Twenty years ago, every aspect of developing a website and putting it online was more complex than it is today – an enchantment of Merlin’s wand to most common folks. The term “webmaster” hasn’t aged well, but it was commonly used in a different era when tech wizards were the only people creating and managing websites. The term has become outmoded as online publishing and website building has become more user-friendly.

Google recently ran a study that showed usage of the term webmaster is in sharp decline, as web professionals now prefer more specialized terms, such as blogger, developer, SEO, or online marketer. In recognition of this change, the company is rebranding “Google Webmasters Central” to “Google Search Central.” The change will be rolled out to Google’s websites and social media within the next couple days.

In addition to the rebranding, Google is also centralizing its help information on one site and consolidating its blogs:

Moving forward, the Search Console Help Center will contain only documentation related to using Search Console. It’s also still the home of our help forum, newly renamed from “Webmasters Help Community” to “Google Search Central Community“. The information related to how Google Search works, crawling and indexing, Search guidelines, and other Search-related topics are moving to our new site, which previously focused only on web developer documentation. 

The Google Webmasters blog and 13 other localized blogs are being moved to the new site for better discovery and easier language switching. Google is going to redirect current RSS and email subscribers to the new blog URL, so readers only need to update their bookmarks.

Google is also introducing a new jumping spider bot to accompany its Googlebot mascot in crawling the internet. The creature doesn’t yet have a nickname, but the company is soliciting suggestions.

WordPress 5.6 Beta 4 is now available for testing!

This software is still in development, so we recommend that you run this version on a test site.

You can test the WordPress 5.6 beta in two ways:

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

The current target for the final release is December 8, 2020. This is just over three weeks away, so your help is needed to ensure this release is tested properly.

Thank you to all of the contributors that tested the beta 3 development release and provided feedback. Testing for bugs is an important part of polishing each release and a great way to contribute to WordPress.

Some Highlights

Since beta 3, 42 bugs have been fixed. Here is a summary of a few changes included in beta 4:

• There was a change to the auto-updates implementation for new installations of the software (#50907). Next steps, and rationale are both available.
• Added better handling of unexpected values in Site Health (#50145).
• Added a way for developers to filter the available authors list in Quick Edit (#47685).
• More accessible handling of the tag cloud widget (#51455).
• Multiple improvements in the Media component.
• Multiple improvements in the Build/Test Tools component.

To see all of the features for each Gutenberg release in detail, check out the release posts: 8.6, 8.7, 8.8, 8.9, 9.0, 9.1, 9.2, and 9.3.

Developer notes

WordPress 5.6 has lots of refinements to 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

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.

Props to @tonyamork, @audrasjb for technical notes and @angelasjin, @yvettesonneveld, @cguntur, @cbringmann for final review.

Envato has passed $1 billion in community earnings after 14 years in business. The company reached the goal a year earlier than anticipated, thanks to the contributions of 81,000 different creators around the globe and millions of customers who have purchased products from Envato Market, Envato Studio, Envato Tuts+ and Envato Elements.

“To this day, we’re very proud that our community earns more money than our company does,” Envato co-founder Collis Ta’eed said. Last month Ta’eed stepped down from his position as CEO to pursue a new ethical chocolate e-commerce venture. He was replaced by former HotelsCombined.com CEO, Hichame Assi.

Due to the pandemic, the Australian tech company recently transitioned to all employees working from home during the global lockdown. Along with the announcement of Ta’eed’s exit, Envato delivered a 20% profit share payout, totaling $3.75m AUD, to its 630-person workforce. The company reported that this is an increase on the 10% allocation from the previous financial year.

“Profit share has become an integral part of Envato and helps connect the team with a share of the success they create through their efforts,” Ta’eed said.

During the past several years, the company has focused heavily on driving profits through Envato Elements, its subscription service. Ta’eed said the business is now “more subscription oriented than at any time in our history.”

One WordPress plugin author, who sells on Codecanyon, commented on the milestone post, urging Envato to renew its focus on the marketplaces.

“Please focus on the marketplaces as well,” FWDesign said. “In the past 2-3 years, you guys focused on Elements, cannibalizing the marketplace, is time to give us something back. Personally, I feel forgotten.”

While the community earnings have allowed creators to improve their lives in various ways – from paying family medical bills to buying apartments – the increase in focus on Envato Elements has been highly controversial. Envato’s forums are replete with complaints about Elements “poaching clients from existing marketplaces,” after many authors spoke out about Envato advertising Elements on authors’ marketplace product pages.

Authors employ various marketing channels to bring traffic to their items, such as Facebook ads or Adwords, and have complained for years that potential customers were whisked away from their product pages by Elements ads. Many authors reported declining sales on individual products as a result.

In May 2018, Envato rolled out a critical change that made all items across all item types available to all subscribers (monthly and annual). This was particularly controversial for WordPress theme authors and many reported significant decreases in sales as a direct result.

At that time, former Envato employee James Giroux responded to authors’ concerns, characterizing the new subscription service as “a long-term play:”

“With Elements, you are buying into a revenue stream rather than a one-time transaction. So, when you compare the value of a Market customer vs an Elements subscriber, you may see less from the subscriber in the first month, but more in their cumulative lifetime revenue.”

Elements may not be the right choice for every Envato creator, but the company’s investment in the service is now pulling in $40 million in annual recurring revenue as of 2018-2019, accounting for 35% of Envato’s $113M in revenue for 2019.

“This year we continued to reinvent ourselves as a subscription company, with a major uptick in subscribers across Envato,” Ta’eed said in Envato’s 2019 Annual Public Impact Statement. However, this new business model is coming at the expense of authors who sell exclusively through the marketplaces.

Envato authors have begged the company’s leadership to take down the banners that boost Elements’ sales by siphoning customers off the marketplace, but the aggressive push towards subscriptions prevails. The frustration is palpable in numerous threads across the company’s various marketplaces.

“It’s one thing to advertise Elements on the web or wherever Envato likes, but to have this banner on all of our item pages is actively poaching potential customers away when they are moments away from buying our items,” AudioJungle author Alister Bunclark said.

Many authors have seen a decline in sales that is outside their control. No amount of marketing traffic to their own portfolios can make up for the $16.50 “all you can eat” offer that is plastered to the top of every page. The banner for the in-house competitor even appears directly in the cart for customers who are trying to checkout with products from non-Elements authors.

“The fact that we are even having to request that Envato stop relentlessly promoting a competing, lower-priced alternative to our portfolios (many of which are exclusively offered at AudioJungle) – on the marketplace where our portfolios are – is discouraging,” one author said.

WordPress authors selling on Themeforest are also frustrated with the banners. In 2019, Envato sold an item every 5 seconds, with WordPress accounting for a third of sales. The company claims to be the “market leader for themes and templates for WordPress,” despite the marketplace’s overall poor reputation among WordPress professionals.

One byproduct of Elements including WordPress products in the subscription is that it tends to encourage the use of outdated themes and plugins. Users can download thousands of products but the WordPress themes do not come with support. Many users are not aware of this when they purchase their subscriptions. Users can get updates only while their subscriptions are active, but they have to be downloaded manually.

“Despite tons of complaints from authors (who made this place what it is in the first place) it is even pointless to promote your items elsewhere to attract some ‘buyers’ because they see the Elements promotions everywhere, even on our own product pages,” Themeforest Elite author Bedros said.

When authors took to the forums to report no sales or declining sales, one user responded, “Don’t panic. They killed the market with Elements.”

Certain marketplaces, like AudioJungle and WordPress themes, are disproportionately impacted by Elements, given the significant time investment to create these types of products.

“I wonder what’s the point, in these circumstances, to spend months (in some cases even a year) to build a decent WordPress theme to sell on Envato,” Bedros said. Another author on the same thread reported working on a theme for 16 months and had only 17 sales two months after it was approved.

“The big buyers (ad agencies and the like) will see an immediate savings on the subscription plan opposed to buying the products individually,” AudioJungle author Daniel Warneke said. “This pulls the high volume purchasers out of the individual market.

“Envato hand picks the authors that have products in Envato Elements, so it stands to reason that they selected a broad range of the most popular products. This would make the service the most appealing.”

Envato Reports 0.18% CTR on Elements Banner Ads But Will Not Remove Them

In the responses to Envato’s 2019 Annual Public Impact Statement, Collis Ta’eed confirmed that market sales are declining. He blames the “movement of the industry” towards other business models as the reason for the decline:

To your question on Market sales, they’re holding up better than we’d hoped, though they are down year on year. Internally we look at the combination of Market and Elements both in gross revenue (which is up) and in authors earnings (which is up). But Market itself is down a few percent on this time last year, and that looks like an ongoing trend (though one that’s not as steep as my worst fears at times!)

It’s tempting to think the driver of Market’s changes are Elements, especially as we drive subscription customers over. But we’d been mapping the trend of the sales curve for years prior to the launch of Elements and had been seeing changes before we ever launched into subscriptions, because of the movement of the industry, first to ‘bundles’ and then to ‘subscriptions’ and ‘free’. From what I can tell the bigger forces on Market are actually industry ones.

Despite the vast undervaluing of their individual products, authors in general do not seem to be opposed to Elements entirely but rather they are opposed to Envato’s aggressive advertisements on their portfolios. The same question surfaces every year and the company’s leadership continues to dance around it.

“Can you explain to authors why they should spend money on advertising their products when as soon as they land on the landing page they see a great big dirty banner saying they can get everything unlimited for a monthly fee?” template author Patchesoft commented. “I feel like this question came up last year and we got a ‘we’ll see what we can do about it’ and yet here we are a year later.”

Ta’eed responded, characterizing the banners as a cross-promotion of traffic between Market and Elements. He claimed that after the company performed some tests, removing the banner “had negligible impact on sales at a daily level.”

Definitely I know that the header bar on Market is up there amongst the most annoying things to authors. But at the same time, it’s important for us to be transparent about the different offerings we have for customers so they can choose what’s best for their needs. While it’s pretty annoying, the traffic diverted from Market item pages is minimal (0.18% of visitors actually click through). That said we’re exploring ways to let customers better know about Elements (and Placeit).

Authors are not buying this justification for the banner ads, and object to the use of the term “cross-promotion,” when the promotion only goes one way. Meanwhile, Elements, which enables non-exclusive sales, is treated like an ad-free, exclusive library.

“’Annoying’ is not the correct word,” AudioJungle member Purple Fog said. “You gotta understand it’s much, much more than that. It’s infuriating, it’s a betrayal, it’s you flipping us the finger.

“If it’s so important for you to let buyers know what all their options are, then why isn’t there a top banner on Elements telling them they can also get the item for a one off fee, in case they don’t want to subscribe?

“That 0.18% is pretty far from the figure you previously gave us (around 2%), and is even harder to believe. Do you mean that you are willing to antagonize the vast majority of authors just for 0.18% CTR? Makes little sense. It’s also hard to believe when there are countless threads opened by buyers who felt they were tricked by that infamous banner. Either your people are lying to you, or you didn’t set up the analytics properly, but in any case, something doesn’t add up here.”

Envato’s Transformation Into a Subscription Company Comes at the Expense of Its Exclusive Market Authors

Envato continues to write its own rules due to its early success and has now amassed a vast labor force who depend on the company’s offerings for their livelihoods. Those who are willing to devalue their work for inclusion in a subscription product (that is guaranteed to sell with a more compelling pricing point) are allowed to continue as cogs in a much more profitable machine.

It’s not wrong for Envato to pivot towards becoming a subscription company. To do so at the expense of market authors is unfair. These authors are paying to advertise for a competing library with lost sales from their own products. It exploits the marketplace authors who were hoping to make a sale, since their higher prices are now just a prop for making Elements look more attractive. Their portfolios become a gateway to the subscription service.

Unless Envato changes how it advertises Elements, the company will remain at odds with exclusive market authors’ interests. This is especially true for creators in markets where having their work available to more customers doesn’t instantly translate into more payments.

“Many authors have chosen to set up shop here exclusively and have supported and promoted this marketplace for years,” AudioJungle author Promosapien said in a thread where authors called on the CEO to remove the banner ads.

“Envato is presently making strategic choices that they obviously feel strongly about and feel are necessary for their own viability. Unfortunately, those choices are diminishing the benefits of being an exclusive author here.

“In fact, you could probably make a good argument that there has never been a worse time to be an exclusive author at a marketplace – when that marketplace is actively and continually using its considerable promotional resources to move website visitors away from your portfolio to a newer, cheaper licensing platform (Elements subscription).”

A few days ago, I came across a small library of blocks. As always, I was interested in seeing what this new plugin brought to the table. Would it surprise me with a block that has not been done before? Would it present a new take on some old ideas? Or, would it be the same old set of blocks that every other block bundle has? Regardless of what it offered, I was excited to try it all the same.

As I clicked on the description to find out more, I was immediately let down. The plugin specifically stated that it was built for only one theme. I could not use it with my preferred theme.

This was not the first time I had run across this issue. Other theme authors have built their own block bundles in the past. The plugin was not bringing anything particularly new to the WordPress community. It had less than a handful of blocks that had already been done before in numerous other plugins.

The problem was that this felt all too familiar.

Over the years, the WordPress community has created a set of unwritten rules regarding what belongs in a theme vs. what belongs in a plugin. Custom post types, taxonomies, and shortcodes are plugin territory. To an extent, widgets should also be exclusive to plugins. However, because of the way they are handled under the hood, there was always an argument that it was OK for themes to register them.

This theme vs. plugin argument has been ongoing for at least a decade. Because of how themes work, such arguments have been a losing battle. Except in a few edge cases, themes could do everything that a plugin could do. However, there was always supposed to be a clear-cut distinction between the two. Themes were meant to handle the front-end design of a website. Plugins were for everything else.

