create DXPs out of WordPress, more power to them.

Karim Marucchi – Forget the buzz, large sites are moving past ‘just’ content, no one product (not #AEM not #Sitecore) will ever be perfect for all the existing & new features that are popping up ‘monthly’, so with #OpenSourse we all can make the most open easy/most compatible /cheap framework that will help the #enterprise manage/customize/blend all the ways you need to interact with your clients. And yes, the good Hosts, are staying out of trying to be all things.

Thanks to these three, the meaning of DXP is a bit more clear.

WordCamp EU Organizing Team Issues Apology

There were some things that took place during the WordCamp EU afterparty that didn’t sit well with some people. The WordCamp EU organizing team explained what happened and issued an apology for the mistakes that were made.

Torque Interviews Marcel Bootsman

Doc Pop of Torque caught up with Marcel Bootsman to talk about his walking journey to Berlin. Ironically, the interview occurs as they’re walking around.

.@mbootsman just finished his 718km walk to #WCEU, so we thought it would be fun to do a and about his #walktoWCEU project. pic.twitter.com/5qSlVZYuiv

— Torque (@TheTorqueMag) June 20, 2019

That’s it for issue twenty-seven. If you recently discovered a cool resource or post related to WordPress, please share it with us in the comments.

BuddyPress 5.0 is on track to introduce a new BP REST API, which has been in development as a feature plugin on GitHub since 2016. Contributors plan to merge the API with 14 endpoints for popular components like activity updates, groups, members, private messages, and extended profile fields. Another eight endpoints for blogs, friends, and other features, are planned to ship in BuddyPress 6.0.0.

The first major use of the BP REST API inside BuddyPress is a new group management interface that enables administrators to quickly search for specific members to promote, demote, ban, or remove. BuddyPress contributor Mathieu Viet shared a demo of what users can expect from the new interface on both the frontend and the backend.

Contributors are still discussing how to include the BP REST API into the BuddyPress plugin package, whether they should continue maintaining it on GitHub until all the endpoints are finished and include it during the BuddyPress plugin’s build process, or merge it into BuddyPress core and use Trac. GitHub is more convenient for development but some expressed concerns about fragmenting the history of the API’s development on two platforms.

BuddyPress lead developer Boone Gorges said in a recent dev chat that shipping the BP REST API without documentation is a blocker. Contributors are now working on a new documentation site. Since version 5.0.0 will be more of a developer-oriented release, Viet suggested contributors take the opportunity to set up developer.buddypress.org with similar resources as WordPress has on its DevHub project. He is looking for feedback on his proposal for automatically generating the documents from the REST schemas of the API’s endpoints and further customizing it for integration into the broader developer.buddypress.org site.

BuddyPress contributors are targeting August 15 for releasing 5.0.0 beta 1 and will discuss a date for RC further down the road. Regular dev chat meetings have resumed and are now happening every other Wednesday at 19:00 UTC in the #BuddyPress Slack channel.

WordPress for iOS 12.6.1 is now available in the iTunes App Store. The User Interface as well as the backend that powers stats has been revamped and more closely resembles what you see on the Jetpack Stats module. There are now date selectors and individual stats contain more detail.

More often than not over the years, when I’ve tried to view stats, they don’t load. In 12.6.1, the stats are cached making them not only quicker to load, but they’re available to view offline as well.

This version also improves the block editor by fixing an issue where the setting to open links in new tabs was always set to off. Also, when users attempt to put invalid content into blocks, there’s a more descriptive error message.

Those who share photos into WordPress from other apps can now share an unlimited number of photos and if an image fails to upload, the error message will contain more detailed information.

The WordPress for iOS app uses libraries from third-party’s. To see who these parties are, the team has added an acknowledgments section in the app. You can view this page by browsing to Me > App Settings > About WordPress for iOS > Acknowledgements. Fair warning, this page is quite lengthy. There’s also a variety of bug fixes in this version as well.

One change that I noticed that doesn’t make sense and that I’ve been unable to find an explanation for is the labeling change. The app is now labeled on the app store as WordPress #1 Website Builder.

I don’t view the app as a website builder, it’s more of a website manager. I’ve asked in the WordPress Mobile Slack channel why this change was made but as of publishing, have not received a response.

WordPress for iOS is free and available on iTunes. There’s also a mobile app for Android devices and a desktop application that be found on the WordPress Mobile Apps site.

Updated June 28th, 2019

I received a response from Elisa Budelli, Mobile Developer at Automattic, regarding the label change.

“The title is describing WordPress as a full product, not only the mobile apps. The switch is based on a recommendation from a SEO specialist, and we will evaluate how it works and revert if we see no impact.”

Recent EditorsKit releases have introduced a set of new tools that some writers may have found missing from Gutenberg. The plugin’s creator, Jeffrey Carandang, said version 1.6 was targeted at improving the writing flow for writers, bloggers, and content creators.

Gutenberg has decent support for copying and pasting Markdown. It will automatically convert links, blockquotes, code snippets, and other formatting into the proper Gutenberg blocks. However, the editor does not offer full support for users who who want to write with Markdown.

EditorsKit 1.6 adds basic markdown capabilities for things like bold, italic and ~strikethrough~ and these can also be used alongside other available editor markdowns and their keyboard shortcuts. These are integrated directly into the RichText editor so you don’t have to use a dedicated Markdown plugin with a custom block, like WP Githuber MD, or Jetpack’s Markdown module.

EditorsKit 1.6 is now available Comes with Gutenberg Editor Markdown Support, Clear Formatting, Subscript & Superscript Formats, Toggle Title and more. Here's a quick preview on how these features were integrated on WordPress Gutenberg block editor pic.twitter.com/apB4uMjuqg

— Jeffrey Carandang (@phpbits) June 4, 2019

Version 1.6 introduced an expanded “clear formatting” option as a response to requests Carandang received on the plugin’s Facebook community and Slack. It clears formatting on specific text, removes formatting on selected text, and clears all paragraph and heading block formatting using the “Clear Block Formatting” option in the block settings. This version also added subscript, superscript, and uppercase text formats, along with a title visibility toggle that removes titles from the frontend on a per-post basis.

