To do that, please do introduce yourself in the chat. As you're coming in today. I will definitely have q&a After Timothy finishes his presentation.
We never want to let Timothy
get away without the opportunity for questions because he always has great answers.
Or he or he makes
up the answers with such intelligence that we don't know who's making them up.
I'm chat GPT I can speak confidently about
indeed. All right, folks, we're
just about ready to get started. Great to see everybody welcome Joe from Colorado. Let's see Sally from UK. Good to see you back, Sally.
Just about ready to get started. If
you're just joining us in zoom pop up in the chat. Say hi, tell us where you're logging in from also make sure when you chat that the little blue box beside to is changed from hosts and panelists to everyone. So that everybody can see what you have to say.
We are just about ready to get started.
All right, I've got three minutes after so let me start the recording and we
will begin. Well good afternoon everybody
and welcome to another live i iThemes Training event. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at iThemes Training and I'm joined today by Timothy Jacobs. Timothy is the lead developer for I theme security. He is also a core contributor and one of the maintainers of the WordPress REST API. In other words, he's a really smart guy. Welcome back, Timothy. Glad you're here.
Thanks for having me, Nathan.
Absolutely. So we've done these launch events. Now for the past. I think it's the last four releases of WordPress. You've been doing them a lot longer with the New York City WordPress Help Desk meet up. So kind of give us an overview of what we're looking for today.
Yeah, so the main topic as we've been for the past couple of races is the full site editor. Certainly ad diving almost entirely integrative Murray this release. We're going to touch on a couple of other things. But it is all Gutenberg all the time.
Indeed. So lots of things happening in the side editor in the block editor and Timothy is going to walk us through all those things. And of course, we'll have plenty of time for q&a After we wrap up today. So feel free to go ahead now if you'd like and pop up in the q&a window in zoom. There's a little q&a icon if you mouse over the shared screen for zoom. Just keep that open and as folks ask questions if they have if you have the same question or if you would like to see that question answered, just click the little thumbs up button beside that question. It will upvote it and we'll take the questions and the number of up votes they have when we get to the end. Also a few things are in the chat first. There's no slides or download today. This is all live demo of the block editor and the side editor. We do have a replay of this training that will be available about an hour or so after we wrap up at the link that I just dropped in the chat. That link will also contain anything that happens in the webinar chat. We'll save that log as well as the transcripts which are available and should be streaming right now if you'd like to access those a couple other things that I will mention in the chat that are in that link bundle that I dropped in. If you're a Kadence user if you're using the Kadence theme like many of us are. There's a great blog post on the Kadence site talking about how Kadence is approaching the subject of full site editing. It's a very thoughtful and explanatory post about why Kadence has adopted the position that it has about the site editor. And you know how all these changes are going to work. So, Ben Ratner the founder of Kadence has a great post there and the link is there in the chat strongly recommend that you read that and last but certainly not least i themes is rebranding we are becoming solid WP, we're doing a rebrand and public there at solid wp.com So if you've not had time to take a look at that, just click that link and take a look at all the visuals that are being developed for the new solid WP and so with that I will be quiet and let Timothy get on to WordPress 6.2 I'm looking forward to this Timothy. Thanks. Awesome. Let's
get into it. Um, so before we dive into demo, which is going to be most of this training today, wish me luck. I wanted to mention two cool resources one is the WordPress developer blog over at developers@wordpress.org slash news. This is a kind of new initiative that kind of takes things that are educational pieces if you're looking to be developer in WordPress or you want to keep up to date and get more kind of tutorial s content but your main.wordpress.org is way too much. There's too much content there. This is a little bit different. It's more high level and more tutorial driven things like that. The other thing that I do want to mention is the WordPress 6.2 Field Guide as always, every release of WordPress gets a field guide and these posts are awesome. They give you an overview of pretty much everything that's happening in this new release. So if by some chance you haven't checked this out yet, and you want to see like everything that's changed you can check out this WordPress 6.2 Field Guide. I also wanted to shout out this about page. So you might not see this if your host is automatic updates. You might never come to this page but over up in the WordPress menu. There's an about WordPress link that will take you to this page that changes for every release. And we'll tell you a little bit about some of the changes and we're gonna go over these in detail today. The main things we're going to focus on is universal. But there are a couple of other performance improvements that have been happening in this release theme that Jason has gotten a lot faster. So this is great for both full site editing and regular WordPress themes. WordPress has gotten faster in this release, which is awesome. There have been continued performance improvements to object caching work best. So if you're using a host, like Nexus or some of the other managed WordPress hosts that have object caching enabled, you'll probably be able to get and leverage these benefits which will make your site faster which is awesome. Vern ICSs a little bit of a question that I'll touch on now, which is that there have been more compatibility updates with the latest versions of PHP. The big one being the requests library has been updated to the latest version, which was kind of like the last major bit of things that would issue a lot of PHP warnings when you're running WordPress on like PHP eight and 8.1. So a lot of those are continuing to get resolved. But with that, let's dive into the full site editor. So and then Oculus change, but probably the one that you'll notice right away is that the editor is no longer considered out of beta in WordPress 6.2 This experience kind of started with full site editing and WordPress 5.9. And so this is for releases in I believe, this doesn't mean that the full site editor is considered done. What it does mean though, is that it's kind of at a place where the WordPress team feels like it's ready for primetime that you can be using it you might be not using all of the features or the full set editor. But it's kind of officially out of the beta experimental status and now it's like hey, this is this is the thing. The next phases of Gutenberg are a collaboration. But again, work is going to continue in already as has been improving in the latest Gutenberg plugin on improving the flow set editor. So don't fret that hey, we're leaving it here and we're not ever touching it again. A lot more work is going to continue on to the first editor just like it does with the post editor and every release even though the post editor came out and WordPress five point now. So let's dive into the editor. And we'll see a another kind of new stream that's feeding us. So this is a new browse mode for the full site editor. So previously, you would be dropped directly into the content of your site in the edit mode. But this gives you a great way to browse through your actual site. So I'll see over here on the right, the current page and template that I'm looking at. If I want to look at different templates, I can do that so I can browse through them. See, for instance, the 404 template, wishing give me a quick way to see it and go ahead and to edit it which we'll take a look at I haven't looked through the archives, the single page, all of those different things. I can also see my template parts. I can manage all my template part so you'll get to this familiar screen by clicking that manage link all the way at the bottom. If I have