WordPress.org

In the summer of 2019, I was asked to help out with a WordPress release. A few months before, the Core Team representatives reached out to other teams in an effort to increase the diversity of the release teams, and I started seriously considering it.

At the time, I was already heavily involved in the WordPress ecosystem and was in my second year as the WordPress Community and Partnership Manager at SiteGround, but I had no experience whatsoever on how WordPress gets done from a Core point of view. Still, when Josepha Haden, WordPress.org Executive Director, pinged me, I said yes without hesitation. And it proved one of the most challenging and rewarding experiences of my life. Here is how. 

Josepha and I walking around Vienna, WCEU 2016 – Photo by Luca Sartoni

An Accidental Contributor: My Path in Tech

From an early age, I seemed to be predestined to become a developer. My parents are programmers, they started in the sixties, and I got my first personal computer in 1982 when people in Italy didn’t really have an idea of what those were.

I followed after their work ethos and I thought that their job was fascinating, making a machine do what you want, but I was drawn to other career options. In fact, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do when I grew up, but computers and websites kept being a big part of my personal and professional life.

While back-end programming was never something that interested me, I found myself taking a class on web design in 1999, then signed up for a degree in Arts and Multimedia in 2004. I finally found WordPress in 2008 and started making a living off of it in 2010. 

Soon, I realized my true skill was helping clients who were coming to me with a request for a website to better focus on their “why” for the website and think about their business and marketing strategy before they hired me. I wrote books on business planning, productivity, and websites. I also started giving talks at WordCamps and other events to educate freelancers on those topics. 

In 2015, I randomly met some people who were involved in the WordPress community, which led me to start contributing too. I didn’t have development skills so I never thought I could contribute to OSS, but it turns out that was unnecessary. I met people who pointed me to the many different teams that make WordPress and started being active in Polyglots first and Community later.

My first WordCamp Talk: The Rebirth of the Italian Community, at WordCamp London 2016

I kept working on my business, but the more I contributed to WordPress, the more I wanted to find a way to help thousands of people at a time. My outreach efforts of giving talks, helping community organizers, and writing content needed to scale. 

This is where I met SiteGround. In the summer of 2017, they were looking for a Community Manager and despite not being one by trade I decided to apply and got the job. Joining the company allowed me to have sponsored time to contribute to WordPress. It also allowed me to tap into the collective knowledge of my colleagues when I start cooking up new ideas for the project.

So I said yes without hesitation, but the truth is that this yes was almost five years in the making. In addition, I felt that Josepha and SiteGround trusted me to do a good job. In return, I trusted the WordPress community to help me figure out all the things that I needed to learn.

How WordPress Gets Done

The other encouraging factor was that ever since WordPress 5.0, a release was no longer made by one person, as it used to be for years, or a person with a couple of deputies. Now there was a whole team at work, affectionately known as “the squad,” so there are many hands on deck.

A Lot of Communication

During a release cycle, there is a lot of communication. There are blog posts from different Make teams. At each stage of the release, there are blog posts in the News section of WordPress.org. There is constant chatter in the public Slack channel and there is a private one which is the safety net for the new people that initially might feel intimidated by asking questions in a large public channel. 

The Different Roles in the Release Squad

WordPress 5.3 had a release squad of 12 people and 654 contributors. WordPress 5.5 threw it out of the park with 805 contributors!

The thing that I love the most about this model for the release is the variety of roles that it includes. There are developers, designers, marketers, technical writers, and project managers. WordPress is not only made of code, and it’s great to see all these different skills coming together to contribute to its release. 

The role of the Release Coordinator (the one I covered for WordPress 5.3 and 5.4) and of the Triage PM (role that was covered by the excellent David Baumwald for 5.3, 5.4, and 5.5) is to try to keep an eye on all the moving parts. And I say try because it’s nearly impossible. This is why there are focus leads for the different parts that are getting worked on.

Matt Mullenweg is the project lead and has been the release lead since WordPress 5.0. He comes up with the high-level roadmap and the focus projects.  But beyond that, he is not involved with the day-to-day life of Core development. In over one year of being involved in Core releases, Matt asked only once to add a feature. 

I am annoyed when people think that everything that happens in WordPress is because Matt wants it that way. It diminishes the role of all the people who care about the project and take it upon themselves to move things forward, to shepherd issues, to champion tickets, and in general to commit to contribute to make WordPress better for everyone, no matter if they do it for one ticket or work on it full time. 

Component Maintainers and Core Committers

A group of people who are instrumental in shaping a release are the component maintainers. They are responsible to look after a certain component that makes up Core and see how tickets in that area are proceeding. They are the ones who can evaluate if a ticket is ready to be merged.

Once a ticket is deemed ready, Core Committers enter the scene. They do a final review of the ticket. They might request some changes, or make the changes themselves while committing. This is the thing that surprised me the most probably. I really didn’t think that a commit could take hours, but it definitely can. In the releases I coordinated, I definitely observed not a lot of engagement from maintainers and committers, and this is very demotivating for people working on tickets. Not everything can go into a release, even if the patch is ready, because there aren’t enough people to review, give feedback, and ultimately commit. With few resources, you have to make choices and those will not always align with each WordPress user or contributor preferences. 

This is probably one of the biggest challenges WordPress will have to tackle moving forward: How can we reactivate people who can give a big help?

The Release Party

Photo by Florian Ziegler

Despite these issues, things get done and when the release is ready, we celebrate with a party. I don’t know who started calling them Release Parties or when they started. What I know is that for 5.3 and 5.4, I hosted quite a few, and they were all a lot of fun. 

On the day of one of the steps of the release (it might be Betas, Release Candidates or General Release) the Core channel gets very active: a lot of people come online to see how the version of WordPress gets released. There are multiple steps and different people involved with different tasks. The release steps are documented in the Core handbook and are followed publicly so everyone can see them all. 

The biggest party is the general release day; there is one specific moment which is incredibly powerful. WordPress has a download counter, so before releasing the new version, the squad takes a screenshot of the previous one, we all say goodbye and welcome the new kid. Despite everything being virtual, this moment is almost tangible and will never cease to move me. We made WordPress, once again.

Screenshots of the WordPress counter seconds before WordPress 5.5 was released and two hours later.

12 Months as a Core Contributor

While I was writing this article, it occurred to me that I have been a Core contributor for a year now. I still have my full-time role at SiteGround, which at times I found hard to juggle, so I have to give my team credit for their support.

I still can’t write PHP and despise JavaScript deeply, but when I look back, I am incredibly proud of the changes that have happened in the past 12 months. I can not take credit for all of them, but I am happy I was able to be somehow part of them.

Release Schedule

One thing that a lot of contributors asked for was a mid-term schedule of releases, to better fit them around their work and personal calendar. Being the new kid can be hard because you don’t know the whole history and background of why things are done a certain way, but that is also a perk. You are free to restart conversations. After discussing it with the squad and other teams, it was clear to me that it was just a matter of “who is going to bring this up with Matt”. And so I did. A couple of days later a tentative release schedule until WordPress 6.0 was published on the Core blog, and we have been using it ever since.

Bigger Release Squad and Mentorship

The release squad is also getting bigger with every release. Many teams are involved in making it and affected by it. It’s important for all these teams to be represented in the process. In WordPress 5.5, there are several new roles, and in 5.6 there will be even more: Test, Documentation, Support are all vital components of what makes WordPress great, so having their feedback while the software is in active development is important.

And it’s important to have mentors. This is a major improvement that Josepha introduced in WordPress 5.3. The release squad is not only made of focus leads, but there is a growing group of mentors able to help new contributors learn the ropes. The idea is that those people will eventually become mentors and teach new people. This is another great way to have more and more people involved in Core, with different skills and backgrounds. 

And this brings me to the biggest change (and challenge) of all. WordPress 5.6, which is shaping up to be a massive release, will have a squad entirely made of women and people who identify as female. Like a lot of things in WordPress, it all started with a “Thinking out loud” moment and is now a reality. Work on this release will start very soon, and I am excited to be part of it as a mentor.

Fellow female contributors leading the Polyglots team at WordCamp Torino 2018. Picture by Gianni Vascellari

WordPress Needs Your Help

I wish I could say it is all unicorns and rainbows, but it’s not. The number of people actively involved in making this project a reality is still very small compared to the magnitude of its reach.

I am very much a doer, so I wish people took the time and energy they take into critiquing WordPress and turn it into active contribution time. Yes, sometimes it requires being very stubborn about a ticket and it requires to follow up on it relentlessly, but I still think it’s worth it.

Active participation also means leaving constructive feedback in tickets or offering to take notes during dev chat. That is the curse and the beauty of a massive project. There is always something to do!

In the last few years, I have also seen an increase in contribution from different kinds of companies. At SiteGround, for example, we mostly contributed to events and the community for years. We sponsored, and we volunteered, we were organizers and speakers. We worked a lot within the Spanish WordPress community to help it develop and grow, and now it’s one of the largest in the global community. In the last year, we have increased the hours we dedicate to more technical teams. I am still active in Core as a mentor and as the team representative. One of our WordPress engineers, Stanimir Stoyanov, is part of the Security team, and one of our JavaScript Engineers, Kiril Zhelyazkov, is now dedicating a couple of days per week to Gutenberg.

My colleague and Core and Security contributor, Stanimir Stoyanov

These topics align with our values, so it was a natural progression for us to become more involved.

Finally, I hope to see people get involved in a proposal I published a few days ago in the Core blog about end-to-end tests. Right now there is one, and I’m sure we can do better. Again, developers are not the only ones needed. Users are the rarest contributors and probably the ones the project needs the most to finally have some user testing in place. I am not a developer, and I’m happy that non-developers can make an impact. 

My Personal Concerns and Hopes for the Future of the Project

When I started contributing to Core, I started a note on my computer with some observations. Not having 17 years of experience in the project helps me see things without bias, and not being a developer helps me see the project more as a living, breathing body, instead of components or tickets. Allow me to share my concerns, hopes, and dreams for the future.

Component Maintainers and Core Committers: You Are Needed More Than Ever

At the time of writing this article, the project has about 60 committers and 60 component maintainers, with a lot of people pulling double, triple, and sometimes sextuple duties. But the reality is that in WordPress 5.4 and 5.5 hundreds of commits were made by Sergey Biryukov. I am incredibly grateful for Sergey’s work. At the same time, I feel like we are inadvertently building a bus factor into Core. The majority of the people with Core Commit access did not commit one ticket. Similarly, I reached out to all the component maintainers to hear about their plans for the upcoming releases and only about 50% of the components replied.

How do we make sure that the people who have the power, and thus the responsibility, to help with committing and shepherding tickets are involved? But also, how do we encourage people to step down and declare themselves inactive so new people can step up? 

My career spans over 25 years in different industries, and one thing remains the same: when people see there is someone else filling a role, they will be less motivated and sometimes even intimidated to step up. Scarcity not only drives purchases, it drives new engagement.

The Community Team, for example, maintains a list of deputies and their different statuses. I have been wondering if Core could do something similar so when new people want to step up they can see at a first glance which components are missing maintainers. People who complain about “The Core Developers” will not see them as a blob, but as individuals who at any point in time might be inactive for a period. When you see that there are actually only a few people actively reviewing and committing, you might be more prone to understand why not every ticket can make it to the finish line.

Documentation Is the Highest Form of Generosity

I say this every time I speak about contributing to OSS: documentation is frequently lacking. Oftentimes, what is there is outdated. 

How do we make sure that documentation is not an afterthought but is baked into the development process?

Handbook from it.wordpress.org – How to translate WordPress to Italian. Photo by Gianni Vascellari

There is a lot of work put into writing dev notes for the changes that affect development, but that is not the only documentation that is needed. Some of the processes described in the Core handbooks are outdated, some are missing because they live in experienced contributors’ minds.

As a big fan of Gutenberg and rich, engaging text, I wish our handbooks would fully leverage the power of the block editor and be more inviting. Right now they are a wall of text and whenever we tell people to look at the handbooks I feel my heart shrinking.

Possible solutions, which I am not sure are technically doable, but a girl can dream: sync with GitHub to solve at least the version control issue. Then recruit, recruit, recruit and work with Documentation, Meta, and Design to provide useful, engaging, readable, easy-to-scan handbooks.

Keep Track of the Moving Parts and Work as One

The other thing that I notice often is how teams, focuses, and components work in silos.

This is absolutely not done to be gatekeepers, it’s just how every team self-organized over the years.

We need to find a way to have a bird’s eye view of what is going into the next release and what are all the moving parts.

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Trac is very granular and you have a number of ready-made reports, you can filter by milestones and see how many tickets are in each component, but that is just part of the story.

Yes, I am talking about finding a way to manage the project as a whole and not as bits and bobs. 

Enter GitHub. At Some Point. 

This is not happening anytime soon, but I hope it will eventually happen. Move development and project management of WordPress to GitHub, like Gutenberg has been doing. 

I know that for many it will be an incentive to contribute to WordPress in a way that is more familiar. It will lower the bar to entrance, which is always welcome. With some handy tutorials, it will allow non-technical people to contribute to documentation, testing, and project management.

The Future is Bright

Despite all the issues, or maybe because of them, the future of WordPress is bright. 

