a:4:{s:5:"child";a:1:{s:0:"";a:1:{s:3:"rss";a:1:{i:0;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:3:"


";s:7:"attribs";a:1:{s:0:"";a:1:{s:7:"version";s:3:"2.0";}}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:1:{s:0:"";a:1:{s:7:"channel";a:1:{i:0;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:61:"
	
	
	
	




















































";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:1:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:16:"WordPress Planet";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:28:"http://planet.wordpress.org/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:8:"language";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:2:"en";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:47:"WordPress Planet - http://planet.wordpress.org/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"item";a:50:{i:0;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:111:"WPTavern: WordPress Names Josepha Haden New Executive Director, Joost de Valk Marketing and Communications Lead";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:29:"https://wptavern.com/?p=87010";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:121:"https://wptavern.com/wordpress-names-josepha-haden-new-executive-director-joost-de-valk-marketing-and-communications-lead";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:4428:"<p>During the <a href="https://wptavern.com/state-of-the-word-2018-wordpress-embraces-the-block-editor" rel="noopener" target="_blank">2018 State of the Word</a> address, Matt Mullenweg acknowledged lessons learned in the process of releasing WordPress 5.0. One of those was the need for various teams across the project to work together better. The friction during the 5.0 development cycle was beneficial in that it surfaced areas where the project can grow and sparked conversations that are already leading to improvements. </p>
<p>Last week Mullenweg announced that WordPress is <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/updates/2019/01/16/expanding-wordpress-leadership/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">expanding its leadership team</a> to include Josepha Haden in a new Executive Director role and Joost de Valk as the Marketing and Communications Lead. These new roles better distribute project leadership to more individuals who have demonstrated the ability and judiciousness to guide large, diverse teams towards success. Haden will be overseeing WordPress&#8217; contributor teams and de Valk is leading the marketing team and overseeing improvements to WordPress&#8217; websites and other outlets. </p>
<p>The Executive Director role is particularly critical for the health of the project, as contributor and community feedback pours in across so many different mediums. Tracking all of this information and taking it into consideration amounts to a full-time job. In her first week in the new role, <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/updates/2019/01/21/our-strengths-and-challenges/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Haden is seeking feedback regarding the challenges contributors face</a> when working on the project. She identified seven challenges which seem to resonate with many who have commented:</p>
<ul>
<li>Coordinating on collaborative work between teams</li>
<li>Aligning our work better to project goals/values</li>
<li>Understanding team roles, leadership structures, and decision making</li>
<li>Clarifying the differences between open source and open commit</li>
<li>Tracking conversations and progress across the project</li>
<li>Raising project-wide concerns more easily</li>
<li>Improving how we recognize and celebrate success</li>
</ul>
<p>Responses from contributors have so far revolved around a similar theme &#8211; the desire for more clearly-defined projects and goals for teams, along with more communication from leadership. </p>
<p>&#8220;Define goals and deliverables for each project deliverable,&#8221; Daniel Bachhuber suggested. &#8220;Once these are defined, it’s much easier to estimate the level of effort and resources required. Distinguish between full-time sponsored, part-time sponsored, and completely volunteer labor. Each of these three do not work at the same pace. It’ll be much easier to estimate a team’s velocity if you know what type of labor you have to work with.&#8221;</p>
<p>Meagen Voss offered some valuable insight from a newer contributor&#8217;s perspective. She said the leadership of the project is very unclear and that people could benefit from that information being more prominently published. She also <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/updates/2019/01/21/our-strengths-and-challenges/#comment-4363" rel="noopener" target="_blank">suggested</a> that WordPress explore the idea of having ambassadors for each team to facilitate communication and collaboration across projects.</p>
<blockquote><p>You get to know your team very well, but no so much other teams. I’ve met some great folks in Slack and am getting to know the two groups I’m involved in super well. But if I have an issue or a question that needs to be addressed to another group, then I would have to hang out in that team’s channel for a while to figure out who the right person is to get in touch with. Identifying “ambassadors” or points of contact for each group could be a quick and helpful way to address that.</p></blockquote>
<p>The conversation is still open for contributors to jump in and share their own challenges and suggestions. Haden plans to follow up with the next steps after gathering more feedback. Action born out of these conversations has the potential to greatly improve contributors&#8217; experiences working together, resulting in fewer people burning out on communication struggles or losing momentum from lack of clearly defined objectives.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Wed, 23 Jan 2019 22:23:19 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:1;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:28:"Matt: Thich Nhat Hanh on Tea";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:22:"https://ma.tt/?p=48949";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:45:"https://ma.tt/2019/01/thich-nhat-hanh-on-tea/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:331:"<blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves &#8211; slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future.</p><cite>— Thich Nhat Hanh in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B009U9S6VM/">The Miracle of Mindfulness</a></cite></blockquote>