any changes here you'll see actions to clear out those customizations so you can go back to how your theme came. And you can add new template parts as you did before. As well as with templates. You can continue to add tons of different template options if there's templates here that aren't the ones that you want. You want to add more maybe you want to style your posts from 2022 and a different way that you style your posts for 2023. You can do that with a date template for instance. Diving into the actual editor now, I just need to click on the actual canvas area. You'll see as I kind of browse into this area that this is also resizeable so this is a really convenient way that I can kind of see how my site looks and browse it at different styles without needing to open up things like dev tools. And when I'm ready, I can just click into the editor and so now we are editing my site the same way that we have in the past. The first thing I want to touch on is in changes to patterns and templates. So you'll see here when I'm hovering over this header area of my site that it's purple, and that's a new way of visually indicating to users what parts are reusable template parts and what blocks are non reusable. The reason why this is important is because if I want to enter that edit the header of my site, any changes that I make here are going to be made everywhere across my site where I'm using this template part. So this is a really convenient way of saying that Oh, I see that I'm using a reusable template. Part. I'm not making just changes to this page. I'm making them everywhere. One of the cool features that is changed in WordPress 6.2 is what I can do with some of these template parts. So I this header looks fine, but maybe I want to do something that's a bit more impactful. If I open up the three dots option, I can go over here to this new replace header option. And so what this does is this comes with all the versions of WordPress it comes bundled with a number of patterns and if you're using a custom theme or a theme that's not 2023 You can get more of them, your theme author can provide them and we can see a lot of the different options that we could use for a header. I'm gonna go ahead and take this one it looks pretty cool. And it's now replaced. So now if I look at the front end of my website we'll see that it is using my new header that I just selected. And we can see as I moved to different pages, for instance, the human condition. Oops, we're not going to see it there apparently that's strange. Oh, that okay. This is a live demo live demos. We now have some demo fails. So what I'm changing here this is actually really important is that I'm on my homepage and I've replaced this header with a new header option but if you see here the name of this header is completely different. It's full width header with hero image and so if I go back to for instance, my template parts I can see now that I have the header which is what I had before and the full width header with hero image. So this is actually created and replaced the header with a different option, but it hasn't actually edited the header template part which I guess is a little bit confusing. If I want to do that I can jump into here. And I can open up the insert or go into patterns and find for instance a header option. So if I choose this one for instance, which is the one we was looking at before I can then go ahead and get rid of this content that was previously there. So that's a good bug that you may run into making changes in your site. And now you'll know why that is. Let's go ahead back into our homepage. And let's see if we can switch this out. There we go. And now we're back to using this full header and we can now see it on our site on our homepage. But we should also here's the test, go to another page and we'll see that that header is there as well. So we can see that it's really important to know what you're editing in WordPress and I guess it could be a little bit more clear. But there we are. Something I am noticing when I'm looking at this is that there's a little bit of padding up at the top here which looks a little bit odd. This is something that you might want to take a look out for. Over in layout. You can remove this by setting the top padding to zero. So again, it's a little weird thing that you kind of run into sometimes this is what you need to surround you still kind of need to know where things are all over the place. But so that's looking really nice.
So as we're looking at the header, there are a couple of other things that we can do. Um, so let's take a look at this navigation. Now. This has been a experience in WordPress that has been kind of difficult to interact with. It's very small in particular, and it's difficult to figure out what you're doing. But in WordPress 6.2. There's an entirely new way to manage your site's navigation, which is pretty important. This is over in the Settings tab and now here's another little tidbit easter egg I guess you could say previously, this was a year you're not you're you're not mistaken for thinking that this might have looked a bit different in earlier versions of WordPress. But this is changed to be a kind of like sidebar icon to indicate that you're opening up the sidebar using the settings icon here. And the main reason for that is that they didn't want us to see a settings gear here and a settings gear here. And why do we have it settings you hear? Well, it's because the block inspector has been split up in WordPress 6.2. So we kept adding new and new and new features into WordPress blocks. And you would get this side where there would be very long and can sometimes be difficult to figure out what exactly you're looking for. So what's new in WordPress 6.2 Is that we've split up this block inspector to have some of the settings options over here in this year panel and then the appearance options over in this panel. Now, when I create this WordPress site originally I'm gonna get a menu that has kind of like a hard coded menu that is automatically kept it kept up to date. It always uses the latest set of pages that are on my site and if they make any changes there that's what I get on my menu. But I do have the option of editing it. So I'm gonna go ahead and click this edit button. And now I am in a menu that has different individual menu items that I can change. So if I want to, for instance, add in a new menu item here let's say a link to this human condition post. I can go ahead and do that. When I'm ready to edit it. I just click on it and I get a much easier interface for interacting with it. So we'll rename this to the human condition
previously
I would have to futz around up here, but all these kind of important settings now are in a much more convenient fashion that I can navigate to. So when I'm ready to go back and make other changes to my menu, I can just click Go to the parent Navigation block and then brought back into the menu here. If I want to for instance, I can create a sub menu. So previously, again, this would be a kind of like little fussy experience to get this working exactly the way you want it to. But with this sidebar mode, I can go into about oops, click on the three dots and add a submenu link. So let's say under the About page, maybe I have another website, let's say google.com. I can go ahead and insert that. And now up in my menu, I can see my about link and the Google link that I've created. And this keeps going as well. So if I wanted to add another submenu link I could and keep going and going and going but I think y'all are getting the idea. And I'll go ahead and save those changes
Alright,
so that's the patterns for kind of editing things with the header but we have this pattern extension brought across other sections of the site as well. A really cool place where this happens is with the query block. So I'm going to select the query loop. If I open up my list view, you can see that this is the block that I'm selecting. And this is a cool example. It's the one that comes built in with my theme but if I want to I can replace it with another pattern. And in this case, WordPress has given me a really big option to say hey, let's replace this pattern. And so I can now browse through this modal that appears that shows me different pattern options. So let's say we have this text one. This one looks really interesting that offsets these different posts. We'll go ahead and set that pattern. And maybe we want to make it a little bit wider. Let's see if we can do that or
not make this block wider. I'm not sure.