I have been lurking around multiple teams in these years, and lately I notice more people coming on board, more people being involved in each release, more people stepping up in leadership roles in different teams. I have also noticed an increase in diversity, which is always a welcome change.

Bottom line: WordPress needs all of us to make it happen. I hope to see you on board!

With all of the advancements made in JavaScript and newer, shinier frameworks, it is sometimes easy to forget that WordPress still relies on the aging jQuery library. The same holds true for thousands of plugins and themes in the official WordPress directories.

For some, this may feel like a journey back to the mid-2000s, a time when JavaScript very much felt like the Wild West. jQuery solved many issues for a programming language that had not kept up with what developers needed to accomplish.

A ticket created by Aaron Jorbin four years ago to move WordPress to the latest 3.x branch of jQuery is finally coming to fruition. However, the WordPress development team will need to make this transition in stages, particularly after waiting for so long.

WordPress has fallen behind on keeping jQuery updated. For a platform that routinely suggests that users need to be running the latest and greatest version, it is odd that WordPress itself has not done the same with third-party code that it relies on. WordPress currently bundles jQuery version 1.12.4, a version of the library released in 2016. It is also a version that supports Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8.

“Mostly because for the last couple of years the focus has shifted to other/more modern JavaScript libraries,” said WordPress lead developer Andrew Ozz on why the platform has fallen behind. “The number of JavaScript developers that contribute to core is limited, and there is a very high demand.”

In the long term, he said a future option might be to move the WordPress admin to native (vanilla) JavaScript completely, which is a sentiment shared in the comments on his announcement post to update the version of jQuery bundled with WordPress. “This would be great,” he said, “and at the same time, a very large effort.”

Far too many themes and plugins rely on this dated version of jQuery to move any faster. While plugins could choose to overwrite core WordPress’s bundled version of jQuery with the latest version, themes have had no such option. The official theme directory guidelines require themes to utilize the core-bundled scripts, including jQuery. There is a good reason for this: for the most part, it ensures compatibility with core and third-party plugins.

However, now it is time to move on.

What Developers and Users Need to Know

WordPress has a three-stage plan to bring jQuery up to date. The core team asks that theme and plugin developers begin testing their extensions with the Test jQuery Updates plugin. This will help them bring code up to date throughout this transitional period.

The first step in this process will be removing the jQuery Migrate 1.4.1 script from WordPress 5.5, which was released earlier today. This version of jQuery Migrate makes older code compatible and helps developers migrate to jQuery 1.9+.

This move will undoubtedly break some plugins and themes. The core team has made the Enable jQuery Migrate Helper plugin available for end-users. “It is intended to be run in production on sites that experience jQuery-related problems after updating to 5.5,” said Ozz. “It works by re-enabling jQuery Migrate and by showing the warnings about the use of outdated/deprecated jQuery functions to site admins.”

The long-term goal is to get developers to update their extensions. In the meantime, this plugin should ease some of the problems.

Ozz said the biggest thing developers need to do right now is to make sure they are testing their extensions against WordPress 5.5. “Ideally, paying more attention to any old jQuery-based scripts and confirming they still work as expected,” he continued. “In almost all cases, the fixes are trivial.”

Beyond WordPress 5.5, things will start to take shape. The tentative plan is to update to the latest version of jQuery and add the latest version of jQuery Migrate as part of the WordPress 5.6 release.

“Again, Migrate will be used to help in updating jQuery based scripts, and also as a backward-compatibility ‘fix’ while plugins and themes get updated,” said Ozz. “The version of Migrate in WordPress 5.6 will be different, as it will correspond to the latest jQuery version. It will serve the same purpose as when it was added for the first time, but now will help core, plugins, and themes get updated from jQuery 1.12.4 to 3.5.1 (or later).”

The third leg of the process will be to once again remove jQuery Migrate from WordPress. This change is tentatively planned for WordPress 5.7, which will not be released until 2021. The end goal is to remove the reliance on Migrate and ship the latest version of jQuery until someday — perhaps far into the future — there may no longer be a need for bundling it with WordPress at all.

“Following the best practices and the recommendations of the jQuery team, Migrate should be used as a helper tool, not as a permanent backward-compatibility solution,” said Ozz. “Ideally, WordPress will be able to do this.”

WordPress 5.5 “Eckstine” landed today, named for American jazz singer Billy Eckstine. This release introduces major improvements for the block editor and the security of WordPress. It was made possible by the contributions of 805 volunteers (with 38% of them being new contributors.) The 5.5 update is a testament to the stability of WordPress during uncertain times, as well as its unstoppable, distributed contributor base, who continue to get things done despite the pandemic’s unique challenges.

WordPress continues refining the editing experience with more than 1,500 updates from 10 releases of the Gutenberg plugin included in 5.5. (The plugin is where all the magic is tested prior to landing in WordPress releases, and features are periodically rolled in.) Some of the most notable changes include inline image editing, device previews, and smoother block movement with better drag-and-drop, block movers, block selection, and block relocation.

Block Patterns are making their debut in WordPress 5.5, with a handful of default patterns already available in the block inserter. This new feature helps users build pages faster by allowing them to instantly place sets of blocks that are already artfully arranged. We have written extensively about why block patterns will change everything and it will be exciting to see what developers do with them now that the feature is in core.

Block Directory Enables Block Discovery and Installation Inside the Editor

WordPress recently launched a block directory for single-block plugins and users can now search for and install blocks directly inside the editor. Selected blocks are downloaded seamlessly in the background and automatically activated and placed in the content. The advantage is that users don’t have to break their workflows in order to install new functionality. Blocks installed via the editor can also be uninstalled from the plugins page in the admin.

Block patterns, combined with the new block directory, will make page building much faster inside the editor by enabling users to quickly spin up layouts and add blocks on the fly.

WordPress Security Takes a Giant Leap with Automatic Updates for Themes and Plugins

Version 5.5 introduces a new UI for enabling auto-updates for themes and plugins. This is an exciting new era for WordPress that brings a higher level of website security while requiring less effort from users. Those who choose to get on the automatic updates train will no longer have to log into their sites and be greeted with a slew of nagging update notices. These updates will happen the same day they are available, so users don’t have to check in as often and sites are better protected from plugin and theme vulnerabilities getting exploited.

WordPress uses wp-cron to fetch updates for plugins and themes twice per day. The feature ships turned off by default in WordPress 5.5, so users will need to visit the theme and plugin pages in the admin to enable automatic updates. The bulk actions menu dropdown now has options for enabling or disabling auto-updates on all plugins, but users can always enable the updates for select plugins if they have any concerns.

Other notable updates in WordPress 5.5 include the following:

• XML Sitemaps: WordPress now includes extensible core sitemaps, and many users will no longer need a plugin for this functionality. This basic implementation was completed in a way that will not impact performance or cause conflicts with other plugins that add sitemaps.
• Lazy Loading Images: WordPress images will now wait to load until users scroll them into view, speeding up performance, especially on mobile.
• Improved Accessibility: Metaboxes can now be moved with the keyboard, assistive devices can see status messages in the image editor, copying links in media screens and modal dialogs can now be done with a click of a button, and more.
• Update Themes and Plugins by Uploading ZIP files: – Users can now update plugins and themes manually by uploading a ZIP file, an improvement for scenarios where one does not have server access.
• Final Dashicon Library Update: The Dashicons project has been discontinued in favor of the new Icon Component. This last update to the library adds 39 block editor icons and 26 other icons.

For a more technical breakdown of some of the changes under the hood, check out the developer notes and the 5.5 field guide.

Here it is! Named “Eckstine” in honor of Billy Eckstine, this latest and greatest version of WordPress is available for download or update in your dashboard.

To access a site hosted with WordPress.com or connected to WordPress.com through the Jetpack plugin, log in with your WordPress.com credentials. After clicking on the Login button, select Continue with WordPress.com.

You can also select the others options to Continue with Google or Continue with Apple if the email address linked to these services matches the email address of your WordPress.com account.

Next, enter the email address associated with your WordPress.com account and click next. From there you can either choose to receive a login link to be sent to your email address or click on the link to “enter your password instead” to use your password to log in.  If you select the option to receive a login link, you’ll be given the option to open Mail where you should have received a new email with a button to click to ‘Log in to the app’. This link expires in one hour and when clicked should redirect you to the app where you will see a list of your sites and have the option to either Connect another site or press ‘Done’ to start managing your WordPress.com connected sites.

See the login procedure below:

The Themes Team suspended Astra from the official theme directory just a few short weeks after it became the first non-default WordPress theme to surpass one million active installs. The reason: the theme was breaking the directory’s ban on affiliate links. The theme has since been reinstated. However, it has been delisted from the popular themes list.

After the Themes Team handed down an initial five-week suspension, the story continued to unfold through various channels over the weekend and into the start of the new week. Brainstorm Force, the company behind the theme, argued that it did not violate the affiliate link rule because the theme was simply filtering referral IDs of third-party plugins. The plugins were technically supplying the links. The company also asked for lenience because this was its first violation.

Since the initial discussion, the Themes Team has reinstated the theme while bumping it off the popular themes list. The goal is to make sure existing users still have access to updates while providing a method for dealing with guidelines violations, a method that does not go to the extreme of outright suspension. The team also added an additional week of punishment after finding a sixth affiliate-related violation missed in the initial review. Astra will now be delisted for a total of six weeks.

Astra is not the first suspension of a popular theme over the years. These high-profile suspensions can lead to the loss of thousands of dollars in revenue if the theme’s business model relies on traffic from WordPress.org. In 2017, a five-month suspension of the Zerif Lite theme left its creators with a decline of 63% in revenue. Zerif Lite’s user count was around one-third of Astra’s current total.

While it will take some time to see the results, being delisted will likely cut into Brainstorm Force’s revenue. The theme upsells a pro version of their theme. It is a common freemium model that many theme companies employ.

The WordPress.org theme review guidelines ban affiliate links. More precisely, the guideline is as follows:

Themes are not allowed to have affiliate URLs or links.

Technically, Brainstorm Force did not directly output affiliate links via its theme. Instead, the theme injected the company’s referral ID into affiliate links for third-party plugins when they were active on a user’s site. In and of itself, this type of injection is nothing nefarious. The plugins themselves allow for such filtering of their affiliate links, presumably to entice theme authors to make a few dollars by recommending and integrating with them.

As for the Astra theme, the question is whether it violated the affiliate guideline. When the rule was written, the Themes Team was most likely thinking about direct links within the theme and not a scenario where a theme was injecting a referral ID or filtering an existing link from a plugin.

According to the Themes Team, at least two of the affiliate IDs in Astra were for plugins that the theme recommended but did not actually integrate with or support in any way. In at least once instance, the theme automatically updated a database option for the Monster Insights plugin to add an affiliate ID — automatically updating any database option without user action is generally not allowed.

Regardless of individual opinions on the Theme Team’s complete ban of affiliate links, it is not a cut-and-dry situation of simply allowing or disallowing.

“It is also about needing to understand the legal impact of disclosures,” said Carolina Nymark, a team representative. “It is not something that the team can take responsibility for, nor look away if authors do not follow it.”

Astra’s Apology and Response

Sujay Pawar, a co-founder of Brainstorm Force, published an open apology on the Astra blog. However, this apology post created its own controversy within the community. The current post was not the first apology. Pawar changed his original post and removed some of the earlier promises he made to the community.

According to multiple sources within the community and a comment on the post, he had promised to dedicate 16 hours from one of the company’s senior developers to contribute work for the Themes Team. Along with this contribution, he promised to spend 5% of the company’s resources toward open source development and to donate to future WordCamps.

“These last few days have been very emotional for me and the entire team,” said Pawar. “I have never been in such a stressful situation in my life. As you can imagine, I wrote many versions of this apology and just wasn’t sure what was the best way to do it.”

For some people in the community, changing the post’s content seemed suspicious. He had changed it around the same time the theme was reinstated on WordPress.org. However, the issue was likely the result of bad timing. Pawar was forthcoming about having written the original post and later removing parts of it.

“My initial apology did include the specifics of how we are planning to increase our commitment to WordPress, but after more thought, I felt it wasn’t the right place to share that,” he said. “I don’t want our contributions to be overshadowed or tied back to a rule violation. We still plan to honor our commitment, and we will release those details in a dedicated post.”

Pawar has no hard feelings for the Themes Team. For him, it has been a high-stress weekend that he will no doubt recover from. He is attempting to rectify the situation the best he can.

“I have a lot of respect for all members of Themes Team,” he said. “They work tirelessly to move the WordPress ecosystem forward. I 100% believe that guidelines must be enforced because it’s the only way to ensure that WordPress keeps growing. As one of the most popular theme authors, it’s our goal to lead by setting a good example and work together with the TRT to set better standards.”

Long Term: Delisting Themes Instead of Suspending

The Themes Team does not have a lot of options when it comes to punitive measures for guideline violations. In a large part, this is the result of limitations of the software in use. The team simply needs better tools.

“The punitive measures the team has right now is suspend it or do nothing,” said William Patton, a Themes Team representative. “There is no in-between, and in a lot of cases, neither of those two options are ideal. From past experience, I have found that asking authors repeatedly for changes is either ineffective or they fix it but the behavior returns after a short time. Suspension has been quite effective in some cases but it is quite a lot of work for the team to manage and maintain lists or time frames of what happened when and to revisit after a given time.”