<p></p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Wed, 23 Jan 2019 21:27:25 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:4:"Matt";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:2;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:66:"WPTavern: WooCommerce Launches New Mobile Apps for iOS and Android";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:29:"https://wptavern.com/?p=86988";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:77:"https://wptavern.com/woocommerce-launches-new-mobile-apps-for-ios-and-android";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:3641:"<p>This week marks the first <a href="https://woocommerce.com/posts/try-the-new-woocommerce-mobile-app-for-key-metrics-order-look-up-and-notifications-cha-ching/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">public release</a> of WooCommerce&#8217;s new mobile app for <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.woocommerce.android" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Android</a> and the improved version for <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id1389130815" rel="noopener" target="_blank">iOS</a>. WooCommerce began beta testing the Android app late last year and the original iOS app has been updated to offer the same features.</p>
<p>This first release should be considered a basic start that is mostly useful for tracking store performance with detailed stats and getting alerts for new orders and product reviews. Users cannot add or edit products and the app does not yet allow for switching between stores. The first release offers basic order management and fulfillment but does not include the ability to change order status. The mobile apps don&#8217;t yet live up to their tagline of &#8220;Your store in your pocket,&#8221; but it&#8217;s a good starting place. </p>
<p>According to the Google Play Store, the WooCommerce app has been installed more than 10,000 times and the response from users has been mixed. The app is averaging a 2.5-star rating after early reviews from 45 users. The iOS app has received similar responses. Many of the negative reviews are due to connection/login issues and the requirement for stores to use Jetpack.</p>
<p>&#8220;This has promise, but get rid of the need for Jetpack,&#8221; one reviewer wrote. &#8220;There are other secure ways of syncing up. Other apps have done it for years. This app has been long overdue, but is poor in execution when you need to install a plugin that tends to bog down your site and that most don&#8217;t need. Give an alternative means of syncing and allow us to edit at least the basics of a product on the go.&#8221;</p>
<p>WooCommerce marketing representative Marina Pape explained the Jetpack requirement in a post announcing the mobile apps&#8217; launch:  </p>
<blockquote><p>The Jetpack plugin connects your self-hosted site to a WordPress.com account and provides a common authentication interface across lots of server configurations and architectures.</p>
<p>Both Apple and Google only allow a single trusted sender for pushes for security reasons (read more), making Jetpack the best way for us to give you modern mobile app features like push notifications.</p></blockquote>
<p>In order to connect sites with the app, Jetpack creates a shadow site on WordPress.com&#8217;s servers and syncs quite a bit of data. Although this <a href="https://jetpack.com/support/what-data-does-jetpack-sync/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">list of data</a> is transparently outlined, the Jetpack requirement is a deal breaker for some users. They either object to sharing their data or believe the plugin will slow down their stores. Until the app&#8217;s features are more compelling than the detriments users perceive in Jetpack, it may lose a few users based on this requirement.</p>
<p>According to <a href="https://trends.builtwith.com/shop" rel="noopener" target="_blank">BuiltWith</a>, WooCommerce is now the most popular shopping cart technology used by 22% of the top 1 million websites, with competitors Shopify and Magento not too far behind at 17% and 13% respectively. Having a new mobile app should help WooCommerce remain competitive, but the team needs to keep iterating on the app to make it more useful for those managing stores on the go.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Wed, 23 Jan 2019 05:35:53 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:3;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:91:"WPTavern: Gutenberg Phase 2 to Update Core Widgets to Blocks, Classic Widget in Development";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:29:"https://wptavern.com/?p=86953";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:101:"https://wptavern.com/gutenberg-phase-2-to-update-core-widgets-to-blocks-classic-widget-in-development";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5791:"<p>Gutenberg phase 2 development is underway and one of the first orders of business is porting all existing core widgets to blocks. This task is one of the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2018/12/08/9-priorities-for-2019/">nine projects</a> that Matt Mullenweg outlined for 2019, along with upgrading the widgets-editing areas in wp-admin/widgets.php and adding support for blocks in the Customizer. </p>
<p>Contributors on phase 2 are also <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/4770" rel="noopener" target="_blank">developing a Classic Widget</a>, which would function as a sort of &#8220;legacy widget block&#8221; for third-party widgets that haven&#8217;t yet been converted to blocks. There may be many instances where plugin developers have not updated their widgets for Gutenberg and in these cases their plugins would be unusable in the new interface without the option of a Classic Widget. This block is still in the design stage. </p>
<p>The widgets.php admin page will need to be completely reimagined as part of this process. Mark Uraine, a designer who works at Automattic, created some mockups to <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/13204" rel="noopener" target="_blank">kick off the discussion</a> about what this screen might look like. </p>
<p><a href="https://cloudup.com/cW5MOA5gsTG"><img src="https://i1.wp.com/cldup.com/o9-F6ebs7m.gif?resize=627%2C421&ssl=1" alt="Widgets as blocks" width="627" height="421" /></a></p>
<p>These mockups are just explorations of where widgets may be headed next, and they do not take into account everything that will be required of this screen. </p>
<p>Nick Halsey, one of the maintainers for <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/components/customize/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">WordPress&#8217; Customize component</a> recommended abandoning this screen altogether in favor of showing widget block areas in the Customizer:</p>
<blockquote><p>The widgets admin screen has a fundamental disconnect with the way that widget areas actually work &#8211; with different areas showing in different parts of the screen and potentially on different parts of the site. It will be very difficult to clearly reflect the frontend page structure on this screen in a way that users will be able to understand. Experimenting with contextual approaches to this experience in the customizer offers numerous opportunities for this fundamental problem to be solved. Starting with the visible edit shortcuts that are already in core, revamped widgets could be edited directly on the frontend (of the customize preview) or in an overlay that is more directly related to the display on a particular screen. The ability to navigate to different parts of the site within the customize preview solves a problem that this screen will never be able to address.</p></blockquote>
<p>Getting blocks to work in the Customizer is also part of phase 2, but conversation on the ticket related to wp-admin/widgets.php indicates the team is not going to abandon this screen just yet. </p>
<p>&#8220;While this screen will eventually be deprecated in the future, especially as more of the site is built in Gutenberg, it&#8217;s a necessary &#8220;baby step&#8221; to get us all there together,&#8221; Uraine said. &#8220;Maybe the best thing is to keep the existing layout, but just allow the use of all blocks within the accordion content areas? This will keep our resources and investment minimal on this particular piece with just a few suggested tweaks to the mockup in the initial post. It will also allow us to move to the Customizer more quickly.&#8221; </p>
<p>Gutenberg accessibility contributor Andrea Fercia encouraged contributors to address accessibility before creating visual mockups by designing the information architecture first. He encouraged them to organize the required information and controls while thinking about how someone might navigate them in a linear way. </p>
<p>&#8220;The customizer is not fully accessible,&#8221; Fercia said. &#8220;The admin widgets screen is the only place where persons with accessibility needs have a chance to manage widgets without having to face big accessibility barriers.&#8221;</p>
<p>Discussion on the future of the widget management screen continues in the ticket and contributors are looking to get more input during this exploration stage. There&#8217;s also a <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/projects/22" rel="noopener" target="_blank">project board</a> where anyone can share a blog post with their own explorations.</p>
<p><a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/projects/20" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Porting widgets to blocks</a> has its own project board if you want to follow along or jump in on an issue. Most of the core blocks are already finished and a handful are still in progress. </p>
<p>Updating the widgets management page and bringing blocks into the Customizer is a major overhaul but will further unify WordPress&#8217; interface for editing and previewing content. Widgets have served WordPress well over the years, making it easy for users to customize their websites without having to know how to code. The feature has also <a href="https://wptavern.com/the-future-of-wordpress-widgets-a-better-ui-with-real-time-previews" rel="noopener" target="_blank">survived many evolutions</a>, eventually <a href="https://wptavern.com/widget-customizer-approved-for-wordpress-3-9" rel="noopener" target="_blank">making its way into the Customizer five years ago in WordPress 3.9</a>. One of the limitations with widgets is that they can only be used in &#8220;widgetized&#8221; areas. Transforming widgets into blocks removes that limitation and makes it possible to use widgets in posts and pages as well.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Tue, 22 Jan 2019 21:11:48 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:4;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:30:"Dev Blog: WordPress 5.1 Beta 2";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:34:"https://wordpress.org/news/?p=6550";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:56:"https://wordpress.org/news/2019/01/wordpress-5-1-beta-2/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:4498:"<p>WordPress 5.1 Beta 2 is now available!</p>



<p><strong>This software is still in development,</strong> so we don’t recommend you run it on a production site. Consider setting up a test site to play with the new version.</p>



<p>There are two ways to test the WordPress 5.1 beta: try the <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-beta-tester/">WordPress Beta Tester</a> plugin (you’ll want to select the “bleeding edge nightlies” option), or you can <a href="https://wordpress.org/wordpress-5.1-beta2.zip">download the beta here</a> (zip).</p>



<p>WordPress 5.1 is slated for release on <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/5-1/">February 21</a>, and we need your help to get there!</p>



<p>Over <a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/query?status=closed&changetime=01%2F11%2F2019..&milestone=5.1&group=component&col=id&col=summary&col=owner&col=type&col=priority&col=component&col=version&order=priority">110 tickets have been closed</a> since <a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2019/01/wordpress-5-1-beta-1/">beta 1</a>, many of which are documentation and testing suite improvements. Here are the major changes and bug fixes:</p>