This isn't this column. This isn't this column. This isn't this group. There we go. Find that the latest group and we can make this bigger and more impactful. And I've switched out how my homepage displays all my different posts. And so we can take a look at that on the front end of our website.
That looks really cool.
Seems like it keeps repeating and repeating and repeating. I'm not sure is that more than six I've got six posts on the site. I'm not sure what's going on there. But I think that is pretty cool. Let's see at queerly Lu scone they're
interesting,
not sure if that's a bug or not or I'm doing something wrong. But yeah, it's a little bit of a strange I'm getting way more posts than I thought I had on my site. But we'll see what's happening there. And so we also got some other cool settings that we can use in the full site. editor which is a new sticky and position support. So I have on my homepage here I've got this cool header. But let's say want this header to stick with me as I scroll down the page. Previously, you wouldn't be able to do that in WordPress, at least not built into WordPress core that is but we've got a new option for that in WordPress 6.2. So I'm gonna go ahead and edit this pattern.
Go into this group
and you will see this new position menu. This position menu has to be in the kind of what's called like the root block. So you'll see here I'm selecting this row. I'm not seeing it here, but I am seeing it on this group. And under position we get a new option here called sticky. So we'll go ahead and change that into sticky and now when we go back to our site that's not sticking around. That's unfortunate. I think it might have to be sticky everywhere. All right, let's go back. Let's save. We'll go back to our site back to the homepage. We'll figure out what's happening. Go into templates. Home, edit this. We got our header. So I wonder if that's the issue. Okay, so I'm going to try something. We'll find out together. We're gonna put this in a group and we'll make this group for with no opposition but sticky here. There we go. So this is maybe not the most usable form with a sticky header it is quite the large one. But that is the issue there is that the sticky functionality has to be on the top top top most part of your blocks. So inside the kind of template area that can get a little bit confusing. But that is the thing to look out for. I'm gonna go ahead and ungroup that because I think we we might have made our website just totally unusable with that. So we'll go ahead and hit save and go back to a little bit of a more sensible homepage. But that sticky functionality is new and can be used maybe with a less large header would be something that would make a lot of sense. Um, so you might have seen I've popped into the inserter a couple of times, the inserter has been kind of redesigned once again, the pattern section that we have here has been regrouped to use categories that are a bit more human friendly, I guess you could say previously, they were very, very technical. But we now have more easy to understand patterns. So I'm gonna go ahead to the 404 page let's say and maybe we want to insert a call to action of some kind on our 404 page. So users don't just land here and feel like they're completely dead. So I'm going to open up the inspector go into patterns and we'll go to call to actions. And we can see a couple of call to actions that WordPress is suggesting for me. I'll go ahead and grab this one. We can insert it there. And just like that, I've got a cool, schedule a visit contact me call to action in my WordPress site on the 404 page and maybe we want to move this up. So the 404 bit is still important, but we were able to easily go ahead and make that change with a redesign pattern inserter Now, so far, we've just been taking a look at the actual editing part of the full site editor. But a another cool feature. And I think probably one of the more powerful features is the global styles. So I'm going to open up the global Styles tab. And one of the most convenient ways that you can see different examples of what your site might look like is through the style variations. So this is kind of like taking child themes of classic themes and bringing them up to the Modern area with foresight editing themes. Your theme can bundle different style variations and we can take a look at this theme to see all the style variations that come with it. What's new in WordPress 6.2 is previously when you were changing the style variations we're still stuck with the theme just showing in your small little window there so you can see all the changes that are happening in a very easy and convenient way. New to WordPress 6.2 is we get this cool zoomed out mode where I can see much more area of my site, much larger area of my site, excuse me at the same time without needing to scroll so much. So we can then go ahead and preview some of these. This is the pattern that we're on now. But we could go into aubergine as blockout one and we can see all the very kind of like distinct ways that this one theme can look
which I think is pretty cool.