While these tools may provide features that some users find to be critically missing from Gutenberg, for many others they simply add to the clutter of the block toolbar and the overall interface. Gutenberg is still sorely in need of a distraction-free UI that will enable users to ditch dedicated writing apps and embrace WordPress as their go-to app for writing.

EditorsKit seems best suited as a playground for features that may or may not have widespread appeal. For example, the most recent 1.7 release enables exporting and importing blocks without the requirement of first converting them to reusable blocks. Users can click on the “block settings” icon and export as JSON on a per-block basis. It’s also possible to select multiple blocks and export them in one file.

Importing blocks back into the editor is as easy as dragging and dropping the .json file. It automatically generates the blocks in an almost magical way an does not require users to navigate to the separate admin dashboard for managing reusable blocks.

Carandang is working on making the import/export work with media attachments. He is also currently working with the Gutenberg team and other contributors to bring the plugin’s Text and Highlight colors feature to the core editor.

In this episode, Malcolm Peralty and I are joined by Dan Maby, Founder of WP&UP. WP&UP is a non-profit charity based in England that supports and promotes positive mental health in the WordPress Community.

Dan explains why he started the charity, what he’s learned and how he manages his own mental health, and how the donation funds are spent. He also shared some startling statistics from a recent mental health survey they conducted. The results of this survey are being put into a white paper that will be published later this year.

We finished up the show covering the news of the week. If you’re interested in supporting WP&UP, please consider donating.

Stories Discussed:

Matt Mullenweg’s Summer Update at WordCamp Europe 2019: Gutenberg’s Progress and a Preview of Upcoming Features

Free Event: Post Status to Live Stream Publish Online July 8-9

Contribution Time, Sponsored, and Teams Fields Added to WordPress.org User Profiles

WP Engine Acquires Flywheel

Transcript:

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Two weeks ago, Justin Tadlock published a proposal on behalf of the Theme Review Team to create a set of standardized packages that theme authors can drop-into their themes. This week, the team has released two feature packages that illustrate what the project is trying to accomplish.

The first is an Autoloader that provides the means necessary for theme authors to autoload PHP classes. While Composer is recommended, the team has created a PSR-4 compliant autoloader as an alternative for those not ready for Composer.

“This is a foundational package that will allow you to use any other packages that we create,” Tadlock explained. “You could even use it for autoloading your own theme classes if you choose to do so (assuming they follow the PSR-4 autoloading standard for class and folder names).”

The second package provides a Customizer Section Button that enables theme authors to create a link or button that points to a URL. This feature was originally developed to allow developers a standard way to display a Pro/Upsell link within the customizer. However, the package is generic enough that developers can use it to link to any URL.

Tadlock also provided feedback on a number of ideas that were proposed. Packages up for consideration include, Breadcrumbs, Sliders and Sections, Mobile Navigation, Color Control with Transparency, Appearance > Theme Name Page, and Standard Template Hooks.

To read his feedback and learn more about the project, including how to get involved, read the feature package update and the initial proposal.

Gutenberg 6.0 was released today with a major update to the Columns block. Users can now select from a set of pre-defined layouts for their columns, with additional features that address many long-standing complaints regarding the block’s usability.

Although many plugins are already doing more advanced things with columns and grid layouts, WordPress core’s current implementation of the Columns block is so confusing that it is barely usable. It has a sliding control for selecting the number of columns but it is difficult to see the column boundaries.

Gutenberg 6.0 gives users the ability to select from multiple pre-defined column options, which include some commonly-requested layouts with variable widths. Users can also elect to skip the layouts and start from scratch. Below is a video demo Gutenberg phase 2 lead Riad Benguella shared in the release post:

The column settings also include a sliding percentage width control, so users can further customize it, whether starting from a template or from scratch.

In adding pre-defined layouts to columns, the Gutenberg team enhanced the InnerBlocks component, allowing developers to extend it to create their own sets of template options to appear upon inserting a block. The Columns block serves as an example implementation of this.

This release also incorporates more than a dozen smaller enhancements and fixes, including snackbar notice support for the widgets screen. Check out the changelog for a full list of changes.

The first ever State of CSS survey results have been published. The data includes responses from more than 11,000 developers in 135 countries. Respondents identified themselves as male (84.71%), female (9.9%), non-binary/third gender (0.86%), and “prefer not to say” (2.62%).

Sacha Greif and Raphaël Benitte, creators of the survey, said it’s skewed towards early adopters, since the sample size is a fairly small selection of the overall CSS developer community. Greif and Benitte also created the State of JS survey, which is where 31.5% of respondents heard about the CSS survey, so the data is also slanted towards the “back of the front-end,” developers who use JavaScript in their front-end work. They concluded that this data is a good preview of where the mainstream side of the ecosystem will be a few years from now.

The majority of respondents indicated that they are fairly confident about their back-end proficiency, with 62.49% identifying themselves as possessing intermediate or advanced backend skills. This trend sets the bar higher for developers who are looking to present a competitive skill-set in the CSS workforce.

The results seem clearly bent towards the JavaScript-proficient segment of CSS developers, with a whopping 80.54% rating their JavaScript proficiency at Intermediate to Expert level.

The summary includes a highly detailed look at different CSS-related technologies, such as preprocessors, methodologies, frameworks, and CSS-in-JS, with differently colored segments representing whether developers have favorable or negative opinions on each.

The results contain data visualizations showing which CSS features and technologies developers know about and/or have used in their work. Flexbox (94.4%) and Grid (54.4%) are among the most widely used layout tools. The frameworks section revealed some surprising results, with a few of the lesser-known frameworks, like Tailwind, Bulma, PureCSS, and Tachyon ranking highest in interest and satisfaction. The most well-known frameworks, Bootstrap and Foundation, fall at the bottom of the satisfaction scale.

These results are fairly representative of early adopters of new technologies in the CSS ecosystem, covering features and frameworks that are not yet mainstream. Greif and Benitte predict that even though CSS seems to be evolving slowly, mastering the newer technologies will become more important for developers who want to remain competitive.

For a more detailed look at other areas, such as typography, interactions, animations, and even what pseudo CSS selectors and form-related selectors developers use in their work, check out the full range of results at 2019.stateofcss.com.