<ul><li><a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/query?status=closed&changetime=01%2F11%2F2019..01%2F22%2F2019&focuses=!~docs&keywords=~servehappy&milestone=5.1&group=component&col=id&col=summary&col=owner&col=type&col=priority&col=component&col=version&order=priority">Several refinements and bug fixes</a> related to the Site Health project have been made.</li><li>The <code>pre_render_block</code> and <code>render_block_data</code> filters have been introduced allowing plugins to override block attribute values (<a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/45451">#45451</a>, dev note coming soon).</li><li><code>get_template_part()</code> will now return a value indicating whether a template file was found and loaded (<a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/40969">#40969</a>).</li><li>A notice will now be triggered when developers incorrectly register REST API endpoints (related <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2019/01/11/new-rest-api-notice-in-5-1/">dev note</a>).</li><li>Bulk editing posts will no longer unintentionally change a post&#8217;s post format (<a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/44914">#44914</a>)</li><li>Twemoji has been updated to the latest version, 11.2.0 (<a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/45133">#45133</a>).</li><li>A bug preventing the Custom Fields meta box from being enabled has been fixed (#<a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/46028">46028</a>).</li><li>The treatment of <code>orderby</code> values for <code>post__in</code>, <code>post_parent__in</code>, and <code>post_name__in</code> has been standardized (<a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/38034">#38034</a>).</li><li>When updating language packs, old language packs are now correctly deleted to avoid filling up disk space (<a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/45468">#45468</a>).</li></ul>



<h2>Developer Notes</h2>



<p>WordPress 5.1 has many changes aimed at polishing the developer experience. To keep you informed, we publish <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/tag/5-1+dev-notes/">developers notes</a> on the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/">Make WordPress Core blog</a> throughout the release cycle. Subscribe to the Make WordPress Core blog for updates over the coming weeks, detailing other changes in 5.1 that you should be aware of.</p>



<h2>How to Help</h2>



<p>Do you speak a language other than English? <a href="https://translate.wordpress.org/projects/wp/dev">Help us translate WordPress into more than 100 languages!</a> The beta 2 release als marks the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots/handbook/glossary/#soft-freeze">soft string freeze</a> point of the 5.1 release schedule.</p>



<p><em><strong>If you think you’ve found a bug</strong>, you can post to the <a href="https://wordpress.org/support/forum/alphabeta">Alpha/Beta area</a> in the support forums. We’d love to hear from you! If you’re comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/reports/">file one on WordPress Trac</a>, where you can also find <a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/tickets/major">a list of known bugs</a>.</em></p>