That is very mind blown. That is aggressive. Um, let's take a look at Yeah, let's let's go with this pitch theme. This seems kind of nice. Especially here we're getting that little padding up the top again, a lot of themes I've noticed seems to have that padding at the top, which makes things a little bit confusing sometimes. Let's see if we can go ahead and get rid of that. There we go. But those are not the only changes that have been made to global styles. So one of the things that's useful about global styles is it lets you apply styles globally to your entire site. So I want to customize let's say the quote block. I can go over to this quote block and we'll see what's new is this kind of preview mode here. So previously if I was looking to edit the stylus for one block, I would need to find somewhere on my site where I was using this quote block so that I could see the changes as I was making them. But now we get this kind of neat, convenient preview here. So let's say if I wanted to change the typography options for the quotes, I could do that maybe we want to change this to a different font. Maybe let's find find a nice serif font. Yeah, that seems pretty cool. Maybe we want to make it larger. That was really large. We'll go with that one. We could make some spacing changes. We could go ahead and make color changes as well. So if we wanted to, let's say make all of our quotes have a background, we could do that. Maybe this one is at a slightly different background there you can see that. And another thing that you might have noticed is this sneaky little additional block CSS option. So this is part of the efforts to make WordPress full site editing come out of beta to give it more parallels and give it more feature parity with the customizer. And so one of the popular features of the customizer is the ability to add CSS so it looks like this. Quote block isn't, isn't exposing padding controls. And maybe I want to give this a little padding here it's looking a little bit uncomfortable. So I can go into additional block CSS and I can add some rules here. So I'll set padding top maybe to one rem and point five grams on the side. And we can see that that's taken effect there. This is one of these places where I'm not sure why the preview doesn't move from and doesn't stay on the CSS tab so it makes it a little bit difficult. We kind of have to go back and forth and back and forth to see those changes but we can see that I'm making them. We're seeing changes being applied. Something that is interesting here is you might be seeing me type this and be like What are you doing? You're not having a CSS selector. You're not doing anything like that. The way that this is intended to work is that you just write the kind of CSS properties back and forth in the CSS editor here. WordPress is going to take care of putting it in the correct place with the correct selectors and all that stuff for whatever block you're working on. So you don't have to worry about that yourself. Now we've been going back and forth and back and forth. But it's kind of in line. There's an even better way of doing this. So a new feature that I think is really cool is the style book. So if you've been working with WordPress for a long time, you may have been familiar with things that we call the theme unit test of old this were like these posts and pages that people would create that would show like all of the different shortcodes if you remember those that WordPress supported and all the different alignments for media and things like that, and they kind of show you all of the options for how content could be displayed and you would go through that list and make sure they all looked nice, and we kind of had some people that were trying to work on this for the Gutenberg editor in which they assemble the block unit test where we just display a whole bunch of blocks that are all built into WordPress core. But now we've got this built in and this isn't a style book. So this pulls in all the box in WordPress core, but it also supports third party box automatically and it brings me the categories of the block that they're registered in. And I can scroll through and see each of them so we can see our quote block here that we've been making changes to but we also can see all these other ones this pull quote variation, the table all of these. So if we go and we'll make some more changes to quote block we should be able to do this a little bit easier. Now, we might say that we want to change the padding like this, huh, that's pretty impactful and maybe one rim on top.
Zero
There we go. It's getting there. And we can see now we're making changes in real time, and it's a lot easier to tell what's going on. Now this global Stylebook area also gives me convenient ways that I can go to the block I'm looking to edit so let's say if I want to go ahead and customize how images appear on my site. I can go over to the Media tab, click on image and the image has reopened for me in this style book editor. Now we can see here another new feature of the Style Editor is style variations. So the image box that comes built into WordPress Core is has two variations. It has your kind of normal variation and it has this rounded variant. And so when I select the rounded variant, it applies these border radiuses and so if I want to now I can edit this style variation. This is something that previously your theme author would have written with CSS, and you would kind of have to write custom CSS to override it. Now you can do that straight from the WordPress editor. So let's say I don't want to make my rounded images just complete circles. Maybe I just want to give it a slight little rounding like that. And maybe I want to actually give them a boarder to maybe emphasize it even more. Maybe we will select. It's brown looks interesting, and something like that. And you can see that I've made these changes for the style variation. So anywhere on my site that I'm using an image that I've selected, the rounded style for it will have those changes applied to it automatically. What we don't have yet is a way of creating new style variations. So right now that's still kind of a manual process. You'd have to register using some code and things like that. But this is like a really good first step that can make it possible to create style variations. And so then you can say, hey, I have these different variations that have been applying over my site. Maybe I'll make a style variation for them. And I can use it throughout my site with one click, which I think is really awesome. There are some more cool UI options as well. I'm gonna go ahead into design and hop into the button. We have a new control for shadow, which I think is really fun. So if I want to, for instance change or apply, in this case, a box shadow I can do that to my buttons and so this is a theme design controller that can be opted into and we can go ahead and go back what I'm actually going to do is let's change the theme choice that we have here because it's kind of making it a little bit hard to see some of those different shadow options. We'll go ahead and go back to our button and go to a shadow. And we can see these different shadow presets that my theme comes with. Again, these are kind of presets that I can choose from but it's something that a theme author can adjust. And maybe in the future, you'll be able to create your own shadow styles from the full site editor. But I think this is a great way to kind of give some cool appearance options and some different different aesthetic choices to your site in one click with this new box shadow control. And so this is enabled for the button. I think it's enabled for a couple of other blocks. I'm not 100% sure which ones we can try. So maybe we'll try this cover block. Is this an option that's available to me not with a cover block. I think it may just be buttons or things like that. But it's something that if you're writing blocks you could opt into if you wanted to. So this additional block CSS is not the only thing that you can do. You'll see you're not seeing it initially. It's kind of hidden intentionally by default. Yeah. So the button changes that we're doing there would be site wide. So that's the cool thing about the global styles is that any changes here? I am changing across my entire site. So if you're wanting to make kind of global style changes and have like a style book or pattern guide that is kept in sync with everything, you can do it from here, you can still of course make changes manually for each individual post as you go. But I do have access to just writing pure CSS. So if I want to add in some additional CSS and here I can just put in CSS rules. So for instance, I have some CSS here that I've gotten that we can try