Today, the WordPress project and its block system are making progress toward solidifying that distinction.

Because of WordPress’s legacy of having various parts that did not all quite fit together in the past, it has created a culture of developers building in-house solutions. Nearly every large theme development company has its own plugins for overcoming the platform’s shortcomings. Most of the blame for this lies with the WordPress project. However, the project’s move to blocks is creating a standardized system that handles everything from a paragraph to the overall site container. With standardization across the board, there will be less and less need for these custom solutions from every theme company.

The block system set a clear line in the sand. It removed the need for shortcodes — good riddance — and will soon phase out widgets. Blocks should be putting those old questions to bed.

For clarity, there is little difference between bundling blocks with a theme and building a separate plugin that only works with a specific theme. The end result is the same. Such a plugin would lock a user into sticking with that theme if they relied on the plugin at all. Few people maintain the same front-end design forever.

The goal is to allow users to switch themes at will while having access to their content and blocks.

These theme-specific block plugins are thinking about blocks in the wrong way. When a user installs a block plugin, the expectation is that they can use those blocks regardless of their theme.

The solution for themes is to use block patterns or styles. Suppose that you wanted to create a slider or carousel as a theme author. There are multiple solutions for this. The first and easiest is to simply recommend a plugin to users or build a plugin of your own that works with any theme. You could also easily add a slider style for the Gallery block. When the user selects it, it transforms the gallery into a slider.

Or, suppose your theme needed to offer a big hero section with a call-to-action button. There is no need for a custom block in this situation. Theme authors can almost exclusively do this by building a custom pattern with existing blocks.

The solution is not to bundle the block in the theme or create a plugin that only works with that one theme.

The beauty of the block system is that most of the pieces are already in place, and they can be rearranged, grouped, and styled in unlimited ways.

Today, there are hundreds of theme-specific plugins in existence. Part of that is because themers were working around the WordPress.org theme review guidelines. Part of that is because some developers did not think creatively enough about solutions. But, the biggest part of it has been because WordPress has not standardized how to build things across the entire platform. Much of that has changed and will continue to change as full-site editing crosses the horizon in 2021. There will be clear paths for themes and plugins.

However, if theme companies continue building theme-specific blocks, we are just lugging along the baggage that the block system is meant to leave behind.

First of all, we’d like to thank all the contributors who tested the first beta of our next major release. Beta testing is very important to us as it’s a good way to check the improvements we brought to BuddyPress are behaving as expected on your WordPress/BuddyPress configurations.

BuddyPress 7.0.0-beta2 is now available for testing, and we’d love to have your feedbacks about it!

Since 7.0.0 beta1:

• We fixed some issues about the newly introduced features (BP Activity Embed block : 12763 ; BP Types Admin UI : 12764, 12767, 12775, 12776 & 12778).
• We improved the performance of the BP xProfile component : 12768 & 12781.
• We changed Member Types to behave more like Group Types: 12765, 12767 & 12778.
• We gave a default avatar to the BP Blogs on multisite configurations : 12772 & 12779.
• We fixed issues with the BP Nouveau Template pack : 12773 & 12774.
• We improved the BP Invitations feature : 12771.

We’ve also updated the 7.0.0 release schedule : the 7.0.0 final release is now scheduled to December 9.

And we need you to get there: do test the 7.0.0-beta2 release so that we can eventually solve issues you might find with your plugins, themes or specific WordPress/BuddyPress configurations.

You can test BuddyPress 7.0.0-beta2 in 4 ways :

• Try the BP Beta Tester plugin.
• Download the beta here (zip file).
• Check out our SVN repository: svn co https://buddypress.svn.wordpress.org/trunk/
• Clone our read-only Git repository: git clone git://buddypress.git.wordpress.org/

Thanks in advance for your contributions

In yesterday’s twice-monthly meeting, the WordPress Themes Team made a couple of important changes to the official theme directory guidelines. They removed a requirement of some CSS classes that have long been sitting on the chopping block. They also implemented the third stage in their long-term plan to make all WordPress themes accessibility-ready.

For years, theme authors have needed to either style several WordPress classes via CSS or add empty, unused selectors. It was a bit irritating for authors who fell in the latter group. The list includes several classes like .sticky (for sticky posts) and .bypostauthor (for post author comments). Now, styling these classes are optional.

The one question mark in this decision is probably around the classes for handling left, right, and center alignment. While the newer block editor stylesheet does support these classes on the front end, it could leave end-users in the dust if they are using the classic editor and a theme author decides to drop support. Any images in posts could become misaligned. Theme authors should test this and consider any problems before deciding to remove these from their stylesheets. For the other classes, those are mostly design decisions.

This change will not be official until the Theme Check plugin is updated to allow themes without these classes through the system.

The second big change is the reignition of the push toward creating more accessible themes in the directory. All themes in the directory are now required to distinguish links in “content” areas via an underline.

The full guideline is as follows:

When links appear within a larger body of block-level content, they must be clearly distinguishable from surrounding content (Post content, comment content, text widgets, custom options with large blocks of texts).

Links in navigation-like contexts (e.g., menus, lists of upcoming posts in widgets, grouped post meta data) do not need to be specifically distinguished from surrounding content.

The underline is the only accepted method of indicating links within content. Bold, italicized, or color-differentiated text is ambiguous and will not pass.

While this is a simple change, it is a bold one. Thus far, there has not been any pushback from theme authors on the announcement post or in the team meeting. However, some may be expected as the news trickles through the theme design community.

The one question that arose about the requirement was whether theme authors could add an option to allow end-users to opt-out of this behavior. The team said this was allowed as long as the underlined links were enabled by default.

The Road to Accessibility

In July 2019, the Themes Team made a commitment to push theme authors to make their themes more accessible. It was not a switch they were going to flip overnight. Instead, the team made a goal of implementing a new accessibility-related requirement every two months or so. These periods would give both theme authors and reviewers ample time to familiarize themselves with each change.

This is the third requirement added to the guidelines since the team implemented the plan. The team started with some low-hanging fruit and added a requirement that themes ship with a skip-to-content link. That guideline addition went over relatively smoothly. The team quickly added a new guideline requiring that visitors be able to navigate menus via keyboard.

That second guideline landed in August 2019. From the outside looking in, the project was initially going well. However, until yesterday, the team had not added any new accessibility guidelines. Over a year had passed, and the plan seemed to be grinding to a halt. Accessibility advocates were probably wondering what happened.

In a discussion with the Themes Team reps a few months ago, they were not sure when they would implement the next guideline. The project was not going as planned.

“We have not added anything else above that because theme authors are still not releasing themes with working implementations of skip links and usable keyboard navigation,” said team representative William Patton at the time. “When those two things become habitual it will be time to introduce another aspect as a requirement. The fact that this has taken so long for authors to get this right probably indicates that we need to do better at guiding them to resources to learn how to do it and why it is important. Perhaps that is a better avenue to pursue than looking to implement additional asks of them.”

Team rep Carolina Nymark shared similar sentiments. She mentioned that underlined links were up next on the list. However, they did not have a deadline in mind yet.

“Skip links and keyboard navigation are still a headache to some extent for some authors,” said Ganga Kafle, a team representative. He said that theme authors who regularly submit themes are doing so with these requirements in mind. However, keyboard navigation remains the biggest pain point, particularly on mobile views.

“But almost all the themes we get are with skip links working properly,” he said. “That is a good thing so far. The new requirement is not so huge and tough. And I think we need to add such small things in a timely manner.”

For now, the team seems to be picking up where they left off. There is still a long path to go before the project is complete.

The best thing that theme authors can do right now is to follow all of the optional accessibility guidelines. This will prepare them for a future in which they are all required.

Six months ago, Google announced its plans to introduce a new ranking signal for Search, based on page experience as measured by Core Web Vitals metrics. At that time, Google promised to give site owners at least six months notice before rolling out the update so they can improve their scores on the metrics before the update. The company reports a 70% increase in users engaging with Lighthouse, PageSpeed Insights, and Search Console’s Core Web Vitals report in preparation for the update.

Today Google confirmed that it will roll out the new page experience signals in May 2021. The search engine also plans to introduce a new visual indicator for pages that fully comply with the page experience requirements:

On results, the snippet or image preview helps provide topical context for users to know what information a page can provide. Visual indicators on the results are another way to do the same, and we are working on one that identifies pages that have met all of the page experience criteria. We plan to test this soon and if the testing is successful, it will launch in May 2021 and we’ll share more details on the progress of this in the coming months.

There are no additional details on what that will look like but AMP’s lightning bolt is a good example of how small graphics can have a meaningful impact on users’ behavior when navigating through search results.

Are WordPress Websites Ready for Page Experience as a Ranking Signal?

The page experience signals Google plans to roll out will include Core Web Vitals (Loading, Interactivity, and Visual Stability metrics), combined with existing search signals for mobile-friendliness, safe-browsing, HTTPS-security, and intrusive interstitial guidelines. Based on where the web is now, in terms of delivering a good page experience (as defined by Google), site owners will undoubtedly need the next six months lead time to become aware of the new ranking signal and prepare.

Google’s Core Web Vitals assessment gives a pass or fail rating, with a “pass” requiring a good result in all three metrics. A cursory test using Page Speed Insights on a few of the websites for the largest companies, hosts, and agencies in the WordPress space shows most of them do not currently meet these requirements.

In August, Screaming Frog, a search marketing agency, published a lengthy report on tests that found only 12% of Mobile and 13% of Desktop results passed the Core Web Vitals assessment. Screaming Frog used the PageSpeed Insights API to test 20,000 websites, which were selected through scraping the first-page organic results from 2,500 keywords across 100 different topics. The report highlighted a few important findings:

• First Input Delay (FID) on Desktop is negligible with 99% of URLs considered good. And 89% for Mobile.
• 43% of Mobile and 44% of Desktop URLs had a good Largest Contentful Paint (LCP).
• 46% of Mobile and 47% of Desktop URLs had a good Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
• URLs in Position 1 were 10% more likely to pass the CWV assessment than URLs in Position 9.

These results suggest that most website owners still have a good deal of work ahead of them in meeting the requirements for passing the Core Web Vitals assessment. Unsurprisingly, Google suggests AMP as the preferred vehicle to get there, but even AMP is not a magic bullet.

At AMP Fest last month, the project reported that 60% of AMP domains pass the Core Web Vitals metrics (meaning 75% of pages on the domain passed), compared to 12% of non-AMP domains passing based on the same criteria.

“Looking ahead to Google Search’s upcoming rollout of using page experience signals in ranking, we challenged ourselves to consider how we could better support the AMP community and reach a point where we are able to guarantee that all AMP domains meet the criteria included in the page experience ranking signal,” AMP Product Manager Naina Raisinghani said.

Those who are already using AMP are encouraged to check out the AMP Page Experience Guide, a diagnostic tool that helps developers improve their page experience metrics with practical advice.

AMP is not required, however, if developers feel confident delivering the kind of performance metrics necessary to pass the Core Web Vitals assessment. Along with the new ranking signal, Google also plans to roll out another promised change that allows non-AMP content to become eligible for placement in the mobile Top Stories feature for Search. Starting in May 2021, sites that can deliver decent page experience metrics will be prioritized, regardless of whether they were built with AMP or through some other means.

Earlier today, release lead Josepha Haden announced the team was pushing back the release of WordPress 5.6 Beta 4 to Thursday, November 12. The beta release was slated to go live today. Questions around the readiness of the auto-updates feature held the beta update back. However, those questions are now resolved.

Haden followed up the Beta 4 announcement with a more in-depth picture of how auto-updates will change for WordPress 5.6. She summarized the current concerns, laid out a path for version 5.6 and 5.7, and discussed plans for the future. The auto-updates feature is not something that will be complete overnight or in just one release. There are complex technical hurdles that must be jumped and a need for a dedicated focus in upcoming releases.

Much of her post focuses on the tactics going forward. However, she mentioned in our chat that she does not want the community to lose sight of the big-picture, vision-setting aspects of the project.

“The subject of auto-updates has resulted in many complicated discussions,” she wrote. “As I reminded the release squad, decisions like these require us to remember that we’re contributing to over 30% of the web, and we have to balance our immediate needs with long term planning.”

The short-term plan is to allow current WordPress users to opt-in to major updates while enabling auto-updates for both minor and major releases for new installations. Some changes to the auto-updates UI are also in the works along with a plan to revise based on feedback in WordPress 5.6.1.

In WordPress 5.7, which is several months away, the goal is to add a nudge on the Site Health screen for anyone opted out of major updates. We could also see a setting to opt-into updates as part of the WordPress installation flow for new sites.

The big picture that Haden is talking about? That is to make sure that all WordPress installations are receiving auto-updates, that these updates are seamless, and that users are running a secure version of WordPress.

Nearly two years ago, WordPress project lead Matt Mullenweg outlined nine goals for 2019. One of those goals was to provide users a method of opting into automatic updates of major releases. It has taken WordPress a while to get there, but it is on the cusp of launching this feature that many have looked forward to.

Haden also further clarified that goal. She said that the long-term plan for both Mullenweg and the other original feature contributors was to always have auto-updates for major releases enabled by default.

Apart from those who already prefer to opt-out of any sort of automatic updates, some users’ trust in the system eroded a couple of weeks ago. The WordPress auto-update system updated sites to version 5.5.3-alpha instead of 5.5.2 — WordPress currently automatically updates only minor releases. While there was no difference between the two versions and the core team quickly resolved the problem, the damage to user trust was already done.