<hr class="wp-block-separator" />



<p><em>Do you enjoy bugs?<br /> I don&#8217;t. So, we fixed them all.<br /> Well, not all. But close.</em></p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Tue, 22 Jan 2019 01:01:24 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:15:"Gary Pendergast";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:5;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:80:"WPTavern: WPML Alleges Former Employee Breached Website and Took Customer Emails";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:29:"https://wptavern.com/?p=86940";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:91:"https://wptavern.com/wpml-alleges-former-employee-breached-website-and-took-customer-emails";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5475:"<p>Over the weekend, many <a href="https://wptavern.com/wpml-website-hacked-customer-emails-compromised" rel="noopener" target="_blank">WPML customers received an unauthorized email</a> from someone who claimed to have hacked the company&#8217;s website and gained access to customer emails. WPML founder Amir Helzer suspects that the attacker is a former employee. </p>
<p>&#8220;The customer is an ex-employee who left an exploit on the server (not WPML plugin) before leaving. Besides fixing the damage, we’ll also be taking legal actions,&#8221; Helzer said Saturday night.</p>
<p>The WPML team worked around the clock over the weekend to secure their systems and sent out an email informing customers of the incident. They also assured customers that the WPML plugin does not contain an exploit and that payment information was not compromised. The company published an <a href="https://wpml.org/2019/01/wpml-org-site-back-to-normal-after-an-attack-during-the-weekend/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">announcement</a> to their website, detailing the incident and their response: </p>
<blockquote><p>We updated wpml.org, rebuilt everything and reinstalled everything. We secured access to the admin use 2-factor authentication and minimized the access that the web server has to the file system.</p>
<p>These are more precautions than actual response to the hack. Our data shows that the hacker used inside information (an old SSH password) and a hole that he left for himself while he was our employee.</p>
<p>This hack was not done via an exploit in WordPress, WPML or another plugin, but using this inside information. In any case, the damage is great and it’s done already.</p></blockquote>
<p>WPML urges customers not to click on any links in the email the attacker sent out and recommends they change their passwords for wpml.org. The attacker has customer names, emails, and sitekeys, but WPML said the sitekeys cannot be used to push changes to customer websites.</p>
<p>Helzer is convinced that the attack was an inside job and suspects two former employees. He and his team are working to provide evidence to the authorities. He said the the nature of the attack demonstrates that it was likely not an outside hacker:</p>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>The first time our site was breached was on the day we fired an employee, who had access to our servers. We didn&#8217;t identify the breach at that time. However, once we got hacked, we analyzed the original hole and we found in our log when it was placed (yup, he deleted the log, but he didn&#8217;t delete the backup). Now that we finished cleaning up the mess, we&#8217;re going through all logs and collecting the full evidence.</li>
<li>The attacker targeted specific code and database tables that are unique to our site and not generic WordPress or WPML tables.</li>
<li>The attacker crafted the attack so that it would cause us long term damage and not be apparent in first sight. That long-term damage is very difficult to guess without knowing our business objectives and challenges. This is information that our employees have, but we don&#8217;t disclose.</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p>The idea that a former employee who is known to the company would risk performing these illegal actions is difficult to grasp, even in the case of someone who was fired and may have been acting in retaliation. The risks of being caught seem too great.</p>
<p>&#8220;In many jurisdictions including the USA, this is jail time,&#8221; Wordfence CEO Mark Maunder <a href="https://twitter.com/mmaunder/status/1086839572384940033" rel="noopener" target="_blank">said</a>. &#8220;So I find it quite incredible that an employee would leave a backdoor, use it to deface their site, steal their data and email all subscribers. This is the infosec equivalent of walking into a police precinct and tagging the wall while the cops watch.&#8221;</p>
<p>Helzer said the incident should serve as a wakeup call for companies that employ remote workers. It highlights the importance of having procedures in place for revoking employee access to all systems used as part of day to day operations.</p>
<p>&#8220;We have to admit that our site was not secured well enough,&#8221; Helzer said. &#8220;If someone previously had admin access and stopped working for us, we should have been more careful and avoided this situation.</p>
<p>&#8220;This can be a wakeup call for others. We talk a lot about the benefits or remote work and most of the WordPress industry works remotely. This made us realize that we need to be a lot more pessimistic when we allow any access to our system.</p>
<p>&#8220;For example, the fact that we’re now coding for ourselves a requirement to login with 2fa, means that we’re not alone in this exposed situation.&#8221;</p>
<p>The attacker&#8217;s unauthorized email and WPML&#8217;s response email went out over the weekend, so many customers will be learning of the incident today when they return to work. Helzer said customers have been supportive so far.</p>
<p>&#8220;I think that customers appreciate the fact that we contacted them as fast as we could and we dropped everything and ran to handle this,&#8221; he said. &#8220;I think that we&#8217;ll still have damage. Clients did not run away from us right now but a good reputation is something that you build over years. A nasty incident like this stays &#8216;on your record.&#8217; This is our livelihood and we take it seriously.&#8221;</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Mon, 21 Jan 2019 16:21:19 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:6;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:58:"WPTavern: WPML Website Hacked, Customer Emails Compromised";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:29:"https://wptavern.com/?p=86908";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:68:"https://wptavern.com/wpml-website-hacked-customer-emails-compromised";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:3452:"<p>On Saturday, January 19, WPML customers started reporting having received an email from someone who seems to have hacked the plugin&#8217;s website and gained access to customer information.</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<p lang="en" dir="ltr">Got same mail and there is this text on <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/wpml?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#wpml</a> website visible now. What happened guys? <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/security?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#security</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/hack?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#hack</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/vulnerability?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#vulnerability</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/0day?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#0day</a> or something? <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/WordPress?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#WordPress</a></p>
<p>&mdash; Gytis Repečka (@gytisrepecka) <a href="https://twitter.com/gytisrepecka/status/1086753453429481473?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 19, 2019</a></p></blockquote>
<p></p>
<p>The hacker claims to be a disgruntled customer who had two websites hacked due to vulnerabilities in the WPML plugin: </p>
<blockquote><p>WPML came with a bunch of ridiculous security holes which, despite my efforts to keep everything up to date, allowed the most important two of my websites to be hacked.</p>
<p>WPML exposed sensitive information to someone with very little coding skills but merely with access to the WPML code and some interest in seeing how easy is to break it.</p>
<p>I’m able to write this here because of the very same WPML flaws as this plugin is used on wpml.org too.</p></blockquote>
<p>The hacker also claims to have exploited the same vulnerabilities in order to send the email to WPML&#8217;s customers and has <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190120015001/https://wpml.org/2019/01/wpml-warning/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">published the same message to the plugin&#8217;s website</a>. The text is still live at this time and product pages have also been defaced.</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<p lang="en" dir="ltr">Defaced product features page, for example. <a href="https://t.co/MWNZh6g1HQ">pic.twitter.com/MWNZh6g1HQ</a></p>
<p>&mdash; Wordfence (@wordfence) <a href="https://twitter.com/wordfence/status/1086789010218016768?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 20, 2019</a></p></blockquote>
<p></p>
<p>The commercial multilingual plugin has been in business since 2009 and is <a href="https://wpml.org/home/about-us/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">active on more than 600,000 WordPress sites</a>. It is a popular plugin for business sites in Europe, North America, Asia, and South America, especially those with a global audience. Customers are still waiting for an official explanation from WPML. </p>
<p>We contacted the company for comment but have not yet received a response. If you are using the plugin, you should deactivate it until the company pushes an update to patch the security vulnerabilities. This story is developing and we will publish new information as it becomes available.</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://wptavern.com/wpml-website-hacked-customer-emails-compromised#comment-276210">Update</a> from WPML founder Amir Helzer</strong>: &#8220;The customer is an ex-employee who left an exploit on the server (not WPML plugin) before leaving. Besides fixing the damage, we’ll also be taking legal actions.&#8221; </p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Sun, 20 Jan 2019 02:32:15 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:7;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:83:"WPTavern: WPWeekly Episode 343 –  Newspack, Expanding Leadership, and Cory Miller";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:59:"https://wptavern.com/?p=86902&preview=true&preview_id=86902";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:87:"https://wptavern.com/wpweekly-episode-343-newspack-expanding-leadership-and-cory-miller";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:1823:"<p>In this episode, <a href="http://jjj.me">John James Jacoby</a> and I discuss Automattic&#8217;s quest to create a new service tailored to journalists. We discuss what&#8217;s next for Cory Miller as his chapter at iThemes ends later this month. Near the end of the show, we talk about recent leadership changes in the WordPress project and share our opinions of Slack&#8217;s new logo.</p>
<h2>Stories Discussed:</h2>
<p><a href="https://ma.tt/2019/01/thirty-five/">Thirty-Five</a></p>
<p><a href="https://ma.tt/2019/01/journalism-and-newspack/">Journalism and Newspack</a></p>
<p><a href="https://corymiller.com/embarking-on-my-next-adventure/">Embarking On My Next Adventure</a></p>
<p><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2019/01/16/wordpress-5-1-schedule-updates/">WordPress 5.1 Schedule Updates</a></p>
<p><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/updates/2019/01/16/expanding-wordpress-leadership/"> Expanding WordPress Leadership</a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.pentagram.com/work/slack">Slack&#8217;s New Logo</a></p>
<p><a href="https://journal.rmccue.io/400/how-wordpress-knows-what-page-youre-on/">How WordPress Knows What Page You’re On</a></p>
<h2>WPWeekly Meta:</h2>
<p><strong>Next Episode:</strong> Wednesday, January 23rd 3:00 P.M. Eastern</p>
<p>Subscribe to <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/wordpress-weekly/id694849738">WordPress Weekly via Itunes</a></p>
<p>Subscribe to <a href="https://www.wptavern.com/feed/podcast">WordPress Weekly via RSS</a></p>
<p>Subscribe to <a href="http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/wordpress-weekly-podcast?refid=stpr">WordPress Weekly via Stitcher Radio</a></p>
<p>Subscribe to <a href="https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/ps/Ir3keivkvwwh24xy7qiymurwpbe">WordPress Weekly via Google Play</a></p>
<p><strong>Listen To Episode #343:</strong><br />
</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Fri, 18 Jan 2019 22:57:11 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Jeff Chandler";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:8;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:134:"WPTavern: WordPress.com Secures $2.4 Million in Funding from Google and Partners to Build a Publishing Platform for News Organizations";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:29:"https://wptavern.com/?p=86795";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:144:"https://wptavern.com/wordpress-com-secures-2-4-million-in-funding-from-google-and-partners-to-build-a-publishing-platform-for-news-organizations";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:9680:"<p>WordPress.com has <a href="https://en.blog.wordpress.com/2019/01/14/newspack-by-wordpress-com/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">announced</a> plans to create a new, open source publishing platform that caters to small and medium-sized news organizations. The <a href="https://newsinitiative.withgoogle.com/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Google News Initiative</a> has contributed $1.2 million towards the development of &#8220;<a href="http://newspack.blog/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Newspack</a>&#8221; on top of WordPress.com&#8217;s infrastructure. </p>
<p>Automattic and Google have joined with other contributing partners from the broader world of journalism for a total of $2.4 million in funding for the first year of the project. These partners include <a href="https://www.lenfestinstitute.org/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">The Lenfest Institute for Journalism</a> ($400K), ConsenSys, the venture studio behind <a href="https://civil.co/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Civil Media</a> ($350K), The <a href="http://kf.org/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">John S. and James L. Knight Foundation</a> ($250K), and an additional partner who will join later this month. <a href="https://spiritedmedia.com/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Spirited Media</a> and <a href="https://fundjournalism.org/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">News Revenue Hub</a> will also contribute to the creation of the platform.</p>
<p>Local news organizations are critical for a healthy democratic society, keeping the public informed about things happening close to home. The move to digital news consumption has forced consolidation in the news industry where larger players have come out ahead while smaller publications struggle to stay above water. </p>
<p>In a report called &#8220;<a href="https://www.usnewsdeserts.com/reports/expanding-news-desert/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">The Expanding News Desert</a>,&#8221; published in 2018, researchers at the University of North Carolina found that nearly one in five newspapers has disappeared during the past 15 years. Many others have become &#8220;ghost newspapers,&#8221; shells of what they once were &#8211; either absorbed by larger dailies that purchased them or suffering from a severely pared back newsroom that is unable to adequately cover local events.</p>
<p>WordPress.com has amassed an expert team to address this crisis in local news. The Newspack platform will cater to the technological and editorial needs of smaller newsrooms, with the monetization tools to make their work sustainable. WordPress.com is currently accepting <a href="https://newspack.blog/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">applications for charter participants</a> and plans to launch in beta near the end of July 2019.</p>
<h3>Open Source Newspack Platform to Offer an Alternative to Expensive Proprietary CMS&#8217;s</h3>
<p>The WordPress community has <a href="https://twitter.com/carlhancock/status/1084900673559371776" rel="noopener" target="_blank">speculated</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/mor10/status/1084887261471072257" rel="noopener" target="_blank">widely</a> about what shape Newspack will take, whether it will be like WordPress.com VIP tailored to publications or something similar to Jetpack with a curated set of tools that could be used by self-hosted sites through SaaS upgrades. According to WordPress.com president Kinsey Wilson, a former executive for NPR and The New York Times who joined Automattic in 2018, the platform may end up being a hybrid of approaches. </p>
<p>&#8220;It’s still very early in the process, but I expect elements of both VIP and Jetpack to inform this,&#8221; Kinsey said. &#8220;Newspack will be part of the WordPress.com platform, but we’re going to be working on a highly curated experience tailored to these news organizations, with individualized support available across editorial and business.&#8221; </p>
<p>The platform will support plugins that solve problems publishers experience at the local level and will also include Gutenberg-specific editorial tools.</p>
<p>&#8220;It will leverage Gutenberg,&#8221; Kinsey said. &#8220;A few examples of the tools that might be launched with Newspack include email integration for marketing and editorial; programmatic ad integration, analytics, real-time backups, and revenue generating tools for subscriptions and e-commerce. We hope to work closely with partners across the WordPress ecosystem for potential ways to work with services that are beneficial to news organizations.&#8221;</p>
<p>The most important distinction of the Newspack platform is that it will be open source. That also puts it directly in competition with proprietary CMS&#8217;s like Arc, Vox Media&#8217;s Chorus CMS, and MediaOS, that are prominent in the news industry right now. Instead of working together, larger media companies have opted to build their own CMS&#8217;s and many of them are also <a href="http://www.niemanlab.org/2018/11/is-it-finally-time-for-media-companies-to-adopt-a-common-publishing-platform/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">licensing enterprise versions to publishers or offering them as SaaS solutions</a>.</p>
<p>I asked Kinsey if Newspack will be something news organizations could self-host or if it will be inextricably tied to WordPress.com&#8217;s infrastructure. WordPress.com is making it open in the sense that publishers will not be tied to using it forever if they want to their information and copy the same setup somewhere else.</p>
<p>&#8220;It is not only open source, it will be designed so that at any point in time any individual site or even a commercial competitor could capture an image of the setup and port it to another platform,&#8221; Kinsey said. &#8220;The value we offer is our knowledge of the news industry, our ability to keep pace with new requirements, and our ability to vet various plug-ins and open-source contributions to the project for security and interoperability &#8212; all at an attractive operating cost of between $1,000 and $2,000 per month. In addition, we hope to expose news organizations to a wider community of like-minded developers and to create an on-boarding system that simplifies the setup.&#8221; </p>
<p>Operating costs on proprietary platforms are much higher than what WordPress.com is planning for Newspack. Arc costs smaller publishers <a href="https://digiday.com/media/washington-post-building-tech-platform-arc/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">$10,000 per month in software licensing fees</a> and can cost up to $150,000 monthly for larger publications. Vox media executives <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/vox-media-to-begin-licensing-publishing-technology-chorus-1531828800" rel="noopener" target="_blank">told the Wall Street Journal</a> that the company &#8220;plans to sell Chorus at different pricing tiers depending on the demands of each customer with fees in the six and seven-figure ranges.&#8221; Small local news publications are often priced out of using a publishing platform like this.</p>
<p>&#8220;It breaks my heart how much of their limited resources these organizations still sink into closed-source or dead-end technology,&#8221; Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg said in a <a href="https://ma.tt/2019/01/journalism-and-newspack/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">post</a> introducing Newspack on his blog. &#8220;Open source is clearly the future, and if we do this right Newspack can be the technology choice that lasts with them through the decades, and hopefully our 15 years of growth lends some credibility to our orientation to build things for the long term.&#8221;</p>
<p>Google&#8217;s support of Newspack is in line with its history of building with and <a href="https://wptavern.com/google-launches-opensource-dev-as-an-introduction-to-open-source" rel="noopener" target="_blank">supporting open source projects</a>. When asked for clarification on Google&#8217;s investment in the project, Kinsey said, &#8220;It is a donation that is intended to support work that otherwise would not likely find commercial support because of the relatively modest means of small digital publishers.&#8221;</p>
<p>WordPress.com&#8217;s Newspack announcement comes on the heels of the news of <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2019/01/16/when-digital-first-media-gannetts-hostile-suitor-comes-town/2579392002/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Digital First Media&#8217;s unsolicited $1.36 billion bid for Gannett</a>. The future of local news is tenuous, as larger players in the industry press for more consolidation and cost-cutting journalism. In the same week, Facebook, who has had a hot and cold relationship with publishers, announced the company is investing <a href="https://www.facebook.com/facebookmedia/blog/doing-more-to-support-local-news" rel="noopener" target="_blank">$300 million to support local news</a>.</p>
<p>In recognition of the dire situation facing many local newsrooms, the largest companies on the web are committing funds to help them find a sustainable business model. WordPress.com&#8217;s Newspack platform, with its affordable, open source alternative to proprietary systems, is positioned to make a strong impact during this seminal time in the evolution of the news industry. </p>
<p>&#8220;By itself, an open source CMS is not going to help news organizations remain independent,&#8221; Kinsey said. &#8220;However, by helping new, emerging organizations overcome the complexity and cost typically associated with technology deployment and instead allowing them to focus resources on journalism and smart business practices, we think we can help them become more sustainable.&#8221;</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Thu, 17 Jan 2019 22:52:47 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:9;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:40:"Matt: My TED Video on the Future of Work";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:22:"https://ma.tt/?p=48932";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:45:"https://ma.tt/2019/01/ted-the-future-of-work/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:2707:"<p>I was thrilled to participate in TED’s new video series, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/TEDsTheWayWeWork/videos/294277961234005/">The Way We Work</a>, and not surprisingly I made the case that distributed work is <a href="https://qz.com/694410/automattic-has-figured-out-the-right-tools-for-remote-working/">where everything is headed</a>. </p>