Patton said that the threat of suspension without action is ineffective. However, actually going through with suspending a theme often has implications for end-users. In some cases, there may be an urgent security update that users need to get, but the suspension system does not make that easy to manage.

There is now an open meta ticket to offer theme directory administrators the option to delist a theme. In effect, this would keep a theme such as Astra available in the directory if someone knows the direct URL. It would also allow the theme author to provide updates, such as security fixes, to users without direct approval from the Themes Team. However, the theme would not be available through the popular themes list or search.

This offers the team a less drastic option than a full-on suspension and has no negative drawbacks for existing theme users.

Currently, the team found what they described as a “hacky” method of essentially delisting Astra. Because the popular themes list algorithm uses the theme’s publication date to help determine a theme’s popularity, the team changed this date for the theme to push it down the popular list. It is not a perfect solution, but it provided a quick middle ground between doing nothing and suspension, at least until a more permanent solution is in place. It also gives them an early chance to test out the effects such a measure would have.

Punitive measures have always been a struggle for the team. On the one hand, they do not like to suspend themes for wrongdoing, regardless of whether such wrongdoing was intentional. On the other, they must attempt to provide a fair playing field for all theme authors. Threats of punishment for guideline violations ring hollow if there is no follow-through. It is not an easy position, and team members can quickly become victims of harassment or unwanted private messages from theme developers and outsiders.

“We had several occasions where theme authors would ‘follow us home’ with blame and different kinds of suggestions,” said Nymark.

One of the ways the Themes Team has been dealing with this is by using the relatively anonymous “@trtmessenger” account when suspending themes. This is the route the team took when handling the Astra theme suspension and followup decisions.

The team has dealt with attacks toward individual members over the years on various decisions it has made. In many cases, the representative who delivered a particular decision, regardless of their personal role in it, bared the brunt of the negative feedback. Far too often, it was a case of shooting the messenger, and the current reps have found a workable solution for this issue.

“This is an account that enables messages to be sent without one single person being held accountable for the message,” said Patton. “It is intended to prevent anyone from getting any negative feedback directly from a decision.”

In light of the recent conversations about the Unsplash plugin’s CDN, several extensions have popped up this week for disabling it. By default, the plugin serves images from the CDN but saves copies to the WordPress media library in case the plugin is disabled or removed. The plugin does not currently have an option to change this.

Disable Unsplash CDN is the first to be published to the WordPress.org directory for changing the plugin’s default behavior. There are no options or settings – activating it turns it on. Xaver Birsak, a prolific WordPress plugin author, created it to help users who may experience slower page speed caused by the Unsplash CDN.

“I’ve followed the release of the official Unsplash plugin as well the strange one-star rating from Matt Mullenweg which is think is not appropriate,” Birsak said. “The problem he mentioned was, in addition to the Unsplash license, the fact that images are being served from Unsplash (Imgix) servers. I don’t think that this is totally unnecessary from Unsplash as a CDN can serve images much quicker in most cases. For some users this is maybe not the case.”

Birsak was referencing Matt Mullenweg’s recent one-star review of the Unsplash plugin, which drew the ire of many plugin developers whose ability to monetize their products can hinge on getting decent reviews. The review called the plugin “sketchy” and called into question the practice of making the CDN the default:

It’s unclear why they want you to use their CDN and make that the default, it’s probably to support their new advertising business model and get analytics for it. Running a CDN is expensive, and if you’re not paying for it then you are the product. I would not be surprised if Unsplash hotlinked images broke at some point in the future.

If you want a CDN, you should run one for your entire site, not just certain images from a single source — in fact having multiple CDNs running at the same time could slow down your site because of the additional DNS lookups.

Birsak said he checked the plugin and found a simple solution for bypassing the hotlinking, which only requires a few lines of code.

“Since it’s so easy, and others may find it useful, I released this plugin,” Birsak said. “Nowadays with GDPR and the invalidation of the Privacy Shield people are more likely to be concerned about sending data to third party services. So disabling the CDN should at least be an option.”

WordPress developer Tom Nowell also created a quick plugin to disable Unsplash’s CDN, which is now available on GitHub.

“I don’t have qualms with Unsplash themselves but I did miss having the option to choose for myself,” Nowell said regarding the plugin’s CDN default. “Rather than argue to add it, I spent a little time and built the plugin, it’s only small so didn’t take much time. As for the CDN, it’s nice to save bandwidth, though for local development it’s always faster to switch it off.”

Unsplash Plugin Will Not Add an Option to Disable the CDN – Its API Guidelines Require Apps to Use It

The plugins that disable Unsplash’s CDN could immediately become obsolete if Unsplash decided to build in an option into the official plugin to do the same. The company has confirmed the team has no current plans to so.

“The CDN is a feature that dynamically serves the right size and format of image, and includes performance optimizations not available via additional plugins like WordPress.com’s Jetpack or most CDNs,” Unsplash co-founder Luke Chesser said. “We do this to improve the performance of the image loading and allow Unsplash contributors to count the number of times their images have been seen.”

In addition to sharing this data with contributing photographers, Unsplash advertisers also need this data to continue getting value from the new Unsplash for Brands business model.

The total monthly cost in 2019 for the company’s image hosting with Imgix was $42,408, which means Unsplash spends north of $500k per year to serve optimized images via its CDN. Chesser said the cost of the CDN is “very low relative to the number of requests and traffic it can serve,” given how optimized and performant the image serving infrastructure is. Last year Unsplash sent petabytes of data through Imgix’s CDN for 250 million variations of the library’s source images.

“We treat brands as contributors as they also share images on Unsplash,” Chesser said. “We report downloads and views back to them. So yes, the view and download counts do matter to our business from a monetary perspective, but to be clear, if you take away brands, we would still have this requirement as it’s central to growing the library and encouraging more contributors.”

Providing stats to brands undoubtedly helps pay the bills and keeps the lights on, so it is no wonder the requirement to use the CDN will remain in the WordPress plugin. In fact, this requirement was built into Unsplash’s API guidelines in 2018 and applies to all applications accessing the collection:

“All API uses must use the hotlinked image URLs returned by the API under the photo.urls  properties. This applies to all uses of the image and not just search results. “

In 2019, Unsplash received more traffic from its API partners than from the company’s own website and official apps. Any successful monetization strategy that hinges on advertising will need to deliver those stats and requiring applications use the CDN in order to use the API is one way to do that.

Matt Mullenweg recently asked what these API guidelines mean for existing WordPress plugins, like Instant Images, that serve Unsplash images without using the CDN. The plugin has more than 50,000 active installations.

“When we released the updated guidelines we applied them proactively to new apps and worked with developers on a case by case basis over a one year period to consider hotlinking and downloads for legacy apps,” Chesser said. “Instant Images was built before we made the update to the guidelines and so we exempted them long ago, along with a number of other legacy apps.”

Instant Images plugin developer Darren Cooney said he will not be adding an option to his plugin for turning on the CDN and declined to comment further on his reasons.

“I will say that I think the CDN should be opt-in and it should be more clear what happens on the Unsplash side when the CDN is in use,” Cooney said. “What is tracked, why it’s tracked and what benefit do added views provide the contributors.”

When asked whether Unsplash plans to update the plugin to deny API access to sites that have added a plugin to disable the CDN, Chesser said no. WordPress plugins weaponizing themselves against each other is not unheard of, although it is unusual and frowned upon.

“We don’t do things like that,” Chesser said. “I think anyone who knows our team and our community will know that we always try to take reasonable actions as we’re representing a lot of contributors and a large community. If a user wants to install a plugin to deactivate the CDN but still access the library, they can do that by all means, but we don’t want to build, promote, and support that functionality ourselves because it works against our community, our business, and our mission.”

The bottom line is Unsplash is a business, and a business needs to make money. Certainly a company doesn’t commission a WordPress plugin from a team of the caliber of XWP without hoping for a return on that kind of investment. The plugin’s setup process makes it effortless for users to connect to the Unsplash API, but there isn’t any transparency during this process regarding what data users are agreeing to send Unsplash. The plugin needs to be more forthcoming about the data the CDN collects on views and downloads. This would go a long way towards establishing more credibility with skeptics. Those who are wary of the requirement to use the CDN can use a plugin to disable it or install an alternative like Instant Images.

On Wednesday, the Gutenberg team pushed what was primarily minor enhancements and bug fixes to the WordPress platform’s primary project. Everyone is mostly gearing up for the WordPress 5.5 release, so we are not seeing any major features dropping at the moment. However, steady work continues on improving the Gutenberg plugin.

Gutenberg 8.7 contains over 30 bug fixes, in which nearly a third were accessibility-related changes. Around half of the new enhancements focused on updating block patterns.

Users can look forward to several minor enhancements that should improve the editor, such as the Buttons block getting a proper preview in the inserter. The monitoring solution behind auto-saving should also work more consistently with this update.

The biggest user-facing enhancement is the change in dealing with invalid blocks. The latest version of the plugin makes the attempt block recovery option the default. This change hides the resolve, convert to classic, and convert to HTML options under the sub-menu (ellipsis button). This is a nice touch and makes the most sense. Attempting to recover a block should generally be the first step when correcting invalid block output.

Block Pattern Updates

Updated block pattern designs.

I can now proceed to eat my earlier words of frustration with block patterns. Or, perhaps I can praise myself in some small way for pushing the Gutenberg team to up their game. I was unhappy with the abysmal designs that were originally going to ship with WordPress 5.5. The team has taken what was looking to be one of the most disappointing first outings for a feature and turned it into something the project can be proud of.

It did not take much. A photo here. A touch of pizazz there. The Don Quixote images and text bring a cohesive theme to the patterns, breathing a touch of life in an otherwise desolate and barren feature.

The “large header with a heading” pattern dropped the blinding background gradient and replaced it with an image. The “quote” pattern now has a face instead of an impersonal icon. Even the “two images side by side” pattern fits in thematically.

If anything, I am not a fan of the long pattern names. “Large header with a heading and a button” and “three columns of text with buttons” do not exactly roll off the tongue. Nor do they make it easy to write about them. I do not wish the pain of typing them out on any support volunteers.

At least we are working with a somewhat decent set of patterns going forward, and that is enough to be thankful for at this point. I will now await the first theme author to truly impress me with custom patterns.

Experimental Features Update

Site editor beta.

Much of the work for this release centered on the plugin’s experimental features. The bulk of it went toward post-related blocks. At this point, these features are so experimental that even experienced developers outside of the inner Gutenberg circle have trouble following the progress. It is nice to see the continual movement in this area. However, from a user viewpoint, it is not even ready for a quick look. Enable at your own risk. Wait until the product is a bit more polished.

I typically enable Gutenberg’s experimental features once a month or so. I want to keep up with the progress and not feel out of the loop. Such was the case over the past couple of days as I tinkered a bit more with the full-site editing and demo templates features. I am unsure what I was hoping for. Mostly, I wanted some indication of a bright future — one that I fully expect to be realized at some point. I wanted to be wowed.

I understand why the wow factor is not there. The feature is far from ready. More than that, I know that, as a developer, you have a vision of the finished product in your head, and as the UI is in flux, others cannot see that vision. It is a step-by-step process that you simply have to continue working through.

I am still of the belief that full-site editing will not be close to a viable feature until 2021. Even with all hands on deck, four months is too small of a window to make anything remotely competitive to existing solutions out there. When full-site editing does land in core WordPress, it needs to do so with a bang, not a whimper.

A short while ago, Justin Tadlock posted an article titled Are Plugin Authors to Blame for the Poor Admin Notices Experience?. If you haven’t already, I recommend reading his article. It describes in detail one question I’ve been pondering since I originally posted the WP Notify feature project proposal almost a year ago now: Will a new notification system for WordPress solve the notification spam, or just move it elsewhere?

The answer might not be as simple as we think.

I have been building, maintaining, and supporting a number of free, paid, and client plugins for the past five years. During that time I have also been an active contributor — as much as I possibly can outside of work and my personal life — to the WordPress open source project. Now that’s definitely a drop in the ocean compared to some folks, but whenever I see the mess that can occur when multiple plugins or themes register admin_notices on EVERY SINGLE ADMIN PAGE, it strengthens my resolve in the idea that WordPress needs a centrally managed notification system. 

If you read Justin’s article, or you are a plugin or theme developer yourself, you know that the notifications system (aka admin notices, a reference to the WordPress hook that prints these notices) in WordPress is limited at best. We need to be honest with ourselves, however, admin notices was not designed to function as a notification system. Admin notices should really only be used to display useful information to the user about state changes in the system. Messages like when a post has been updated or deleted, or a database upgrade is required. Short, useful, and more importantly, relevant.

As developers, we usually look for the root cause of a problem. And in the case of admin notices, the root cause is not the current notification system, or the fact that plugin developers use it for things other than, well, admin notices. The root cause is the fact that there has never existed a mechanism for notifications other than admin notices to be displayed to the user. This means that whenever a plugin developer has needed, or in fact wanted, to communicate with their users, via “in app messages,” admin notices has been the only way they can do so.

Want to let your users know about a new upgrade? Admin notice. Want to ask them to leave a review? Admin notice. Your premium license is about to expire! Admin notice. Hey, we’ve got a new sale on our premium products! Admin notice. It all soon adds up to an almighty mess.