This was not an ideal leadup to the December launch of auto-updates for major releases.

However, one hiccup — one that was effectively not an issue — seven years after WordPress 3.7 launched with security and maintenance updates is not too bad. The system has been a boon to making the web a more secure place. Ultimately, that is what auto-updates are all about. The big goal is to make sure that all WordPress sites are running on the most secure version available.

“It’s important that whatever we implement isn’t taking us further away from our long term goals of having seamless, auto-updates across the project,” wrote Haden. “Auto-updates can help us have a more secure WordPress ecosystem, and in turn can help change the public perception of WordPress being an unsecure choice for users of any skill level.”

As part of the growth of HeroPress, we’re looking at ways to support other community-focused initiatives, and here’s an excellent place to start:

Looking for something new in the new year? Kick off 2021 by being a part of WordFest Live. The team at Big Orange Heart is pulling together the first ever global event focused around 24 hours of celebrating WordPress.

They need sponsors and attendees, but most timely right now is the call for speakers.

If you’d like to apply to speak, head over to https://www.wordfest.live/call-for-speakers/ The event is looking for speakers from all over the world to share their WordPress knowledge.

Want to learn more? This article gives you a feel for the event, answers some questions, provides some topics to help guide you if you’re stuck, and explains what makes this a festival instead of “just” a conference.

The event is FREE with donations going to support Big Orange Heart. Speaker submissions close 18 November, 2020.

The post Don’t Miss Your Chance to Speak at WordFest Live 2021 appeared first on HeroPress.

The Biden-Harris presidential transition team has launched a new Twitter account and a website powered by WordPress. BuildBackBetter.com is hosted by Automattic and is zippy fast, thanks to Jetpack, Cloudflare CDN, and a lot of other performance optimizations. It loads in 333 ms, performing just 19 requests.

The site was created by Ben Ostrower’s team at Wide Eye, an 11-year old agency based in Washington, D.C., and the same team behind Kamala Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign website. Their work on Harris’ site won recognition as a finalist in Fast Company’s 2020 Innovation by Design Awards in the Graphic Design category.

In anticipation of winning the election, the Biden-Harris Transition team uploaded the content for the website in October, based on the image URLs. It uses a custom theme called Transition. Peeping under the hood, it looks like the site is using the Ninja Forms plugin for the email signup and contact forms, as well as Google Tag Manager for analytics. The language switcher is powered by MultilingualPress.

Wide Eye paid particular attention to the multilingual and accessibility features of the site with beautifully implemented toggles for contrast and font size. The high contrast toggle (dark mode) creates an elegant and natural transition between modes, without compromising the quality of the design.

The transition site also has an official accessibility statement regarding the team’s commitment to working towards WCAG 2.1 AA standards compliance:

Our on-going accessibility effort works towards conforming to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 2.1, level AA criteria. These guidelines not only help make web content accessible to users with sensory, cognitive and mobility disabilities, but ultimately to all users, regardless of ability.

Visitors are encouraged to email accessibility@bidentransition.org with feedback on how to provide a better experience.

The Biden-Haris transition team is focused on building the necessary infrastructure for providing a smooth transfer of power from the current administration with a focus on critical matters, such as public health policy and national recovery plans. The website publishes updates on the leadership being assembled to tackle these challenges.

Both the current administration’s whitehouse.gov and JoeBiden.com are also running on WordPress. If the Biden-Harris transition website is any indication, the next edition of whitehouse.gov may also relaunch on WordPress.

WordPress 5.6 will ship with the latest jQuery library next month. This is a major update that all plugin and theme developers should begin testing against. Last week, Marius Jensen announced the change on the Make Core blog.

The following jQuery-related libraries are expected to ship in the update (WordPress Trac ticket):

• jQuery 3.5.1
• jQuery Migrate 3.3.2
• jQuery UI 1.12.1

This change is not surprising. Lead developer Andrew Ozz announced the original three-phase transition to update the jQuery library earlier this June. The end goal is for WordPress to bundle the most up-to-date version and keep it updated going forward. WordPress has fallen behind and relied on an older version for several release cycles. As a result, much of the plugin and theme ecosystem has relied on outdated features.

The three steps of the process are as follows:

• WordPress 5.5: Remove the jQuery Migrate 1.x script.
• WordPress 5.6: Update to the latest jQuery, jQuery UI, and jQuery Migrate scripts.
• WordPress 5.7: Remove the jQuery Migrate script.

If the removing, adding, and once again removing jQuery Migrate sounds confusing, it is because it can be. jQuery Migrate is essentially a helper script that allows developers to “migrate” to newer versions of jQuery. It is a backward-compatibility fix. The version of jQuery Migrate being re-added in WordPress 5.6 corresponds to newer versions of jQuery. It is being added as a temporary fix to give plugin and theme developers time to update their code. The hope is that developers will no longer rely on it by the time WordPress 5.7 ships.

“Following the best practices and the recommendations of the jQuery team, Migrate should be used as a helper tool, not as a permanent backwards compatibility solution,” said Ozz in our discussion a few months ago. “Ideally, WordPress will be able to do this.”

Whether jQuery Migrate is removed in WordPress 5.7 remains to be seen. Right now, it is a tentative goal. Thus far, the process is still on track. Much of this also depends on how smooth the WordPress 5.6 ship sails. The 5.5 release sunk, at least for many users. This is a result that we do not want to repeat.

Navigating all of this is no small feat for end-users. They rely on WordPress, plugin, and theme developers to keep things running smoothly. With a month left before the launch of WordPress 5.6, plugin and theme authors need to start testing to make sure their projects work with the latest version of WordPress.

Expecting some issues with WordPress 5.5, the WordPress development team created the Enable jQuery Migrate Helper plugin to ease the transition for users on WordPress 5.5. In the first week, the plugin had over 10,000 active installations. Today, it has over 200,000 users. This number is not necessarily indicative of plugins and themes with outdated code. Presumably, some percentage of these users no longer need the plugin because their extensions have been updated while they have yet to deactivate it. There is no public data on who is using the plugin and why.

The plugin is still useful right now. It logs deprecation notices and makes them available to users. If the plugin does not log any notices after a week or two, users are encouraged to deactivate the plugin. If they are still seeing notices, they should contact their theme or plugin developers, depending on what is triggering the notices. When users update to WordPress 5.6, they should no longer need the plugin.

We will be six months into this process for the next major release. Developers have had ample time to make adjustments. Let this be a friendly reminder to test plugins and themes during the 5.6 beta cycle.

Plugin and theme authors should test with the SCRIPT_DEBUG constant enabled in their wp-config.php files. More information is available via the Debugging in WordPress documentation.

Jensen has published a guide on updating jQuery in unmaintained themes or plugins. It is primarily geared toward end-users who are comfortable enough going the DIY route. However, developers can find some useful information in the tutorial too.

Yesterday, Munir Kamal released version 2.1 of the Editor Plus plugin. The biggest change is a complete overhaul of its design controls. The developer also added a new Lottie animation block.

I probably sound like a broken record after covering the last several releases of the plugin, but Kamal is doing some amazing things with the block editor. He is pushing limits and experimenting in areas that few others have yet to attempt. I am beginning to wonder if he has some secret, never-ending checklist of feature ideas in which he ticks off a few boxes every couple of weeks.

The plugin has only 1,000+ active installs at the moment. However, it has maintained growth of over 11% since the midway point in 2020. I expect this to accelerate in the coming year as Kamal continues placing individual pieces of the larger puzzle, which includes the free blocks, patterns, and templates at Gutenberg Hub. He has laid the groundwork and now has one of the largest block editor resources on the web.

Design Controls Overhaul

More compact block design controls.

My biggest complaint about Editor Plus has always been how overwhelming some of the block options have felt. Too many choices can be blinding, and they make it tough to figure out where to start when customizing blocks.

In our last discussion a couple of weeks ago, Kamal said that “other UI improvements are yet to come.” He was already working on tightening up controls, creating what he referred to as a more compact UI. He was drawing inspiration from the Figma and Sketch design tools.

On the whole, this update creates that cleaner UI that he was shooting for. Some of the biggest improvements come from moving controls and labels inline with one another. The change means that users must do less scrolling to go through a multitude of options.

There are still areas that could be cleaned and made more intuitive. Right now, Editor Plus adds custom block options tabs where WordPress already has the same tabs. For example, the plugin creates its own “+ Typography” tab. Instead, it should mount its custom options on the existing core Typography tab. From a purely user-experience perspective, it is confusing to see the similarly-named tabs. This would also create a more compact list of top-level tabs. The plugin has other tabs or controls with the same issue.

Lottie Animation Block

Still shot of the Bouncy Car Lottie animation.

Kamal added the plugin’s first seven blocks in the last plugin update. His primary goal is to stretch what the default WordPress blocks can do. However, he needed to create some new blocks to handle some of the layouts that were not possible with core alone. The latest update adds a Lottie animation block, which allows users to link to or upload a JSON file for a Lottie animation.

Created by Airbnb, Lottie is a library that parses Adobe After Effects animations that are exported as JSON with Bodymovin. It then renders them natively on mobile devices or the web. The file sizes are smaller than many other options, and the animations can be scaled up or down without pixelation.

LottieFiles is one of the largest libraries of free Lottie animations on the web. It has 1,000s of animations for users to choose from.

Kamal has already begun making use of the new Lottie animation block in Gutenberg Hub’s section patterns library, which houses block code that users can copy and paste into the editor, provided they have the Editor Plus plugin installed. Thus far, he has added three Lottie patterns with Black Friday animations — just in time for the shopping season.

Still shot of an animated Black Friday pattern.

While the Lottie animation JSON files are small, the script to play the animations is not. The JavaScript file comes in at a whopping 294 kb. This file is only loaded if the Lottie block is in use. The size may be a deal-breaker for some users. However, for animation-heavy websites, it might be worth considering.

WooCommerce 4.6.2 was released yesterday with a fix for a vulnerability that allowed account creation at checkout, even when the “Allow customers to create an account during checkout” setting is disabled. The WooCommerce team discovered it after several dozen users reported their sites were receiving spam orders, or “failed orders” where the payment details were fake.

WooCommerce developer Rodrigo Primo described how the bot is attacking stores:

The gist of it is that the bot is able to create a user when placing an order exploiting the bug fixed by 4.6.2. After creating the user, the bot tries to find vulnerabilities in other plugins installed on the site that require an unprivileged authenticated account.

WooCommerce recommends users update to 4.6.2 to stop bots from creating users at checkout and then remove any accounts the bot previously created. This will not stop the bots from creating fake orders so store owners are advised to install additional spam protection from the WooCommerce Marketplace. Some users in the support forum are trying free plugins like Advanced noCaptcha & Invisible Captcha and Fraud Prevention Plugin for WooCommerce.

The first logged instance happened nine days before WooCommerce was able to issue a fix. In the meantime, some users reported having their site’s URL changed and other hacking attempts. Dave Green, WordPress engineer at Make Do, used log files to determine that the script relies on exploiting other vulnerabilities in order to gain access to the database.

“That script is creating the order, and is also likely to be exploiting whatever vulnerability is available to bypass customer account settings and create a new user; it may or may not be relying upon other exploits for this,” Green said.

“Assuming it has successfully gained access to the system, it then tries to update the DB. It either fails and leaves you with nuisance orders, or succeeds and points your site to the scam URL.”

The WooCommerce team has also fixed this same bug in WooCommerce Blocks 3.7.1, preventing checkout from creating accounts when the related setting is disabled.

WooCommerce did not publish the names of any of extensions that have vulnerabilities being exploited by this script. However, some one user reported an attack that coincided with the fake orders:

I had a failed order yesterday with similar info to the OP as well.

At the exact same time that failed order came in, my WAF blocked two attempted attacks from the same user/IP (bbbb bbbb) for “TI WooCommerce Wishlist < 1.21.12 – Authenticated WP Options Change”

The script may have been probing for a vulnerability in the TI WooCommerce Wishlist plugin, which was patched approximately two weeks ago. The plugin is active on more than 70,000 WordPress sites.

The WooCommerce team is still researching the origin and impact of this vulnerability and will publish more information as it becomes available.

Automattic released over 100 block patterns to its users on WordPress.com last week. Patterns are a set of blocks that users can insert into their posts or pages for predefined yet customizable sections of content. Most of WordPress.com’s new patterns are general enough in design to cover a range of uses. However, the choices also cover some niches like restaurants.

“The WordPress Editor is a powerful tool that can help bring your design ideas to life but one of the best parts is, you don’t have to start from scratch,” wrote Ian Stewart, the WordPress.com Design Team Lead, in the announcement. “Building sophisticated designs can be as easy as picking Patterns from our growing library, and snapping them together to create beautiful-looking posts and pages.”

Aside from the work that Gutenberg Hub has done with its template library, this is one of the largest dumps of block patterns from anyone in the WordPress community at once. The big question right now is whether the larger WordPress community will see them in some form.

“No immediate plans to bring those out to the larger community outside of WordPress.com just yet,” said Stewart in a quick chat. “I expect us to contribute in some fashion to the potential block pattern directory but no immediate plans there yet either.”

Admittedly, I was a little disappointed in the response. I bought into the idea of block patterns from day one and have been patiently awaiting an explosion of layouts from the development community. As a former theme business owner, I see the dozens of problems that patterns would have solved for me five, six, or seven years ago. And, this is a feature that could win over some holdouts who are waiting for the block editor to mature enough to build more advanced layouts.

Grouping Quote, Spacer, and Columns creates custom Quote pattern.