<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<div id="fb-root"></div>&version;<div class="fb-video"><blockquote cite="https://www.facebook.com/TEDsTheWayWeWork/videos/294277961234005/" class="fb-xfbml-parse-ignore"><a href="https://www.facebook.com/TEDsTheWayWeWork/videos/294277961234005/">Why Working from Home Is Better for Business</a><p>This company is so dedicated to remote working that they literally don&#039;t have an office. Here&#039;s why a "distributed" workforce is better for business — and employees:</p>Posted by <a href="https://www.facebook.com/TEDsTheWayWeWork/">The Way We Work</a> on Monday, January 14, 2019</blockquote></div>
</div>



<p>It has over 130,000 views already! What I really love about this video in particular is that we get into the specifics of <em>how</em> a company can start to embrace a culture of letting employees work from anywhere, even if it started out as a traditional office with everyone in the same place. Automattic never started that way, so even as we’ve scaled up to more than <a href="https://automattic.com/work-with-us/">840 people</a> in 68 countries, there’s never been a question — it’s now built in to our entire culture.<br /></p>



<p>For distributed work to scale up, it’s going to require more CEOs, workers, and managers to test the waters. Any company can experiment with distributed work — just pick a day or two of the week in which everyone works from home, I suggest Tuesdays and Thursdays, then build the tools and systems to support it. Yes, that may require some shuffling of meetings, or more written documentation versus verbal real-time discussion. But I think companies will be surprised how quickly it will “just work.” <br /></p>



<p>If the companies don’t experiment, workers may force them to do it anyway: <br /></p>



