but it has again done a little bit of checking to see what's on my website and says, Hey, your site doesn't require an object cache, it would still dramatically speed up from using an object cache. But you don't desperately need it. Again, this is a thing you can click this link to learn more about it. But if you talk to your host, they can help you set one up. If you're on a Managed WordPress hosts, you probably already have it. And if you do, you'll see a different message over here in site health. So with those site health and performance stuff out of the way, we're going to dive into as a Gutenberg changes for 6.1. So I'm going to take a look starting with let's see, where do we want to start? Let's just dive into an editor. I'm going to set myself up a new page. Now one thing that you didn't see when I hopped onto this page was a big welcome notice that said, Hey, welcome to the block editor. Do you want to learn some tips about it? This is that notice out of here in most of my demos, because WordPress now remembers when you have dismissed those tips. So previously, your editor preferences were just stored locally in your browser in what's called local storage. And that goes away after some time either from the your browser getting wiped, or making changes. But now all of that is stored in your user matter. So what this means is that if you set up your editor preferences going up here into Preferences, and you make changes here, these preferences will stick with your user account, no matter what browser you're using, you clear your browser history, you clear browser data, anything like that your editor preferences are synced to your user account. So the big noticeable one is that you won't get that dialog anymore after you've seen it for the 50th time. But it also means some of these other changes like showing the pre published checklist, the appearance options, these are all saved to your user now so you should have those changes be sticky. There are a variety of new improvements and new features for blocks that we'll take a look at. I'm going to add a title to my post here. The first thing that I want to talk about is locking. So I'm going to insert in a template pattern here. Let's say this one this is a really cool pattern. That looks really awesome. But there is a lot of things that could go wrong here. So something that was introduced in an earlier WordPress release was locking and what locking lets you do is say, hey, I want to prevent someone from either moving or removing this block and you can do it by hitting lock all and hitting apply. The problem was previously if I wanted to lock a complex pattern like this, I would have to go to every block and go here, hit lock, hit lock all blah, blah, blah. But we now have this new feature here called apply to all blocks inside. So instead I'm gonna go ahead and unlock this paragraph block. And I can said go up to this group class, and I can hit lock and it's going to lock every single block inside of my group box. So instead of needing to go one by one and locking them, I don't have to and you can see now that I can't move these, I can still edit the text, but I can't remove it. It makes it harder for me to break my website accidentally. Anyone who is able to lock is also able to unlock by default. But we talked about this in our WordPress 6.1 overview. There is little bit of custom code that you can do with a filter to say, hey, this user doesn't have permission to turn off locking. So if you want to do that for your clients, let's say that's totally an option available for you. I'm gonna go ahead and unlock this though so we can make some more changes
Okay, so we have a number of other changes as well. Um, so a new one is more or less Hi, this Preferences window is making adjustments on each individual column. So this is a three column layout here. And new thing that I can do is I can hop over into this border control and I can set border options for the individual columns in my columns block. So if I wanted to give this a little bit of a outline or something like that, maybe that one's not the best place to put it, maybe let's put it in our text. I can add a border right to this column, use this red. I can break this apart. So if I wanted to kind of provide a little bit of a separator, I could do something like that by sending a pixels over here and we'll hide the border from these other options. And I can combine this with tools like padding to provide a little bit of spacing between those there. So you can see I have a kind of cool new design tool that lets me be a little bit more flexible in customizing the layouts here. You'd also see that the padding controls are also a lot nicer and showing you more clearly representing the padding changes that you're making on your site. And this also applies to margin. So margin isn't actually available for this box, we'll grab a block that is like let's say the group block and I'll enable margin and you can see the margin controls getting shown. So if we actually pop up here you can see a preview of margins which makes it a lot easier to understand what you're changing when you're using these different options. Let's get rid of them. I'm going to insert a little bit more content here at Let's insert a gallery block the CSUN the new gallery changes let's go here gallery. Got this two images block and let's actually add a nother
let's actually add a couple of images to our gallery here
so we can select our gallery oops there we go. We'll make this a two common go to that new change that we have is the spacing so previously, we're able to set block spacing for all directions in our gallery. But we can now unlink this setting control and we can set with Gutenberg team is calling axial spacing, so I can have different spacing vertically that I do horizontally. So I'm not a designer, but I'm sure some of y'all who are more creative can figure out some cool things to do with that. We can also now set borders on images. So I'm going to set up a border here. Maybe we'll make this one red. We can also kind of unlink it and maybe have a little bit of a cool effect. We can make the border only appear on one side of the image. Maybe make it look a little bit like a shadow or something like that. Do some kind of cool customizations. Looks a little bit three dimensional. And then you could of course make those changes different for different items. So if we wanted to adjust this image, sorry, my editor is being a little bit laggy today I'm not sure why. And we'll set up another border color. And maybe we'll make this one only on the right hand sides. I don't know that looks kind of cool, I think. I don't know. I'm sure those of you who are more creative can figure out a cooler things that you can do with these controls. Yeah, let's put the call to us about buy more design options. We also have changes to the list block. So I'm going to insert in a list of text.