“The team’s current focus is on making great-looking WordPress.com patterns and contributing back to the Gutenberg Project when we see potential for improvement with the tools for creating them,” said Stewart. “I think, like you, we’re pretty excited about the potential for Patterns and improved design controls in the Block Editor. So we’re plugging away at that right now. There’s a lot of exciting designs that can be made today and even more that we’ll be able to make in the future.”

Not now is not a no, however. Automattic has a gluttony of talented designers. If a block pattern directory emerges from recent discussions (it’s still an early idea), I have little doubt that individuals from the company would submit patterns. Users of the WordPress software will also see new patterns in themes that the design team releases publicly, such as those within Seedlet.

Heading, Paragraph, Spacer, and YouTube blocks create this pattern.

The great thing about patterns is that they are easy to recreate. Even if the WordPress.com design team decides to keep them in-house for the foreseeable future, they can offer inspiration to theme authors who are looking to dive into this feature. Most of the patterns use only the core WordPress blocks. However, some of the contact-related patterns use the Form block, which is available via the Jetpack plugin.

Other patterns make use of the Layout Grid block, which is in the official plugin directory. This is one area that the block editor still lags a bit behind in, so it is necessary to use a plugin to make some of the more complex pattern designs work. However, there is an open discussion on a grid system for core. Tavern readers seemed to be receptive to the idea earlier this year too.

Grids within grids — nesting for a complex layout.

The design team put together an extensive array of call-to-action patterns. With over 20 to choose from in this category alone, just about any site owner who wants to sell a product, service, or content should be able to find something that suits them.

Call to Action block pattern for shops.

For now, those using WordPress.com can fully enjoy one of the better parts of the block editor. As for theme authors who are building for the open-source WordPress platform, remember that great artists steal.

photo credit: Matt Moloney

Frontity has launched a partnership program to support the maintenance of its open source framework for building React-based WordPress sites. 10up, a large agency that provides headless solutions to enterprise customers, is the first partner to join in support of the project.

“Since we launched Frontity Framework last year, dozens of WordPress publishers have asked our team about consulting services and for help on their migration to Frontity,” Frontity communications director Reyes Martínez said. “It was great to see an increasing interest in using Frontity at an enterprise-level but, unfortunately, we didn’t have an efficient way to help them all and fulfill the custom requirements these projects usually need.”

This partnership allows Frontity to funnel requests for consulting to 10up and other future agency partners. Reyes said the partnership does not have a monetary aspect but rather 10up is supporting the project by maintaining and extending the framework through contributions.

Prior to this arrangement, the agency had already contributed to the core framework, most notably by developing the Link Component and Auto-Prefetching features. 10up also created the ElasticPress package, which improves search for sites using Elasticsearch.

“Frontity provides an easy to use package management interface that enables us to quickly extend the platform — similar to how plugins work in the WordPress ecosystem,” 10up VP of Engineering Taylor Lovett said, explaining why the company formalized a partnership with the framework’s creators. “It includes features that typically require custom engineering, such as Google Analytics integration, routing, and integration with plugins (like SEO tools).”

Earlier this year Frontity raised €1M in funding in a round led by K Fund, with Automattic covering 22%. This funding keeps the maintainers free to focus on the open source project. Frontity recently ranked #9 on Runa Capital’s Open Source Startup (ROSS) Index, which ranked the top 20 startups by Github star growth for Q3 2020.

The project’s partnership program is an interesting and somewhat uncommon approach to sustaining the framework’s growth. It redirects a steady stream of leads for custom work to partners, helping potential users find expertise, while ensuring the project is well maintained. As the WordPress ecosystem demonstrates increasing interest in building React-powered websites, Frontity is turning the growing demand for custom work into an opportunity to bolster the open source project and ensure the framework’s future.

“Some companies are aware of the advantages of a decoupled React front-end and contact us because they are interesting in using Frontity, but don’t have the team or the internal resources to build or migrate a project from scratch,” Reyes said. “Others that have the resources and already tried (or know) Frontity, contact us because they still want a freelancer or agency to help with the development, design or maintenance of the project.”

Frontity is in conversation with some agencies from the WordPress VIP Agency Partner Program and other hosting companies but could not share more details at this time. The basic qualifications for partners include previous experience with enterprise customers in the WordPress space, expertise with headless WordPress and React frontends, and willingness to actively contribute to the Frontity framework.

Version 9.3 of the Gutenberg plugin dropped earlier today. It is the first version of the plugin during the WordPress 5.6 release cycle that will not see its new features land in the core platform. However, bug fixes have been backported to WordPress 5.6 beta 2 and 3. Much of the work for the release focused on full-site editing (FSE) features and fixes. However, some minor enhancements outside of the site editor landed in the update.

The Social Links block now supports Patreon, Telegram, and Tiktok, which brings the total number of social icons to 43. The Buttons block also has an overhauled alignment option.

Overall, the release mostly adds polish to existing areas. The development team fixed over 20 bugs and has continued pushing forward with improvements to the site editor.

Removal of Widgets and Customizer Screens

Widgets and Customizer no longer under Appearance menu.

The biggest story around Gutenberg 9.3 is not in measurable code or user-facing design changes. Instead, it is within a discussion on a ticket about removing the Customizer and Widgets screens when a user has FSE enabled.

Version 9.3 hides the Widgets and Customizer items from the WordPress admin menu. However, they are still accessible by directly going to the URL or lingering links within various parts of the WordPress admin like on the Themes screen. This change could have implications for the future of those screens.

“I think it would be a bad move to hide them now without clearly communicating to the WordPress community what the future of widgets and the customizer is,” wrote Carolina Nymark, a Themes Team representative, in the ticket. “Hiding them is going to lead to more questions from worried users and developers. I think hiding them without answering these questions publicly is a bad idea. I’m not asking you to answer me in this pull request, I am asking that ‘WordPress,’ be it the core-editor team or someone else, presents the long term plan for these core features.”

She lists several questions that should be answered by project leaders. Most of them boil down to the central question of what role the customizer will play in the long term:

• Even if the menu item is hidden, the customizer can still be accessed, will the options still work?
• What role will the customizer have with FSE themes?
• Will it be deprecated, how and when? If it is not going to be deprecated, why hide them?
• Will it also be deprecated for non-FSE themes? How and When?
• How do I convert existing customizer options for my updated theme?
• What about the WordPress options that are only available in the customizer, like the site icon?

“The idea here is that since FSE themes don’t have widget areas, the widgets screen is useless,” responded Riad Benguella. “For the customizer, it’s a duplicate of the Site Editor screen (similar capabilities), so we need to make sure the Site Editor fills the gaps left by the Customizer. Global styles and Site blocks address most of the site options required for FSE themes and making the switch (hiding the customizer) will allow us to discover gaps we’re missing.”

That FSE themes will not have widget areas does leave one to wonder why so much work has been put into converting the sidebar/widgets system to use blocks over the past year. It was also a planned feature for WordPress 5.6 that did not make the cut.

Benguella’s thoughts seem to be in line with 5.6 release lead Josepha Haden’s recent comments. “There’s a lot of interest in reducing the number of workflows, and I’m hopeful that we can consolidate down to just one beautiful, intuitive interface,” she said in response to pulling the plug on widgets for 5.6.

Benguella’s comment is also one of the first public indications that I have seen about what such a consolidation would look like. Presumably, there will be no need for the Nav Menus, Widgets, or Customizer screens as WordPress progresses in the coming releases.

I still question whether the work that the team is putting into making those screens handle blocks is worth it. Traditional themes should simply use traditional nav menus, widgets, and customizer options. New block-based themes should use the site editor when it lands.

There are still some unanswered questions from Nymark’s list. We will need to wait for further feedback from someone in the know. She is right about the need for clear and public communication.

Automatic Switching to FSE

Notice given to users when they are using an FSE-capable theme.

One of the biggest improvements, particularly for people testing FSE, is that Gutenberg now automatically enables FSE when a user activates an FSE-capable theme. It will also disable FSE when switching back to a traditional theme.

Some good themes to test FSE with are Q, Twenty Twenty-One Blocks, and Seedlet Blocks.

Users can also no longer enable FSE via the Gutenberg Experimental settings screen. Using a block-based theme is now a requirement to test this part of the Gutenberg experience. This is probably a good call at this stage. Despite being clearly labeled as experimental, thousands of users run Gutenberg in a production environment and may enable it. Plus, it keeps people from testing a broken experience when their theme does not support it.

Buttons Block Content Alignment

New inner content alignment option for the Buttons block.

For theme authors who do not rely on the Gutenberg base styles, they may need to update their theme stylesheets to handle content-alignment classes on the Buttons block. However, they will also need to continue supporting the old classes for backward compatibility.

This change means that users can use wide and full-width alignment on the block while separately aligning the block’s content.

The update adds a content justification option to the editor toolbar for the Buttons block. It makes sense to use this method because the Buttons block is technically a container. It merely houses one or more inner Button blocks. The previously-used alignment system is meant for aligning the entire block rather than the block’s content.

In past versions of the block editor, the Buttons block used the traditional align* classes for left, right, and center alignment. This Gutenberg update switches the classes to is-content-justification-*.

The editor will automatically transition the Buttons block to the new classes when a user edits a specific post with the block. Otherwise, they will still have the old align* classes.

WordPress 5.6 is set to add a UI that allows users to opt into auto-updates for major versions of core. Previously, developers could turn these updates on by setting the WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE constant to true or by using the allow_major_auto_core_updates filter. Version 5.6 exposes this setting in the UI to make it more accessible for users.

Jb Audras posted a dev note on the feature yesterday with instructions for how developers can extend it to add more options.

A previous version of this UI specified that the setting refers to major versions:

Keep my site up-to-date with regular feature updates (major versions).

This was changed 11 days ago to remove the wording that tells users which versions the setting controls.

“The idea was to make the wording more general, and maybe easier to understand,” Jb Audras said. “As minor updates are already automatically updated (since 3.7), new users may not understand what is behind the ‘major versions’ term.”

This new wording makes the setting unclear. Users may not understand what “major versions” are but “feature updates” is even less clear. Does it include updates to existing features? Or only the introduction of brand new features? A better option might be to link “major versions” to documentation on HelpHub.

In the current climate, where positive sentiment regarding auto-updates is declining, shipping the new UI with a nebulous term like “feature updates” is not going to inspire as much confidence as explicitly identifying what updates the setting controls.

Audras said he is open to having the wording changed but that so far those testing the beta don’t seem to have a problem with it. String freeze is scheduled for November 10, and after that no more wording updates can be committed.

Contributors are also discussing adding a filter that would allow developers to hide the auto-updates UI for major versions. Mike Schroder noted that this would be especially useful for hosting companies that are handling updates in a different way. Some developers or agencies may want to use the filter to prevent their clients from turning auto-updates on for major versions.

Core Committer Jonathan Desrosiers said he is not in favor of using a filter to hide the UI on a page that is not likely to be accessed by users who have the ability to update core:

If that change is made (disabling the form when the constant is defined or allow_major_auto_core_updates filter is used), then I am not sure the UI should ever be hidden. As raised by @aaroncampbell in today’s weekly meeting, the update page is only accessible to those with the update_core capability (trusted users). While there may be valid use cases for wholesale hiding the new feature, I haven’t seen one yet. To me, disabling the form and explaining why the form cannot be used to update the desired behavior is more valuable to the site owner, as they would be better equipped to make an adjustment.

If you want to contribute to the conversation, check out the dev note on the new auto-updates interface for major versions and the Trac ticket for a filer that would hide the UI.

Spearhead theme blog/posts page.

Last Thursday, Automattic announced its new Spearhead theme to WordPress.com users, which primarily focuses on podcasters. However, the team has marketed it toward content creators in general. It is a child theme of the company’s recently-released Seedlet theme. Cece Yu originally created the design for the Spearhead podcast, which is currently in use on the website.

Spearhead is not just a theme for WordPress.com users. Self-hosted WordPress users can expect availability in the future. “Adding Spearhead to the themes directory is on our to-do list,” said Jeff Ong, a designer at Automattic. “Just haven’t gotten round to it yet.”

For self-hosted users who want to give the child theme a spin right now, Automattic hosts all of its free themes in a GitHub mono-repository. The Spearhead theme is located in its own /spearhead sub-directory.

The announcement post said that the theme is fully block powered. This would be better reworded to say that it is a block-first WordPress theme. When full-site editing lands in core WordPress, we can start saying that themes are fully powered by blocks. Until then, it is just the content that is made of blocks. And, Spearhead’s parent theme is a prime example of a solid block-first theme. I imagine it will be the springboard of many upcoming themes from Automattic’s theme designers, whether that is in the form of a building child themes or using it as a starter.

Given Spearhead’s podcast roots, the development team wrote a small function to locate an Audio block from the post content and present it on the blog and other archive-type pages below the excerpt. In the past, this sort of feature was difficult to achieve because of little-to-no standardization on audio output. However, the block system makes it possible with just a few lines of code.

Automatic Dark Mode Support

Light vs. dark modes based on OS settings.

One of the more interesting aspects of Spearhead is its support for users who are browsing the web in dark mode. This setting is located in various locations based on the user’s operating system. However, when enabled by the user, the theme automatically detects this and switches its color scheme.

This system uses the prefers-color-scheme CSS media feature to style for dark mode. This feature is generally supported by most modern web browsers. For browsers and operating systems without dark/light mode support, users will see the default light color scheme for the theme.

I generally prefer light color schemes, but this is one of the few dark color schemes that is at least comparable or maybe better than the light one. Far too often, I find dark schemes unreadable for long-form content, but the development team took care to select a palette that works well for whatever the site visitor chooses.

Custom Block Patterns

Inserting the Podcast Links block pattern.