Your comfort zone is a muscle. If you don’t stretch it, it will shrink.

It still feels unreal. Two days ago, I was standing on a stage, sharing my expertise. And not just any stage. One of the stages of WordCamp Europe 2019 in Berlin. A conference with over 3200 registrants, over 2700 attendees. A conference room with a capacity of 1100, 60-70% full. And lots of positive feedback.

Never judge by appearances

Getting to this point hasn’t been a walk in the park. Not even remotely. Had you asked me about something like this five years ago, I would have smirked. Statistically, I am much more likely to be depressed, chronically anxious or abusing substances. You see, I have been a victim of (relational) bullying several times during my elementary school years. I changed schools because of it, yet it happened again.

Bear with me here, this is not going to be a “I feel so sorry for myself” sob story. There is lots of hope, encouragement and empowerment in this story. Yes, I have struggled with feelings of insecurity and feelings of “not being worthwhile”. And yes, every time I think I have finally dealt with it, it does pop up again in another shape or form. But every single time, I have been able to turn it around into an opportunity to grow. I may still depend a bit more on validation than average. But people who know me, will confirm that I am known to be one to encourage others.

A little bit of context

I won’t wear you out with the whole back story. Instead, let me take you back about 5 years. Me, my husband, and my two kids had been living in the Caribbean for a number of years. Unfortunately, I had hit another rough patch. I had been working with a wonderful local psychologist, but I was not getting the results I hoped for. And then it hit me: I would not be growing without intentionally seeking out opportunities to grow. So I decided to send myself out on an experiment. And, thankfully we were able to afford an experiment like that.

Being intentional about personal development

One of the goals I set, was to be able to present myself as a digital marketing expert more comfortably. And I felt that it would be easier to do this outside my local area since I was running a pattern of playing small there. So I purchased a ticket to WordCamp Miami (a short flight away). As I started to freak out about what I had done, an email came in. The organization was looking for volunteers. Perfect timing. That would help me focus on helping others rather than feeling lost and not knowing whom to talk to. Or getting all hyper from butterflying around.

This turned out to be a great decision. I had never encountered a community more inviting and inclusive. I had a blast during the weekend. And even got invited over for a home-cooked dinner by one of my co-volunteers. Some first lasting friendships were born that weekend.

Having this first volunteer experience under my belt landed me several volunteer gigs in the US over the following years. Not only for WordCamps, but also for a much more expensive internet marketing conferences and coaching programs.

One of the events I got to volunteer at, was MyNAMS 2015. I was first timer, volunteer and (assistant) trainer at the same time.

Starting all over again

Then, three years ago, we moved back to The Netherlands, and I had no professional network in my home country at all. So, once our family had found a new routine, I signed up as a volunteer for WordCamp Europe in Paris (2017). That made me stretch far out of my comfort zone since about 2000 people would attend, and I did not know one single soul. Signing up as a volunteer was a no-brainer already by that time. To help myself get over some anxiety about the number of people attending, I decided to sign up for contributors day for the first time. After all, “only” some 300 people would attend that event.

The friendly people at the marketing team adopted me right away and gave me something useful to do. I teamed up with another volunteer to set up several Trello boards to manage the many ongoing projects. Over the weekend I got connected to more warm, welcoming and encouraging people than I could ever imagine. Some of them noticed that I had a way of expressing myself that could point to a talent for speaking. They kept encouraging me to the point that I submitted my very first talk proposal. Looking back, I never really expected to be picked. You should have seen my face when I received the e-mail stating I had been selected…

Another leap of faith

So two months later, I was standing in front of some 50 people. At WordCamp Nijmegen, I shared my story about growing my self-confidence to a much healthier level by volunteering during WordCamps and other events. You can view the recording on WordPress.tv. I received some great feedback. This gave me the confidence to apply for the next WordCamp, this time with a topic within my field of expertise: How to create buyer persona.

Over the course of 2 years, one opportunity led to another: First, I became part of the organizing team of WordCamp Utrecht and helped organize that event twice. Then, I became a team rep for the #MakeWordPress marketing team. Next, I got to lead a workshop at WordCamp Europe 2018. And as a result of all of this, I landed several freelance gigs, training virtual assistants and writing copy for a renowned WordPress agency, Level Level. Ultimately, by making myself stretch my comfort zone a bit further out every single time, I ended up landing my dream job. I’m now in charge of marketing for Level Level.

Contributing to WordPress will help you make friends from all over the world. I warmly recommend it!

Lessons learned along the way

Do I still have my moments of not feeling enough? Totally. But let me share some of the most valuable lessons I learned along the way.

People who were never bullied have the same insecurities

Ha, you didn’t see that one coming, right? And until you are ever ready to open up about your feelings of insecurity, others will probably not feel safe sharing their feelings about it, either. Because being vulnerable IS scary. And people may abuse it. But it can be amazingly empowering, too. Blaming the bullying and staying in my ever-shrinking comfort zone would probably have been easier, but I’m so happy I ended up discovering that it turned out I was telling myself a lie.

Your comfort zone is a muscle. It is made to stretch.

This has become one of my pet peeves. Work your comfort zone like a muscle. If you don’t, it will shrink right back. You’ll keep playing small. Stretching it will be painful at first. But imagine that feeling of victory, that intense satisfaction when you look back and notice how much you have grown. Needless to say, it takes quite a bit of energy. You will be exhausted at times, and your comfort zone muscles will be sore. It’s the circle of life, after all. You will survive and grow stronger every day, which is exactly what I want for you.

Find your kind of crazy

We WordPress people, as unique as we all are, have lots in common, too. When helping my son through a rough patch several years ago, I did a lot of online research. I took a deep dive into everything from ADD to giftedness, and from visual learning to being highly sensitive. The “symptoms” of all of these are very much alike. And the biggest lesson: if you’re able to focus for a long time on something that you really enjoy, it’s not ADD.  You may recognize some of these “symptoms”:

• not being able to sit still;
• easily distracted when working on routine matters;
• being able to hyperfocus when working on something that intrigues you;
• having a wide variety of interests;
• tend to get into power struggles with authoritative personalities;
• highly creative;
• mastering new skills by understanding and applying a concept rather than mastering it step by step (Once you know the concept of addition in math, for instance, it doesn’t matter whether you add 2+4 or 19574+274503. This in contrast to others who need to start with 1 digit numbers, then to 2 digit numbers etc).

