so let's take a quick poll in the chat How many of you have updated to WordPress six five on at least one website? Anybody brave and done the update already? Manu has dug has
interesting, interesting lot of folks who have not Louise done 10 Several sites. Jeff Jeffrey says no issues. Yeah. Excellent. So again, welcome. If you're just joining us, we'll get started in about three minutes from now we're going to be looking at WordPress 6.5, which just released yesterday, Timothy Jacobs is here with us to walk us through all the new features of this latest version of WordPress, no downloads, no slides or anything like that. This is all live demo. The link to view the replay or share that later is in the chat. I will have that up about an hour after we finish. And as always, plenty of time for your questions today. Just a couple of minutes away from getting started now. We'd love to hear from you in the chat if you've taken the plunge and updated to six five on any of the sites that you manage or any of your personal sites love to hear from you there. So far several folks have and no issues which is great. To hear. I think most of these updates were site editor related right Timothy block editor side editor
monoblock editor changes there are some other things I guess too. More than usual I would say of non block editors site editor related stuff this release actually. Yeah,
interesting. And so if you want to take a look at this page where Timothy currently has on the screen, this is the new microsite they're building for each WordPress release which I just learned about as Timothy and I were chatting today. They're dropping these new microsites right with every release.
Yeah, we should probably be getting a new one and kind of take some of the stuff that was in the about page that is like very lovingly crafted, but most people don't see these days because either their host updates for them or stuff like that. So it puts it into a nice little public page that features all of the changes in a new WordPress release.
Yeah, very good. That's a great little overview. If you want to click through and check that out. The link is there in the chat. And if you haven't answered in the poll, have you updated your WordPress sites to 6.5 any of them? Let us know if you've done that and how that's gone for you. We're less than a minute ago before we start live talking all about 6.5 latest release, lots of neat new features. And Timothy is going to walk us through all of those. I am noticing that several of you are only chatting with Timothy and I just hosts and panelists. And if you want to change that right above where you type the message in, you can drop that little blue box down and select everyone and everybody can see what you're typing. Just about ready to get started. Again, if you're just joining us in zoom there are no downloads or slides for today. This is going to be all live demo. There is the nice little intro site that is linked in our link bundle now along with the replay link as well. Just about ready to get started I can have had one side auto update. I did too. I thought we had all that all those disabled but one site of ours did in fact auto update as well. All right, it's now three minutes after so let's get the recording started and we'll dive right in. Well, good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening, everybody, wherever you happen to be around the world. We're glad that you've chosen to spend about an hour with us here at solid Academy looking at WordPress 6.5, which just released yesterday. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at solid Academy and joined once again by Timothy Jacobs, the lead developer at solid WP Timothy is also a core committer he is one of the managers of the WordPress, or what's the word Timothy a REST API? Yeah, one of the component maintainers component maintainers there we go of the WordPress REST API and also one of the leaders of the New York City WordPress Help Desk meet up the Welcome back, Timothy, how are things in your world today?
Doing good busy week but excited to be here with you all?
Absolutely. So folks, just a quick intro as we'll let Timothy dive in here in just a moment if you're just joining us in zoom Glad you're here. There are no downloads, no slides for this live stream. This is all live demo. We are recording the live stream though and we'll have the replay up about an hour after we wrap up and that link is in the chat. So also if you have questions along the way, please use the zoom q&a feature. You can see that by mousing over the shared screen, you'll see the icon bar appear and the q&a link is there. I would just recommend you keep that open throughout today's live stream that will allow you to ask questions whenever they come up. And if you will upvote the questions of others that you also have. We'll take the questions in order of up votes. When we get to the end. So with that, Timothy I'll be quiet and let you get into WordPress 6.5 Awesome.