Spearhead removes the three patterns registered by the Seedlet parent theme. It then registers four of its own patterns:

• Related Posts
• Archive Page
• Podcast Links
• Podcast Links List

The Related Posts pattern requires the Jetpack plugin to be installed. Currently, the theme does not check if the plugin is active before registering the pattern. Presumably, this is because Jetpack features are available on all WordPress.com sites. However, the development team will need to address this before submitting it to the WordPress.org theme directory.

The Archive pattern allows users to create an archive page on their site. It displays a search form, the latest posts, and the site’s categories. It is not quite as fully featured as a complete archive plugin. However, it does replace what is often the traditional archive page template shipped with many themes. The use of a pattern is a nice shift that gives users more flexibility to change the output than what is possible with page templates.

It will be interesting to see if more theme authors follow suit and reevaluate their theme’s page templates. Transitioning to a block pattern may be a better option in many cases.

The Podcast Links pattern outputs a Navigation block with links to sites that host podcasts. End-users will want to update the link URLs. The Podcast Links List pattern is similar. Surprisingly, it is not actually a list. It is a paragraph of links and does not have the same prefix text.

WordPress has opened its 2020 Annual Survey, a short set of questions designed to collect more information on how different groups of people are using the software. It takes approximately 5 minutes to complete and all data is anonymized.

WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy said she uses the results from the survey to inform her plans and recommendations all year long. In addition to providing valuable information for WordPress’ leadership, the results will also be shared with the wider community.

The Community Team has prepared a report with results from the 2015 and 2019 surveys, which had not been previously published. The 2019 results are summarized in a set of Google slides and are also available as a PDF or PPT.

Despite 2019 being the first year that the survey was translated into five different languages, it only received 6,203 respondents, as compared to nearly 46,000 in 2015. The highest number of responses came from Europe (62%) and Asia (12%), while North American engagement has declined drastically to just 10%. Unchanged from previous years, most WordPress users identify as male (79%).

2019 NPS Results: Detractors are Steadily Shrinking

The 164-page report has a lot of information to digest but one of the highlights is the Net Promoter Score (NPS). It is a loyalty metric derived from users’ responses to the question of how likely they are to recommend WordPress to friends, colleagues, or clients. It provides an informal measurement of user satisfaction or perception.

WordPress’ 2019 NPS was 54, an increase from previous scores of 50 and 52. Promoters remain static while Detractors are steadily shrinking. This score, however, is skewed towards representing those who have a favorable enough opinion of WordPress to take the time to respond to the survey. The software’s truest detractors have likely already moved on to following other tech communities and may be underrepresented in the NPS score.

More than 75% of respondents have been using WordPress for three years or more. Results indicated the project’s open source community is an important driver for why people use the software:

“Nearly six-in-ten (59%) of survey respondents choose WordPress because it’s what they know best. Half (50%) say they enjoy its open source community. Nearly half (48%) say WordPress has the features they need.”

This indicates that the WordPress community provides a factor of “stickiness” equal to that of the features the software offers. Improving and maintaining a healthy community is an important consideration for user retention, since a user sticking with WordPress is just as important as attracting new users.

CMS Usage on the Rise Among Professionals, Blogging Is Declining

The 2019 survey found that 76% of professionals are using WordPress as a CMS, with slightly higher numbers (79%) for the WordPress Company Pros segment (those who work for a company that designs/develops websites). Blogging usage among professionals is consistently declining.

In the segment of respondents reporting as Users, blogging is also on the decline, with 49% using WordPress as a personal blog in 2019 vs. 63% in previous years (2015-2017).

WordPress Professionals Slow to Adopt the Block Editor

One noteworthy section in the 2019 results includes data on block editor adoption. When asked “Which editor do you currently use?”, 53% of respondents who identified as professionals said they are using the Classic Editor. This indicates the block editor is still finding its footing among professionals. An increasing percentage of these professionals are also self-employed (44% in 2019 vs 36% in 2016).

Another question asked, “Have you or your team built blocks for the new editor?” Less than half of those using the new editor confirmed they have new blocks added for using it, and 17% were not sure. If more than half of professionals have yet to adopt the new editor, it seems the market for block-based products has a great deal of room to grow.

Block editor adoption among Users could be as low as 36% or as high as 56%, but a large portion of users (20%) are unsure which editor they are using. This is not a bad thing, as most new users will have no prior knowledge of the Classic editor. Results from the 2020 survey should be useful for tracking adoption of the block editor over a longer period of time since its debut in WordPress 5.0 (2018.)

Attendance at WordPress community events, such as meetups and WordCamps, seemed to be on the rise, as well as submitting bug reports and contributing to documentation. However, 2019 saw a sharp decline in the percentage of those who report having created their own theme (61% to 42%) or plugin (50% to 38%), when compared with previous years. The percentage of core contributors (5%) has remained steady. This might mean that creating themes and plugins is becoming more difficult or less rewarding, or perhaps the survey attracted more of a different type of user than it did in previous years. There are any number of explanations but this may be a trend to continue watching.

WordPress Users Remain Uneasy about Auto-Updates, Positive Sentiment is Declining

In light of the incident last week where WordPress’ auto-update system misfired, updating live sites to an alpha version, the survey includes valuable data about how users are feeling about this feature. The data from 2019 indicates that positive sentiments regarding auto-updates were already on the decline since 2015.

Those reporting that they loved auto-updates declined from 41% to 35%. The percentage of those who would like to see auto-updates for major releases of WordPress declined from 24% to 15%. Positive sentiment regarding theme and plugin auto-updates also decreased. Meanwhile, awareness of auto-updates increased in 2019, and slightly more users reported the feature makes them nervous or that they hate it.

These are just a few major highlights from the 2019 survey results, but the report includes much more detailed data regarding contributor satisfaction, time spent contributing, contributors’ experiences, and other topics. Check out all the summaries in the Google docs presentation, and make sure to take the 2020 survey to improve the representation of WordPress users this year.

These plain canvas-like themes have until now been a choice for those who prefer it (those who like to design their own thing), but this article makes it sound like these types of themes should be the only choice in the future of WP.

This is worrisome to me as a non-designer who looks for themes specifically based on things like attractive button styles.

FSE sounds bad for people like me, who aren’t artistic, can’t coordinate colors, and want themes to do the artistic stuff.

This was the response by a Tavern reader named Isabel on the recent coverage of the Q theme, an experimental project for the upcoming full-site editing (FSE) feature of WordPress. More specifically, she was worried about a thought that Ari Stathopoulos, the theme designer, had made asking that theme authors not get too opinionated with their default styles for things like buttons and so on. His view seemed to lean more toward creating open and customizable themes. However, it is not the only valid opinion on what themes should look like.

This is not much different than what we have experienced over the previous decade or more. Some theme authors build open canvasses for users to customize. Other theme authors build intricately-designed layouts with unique textures, shapes, and forms.

This is not going to change when FSE lands in core WordPress. Themes are merely the expression of the designer’s vision for what a site could look like, and not all theme authors think about design in the same ways.

The Q theme is meant as a starting point or testbed for FSE. There will be many open-canvas themes. These types of themes are already wildly popular, particularly when used in conjunction with a page builder. Astra has over a million installs. Hello Elementor has surpassed 400,000. GeneratePress has over 300,000. There is big money in this segment of the theme market. FSE will undoubtedly help to increase the competition.

However, that is not all that themers are giving us. The recently-released PhotoFocus theme by Catch Themes is on the upward trend, inching its way into the popular themes list on WordPress.org. And, there are hundreds of other options that go beyond the plain ol’ open, black-text-on-white-background themes built for customization by the end-user.

I simply do not see the current trends shifting too much. Yes, those trends already lean heavily toward open-canvas themes. FSE will allow developers to build those types of themes for core WordPress instead of page builders much more easily.

However, this is also an opportunity for those who want to experiment with more artistry to do so.

Stathopoulos did say:

It’s tempting to add extremely opinionated styles, for buttons for example, but more and more things get added every day to the editor like a border-radius setting for buttons.

But, we must put that into the context of his followup remarks:

Theme authors should avoid the trap of designing an FSE theme having in mind what the editor currently does. Instead, theme authors should strive to build something having in mind a vision of what the editor will eventually become.

He is not saying that every theme needs to be plain and boring. He is not saying that theme authors should be reluctant to put a unique spin on the Button block, for example. He is saying that theme authors need to evaluate how they approach design based on what block options are available for end-users.

Buttons are a good example of this. With the border-radius option that allows end-users to control rounded corners for buttons, he means that theme authors should not overwrite border-radius styles in their CSS. Users should have the option to control it if they want. He is also talking about using the eventual Global Styles system to set up defaults. If theme authors want rounded buttons by default, they should use the system that WordPress provides rather than writing the CSS. He wants theme authors to be aware of the current block options and styles while preparing for new options in the future.

This upcoming era of theming changes how theme authors work with the system. It does not mean they cannot branch out in terms of design.

Here’s where the block editor project makes things more interesting for those users who want things like “attractive button styles” but lack some of the artistic skills expected from the theme’s designer. The block system is set up for unlimited variations on what themes can provide to end-users.

Sticking with the Button block example, users can already see two block styles named Fill and Outline in WordPress as shown in the following screenshot.

Using the Outline block style.

Theme authors can add all sorts of style variations today, and some have already done so. Block styles offer a lot of variety, and WordPress allows users to further customize these if they wish to do so.

WordPress also offers two different block patterns that utilize the Buttons block. They are basic two and three-button layouts. However, theme authors can use the Patterns API to create any number of layout options using buttons.

Inserting the “two buttons” block pattern into the editor.

Stathopoulos’s comments on not being too opinionated should also be taken in the context of the upcoming Global Styles system, which is currently being tested in the Gutenberg plugin. This system allows theme authors to set up global, default options for everything. They can also drill down and set up default options for individual blocks. For example, a theme author can set a default background gradient, rounded corners, and any other options available for the Button block. These default options can span the width of the spectrum, from a simple and understated square button to a rounded button with a vibrant gradient background and a drop-shadow. The more block options that WordPress’s editor offers in the future, the more flexible theme authors can be with their designs.

Experimental, per-block global styles in the site editor (feature not finished).

Isabel’s concern is valid. It is tough to keep up with all the changes happening and those that are on the feature list of the future. The Gutenberg project moves fast, and when we write about features or experimental themes, it is easy to overlook some of those questions that the average user might have.

To put some users’ minds at ease, future WordPress themes will undoubtedly offer a breadth of artistic designs that are suitable for all sorts of websites. Designers and non-designers alike should look forward to the months and years ahead.

WordPress 5.6 Beta 3 is now available for testing!

This software is still in development, so we recommend that you run this version on a test site.

You can test the WordPress 5.6 beta in two ways:

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

The current target for the final release is December 8, 2020. This is just five weeks away, so your help is needed to ensure this release is tested properly.

Thank you to all of the contributors that tested the beta 2 development release and provided feedback. Testing for bugs is an important part of polishing each release and a great way to contribute to WordPress.

Some Highlights

Since beta 2, 20 bugs have been fixed. Here is a summary of a few changes included in beta 3:

• Added block patterns for Twenty Twenty (see #51098) and Twenty Nineteen (see #51099) themes.
• Added theme support for navigation-widgets (see #51445).
• Fixed incorrect slashes in the URL if the parent is empty for REST API (see #44745).
• Added a test to Site Health to verify that the Authorization header is working as expected for Application Passwords (see #51638).
• 10 additional bugs fixed in the block editor (see #26588).

To see all of the features for each Gutenberg release in detail, check out the release posts: 8.6, 8.7, 8.8, 8.9, 9.0, 9.1, 9.2, and 9.3.

Developer notes

WordPress 5.6 has lots of refinements to the developer experience as well. 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

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.

Props to @hellofromtonya for help and @chanthaboune  for final review.

October 2020 was a notable month for WordPress lovers, thanks to the release of several products and updates. Read on to keep up with all the latest news!

---

The 2020 WordPress Annual Survey is out

The team published the 2020 WordPress Annual survey —  to help those who build WordPress to understand more about our software usage and our contributors’ experience. The Annual Survey will be open for at least 6 weeks and is available in French, German, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish. The survey results (once complete) will be posted on WordPress.org/news. The 2019 survey results have also been released and can now be viewed as slides or downloaded in PDF format. 

WordPress Translation celebrations spanned four weeks

The last week of September and most of October were focused on recruiting and encouraging polyglot contributors to the WordPress translation project. What was originally envisioned as a single-day event lasted 24 days! The Polyglots and Marketing Teams are exploring how future mini-events can be supported to continue building the momentum. Recordings of the live talks and interviews with contributors are available on YouTube. Write-ups from the different events are on the WPTranslationDay website. 

Want to help WordPress speak your own language? Follow the Polyglots team blog and join the #polyglots channel in the Making WordPress Slack group. 

WordPress maintenance and beta releases

The Core team released WordPress 5.5.3 on Oct. 31, following the release of Version 5.5.2 on Oct. 29. Both releases fix several bugs and security issues with WordPress. You can update to the latest version directly from your WordPress dashboard or download it now from WordPress.org.  The team also released WordPress 5.6 Beta 1 on Oct. 20, followed by Beta 2 on Oct. 27. When ready, the final release will include improvements to the editor, auto-updates for major releases, PHP 8 support, and the Twenty Twenty One theme. You can test the Beta versions by downloading them from WordPress.org or using the WordPress Beta Tester plugin.

Want to be involved in the next release? Follow WordPress 5.6 updates on the development cycle and sign-up for the code review/commit office hours. You can help build WordPress Core by following the Core team blog and joining the #core channel in the Making WordPress Slack group. If you would like to help out with WordPress 5.6 outreach, contact the WordPress Marketing team on the #marketing channel.