(see, https://www.sengifted.org/post/adhd-and-children-who-are-gifted and https://www.davidsongifted.org/Search-Database/entry/A10226 if you’d like to learn more about this.)

Over the past two years, I had lots of conversations with community members, and have learned along the way that many recognize these. I think this is one of the reasons we feel so connected. But whether this sounds like you, or not at all…. I strongly recommend you to find and connect to a group of people that you resonate with and who love you for who YOU are. Encourage each other.

Be ruthless about self-care

I can see a huge difference in how I feel, both physically and mentally, depending on how well I take care of myself. Purely in simple things like eating lots of fruits and veggies. Drinking no-sugar drinks like herbal infusions and water. Getting enough sleep. Being out in nature. Exercising regularly. Hanging out with friends and family instead of working all the time. This by itself won’t get you out of a depression, but I am confident it will help improve things. It helps me from getting burned out, for sure.

If you’re employing one of us

You may be reading this and leading a team of WordPress people. And you may, or may not recognize yourself in parts of my story. Either way, I may have some valuable tips for you, too.

We’re precious. We’re valuable. And, we need more validation than average

We may not always notice that we’re burning the midnight oil. We may need you, or our co-workers to notice. We’re sprinters, not marathon runners. So we’ll have bouts of brilliance, and bouts where nothing may seem to come out of our hands. Know that. Appreciate that. And help us know that it’s ok that we’re wired like that. We may need that wee bit more of validation, of encouragement. We need to know you believe in us and that we’re valuable. And we may need a hug every once in a while.

Disclaimer

I’m not a psychologist. I’m just sharing what I what I learned while trying to turn my life around. Also, the highs and the lows keep coming and going. Over the past five years, though, the trend has been upwards. And getting through my lows has become easier as I have become more confident about my ability to get through.

The post How The WordPress Community Helped Me Face My Fears And Do It Anyway appeared first on HeroPress.

In a move that caught some people by surprise, WP Engine has announced that it has reached a definitive agreement to acquire Managed WordPress host, Flywheel.

While financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, Heather Brunner, WP Engine’s CEO confirmed to TechCrunch that the company needed to raise a small round of funding to finance the deal.

Dusty Davidson, Tony Noecker, and Rick Knudtson founded Flywheel in 2012 in Omaha, Nebraska. In 2012, there were already a handful of players in the Managed WordPress Hosting space but Flywheel was able to carve out a niche by focusing on Designers and Agencies.

In 2016, Flywheel became one of the few hosting companies added to the WordPress.org recommended hosting page. However, their listing was removed a few months later without an explanation.

Also in 2016, Flywheel acquired Pressmatic, a local WordPress development application for OS X from Clay Griffiths and rebranded it to Local by Flywheel. Representatives from both companies have stated that there are no plans to merge WP Engine Devkit with Local by Flywheel.

According to a frequently asked questions document, nothing much is changing in the foreseeable future for Flywheel customers.

Business will continue as usual! There will be no immediate changes to the Flywheel platform, plans, or experience. We’ll be spending the coming weeks and months on strategic innovation and integration planning, and are super excited to figure out how we can leverage all of our collective strengths, products, and brand assets in the best possible way.

Acquisition FAQ

Flywheel has generated a loyal following of happy customers over the years and some of them took to Twitter to express their concerns regarding Monday’s announcement.

Seeing these types of responses from customers is a testament to the level of service Flywheel provides. Many of them explained why they chose to host their clients with Flywheel over WP Engine.

Both companies have vowed to keep customers in the loop of any potential changes to plans, services, or products. While each company will operate independently as things are sorted out, it will be interesting to see how the two companies are integrated over time and how customers respond.

If you’re a Flywheel customer, please let us know what you think about the acquisition in the comments below.

To learn more about the deal, check out the following links.

• Flywheel is joining WP Engine!
• WP Engine to Acquire Flywheel
• Big news: Flywheel is joining WP Engine! From Dusty Davidson
• Realizing Our Vision To Build the Most Relied Upon DXP for WordPress from Heather Brunner

Google released version 1.2 of its official AMP plugin for WordPress ahead of WordCamp Europe in Berlin. This release introduces a new AMP Stories editor that is powered by Gutenberg.

AMP Stories are separate from the capabilities that enable AMP for the rest of the website, and they can be used together or independently. The Stories feature has its own post type that uses the block editor and comes with custom blocks that enable the following:

• Multiple story pages can be added in a horizontal editing interface
• Page reordering with drag and drop
• Text block (the default instead of Paragraph) allows for text to automatically resize to fit the container
• 40 font families for styling the Text block
• Blocks can be dragged and rotated anywhere on a page, with ability to move in front of or behind other blocks
• Select from blank pages or pre-made page templates
• Text block can have varying background color opacity
• Blocks on a given page are listed in a persistent table of contents (with drag and drop)
• Story pages can have background video or image (with focal point)
• Pages can have a solid background color or gradient, including opacity for overlaying background image/video

The stories created in the editor can also be embedded in other posts and pages using the regular embed block or the Latest Stories block.

Stories are a mobile-focused format that have become increasingly popular with social networking apps like Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook. Stories on these platforms are usually created as ephemeral bits of content that are not easy to embed without using a third-party application. Google is marketing AMP stories as “visual storytelling for the open web.”

“I like to position it as Web Stories,” Google Developer Relations Program Manager Thierry Muller said. “It is powered by AMP, but there are none of the challenges developers might face when making a website AMP compatible. With Web Stories, users are now able to create stories accessible via a simple URL, content that they own and can use open source tools such as the Story editor for WordPress to create stories.”

Muller said the target audience for AMP stories includes publishers, travel bloggers, food bloggers, and anyone who wants to create immersive content. Some well-known publishers, such as The Telegraph, Washington Post, and CNN, have partnered with Google as early adopters, using AMP stories to cover news and events. The Stories also show up in a carousel in mobile search results.