So yeah, we're gonna be talking about WordPress 6.5. It was released just yesterday, so it's hot off the presses. And yeah, we're gonna dive into some demoing of Gutenberg, some other WordPress changes. Give me all your crossed fingers that everything goes to plan. We'll see. So to start with, I wanted to mention a couple of big wins here, which is again from the performance team. And one of the things that was also worked on is editor performance. So loading the WordPress Gutenberg editor is now twice as fast or can be up to twice as fast as it was in the previous release. Typing so when you input something onto the screen, and you see those changes, is now up to five times faster than was before. Another huge window from the performance team. was the introduction of their performance translations project. So if you are one of the I think nearly or more than at this point 50% of WordPress sites that are in a language other than English, your site is now going to be way faster using performant translations, which is a new kind of like PHP based translation format that is a huge win for those multilingual sites. Now onto demo bits. The first thing and this is what I mentioned when I say that we have a bit more non Gutenberg changes that are pretty substantial than we've had in a long time. In a word press release. The big one here that I'm going to talk about first is plugin dependencies. So I've set up the Hello Dolly plugin. I've done a little bit of tinkering a little bit of hacking. I've made this plugin for Hello Dolly. Say that it depends on Jetpack and that's done with this new requires plugin header that I can specify in my plugin. And so now WordPress knows that hey, you can't use Hello Dolly unless you have jetpack installed. Now that's of course not true. It's true for this demo. But now you can see that WordPress is preventing me from for instance activating this. What I can do now though, is to say hey, here are the dependencies that this plugin requires. I can click into it, install jetpack activate it. We're not going to go through the whole jetpack setup process, but we will now be able to see is that Hello Dolly is now able to be activated. So you can see we can't if we activate for instance Ella dolly here we no longer can deactivate jetpack until we deactivate Hello Dolly. It's just a way of you know actually enforcing through the WordPress UI that hey, plugins can actually be dependencies for other plugins. So this was a huge feature that I know a lot of core contributors have been working on for a long time. It's really exciting to see Landon WordPress core. The other feature that I wanted to touch on is kind of a cool one for folks who aren't using the site editor or they want a another way of managing this bill. You set it up by using a header in the plugin file. So it's just as simple as saying that hey, this plugin requires another plugin and WordPress takes care of all that for you. I just added this little bit of snippet of code and it is right there. So the other thing is this site icon feature so we've had the site icon feature for a long time. It's available through the customizer and through the site editor, but a new thing is that you can now do this configuration inside of the WP admin settings screen here. So if I wanted to use this image, which doesn't really make much sense as a site icon, but I suppose we can roll with it. I can do all of this now through the WordPress settings screen so you can see my fav icon from my site has been added up on there. So yeah, with that, we are going to dive into Gutenberg and dive into all of the other changes that we have going on. The first one that I want to talk about is something that I'm really excited about, which is what are kind of technically called data views. And so data views is a kind of package that the WordPress team has introduced. That lets you start to bridge the gap between some other WPM and list table screens and the site editor management interface. So we can see that in templates here, for example, this is this new data views and it's kind of like a WordPress list table that we have in WPM and it has features for you know, hiding columns and showing columns. If I want to add a description, I could add in a preview column here and it will now show me a preview. I can change how things are sorted for instance, sorted, ascending this or descending that. I can even use a different label a different, a different layout and I can make this layout as a grid. So if I want to see a visual interface of all my templates, I can do that. Here. I can add filters. So if I only want to find authors from the 20 2014, which is the theme I'm using, I can do that. I can search for things if I want to see the blog page, I can do that. And so this is available in the template section, but it's also available with pattern so we can see those here. And we can change this again we can do a similar thing if we want to sort show certain fields not just Ramson we can show whether or not a pattern is a synced pattern or not. All of these things basically are customizable how many things we show per page, we can do searching all of that and so not only is this available for patterns and templates, we can also have this for pages who are the content in our site. So we can see here I have a couple of pages in my demo site over here. I can see them in this list table. And again I have the same similar set of features I can display. This is a grid, the featured image will be pulled in, I can do bulk actions. For instance, if I wanted to delete both of these, I can move them to the trash or restore them. So this is a really powerful interface for managing the content on your site and it's available through the site editor. So this is something only if you're using a theme that has the site editor enabled, and it's kind of like a preview of the next steps of how the WordPress admin is going to look. And I think it's really cool. I'm super excited about this as a plugin author as well. We're already thinking through ways that we can adopt these data view libraries and our plugins to make super rich tables that are fully featured navigatable, sortable orderable so I think these are really cool. Yeah, so you get this year from the actual site editor. So if you're using a theme that uses a site under review to Appearance Editor, head on over to Pages, for