Oops This is my first list item. This is my second list item. So what's new for lists is lists are now composed of list items. So you can see I have a list block and that's made up of this item blocks and what this means is that it's a little bit easier for me to move things around. So this is kind of like a continuation of the gallery block. Previously we just had the gallery block and it was one whole big thing but now we have a gallery block that is made up of multiple image blocks. And now we have this. Now we have this available for this box. So each list is made up of multiple list items. And you can treat these like actual box that you can move around and make changes to if you wanted to, for instance, apply a CSS class just to one particular list item. You can do that now. You wouldn't have been able to do that before. Yeah, questions I would be great to put in the q&a section. Okay. 222222 children Yeah, we also have more controls that are available in more consistent places. So we have a cool little overview of to the roster of the design tools that are available for blocks so we have this big post here and we'll put this in the replay. I don't think Nathan I can post into the main chat for some reason is just telling me that I'm messaging hosts
Yeah, if you drop down the host click that little blue
Yeah, I see host and then I see you oh that's it you don't have I don't see an every one option but maybe if you want to. I will repost my, my link there y'all can see this. So this is an overview of the different design tool options that we have for different blocks. And so these have kind of become a lot more comprehensive. So if we go into typography, for instance, we have font family. Oops, my editor is lagging. Again, not sure why. Let me maybe save maybe that'll help. Mine height letter spacing, decoration letter case, all of these different options that are available. And these are now more consistently applied everywhere in the editor where you can edit text, so you should see more consistency in the different decoration appearance, tools line height all these tools should be available to you in more places. Um, the other thing that I wanted to mention in just the editor side of things is we have a new information, little factoid, which is the time to read. So WordPress has this cool little panel up here that says the words that are my posts, the characters, the headings, the paragraphs, the blocks, all that kind of stuff. But we also have a new item here that says time to read. So it's doing an estimate based off of the length of my posts, how long it would take your reader to write. How long do we take a reader to read my post so if you want to write to a certain time limit, say you want people to maybe spend five or so minutes reading your post. You can use this tool to kind of help guide you in writing your content, making it longer making it shorter, so you're not just hitting a particular word limit. So that a bit of an easier way to kind of understand what a word limit might mean. went ahead and save that. And now I'm going to dive into 2023 which is the new block theme for 6.1. So this is a really cool theme that comes with a whole host of different block styles. So if you remember from 2022. When we show that off, there is a couple of different style options. But with 2023 We have tons of style options, and I think they do a really great job of showing how radically different a theme can look that is the same actual theme but just have different style options available. So this is the default one and what it looks like here. We have our machine which looks pretty radically different. We have block out with its own different font choices. A really cool use of duotone Canary, which has this interesting like mono spaced typewriter type font. Electric, I really like this one, this bright blue, and kind of like paper rich background. Grapes is also something that I'm quite a fan of. And marigold. I really love these types of color palettes of these creams. I think the button on this looks super awesome. And these funds over here. Pilgrimage This one's pretty interesting. I don't know how well the Zoom picks this one up. But if you actually see this has like a checkered background pattern, which kind of looks really high tech. Really interesting to see. We have pitch which is another cool darker variation sherbert which is all about the gradients and it's quite a bright look. And then whisper which is the one I was looking at before I maybe we'll switch to marigold for now I quite like this one. And what's great about these different style choices is that this isn't just the limit. It's not just hey, I have these 10 and I can choose which ones I want to see I can then customize this further. So I can hop on into colors. And we get our palette here and I can make changes to different palettes. So let's say I have a different color that I want to use. We can maybe change this base cream to something a little bit more orange area or maybe a little bit more papery or blue. I can essentially make whatever customizations here that I want. So now we have a kind of like pinkish flavor of this theme. And then we'll hit Done to say that I'm finished making those adjustments. I'm gonna go ahead and say that I like my changes there. So this isn't just the only changes is the new theme. We also have a lot better support for customizing your templates in your template parts. So I'm going to hop over into templates. These are the templates that come with my theme. So we have the homepage template, the single page template, the 404 template, which I still think it's very cool that we can now edit what four four is display and our theme previously we had all sorts of plugins and things like that. The archive blog, and a different template that you could use Pages index, search rank, etcetera. A new thing that we have is better ways for handling single items. So I have a custom post type that I've registered on my site. And I can easily insert in the template for events, which is my custom post type. And this is now me making customizations for what any entries for the events custom post type display as I can also do ones for specific items. So if I say
no