Gutenberg 9.2 is released

Version 9.2 of the Gutenberg plugin came out on Oct. 21. This release offers support for video subtitles, the ability to transform selected blocks into the columns block, background patterns in cover blocks, along with several exciting features such as improvements to the widget screen, as well as bug fixes. You can find out more about the Gutenberg roadmap in the What’s next in Gutenberg blog post.

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.

Learn WordPress is gearing up for launch

The Learn WordPress initiative, which offers WordPress video workshops followed by interactive discussions, is aiming to put out two courses by the end of the year as part of its full launch. The team is working on creating courses and is requesting feedback from community members on the planned list of courses.

Want to contribute to Learn WordPress? You can now submit a workshop application (submissions in non-English languages are welcome), apply to become a discussion group leader, organize discussions for your local WordPress meetup group, or update screenshots on existing lesson plans.

---

Further Reading:

• The Q3 2020 update from the WordPress project is now out!
• The WordPress Marketing team has put together a list of WordPress 5.5 marketing resources consisting of video presentations, slides, questions & answers, social media posts, and more – aimed at both developers and non-developers. The team has also prepared a list of captioned screen-recordings in several languages to aid new contributors. Contact the team on the #marketing channel if you would like to contribute to these and upcoming projects. 
• The WordPress Core team has announced a proposal to introduce application passwords for REST API integrations.
• Five online WordCamps took place in October: WordCamp Rochester, NY, WordCamp Austin, TX, WordCamp Italia Online, WordCamp Los Angeles, CA, and WordCamp Bulgaria Online. You can find livestream recaps of these camps on their websites. The camps are also in the process of uploading their videos to WordPress.tv. Check out the WordCamp Schedule to catch up with upcoming online WordCamps.
• Contributor teams have started work on adding dark mode support for the Twenty Twenty One theme. Additionally, the development of the Full Site Editing version of Twenty Twenty One has also kicked-off in the Theme Experiments GitHub repository.
• BuddyPress 7.0 beta, which comes with new administration screens, blocks, and improved CLI support – is now available! 
• The Core team is revisiting starter content for WordPress themes as part of the 5.6 release. The team also decided not to ship the widgets screen in WordPress 5.6 and have started discussions on aligning the WordPress release cycle with industry standards.
• WordPress Accessibility enthusiasts all over the world joined hands for the first ever 24 hour WP Accessibility day event on Oct. 2. You can find the recorded livestream of the event on its YouTube channel.
• The Meta team has kicked off a discussion on setting up a Block pattern directory (similar to the existing block directory). 
• The Themes team has published a post clarifying how Block based themes will work with WordPress 5.6. Check out the block-based theme tutorial and its documentation to learn how to build block-based themes. 

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

WordPress’ Core systems team had an eventful Friday when an error in the auto-update system caused sites to update to WordPress 5.5.3-alpha-49449, including live production sites with no auto-update constants defined.

Those who received an email about the update logged into their sites to see the message: “BETA TESTERS: This site is set up to install updates of future beta versions automatically.” 

Shaun Rieman logged the first ticket about sites being updated to 5.5.3-alpha-49449, which was also incidentally his first WordPress trac ticket. More users and developers confirmed the issue.

“It’s worth noting that there’s no functional difference between 5.5.2 and 5.5.3-alpha, so there’s no need to worry in that regard,” core committer John Blackbourn said.

Sites that were accidentally updated also installed all the default themes released over the last decade, as well as Akismet. Developers will need to manually delete the bundled themes that they don’t need.

In under an hour, all affected sites were automatically returned to 5.5.2, but the incident has eroded trust and damaged confidence in the auto-update system. Several commenting on the ticket asked how they can explicitly disable development updates.

“The worrying thing is that a single developer can do this, seemingly without any checking or confirmation by other developers,” UK-based developer Paul Stenning said. “This is a serious security concern as a rogue developer could push out malicious code in an update that nobody else checks.”

WordPress agency owner Rob Migchels, who had approximately 50 websites affected, tracked 18 minutes between the the trac ticket (#51679) and receiving the fix.

“The 5.5.3-alpha issue is a side effect of another issue that occurred on 5.5.2,” WordPress engineer and 5.6 Triage release lead Tonya Mork said. Jake Spurlock published an official statement regarding the incident as part of the 5.5.3 release notes:

“Earlier today — between approximately 15:30 and 16:00 UTC — the auto-update system for WordPress updated some sites from version 5.5.2 to version 5.5.3-alpha. This auto-update was due to an error in the Updates API caused by the 5.5.3 release preparations.”

Spurlock elaborated on the technical details in a separate post on the WordPress development blog:

While work was being done to prepare for WordPress 5.5.3, the release team attempted to make 5.5.2 unavailable for download on WordPress.org to limit the spread of the issue noted in the section above, as the error only affected fresh installations. This action resulted in some installations being updated to a pre-release “5.5.3-alpha” version.

In a situation like this, where users who haven’t elected to run their live sites on beta releases are getting a forced update, site owners might wonder whether this update is actually arriving from WordPress, or if the system has been hijacked.

Security researcher Slavco Mihajloski, who commented last week on the lack of transparency regarding how automatic updates are tested and performed, said this incident highlights the need for more openness surrounding the process.

“Why is transparency important? Because procedure will become public and when public, the community will be able to contribute in order to improve it,” Mihajloski said. “At the moment it is more than obvious that this process and the whole security at WP.dot org lacks QA and QC. Each task is left to an individual or closed group. Imagine the following: what if an automatic security update could be pushed only if: – X out of Y (where X < Y) authorities agree that update is fine – have a pilot update on let’s say 100 different servers (I hope .org could afford this) where regression tests will be fired against each one. The current problems would not occur.”

Automatic background updates for minor releases have saved developers thousands of hours in updating sites. A UI for allowing users to opt into automatic updates for major releases is on the roadmap for WordPress 5.6, expected in early December.

This particular accidental update has betrayed for many developers what was already a somewhat fragile trust in the auto-update system. It doesn’t shore up more confidence for selling the idea of core updates when 5.6 is released, but it doesn’t mean that auto-updates are not a good idea. WordPress.org will need to put better processes in place in order to win back users’ trust.

The incident affected more than 100 sites for WordPress agency owner Robert Staddon. He reports that they all displayed the “Update now” button with the confusing and incorrect text seen below. Staddon said the incident has not yet caused him to change his approach to allowing clients to receive auto-updates.

“I was very grateful for the extraordinarily fast response time to get the problem fixed,” Staddon said. “However, it did shake my confidence in the WordPress auto-update process. Considering the number of websites using WordPress, a mistake of this magnitude could end up having a rather catastrophic effect around the web. I would hope that the core team would be able to evaluate how this happened and consider putting some checks in place to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Twenty Twenty-One in the Gutenberg site editor.

Last Friday, Themes Team representative Carolina Nymark announced the Twenty Twenty-One Blocks theme project. It is a block-based version of the Twenty Twenty-One default theme that is shipping along with WordPress 5.6. It will work with the site editor available in the Gutenberg plugin. Developers will work on the two themes as separate projects.

The original plan was to explore support for full-site editing after the WordPress Beta 1 release for Twenty Twenty-One. Some had hoped that support would land in the theme itself. However, a second theme could be a better path in the long run.

As I wrote in my original coverage of Twenty Twenty-One, it did not seem likely that full-site editing would be far enough along in development for it to be a primary feature for the theme. Since the feature will not be in WordPress 5.6, it makes sense to develop for it outside of the primary theme for the time being.

“Twenty Twenty-One Blocks is an experimental theme created as an example to highlight what is possible with Full Site Editing,” wrote Nymark in the announcement. “The theme will need Gutenberg and the Full Site Editing experiment to be enabled. It will not be part of Core, but once complete it will be available in the theme directory.”

Currently, there are no plans to integrate the two themes down the road. They will be maintained as separate projects. This sounds like a smart strategy for this theme. It will allow developers to work on the Blocks theme as a separate entity in the coming months without having to worry about potential problems with merging.

I am excited about this project because it means we get a somewhat official, though not technically a default, theme that supports full-site editing. Otherwise, the community would have had to wait another year for the Twenty Twenty-Two theme, which will presumably be 100% built with blocks.

The Q theme by Ari Stathopoulos, a Themes Team representative, is a little farther along at the moment. It is a solid starting point and learning tool. However, there should be a theme project coming from core WordPress developers that is leading the way for other theme authors. There is a sense of trust, particularly for first-time theme authors, when picking apart an officially-supported theme that it is built to current standards. That is why Twenty Twenty-One Blocks is important.

Thus far, little work has gone into the theme, much of it coming from the original pull request to kick off development from Kjell Reigstad. The theme is currently stored in the WordPress Theme Experiments repository. Ideally, the team will split this theme into its own GitHub repository since it will be added to the theme directory and not merely an experiment.

For theme authors who want to cut their teeth on building block-based themes, this would be a good place to begin taking those initial steps. Or, it will at least be a good project to follow because this is as close to an “official” theme that supports full-site editing that we will see for a while.

At this point, the theme does not do a lot. It is minimal and nowhere near a block-based equivalent of Twenty Twenty-One. However, it works as well as most other themes supporting Gutenberg’s site editor.

For now, template parts do not seem to be working on the front end. However, template parts have been hit or miss in my tests for a while, sometimes seemingly working only by some randomly magical force that rears its head when I close in on the limits of my frustration — it will likely begin working immediately after publishing this post. That is often the nature of testing alpha-level software. Nevertheless, I am excited about following the development of this theme in the coming weeks and months.

WordPress 5.5.3 is now available. 

This maintenance release fixes an issue introduced in WordPress 5.5.2 which makes it impossible to install WordPress on a brand new website that does not have a database connection configured. This release does not affect sites where a database connection is already configured, for example, via one-click installers or an existing wp-config.php file.

5.5.3-alpha Issue

Earlier today — between approximately 15:30 and 16:00 UTC — the auto-update system for WordPress updated some sites from version 5.5.2 to version 5.5.3-alpha. This auto-update was due to an error in the Updates API caused by the 5.5.3 release preparations (see more here). The 5.5.3-alpha version at this point was functionally identical to 5.5.2 as no development work had been started on 5.5.3; however, the following changes may have been made to your site:

• The default “Twenty” themes installed as part of the pre-release package.
• The “Akismet” plugin installed as part of the pre-release package.

These themes and plugins were not activated and therefore remain non-functional unless you installed them previously. It is safe to delete these features should you prefer not to use them. 

If you are not on 5.5.2, or have auto-updates for minor releases disabled, please manually update to the 5.5.3 version by downloading WordPress 5.5.3 or visiting Dashboard → Updates and click “Update Now.”

For more technical details of the issue, we’ve posted on our Core Development blog.

Thanks and props!

Thanks to those who contributed to the 5.5.3 release: @audrasjb, @barry, @chanthaboune, @cbringmann, @clorith, @davidbaumwald, @desrosj, @hellofromtonya, @jeffpaul, @johnbillion, @garubi, @metalandcoffee, @mukesh27, @otto42, @punitsoftac, @sergeybiryukov, @whyisjake, and @xknown.

WordPress 5.5.2 is now available!

This security and maintenance release features 14 bug fixes in addition to 10 security fixes. Because this is a security release, it is recommended that you update your sites immediately. All versions since WordPress 3.7 have also been updated.

WordPress 5.5.2 is a short-cycle security and maintenance release. The next major release will be version 5.6.

You can download WordPress 5.5.2 by downloading from WordPress.org, or visit your Dashboard → Updates and click Update Now.

If you have sites that support automatic background updates, they’ve already started the update process.

Security Updates

Ten security issues affect WordPress versions 5.5.1 and earlier. If you haven’t yet updated to 5.5, all WordPress versions since 3.7 have also been updated to fix the following security issues:

• Props to Alex Concha of the WordPress Security Team for their work in hardening deserialization requests.
• Props to David Binovec on a fix to disable spam embeds from disabled sites on a multisite network.
• Thanks to Marc Montas from Sucuri for reporting an issue that could lead to XSS from global variables.
• Thanks to Justin Tran who reported an issue surrounding privilege escalation in XML-RPC. He also found and disclosed an issue around privilege escalation around post commenting via XML-RPC.
• Props to Omar Ganiev who reported a method where a DoS attack could lead to RCE.
• Thanks to Karim El Ouerghemmi from RIPS who disclosed a method to store XSS in post slugs.
• Thanks to Slavco for reporting, and confirmation from Karim El Ouerghemmi, a method to bypass protected meta that could lead to arbitrary file deletion.
• Thanks to Erwan LR from WPScan who responsibly disclosed a method that could lead to CSRF.
• And a special thanks to @zieladam who was integral in many of the releases and patches during this release.

Thank you to all of the reporters for privately disclosing the vulnerabilities. This gave the security team time to fix the vulnerabilities before WordPress sites could be attacked.

For more information, browse the full list of changes on Trac, or check out the version 5.5.2 HelpHub documentation page.

Thanks and props!

The 5.5.2 release was led by @whyisjake and the following release squad:  @audrasjb, @davidbaumwald, @desrosj, @johnbillion, @metalandcoffee, @noisysocks @planningwrite, @sarahricker and @sergeybiryukov.