and you can see we don't have text shadow controls yet in WordPress core. But if let's say you want to be adventurous and add tech shadows to all of your post titles. That's something that you can do now using the CSS editor on a global basis, not just on a per block basis. But like I said, this is hidden by default. You have to go to it in this three triple dots area. But once you've added custom CSS, the additional CSS option will show up for you. So if you're not seeing it immediately, that's why style variations. I'm looking through my notes to make sure you've covered the things that they want you there, Zoomed Out View inline preview custom CSS, the style book buttons and shadow and editing style variations. Yeah, so those are some of those changes with global styles. So now we're going to take a look at some of the changes that have been made to just the regular WordPress post editor. So I'm gonna go over into a post here let's say this one the human condition. Something that we've had in previous versions of WordPress that a lot of people liked was distraction free mode. This was where you would see little button up in the tiny MCE toolbar area where you could click a button and go full screen. And I know one of the things that people have kind of extra struggling with with Gutenberg is that when you're just trying to write content, it can kind of feel like it's getting in your way a lot of the time. And we've had options that kind of hide some things you can have a top toolbar so you don't get the floating bits. And you can have to splat spotlight mode, excuse me. But we now have distraction free mode, which is new in WordPress 6.2. And this is like as a truly pretty distraction free mode. Almost all of the UI is completely gone. The pop up UI is when I'm clicking on different things are gone. I do still see the insert or when I get to another page so if I want to insert something, I can do that and insert a quote block let's say
but I can in this view just freely write my content without needing to focus on all of the complicated UI that WordPress is presenting and really hide it for me. When I'm ready to make changes, I can bring my mouse up over into the header area. Go ahead and hit update. And I can always exit out either using that keyboard shortcut which is right there, Shift Command and the backslash or I can just click on the button. Let's go open up a new page.
It's about page.
Another cool feature is the inserter has been expanded with this new media tab. So this media tab has different categories depending on what content is uploaded to My Media Gallery in WordPress. So this site only has images so it shows images and I can browse through my list of images here. And if I want to insert one, I can just go ahead and click on it and it gets inserted into my content. But you might have seen that sneaky other option there called Open verse. So open verse is the Creative Commons kind of search engine. It's contains tons and tons and tons of content that is available for you to use. And it's now part of the WordPress project for a little bit of time now, maybe a year. I'm not I can't remember exactly when open verse officially came under the WordPress open source umbrella, but it has now been pulled into your WordPress editor. So if I want to grab a Creative Commons image, I can click on this open first tab. And I can scroll through some of the different images that I have available to me. I can also do searching so we can maybe try searching for WordPress and see what happens there. And we can see oh, that's a WordPress editor and we've got some WordPress icons things like that. Is that a WordPress 15 cake that is very cool. So if I want to say hey, let's use this in my post, I can go ahead and click on it there Okay, so this is an interesting thing. So some images. WordPress will try by default to actually upload any of the images that you select from here into your actual media library. But sometimes it's not possible depending on where the site is hosting that image. And so when it does do that, WordPress will let you know. And so here if I insert this image, I'm inserting it as an external image. So if I looked for instance, in code view I can see that the image site is PD w.org, etc, etc, etc. But if I answered another image from open verse, I think I have one here that my works. I've used this one before we can try it. Yeah. So I've now clicked on this image in the open verse library, and it is automatically uploaded it to my WordPress media library. So if I edit this as HTML, but you can see that this is on the Nexus site that I'm testing with here. And so this means that you're not hot linking images from other places you're not using their bandwidth you're not at risk of if that image changes or things like that, or privacy risks in certain countries with privacy laws that say, Hey, you shouldn't be having your visitors connect to other sites that they don't know about when they visit your site. So by default, WordPress will try and upload that open verse image right into your document, and you can go ahead and use it. Now the thing that's really cool about this is that it automatically inserts in the credit information that you're kind of required to give when you use a Creative Commons image, so you don't have to go hunting for it yourself. It's automatically added in here with all of the attributions excuse me all of the attributions that are required. And I think yeah, we can see the changes that he made on the post title with a shadow coming in over here. So I think those are the main WordPress changes that I wanted. To cover and WordPress 6.2. But like I said, there are tons this is really only a snapshot of them. If you go over to the WordPress 6.2 field guide, you can see a whole bunch of details. Some of them didn't cover a minimum height, dimension support this talks about the times. There's some developer changes as well, things like that. But yeah, that is a snapshot of WordPress 6.2. All right, great stuff,
Timothy. We went a long way in the last 40 minutes or so, so many new things to see and the side editor and the block editor and we have several questions that have popped in throughout. Let me just invite everybody if you've not yet done so to pop open the q&a here in zoom, and either ask a question there that you've not yet asked. Or if you see a question that's already listed that you would also like to see answered, just click the thumbs up icon there underneath the question and we'll be taking those questions in the order of up votes. We can there's no way in a zoom webinar to allow chat to be copied. It's a zoom limitation and we've been back and forth with them. On this sorry about that. For those of you that would like to do that. There's just not a way to do that. But we will have this replay up in about an hour after we're done. And let's start to take some q&a here. So you touched on this a little bit earlier at the very beginning. Verne's question about WordPress and PHP eight support Can you elaborate on that anymore, Timothy?