There we go. So if I want to create a template for a specific post item, I can do that. So I am saying that I want to create a template for one of my blog posts on my site. I can come down and I'm seeing a preview of all the different posts on my site. And if I wanted to, let's say make a template for this particular blog post. I can do that. So if maybe on this post, we want to change the post title color to be something completely different. We can go ahead and do that. Maybe we'll make the text dark for some reason. Let's save and now if we go to our site we can see this is using the dark black text. Whereas on a score, which is Oh, that's a little bit weird. Oh that might be the default color. Let's see. If we change this, something really different. This is the problem with posts that are all demo is sometimes things go a little bit wonky
there we go okay yeah, okay. So I just by accident chose the same color that was used there. But so you can see with this COVID of Coots post, I now have a red green text for the blog post style and so that's just a very like primitive change to kind of show what it lets you do. But you could do something like way more radical if you wanted to. For instance, if we wanted to put these side by side, we could do something like that we could put our group and our post content into a row. And then we have like a completely different layout even for what this looks like maybe we'll convert this group into a stack and center things.
And we can see now this post looks completely different. But if I now go to my other blog post, they look the same. So this is something that you could do previously, but now you have a UI inside of Gutenberg to let you create those templates from the UI without needing to write any code. This extends also to custom taxonomies. So if I wanted to display the custom taxonomy that I have, and maybe display a template for a specific term, you can do that. And you have all those options that we've had before like making a specific author page, a date page. You can do that. This is kind of like the big promise of the block editor is making it easier for you to as a user who doesn't maybe know how to write code, make it easier for you to say okay, these are the different templates that I want. And we don't have all of them yet. You've probably seen the WordPress template hierarchy, which is this big guy over here. And we don't have every single variation of this yet. But kind of the idea is to provide as many of these as possible through the UI, and we're getting pretty close. We have almost all the ones there, I would say. And yeah, it's giving you that power as a user to be able to make those changes. Let's see. Oh, okay. Um, so another thing that's pretty cool as the site editor is we now have fluid typography support. So I have this h1 Heading, which is used as the title of my site. We have these different size options, maybe we'll set gigantic and we'll hit save. What's cool now is previously in WordPress, when I had this gigantic text, this might look really great on desktop, but in mobile, it would also be very very huge. But now if I hop on over into responsive, that pull that will that oops. Can I not do this in Chrome? There we go. You can see that the text of the header here is getting bigger as I'm scaling up and is shrinking as I'm scaling down. And so that helps make mobile design where appropriate. We don't have in WordPress core the ability to design for completely different viewports for something like that you need like a more powerful editor like things that Kadence or others provides that you set different designs at different breakpoints. But this is providing a way where without you needing to specify this is what I want this to look at all these different sizes. It tries to be more intelligent, and resize text appropriately so that it is not so incredibly large on mobile while still having that gigantic big impact that you wanted to have on desktop. So that new responsive control is something that if you're a theme developer, you're reading themes for clients that you can take control of, but as a user, it's not something that you need to do anything about. You just can have the option you just select which text size amongst the options you'd like and you'll get it automatically nothing for you didn't you to configure well put this back into gigantic I like it quite large like that. Okay. Let's see. I think those are the big main ones that I wanted to talk about, which is full site editing. There's a whole bunch of there's 10 releases of block editor changes that have made into this release and they kind of vary on different sizes of features. And as a lot of like small incident improvements. There have been changes for instance, that cover block and how you work with that and themes make it a little more obvious things like that, but not really huge groundbreaking features. I would say WordPress 6.11 Really cool thing that I did want to mention let's go ahead and save your changes. Thanks for catching that Gutenberg is a very new template locking mode for called content only editing. So I've set up a custom post type that uses this really cool template. So I'll say yes. And this template is locked using this new content only locking mode. So if I walk around in this editor here you can see it's transformed a bit. This doesn't look like normal. My group lock is locked. And it's showing me the different pieces of content that I can edit. And those are the only changes that I can make. I can't make structural changes or anything like that. And so what this is a really great option for is if you're developing something for clients and you want them to have an editing experience like this, where they know what changes they're gonna make. If they say that, hey, this is what the dates are going to be. We'll change this to 2023 I guess. Oops. Sorry, my browser is just being a little bit laggy today and I'm not sure why. They know exactly what changes they make here or what they are going to see on the front end. But they don't have to worry about them completely breaking up their layout. They don't have to worry about accidentally inserting a block into the wrong place or changing it. If you actually look at kind of like how this is structured. I can't even like see the how this is made up. But there's a couple of different spacer blocks and all sorts of stuff going on there. But as someone who just needs to write the content, I now have a really great experience where you don't have to worry about accidentally breaking anything. And as you can see it intelligently knows like Hey, relax. I'm only going to show you the controls to replace the image. It's a lot harder for me to break things. Oops. So we could switch this out to maybe this guy. Maybe it's something vertical. Do we have a vertical image in here? No no, it's just this one.