And that’s the problem with a project like WP Notify. We’ve had admin notices, in its current iteration at least, since 2011. That means we have been using it for all our user facing messages now for nine years at least – nine years of plugin and theme developers using admin notices to send messages to users. 

If you have children, imagine telling your nine year old that the way they have been walking is wrong, and they now need to learn a completely new way of doing it. Good Luck!

So, as much as it pains me to admit it, WP Notify is not the silver bullet that will magically fix the problem at its core. As Matt Mullenweg pointed out in the comments on Justin’s article, “I don’t think a notification center is the solution to this problem. It may be useful for other reasons, but not that one.”

However, not having a specific solution for notifications other than those that are necessary, means that developers will keep on doing things the way they have always been. Enforcing new guidelines around the current functionality nine years later is going to be hard, especially since enforcing these guidelines will have to be done by a small group of volunteers, namely the theme and plugin review teams. 

By building WP Notify, we create a new and hopefully better way for plugin and theme developers to connect and communicate with their users. At the same time, we provide a tool by which we can more easily enforce any new guidelines. A guideline could be created for example, that unless your message is strictly within the realms of informing the user about state changes in the system, it needs to be displayed in the notifications center, and not as an admin notice.

So no, I don’t believe WP Notify will be a silver bullet solution. We’re not going to build it, ship it, and suddenly all the notification spam goes away the next day. That kind of change takes time.

But I do believe it’s a step in the right direction.

If you agree with me, why not join our merry band and help us build it. 

Automattic’s relaunch of P2 is now in Beta. This is the long-awaited update to the company’s internal collaboration software that is also used on WordPress.org and other self-hosted sites via a theme. For years, Automattic, which now counts more than 1,200 employees in 77 countries, has had P2 at the core of its written communication tools. It is used as a complement to Slack and video conferencing, providing a public collaboration space for conversations which might otherwise be hidden away in emails.

The older version of P2 functioned as a dependable workhorse with few changes over the years, but the beta introduces some marked improvements that make it more versatile than before. It is now seamlessly integrated with the block editor and includes a streamlined invitation system for onboarding new team members.

P2 has a fresh design that has come a long way since its roots as an evolution of the Prologue microblogging theme. Many things about WordPress have changed since P2’s first launch 11 years ago but threaded conversations have endured as a useful collaboration format. Mobile support is one of the things that has improved significantly. Users can get notifications via the web, email, and the WordPress mobile apps.

“It works on the WordPress apps perfectly but it’s handled as a normal WordPress site, without any P2 specific functionality,” Automattic’s P2 launch lead Jon Burke said. “P2 specific functionality and improvements are on the mobile app product roadmap. The browser version on the other hand has all the particularities that P2 has.”

The beta version of P2 is free and each instance comes with 3GB of storage space for images and files. Users can create as many as they like. The product is built on top of WordPress.com’s infrastructure but functions as a scaled back version of a blog – essentially a WordPress for teams.

Pricing for the commercial upgrade has not yet been determined, according to Burke, but the roadmap includes a hefty list of features.

“We’ll have integrations with third party services, project management features, more storage space, custom URLs, more customization options, etc,” Burke said. “We plan to introduce multi-site functionality, too, so an organization can create multiple P2s while sharing the same user base, have cross-posting, a common glossary, and other advanced features.”

With the diverse myriad of blocks pouring into the WordPress ecosystem, every P2 has the opportunity to be unique, depending on which features it introduces through the editor. Burke said Automattic plans to allow admins to extend their P2 instances with plugins in the enterprise version.

P2 Set to Roll Out on WordPress.com, Self-Hosted Version Coming “Eventually”

P2 is just now entering beta but many fans are already eagerly awaiting a self-hosted version. Burke said it is coming “eventually,” but the team hasn’t yet worked out how it will be structured. The project is not currently available on GitHub.

“With this launch version behind us the P2 team will turn to this but don’t yet have a time-line,” Burke said. “The team will need to now define how the backend admin will look.” The updated P2 is also coming to power conversations on WordPress.org further down the road.

“We don’t yet have a target date but it is on the product roadmap,” he said. “This P2 version has been more than a theme or plugin update – it’s really a product concept- so we can’t simply update the WordPress.org P2 theme; it requires additional progress.”

P2 seems like it would be a good fit for Automattic’s Happy Tools suite of products for distributed teams. A version of P2 with more features may roll out under this brand once the beta concludes.

“Given the sudden global shift to remote work we really wanted to get out a stable product as soon as we could,” Burke said. “That really made WordPress.com the most expedient pathway to get P2 into peoples’ hands.

“Now that we have launched this version, we will make decisions around where the next releases will live. P2 has been envisioned as being part of the Happy Tools suite. But we are going to learn from the early users on WordPress.com and prioritize the next steps. We know that some users will need a premium version on WordPress.com in order to secure a custom domain and other features so we will update that shortly.”

Iain Poulson announced that Plugin Rank is open to the public yesterday. It is a new service that allows plugin authors to track their rankings by keyword on the official WordPress plugin directory. The service is geared toward plugin authors with freemium offerings.

The tools were already in place for Poulson to build the service. He just needed to build his service on top of them. “Plugin Rank leverages the WordPress.org API to retrieve a set of plugins for a search term,” he said. “It’s the same API that WordPress uses when a user searches for a plugin inside their WordPress dashboard or when searching on the plugin directory.”

Poulson described how a user might search for a membership plugin by typing “membership” in the search box. The WordPress API returns a set of plugins that best match that term, based on an internal ranking algorithm. The Plugin Rank service uses this same, underlying technology.

“Plugin Rank will check the API daily to find the latest positions of the plugins for the keywords being tracked by Plugin Rank customers,” he said. “This data is then used to show position movement and charted to show an overall picture of how the plugins are ranking.”

Plugin dashboard screen.

The idea for the service was born from work he and others were doing at Delicious Brains, a WordPress development company, a few months ago. “We’d started to work on improving the copy in the WP Migrate DB plugin readme.txt files to rank higher in search results,” he said. “Brad Touesnard set up a Google sheet with all the keywords we wanted to rank for, a link to search the keyword on wordpress.org, and columns for each month. He started to record the position the plugin appears for each keyword every month. Or that was the idea, when we remembered!”

Poulson began using the same system for WP User Manager and Intagrate, two freemium plugins he had in the plugin directory. However, it did not take long to realize the futility of that system.

“The sheer manual nature of the task of setting up the sheet, monthly checking, and trying to remember to do it made me think there must be a better way,” he said. “So I started to work on an app to do it for me.”

Besides simply providing a particular plugin’s rank, Poulson said the service provides information that can help plugin developers raise their rankings in the search results.

Competitive analysis against other plugins.

“The competitor analysis in Plugin Rank gives you an insight into the top 50 plugins that rank for the keywords you care about,” said Poulson. “It gives you insights into what those plugins are doing that make them rank higher than you. Do they have a high amount of the keyword in their readme? Do they have it in their title or tags? Do they answer the bulk of their support requests? Do they have a large number of five-star ratings?”

A Premium Service with a Premium Price

Plugin Rank is the first service of its kind in the WordPress industry. Therefore, Poulson had to look outside of traditional WordPress channels to get a sense of how to price the new service.

“I looked at similar SEO tools for traditional search engines, like Ahrefs and SEMrush, and tried to base my pricing on how valuable it can be in relation to other marketing channels,” he said.

Only time and feedback will decide whether he found the sweet spot between offering a valuable service and what plugin developers are willing to fork over. The Starter tier allows plugin authors to track up to five keywords for a single plugin. It also includes email reports and competitor analysis. The $9 per month price tag is low enough for developers to dip their toes in and decide whether it is worth upgrading for tracking more keywords and plugins.

The $49 Plus plan allows up to five plugins and 50 keywords. It also includes tracking for multiple languages. The $119 Pro plan bumps the plugin count to 20 and keyword number to 500.

Right now, Plugin Rank is offering a 21-day free trial, which is a no-brainer for any freemium plugin author who might even be remotely interested in the service. I have no doubt I would sign up if I was still in the freemium plugin game.

“Most developers and companies will invest heavily and get good results from content marketing and SEO improvements, and their WordPress.org plugin listing will receive little attention,” said Poulson. “But for freemium plugins, it can be a huge channel for getting people using their plugin and buying the up-sells. So it’s priced with that in mind.”

The Future of the Service

The knowledge of where a plugin stands in the rankings and having the data readily available will undoubtedly help many plugin authors. However, knowledge is merely the beginning of ranking higher. For developers who are not well-versed in marketing and SEO, they will need to develop new skills to make full use of what they learn from the service.

Poulson seems interested in expanding the service beyond its initial goal of providing ranking data. Tutorials, videos, and other resources would be a nice value-add for those who buy into the service now.

“Plugin Rank’s primary functionality at the moment is monitoring and getting access to data,” he said, “but I’ve got features planned that focus on how to make improvements, as well as tutorial-style content on the Resources page.”

Immediately available is BuddyPress 6.2.0. This maintenance release:

• fixes 1 bug related to the 6.0.0 release,
• is preparing BuddyPress for WordPress 5.5.0,
• is a recommended upgrade for all BuddyPress installations.

For details on the changes, please read the 6.2.0 release notes.

Update to BuddyPress 6.2.0 today in your WordPress Dashboard, or by downloading from the WordPress.org plugin repository.

Many thanks to 6.2.0 contributors 

hareesh-pillai, man4toman, dcavins, boonebgorges, imath

We're seeing the strain of isolation and 100% remote work without meetups, conferences, or other in-person opportunities to collaborate. In this episode of Post Status Draft, Cory and Brian discuss how to create healthy virtual work environments, including some tips for establishing better work days.

Or watch this episode on YouTube:

Sponsor: Pagely

Pagely offers best-in-class managed WordPress hosting, powered by Amazon's Cloud, the Internet’s most reliable infrastructure. Pagely helps big brands scale WordPress.Thank you to Pagely for being a Post Status partner!

As the world scrambles to invent and manufacture therapeutics and vaccines for COVID-19, the World Health Organization has declared the pandemic “a once-in-a-century health crisis, the effects of which will be felt for decades to come.” Outbreaks vary in severity across the globe, making it impossible to host international conferences safely for many months (and possibly years) to come.

In consideration for the time and efforts of hundreds of volunteers who would be involved in planning in-person events, WordPress announced it will no longer accept any applications for flagship events in 2021:

Flagship events (i.e. large, regional WordCamps that attract an international audience) bring together people from all corners of the world, so until infection rates are effectively mitigated and/or a vaccine is widely available, these large scale events that typically host more than 1,000 individuals could become “super-spreader” events if a single infected person attends. 

Applications for new flagship events (or regional events that cover multiple regions or countries) will not be accepted for all of 2021.

The announcement comes on the heels of WordCamp US canceling its virtual event due to overextended organizers and online event fatigue for attendees. Up until this point, organizing teams from the large regional camps have been making their own determinations regarding the suitability of hosting an event online. The change announced this week prevents new events from applying and then inevitably having to transition to a virtual format.

Existing flagship events that were already in the pipeline will be allowed to continue as online events. These include WordCamps Europe, US, Asia, and Centroamérica. Of these, WCEU has already announced an online event.

“As online events continue to evolve to reflect community needs, the Community Team strongly encourages these flagship organizing teams to be creative in their approach,” Hugh Lashbrooke said in the announcement. This challenge forces organizers to proceed only if they can knock it out of the park in terms of creativity. Otherwise, it’s simply hosting another online conference in the same tired format for the sake of tradition.

WordPress is at an interesting point in its history where it can no longer rely on in-person events to drive enthusiasm, education, and growth for the community. Flagship WordCamps are a necessary casualty in the fight to slow the spread of the virus, but this early decision provides a welcome peg of certainty for those who normally invest a significant amount of time in making these events a reality.

Samir Shah is ready to part ways with his popular Disable Comments plugin. The WordPress extension has garnered over a million users and a solid 220 five-star reviews out of 229, but its owner no longer has the time to maintain it. Rather than simply give it away or sell it for profit, he plans to auction it for charity. The highest bidder will donate to Effective Altruism Funds (EAF), a charitable organization, for ownership.

Shah asks that those who are interested in bidding on the plugin contact him via his Twitter account. He is also open to feedback on how to approach this at the moment.

He first released the Disable Comments plugin in 2011. This was during a time that he was working professionally with WordPress. His primary use case was with corporate clients who did not need any sort of commenting functionality on the site.

“After repeating this implementation on several projects I ported it to a plugin,” he said. “The plugin became popular very quickly so it turns out this was a common use case.”

Shah used PHP and WordPress primarily between 2009 and 2015. However, the work his company has been doing has shifted his focus to other languages and platforms. He has not used WordPress professionally since 2016 but has continued maintaining this plugin for the community in his free time.

“In the last year or two I’ve found it hard to keep up with the maintenance of the plugin,” he said. “I’m increasingly unfamiliar with both the WordPress core (major changes like Gutenberg, for example) and with newer versions of PHP. It is time to find a new owner who is actively using WordPress.”

Disable Comments allows administrators to disable the comment functionality across the entire site. Users can also control it based on a specific post type or even disable comments across the network when used on a multisite installation.