WordPress users who want to start using the AMP plugin’s Stories feature will need to have Gutenberg 5.8+ installed, because it requires some of the newer features in the block editor that haven’t yet be merged into core.

The addition of AMP Stories to the official AMP plugin may make it more appealing to those who have been hesitant to install it simply for the website capabilities. It gives the plugin another entry point with users who are more interested in the visual storytelling aspect.

In a recent post examining the web standards community’s confusion surrounding how Google Chrome seemed to be unilaterally implementing a new element called toast, Jeremy Keith made a good observation regarding developers’ skepticism about AMP.

“I certainly don’t think this is a good look for Google given the debacle of AMP’s ‘my way or the highway’ rollout,” Keith said. “I know that’s a completely different team, but the external perception of Google amongst developers has been damaged by the AMP project’s anti-competitive abuse of Google’s power in search.” Google Web Advocate Das Surma lent credibility to Keith’s take on the matter, saying it offered “a pretty accurate representation of our intentions, but also of the problems and mistakes we made.”

It’s not easy to quantitatively measure how developers’ anti-AMP sentiment has affected the adoption of Google’s official AMP plugin for WordPress, especially given the rocky start it had in the official plugin directory. XWP and Google engineers had a lot to overcome after taking over the plugin’s development from Automattic when users began to wonder if it had been abandoned.

The first version of the AMP plugin was released in October 2015 and initially had 400 active installs. Over the past four years, that number has grown to more than 400,000 active installs. The plugin has had a 33% increase in its user base from December 1, 2018 (300,000+) to today (400,00+). This is likely due to some of the more user-friendly improvements that have been introduced in the past six months. Google and XWP’s involvement seems to have successfully dug the plugin out of its previous trend towards negative ratings from users who couldn’t get any support.

Nevertheless, Google is still struggling with the challenge to convince WordPress users that the AMP plugin is a must-have addition to their sites. Convincing the wider WordPress ecosystem to build AMP-ready plugins and themes that provide the compatibility for functionality that users’ websites rely on in order to be anything more than a basic blog. Adding AMP stories to the plugin may help to get more WordPress users on board to further explore AMPing up their websites.

Approximately 410/500 issues and pull requests in version 1.2 were dedicated to the new AMP Stories feature. This release introduces the notion of “AMP experiences,” a fancy industry buzz word that divides the Stories and Website features into separate functionality. The website framework improvements include a renaming of the template modes: Native, Paired, and Classic are now Standard, Transitional, and Reader, a strategic and notably less clear way of identifying the modes that seems intended to drive users towards adopting the native AMP approach. The editor has also been updated to display a warning when a featured image is too small for Google Search’s requirements, as well as provide better block-level warnings and improvements to validation requests.

Check out the v1.2 changelog for a full list of everything that is new in this release.

Another successful edition of WordCamp Europe concluded this weekend in Berlin. The event was the largest WordCamp in history, with 3,260 tickets sold and 2,734 attendees present on the ground. WCEU sold 800 more tickets than the previous year in Belgrade. Contributor Day gathered 611 attendees into 25 teams, and approximately 28% of them (169 attendees) were new WordPress contributors.

Smiling faces of awesome people at Contributor Day #WCEU 2019 We had 25 teams, and 611 signed up to give back to #WordPress today, of which 169 said they were new contributors. Thank you! pic.twitter.com/P7W7Ocl0lw

— WordCamp Europe (@WCEurope) June 20, 2019

To cap off the conference, attendees enjoyed a lively celebration Saturday night, donning vintage outfits for an 80’s themed after party at the venue. The party included a controversial show that some attendees found offensive and unwelcoming. WCEU organizers have addressed this issue in a post. According to WordPress community organizer Andrea Middleton, “that part of the show did not match the expectations that they had set with the venue, and was a disappointing surprise.”

A glimpse of swiss #WordCamp 's organisers in 80ies look for the #WCEU after-party yesterday. With @neverything and @andrew_liyanage @wp_switzerland upcoming #wczrh and @wpgva pic.twitter.com/yzBgxndopK

— Patricia BT (@PatriciaBT70) June 23, 2019

For those in the US that are wondering what an sfterparty in Europe looks like.. #WCEU #WCUS pic.twitter.com/BXZpZHyQpt

— Pieter Daalder (@w1zz) June 22, 2019

Despite the controversial after party show, the event received mostly positive feedback and many attendees reported that it was “best WCEU” they had ever attended.

In addition to breaking records as the largest WordCamp in history, organizers report that the majority of ticket holders (56%) were first time WCEU attendees.

“Berlin is an amazing city and by far one of the most popular locations for remote work in Europe,” 2019 global lead Milan Ivanovic said. “When we add on top the strong German community, with WordCamps across the country and four monthly WordPress meetups in Berlin alone, it was a no brainer that we would have a sold-out event. We also had an amazing line-up of speakers with 3 tracks and 3 workshops, along with on-time information shared to our attendees.”

WordCamp Europe 2020 to be Held in Porto, Portugal

At the conclusion of the event, organizers announced that next year WCEU is coming to Porto, June 4-6. Porto is Portugal’s second largest city, known for its beautiful beaches, port wine exports, bridges, vineyards, charming cobblestone streets, and affordability. It also has a vibrant and growing WordPress community. Portugal is home to Zé Fontainhas, one of the original creators of WordCamp Europe.

Jose Freitas, who will be heading up the local team in Portugal, has been working with WordPress since 2008 and has been involved with the community since 2013. He said the Portuguese WordPress community has been working on its application to host WCEU for three years.

“We are thrilled to have WCEU in Porto next year,” Freitas said. “Portugal is indeed a small country but we have a good WordPress community. At Porto we have had a monthly WordPress Meetup since January 2014, without failing a month. WordPress is growing quickly in Portugal and every day we have people joining our community.”

The greater community is connected on Facebook through the WordPress Portugal group, which has more than 4,400 members.

“We found that for some people, mostly beginners, it’s difficult to start using the support forums,” Freitas said. “So we made a Facebook group and people can ask questions and receive help or feedback related to their projects. Most of the users are people that made their own websites and websites for non profit organizations.”