Something like that. Oh, I don't know why that failed. That might be something wrong with a demo site. I'm not sure why I wasn't able to edit that image. That's very odd. But yeah, I've just created this with a custom post. I'll show you all what that looks like. I have a code snippet that I've set up here. And the only thing that's new is I'm registering my custom post type is I'm setting this content only property in my template block. And that provides that whole UI so you can see this is like a kind of pretty complex template is made up of lots of box. Don't worry if you don't know what any of this means. But I am able to provide this to my client, my users who are going to be creating the content for my site without any worry that they're going to break anything. So I think that's a really cool feature. The other thing that I wanted to touch on with 2023. This is also a little bit of code, but you don't have to worry about what any of this means. I'm going to hop into the theme file editor. So this is 2023. This is its style that CSS file. You can see it contains no CSS of its own. This entire thing is powered by block styles and theme that Jason and you saw those completely different variations that look wildly different to each other. It's all done through this configuration in the spot dot JSON file. And I think it really goes to show how far we've come from WordPress 5.9, where the first form of the site editor was introduced to now where you can have some really dramatic, completely different layouts, completely different type choices, fonts, sizes, styling, to be able to do all of this without having to write any lines of CSS. And what's really cool about this is this is also all things that you can do as part of the site editor. So if you're not someone who is a developer and looking at that theme, that JSON file was like Ah, I don't want to do anything like this. You can make these changes yourself for the most part by going through the full site Style Editor using global styles to make these kinds of different palettes and have a radically different theme that you've designed entirely through the foresight editor, which I think is very cool and really shows just how far that has come and there's still a lot to do a lot to improve. And the last thing that I wanted to touch on is for people who aren't yet ready for adopting an entire full site editing scheme. So I made a slight change to I think it was 2021
Oh no domain change get lost. I did something dangerous and I made these changes in the actual functions file which is probably a bad idea and I'm getting punished for it. Yeah. Well, the thing that's new is we have a new feature. Let me see if I can find it for y'all.
I block based template parts and traditional themes. So this is a great way for you if you have a traditional WordPress theme. And you are saying hey, I don't want to build a whole full site editor theme. I'm not ready for that yet. But I still want to be able to let my users customize little bits. Maybe they want to customize the footer and I want them to be able to use the block editor for that. You can do this now. By just calling add theme support block template parts and creating different template parts in your theme. And so this will let you say to your users Hey, you can customize these individual small portions of your site using the full power of the block editor. But we don't have to worry about creating an entire block editing theme so this is a really great kind of transition path to going from traditional classic WordPress themes into kind of the themes of the future with block editor themes by just slowly introducing more and more parts that might be available to customize this way. So this is something that doesn't end user isn't really something that you're benefit directly from. But if you are building sites for clients, and maybe you don't want them to have to come to you for every single little change in the site, and you want to give them a little bit more power, you can slowly introduce that by adding support for block based template parts and traditional WordPress themes. But with that, those are the main things that I wanted to touch on in WordPress 6.1. If you saw my previous thing here, this is a link to the field guide. And there are a whole bunch of posts that talk about all the changes in WordPress 6.1. So you can take a perusal through this to kind of learn more about them and dive a little bit deeper. But yeah, that is the main bits of WordPress 6.1.