<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">I don't think tech folks quite understand how pervasive remote work has become. It's not even a debate anymore, it's a full on revolution. Hard to do any recruiting these days and not constantly run into talented folks who will never go back to working in an office again.</p>&mdash; Max Lynch (@maxlynch) <a href="https://twitter.com/maxlynch/status/1084854197869264896?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 14, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Wed, 16 Jan 2019 20:32:43 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:4:"Matt";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:10;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:91:"WPTavern: WooCommerce Blocks is Now a Feature Plugin, Version 1.3.0 Introduces 6 New Blocks";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:29:"https://wptavern.com/?p=86856";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:101:"https://wptavern.com/woocommerce-blocks-is-now-a-feature-plugin-version-1-3-0-introduces-6-new-blocks";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:2645:"<p><a href="https://woocommerce.wordpress.com/2019/01/15/woocommerce-blocks-1-3-0-release-notes/">WooCommerce Blocks 1.3.0</a> was released yesterday with six new blocks. Previously, the <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/woo-gutenberg-products-block/">plugin</a> allowed users to display a grid of products by category. The new version introduces a Featured Product Block with design options for customizing nearly everything about the display, including color overlay, price and description, text alignment, call-to-action button, and the product photo. </p>



<img />



<p>Version 1.3.0 also introduces a Hand-Picked Products block that displays a grid of manual selections that can be ordered in different ways. Other new blocks include the following, which display as a grid and can be filtered by category:</p>



<ul><li>Best Selling Products block</li><li>Top Rated Products block</li><li>Newest Products block</li><li>On Sale Products block</li></ul>



<p>WooCommerce Blocks is also now a <a href="https://docs.woocommerce.com/document/what-is-a-woocommerce-feature-plugin/">feature plugin</a>, which means that after it is more polished and tested, the plugin can be considered for merge into WooCommerce core. WooCommerce Blocks 1.4 is expected the last week in January with improvements to the Featured Product block and a new Products by Attribute block.</p>



<p>In December 2018, WooCommerce <a href="https://woocommerce.com/posts/people-behind-stores/">published usage data</a> that indicates 40% of users who could be considered &#8220;established business owners&#8221; also have a brick-and-mortar location, and 27% host events in physical locations. This means that many WooCommerce store owners have multiple channels for selling their products. The data also showed that large stores don&#8217;t always turn to big companies to handle their website development needs.</p>



<p>Based on that usage data, blocks have the potential to greatly improve the site management experience for many WooCommerce store owners who want to market to different audiences beyond their physical stores. Blocks enable them to easily swap out featured products and customize promotions on products that are selling well in their stores. All of these actions are quick to configure inside the new editor with a live preview. The sooner this feature plugin lands in WooCommerce core, the easier it will be to make these kinds of quick updates. Store owners with sites running on WordPress 5.0+ can take advantage of these blocks now by <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/woo-gutenberg-products-block/">installing the plugin</a>.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Wed, 16 Jan 2019 20:11:25 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:11;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:74:"WPTavern: CoBlocks Adds Row and Columns Page Building Blocks for Gutenberg";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:29:"https://wptavern.com/?p=86811";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:85:"https://wptavern.com/coblocks-adds-row-and-columns-page-building-blocks-for-gutenberg";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:3005:"<p><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/coblocks/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">CoBlocks</a>, one of the earliest block collections for Gutenberg, has added new page building blocks and tools in the latest <a href="https://richtabor.com/coblocks-gutenberg-page-builder/">1.6 release</a>. ThemeBeans founder <a href="https://richtabor.com" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Rich Tabor</a> and plugin developer <a href="https://phpbits.net" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Jeffrey Carandang</a> partnered together on this iteration of CoBlocks to bring users new Row and Columns blocks and a Typography Control Panel.</p>
<p>The Row and Column blocks are resizable and can be dragged to new positions. </p>
<p><a href="https://i1.wp.com/wptavern.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Screen-Shot-2019-01-15-at-5.33.39-PM.png?ssl=1"><img /></a></p>
<p>After selecting the Row block, users can choose the number of columns and then a layout for the row.</p>
<p><a href="https://i1.wp.com/wptavern.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Screen-Shot-2019-01-15-at-5.40.22-PM.png?ssl=1"><img /></a></p>
<p>These row layouts can also be adjusted from inside the row toolbar or inspector sidebar panel, which includes responsive media query controls. </p>
<p><a href="https://i0.wp.com/wptavern.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Screen-Shot-2019-01-15-at-5.53.18-PM.png?ssl=1"><img /></a>The Row and Column blocks also come with fine-grained controls for adjusting background and text color, width, margin, and padding. </p>
<p>Version 1.6 also includes a new Typography Control Panel with support for Google fonts. Users can customize the fonts with built-in controls for line-height, letter-spacing, font-weight, and text-transform properties. It also supports customizing fonts for the core heading, paragraph, and button blocks. </p>
<p>The video below shows a quick demo of column layouts and nested row blocks in action, as well as a few other blocks in the collection. Tabor said the team has more blocks in development that are geared towards full page layout and design. They are also working on a more advanced Google Maps block, feature blocks, and image cards.</p>
<p></p>
<p>The Gutenberg team has been <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/4900" rel="noopener" target="_blank">discussing a &#8220;section&#8221; block</a> since February 2018, where columns blocks could be placed inside the more generic section container. It&#8217;s on the <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/13113" rel="noopener" target="_blank">roadmap for Phase 2</a> but contributors are taking their time to carefully define how this block will work. In the meantime, plugin developers have created their own versions of sections.</p>
<p>CoBlocks is currently setting the bar for Gutenberg-powered layouts. When WordPress core gets deeper into site building, this plugin&#8217;s user-friendly approach to rows and columns should provide some inspiration for creating an intuitive page building experience.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Wed, 16 Jan 2019 01:49:38 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:12;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:67:"WPTavern: WordPress Support Forums Add @mentions with Auto-complete";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:29:"https://wptavern.com/?p=86721";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:77:"https://wptavern.com/wordpress-support-forums-add-mentions-with-auto-complete";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:1852:"<p>The <a href="https://wordpress.org/support/forums/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">WordPress Support forums</a> have been updated to include Twitter/GitHub style <a href="https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/2488" rel="noopener" target="_blank">auto-completion for usernames</a>. As users begin typing @username in the forum&#8217;s TinyMCE editor, it will begin to suggest usernames, narrowed further by characters typed. Hitting tab or enter will complete the username and link it to the user&#8217;s profiles.wordpress.org page. This will trigger a notification for the user. </p>
<p><a href="https://i1.wp.com/wptavern.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Screen-Shot-2019-01-15-at-9.56.52-AM.png?ssl=1"><img /></a></p>
<p>A similar feature was implemented on <a href="https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/830" rel="noopener" target="_blank">WordPress trac</a> three years ago. This initial version of @mention auto-complete for the support forums works in a similar way in that it completes a partial search query from a known set of usernames. In this case it only includes thread participants. In order to make the auto-complete scale for WordPress.org&#8217;s 10+ million registered users, it does not perform site-wide username lookups or include moderators, plugin reps, or theme reps who have not yet commented on the thread.</p>
<p>The @mentions have been implemented across all WordPress.org forums. Any issues with the feature can be reported on trac by re-opening the original <a href="https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/2488" rel="noopener" target="_blank">ticket</a> or creating a new one. Daniel Iser <a href="https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/2488#comment:20" rel="noopener" target="_blank">commented</a> on the ticket that he is working on getting this feature working for bbPress during the first half of this year.  </p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Tue, 15 Jan 2019 18:12:43 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:13;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:29:"Matt: Journalism and Newspack";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:22:"https://ma.tt/?p=48924";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:46:"https://ma.tt/2019/01/journalism-and-newspack/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:2189:"<p>WordPress.com <a href="https://en.blog.wordpress.com/2019/01/14/newspack-by-wordpress-com/">is partnering</a> with Google and news industry leaders on a new platform for small- and medium-sized publishers, called <a href="https://newspack.blog/">Newspack</a>. The team has raised $2.4 million in first-year funding from the Google News Initiative, Lenfest Journalism Institute, Civil funder ConsenSys, and the Knight Foundation, among others. We&#8217;re also still happy to talk to and engage other funders who want to get involved — I&#8217;d love to put even more resources into this.<br /></p>