In addition to the security researchers and release squad members mentioned above, thank you to everyone who helped make WordPress 5.5.2 happen:

Aaron Jorbin, Alex Concha, Amit Dudhat, Andrey “Rarst” Savchenko, Andy Fragen, Ayesh Karunaratne, bridgetwillard, Daniel Richards, David Baumwald, Davis Shaver, dd32, Florian TIAR, Hareesh, Hugh Lashbrooke, Ian Dunn, Igor Radovanov, Jake Spurlock, Jb Audras, John Blackbourn, Jonathan Desrosiers, Jon Brown, Joy, Juliette Reinders Folmer, kellybleck, mailnew2ster, Marcus Kazmierczak, Marius L. J., Milan Dinić, Mohammad Jangda, Mukesh Panchal, Paal Joachim Romdahl, Peter Wilson, Regan Khadgi, Robert Anderson, Sergey Biryukov, Sergey Yakimov, Syed Balkhi, szaqal21, Tellyworth, Timi Wahalahti, Timothy Jacobs, Towhidul I. Chowdhury, Vinayak Anivase, and zieladam.

Last week, WP Busters released its first plugin titled Passwordless WP. It is a project from full-stack developer Ilya Zolotov that allows end-users to log into their WordPress websites via Touch ID, Face ID, or pin. The goal is to make accessing a site easier and more secure.

Zolotov built the plugin after checking his email on a public database and finding old passwords. He said he now uses a safe browser for work purposes without extensions and scripts. He also said the millions of credentials stolen or compromised every year was a motivator for building the plugin.

“I like this feature of my laptop, and I am using it every day,” he said. “As well, I am using it to avoid entering the ‘root’ password in terminal using my finger, it’s comfortable and any sniffer can’t capture my password.”

Last year, he decided to check browser support for handling passwordless logins but was disappointed that Safari on iPhone only supported external USB keys at the time. He concluded that the technology was not ready yet.

“In Apple’s summer news, I saw the update: the platform authenticator would be available in iOS 14 and BigSur on Safari, and passwordless authentication is working in Chrome now. Also, Microsoft will release Windows Hello support. 2020 is the passwordless year. Awesome!”

He then began work on developing the first version using stable cryptographic libraries and building a simple user experience. He believes the technology that allows this plugin to work will be widely supported from now on.

Zolotov assures users that it is a fast, secure, and certified protocol. The plugin does not store any personal data on the server or link to third-party services.

“Other plugins which use SMS or Email to log in, send you code or link,” he said when asked about how Passwordless WP differs from similar plugins. “They make your life harder because you need to do more clicks — open email and link, unlock phone, etc. I prefer to enter a password using my manager, which uses my Touch ID.”

Other plugins using the same technology do exist. WP-WebAuthn, for example, has a few additional features and has been around for about seven months.

How Passwordless WP Works

Logging into the site via fingerprint.

The plugin requires HTTPS, unless in use in a localhost test environment. It also has a minimum requirement of PHP 7.2. Outside of that, it will work for any WordPress installation. Passwordless logins are handled on the user level, which means that each user on a WordPress site must register a token from their profile page.

The process is simple and takes only moments. Once on the register token screen, users merely need to click a button and choose the authentication method from their operating system.

Registering a token for a user account.

From that point forward, when logging into the site, it is merely a matter of clicking on a username and using your Touch ID or Face ID to log in.

The following is a quick video of the plugin in action:

My experience is with Google Chrome on Windows. The latest release, version 1.1.6, is working well. The previous version had an issue with a missing PHP extension in testing, but the plugin author fixed it quickly and sent out an update once I notified him of the problem.

In what seems to be a never-ending onslaught of new features, Munir Kamal has released some major new features to his EditorPlus plugin in the last two updates. Version 2.0, which landed earlier today, includes a set of seven new blocks. The previous release showcased a create-a-block feature that puts more customization options in the hands of end-users.

The block editor has fueled his creativity, and he has not run out of ideas for his block-sharing website GutenbergHub or EditorPlus plugin. Upcoming releases should see an overhaul of the UI for the plugin and a possible API for third-party developers.

He said he will be making sure that EditorPlus is working alongside WordPress’s site editor when it lands in the future. Plus, eventual support of WooCommerce’s blocks is on the table. For now, the focus is on the plugin features he has launched in recent weeks.

Creating Custom Blocks

With WordPress’s core set of blocks already in the hands of users, nearly anything is already possible. These blocks essentially cover all the foundational elements of web design, such as headings, paragraphs, lists, quotes, and more. Sometimes the trick to building something unique is mixing and matching these elements to create something new. That is essentially what this new create-a-block feature is for EditorPlus.

Saving a custom block is simple. Users must first wrap their blocks into a core Group block. Then, from the “more options” menu in the block toolbar, select the “Add to Custom Blocks” option. The plugin will ask for a block title before saving.

Saving a custom block.

Not to be confused with reusable blocks, which are resources that remain the same from post to post, created blocks are like any other blocks. They are accessible via the block inserter under the “My Custom Blocks” category.

Custom blocks available from the block inserter.

A couple of minor details are missing that would be great additions for the long term. The first is the ability to select a custom icon for the block. Currently, all custom blocks share an icon. The second is the ability to add a preview in the block inserter.

Kamal built this feature so that end-users could create simple blocks for themselves. It is also a tool for developers to quickly create blocks for client websites.

“For example, almost all business websites need a Testimonial block, but there is not one in core for that exact purpose,” he said. “Of course, you can create it using the combination of core blocks, and that’s the way to do it. I’ve seen many block plugins bringing such blocks like Testimonial, Team, Pricing, etc., but those can be easily created with core blocks.”

He has already shown the community how far you can stretch the core blocks to create unique layouts with his block and template libraries. So, it is not outside the realm of possibility that users could build some of these things directly from the editor.

The block creator seems like it would be better handled as a block pattern creator. In essence, users are creating custom patterns, which are groupings of blocks. Kamal said that a pattern creator is on the to-do list too.

“As Gutenberg has both these pieces to use for creating content/layouts, I will add both features,” he said. “Save as block has been added, ‘save as pattern’ will be added too. It will be up to the user to use whatever way they want to according to their workflow.”

I lean toward sticking with the existing pattern paradigm, a single feature that handles groups of blocks. However, it will be interesting to see what users prefer. In the long run, what matters most is that they have easy access to the tools they need to build their pages.

The “Missing” Blocks

Using the Progress Bar block in the editor.

Earlier today, Kamal released what he calls the “missing” blocks for WordPress. These are a set of seven custom-built blocks that handle types of content not possible with the existing core blocks. In the past, he has been hesitant to create any blocks, preferring to extend the tools that WordPress provided out of the box.

“My original idea and still is to extend Gutenberg for what is missing and to make it more powerful for creating beautiful designs visually without code,” he said. “And, after creating hundreds of templates/designs, I’ve realized a need for some important missing blocks that are most commonly used around the website builders but missing in Gutenberg. So I am only adding those blocks in EditorPlus that are missing, must be needed to create modern designs, and can not be created using a combination of core blocks easily. For example, a tabs block, accordion block, or all other blocks added are those that fit these criteria.”

The plugin includes the following new blocks:

• Tabs
• Toggle/Accordion
• Icon
• Rating
• Progress Bar
• Stats/Counter
• Countdown Timer

Some of these require additional JavaScript, which is why they do not make good candidates for core WordPress. However, they are good options for plugin developers, and these are not uncommon blocks from other library-type plugins.

The thing that sets them apart is the integration with the plugin’s styling system, which Kamal may be opening up to other plugin developers in a future release. The current plan is to create an independent Styles API for letting users customize any block. He has already gotten some feedback from the Advanced WP Facebook group on the idea. Much of the feedback is wishing that such a system would land in WordPress itself.

One interesting feature of the plugin’s new blocks is that when clicking on a sub-element of a block, its design options are automatically triggered in the block options panel. For example, the star rating block has “title” and “rating” elements. When clicking on the title, its design options open in the sidebar, and the same happens for ratings. This is a departure from the typical organization of EditorPlus’s design options on the core blocks, which are grouped by CSS properties. The focus is put on the individual element, and it makes it much easier to find a specific option.

This experimentation is a bit of a precursor to what Kamal is working on for a future update. One of his big goals is to do some cleanup of the UI — there are a lot of options in the plugin — and let users more quickly customize their blocks.

Block patterns were one of the most exciting and transformative features introduced in WordPress. 5.5, giving users a giant head start on building pages by allowing them to insert sets of pre-designed blocks. Core now includes a handful of default patterns available in the block inserter but contributors are exploring the idea of expanding this small selection into a full-blown pattern directory.

Alex Shiels opened a discussion on make.wordpress.org to get feedback on how it might be implemented. He suggested that the pattern directory would be similar to the block directory, minus the need to install plugins in the background. Community-contributed patterns could be searched and added via one-click installation from the block inserter.

Shiels asked for feedback on several questions, such as how block patterns could be represented in search results and how previews could accurately reflect how a pattern might appear with different themes. One of the most important considerations he raised: Should the Block Pattern Directory be limited to patterns using only core blocks?

If patterns can only contain core blocks, that leaves it to third-party markets to provide patterns that include blocks from plugins. It seems more likely that block plugin developers would opt to ship their own selection of patterns inside their plugins, instead of contributing to the pattern directory. Having it open to all blocks hosted in the directory would encourage a more diverse range of patterns. Patterns requiring a non-core block might include a prompt to download it.

The WordPress community has already created many different unofficial pattern libraries, although the terminology can be confusing. Gutenberg Hub’s template library may be one of the most prominent. It provides section patterns and full page templates that users can browse and then copy the code to paste into their own sites. Jeffrey Carandang’s “Share-a-Block” site also offers a selection of patterns to download.

WordPress.com has just launched its own pattern library today with more than 100 patterns pre-designed patterns available. Automattic plans to add more patterns based on user feedback and requests. This new free library will make site building easier for millions of users and also creates a strong incentive for using the block editor.

Patterns leverage all the best things about the new editor. Inserting a pattern is easier than wrangling shortcodes or wading through theme options to try to get the right combination to reproduce the demo. Patterns are more approachable than page builders and don’t require learning a new interface.

As the momentum around block patterns increases, I think we will see more commercial theme and block plugin creators using patterns to showcase their products and provide starter packs. It is the best way to help users understand the wide range of possibilities that the block editor enables.

Having an official directory of community-contributed patterns could be an interesting way for creators to cross-promote their free blocks and designs, while opening up a whole new world of design options for self-hosted WordPress users. How many times have you been shopping around for just the right WordPress theme and found that you like certain sections and layouts offered in several different themes? Patterns give you the ability to cherry pick different sections to create your own unique layout for each page/post, without having to wrestle with the limitations of your theme.

The ability to browse and access community-contributed patterns directly within the editing interface may have a long list of technical challenges to solve, but it would undoubtedly put more design power into users’ hands.

Not everyone can take a blank canvas and artfully combine blocks to produce sophisticated designs. Putting patterns at users’ fingertips would make site building more of a delight, especially for users who are new to the block editor. It might also allow users to save their favorite patterns for future use, in the same way you can save your favorite themes and plugins.

The discussion on WordPress.org is just getting underway. A few of the original contributors on the idea have created a GitHub repository to track and explore some of the more technical considerations of launching an official block patterns directory. If you have ideas to contribute on how this could be implemented or want to share other considerations, make sure to comment on the post.

वर्डप्रेसने मुझे मेरे ज़िंदगी में कुछ अलग करने का मौक़ा दिया।

One fine day, I was checking my Twitter account and suddenly, got a message from HeroPress. I was astonished after getting a message from such a huge platform. I got to share a lot with Topher while having a long chat session with him. He then asked me to write an article for HeroPress.

It took me a while to think about what to write as writing about technical never excites me that much. Soon, I realized that what’s better than writing my own story and telling the story about how an introvert girl from a small village of India chased her dreams and gave a direction to her life.

Early Life

I was born in Banera, a small village in India. After completing my primary education there, I moved to my uncle’s place in a nearby city for higher education. There I decided to become an engineer. Being from a rural background, people in my village refuse the idea of sending their girl child to another city for further studies. Fortunately, that was not the case with me because my parents are immensely supportive and loving. They’ve always encouraged me to believe in myself and fulfil my dreams. With their support, I pursued my engineering in Electronics & Communication, and yes, that’s an entirely different field looking at my current profile.

Introduction to Web Development

Although I did my engineering in Electronics and Communication, I was not sure about having a future in this field. I was completely blank about my career and had no clue of what to do next. First, I thought about doing masters, but I was already tired of studying all those subjects. I applied for jobs, but there was no success. That was when one of my friends suggested that I should explore Web Development. The idea interested me, and then I started looking for some learning resources. Later I got an Internship as a PHP Developer. It was an unpaid internship, but still, I did it because I thought it would be an excellent opportunity to learn with real professionals.

Getting Started with WordPress

After doing the internship for three months, I got my first job. Before knowing WordPress, I got the chance to explore many CMS. I’d worked on Joomla, Magento and ExpressionEngine. Then my boss assigned me a small project on WordPress. At first glance, I found it very interesting. I found it surpassing and much better as compared to the other platforms I’ve worked on earlier. Its vast knowledge base made it easy for me to learn. I soon got comfortable managing WordPress, playing with plugins and themes, and started exploring it more in-depth.

There comes the next phase of my life. I was about to get married to Anand. He was in the same field as mine, and this helped me gain more confidence to pursue my interest. During our courtship period in 2015, he left his job and started his WordPress based Web Development Agency – WPVibes. Soon we got married, and I joined him as the first team member of WPVibes. Being part of a new startup gave me a lot of experience. I got to be involved in new processes. We started with Web Development, and soon we began exploring opportunities in plugin development. We started providing custom plugin development services as per the client’s requirement and created some free and paid plugins. We found it much more exciting and productive. Today, WPVibes is a team of 10 members.