instance, and then the Manage All Pages button at the bottom and that will show you how you get to this particular interface. So it is something that is a site editor feature. But if you've been looking around the WordPress blogs and make core and posts like that, there's been some kind of talk about what the future of WP admin looks like. And so I think these types of views will probably become available to non full site editor sites in the near future. But no guarantees but I think that's where things are heading towards. So speaking of the other place that this was available in is patterns, and so it's brought in some cool features. So for instance, I'm going to go ahead and find this FAQ pattern let's say if I want to now I have a really quick way of duplicating this pattern right from the pattern gallery. I just hit duplicate and give it the new FAQ the new title so maybe this is you know, security FAQs and I can go ahead and just make that change right here and hop into editing like it would any other pattern when I go back to managing all the patterns for these patterns that are custom, I get lots of different options. I can rename this pattern from the screen. I can export it as JSON or I can just completely delete it. And so I can do all of these kinds of management interfaces without needing to dive into the actual site editor for it. So one of the reasons why this word press release was hung up was the font library. And now we're going to dive into what this font library actually brings us and I think it's very cool. So you might already see this that this if you're familiar with 2024. This isn't the default font. What I've done is I have installed a new font from the typography section. So in the full site editor, I head on over to global styles and into the typography section. And you'll see we have this font system here. And so this font library work has kind of been building over multiple releases. And we now have the ability to add custom fonts. So head on over to this Manage fonts button and you'll see here the fonts that I've installed. And then here are the fonts that come from my theme. If I had a custom font let's say that I got from a website or a paid for something like that, I could upload those font files into WordPress. But what I can also do, which is really cool is just connect to Google fonts. So this now is bringing me a gallery of all the fonts that are available through Google fonts. And I can see preview of previews of them and pick the ones that I want to install on my site. So let's say I don't know let's find a cool one. Does anyone have a favorite Google font that they like Baltazar that one looks pretty cool
oh no. Let's bubblegum Sans. That looks cool. Or this one. I like this. So yeah, this is what's really cool too, is I'm gonna pick this bungee shade font, which looks awesome. I'm gonna say this is the font that I want to install. And I'll click the Install button. And now what's happened is it's telling me that the fonts were installed successfully. I can see them in my library here. And what it's done is copy the font from Google Fonts servers, and is now putting it in hosting on my website. So if you are for instance concerned with GDPR things or privacy regulations or anything like that, you don't have to do any extra work. WordPress just handles this for you in one button click and so now we can see we have this new bungee shade font installed here. So if I wanted to, I could, for instance, easily make all the headings on my site, use that new font style, and we can see that here. That's a bit extreme. So maybe we'll only use it for particular, particular fits the content. If we wanted to, for instance, only make it for a, let's say a heading block. We could go ahead and do that. And we'll see the headings on my sites have changed into that font. But yeah, I think this is a really cool feature that lets you bring all of Google fonts into your theme really easily. Without a lot much work. You just need to search for it and you've got a custom font. So I think that's pretty cool. What you're also able to do is then say, Hey, if you're not using these fonts, you can deselect them. So if we go into the Font Manager, let's say I'm done with using inter for instance, I could uncheck this and then this font wouldn't get loaded. So you do want to not go too extreme and install 5000 fonts. You want to keep it to just the ones you need. For instance, this comic new font that I wanted has like eight variations. I only picked the three that I want and install those for me. But yeah, I think this is a really awesome feature for bringing the full power of Google fonts into your theme in a visual way without needing to use a third party plugin, which is fantastic. So something you may have seen is the revisions editor has gotten some updated that's weird. I don't know why. Why this one lost my font choice. Did I revert it? I can't remember. Yeah, let's go back to the header and make it bungee shade. Oh, no. Yeah. So I've seen this a couple of times. And when I was prepping for this that it seems like sometimes it stops working. I don't know why I'm going to try refreshing Yeah, Barbara. It is only Google fonts that is built into the font manager but you can always just upload any font that you want. So if you get a font from Font Awesome, I guess font awesome is traditionally icon fonts. I wonder if you could use something like that. I don't know. But if you do have custom fonts you're able to use them with this. You just won't have it part of the like, native experience for installing things. Alright, so let's take a look at the revision history. So the revision history has gotten some cool updates to it. One you can now see that there is a summary of the changes that have been made in each revision. And this also applies to the style book. So you can see here that as I am going through the different revisions, the style book and all the different blocks on my site, we can see how those changes applied. So you can imagine if you're making loads of changes to your site, and you say Oh, nope, turns out actually don't like how that looks, you can just go ahead and find the revision that you want. And go ahead back to it. So if we wanted to, for instance, you can see earlier today I tried out this comic new font, and we can go ahead back to it and save those changes. We've