This week (April 14) there was a preannounced meeting with WordPress Project leaders Matt Mullenweg, Matias Ventura, Helen Hou-Sandi, and Josepha Haden Chomphosy. The purpose of the meeting was to host a "go/no go demo" to demonstrate and review the current state of Full Site Editing (FSE) in WordPress and to determine what, if anything, should be included in WordPress 5.8. (5.8 is scheduled for release in July 2021.) Some possible implementations of FSE were discussed in this meeting.
The decision was Go, but there were some suggestions to slow down and communicate more with people building sites, themes, and plugins in light of their needs. An update after the meeting says:
"The changes that Phase 2 bring to WordPress are substantial, so to avoid overwhelming users the Global Styles interface and Site Editor (managing all templates) will ship post-WordPress 5.8. This also gives more time for more theme authors, plugin developers, agencies, designers, site builders, and the like to explore and provide feedback."
What you can expect with reasonable confidence in WordPress 5.8:
- Improvements from Gutenberg 9.9+.
- Introduce new blocks. (Query, Site Logo, Navigation, etc.)
theme.json mechanism.
- Template Editor for Pages/Blank Template.
- Widgets Screen and Block widgets in the Customizer.
- Design tools: Duotone, Layout controls, padding, etc.
The post-meeting update has particulars on these points. It also includes a video of the meeting followed by a transcript. Transparency and accessibility points for that! 👍
Last night I had the chance to hear a very well-prepared talk from Anne McCarthy that outlines more deeply the plan for FSE. I highly recommend Anne's talk for Post Status readers, as it includes the overall vision as well as some details about the new blocks and the implementation of FSE.
What I took away from Anne's presentation — and the continuous updates from Core in the past few weeks — is that they are taking the lessons from Gutenberg's Phase One launch to heart and applying them now. (Remember the Gutenberg launch happened the same week as WordCamp US.)
Being careful and avoiding a "shock and awe" approach, however, might give the impression to casual observers that this isn't a fundamental change for WordPress moving forward, even if the true impact isn't felt for years. With changes on this scale, it's important that enough people in the WordPress community are aware of what's coming, and they need to be involved in testing on some level.
To that end, check out the latest call for testing which is particularly focused on the Query block. I got to see the potential of this block last night — what you will be able to do with it is impressive. 💥
A live demo along with Anne McCarthy's talk was given at the WordPress Mega Meetup last night, and here is the full video of that event. About halfway through you can see Marcus Kazmierczak show off some nifty features and answer a variety of very good questions. 📺
Deborah Edwards-Onoro explains how to enable the Classic Editor at WordPress.com.
Why Deborah felt this needed to be published in the first place is an interesting question. There's an answer: she noticed a blind WordPress.com user couldn't use the site anymore when WordPress.com launched a refreshed interface.
Deborah was surprised this could happen:
"What I don’t understand: WordPress.com chose not to announce the change on their blog. The announcement was only published in the WordPress.com forums. Which doesn’t make sense to me, given it’s a major interface change."
I wanted to follow up on this, so I reached out to Dave Martin at Automattic. Dave is a member of the communication/PR team. He said, "The update was communicated to all customers within the app as well to everyone via our blog."
Dave further commented: "Through our interfaces and APIs we enable many ways to post and interact with your WP site, and we're always working to improve the accessibility of every interface. People can also install plugins to enable additional ways to post."
So there were announcements, but apparently, they were not seen by everyone. There's likely a lesson here — how major changes on any site can affect users, and how important the Classic Editor still is for significant groups of people.
I asked Dave how long WordPress.com will support the Classic Editor, but I didn't get a direct response. I take it that as long as the Classic Editor plugin exists and works with the latest WordPress version, then it's going to remain an option on WordPress.com. It will be officially supported until the end of this year.
WordPress's market share has hit an even 41% according to W3Techs.
That is a 1% gain over the past 45 days. Outside of some respectable growth from Shopify, other CMS platforms have seen relatively flat growth since the start of the year.
I agree with Andrew Woods' comment on Twitter:
"If these other platforms ever hope to catch up to WordPress and take back some market share, they need to think about what WordPress does right, and incorporate that into their products while improving upon WordPress’ weaknesses."
Gutenberg 10.4 was released this week with features like block widgets in the Customizer, enhancements to the Site Editor, improvements to rich text placeholders, and bug fixes. 🐛
Exploit acquisition company Zerodium announced last week that it’s temporarily offering $300,000 for high-impact WordPress exploits. 💰
"The exploit must work with latest WordPress default install, no third-party plugins, no auth, no user interaction!"
This is an interesting development. Payouts are typically only $100k. Are exploits in core becoming rarer, is demand for them increasing, or both? 🤔
Felix Arntz recently published the Share Target WordPress plugin. It allows you to share content to your WordPress site directly from a device that's able to use the Web Share Target API. 🎯
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