Interaction with WordPress Community

I started following some WordPress based groups on Facebook, and there I got to know about WordCamps. Soon I got the opportunity to attend my first WordCamp – WordCamp Ahmedabad. There I learned how amazing WordPress Community is. WordCamp Ahmedabad has one of the best WordPress communities in India, and everyone, including organizers, attendees were so humble and welcoming. There I listened to speakers from India and abroad. Some of them shared how they got into WordPress and how WordPress has changed their lives. One of the most inspiring sessions was by Rahul Bansal. He talked about contributing to WordPress and giving back to the community. He also explained how contributing to WordPress can help you to enhance your knowledge. It inspired me to contribute to WordPress. At that time, I couldn’t manage to get involved with WordPress due to my busy schedule. The WordPress community of Ahmedabad immensely inspired us. Later, we started a WordPress meetup group in our city – Ajmer and found it a way to contribute to the community.

In the next WordCamp, I also attended the contribution day. Most of the contributors were inclined to contribute to Core, but I decided to choose a different path. I joined the team of WordPress TV Contributors.

WordPress TV is a platform where you can explore videos of WordCamp sessions. You can learn more about it here, https://make.wordpress.org/tv/.

Then I started contributing to WordPress Training. WordPress Training team manages the lesson plans and prepares content to educate people about building stuff for WordPress. The training team has recently launched a new platform for learning WordPress https://learn.wordpress.org/ (I am a proud contributor to this platform)

The year 2019 came with an exciting moment in my life. I got selected as a Volunteer for WordCamp Asia in Bangkok, Thailand. This was the very first edition of WordCamp Asia. After this, I got more involved with the community. I was very excited about playing this big role, attending my first WordCamp outside India, and that too, by being a part of the volunteering team. But due to the Covid pandemic, the event got cancelled. It was quite heartbreaking. Since all bookings were already made, we (me and my husband) didn’t cancel the trip and enjoyed a vacation to Thailand.

My message to WordPress Community

What I have learnt in my life is it doesn’t matter from where you come and what background you have. All that matters is your hard work and positive attitude towards life.

I have a message for all the WordPress lovers and also for those who are starting with WordPress. There is a huge community to help you with your learning, so start learning and try to give back to the community. It doesn’t matter if you are not comfortable with programming; there are many different ways in which you can contribute.

Jai WordPress!

---

जीवन में मिले रंग वर्डप्रेस के संग

उस दिन मैं अपना ट्विटर अकाउंट देख रही थी की तभी मुझे हीरो प्रेस की तरफ से एक संदेश आया| उसे देख कर अचम्भित रह गयी| मैं हीरोप्रेस पे बहुत से लेख पढ़ चुकी थी, तो ऐसे में अचानक से उसकी ओर से संदेश आने पर मेरा अचम्भित होना स्वाभाविक ही था| उसके बाद मेरी Topher (हीरो प्रेस के संस्थापक ) से लंबी बातचीत हुई और उसके बाद उन्होंने मुझे मेरा लेख लिखने के लिए कहा और साथ ही यह अनुरोध भी किया की मैं अपने लेख को अपनी मातृभाषा हिंदी में भी लिखुँ|

मुझे ये तय करने में काफी समय लगा की में इसमें क्या लिखूं| तकनीकी लेख लिखने में मेरी ख़ास रूचि नहीं थी| फिर मुझे लगा की क्यों ना इसमें खुद की कहानी ही लिखी जाए| लिखा जाए की कैसे भारत के एक छोटे से गाँव की एक अंतर्मुखी लड़की ने अपने सपनों को पूरा किया और अपने जीवन को एक दिशा दी|

प्रारंभिक जीवन

मेरा जन्म भारत के एक छोटे से गाँव बनेड़ा में हुआ था| मेरी प्रारंभिक शिक्षा वहीँ हुई| चूँकि हमारे गाँव में उच्च शिक्षा की कोई सुविधा नहीं थी अतः उसके लिए मुझे पास ही के शहर में

अपने ताऊजी के पास रहना पड़ा| उसके बाद मैने इंजीनियरिंग करने का विचार बनाया, परन्तु उसके लिए मुझे फिर किसी और शहर में जाना पड़ता| उस समय के ग्रामीण परिवेश में पढ़ाई के लिए ज्यादा दूर भेजने को सही नहीं माना जाता था, और वो भी खासकर जब बात एक लड़की की हो|

परन्तु मेरे मामले में मुझे मेरे माता पिता का पूरा सहयोग प्राप्त था| उन्होंने हमेशा ही मुझे आगे बढ़ने और अपने सपनों को पूरा करने के लिए प्रोत्साहित किया| उनके सहयोग से ही मैंने इलेक्ट्रॉनिक्स एंड कम्युनिकेशन (Electronics & Communication Engineering ) में इंजीनियरिंग करी| जी हाँ, ये मेरे वर्तमान कार्य क्षेत्र से पूर्णता भिन्न था|

वेबसाइट डवलपमेंट से मेरा परिचय

जैसा की मैंने बताया की मैंने इंजीनियरिंग बिलकुल ही अलग क्षेत्र में करी थी| मैंने कभी सपने में भी नहीं सोचा था कि सेमीकंडक्टर और सर्किट की पढ़ाई करने के बाद मैं वेबसाइट बनाउंगी| पर वक्त को शायद यही मंज़ूर था| इंजीनियरिंग पूरी करने के बाद मेरे पास २ विकल्प थे, आगे की पढ़ाई (M.Tech) करूँ या फिर नौकरी की तलाश करूँ| आगे पड़ने का मेरा मन नहीं था, तो मैंने नौकरी करना ही सही समझा| परन्तु काफी प्रयास के बाद भी मुझे कोई मनमाफिक नौकरी नहीं मिली|

ऐसे में मेरी एक सहेली ने मुझे वेबसाइट डेवलपमेंट में हाथ आजमाने की राय दी| कॉलेज के दिनों में मैंने थोड़ी PHP और HTML, CSS पढ़ी थी, तो मैंने उसी को और गहराई से समझना शुरू किया, कुछ कोर्स भी करे| मुझे जल्द ही PHP डेवलपर के तौर पर एक इंटर्नशिप मिल गयी| इसमें मुझे कोई वेतन नहीं मिलने वाला था, पर मुझे विश्वास था कि किसी कोर्स के बजाय ये एक बेहतर मौका है कुछ सीखने का|

वर्डप्रेस से मेरा जुड़ाव

३ महीने की इंटर्नशिप के बाद मुझे एक नौकरी मिल गयी| वहां वर्डप्रेस पर काम करने से पहले मैंने कई दूसरे CMS पर भी काम किया, जैसे कि Joomla, Magento, Expression Engine आदि| फिर कुछ समय बाद एक प्रोजेक्ट में वर्डप्रेस पर काम करने का मौका मिला| मुझे ये काफी ज्यादा दिलचस्प लगा| इससे पहले मैंने जिन CMS पर काम किया था, उनके मुकाबले यह बेहद सुलझा हुआ लगा| इसके बारे में जो जानकारी चाहिए वो आसानी से इंटरनेट पर उपलब्ध थी जिससे मुझे इसको सीखने में बिलकुल भी कठिनाई नहीं हुई| धीरे-धीरे वर्डप्रेस चलाने में, Plugins और Themes का उपयोग करने में मेरा आत्मविश्वास बढ़ता ही गया और मैं इन सबको और भी गहराई से सीखती गयी|

इसके बाद मेरे जीवन का एक अगला पड़ाव आया – शादी| नवम्बर २०१५ में मेरी शादी आनन्द से हुई|

वह भी वेबसाइट डेवलपमेंट के क्षेत्र में ही काम कर रहा था और इससे मुझे मेरा रुचिकर काम जारी रखने में कोई भी दिक्कत नहीं हुई| हमारी शादी के कुछ समय पहले ही आनन्द ने नौकरी छोड़कर अपनी खुद की वेब डेवलपमेंट कंपनी (WPVibes) शुरू करी| इसमें भी मुख्यतः काम वर्डप्रेस पर ही था| शादी के बाद मैँ भी पहली टीम मेंबर के तौर पर कंपनी से जुड़ गयी| एक बिलकुल ही नयी कंपनी से जुड़ना एक अलग ही अनुभव होता है| आपको कई ऐसी चीजें सीखने को मिलती है जो आप एक बड़ी स्थापित कंपनी में काम करके नहीं सीख सकते| शुरुआत में हम वेबसाइट ही बनाते थे, पर जल्द ही हमने Plugin डवलपमेंट में भी संभावनाएँ तलाशना शुरू किया| हमारी क्षमता को देखते हुए यह हमें ज्यादा रोमांचक और उत्पादक लगा|

वर्डप्रेस कम्युनिटी और मैं

मैं फेसबुक पर वर्डप्रेस से संबंधित कुछ ग्रुप से जुड़ी| यहाँ मुझे बहुत कुछ सीखने को मिला और मुझे वर्डकेम्प (WordCamp) के बारे में भी पता पड़ा| जल्द ही मुझे मेरे पहले वर्डकेम्प – वर्डकेम्प अहमदाबाद में भाग लेने का मौका मिला| यहाँ मुझे एहसास हुआ की वर्डप्रेस समुदाय (community ) कितना जबर्दस्त है| वर्डकेम्प अहमदाबाद, भारत में होने वाले श्रेष्ठ वर्डकेम्प में से एक है|

यहाँ मैंने देश विदेश से आये हुए कई लोगों के वक्तव्य सुने| इनमें से सबसे ज्यादा प्रेरणादायक राहुल बंसल का वक्तव्य लगा, जिसमे उन्होंने वर्डप्रेस समुदाय को अपनी ओर से कुछ वापिस देने के बारे में (Give Back to the Community) चर्चा करी| उन्होंने यह भी बताया की किस तरह वर्डप्रेस में योगदान करना आपके लिए ज्ञानवर्धक भी साबित हो सकता है| इससे मुझे वर्डप्रेस में अपना योगदान देने की प्रेरणा मिली| हालांकि किसी कारण वश उस समय में वर्डकेम्प के Contribution Day में भाग नहीं ले पायी थी| वहां की वर्डप्रेस समुदाय से प्रेरित होकर हमने हमारे शहर अजमेर में भी वर्डप्रेस मीटअप (Meetup) की शुरुआत करी और लोगो को वर्डप्रेस से जुड़ने और इसके बारे में जानकारी देना शुरू करा| यह भी वर्डप्रेस में अपना योगदान (contribute) देने का ही एक माध्यम है|

अगले वर्डकेम्प में मैंने Contribution Day में भी भाग लिया| ज्यादातर योगदानकर्ताओं (Contributors) का झुकाव Core की तरफ रहता है, ऐसे में मैंने कुछ हटकर करने की सोची और वर्डकेम्प टीवी (WordPress TV) में योगदान करने के बारे में सीखा| वर्डप्रेस टीवी एक वेबसाइट है जहाँ आप पूरी दुनिया के वर्डकेम्प से जुड़े वीडियो देख सकते हैं| इसके बारे में अधिक जानकारी के लिए आप यहाँ देख सकते हैं https://make.wordpress.org/tv/

इसके बाद मैंने वर्डप्रेस ट्रेनिंग (WordPress Training) में भी योगदान करना शुरू करा| वर्डप्रेस ट्रेनिंग की टीम वर्डप्रेस के बारे में जागरूक और शिक्षित करने के लिए पाठ्य सामग्री तैयार करती है|

हाल ही में शुरू करी गयी एक वेबसाइट https://learn.wordpress.org/ में भी मेरा छोटा सा योगदान हैं|

वर्ष २०१९ मेरे लिए एक बहुत ही अच्छा मौका लेकर आया| मेरा चयन पहली बार होने वाले वर्डकेम्प एशिया २०२० (WordCamp Asia 2020) में वालंटियर के तौर पर हुआ| इसका आयोजन बैंकाक (थाईलैंड) में होने वाला था| मैं इसे लेकर काफी उत्साहित थी| ये भारत के बाहर किसी वर्डकेम्प में भाग लेने का मेरा पहले मौका था और वो भी एक वालंटियर की तरह| परन्तु कोरोना महामारी के कारण ये मात्र एक सपना ही रह गया| इसके आयोजन के कुछ दिन पहले ही इसे रद्द कर दिया गया|

फिर भी मैंने मेरी यात्रा रद्द नहीं करी और आनन्द के साथ थाईलैंड में कुछ दिनों की छुट्टियों के मजे लिये|

वर्डप्रेस समुदाय के लिए मेरा संदेश

मैंने अपने अभी तक के जीवन से यही सीखा है की इससे कोई फर्क नहीं पड़ता की आप कहाँ से आये हैं और क्या आपकी पृष्ठभूमि रही है| यदि आप मेहनत कर सकते है और एक सकारात्मक सोच रखते है तो आप अपने रास्ते खुद बना सकते हैं|

सभी वर्डप्रेस के चाहने वालो और खासकर उनके लिए जो अभी वर्डप्रेस से जुड़े हैं या जुड़ना चाहते हैं उनसे मेरा यही कहना है की आगे बढ़े, आपकी मदद के लिए एक बहुत ही बड़ा समुदाय (community) है| तो भी शुरू करें और जब भी हो किसी भी तरह से अपना भी योगदान देने की कोशिश करें| जरूरी नहीं की आपको प्रोग्रामिंग आती हो, अगर आप अपने एक मित्र को वर्डप्रेस के बारे में बताते है या सिखाते हैं तो ये भी एक तरह का योगदान ही है|

जय वर्डप्रेस !

The post A Life Changing Journey With WordPress – जीवन में मिले रंग वर्डप्रेस के संग appeared first on HeroPress.