gotten some improvements to drag and drop. So if I wanted to, for instance, add a new pattern to the top of my site here, let's say a new testimonial, let's say and I wanted to put this onto the top of my site. Previously, this would be a little bit finicky to insert, but it is now way easier. They've kind of made some graceful adjustments to how you can insert patterns the top and bottom of your site to make that easier. The other cool thing is with list view, so I can drag as I was able to do before but one of the changes is that as I drag the blocks kind of move out of the way so I know where I'm dropping things to. And it's not going to be as much of a surprise to me where things might end up. So just kind of like nice little UI features to make navigating a bit easier. Speaking of ListView we have some more features you might have remember we talked about this a while ago, where you can rename group blocks. So we can give this group block a custom name we can see here this one it's the testimonial. We let say have this group here we can change this to be let's call that email CTA. What's new though is that we can now rename pretty much any block. So we have for instance, maybe this paragraph here. If we wanted to maybe give this a different name, we could say like subhead or something like that. And now it has its own name that's easy to identify in our ListView and makes it just much more familiar of knowing exactly what you're going to edit. So this is a cool little feature that we've had before but has been expanded out. The last thing on the list view here is something that makes it easier and faster I guess to navigate. You'll see and I've been heading over into this little Options menu in order to get different features like you know, moving and renaming and stuff like that. If you're familiar with like using desktop software, something that you're often able to do is right click and now you can do that. In the site editor. So I just did a right click on my mouse or my trackpad more accurately, and it opened up this kind of context menu here. So like I could lock this block, for instance from here without needing to navigate over to this triple navigation menu. So for those of us who use like to use all the features of your blocks, or excuse me of your pointing devices, this is really convenient way to just open those up wherever you want, without needing to find this tiny little button over here. So with that, we're going to head on over to the page editor. We're going to head out of editing my full sight. And this is a really cool feature I think so we have this page here. It's the sample page with WordPress. And we know that this isn't exactly what the page looks like on the front of my site on the front end on my site. I have you know the featured image, I have my navigation, I have the footers, stuff like that. But none of that is available in this editor here. And sometimes that's what you want. You just want to be able to focus on your content. But what's new is this new template preview option. So if I click this template Preview button, it now shows me what my page looks like in the context of my entire website. So I think for a lot of people, this will be a bit more intuitive of knowing like, Oh, I understand how all of these pieces come together. And if I wanted to, for instance, change my featured image, I can do it right here. I can still change my title but the rest of my site here, I'm not actually able to you know, edit the navigation. I can't change the footer right now. I'm just able to edit the content of my site. So I think this is a really interesting way of kind of bridging the gap between what the front end of your site looks like and what the back end of your website looks like. Without making it easy for your clients just oh, I accidentally changed how the navigation works. Instead, it just looks more familiar to them. So I think this is a small, it seems small. It's just one little button. But I think it's a really powerful feature that I'm really excited about. Inside of the content editor we have some cool quality of life changes. The link you buy has been made much nicer and easier to use. It's gotten kind of a visual facelift, which is something I know I do a lot when I'm writing technical blog posts, you're linking out all over the place. So the link editor has gotten some cool improvements. We can see that this block is our you know, quote block from WordPress and it's got a new feature which is box spacing. So you can now use the block spacing controls to customize the space between the citation and the actual paragraph content. And if we even inserted for instance, I think let's say we wanted to add an image in here
we're able to get that adjusted with block spacing. So that's just another one example of you know WordPress bringing controls from one place all over the place. We also got some changes to the group box. So I'm going to create a new group and we'll add in some text let's say or maybe a button
and the group Bach now has new options for backgrounds so I'm going to this one might be an ugly let me let me get a better background pattern. Actually, maybe let's do use this because you'll show off one of the changes, um, and we'll make our buttons let's maybe put these in a group as well. Or maybe we give this group some in height. Yeah. So one of the changes is to background images. Let's see if I can read it. Yeah, well, I can change background size properties. I can change the focal point for this background. Image. And I also get options for pattern replacement as well. So if I want to repeat this background image multiple times, I can go ahead and do that. So we've gotten some new changes to the group block there. Another thing is our cover blocks. So I'm going to go ahead and insert a new cover block. And I'm going to again use a image from the gallery or excuse me, an image from my media library. And one of the things that's cool that you might not have seen there is that it is now applying a color to this cover block based off of the color in my image. So it's applied this overlay color that is a custom color and it automatically sampled it from the image that I chose. So if I for instance, let's find a picture of the Sun maybe. Yeah, let's use that one. Nope. I want to find one that I can insert into my media library. Sure, let's use that one.