The primary use case is for disabling all commenting-related functionality. When this mode is enabled, the plugin hides comment links from all menus, removes comment widgets, hides the discussion settings screen, disables outgoing pingbacks, and more. Of course, it disables commenting on the front end too.

Shah also has a “must use” version of the plugin available on GitHub. This comes in handy for professional work where the developer does not want the client to accidentally deactivate the plugin.

“I never intended to make any money off this plugin, which is completely free to use,” said Shah. “I have however received a number of financial offers for it over the years (presumably because people value the large user base), and so the idea I had was to auction it. The highest bidder would pay their bid to my preferred charitable organization, and send me a receipt as proof of donation in exchange for ownership of the plugin.”

He is hoping that someone in the community will value a free plugin that does not generate revenue. With over a million active installs, there is a possibility that a company could directly or indirectly profit from ownership. Even if not, this would be a good opportunity for someone with the resources to give back to the WordPress community. There is an obvious need for this type of plugin.

While Shah says he does not spend much time on charitable work, he does try to donate a percentage of his annual income to charity and believes this is another avenue to do some good.

“I’m in the privileged position at the moment of having sufficient income to meet my basic needs,” he said. “Selling the plugin for profit isn’t going to alter my standard of living, and I’m not interested in profit for its own sake. If I can extract some value from this plugin and give it to EAF then it will go some way to improving the lives of others.”

He said he chose EAF because it uses an evidence-based approach to distributing funds by focusing on empirical measures of impact. “This felt to me like a better strategy than just picking a cause that I was personally attached to. There are particular areas of their work — e.g., the long-term future fund — that I think are especially important today.”

It will be interesting to see how this type of sale works out. What do you think of trading ownership of a plugin for a charitable contribution?

The second release candidate for WordPress 5.5 is here!

WordPress 5.5 is slated for release on August 11, 2020, but we need your help to get there—if you haven’t tried 5.5 yet, now is the time!

You can test the WordPress 5.5 release candidate in two ways:

• Try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (choose the “bleeding edge nightlies” option)
• Or download the release candidate here (zip).

Thank you to all of the contributors who tested the Beta releases and gave feedback. Testing for bugs is a critical part of polishing every release and a great way to contribute to WordPress.

Plugin and Theme Developers

Please test your plugins and themes against WordPress 5.5 and update the Tested up to version in the readme file to 5.5. If you find compatibility problems, please be sure to post to the support forums, so those can be figured out before the final release.

For a more detailed breakdown of the changes included in WordPress 5.5, check out the WordPress 5.5 beta 1 post. The WordPress 5.5 Field Guide is also out! It’s your source for details on all the major changes.

How to Help

Do you speak a language other than English? Help us translate WordPress into more than 100 languages! This release also marks the hard string freeze point of the 5.5 release schedule.

If you think you’ve found a bug, you can post to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. We’d love to hear from you! If you’re comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, fill one on WordPress Trac, where you can also find a list of known bugs.

Dōvy Paukstys was rushing out another update with bug fixes yesterday morning as we chatted about the future of his popular Redux Framework. It was not the first update of the day. The Virginia-based developer is just over a week into what he has called the soft launch of Redux 4.x. It is a major reconstruction of a plugin that has been powering over 900,000 websites and has a strong developer audience.

The changes over the past week might seem risky to some. He has built a massive user base by providing one of the most powerful theme and plugin options frameworks in WordPress history. The plugin’s new focus leans heavily toward the block editor, which is still one of the most controversial features of WordPress, even after nearly two years as part of the core platform.

Paukstys needed to make a change. The developer-only approach was not generating the return on investment that he needed. The $7,000 in donations and subscriptions received in 2019 was not sustainable, especially when products on the Envato marketplace had generated at least $56 million on the back of Redux, according to data he had gathered. He was leaving far too much money on the table. Redux was a successful product on the surface, but developers were either unwilling to pony up the cash or the business plan was not working. It was time for something new.

It was not merely time for a change because the business was essentially going nowhere. The game was and is still changing. Theme options, the bread and butter of Redux, will likely be a thing of the past in the next year or two. Themes will become far less reliant on options panels. Developers will need to build their offerings around the block system and plugins like Redux need to keep up.

The writing was on the wall. The best time to profit from a theme options framework was the past decade. Whether it is the block editor or a page-building plugin like Elementor, design options are on the individual page level now, or at least not buckled into old-school concepts like theme options panels or the customizer.

The times they are a-changin’, and Redux is changing with them.

Paukstys is no stranger to moving with the flow. It has allowed his framework’s user numbers to continue growing over the years. In 2015, he shifted gears and focused on making sure his framework supported the customizer. This came after a controversial decision from the Themes Team to require the use of the customizer instead of custom theme options screens. Paukstys was a vocal opponent of the decision and still believes the customizer never panned out. In hindsight, he may have been right; the customizer has felt like an abandoned project over the past couple of years. Still, he made the necessary moves to keep his options framework relevant when necessary.

Today, he is propelling Redux into a new era in which blocks reign supreme.

“If Redux didn’t go into the world of blocks it would eventually be a thing of yesterday,” he said. “The future is blocks and that’s where we are putting our focus. We’re excited to once again be on the cutting edge and we hope our product can really help users, freelancers, and agencies build and improve their sites in ways they never have before.”

What he and the Redux team has done is tack an entirely new set of user-focused features onto what was once a developer platform. Even the marketing has changed. Redux is now in the business of providing and upselling features to end-users. It is no longer taking a backseat to the theme and plugin authors who have profited in the millions upon its developer API. The team is taking the steering wheel and driving toward its own future.

What Does the New Redux Do?

Ice Cream shop template kit.

Redux still does all the things it has always done. Developers can build custom settings screens and offer whatever options they want to their own end-users. The most glaring addition is the new Redux Templates feature, which directly integrates with the block editor.

“Redux Templates acts as a block discovery library if you will,” said Paukstys. “We bring all templates provided by third-party plugins into a single library. You can essentially see and preview what’s possible, click, and import.”

Redux also has a built-in block dependency installer. When importing third-party templates or blocks, it will check if the plugin is installed and active. If not, it will take care of that for users.

The end goal is to ease the trouble of finding advanced block templates. Currently, most of the block templating plugins are dispersed, projects wondering around the wild. Users cannot find what they need if they do not know where to look. Redux changes all of that. Currently, it supports 18 different block plugins. It serves to give more exposure to existing block plugins and helps users discover solutions they might not have otherwise found.

On the post-editing screen, the plugin adds a new “Templates” button to the top toolbar. Once clicked, it opens a popup with its library of sections, templates, and template kits.

Viewing templates from the Redux library.

One of the nicer features of the plugin is its previewer. By clicking the preview button, users can see what a section or template looks like before importing anything. On the left side of the previewer, the plugin displays tabs that show what blocks are used and what required plugins would need to be installed and activated.

Redux leaves little to the imagination. Any necessary information about what is being installed is directly available. Plus, it provides links to any plugins that might be installed.

Previewing a contact template.

The great thing is that the Templates feature does not lock the user down to the Redux plugin. If a user wants to deactivate Redux in the future, nothing will change with their blocks. It is primarily serving as a bridge between end-users and the massive world of block projects.

“We see the future of options being diminished in the long run by blocks, so we found a way to move into that space to keep Redux always on the cutting edge,” said Paukstys. His team completely rewrote the underlying framework and brought everything up to the WordPress coding standards.

The move to support blocks is more of a repositioning of a project whose days were numbered.

Paukstys stressed that Redux has every feature that it had before and even more. The team added CSS variables for developers if they prefer using them over a compiler. He feels like the core framework has improved drastically, which means old users can continue enjoying the features they have become accustomed to.

A New Business Plan

Make no mistake. Paukstys is looking to grow the revenue of his business and create a sustainable future for Redux. The pricing plan is clear and follows a model that has been successful for many commercial plugins over the years. The plans are tiered and range from $49 per year to $249, depending on the number sites the user wants automatic updates and support for.

The commercial plans offer new features for developers like automated Google Font updates, custom fonts integrated into all panels, unlimited widget areas, and dynamic search.

However, the big upsell is landing directly on the doorstep of end-users. Each of the commercial plans offers full access to over 1,000 sections and full-page templates. The breadth of options can almost be overwhelming, but the average user will be able to find nearly any type of template needed for their site. From restaurants to corporate offices to fitness studios, there is a little something for everyone.

“I was all too altruistic,” said Paukstys of the previous years. “I believed that if I helped people make money, they’d give back. Unfortunately, that is not how it works. I’ve worked for years with various pricing models, each doomed to fail.” He had seen others rise to business success, quite often on the work that he had put in. It is not all about money, and he believes he has something of value to offer in return.

Development skill is not enough to breed financial success. Sound financial principles must back it up.

One of the catalysts for recent changes to his business plan was joining Post Status, which has a strong community of business leaders in the WordPress ecosystem. He credits Alex Denning, Kimberly Lipari, Haris Zulfiqar, Rich Tabor, and others as inspiration, helping him to shift his thinking around the business side of the project.

Some of the lessons he has learned thus far are:

• Developers are already starved. Focus on users.
• Add-ons can be a bad model. A single pro/premium product is much easier to sell and manage.
• The need for a revenue model. Don’t expect people to just hand over money.
• Use the audience you have. Don’t cannibalize yourself.

“Where we’ve ended up is a much cheaper plan for developers and a powerful toolkit for users,” he said. “Hopefully, we’re pushing Gutenberg into a greater place of value.”

Moving Forward

Naturally, not every user will be happy with the overhaul of the plugin. For years, Redux was geared specifically toward developers. It was an options framework.

“Redux was for a completely different purpose which is for developers to create Options framework,” wrote a user named James in a review. “They have changed the plugin suddenly to a page builder something like that. It doesn’t make sense and they are using the previous plugin’s reputation.”

It is a fair criticism. And, it was expected. The plugin has switched much of its focus to end-users. However, it has not removed the existing API and features that made it successful with developers in the past.

Paukstys is clear that he is building on top of the reputation that Redux has earned and launching new features for end-users. He is unapologetic about trying something new to bring in a reasonable return on his years-long investment of time and resources. Launching a completely new and separate project would carry far more risk. It makes sense to build atop the mountain he had already built.

It won’t make everyone happy. However, he said that the feedback has been “shockingly positive” in the week since the Redux 4 soft launch.

“I’ve never realized how much users appreciated Redux,” he said. “Some of the changes to the framework broke sites, and everyone I have reached out to help has been so extremely gracious. It’s so refreshing and honestly helps me to see why the WordPress community is such a great place to be. I fear developers are too harsh to one another. Users on the other hand, if provided kind support, are in turn incredibly kind.”

If most of the feedback thus far is any indication of the plugin’s future, do not expect to see pitchforks and torches.

He might have to take a few lumps with a few disgruntled users over the change. It comes with the territory. However, feedback will likely directly correlate with how well he serves users through the Redux support channels.

The project will also benefit from a potentially new user base in the coming months and years. The plugin is dipping its toes into a new market while maintaining the features that got it to where it is today. It will be a bit of a balancing act, but the plugin must move with the times.

The Future of Redux

This is a new era for Redux. In the immediate future, Paukstys and team will need to focus on ironing out all of the bugs and the transition to a new market. It is a time for reflection, careful listening, and attentiveness before diving headlong into new features.

“In the past, we were 100% developer-centric,” said Paukstys. “That being said, we always had our eye on the user and wanted to fulfill their needs. Now we’re expanding to support the users directly, as well as developers.”

With the newfound focus on end-users, there is potential for growth in other areas. Paukstys says the focus is 100% on the block editor at present. Branching out to support other major page builders like Elementor is not out of the question. However, Redux should be able to continue finding success by extending the core experience.

“When we started this adventure into the blocks space, we worried, given the limited number of blocks out there,” he said. “But honestly, there’s some amazing innovation out there, and it’s been pretty great what we can build with Gutenberg.”

Last week, Automattic’s marketing team made a positive step towards curbing the perennial branding confusion between WordPress.org and WordPress.com. The company’s press page was updated with a notice to journalists who are writing about Automattic:

Automattic owns and operates WordPress.com, which is a hosted version of the open source WordPress software with added features for security, speed and support. Please append “.com” when referencing our product name.

WordPress is open source software, which is written, maintained, and supported by thousands of independent contributors worldwide. Automattic is a major contributor to the WordPress open source project. If you would like to contribute to the WordPress open source project, learn more at make.wordpress.org.

This update was prompted by a recent conversation on LinkedIn between Caspar Hübinger, who works as a digital marketer at Human Made, and WordPress.com CMO Monica Ohara. Hübinger had posted regarding an inaccuracy in a recent New York Times article featuring Matt Mullenweg as an evangelist for remote work at Automattic. The article, which has since been corrected, misattributed Automattic as the company that “runs the digital publishing platform WordPress.”

These kinds of mistakes are quite frequent, yet understandable, in publications that are not as familiar with the WordPress ecosystem. Yet, these errors often evoke a strong reaction from the project’s community whenever they pop up in the media.

Ohara commented on Hübinger’s post and exchanged direct messages where he made a case for clarifying the branding on Automattic’s website. Ohara was amenable and the notice appeared shortly after the exchange.

Several years ago Hübinger created a website to clarify the confusion between WordPress, the open source project, and WordPress.com. Post Status also has a resource page that explains the difference between WordPress.org and Automattic’s products, but these kinds of external resources never seemed to make much of a difference.