<p>It’s been a difficult climate for the news business, particularly at the local level. It also breaks my heart how much of their limited resources these organizations still sink into closed-source or dead-end technology. Open source is clearly the future, and if we do this right Newspack can be the technology choice that lasts with them through the decades, and hopefully our 15 years of growth lends some credibility to our orientation to build things for the long term.</p>



<p>Here’s <a href="https://kinsey.nyc/">Kinsey</a> in Nieman Lab: <br /></p>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>The goal is to both make sure that the catalog of publishing tools as well as business tools they need to be able to run what one hopes is a sustainable news operation are addressed simultaneously. It’s not simply a CMS for a newsroom, but a full business system that enables publishing and monetization at the same time.</p><cite>&#8211;<a href="http://www.niemanlab.org/2019/01/heightening-the-cms-race-wordpress-com-and-news-revenue-hub-devise-a-toolkit-for-local-newsrooms/">Nieman Lab interview</a></cite></blockquote>



<p>As you have come to expect from Automattic, everything will be open source and developed to the same standards WordPress itself is. We’re working with Spirited Media and the News Revenue Hub on the platform, and we will likely look for even more partnership opportunities from across the WordPress ecosystem. If you’d like to invest or get involved, drop us a line at <a href="mailto:newspack@automattic.com">newspack@automattic.com</a>. </p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Tue, 15 Jan 2019 01:03:55 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:4:"Matt";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:14;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:109:"WPTavern: WPCampus Selects Tenon LLC for Gutenberg Accessibility Audit, Completed Report Expected in February";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:29:"https://wptavern.com/?p=86773";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:117:"https://wptavern.com/wpcampus-selects-tenon-llc-for-wp-campus-gutenberg-accessibility-audit-completed-report-expected";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:1626:"<p>WPCampus <a href="https://wpcampus.org/2019/01/gutenberg-audit-vendor/">announced</a> that <a href="https://tenon.io/">Tenon LLC</a>, a leading accessibility firm founded by <a href="http://www.karlgroves.com/">Karl Groves</a>, has been selected to perform its Gutenberg accessibility audit. More than $10,000 has come in through WPCamps&#8217; crowdfunding campaign. Shortly before WordCamp US 2018, <a href="https://wptavern.com/interview-with-rachel-cherry-automattic-pledges-to-fund-wpcampus-accessibility-audit-of-gutenberg">Automattic pledged to fund the remainder</a> of the audit. The final cost for the chosen vendor is $31,200.</p>



<p>A diverse committee of WordPress, accessibility, and higher education professionals evaluated seven proposals before selecting Tenon LLC. The company&#8217;s Tenon API delivers advanced reporting that assists clients in understanding which issues to prioritize first in the process of building more accessible experiences. The <a href="https://wptavern.com/access-monitor-plugin-tests-wordpress-sites-for-accessibility-compliance">Access Monitor plugin</a> for WordPress is an example of a tool built using this API. Site administrators can use it to identify and tackle accessibility issues with the help of automated testing.</p>



<p>WPCampus will leave its crowdfunding campaign open until Friday, February 8 to allow more community participation. The organization plans to deliver a progress update on Thursday, January 31, and is aiming to complete the audit by late February. A public report of the findings will be published as a resource that anyone can access.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Mon, 14 Jan 2019 17:20:22 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:15;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:17:"Matt: Thirty-Five";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:22:"https://ma.tt/?p=48911";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:34:"https://ma.tt/2019/01/thirty-five/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:3398:"<div class="wp-block-image"><img src="https://ma.tt/files/2019/01/IMG_8762-768x1024.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-48912" width="247" height="329" /></div>



<p>What a year.</p>



<p>First, it feels amazing to write this inside of the new Gutenberg block editor in WordPress 5.0. It was a labor of love for so many and the next chapters are going to be even more exciting.</p>



<p>The best part of the last year was growing closer to my friends and loved ones —&nbsp;I don&#8217;t know if it&#8217;s externally perceptible but my heart feels a lot more open. </p>



<p>I&#8217;ve found a good balance with meditation, work, sleep, fasting, eating, and reading that gives me a lot of joy, energy, and feels like a combination I could sustain the rest of my life.</p>



<p>Reading in particular was a highlight as I finished 38 books, which is the most in a year since I started tracking, and so many of them were truly excellent I&#8217;m going to do another post just on books. I will give a special call out to <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TBKYK60/">The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu</a>. Leaving my Kindle Oasis at an airport ended up being a blessing in disguise as I started using the Kindle app on my iPhone a lot more and that&#8217;s become my new favorite habit. (And the physical Kindle was returned!)</p>



<p>It was a strong travel year, covering 126 cities, 20 countries, and 377k miles. I especially enjoyed visits to Tulum, Iceland, Bodrum, Tonga, Kauai, Lanai, and Courchevel. I finally checked off my bucket list item to become scuba certified and had an amazing opportunity to swim with humpback whales.</p>



<img src="https://ma.tt/files/2019/01/Tonga-Wanderings-2-of-5-1024x635.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-48914" />I was a few feet from <a href="https://www.comewander.com/">Adam Gazzaley when he took this photo</a>.



<p>I also had lots of opportunities to practice patience, weathered a torrent of personally-directed criticism across every medium, and had a few months that were the hardest I&#8217;ve worked in my career. With the benefit of a little distance, though, those things don&#8217;t loom as large. I learned a ton —&nbsp;often the hard way but often that&#8217;s what it takes —&nbsp;and discovered I had some additional gears that can kick in when needed.</p>



<p>As I pass solidly into my mid-thirties, I don&#8217;t have any drastic shifts on the horizon but I am looking forward to continuing to strengthen the habits I&#8217;ve been able to develop this past year.</p>