And you can see now that oh no, it didn't pick one actually interesting. Maybe this only happens when I go through the replacement. So this is what we mean by live demos. We're going to insert a cover block we're going to use something from the media library. Select the image. And yeah, we can now see that an orange overlay color has been chosen because that's the dominant color in the image there. So it's interesting that for some reason it doesn't pick it up and use the Transform tool that is a bug report that I will be making later today.
Another option is that we now have aspect ratio controls for the images as well. So you can see that we have selected the original aspect ratio of the image. But if I want to change this to square, standard portrait tall, I have all of those option here to alter the aspect ratio of the image that is powering my cover block which I think is also a nifty feature. One more thing in the Gutenberg editor that I want to talk about is the gallery feature. So I'm going to choose a couple of images for my gallery. And a new feature that we have is randomized order. So what this feature will let me do is whenever I go to view this page, I'll have a random order of images here. And so you can see that happening. So this was one of those features that was available in the old gallery shortcode but wasn't exposed yet in Gutenberg. Okie dokie. So we have two more things that I'm going to talk about and then we'll open it up for questions. So the one that I wanted to show here is what's called blocked bindings. And so this is kind of a first step feature. And it is very, I guess you could say it's not exactly usable right now. But it's pretty cool in concept. So what block bindings that you do is take an attribute and unblock for instance, the button you were out or button text, or the content of a paragraph. And instead of writing it into the post manually, you can source that content or bind that content to some other data source. And the data source that WordPress has shipping in with 6.5 is post meta. So what I've done here is I've added a custom field to this post called T J underscore URL and it contains a URL here. And what I've had to do in the code editor, and that's what I mean by this, this feature is kind of you know, laying the groundwork, this isn't yet I'd say available for general use. But in the code editor I've added these attributes here called metadata and bindings and I've said hey, for this button block, I want you to pull the URL from post meta instead of it making something that I write myself. And so we can see now here, I don't have an option anymore. Excuse me, to manually put in the URL for this button. I can still you know, change the text. But I can't actually change the URL. So if I now go ahead and hit update, and we go ahead and view this page, we'll see that the make an RSVP button is going to meetup.com and that's because that's what I have selected in this custom field. So I think this is a really cool step one of the future. I gave a talk a while ago Nathan if you could drop that link into the chat, talking about how you can see PT EFI or custom see custom post type of five Gutenberg blocks. And this was a thing where you could take a good number block and instead of making it a content that you have to type in manually, you could pull that content from custom post types and metadata fields on those custom post types. But in order to do that required you know, writing a whole bunch of code, there's that talk, you can see it we spend, you know 2030 minutes going over the code that you have to write. Block bindings are now kind of WordPress bringing this feature into the block editor itself and right now this is a the custom fields UI from WordPress Core. So in an ideal world, you know, you would probably have a different way of editing this maybe you put it in the sidebar or something like this, but this provides us a really quick way of demoing it soo so this is bringing that feature into the WordPress block editor kind of natively. So this is a step one. It's not I would say super useful yet particularly if you aren't willing to write custom code for Vox it's like this isn't exactly ready yet. But the UI is starting to come together, you can see already that this content is locked for being edited. And there are some plans that people are talking about for making it possible to create block bindings in the UI. So you're able to say for instance, you know, source this from this metadata attribute and not need to write any code know how to do that. So I think this is a really cool feature, but it is still kind of a step one. If you go ahead to the WordPress 6.5 page, I believe there is a link out to let me see if I can find it to a blog post here.
Yeah, to the block bindings API. So this is kind of a feature that is talking about how to use block bindings. Yeah, I think you'll have to copy that. Link. Nathan, I can't send it out to everyone it looks like and there's also a blog post about this in the new developer blog. I say new I guess it's been here for about a year now. But there are some great posts that are being put up here if you haven't checked them out. And we can see block bindings right here. So this is kind of a more in depth tutorial that talks about how block bindings work. So yeah, this is early days, but I think a powerful new feature. The other one that I want to talk about is the interactivity API. So this is another new thing that is launching kind of in WordPress 6.5. But I would say it is again, early days for someone wanting to use. So I'm gonna go ahead to the field guide and grab out this interactivity API post. What the interactivity API lets us do is add dynamic behavior to the front end of our site and tie it into the block editor. And so we already see that with WordPress in some instances. So if you remember in 6.4, I believe it was we have the ability to open up images in a lightbox. So if I add in a new image to this post let's grab something from open verse
where is that button here? We go. I can click Expand on click.