All right, great stuff. Thanks, Timothy. great overview of all the new things that have been added in WordPress 6.1. Several questions stacked up here. There were a number of questions in the chat if you would like to get those answered. If they weren't answered in the course of the presentation, drop those in the zoom q&a Please. And if you haven't done so already, pop up on that Zoom q&a and upvote any of the questions that you also would would like to get answered. All right, Timothy several questions stacked up here. The first is can you describe this is from Peter Can you discuss how certain new features might not be available depending on your theme like how much of what you just showed is dependent on the theme being a block theme
so the stuff of this site editor is dependent on the block team except for the templates, which you can now kind of start to use with that I just talked about some options are there are things that your theme kind of has to opt into. They don't necessarily need to be a block based theme so if we talk about appearance tools are amazing and find this post for you. There is an add theme support appearance tools that you can use which will add these kind of let's hop back on to it
which will add the is like suite of typography options that are available here. So you don't need to be using a full site editing theme to get access to these. But your theme kind of has to opt into some of them and that's something that they can do but yeah your what options will be available to you are going to depend on your theme. And also themes can disable options on their own. So if you're looking at this, you're saying, Hey, I don't want my client to be able to change the appearance, or the line height or any of these things. As a theme author when you're handing over your theme file. These are things that you can disable in your theme that JSON and you can say, hey, this tool don't show this tool you do want to show. So while the force editor part of it is like hey, give users the control to do anything that you want. It also gives you the ability to say take away many of these controls as possible. So I think it actually is a really great option for client sites in that way. Is it lets you restrict things almost I would say more so than previously, right? If you had the classic editor, and you could put whatever HTML in there and you couldn't say anything about it. But with Gutenberg, you can actually restrict all that stuff or do something. It's pretty cool.
Yeah, very cool. Question from Deb. I tend to think any idea of when 6.2 is going to come out.
I know. It would be as Kathy mentioned next year. It could be like in a January February type of thing is possible. That's when we released 6.0 I believe, or was it 5.9? Yes, 5.9. That was like in January or so. But I'd say probably closer to a little bit later than that. Not that early. We would probably have needed to get started if we were going to release that early in 2023. But yeah, there's not gonna be a new major release this year. But there will be a kind of post and discussions in make that wordpress.org If that's something that interests you, you can participate. And then we'll hear what the WordPress leads decide.
Yeah, very good. I just dropped a link in the chat for the official road press road press. It's one of those days your WordPress roadmap which just simply lists 2023. Yeah, sometime next year.
But I mean, the thing if you're eager for new things, Gutenberg, you can use the Gutenberg plugin. Pretty much every two weeks like clockwork, there's an update to the Gutenberg plugin. So if you're really itching for new things to try out, you can install the Gutenberg plugin. Yeah, last updated two weeks ago.
Yeah, for sure. And by the way, we every every month we do a WordPress news roundup here on iThemes Training. So if this is if you're not someone who normally attends iThemes Training webinars this is definitely one to take a look at each month. I'll drop the link in the chat here in just a minute. But we do part of the WordPress news roundup is a full overview of the two drops of Gutenberg that have happened in the last month so we keep pretty well up to date on all those new features. Let's see next question from Devin. Can you elaborate any more just maybe review significant performance updates that were made to the editor or to core?
Yeah, so the big one is the performance Field Guide for WordPress 6.1. The biggest thing is get a little bit technical, but we don't want to go down that road too much. But essentially, what WordPress used to do is you would cache the post objects in the database or in object caching. So if it knew that it was displaying this post again, it wouldn't need to make a separate call your database to figure out more info about that post. If you call get post once you're good if you had 100 times you're good. So the same thing. The big thing that changed is that now queries that you make with WP query which are made all over your site, for instance, on your homepage, you probably have a query that gets your five latest post or something like that. That query itself is now cached and so that can have a really big improvement impact, you're going to need to be using a persistent object cache. And that's that little tool that we mentioned in site health that will tell you whether WordPress thinks you need one or not. It's basically checking how much content is in your site. If you only have a few posts like I do on this demo site, your site should be blazing fast anyway, you don't need it. But if you do need that after WordPress as you would HIGHLY benefit from it, you'll see that a persistent object cache is recommended here instead, and that will let you get the full power out of those changes. But aside from that, there were a whole bunch of changes that the performance team made a lot of queries that were one offs now run through WP query which makes things more performance, which makes things more performant. Excuse me, there are improvements. The REST API, multi site had improvements, the bootstrap and load process the cache API, this is another big one. That kind of like best cache plugins. If you're on Nexus, you have object cache pro now, which is an excellent one, and you can get it yourself. That is really up to date with the latest caching API's provided by WordPress. So there was a lot of work on improving performance. This is an ongoing process to speed things up. There are a couple of things that the team is also looking at for six that one that one for perform there for improving performance, and you've infected me Nathan with the words today is no again talk. You can see improved performance report blocker distraction. There's lots of these things. So there have been and will continue to be more.