In 2018, Hübinger prevailed upon the author of a TechCrunch article who referenced WordPress.com as “WordPress” and worked with her on getting the difference documented in TechCrunch’s internal editorial guidelines. After he had explained the problem, she replied: “We had no policy on this. We’re going to change it to .com (or make references to Automattic as needed), and note in our style guide.”

When asked why he finds himself a champion of this particular cause, he said he often found himself angry when the name of the open source project he has dedicated most of his digital career to was confused with a commercial service built on top of it.

“It’s a distortion of reality and I always felt sort of betrayed when it happened,” Hübinger said.

“I know that many of my community peers feel hurt to this day, even if some of them would probably shrug it off when asked. The word for it is resignation, and to me, it is poison to the human soul. From my perspective, Automattic’s passiveness actively fed the narrative that they were profiting from the naming confusion, and that narrative – true or not – it keeps poisoning WordPress’ open source community.”

Although many times articles with errors confusing WordPress and .com were corrected afterwards, it can take a few days after the initial rush of traffic hits.

“So the message that ‘Automattic runs/owns WordPress’ keeps being established for the public,” Hübinger contended when making his case to Ohara. “Worse, the burden of flagging miscommunication when it happens and having it corrected in many cases is left to those who are harmed by it, i.e. open source contributors.”

For years people have speculated whether Automattic might rename WordPress.com to avoid the longstanding confusion. Many believe it will never happen, since the company undoubtedly benefits from tightly coupling its products to WordPress’ name recognition. Ohara declined to comment on whether any major branding changes are on the horizon.

“I will say that we’re not trying to compete with the WordPress ecosystem,” Ohara said. “We want to help the overall ecosystem grow and I look forward to working closely with the community.”

This small yet important change to Automattic’s press page is the direct result of Hübinger’s persistent advocacy effort. It may not eliminate all future media errors, but it is a positive development that demonstrates someone is listening.

“While a dedicated press page will not be able to prevent future confusion of WordPress and WordPress.com altogether (because it simply isn’t possible), my hope is that it will be seen as a first practical step to help heal the relationship between Automattic and parts of WordPress’ open source community, which so many Automatticians have made such incredible amounts of contributions to ever since the company existed, and that is another thing that is too easy to forget,” Hübinger said.

July was an action-packed month for the WordPress project. The month saw a lot of updates on one of the most anticipated releases – WordPress 5.5! WordCamp US 2020 was canceled and the WordPress community team started experimenting with different formats for engaging online events, in July. Read on to catch up with all the updates from the WordPress world.

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WordPress 5.5 Updates

July was full of WordPress 5.5 updates! The WordPress 5.5 Beta 1 came out on July 7, followed by Beta 2 on July 14, Beta 3 on July 21, and Beta 4 on July 27. Subsequently, the team also published the first release candidate of WordPress 5.5 on July 28. 

WordPress 5.5, which is slated for release on August 11, 2020, is a major update with features like automatic updates for plugins and themes, a block directory, XML sitemaps, block patterns, and lazy-loading images, among others. To learn more about the release, check out its field guide post.

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

Gutenberg 8.5 and 8.6

The core team launched Gutenberg 8.5 and 8.6. Version 8.5 – the last plugin release will be included entirely (without experimental features) in WordPress 5.5, introduced improvements to block drag-and-drop and accessibility, easier updates for external images, and support for the block directory. Version 8.6 comes with features like Cover block video position controls and block pattern updates. For full details on the latest versions on these Gutenberg releases, visit these posts about 8.5 and 8.6.

Want to get involved in building Gutenberg? Follow the Core team blog, contribute to Gutenberg on GitHub, and join the #core-editor channel in the Making WordPress Slack group.

Reimagining Online WordPress Events

The Community team made the difficult decision to suspend in-person WordPress events for the rest of 2020 in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. The team has also started working on reimagining online events. Based on feedback from the community members, the team decided to make changes to the current online WordCamp format. Key changes include wrapping up financial support for A/V vendors, ending event swag support for newer online WordCamps, and suspending the Global Community Sponsorship program for 2020. The team encourages upcoming online WordCamps to experiment with their events to facilitate an effective learning experience for attendees while avoiding online event fatigue. The team is currently working on a proposal to organize community-supported recorded workshops and synchronous discussion groups to help community members learn WordPress.

Want to get involved with the Community team? Follow the Community blog here, or join them in the #community-events channel in the Making WordPress Slack group. To organize a Meetup or WordCamp, visit the handbook page. 

WordCamp US 2020 is canceled

The organizers of WordCamp US 2020 have canceled the event in light of the continued pandemic and online event fatigue. The flagship event, which was originally scheduled for October 27-29 as an in-person event, had already planned to transition to an online event. Several WCUS Organizers will be working with the WordPress Community team to focus on other formats and ideas for online events, including a 24-hour contributor day, and contributing to the workshops initiative currently being discussed. Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word (which typically accompanies WordCamp US) is likely to take place in a different format later in 2020.

Plugin and theme updates are now available over zip files

After eleven years, WordPress now allows users to update plugins and themes by uploading a ZIP file, in WordPress 5.5.  The feature, which was merged on July 7, has been one of the most requested features in WordPress. Now, when a user tries to upload a plugin or theme zip file from the WordPress dashboard by clicking the “Install Now” button, WordPress will direct users to a new screen that compares the currently-installed extension with the uploaded versions. Users can then choose between continuing with the installation or canceling. WordPress 5.5 will also offer automatic plugin and theme updates. 

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Further Reading:

• The Block directory is coming to WordPress with the 5.5 release. Plugin authors can now submit their Block plugins to the directory.
• The Core team has opened up the call for features in the WordPress 5.6 release. You can comment on the post with features that you’d like to be included, current UX pain points, or maintenance tickets that need to be addressed. August 20 is the deadline for feature requests. 
• Editor features such as the new Navigation block, the navigation screen, and the widget screen that were originally planned to be merged with WordPress 5.5 have been pushed for the next release. 
• The Theme team is inviting proposals on whether to allow themes to place an additional top-level menu link in the admin.
• BuddyPress 6.2 beta is out in the wild, and the team will soon release the stable version. The update includes changes that will make BuddyPress fully compatible with WordPress 5.5.
• WordCamp EU 2021, which was being planned as an in-person event in Porto, Portugal, is moving online. The team is considering an in-person WordCamp EU in 2022. 
• The Polyglots team has prepared and finalized a Translation Editor & Locale Manager Vetting Criteria to provide more clarity on how global mentors assign PTE/GTE/Locale Managers and to help locale teams set their own guidelines. The document, which was finalized after a lot of discussion, is now available in the Polyglots handbook.
• Members of the Community team are discussing whether WordCamp volunteers, WordCamp attendees, or Meetup attendees should be awarded a WordPress.org profile badge. The ongoing discussion will be open for comments until August 13.
• The WP Notify project, which aims to create a better way to manage and deliver notifications to the relevant audience, is on to its next steps. The team has finalized the initial requirements, and is kicking off the project build.
• The WordPress documentation team is considering a ban on links to commercial websites in a revision to its external linking policy. The policy change does not remove external links to commercial sites from WordPress.org and only applies to documentation sites. The idea is to protect documentation from being abused, and to prevent the WordPress project from being biased. Discussion on this post is still ongoing, and a decision has not yet been made. Feel free to comment on the discussion posts, if you would like to share your thoughts on the topic.

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

A Big Orange Heart, formerly known as WP&UP, has opened its 2020 Remote Work Wellbeing and Mental Health Survey. The charity organization focuses on supporting remote working communities with education and resources for mental and physical health. It is also home to a community of more than 4,700 members who support each other in growing their businesses and building new skills.

The survey asks fairly broad questions about your mental health and the mental health support in your work environment. It takes approximately three minutes and is completely anonymous.

Results from the 2019 survey showed that the majority of people in the WordPress community work alone and a significant percentage are dealing with anxiety and suicidal thoughts:

• 8% of the WordPress community have had suicidal thoughts in the last 12 months
• 47% stated their workplace makes them feel anxious
• 56% of the WordPress community works alone

Big Orange Heart founder Dan Maby believes these results are helping his team save lives. The charity is actively creating and maintaining services and a peer support network that encourage people to stay connected to their community, in order to reduce the isolation they experience.

“Our 2019 results identified that almost 8% of all respondents had been dealing with sustained periods of feeling suicidal over the previous 12-months, twice the national US average,” Maby said. “This finding led to more training being provided in suicide prevention and support for our team, which enabled us to support multiple individuals that have contacted us requiring suicidal support, all of whom are still with us today.”  

There are more people working alone remotely now than ever before due to the pandemic. Spend a short time on any social media network and you will likely hear several people say they are not doing okay. This survey helps the team at Big Orange Heart understand the extent of mental health related issues within the remote working community and informs various initiatives the organization plans throughout the year.

“As a charity, like so many others at this time, we have been heavily impacted by the COVID-19 global crisis,” Maby said. “Now more than ever we need to ensure our limited resources are used in the most effective way possible. Your anonymous data will allow us to best understand how we can help improve the lives of others within our community.”

The Remote Work Wellbeing and Mental Health Survey runs for one month and will close on August 31st. Take the survey and check out Big Orange Heart’s blog for several helpful posts on how to maintain your mental health while working during this crisis.

With the WordPress 5.5 development cycle coming to a close, it is time to begin mapping out what features should land in WordPress 5.6 later this year. Earlier today, Chloe Bringmann asked the community to chime in with its wish list on the Make Core blog.

As usual, I have a few thoughts. I tend to lean toward addressing some of the long-standing developer-friendly tickets because these features allow plugin authors to build better products for end-users in the long run.

A complete custom post status API tops my usual list of most-wanted features. I have already opined over this for my WordPress 5.5 wish list. It may be time for more realistic dreams. Maybe we will revisit it another year or two down the road. However, if any core leads want to give the feature a green light, I will gladly be the evangelist and get others excited about it.

Homepage Post Type Selection

For this release, I want to call out one of my other years-long wishes. WordPress should allow end-users to select any custom post type for display on the homepage.

Imagine a WordPress where users can head to their Reading Settings screen in the admin and select something other than their normal posts list or a page to appear on the homepage. Have a forum plugin installed? Maybe users want to list their latest topics or forums list. Running an eCommerce plugin? Users should be able to display their products. Setting up a web design portfolio? Display the most recent projects by simply selecting this choice in the admin.

This is an area where the software has always catered to bloggers and has avoided throwing a little love to other types of sites.

Currently, plugin authors must perform some crazy hacks to make this work. The WooCommerce custom query class is enough to make any developer give up. Not all of the code in that file is for the front page, but it has a frustrating amount to make something work that should be far simpler for plugin authors.

The reason this needs to be in core WordPress is so that each and every plugin does not need to roll a custom solution. Plugins should be able to flag their post types during registration as “allowed on homepage” — not all post types are meant for this type of display. Then, WordPress should handle all the dirty work behind the scenes if a particular post type is selected by the end-user. The addition to the API for plugin authors would be simple, and plugins that are already hacking this feature together can drop a lot of unnecessary code.

There is an existing 8-year-old ticket for the feature. It has a few old and likely outdated patches and has not seen any real activity in the past four years. Nevertheless, it would be nice to see this feature in core WordPress and finally close the ticket.

Block System Wish List

Like most releases, the block system will be getting the most attention. The things that will land in WordPress 5.6 are mostly already set in stone, assuming a particular feature does not fall behind in development like widgets and nav menus did for the 5.5 release.

On the whole, I like the general direction the block system has been headed. If anything, I have been impatient with some things, such as awaiting the integrated block management screen in the admin. For other features, such as full-site editing, I am still wondering whether they are realistic goals for the WordPress 5.6 release.

I would take a release and focus on tightening up and polishing the existing system. Take stock of the pain points — and there are many — that users are mentioning. Spend time working on smoothing out the editing experience before tacking on new features.

That is not going to happen. New features are what get developers up in the morning and excited about the project. Therefore, my fallback request is to bring on the block management screen.

What’s on your wish list?

WordCamp US 2020, which was originally scheduled for October 27-29, was officially canceled today. In April, organizers transitioned to planning for it to be held as a virtual event, but the tenuous situation with the pandemic in the United States and the stress on the event’s large crew of volunteers has precipitated a full cancellation. The decision was announced on the WCUS website:

It is with heavy hearts that we have made the decision to cancel this year’s WordCamp US event. In light of the continued pandemic, online event fatigue for attendees, organizers, and volunteers, and the desire for WordCamp experiences to be traditional WordCamp experiences, we have made the difficult decision to stop this year’s planning, and cancel WordCamp US 2020.

After the pandemic started forcing WordCamps and meetups to go online, many community team members seemed to put on a brave face about adapting WordCamps to virtual events, but WCUS organizers are publicly recognizing the reality of online event fatigue.

Angela Jin, one of the lead organizers, said her team discussed how recent online WordCamps have struggled to meet traditional goals of connecting people and encouraging contribution. In light of attendees’ increasing online conference fatigue, WCUS organizers considered the cost of volunteers’ time.

“The Lead Organizers also took into consideration how many volunteers we have on this team, and how much time we were asking them to invest in an event that didn’t seem to be able to offer the same level of joy or satisfaction that an in-person WordCamp would,“ Jin said.