Yeah, so basically, WordPress kind of has what we're advertising is like beta slash preliminary support with PHP eight. And what that basically means is that if you're using WordPress Core, and things don't go wrong, which I'll expand on a little bit your site will run fine with phpa. WordPress is an old project. What anniversary we're about to celebrate it's gotta be 20 years is that this 20 year anniversary. WordPress has a lot of code and while we have tons 1000s of tests, we don't have tests. That cover every possible edge case where something could go wrong. So what we're kind of saying with where WordPress is support is now is that you can run WordPress on PHP eight, I run it on word on PHP eight, and you shouldn't run into any issues if some other errors happening and something unexpected goes wrong, you may see some PHP errors. Like I said, one of the big last remaining sources of PHP warnings that WordPress kind of core and friends would admit has been fixed. In this version. We've upgraded the requests library from one dot x to two dot x so a couple of very, very dedicated contributors have updated the request library. That's what lets WordPress make HTTP calls. So if you're using like Stripe, for instance, well, payment gateways actually probably don't use the request library. But most of the times when your WordPress site is making calls externally, maybe fetching plugin updates things like that uses the request library. And that was the source of a lot of PHP eight warnings, but there's been fixed. We also wrote a blog post about this on the i iThemes blog that you can check out and maybe anything and do some quick googling for the link of that one. One of the things I mentioned there is that it's important to keep in mind the difference between warnings and errors. So you'll still find for a lot of WordPress plugins that they'll emit warnings on PHP eight, and usually what those are is deprecation warnings. So the PHP project is moving very fast, and they're changing things that previously used to work, but maybe weren't the most best way of doing them, or the opinions of the PHP kind of core group have changed. And so they emit deprecation warnings to let plugin developers and extension developers know that, hey, these changes are coming. And what that means is that your site right now is going to run fine in may emit some deprecation warnings, but make sure you're running your site with WP debug turned off the bug display turned off this warnings aren't showing up in the front end. But that is something to keep in mind is that you can these days run most plugins in my experience if the big ones that are actively maintained on PHP eight, you may get some warnings, but that's not the same thing as an error. And so that's something that's like, almost expected to some extent and kind of a good thing is PHP telling us that things are gonna change in the future.
Yeah, very good.
I'm not coming up with any quick search results on that one, Timothy.
I might be able to find it. It was something maybe in January or February, it might have been actually even earlier than that. Might have been when the PHP 8.2 release happened.
Yeah, there's a PHP 8.2 article. That might be I'm gonna drop that link in the chat. Okay, yeah. Next question here is from Sue. Can you override a header on single on a single page and or have a unique header to posts and another four pages?
i Yeah. So what we can do, we'll go into our templates here. And we'll go into let's say our page template. And so this is the template that you WordPress uses to display pages. Um, if I want to, I can also get more specific. I'll show you that in a second. But when you go to edit this, and we open up our ListView, you can see that I have this header here and it's telling me that hey, this is one of the reusable parts, but we can replace this so if we have to do it from here to figure out exactly which menu I have to open up, replace header. So this is what we kind of stumbled into with our demo. But so I'm going to replace this header with this option, maybe just the text only version. And now if we go to my site we'll see that my homepage is still using this full view very nice editor, but I'd go to something like the contact page. It's using the mini header. And so that's because this template that I'm editing is the page template. And so any changes that I make to this template here are only affecting this template. And so I could even go into manage all templates and we can see some of these changes that are made customized, customized, and we can add new. And so we could say for instance, let's display a single end with post and instead of all posts we can search for a specific post. So let's say this naming and necessity by sock.
We can create a template for that.
Go over to it and it's pulling the things from my site. But if I want to adjust this one I could so let's say we want to again replace this header for this particular post. It's essentially using the whoops flicking all over the place Sorry, I'll replace editor and we can say maybe on this particular post we want this header for some reason. We can go ahead and do that. So now if I go to my site
and we find that post by saw
here Yeah. These come with links
I don't think this pattern came with links. Okay, we'll go ahead and go to the post
and we'll see that it is using this header. So basically the entire WordPress template hierarchy if you're familiar with that, almost all of it now I believe you can replicate in the site editor. And so that means that you can have a custom template that is working for any of them. And you can change things like headers and footers, all of that stuff. Very good.
Okay, so we can go into the site editor and seeing things work and sometimes it's hard to find what you're looking for. And this kind of goes to Elizabeth's question, that's up next, which is for those folks that are used to using a page builder, and they look at this and they go this is really complicated. What how do you answer that?
So I think there are two things to it. One is I think page builders are complicated too. So when we use tools, we kind of get used to them and we start with solving one particular problem. And then we grow to solving another problem and another problem and another problem. And once you've already mastered one tool that can be difficult to change to another tool with a completely different paradigm. So it is and can be intimidating. If you are using something previously that you know really well. I would also say that there are kind of different extents as to what kind of things you want to customize. I think WordPress doesn't expect you to use the full powers and capabilities of the site editor necessarily. Themes still play a really important role in WordPress where you'll go into the themes directory and look for themes that are kind of like close to what you want or exactly what you want. But it does bring you a lot more power to when you do want to make customizations on your site. You can do that without needing to write code. So if you've been creating themes completely from scratch with a different page builder tool, I would say that you can start trying to use the full site editor if you're interested, but it will be a new tool to learn. I think part of the benefits is the tight integration with WordPress Core. So the next phases of WordPress for instance are things like multilingual support and multi editing capabilities and workflows and things like that. And it's all built on top of blocks. So other kinds of page building tools like Elementor, or Divi or things like that. They're kind of very outside of that ecosystem. It's unclear to what degree they'll get some of those benefits that the WordPress Core project is working on. So that's kind of the business reason I guess I could say as to why you might want to try out the full site editor because it's the way that the core WordPress project is going, but it is still new. The full set editor is only a year old. Elementor has been doing things for a long time. So there are definitely places where WordPress can be easier and we've seen a lot of improvements since 5.9. But there's still a lot more to come.