Very good. Yeah, there's a whole team just focused on that,
which is yeah, there's a performance team specifically, you can check them out in the performance channel in Slack. If you want to get a deeper dive or follow on make that work best at work slash core. That's a really great place to be.
Our next question is from Laura. Why was the container block removed? Is it easier for people to use group block to hold other blocks?
I don't believe that container block is a WordPress core thing. So what we have is the group block in WordPress Core, and that group block has different options. So you can see this one is a group but I can change this and this will break this layout. But I could change it to a row which is going to rearrange everything into a row or into a column. And if for those who don't know CSS, rows and columns are Flexbox. So if you've heard about CSS flex, and all the awesome things that it provides, rows and columns, let you make those changes without needing to write any code. But so the group block is still here, more powered up than ever. It just keeps getting more and more improvements to it. But we do still have it but a separate container block. I don't believe it's something from WordPress core and maybe from another plugin. And it would make sense I could understand why a plugin might remove that block with how the group block works in WordPress these days. Like you get really cool things to group like for instance, like if I want to put this list item plus this gallery into a group, I can select multiple and I automatically get these options here for transforming this stuff, which you don't really get if you have a custom container block and things like that. So that might be why it got removed.
Yeah, very cool part of the evolution of the block editor. Exactly. All right. Question here from Robin is the current Gutenberg plugin compatible with WordPress 6.1. It wasn't as of yesterday.
If it wasn't as of yesterday, then still no, it should be though. It should work. There's there have been issues in the past. I'm not currently aware of any issues, but it's certainly possible. It's a little bit tricky around the time of releases, because we're taking a whole bunch of changes that were put into Gutenberg and pulling them into WordPress. And so there's a little bit of a time period where things are a little bit finicky. But it used to fade a layer many many times ago, but that shouldn't be happening anymore. So it should be compatible. But it's possible that there is an issue if you haven't seen it reported in the forums and this kind of tagging along to Kathy's question you can go ahead and report it in support forums. So I'm not seeing a topic here specifically for that. So if you are experiencing issues, I would definitely open up an issue.
Yeah, that is interesting. It is showing up to six dot O dot three. But yeah, that's
always you mean in this thing I could see that might not have gotten an updated and won't get updated. Until the Gutenberg release that happens this week. And I could see that, but I think it should we're I mean we're here let's try it on install now. What could possibly go wrong? Exactly. And activate and let's load up a block editor. Let's go to my cool events thing. I think this is really cool. This might be my favorite thing. Is the content only locking? Because I think it really shows some of the power. But yeah, thanks to working. So it the tested up to hasn't been updated. It probably will be in the next release because I think the previous release 6.1 wasn't available when it got released. And there should be a good American release this week. I believe that it might be different because with six point 1.1 coming, but you should be continuing. Yeah, and
I think he just put your finger on the issue. When this let this Gutenberg What is it 14 dot 4.0 Yeah, was released. The latest version of WordPress was six Dotto dot three. Yeah. Good. Good question, Robin. Let's see. Here's a good wrap up question from Kathy Timothy. What is it like to be a core contributor that takes a lot of time how can people contribute to these types of improvements?