And then when I click on this, it opens up into a lightbox view. This is all implemented with the interactivity API. And this is kind of the promotion and we're past 6.5 of the interactivity API from something that is more experimental. And behind the scenes into something that is more like ready for use. This is really though a developer feature. But I wanted to show this is an old demo that the team provided that works on the interactivity API to show what it can do. So this is for instance, a site WP movies dot Dev. And yes, Karen. And you can see as I click around, these refreshes aren't happening by you know, refreshing the page completely. All of this like navigation and showing things and kind of in some instances animation, I believe. All of these are being powered by the interactivity API. So this is a cool feature that is more developer oriented. So it's it's not something that I can easily just, you know, demo to you in the editor at this point. Yet, but it is a kind of really big API that's been added into WordPress 6.5 for developers to use to kind of add interactive behaviors to the front end of your site. So if you're interested in that, you can check out this dev note from WordPress 6.5 on the make that wordpress.org core blog and play around with it. So with that, those are the main features that I wanted to demo in this 6.5 talk. So yeah, we can open it up to questions.
And lots of really neat features have been added in this latest version of WordPress. Thanks so much for that walkthrough, Timothy. And an interesting look ahead into what's coming. So let me before we get into questions, and actually, folks, if you have a question you haven't asked yet, open up the zoom q&a and drop it in there. We had several questions going on in the chat itself. But if you have a if that if your questions weren't answered in the course of the live stream earlier, please put those in the zoom q&a And we'll get those over to Timothy in just a moment. Also, please upvote the questions that you would like to hear the answers to and we'll take those in order in just a minute. And while you're doing that, my first question to you Timothy is, so we looked at the custom post type of fIying of buttons. We looked at the interactivity API, but as you look forward on the horizon of the things that are coming to core WordPress, what gets you the most excited?
Yeah, so let me see if I can pull up one of these posts. The thing that I find potentially the coolest I think it was on the design blog is what people are imagining for a new WP admin. Let me see if I can find some of these posts. Yeah, the admin design kickoff. So there hasn't been huge amounts of like public progress I guess on this yet that like we're seeing but where you've just now seen the first which is like these data views. So the data views that I showed up at the top is kind of the reenvisioning of lists tables in WordPress, which are, you know, a huge part of how we use WordPress is these lists tables, how we have the command to have that that kind of introduced so I'm really excited for the potential of a WPM InDesign refresh. I think when you look at you know, what WordPress is Amande back end looks like compared to some more modern tools. I think it's a bit lacking. As plugin developers were able to use lots of different technology provided by Gutenberg, but it isn't a kind of whole seamless experience where everything kind of fades together. And so that's what I'm really excited about is kind of taking this and putting it into a full design system that WordPress plugin authors are meant to use and integrate with. And so that's really what I'm like most excited about, excuse me, is seeing where, you know, where we go with the new WPM and direction so that's where I'm most hopeful for Yeah,
and that's actually slated for this phase of Gutenberg. Right. I
think it's part of it. So it's not specifically what we're in right now is collaboration. And there's a lot of interesting work going on there. So it's not tied exactly to a current phase. But a lot of the technology that is being implemented goes along with it. So things like date of use things like the command palette, those are all kind of part of the vision of what the new WPM in could look like, this entire like, you know, sidebar drilling in interface is like a big part of that concept. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, for sure. So, what we're seeing in the current side editor is kind of a taste of what's coming perhaps in the new admin design,
exactly where you would have a page like this instead of
a page like this. Got it. And folks, I dropped this link in the chat a little bit earlier. But if you've not had a chance to play around with the site editor yet, because maybe your the theme that you primarily use is not up a block theme. It's not a theme that supports full site editing. I dropped the link in the chat once again, for WordPress playground. And with that link, it's going to spin up a WordPress instance that runs in your browser using the 2024 theme by default and you can get right in there and start to play with the side editor and just kind of feel your way around. It's pretty cool if you've not really spent some time with it.
Yeah, this is a really neat feature. It also lets you kind of try out some plugins that are enabling playground mode. It's pretty neat. Yep.