Up until now, Portugal has hosted one WordCamp per year, alternating between Porto and Lisbon locations. Following 2020, local organizers plan to host two camps per year, and WC Lisboa is expected to be scheduled for October 2020.

The Porto community had formidable competition in its journey to securing the opportunity to host WCEU 2020, beating out Athens, Granada, Manchester, and Torino. Freitas attributes his team’s success to its dedication to improving Porto’s application for the past three years, following a disappointing attempt in 2016.

“First it was only a dream,” Freitas said. “After, it was what if… We applied the first time in 2016 to WCEU 2017. We were in the final decision but the event went to Paris, as we all know. So we started right then the application to 2020.

“We made it better, stronger, complete with all the new requirements. Each WCEU was getting something new and in each one we added the new thing to our documentation. We made a strict budget, with realistic numbers in all parameters. I think that was important for the people who made the selection.”

WCEU 2020 sessions will be held in English. Freitas said the majority of Portuguese people have a good understanding of English and most in the WordPress community are fluent in both languages.

The maximum capacity for the venue is 8,000 people. WCEU’s arrangement for 2020 allows attendance to go up to 4,000, in case the event has another record-breaking year.

“We have a wonderful venue in the city center and surrounded by a garden and a balcony with amazing views of the river and part of the city,” Freitas said.

WCEU 2019 local lead Bernhard Kau will be joining the 2020 team as one of the global leads to provide a smooth transition from one year to the next. Attendees can expect some of the successful aspects of the 2019 event to make a return at next year’s WCEU.

“The additions of WP Cafe and Wellness at WCEU were a big success and I would love to have more space for them at WordCamp Europe 2020 in Porto,” Kau said. “There are also some other ideas helping attendees staying healthy, both physically and mentally.

“As I have never been to Portugal, I am very excited to visit another country. I have met some members of the Portuguese Community on WordCamps throughout Europe and they are some of the most friendly people you can find.”

For those who are considering adding WCEU 2020 in Porto to their calendars, Freitas offered a preview of what attendees can expect:

Imagine yourself… it is June, 3, 2020. There’s one day to go before WCEU.

You go to the city center to know a little of the city. You walk in small and narrow streets and find that some of those have a history of more that a thousand years. You ask some directions, because you don’t want to use smartphone maps, and people are nice and even offer to take you to the place that is only 500 meters way.

You go to the very old part of the city and realize that it wasn’t changed for many, many years. It was not changed because people didn’t want to and because now it’s a UNESCO World Heritage site.

You sit near the river and look at the bridge designed and build by a student of Eiffel (yep, that Eiffel). The sun has made the Douro river look like silver and you finally get why the Romans gave the name of Porto (port) to the place.

It’s time to lunch some tasty and delightful Portuguese food. Don’t skip the dessert. To burn some calories you’ll go to the check the venue.

You pass the old Reitoria building (the place were the university principal used to work) – Porto has the biggest Portuguese university – and see a garden with trees, flowers and even some peacocks.

You enter there and find the way to the venue: it looks like the top of a spaceship, like the ones in the movies. There’s a banner: “WordCamp Europe 2020.”

Now you feel that you’re only a few hours away from the moment you have been waiting for. But, let’s go because you have to see other parts of the city.

The next day, you join hundreds of WordPress people who are helping the community in Contributor Day. There is a lot to do before the two conference days and workshops, before visiting the sponsors area, before meeting some of the nice folks that you didn’t see since last year, before making new friends.

After all, it’s possible to make new friends in an event of thousands of people.

WordCamp Europe is made possible every year by a massive team of organizers and volunteers who help keep costs low, in addition to sponsors.

The organising team would like to thank all of the volunteers for contributing to an amazing #WCEU! pic.twitter.com/1um7usNZqT

— WordCamp Europe (@WCEurope) June 22, 2019

The 2020 team put out the call for organizers after announcing the host city. In the first 24 hours, the team has already received 30 applications. The deadline to apply is July 15, 2019. Calls for sponsors, volunteers, and speakers will come after organizers are selected, as the year-round work of organizing WCEU continues again for 2020.

A new section named Contribution has been added to WordPress.org user profiles. This section contains fields that enable users to share how much time they contribute to WordPress on a weekly basis, which teams they contribute to, and whether or not those contributions are sponsored.

Each field is optional and will only appear if the Hours and Teams fields are filled in. The sponsored tag will only appear next to the Contributions heading if you answer Yes to being sponsored and the other fields are filled in.

Andrea Middleton describes these fields as a step towards a possible version one of the Five for the Future program that was published last year.

“I think it will also help with transparency, and might facilitate how teams set internal expectations for how much time different contributors might have to spend on a project or ongoing task,” she said.

In addition to the profile fields, the official WordPress Jobs Board has also been updated to include a new Contributor position. The goal is to make it easier for companies to find and hire people interested in becoming sponsored contributors.

These changes are the first iteration with plans to enhance them in the future. If you have any suggestions or ideas on improving these fields, you’re encouraged to leave a comment.

One question I have regarding potential additions is whether or not it makes sense to provide a text field where users can name the company that is sponsoring them. This may aid in transparency and avoiding conflicts of interests.

On the other side of the coin, does it make sense for the company’s name to be public information, or should contributors only share that information with team leads or reps on a 1-on-1 basis?

I feel as though knowing someone’s contributions are sponsored is only half of the equation. Without knowing who the sponsor is, that information is practically irrelevant.

image credit: WCEU Photography Team

Matt Mullenweg took the stage at WordCamp Europe in Berlin this afternoon to give a summer update on the progress of the block editor. He attributed much of its continued success to the availability of the Gutenberg plugin, which allows for quick iteration and testing. More than 150,000 posts are published per day using the block editor, which Mullenweg said is “a testament to the long development period” that gave the team an opportunity to work out bugs and make it usable for a large number of people.

Since its initial release, the block editor has added a host of notable improvements, including block management capabilities, a cover block with nested elements, widgets as blocks, block grouping, and snackbar style notices.

Mullenweg highlighted a few beautiful and innovative examples of Gutenberg in the wild. Two projects from Human Made showcase Gutenberg-powered designs (artefactgroup.com) and an AI integration that analyzes a user’s writing in the editor (ingenuity.siemens.com.)