“As you might imagine, this was a very upsetting realization, but the whole team spent time discussing together, and we believe that we made the right decision.” 

The U.S. passed more than 150,000 Coronavirus deaths this week and outbreaks are worsening right as schools are supposed to be opening. As COVID-19 cases continue to rise sharply in many states, renewed lockdowns and political tensions have put people on edge. Every day brings a fresh injection of bad news and the country is deeply mired in division ahead of one of the most contentious presidential elections in history. Late October is not an ideal time to try to host WordPress’ flagship WordCamp online.

One WCUS organizer, who requested to remain anonymous, said he was angry that he invested more than 100 hours across various organizing teams and wished it had come sooner. He described how multiple personal stressors were impacting daily life and draining the team’s energy.

“I feel everyone is tired and worn out,” he said. “They are stressed – we are all losing friends [to COVID-19]. Everyone is fighting about politics and the work suffered.”

He reported that many organizers were not doing their parts and all tasks were delayed. Although he experienced a high level of frustration with how it was handled, he was relieved when the decision was announced. Many of the event’s 50 organizers are also involved in coordinating local meetups and leading other WordCamps, and their energies are spread thin.

“This will pave the way for something new and better,” he said. “We have to evolve as a community and one more zoom meeting is not it.”

Not all organizers considered the time invested as a loss. Cate DeRosia, who has also helped organize WordCamp Grand Rapids in the past, said the lead WCUS organizers consulted with the entire team through a multi-step process and gave opportunities for their opinions to be heard.

“It’s easy to imagine that as an organizer I’d be disappointed by this decision, but that couldn’t be further from the truth,” Cate DeRosia said. “None of this is what I’d hoped for, but the time I’ve invested in WCUS has helped me grow relationships and learn new skills that ultimately help me further my career goals and make me a better volunteer in the future.

“COVID-19 has been unpredictable and made everything about life harder. By making this difficult decision now, we all get back a little of our time to invest in other areas instead of using up more energy and risking volunteer burnout for an event that ran the risk of getting lost amid other online events.”

State of the Word May be Hosted as a Separate, Focused Event

WCUS is encouraging speakers to apply again next year. Although all regular sessions on the program were canceled, some organizers will be shifting their focus to hosting a 24-hour contributor day along with producing some workshops and youth programming content.

Matt Mullenweg’s annual State of the Word address is also expected to happen but will likely take a different format this year.

“Discussions about the State of the Word are still active; our understanding is that it will still happen, but possibly not in association with any other event,” Jin said.

“I’m really excited about the potential for lots of smaller, focused, and educational ways for the community to connect online this year,” Matt Mullenweg said. “For the State of the Word I don’t have a plan yet, I think there’s less value to us watching the same thing at the same time if we can’t hang out afterward, but it still would be fun to celebrate the great progress we’ve been making with some sort of video. Stay tuned November-ish.”

Cancellation costs for WCUS are still being finalized. Prior to making it a virtual event, the original budget was close to $1 million, with the largest costs being the venue and catering. Jin said the team will publish a full accounting of expenses on the Community Team blog or the event site after the last round of discussions with vendors are complete.

It’s too soon to know if the WordCamp will be an in-person event in 2021. When asked if they will be hosting in St. Louis again, Jin said that any decisions regarding WCUS 2021 are paused for now.

“The WCUS team did invest a lot of time and energy into this event, but in a year when it is incredibly hard to plan anything, we did the best we could and adapted quickly,” she said. “I’m sad, of course, as I miss seeing everyone at WordCamps, but even if it was time and energy invested in something that didn’t happen, I spent time doing it with brilliant people who care just as much about WordPress as I do. It’s been an immensely challenging year, and I’m humbled to have been a part of this team, which has consistently supported each other and grown together in the face of adversity.”

I am always on the lookout for interesting syntax-highlighting plugins, particularly for those occasions when I write tutorials or other articles that lean heavily on code. Far too many plugins use shortcodes, custom blocks, or other odd solutions. However, there is one option that I intentionally overlooked when it was released over a year ago: Code Syntax Block by Marcus Kazmierczak.

Based on the name, I assumed it was yet another standalone block. However, I have since given it another look and realized that this was note the case. It integrates directly with the core WordPress block. There are times when a new block is necessary, but this is not one of those times. Sometimes it is better to extend the existing blocks in core.

Code Syntax Block uses the Prism JavaScript library to add syntax highlighting on the front end of the site. The plugin is designed well. It loads its scripts and styles only when the code block is in use.

Front end PHP code example.

The plugin does not load Prism in the editor, so the code output will use the default editor or theme styling. This may not appeal to those who want a one-to-one match between the back and front end. I am comfortable with the non-highlighted version in the admin while having the pretty output on the front end. However, it would be nice to see an option or filter to enable highlighting in the editor.

Out of the box, the plugin uses the One Dark theme, which was created for the Atom editor and ported to Prism. Developers can overwrite the theme with either a custom assets/prism/prism.css file in their theme or by filtering the path or URL that gets loaded. The Prism project has a variety of themes available that are plug-and-play. Other themes exist outside of the official list too.

On the admin side, the plugin creates a new “Settings” tab for the code block and adds a few options that users can choose from:

• Language
• Show line numbers
• Title for code block

Editor view of Code Syntax Highlighter

By default, the plugin does not support the full list of over 200 languages. Instead, it lists just over 40 of the most popular. The list is filterable, so anyone can add or remove languages with a few lines of code. There is also a filter hook for setting the default languages, which would be particularly useful for those who routinely post code snippets in the same coding language.

After a few days of testing, I can safely say that Code Syntax Block is being added to my WordPress toolbox. I wish I had only given it a shot much sooner.

Bing has launched its first official plugin for WordPress aimed at helping site owners get their content indexed immediately. Instead of waiting for a bingbot to crawl the site, the plugin notifies Bing of any new or updated content automatically using its Submit URL API.

“Bing believes that the future for search engines is less about crawling to discover content and more about sharing new and updated content across the web, a fundamental shift in the way that search engines handle web sites,” Bing Product Manager Fabrice Canel said. “Instead of monitoring RSS, sitemaps and HTML pages to check for new pages, discover content changes and/or new outbound links, websites will notify search engines directly about relevant URLs changing on their website.”

Search engines can take anywhere from several hours to a few weeks to crawl a website. Bing’s API allows site owners to get content indexed immediately, while eventually reducing the crawling frequency for sites where there are no changes. Users will need to generate an API key in order to configure the plugin for access to the Bing Webmaster Tools API.

The new plugin also introduces a few other options for managing URL submissions:

• Toggle the automatic submission feature
• Manually submit a URL to Bing Index
• View list of recent URL submissions from the plugin
• Retry any failed submissions from the recent submissions list
• Download recent URL submissions for analysis

Canel said the Bing Webmaster Team recommends using the new URL Submissions plugin as a complement to existing plugins that connect sites to Bing, such as Jetpack’s site verification tool, and SEO plugins that add XML sitemaps. Bing’s plugin is different in that it focuses on enabling Bing to discover immediate changes on WordPress sites.

“Sitemaps are a great complementary solution to our plugin to discover all URLs on WordPress sites, but we cannot monitor each sitemap all the time,” Canel said. “Only a small percentage of WordPress sites are publishing content every day. Most are nearly static and this is preferable to be notified instead of pulling content every so often for them. Same for sites publishing often, it helps to get the content quickly indexed instead of having to wait a long time.”

Bing doesn’t usually get as much airtime as Google and its supporting tools, since Google continues to dominate the search market. Bing’s market share is currently hovering at 2.75% of searches globally on all platforms as of June 2020.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Search Engine Market Share

The search engine has seen slow but steady growth in certain regions and platforms. Bing performs higher globally across desktop searches (6.08%). In the United Sates, Bing’s market share is sitting at 6.99% and is even higher on US desktop searches (13.35%):

Google	87.71%
bing	6.99%
Yahoo!	3.44%

Search Engine Market Share in US – June 2020

Bing may not boast a big slice of the search market pie, but the search engine served close to 936.5 million unique global visitors during the month of May 2020. More than half of Bing users have a bachelor’s or post graduate degree and 38% of Bing users have an income of $100,000 USD or higher. Depending on the demographic you are targeting, being found by Bing users may be one small factor in your site’s overall success.

The search engine recently updated its webmaster guidelines for the first time since 2012. If you’re looking to optimize for Bing’s audience, this document contains a detailed break down of how the search engine ranks content.

August 11, the target release date for WordPress 5.5, is just shy of two weeks away. For developers who have not been completely on top of the upcoming release, now is a good time to start looking at how changes might affect their projects. Theme authors in particular can expect several new features and some breaking changes.

For the most part, WordPress 5.5 will introduce new features that theme developers can begin to add to their themes. However, the two biggest changes that could negatively impact their themes will be automatic updates and direct HTML changes to the custom logo output.

Outside of the new features and changes, theme authors should catch up on our coverage of the Gutenberg plugin and test against its updates that are being merged into core WordPress.

Auto Updates

WordPress 5.5 will finally introduce automatic updates for plugins and themes. It is a long-awaited feature and should be a good thing in terms of keeping end-users updated and running what is usually the most secure version of their extensions. However, the big downside to automatic updates is that most themes and plugins will not have the same level of quality control as core WordPress receives. Even the best development companies might have only a few people looking over the code.

On the flip-side, the automatic updates feature means that theme authors can push fixes out to end-users much more quickly.

The big thing is that theme developers need to be aware that users will be enabling automatic updates. For some, this might not mean changing anything with their release cycles. For others, it might mean tacking on some extra time to ensure that extra quality control is in place. The success of automatic updates lies directly on the shoulders of the plugin and theme authors. It is a huge responsibility that should not be taken lightly. WordPress is placing a lot of trust in its development community to get this right.

HTML Change for Custom Logos

As part of an accessibility-related ticket for WordPress 5.5, the core get_custom_logo() and the_custom_logo() functions will no longer output a link around the logo image when viewing the site homepage. This change was made because the link itself points to the homepage by default and is unnecessary in that context.

Right now, there are 183 themes in the official theme directory that target the link in their CSS. This does not necessarily mean that all 183 themes will be broken upon update. However, it likely means that some of them will need a tweak or two.

Theme authors are encouraged to target the .custom-logo-link class instead of any particular HTML element. The new change will add a <span> element rather than an <a> element on the homepage. Both will use the same class.

Block Patterns Have Arrived

It is no secret that I am downright giddy about the prospect of theme designers being loosed upon the world, allowing their talents to shine via block patterns. Patterns have been one of the missing features since the initial launch of the Gutenberg project. For theme authors, they represent that missing link between designing unique “templates” or “sections” and providing end-users a means to add them to their sites.

Block patterns are essentially groups of pre-configured blocks that users can insert into their posts or pages at the click of a button. The beauty of the system is that theme authors can design whatever patterns their hearts desire and make them easily available to their users. No need for complicated theme settings. No lengthy tutorials explaining how to recreate the demo. Design something in the block editor. Register it as a pattern. Let users insert it into a post and rejoice.

This is an opportunity that theme authors have never had before. It is an opportunity to create beautiful designs without having to worry about overcomplicating it for the average user. It is a pivotal moment in WordPress theme design history. Theme authors have the chance to push the system and see what WordPress and its block editor are truly capable of.

Building a restaurant theme? Provide users with multiple food menu patterns. Creating something for novelists or other book authors? Give users some layout options for showcasing their books.

The block patterns API removes many prior limits to what theme authors could realistically do. Now, it’s time for those theme authors to take charge.

Line Heights and Custom Units

The block editor has two new tools for end-users to take advantage of: custom line-heights and custom units. Theme authors can opt into allowing users to edit the line-height of paragraphs and headings with the custom-line-heights theme support flag. They can also allow users to switch between various units, such as when defining the Cover block’s height, with the custom-units flag. In addition to pixels, themes can define which units are supported.

Allowing users to customize the line-height value for text can be tricky business. There are some situations where it is warranted. However, for theme authors who prefer to maintain a strict vertical rhythm, this could lead to disaster. This will likely come down to a personal choice for developers based on what type of theme they are building.

Accessible Widgets Navigation

Starting with WordPress 5.5, theme authors will be able to opt into outputting more accessible widgets. By default, widgets that display unordered lists do so without any context. This can make it difficult for those using assistive technologies to navigate the site.

Theme authors can now add navigation-widgets to the HTML5 theme supports array to add the new markup. WordPress will then wrap all core widgets with a <nav> element and an aria-label based on the widget title.

This will not affect widgets from third-party plugins. Plugin authors should reevaluate their widgets to determine if they want to support this feature.

Template Functions Updates

WordPress is tacking on some nice features for its templating functions in the upcoming release. The first major change is that theme authors can pass data to template files. We have previously covered this story on the Tavern. This feature, while years late, should still be useful for more complex theming setups and allow developers to bypass odd workarounds or in-house solutions.

Template-loading functions, such as get_template_part() and others, will also return a value in WordPress 5.5. If the template is not found, the function will return a false value. Otherwise, it will return void. This will be helpful in situations where theme authors need to run a conditional to check if a template exists.