All right. Well, let's get into some questions here. Several of our questions are from folks in the audience who are Kadence users. And they're just asking questions about how some of this relates to Kadence itself. So Manu first of all asks, What features that we've talked about in WordPress six, five, would not be seen if you're using the Kadence theme, which is not a full site editing thing.
Yeah, so that's really best answered by the Kadence team. Because there are kind of like different levels of things that can be opted into. But you'll see for sure anything that is like in the actual page and post editor stuff that is coming through appearance editor here, I don't think are really available to you yet. I know Ben has talked about what their kind of plans are for adoption, but I don't know what they are, unfortunately. Yeah,
the last I heard on that was really back before the side editor has had fully matured and thence thought at that point, what at some point they're going to start supporting site editor when all the dust had settled with a lot of that development. So but again, that that is definitely something to pose to the Kadence community. And then you know, the if you're not part of the Kadence Facebook group, that is a great place to start. Alright, so question about the, the font library. So a lot of themes like Kadence have a custom fonts plugin. That's been the way that developers have chosen to allow custom fonts in the past. So is it better now to use the core font library rather than a theme based or standalone plugin for adding custom fonts? Yeah,
so the font library functionality and core is built on two things. One, there is a PHP API. And that is kind of available that plugin authors or classic theme authors could start adopting the actual UI that I showed, and that kind of shipped a couple of releases ago, when we got support for fonts in WordPress themes and the site editor that kind of drove all of that what we have that's new in this release is the ability to you know, add your own fonts and install fonts and stuff like that. And this is a feature that is oops, that is exclusive at the moment to themes using the site editor. I could see for instance, this UI getting extracted into something that any theme could use and making it reusable. But right now, it's not really a choice you can actively make, I would say it depends on the theme that you're using. If you're using a full site editing theme like 2024 I would say you probably shouldn't use a plugin for managing custom fonts now because it's both into core and you know, using the core features when we can as usually prefer but if you're using a theme that isn't using the full site editor yet, I believe you're gonna have to stick with their solution for now. And you know, we might see Kadence start to build on top of the libraries that WordPress has implemented even before it is full site editor compatible. But yeah, it's kind of just a you gotta use with your theme offers and what your theme offers is going to depend on if it's a full site editor theme or classic theme.
Got it? That makes sense. All right. So in regard to the font library here, do we know what formats of font it supports? Is it TTF OTF, WOFF. All of those right there. Yeah, so and you don't have to upload multiples. You just choose one of those formats, and it's going to work I?
That's a great question. I think you're wanting to these days still upload a couple of different choices, I think for maximum browser capabilities. But yeah, I think you still want multiple but we might have gotten to the point with browser capabilities that you can just use one. And that should work with all of them these days, but I don't know the exact answer.
I'm not sure either. Let's see here. I think that takes care of all the font questions. Question from an anonymous attendee. They say they had four sites auto updated, something changed with WordPress. They've never had a site auto update to the main version
before. So not on WordPress the size in 5.6 is when, by default new WordPress installs will default to auto updating core. So that was a change for any new sites that you created after WordPress 5.6. So it's possible you know if those were some new sites that you created, that you're seeing that for the first time what you'll see depending and is that some hosts will manage updates themselves. So it's possible that the web host that you're using has decided to implement auto core updates. And oftentimes, they connect it with things like you know, visual regression tests and things like that. So it's possible that your WordPress host is now keeping WordPress up to date as you can see here on this nexus site.
Yeah, interesting. Let's see. Question from Manu. How many options are there between four core up to 6.5 WordPress Core actually Minute, I'm not quite sure what you're asking that question. If you could clarify that in the chat. We'll get that over to Timothy. I thought I knew and then I don't so if you could clarify that we'll get that question asked. Alex would like to know, do we know when partially synced patterns will become available? I
have not seen anything talked about it specifically recently. A good thing to always look at is GitHub if you really want the details.
Yeah, it looks like it might be still kind of like being explored. They might not be happy with the UX of it. But yeah, I don't know specifically. But, yeah, GitHub is kind of the place where all of these conversations happen. So if you're interested in something specific, GitHub is the place to check out.
Yep. And in the make WordPress slack that the conversations are happening, they link back over to some of these get hub links as well and you can always stay informed of the conversation there.