Yeah, for sure. And one thing I'll add to that is you know, we've seen how the block editor has gotten much easier to use. I mean, the block editor today is great. I love it. I really enjoy using it as a Content Editor. It was not like that, when it first came out. It was really complicated. It was hard to use, but it's fine. It was early, very early. And so it's gotten better with all these iterations with every new version of WordPress and the biweekly drops of Gutenberg. And so you're still seeing a lot of evolution in the site editor as well. And so some of these flows that are kind of weird, and it's here but it's there and it's you know, that just like the block editor will likely get worked out over time. This by the way, in some of the flux with the site editor is one of the reasons the Kadence team for example, has chosen not to support full site editing currently in its current form. And if you miss this link that I shared earlier, there's a great post on the Kadence blog from Ben Ratner, the founder of Kadence, just about the thought process of you know, site, full site editing and how Kadence is going to support that and so forth, but it is it's certainly a work in progress. Yeah. All right. Great question, Elizabeth. Thanks for asking that. Stephanie's up next, when you were showing the the the block where you can add the additional CSS in the past when you were just using a theme and you use say the customizer to change your CSS or you added code you know at the theme level when the theme updated you would lose those changes. So how does this work in that situation?
So I believe is tied to kind of the variations that I go for. But if you update WordPress, you shouldn't lose them. It kind of the short of it so it's not it's not like editing the style dot CSS file, basically.
Yeah. Oh, here's
the good question from Phoebe. I'm not sure the answer to this one. When you showed the image importing from open verse Did it have alt text already?
So it should have alt text if it was there in open verse is my recollection. So if we go into posts which one was I editing? Good question. I think this one nope, not that one. Oh, did I put in a
page I'm gonna put a page
so we can take a look. If we edit this in code. We're actually stuck on the sidebar. So this one it looks like it doesn't. This one it looks like it doesn't. So it's not inventing alt text. But it's something that I guess I'd say Be on the lookout for to make sure that you are adding alt text. Yeah.
I think you're right, Timothy. We played around with open verse for a news roundup last month and I believe if it's there, it pulls it in. But it's yeah, it's not there. It's not going to create it.
Alright, next up.
Let's see also from Elizabeth PHP 8.0 and higher are supported Why would WordPress not fully support PHP eight currently?
I think you spoke Yes sir. kind of touch on that. Basically, WordPress fully supports PHP eight in the sense that you can run WordPress on PHP eight without errors. But what full support really means is different for different people. Um, WordPress, mais emit some warnings in some cases that are like deprecation warnings, and those will get fixed over time. But WordPress has 1000s and 1000s of lines of code. So it takes a while. And if you pass unexpected data to different functions, fatal errors might be generated. And so those can be caused by plugins or if there's one particular weird edge case that WordPress doesn't have covered by tests. But WordPress is basically a very large and very old project. So there's a lot of work to do. All right.
Um, yeah, and I will just say in all the sites that we manage in the agency that I run, we I can't think of any PHP warning even warnings that are in the error log from core it's always about plugins. Yeah, we moved to PHP eight. Vern has a question in the burn. I'm not sure I understand that question enough to even ask it. So maybe Timothy, can you read that question? If you know what burn is asking, maybe you could answer it for him.
I think it might be a bit too time to really get into. You can do it with WordPress filters, Vern or by customizing your WP config to set the site URL options dynamically. But yeah, I think that's a bit too complicated to get into here, but you can also post on wordpress.org has a forums and there's an advanced section, and that'd be a great place to post about that or in the WordPress Stack Exchange.
Great. John has a question. How about Megaman news? Is that possible in site editor
um, so I guess, kind of, um, so the truth the 100% Like, is there a mega menu functionality in the site editor is now but you can add things into the editor. So I have these different menu items here about contact the human condition, I can add in other blocks here we have been adding in just these different links. But if for instance, I wanted to add and I believe we can add in a search feat and finality and I can add in a My Sites logo, not the word logo, my site logo and we don't have one set, but if we click that be better on there. We can kind of do this type of thing. And so someone could I don't know if anyone has yet developed blocks that can go in here. So the navigation section in the navigation block supports child blocks. So someone could definitely build for instance, a mega menu block that worked with it. I don't know if anyone has I'm not sure that it's like on the top of the roadmap for WordPress core to have that like Mega Menu support built in. But because of how WordPress works now, and being blocked based, someone could develop a block to do it.
Interesting. Yeah. This is a perfect case for a plugin or a theme to take on that functionality. Exactly. Yeah. All right. Sue would like to know is this is the CSS that you wrote per block. Also listed in the full CSS editor.
No, you don't have like a. Here's an easy way of seeing all of the CSS that gets spit out basically, this is very much v one of CSS, but you'll see like I didn't get autocomplete or syntax highlighting or those kinds of things. So this is pretty much of the one of that feature. So that may be something that comes in the future. You can look forward to it. But there is not a way to do that currently in WordPress. I don't think so. Yeah, but again, the recommendation is like every single release we get more and more options that you can edit interactively. So for instance, my demo here use the example of adding text shadow and text shadow isn't an option. It might be in the future. We just got box shadow, for instance. So WordPress, his goal is to try and give 80% of the things that you 100% of the things that you do 80% of the time, I don't know pick it pick a percentage, wherever it wants to make it so that you can do almost anything that you'd want to do with the different controls that work interactively. So you don't need to know how to write CSS, but for those cases where you can't do it yet. CSS is kind of an escape. Hatch. And it's important to be able to give parity between the customizer and the full set editor. And it is
it seems like a plugin could be written that would look for all the things and get into a place where you could see it but I don't I mean, we look at plugins every month for plugin roundup and I've not seen a mega menu plugin for blog for the block editor or the site editor menu, nor have I seen a plug in that does this yet. Let's see. Okay, this is the question of the hour for Mani, Timothy. Is it safe to update WordPress 6.2
I would say so I haven't seen that crazy amount of ad tickets come in WordPress 6.1. We had a couple of issues and had to have a pretty urgent six point 1.1 But I haven't seen that kind of activity and track. So I would say it's safe to update for sure. As always, you know, still do a backup. Still do a staging site. And that's what I'd recommend if it's a big site. Honestly still, but generally Yeah, I haven't seen major changes. You may have plugin issues. I've seen a couple of plugins that created releases day of WordPress six months to release to fix compatibility issues with some of the WP requests changes. But core itself is pretty stable. And I think at this point a week out was this plugins should have been updated if they're actively maintained, if not actively maintained. Find a new plugin would be my general
suggestion these days. Yeah. All right.