Election season is ramping up in the U.S. and Gutenberg-powered sites, like hurst4delegate.com, are starting to pop up. Mullenweg noted that 21/24 of the current democratic candidates for President are using WordPress for their sites. Whitehouse.gov also switched from Drupal to WordPress earlier this year.

Mullenweg also gave a quick preview of some of the upcoming Gutenberg features that are currently being developed on GitHub. Most of them are still in the prototype stage. The team is creating a system to install new blocks online, which will tie into the planned block directory. Mullenweg said Blocks could become a new top-level menu item in the WordPress admin, with screens dedicated to block discovery.

"A block directory is coming that will take over other “top level navigation” and brings a “playfulness” to discovering #Gutenberg blocks.” @photomatt #WCEU #WordPress pic.twitter.com/wsiHcPaVuL

— David Bisset (@dimensionmedia) June 21, 2019

He showed demos of the navigation block in progress, a prototype for adding realistic motion to block movement, an experimental footnotes block, and a demo of resizing images with “snap to grid” capabilities. Mullenweg said one of the goals with Gutenberg is to “make it possible to create beautiful experiences, because that’s part of what the web needs to win.”

New footnotes feature being tested in #Gutenberg. @photomatt #WCEU #WordPress pic.twitter.com/b8yhn2X71w

— David Bisset (@dimensionmedia) June 21, 2019

Mullenweg also gave an update on Gutenberg’s progress in the mobile apps. He said the new editor is operational but development is slow moving because the mobile engineers essentially have to duplicate all of the work that has been done by hundreds of Gutenberg contributors thus far.

Q&A Highlights Governance, Core Maintenance, and the Future of WordPress Themes

The Q&A portion of the session featured a variety of topics, ranging from an aggressive tirade about licensing and Envato, to more relevant inquiries about the future of WordPress themes. While this format of interaction has its shortcomings, it gives community members the opportunity to check on the status of issues where they have a particular interest.

One attendee asked if WordPress.org plans to implement a more democratic structure for decision making. Mullenweg seemed to interpret the question as referencing a system where tens or hundreds of millions of WordPress users would participate in making decisions on features through a vote or some other form of feedback. In contrast, he said WordPress’ current approach is for leadership to try to get a sense for what the most common issues are through polls and public channels and allow those issues to help shape the project’s roadmap.

Mullenweg shared that one particular issue on his mind right now is the problem of “how do I make my theme look like the demo?” He said contributors are experimenting with different types of models for making decisions that move WordPress in the direction to solve these types of problems.

He said that the project’s decision making is fairly transparent, without a lot of mystery, and that the community has tons of feedback mechanisms. This is a somewhat controversial claim, as regular project contributors have expressed frustration with the lack of communication surrounding important planning and decisions, such as release dates and project timing, as it pertained to how WordPress 5.0 landed. The community was frustrated by a lack of effective ways to communicate critical issues and complaints to project leadership. As a followup to this specific feedback, Josepha Haden, the new Executive Director of the WordPress project, has been diligent to track and communicate how leadership is working to improve communication.

Another attendee asked if WordPress themes will become obsolete after Gutenberg gains more site-building capabilities. Mullenweg predicted they will always be a part of WordPress but seemed inclined to let the market decide the fate of themes.

“I don’t know,” he said. “They are going to change for sure. I don’t think they ever go away.” He said he could see developers offering an array of different designs that could be used as a starting point. Although a WordPress theme has a very specific definition right now (as far as what types of files are included), Mullenweg said he can see that definition evolving over time. He said he could see themes becoming like a starter template or a library of patterns to choose from, or even a set of complex layouts that could work across different themes.

“I think we’re going to decouple themes a little bit but I don’t know how or what that will look like,” Mullwenweg said. He also noted that a lot of themes right now represent a similar aesthetic, often business minimalist that use white and blue colors. Design trends have the potential to shift dramatically as Gutenberg and themes evolve to allow users more control over how their sites are designed.

It is no secret that the WordPress development community is eager to switch to GitHub or another Git-based infrastructure for core development. Most of the recent feature projects have successfully matured on GitHub, with the majority of work and discussion taking place outside of Trac. One attendee asked about the possibility of moving away from Trac in the near future. Mullenweg said that this year the team that works on WordPress.org is prioritizing changes to the directory, but in the meantime anyone with Python knowledge is welcome to contribute to tweaking Trac for improvements in the interim before WordPress moves to Git-based development.

I’d love to move off of Trac as much as the next person. In the interim I’m working some cool tools to make life easier using the Elasticsearch cluster I built for it. Let me know if you want to help! https://t.co/E26P66ebmQ #WCEU

— William Earnhardt (@earnjam) June 21, 2019

In response to a question about blockchain technology and WordPress, Mullenweg said he has long been an enthusiast in this area and loves the idea of open source applying to money, as well as having a distributed ledger.

“But I can’t think of any problem in core WordPress right now that the overhead of a blockchain would really improve,” he said. “Everything I could think of right now would probably be plugin territory.” However, he said that the WordProof plugin’s timestamping WordPress content on the blockchain is among one of the best ideas he has seen for this technology so far.

When asked how he plans to “balance chasing the new and shiny with all of WordPress’ existing legacy APIs,” Mullenweg said that “PHP is going to be crucial to us for many years to come.” He recognized that the project has fallen behind in maintenance with some of its older APIs but that work on Gutenberg can be done in parallel.

The new triage team is currently going through all the tickets, refreshing patches, and working on taking them to resolution. Mullenweg noted that WordCamp Europe hosted the first ever triage table at its contributor day and said that this new area is ripe for contribution.

The REST API, despite its broad support and noteworthy contributors, is one area that Mullenweg said has held Gutenberg back. He said it still does not have the demonstrated use that its advocates predicted when working to get it merged into core and cautioned that WordPress should always use an API first before shipping it to the world.

Mullenweg concluded the Q&A by estimating that Gutenberg is only 10% of the way down the road towards solving the problems that WordPress contributors set out to tackle. He predicts that building on this initial effort will carry into the next decade.