I think I'm understanding my next question. Which is like there's a whole lot of different major WordPress versions since version four to 6.5. If you go to wordpress.org/about, SAS stats, you can kind of see a distribution of them. And so this will this will show you all of that my recommendation is be on the latest. Don't be in this other side of the graph here on this side of the graph,
indeed. All right. Oh, the great question from Moses, has accessibility been taken into account in the development of the full site editing tools?
Yeah, it has been but I would say accessibility isn't a binary. So there are certainly things that can be improved about the accessibility of the editor. Building an editor as complex as Gutenberg has complex kind of, you know, accessibility requirements, I would say where it is quite good is the HTML that is output for your site. That's much, you know, more manageable to say like, okay, we're doing these things correctly. The editor itself. I know the team thinks about it, and there's a whole accessibility team that works on it, but there are also lots of things that folks would like to have improved. Because yeah, it is it is a complicated beast to navigate. So I would say yes, it is being taken into account, but I wouldn't call it you know, complete let's say or done or you know, it's either accessible or not accessible. It's a it's a spectrum.
Yeah, indeed. By the way, I did just drop a link in the chat. Every month we do a monthly WordPress news roundup here on solid Academy, and the first things we cover out of the gate are what's going on in core WordPress development. And then each of the Gutenberg releases that usually to each month that have happened and some of the features that have been added. So if you want to stay up to date, our goal for that live stream is spend an hour 15 minutes to an hour with us every month and you'll stay up to date on all the news that matters for WordPress, especially for those of us that are building and managing sites for clients. So that link is there in the chat and you can register there for the next one coming up in just a couple of weeks. question in the chat from Michael will the block editor be available for product pages of WooCommerce?
Yeah, Ben, enter this. This is something that the team is working on. I don't know if I can install WooCommerce fast enough year for us to you know,
you got 2000 onboarding questions to answer exactly
i We got quite a step through to go through. But yes they're the team is actively working on Voorburg and fIying things and yeah, there is a new editor for it. It looks quite a bit different. I think one of the things that is going to be difficult for a transition is all of the plugins that add things to you know their product editing interface, so, you know, it's not non trivial. But yes, they are working on it. And yeah, I think it is in there
there it is editor. experimental features use at your own risk
Yeah, so this is this new editor, fresher monitor and interface content rich product descriptions, lighting, past performance, more features, etc. But yeah, so I can do things like getting my titles setting prices, choosing images. It looks like variations have been added. That's new from when I last checked it out. Pricing all of these options. So there's a lot here. I think how plugins are going to start using this is going to be like, you know, part of the question. Yeah, I can launch a full full block under here if I want to you know, Oh,
I haven't seen that. That's cool. Yeah.
So I think it's really exciting. But, you know, still a ways to go yeah, you can see here this doesn't look like it's actually connected to the Media Library properly. And yeah, it looks like I don't have options to like, you know, insert things from open verse, stuff like that. So something that is definitely still being explored by and that doesn't show anything if Oh, there's something like content.
You didn't want to keep that content at Timothy. No, of course. It's a group change this group in some columns
interesting seems to have disappeared. Experimental. Very, very.
So I guess copy and paste frequently?
Yes, yes. Yes. Wow. So maybe you don't enable this on an actual live site?
No, I probably wouldn't. Especially if you're I mean, if you're maybe doing just a WooCommerce base install when nothing. Maybe, but yeah, I'm really excited about this. I'll say personally. The the transition to more things in WPM and using you know, the WordPress components and stuff like that, I think is really exciting. I think it allows us to build UIs that are more competitive with third party tools. Like you know, Squarespace and others. So I am very excited about this direction, but it is. It is new, very
new. Well, Timothy, this has been great. I really appreciate your expertise walking us through all the different editions in WordPress 6.5. Any final words as we're wrapping up?
I try it out. I'm pretty excited about it. If you haven't played with the full set editor yet. I think every release it gets better. So a cool thing to play around with. But yeah, I'm excited.
Very good. Yeah. So use WordPress playground. If you'd like to folks, that link was there in the chat. You can scroll up and grab that you can immediately dive right into what 2024 is installed by default. So you have the site editor and you can play around and test out all of these features. Well, that's gonna do it for us today. Thanks for spending the last hour with us. Hopefully you've learned a few things and seen some really cool new additions to WordPress. We add the replay for this live stream will be up in about an hour and that link once again is there in the chat. We're back with Office Hours for members tomorrow here at one o'clock Central on solid Academy, where we go further together.