It does take a lot of time. I highly recommend it. I think it's a really great way to get involved. The way I got involved was I found an issue. I think it was it was for a test site that I needed to do. And my very first issue I wonder if I can show this is I can't really but I'm gonna open up the taxonomy editor. Let's go into a category you have this Add New Category form here. And what WordPress back in I don't know three dot something or other I think is when I submitted this ticket you can add in custom things this Add New Category screen, but if you edit it, you couldn't add it here. So you could only add these new fields when you are adding new items to add taxonomy but you can add it to the old ones. And so I created a ticket for that and Boone merged it into WordPress core. Many moons ago. And so really the great way to get started is if you find a bug and you're comfortable contributing to write a patch for it, I wrote up a ticket. The other thing that you can check out you can look for this on WordPress core but there's a cool twitter feed which is called good first bugs. And so it pulls the tickets from WordPress core and tweet them out. So adding WordPress slash viewport is missing dependency on this fullscreen alignment display options of a box. Here's another Gutenberg one. There's a lot of Gutenberg ones. So basically, these are issues that WordPress contributors and committers kind of flag as being something that hey, if you're wanting to hop on in to develop with Java and WordPress that this might be a good place to start. It's a kind of more self contained bug. Then you can go ahead and do it that way. It does take a lot of time. I should spend more time on it to be honest. I merged something just earlier today. Go to WordPress slash WordPress dev out. So here was the latest thing that we just merged in which was fixing that bug with ICM sync and some other plugins. But you can see all the work that people do by going through the commit and watching all these changes. There's lots and lots and lots of stuff that happens there. So I would say getting either if you just want to write code, go to the good first bugs. That's a really great place to get started and you know more than you're working on something that won't sit languished. If you find some track ticket that's many years old. You might work very hard on a patch for it, but you won't. It's not something that a lot of people are currently paying attention to. But with good first bugs that's a good spot of like, Hey, you're submitting a patch to it. We try to get to those you know, as soon as we can. But you're not just limited to developing with code if you go to make up wordpress.org You can see all the different teams is the core team, the design team the mobile team, which is a core thing a coaching polyglots support, you can just head over to the support forums and reply. I highly recommend going to your local work camp and attending contributor day. I don't know anything. Is there gonna be a contributor day for WP y'all do you know that?
No. And so we're in Birmingham is the first weekend of February we the first word camps down here in Birmingham in 2023. We're not planning a contrib Day this year.
Gotcha man yeah some some word camps do summer camps don't. If you're there you can probably find some people and say like, hey, I'm interested in getting involved in WordPress. And even though there's not a dedicated contributor day, they can kind of point you in the right direction. But those are also a really great resource to check out.
For sure. So that I had never learned heard of that Twitter feed Timothy. So that's a really good takeaway for me today. It's
really cool. Very cool.
All right, that I believe that wraps up all our questions. Good questions for everybody. Timothy, any final thoughts as we're wrapping up?
No, I'm WordPress. Yes. 6.1 is here. Um, it has a lot of great and performance improvement changes. I would say if you haven't updated yet, wait until six point 1.1 is scheduled for release. We've accumulated a lot of tabs over the course of this. There's plan for next Tuesday. So if you haven't updated I would hold off until that comes out. But if you have updated you don't need a rollback or anything like that. your site's fine. But there's just a little bit more bugs than usual, but I think it's a cool release. 2023 is beautiful. Oh, I didn't get to show this off. I'll show this really quick. I think this is live. It was in Preview previously. Yes. So we now display style variations and WordPress Edward. So I can now click through and see all of the different variations that 2023 provides. So I think this is a really cool demonstration of how far we've come with a full site editor and block themes. And then my second favorite thing is custom taxonomies and content, only locking modes. I think being able to give a truly WYSIWYG experience to my client. This isn't just a list of input fields where they don't know what does what. It's actually what their website is going to look at, but they can't break anything. I think that's extraordinarily cool. So it was my favorite things, but I encourage you all to update next week.
Yeah, very good. Well, thank you Timothy. I just dropped again in the chat the replay link where you can review this video. We'll also have the chat log and the transcript which I finally got working about five minutes in today. Sorry for that hassle, but what we have in the transcript will be there as well. Also just if you are if you have not yet upgraded to PHP eight on in your hosting environment, you may be aware that the life span the end of life for PHP 7.4 is later this month and so we've just scheduled a webinar with Timothy. Goodness Timothy
during the webinar No.
Tiffany Tiffany bridge from next SAS is going to be with us on Monday, November the 21st. It's a little out of our normal schedule, but Monday, November 21 At one o'clock Central she's going to be talking about upgrading to PHP dot eight and how to do that safely with your WordPress sites testing and so forth for incompatibilities. So if you've not registered for that one that is a free webinar. Click that link. It's there in the chat. Well, again, that's going to wrap it up for today. Thanks, Timothy for great advice, great demo of all the new things in WordPress 6.1. Thank all of you for being with us as well. We'll see you back here next time when I iThemes Training where we go further together