Post Status will be live streaming Publish Online on July 8-9, 2019. The event, which is geared towards WordPress professionals, has traditionally been limited to club members. This year Post Status creator Brian Krogsgard is opening up the live stream for anyone to watch for free.

“I debated so strongly on this,” Krogsgard said. “But these are great talks — valuable to the community — and I want to make them accessible.”

Publish Online will feature 14 presentations from community leaders who are deeply invested in the WordPress ecosystem in one way or another. The talks are centered around WordPress core processes and vision, mixed with web business topics.

Those who want to watch for free will need to register for the event. Access to the live stream will be available at PostStatus.com/live. Post Status members will have access to all the recordings, transcripts, and audio after the event has concluded. The site is currently running an early bird special on club membership, discounted to $79/year ahead of the Publish Online event.

In this episode, Malcom Peralty and I discuss what’s new in WordPress 5.2.2, XML Sitemaps possibly landing in core, and WooCommerce clarifying its CDB seller policy. We also provide a preview of what to expect at WordCamp EU and congratulate Marcel Bootsman for successfully walking to Berlin, Germany.

Stories Discussed:

WordPress 5.2.2

WordPress 5.2.2 Squashes 13 Bugs

XML Sitemaps in Core?

Marcel Bootsman Arrives at WCEU

WordCamp EU Event Guide

WordCamp EU Live Stream Link to be announced

ClassifAI from 10up

WooCommerce Clarifies its stance on stores selling CBD products

Transcript:

EPISODE357Transcript

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Listen To Episode #357:

Writing novels is hard, and requires vast, unbroken slabs of time. Four quiet hours is a resource that I can put to good use. Two slabs of time, each two hours long, might add up to the same four hours, but are not nearly as productive as an unbroken four.

Neil Stephenson on Why I’m a Bad Correspondent

Jason Bahl, creator of WPGraphQL, is joining the Gatsby team to work on WPGraphQL (and its immediate ecosystem) full-time.

Gatsby, the immensely popular static site generator for React.js, lets users pull data into pages from WordPress, Drupal, Contentful, Google Docs, AirTable, markdown, and any other data sources. It is used by tens of thousands of developers and downloaded nearly 500,000 times each month.

Gatsby founder Kyle Mathews created Gatsby Inc. as a company to further the project’s goals, and received $3.8M in seed funding in May 2018. The investment is being used to build cloud services for Gatsby and improve Gatsby’s core open source software. As the company has grown, Gatsby is beginning to invest more heavily in the open source ecosystem that surrounds the project.

With WordPress powering 34% of the top 10 million websites, it’s only natural that Gatsby would look to WPGraphQL, one of the most promising projects in the WP ecosystem, for its next investment in open source. The more WordPress developers Gatsby can get using GraphQL and JavaScript, the more it benefits the greater Gatsby ecosystem.

“The number of developers using Gatsby to build sites where the content is managed by WordPress is growing,” Bahl said. “The current `gatsby-source-wordpress` plugin pulls data into Gatsby using the WordPress REST API, but the REST API has a lot of pain points that are proving to be very difficult to get past.

“WPGraphQL solves many of those pain points already, and has potential to solve even more. The more robust WPGraphQL is, the better it is for all JavaScript consumers, whether it be Next.js, Gridsome (a Vue static site generator) or Gatsby.”

Bahl followed the Gatsby project from afar before striking up a relationship with the team through the various Slack channels where the community is active. A year and a half ago, he moved the docs.wpgraphql.com site from WordPress to Gatsby, where the content is stored in Markdown files on Github. This allows users in the community to contribute to the docs by submitting pull requests.

In February 2019, Bahl gave a presentation at WordCamp Phoenix on “Building Static Sites with WordPress, Gatsby and WPGraphQL” After that he saw more growth in the crossover ecosystems – more people in the Gatsby Slack asking about WordPress, and more developers in the WPGraphQL Slack asking about Gatsby.

“I’ve been following all things GraphQL for a few years, so Gatsby has been on my radar for a while as Gatsby uses GraphQL to create a ‘content mesh’ where data can be pulled from many sources into one Gatsby site,” Bahl said.

“The more I followed Gatsby from afar, the more intrigued I was. The development experience of Gatsby is great, especially if you enjoy React, which I do.”

Bahl is active in both Slacks, on both GitHub repos, and on Twitter, helping people build Gatsby sites with WordPress and GraphQL, which is how he developed a relationship with the team.

“In mid April I made it known to a few people that I would love to work on WPGraphQL full-time if I had the opportunity,” he said. “On May 30, Kyle Matthews direct messaged me on Twitter saying Gatsby is planning on investing in WordPress more and they’d love to chat. The following week I had some video calls with Kyle, Sam, and some other folks on the Gatsby team, and they made me a formal offer to join the Gatsby teams to make WPGraphQL the best it can be.”

The WPGraphQL project already has a rapidly growing library of extensions for popular WordPress plugins, despite the fact that the project has not yet reached a stable 1.0 release. Bahl’s new opportunity with the Gatsby team will enable him to work with the community’s momentum to get WPGraphQL further on its roadmap.

“Working on WPGraphQL full time will allow me to work on features and bugs that I’ve not had adequate time to focus on while also maintaining a full time job,” Bahl said.

“WPGraphQL is used in production by many already, but it’s still pre 1.0 because of some breaking changes I foresee but haven’t had adequate time to dedicate to addressing.”

Bahl will also be available to provide better resources for the community, such as documentation, example codebases, and courses and tutorials, in addition to attending more WordCamps and other conferences, participating in podcasts, and interacting on GitHub issues, Slack, and other communication channels.

“It will also provide more time to focus on conversations on whether GraphQL should be part of WordPress core (or not), and educate the community and core maintainers on the tradeoffs,” Bahl said.

In hiring Bahl to work on WPGraphQL, Gatsby is making a significant investment in the WordPress community that depends on this project. The improved support and quicker pace of development should bring peace of mind to those who are already using WPGraphQL in production.

“I’ll also be working closely with other members of the Gatsby team to make the experience of using Gatsby with WordPress a great experience,” Bahl said. “We have a lot of ideas about how WPGraphQL can make the Gatsby + WordPress experience a fantastic one for developers and users alike.”