Let's do one more question from Ben. And this is part of the actually let's do we'll end with a question on another question. I just want to chat. Ben has a question. About multi language. What will happen to plugins like WP MBL when multilingual comes to core so that's the next phase of Gutenberg, as I understand it is bringing in phase it's two stages out
yeah from so the next step is collaboration and collaboration is really important to get multilingual working. So it's a little bit ways out from that and multilingual that you've built on top of collaboration. Where what happens to those plugins? Great question. I think it'd be up to those plugins. Do you see if they want to build on top of the system that WordPress is building? I think WordPress would hope that they do. WordPress, multilingual solutions have all kind of been a little bit weird with WordPress Core, not really officially supporting. So hopefully WordPress should be providing great API's that these plugins can have different takes on and make it possible for there be different plugins out there. But I think the idea is that you'd be able to use WordPress in a multilingual setup without needing a plugin. Come phase four.
Yeah, and that's still a few years up the road. Yeah. Okay, here's a question from Ken and I lied. We're gonna take one more after that, because Tina just asked a great question and q&a. I think it'd be good to end with Kenneth has a question that was in the chat that I think is important. Especially just to clarify about the difference between what's happening in core and the Gutenberg plugin. When should you install the Gutenberg plugin? When does that make sense versus what's in core?
So generally, I would say don't install the Gutenberg plugin, and the good number of plugin is a testing ground it's a playground, it's really cool to see the changes that WordPress is implementing. And but I would not use on our production website. What I would recommend though, if you're like a freelancer work for an agency, maybe you have a site of your own that you play around with your blog. Personal site, maybe not your, your agencies.com website, but your personal sites I would try the customer plugin is essentially the place where the new features that will be coming to WordPress Core live and they get iterated on and respond to user feedback. So it is a really great place to see a kind of sneak preview give feedback when it's still easy to make changes, and all of those things, but I wouldn't use it on a live site because it still is kind of like the experimental testing ground for universe.
Yeah. And they pull things in and take things out. And yeah, it's for sure. Alright, let's end on this one. From Tina, could you suggest some good full site editing themes to try out?
Yeah, so there's two that I mentioned. I would always check out WP tavern. You can see our news about AI themes. And there is this theme that Anders released just recently Anders is a fantastic theme designer. And another one that I looked at recently is called lemony and Sara reviewed it let me see if I can find it real quick. I have to go into search here we go lemony, a free WordPress box theme. So this theme is really cool. Let me pull up a
demo of it.
This is
I would say this is kind of like a Theme Forest theme that has been brought into WordPress and the block editor and full site editing and by that I mean like you're getting a kind of full, like fully featured all of these different things that you can do everything that you would ever want kind of functionality that you kind of got with ThemeForest business themes, that kind of era of WordPress, but there seem for somebody that has brought in their kind of like take on user experience to WordPress Core native functionality using the full site editor, as opposed to like short codes and all all the things are 2012 And I think this is very, very interesting to see what viewed American do in the context of a full site editor. There are pain points. For instance, they have the sidebar here but the sidebar is a template part. So you kind of have to edit in a couple of different places and there are things like that to kind of show you where WordPress and theme authors can still make things easier but to me it's the most exciting kind of like business theme we've seen a lot of like blogging themes and portfolio themes and art see themes that are full set editor built but this is like to me it's like one of the first that I've seen this like really like a hey, this is like a business theme that you can use that does all the things that you want. It to do. And I think it's very interesting to see how fluid editing works in this kind of environment.
For sure. Well, Timothy, this has been great. Really good walk through the new features in the sign editor and WordPress 6.2. Any final thoughts as we're wrapping up?
I know I would say it is exciting where WordPress is moving. And I'm we've seen a lot in basically just a little over a year in the past four releases. So I'm excited to see where things are going. And collaboration is kicking off now in WordPress 6.3 and that I am very excited for as well because that that that'll be a big game changer, I think.
Absolutely. Well, thanks again, Timothy, For your expertise. Thank you all for being with us as well. Great questions as we were wrapping up today. Really good discussion. I did drop the links back in the chat if you would like to watch the replay of this event or share it with someone else the link is there in the chat. And it'll be ready in about an hour maybe a little less from from now. Also, if you're a Kadence user, make sure you read that blog post from the Kadence team about how Kadence is approaching full site editing. And finally be sure you take a look at solid wp.com which is the new name for AI themes. We'll be rolling that out over the next couple of months. This is a rebrand in public projects. So we're letting you kind of see things as they happen. So a lot of great things are happening at AI themes. We'll be talking more and more about that. All right, that's gonna do it for us today. Thank you again, Timothy. I'll be back for members tomorrow with Office Hours. Here 1pm on I iThemes Training, where we go further together.