Gutenberg 8.6 landed quietly last week. Much of the focus right now is ironing out the remaining bugs for WordPress 5.5 during its beta cycle. However, that does not mean the Gutenberg project has come to a complete halt in terms of new features. The team is marching forward with extra goodies for those who use the plugin.

The latest update of the plugin did not cover as much ground as normal, but it does include an enhancement for the Cover block when using a video background and several updates to block patterns.

The primary focus for version 8.6 was squashing bugs. The development team addressed over three dozen of them while correcting a handful of performance issues. While new features and enhancements from 8.6 onward are not expected in the upcoming WordPress 5.5, most bug fixes should be included.

Focal Point Selector for Video Covers

Selecting a focal point for a video background.

The Cover block has long allowed users to pick a focal point for background images. However, this feature was missing when users added a background video to the block. As of version 8.6, that is no longer the case. Both image and video backgrounds should work in much the same way.

Gutenberg now has a new “Focal point picker” option located under the “Media settings” tab when adding a video background. Users can select the focal point by dragging the circle icon in the video box or hardcode left and top percentage values in the input fields below it.

This is not a particularly exciting development for most Gutenberg users. Self-hosting video is not cheap and remains unused for most. However, for those who do use video backgrounds, it is one of those nice-to-have features that is there when needed.

Updated Block Patterns

Inserting the updated quote block pattern.

The Gutenberg team updated several of the existing block patterns. For the most part, the pattern updates were minor cosmetic changes, tweaks that improve the overall design. The button-related patterns received simple changes, such as new text labels and colors. The developers also changed the colors and text of the large header patterns.

The team moved the header above the columns in the two columns text pattern and changed the text to make the columns appear equal height by default. It is a poor use of textual columns, which would ideally be handled with CSS instead so that it works appropriately across screen sizes. Perhaps it would be better to have a “Text Columns” block in the long run.

The nicest block pattern update was for the quote pattern. It now has an image at the top and a separator at the bottom. It is akin to a single testimonial, which is more of a pattern than a basic quote.

Theme authors can also remove support for the core block patterns with a single line of code: remove_theme_support( 'core-block-patterns' ). This does not drop support for patterns altogether. For example, patterns added by plugins or the theme will still appear in the inserter.

Site Icon Used in Fullscreen Mode

Site icon appears in top left in fullscreen mode.

When writing in fullscreen mode, the “back to posts” link has utilized the WordPress logo in the past. In version 8.6, the user’s custom site icon will take its place. However, this will only happen if the user has uploaded an icon via the customizer.

I am unsure how I feel about this change. In practice, it almost feels like clicking the icon should take me to the front end of the site instead of the post management screen. At least with the WordPress icon, it felt like it was pointing toward an admin-side screen instead. For my workflow, I would rather see this link/icon replaced with a button that toggles between fullscreen and normal mode, popping the admin menu back into place rather than departing the editing screen altogether.

The first release candidate for WordPress 5.5 is now available!

This is an important milestone in the community’s progress toward the final release of WordPress 5.5.

“Release Candidate” means that the new version is ready for release, but with millions of users and thousands of plugins and themes, it’s possible something was missed. WordPress 5.5 is slated for release on August 11, 2020, but we need your help to get there—if you haven’t tried 5.5 yet, now is the time!

You can test the WordPress 5.5 release candidate in two ways:

• Try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (choose the “bleeding edge nightlies” option)
• Or download the release candidate here (zip).

Thank you to all of the contributors who tested the Beta releases and gave feedback. Testing for bugs is a critical part of polishing every release and a great way to contribute to WordPress.

What’s in WordPress 5.5?

WordPress 5.5 has lots of refinements to polish the developer experience. To keep up, subscribe to the Make WordPress Core blog and pay special attention to the developer notes tag for updates on those and other changes that could affect your products.

Plugin and Theme Developers

Please test your plugins and themes against WordPress 5.5 and update the Tested up to version in the readme file to 5.5. If you find compatibility problems, please be sure to post to the support forums, so those can be figured out before the final release.

The WordPress 5.5 Field Guide, due very shortly, will give you a more detailed dive into the major changes.

How to Help

Do you speak a language other than English? Help us translate WordPress into more than 100 languages! This release also marks the hard string freeze point of the 5.5 release schedule.

If you think you’ve found a bug, you can post to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. We’d love to hear from you! If you’re comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, fill one on WordPress Trac, where you can also find a list of known bugs.

photo credit: Burst

The WordPress Community Team has officially updated its guidelines for WordCamps to be online-only events for the remainder of 2020. The six WordCamps on the schedule through the end of the year were already planning on using an online format but the guidelines also include local meetups.

“The team acknowledges that this is not easy for the community that has been heavily based on in-person events and encounters,” Timi Wahalahti said in the announcement. “Unfortunately, the global coronavirus situation does not seem to be slowing down to a level that would allow us organizing in-person events safely at this time.”

The guidelines will be re-evaluated in the first quarter of 2021, but some organizers are already planning for online events next year. WordCamp Europe 2021 is the first WordPress event to go virtual for the coming year, with the in-person event resuming in 2022.

Moving what was once a vibrant in-person gathering to a two-dimensional online format is a challenging endeavor, especially when the world is suddenly awash in online events competing for attention. Making virtual events stand out from the crowd is a new marketing challenge.

There is something about the magic of WordCamps that gives momentum to ideas and collaboration. While you cannot replicate the chance meetings in the hallway and the priceless conversations over long dinners, online events have the benefit of being more geographically inclusive. The constraints of the pandemic are also challenging our assumptions about how online gatherings are supposed to work.

WordPress Community Team to Explore New Event Formats, Redefine Relationships with Sponsors, Temporarily Cancel Swag Spending

The necessity for virtual events has inspired discussion around some new event formats, including a new proposal that decouples online events from geography. WordPress Community manager Hugh Lashbrooke described how events might explore combining synchronous discussions with previously recorded workshops:

What if we blended those two elements into a program that provides the flexibility of online content, with the value and sense of community that comes with learning together?

We could publish workshops in a central location (on wordpress.org, for better visibility and reach) and then invite learners to join live discussion groups that cater to different timezones. This “flipped classroom” model allows people to learn at their convenience, and then come together for additional development. 

Lashbrooke suggested the workshops could be designed by people who would otherwise be speaking WordCamps and could possibly source content from WordPress.tv or talks that have been given at online meetups.

“There is also potential for longer courses, composed of multiple workshops, and a group that meets repeatedly over time,” Lashbrooke said.

So far the suggestions in the comments include introductory workshops for WordPress. These would be timely for newcomers who have recently lost work and are looking to improve their online resumes or portfolios, or start up a new business. Beginner workshops have strong outreach potential if promoted outside of the WordPress community.

During the first half of the year, the Community Team began transitioning to facilitating the needs of online events and have continued to work tirelessly to find ways for people to connect. In a recent update, WordPress community organizer Andrea Middleton explained that changes are coming for future online events, which may adopt another name instead of using “WordCamp.”

Due to the financial position of WordPress Community Support PBC (WPCS), the community team is ending programmatic support for online AV vendor expenses. WordCamps that are not yet on the schedule will be encouraged to get sponsorships if they require the use of a professional AV vendor.

“Likewise, we have paused plans to spend money on sending swag, T-shirts, or other typical WordCamp collateral,” Middleton said. “It’s important to change our frame of reference for what’s necessary to make online events, away from the WordCamp model. Just because we did things a certain way for WordCamps, doesn’t mean it’s a high priority for online events.”

Sponsorships are also being re-examined, as online events haven’t quite been able to deliver the same value to sponsors that traditional events did.

“The value proposition of online sponsor booths is shaky, and we’ve always prided ourselves in partnering with our sponsors,” Middleton said. “Looking ahead, we must examine how much funding we need to create events that meet the goals of the team, and let that determine how to best coordinate with our community sponsors to deliver value and further our mission.”

The potential for in-person events for the coming year is still uncertain at this point, in the absence of a vaccine ready for commercial distribution. WordPress’ global sponsorship program has been temporarily suspended and the Community Team plans to work with global sponsors later this year to make a plan for 2021.

Last Thursday, Vova Feldman published an article asking that we stop blaming plugin authors for the plethora of admin notices that users are bombarded with each day. The real culprit? The lack of a notifications mechanism in WordPress core.

Feldman’s post was prompted by a tweet in which Scott Bolinger called out plugin authors for letting admin notices get out of control:

Feldman argues that laying the blame on plugin authors is the wrong way to look at the issue. While I agree that the underlying problem lies with WordPress, plugin authors have played their part in creating an atmosphere where they have become the scapegoat for everything wrong with the system.

I have developed plugins since a fateful day in April 2007 in which I released a plugin that simply listed the current page’s subpages. I have worked on 100s of plugins for clients and public release since then. In that time, I have maybe added a custom admin notice two times and only when the plugin had a major change, such as a database update. I reserved such notices for the OMGBBQ-very-important-you-need-to-read-this type of stuff. I considered it my duty to create an experience in which the user did not have to dismiss a notice every time one of my plugins received an update.

This was not because I was cognizant of the growing issue of dozens of notices on some sites or how often users were being overwhelmed with them. For many years, I worked within a bubble where I simply focused on creating what I considered an ideal experience for my users. I always thought the admin notices system created an abysmal experience. It did not make sense to use it more than necessary.

On the other hand, there were likely a few times over the years where I should have added some sort of notices for changes. Instead, I avoided doing so altogether because WordPress lacked a notifications system. I missed some good opportunities for communication.

To a large extent, the issue stems from this lack of a proper notification system. However, plugin authors have perpetuated this broken system by continuing to use it when unnecessary. They have used it as a billboard to place their holiday ads. They have used it to upsell commercial versions of their products and services while prompting users for a five-star rating. There is plenty of blame to go around.

Instead of placing blame, we should start asking what tools would solve problems for developers.

The Need for a Better System

Technically, WordPress simply has a hook and a set of common classes that developers can use in their HTML to provide some different colors for notices. There is no API, and without an API, it is impossible for even third-party plugin developers to even try their hands at creating various solutions.

The closest thing WordPress has to an API is a little-known project from the Themes Team that provides a standardized method for theme authors to add notices. However, the project covers only one aspect of admin notices, which is to create a consistent UI.

The admin notice issue cannot be properly addressed without identifying the problems that plugin authors have tried to solve within the system, which at least includes the following:

• User-oriented notifications, generally appearing after a user action.
• Advertising commercial products and services.
• Calls for plugin feedback or star ratings.

One of the primary issues with the current notification system is that it was created for the first item in that list. The other two items are not necessarily bad things. They are just poor usages of the system in place. However, there is no other standard method to handle those scenarios.

Advertising is something we all must deal with in some form or fashion. I am unsure if there could or even should be a standard API for advertising. An outright ban of ads in the admin notice area could create a beast of its own, forcing plugin authors to come up with more obtrusive forms of advertising in other areas of the admin. I want to support advertising but not when that advertising wiggles its way to the top of every admin screen.

WordPress provides no easy way for end-users to rate or review plugins from their admin interfaces. Having an easy way to provide direct feedback would be immensely helpful for both users and developers. While I am certain many people would argue against such integration with the WordPress.org site (there are arguments against any external integration out of the box), ratings and reviews would require an explicit opt-in from end-users because they would need an account on WordPress.org.

Advertising and plugin feedback should not be a part of a discussion on admin notices. However, reality dictates that they are integral to the conversation.

The first order of business must be to create a new notification system from the ground up. It should provide a standard API for plugin authors while handing over full management capabilities to the site owners. Users should be able to disable notices altogether or even enable/disable notices on a per-plugin basis. Notice that a particular plugin author provides useless notices? Well, just disable notices from that plugin. The author lost their privileges.

From that point, we can let the progress drive the discussion on what to do about advertising and calls for feedback. A new system may shift them to a new screen — out of sight out of mind — but not make those problems disappear.

More than anything, it is time for a champion. The project does not get done without someone who will pave the path forward and earn the green light for a new notifications system in WordPress.

WordPress 5.5 Beta 4 is now available!

This software is still in development, so it’s not recommended to run this version on a production site. Consider setting up a test site to play with the new version.

You can test WordPress 5.5 Beta 4 in two ways:

• Try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (choose the “bleeding edge nightlies” option)
• Or download the beta here (zip).

WordPress 5.5 is slated for release on August 11th, 2020, and we need your help to get there!

Thank you to all of the contributors who tested the beta 3 development release and gave feedback. Testing for bugs is a critical part of polishing every release and a great way to contribute to WordPress.

Some highlights

Since beta 3, 43 bugs have been fixed. Here are a few changes in beta 4:

• Add "loading" as an allowed kses image attribute (see #50731).
• Add filter for the plugin/theme auto-update message in the Info tab of Site health (see #50663).
• $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] not a reliable when generating email host names (see #25239)
• Several backported fixes from Gutenberg are included in WordPress 5.5 Beta 4 (See PR #24218)

Developer notes

WordPress 5.5 has lots of refinements to polish the developer experience. To keep up, subscribe to the Make WordPress Core blog and pay special attention to the developers’ notes for updates on those and other changes that could affect your products.

How to Help

Do you speak a language other than English? Help translate WordPress into more than 100 languages!

If you think you’ve found a bug, you can post to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. We’d love to hear from you!

If you’re comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, file one on WordPress Trac, where you can also find a list of known bugs.