<p>Other years: <a href="https://ma.tt/2003/01/bday/">19</a>, <a href="https://ma.tt/2004/01/so-im-20/">20</a>, <a href="https://ma.tt/2005/01/hot-barely-legal-matt/">21</a>, <a href="https://ma.tt/2006/01/matt-22/">22</a>, <a href="https://ma.tt/2007/01/twenty-three/">23</a>, <a href="https://ma.tt/2008/01/twenty-four/">24</a>, <a href="https://ma.tt/2009/01/twenty-five/">25</a>, <a href="https://ma.tt/2010/01/twenty-six/">26</a>, <a href="https://ma.tt/2011/01/twenty-seven/">27</a>, <a href="https://ma.tt/2012/01/twenty-eight/">28</a>, <a href="https://ma.tt/2013/01/twenty-nine/">29</a>, <a href="https://ma.tt/2014/01/matt-3-0/">30</a>, <a href="https://ma.tt/2015/01/thirty-one/">31</a>, <a href="https://ma.tt/2016/01/thirty-two/">32</a>, <a href="https://ma.tt/2017/01/thirty-three/">33</a>, <a href="https://ma.tt/2018/01/thirty-four/">34</a>, 35.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Sat, 12 Jan 2019 00:12:56 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:4:"Matt";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:16;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:70:"WPTavern: WPWeekly Episode 342 – GitHub, Commercials, and Governance";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:58:"https://wptavern.com?p=86783&preview=true&preview_id=86783";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:75:"https://wptavern.com/wpweekly-episode-342-github-commercials-and-governance";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:2012:"<p>In this episode, <a href="http://jjj.me">John James Jacoby</a> and I discuss what&#8217;s new in WordPress 5.0.3. We share insight into a new feature in WordPress 5.1 that will protect users from fatal errors or more commonly known as the white screen of death.</p>
<p>We discuss the WordPress Governance Project and WordPress&#8217; leadership overall throughout the past few years. Near the end of the show, we share our opinions on WordPress.com&#8217;s new marketing campaign.</p>
<h2>Stories Discussed:</h2>
<p><a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2019/01/wordpress-5-0-3-maintenance-release/">WordPress 5.0.3 Maintenance Release</a></p>
<p><a href="https://wptavern.com/github-announces-free-unlimited-private-repositories">GitHub Announces Free, Unlimited Private Repositories</a></p>
<p><a href="https://wptavern.com/wordpress-5-1-to-replace-blogging-references-with-publishing">WordPress 5.1 to Replace “Blogging” References with “Publishing”</a></p>
<p><a href="https://wptavern.com/wordpress-governance-project-flagged-as-unsanctioned-first-meeting-set-for-january-15">WordPress Governance Project Flagged as Unsanctioned, First Meeting Set for January 15</a></p>
<p><a href="https://wptavern.com/wordpress-com-launches-new-do-anything-marketing-campaign">WordPress.com Launches New “Do Anything” Marketing Campaign</a></p>
<h2>WPWeekly Meta:</h2>
<p><strong>Next Episode:</strong> Wednesday, January 16th 3:00 P.M. Eastern</p>
<p>Subscribe to <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/wordpress-weekly/id694849738">WordPress Weekly via Itunes</a></p>
<p>Subscribe to <a href="https://www.wptavern.com/feed/podcast">WordPress Weekly via RSS</a></p>
<p>Subscribe to <a href="http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/wordpress-weekly-podcast?refid=stpr">WordPress Weekly via Stitcher Radio</a></p>
<p>Subscribe to <a href="https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/ps/Ir3keivkvwwh24xy7qiymurwpbe">WordPress Weekly via Google Play</a></p>
<p><strong>Listen To Episode #342:</strong><br />
</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Fri, 11 Jan 2019 22:18:24 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Jeff Chandler";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:17;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:106:"WPTavern: WordPress 5.1 to Introduce New White Screen Protection Feature, Beta 1 Now Available for Testing";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:29:"https://wptavern.com/?p=86765";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:116:"https://wptavern.com/wordpress-5-1-to-introduce-new-white-screen-protection-feature-beta-1-now-available-for-testing";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:3611:"<p><a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2019/01/wordpress-5-0-3-maintenance-release/">WordPress 5.0.3</a> was released this week with more than a dozen fixes related to the block editor. The automatic background update has gone out and <a href="https://wordpress.org/about/stats/">23.2% of sites are currently running on 5.0+,</a> with 47.2% hanging back at 4.9. Meanwhile, work on WordPress 5.1 charges forward and <a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2019/01/wordpress-5-1-beta-1/">Beta 1</a> is now available.</p>



<p>One of the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2018/12/08/9-priorities-for-2019/">projects Matt Mullenweg identified for 2019</a> was to merge the Site Health Check plugin into core to assist with debugging and encourage &#8220;good software hygiene.&#8221; The Site Health Check project, formerly called &#8220;ServeHappy,&#8221; began with the goal of helping users get their sites running on supported versions of PHP but has evolved to include other aspects of site maintenance and debugging.</p>



<p>WordPress 5.1 brings one of the most exciting aspects of the Site Health Check project into core. It introduces a new <a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/44458">white screen of death (WSOD) protection feature</a> that catches fatal errors so that users can still log into the admin to attempt to resolve the issue. In the past, non-technical users would have to contact their hosting companies or FTP into their files to try to fix plugin or theme compatibility issues by turning things off.</p>



<p>In preparation for WordPress&#8217; highly anticipated <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2018/12/08/updating-the-minimum-php-version/">minimum PHP version increase</a>, 5.1 will display a warning and help users upgrade their version of PHP. The minimum will be bumped to 5.6 in April and, depending on feedback, will be bumped again to 7.0 in December 2019.</p>



<p>&#8220;This project benefits not just WordPress users, but also the surrounding PHP ecosystem as a whole,&#8221; Jenny Wong said in the <a href="https://jwong.co.uk/blog/2019/01/10/how-wordpress-is-dropping-php-end-of-life-versions/">notes</a> she published from the Site Health Check Project review at WCUS 2018. &#8220;Our hope is that this will prompt a lot of PHP updates across the web.&#8221;</p>



<p>If you want to take advantage of more features from the <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/health-check/">Site Health Check plugin</a>, you can install it from WordPress.org and visit the Dashboard > Health Check for a detailed overview of your site. It also has a very handy troubleshooting mode that enables a vanilla WordPress session, where all plugins are disabled, and a default theme is used, but only for your user. This works without disrupting the way the site displays to visitors.</p>



<img />



<p>WordPress 5.1 also introduces some updates for developers, including the ability to replace the cron system with a custom cron handler, set a custom location for WP_DEBUG_LOG, a new <code>wp_blogmeta</code> table, and a few other changes. </p>



<p>WordPress 5.1 is currently slated for release on <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/5-1/">February 21</a>. The upcoming release is a big step on WordPress&#8217; journey to becoming even more user-friendly. The idea that users will never again be locked out of their sites due to a WSOD is a major enhancement that will greatly improve the way they interact with WordPress&#8217; plugin system. It also makes the prospect of installing new themes and plugins less daunting for non-technical users.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Fri, 11 Jan 2019 21:17:46 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:18;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:30:"Dev Blog: WordPress 5.1 Beta 1";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:34:"https://wordpress.org/news/?p=6540";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:56:"https://wordpress.org/news/2019/01/wordpress-5-1-beta-1/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:4140:"<p>WordPress 5.1 Beta 1 is now available!</p>



<p><strong>This software is still in development,</strong>&nbsp;so we don’t recommend you run it on a production site. Consider setting up a test site to play with the new version.</p>



<p>There are two ways to test the WordPress 5.1 beta: try the&nbsp;<a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-beta-tester/">WordPress Beta Tester</a>&nbsp;plugin (you’ll want to select the “bleeding edge nightlies” option), or you can&nbsp;<a href="https://wordpress.org/wordpress-5.1-beta1.zip">download the beta here</a>&nbsp;(zip).</p>



<p>WordPress 5.1 is slated for release on&nbsp;<a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/5-1/">February 21</a>, and we need your help to get there. Here are some of the big items to test so we can find as many bugs as possible in the coming weeks.</p>



<h2>Site Health Check</h2>



<p>Site Health Check is an ongoing project aimed at improving the stability and performance of the entire WordPress ecosystem. The first phase of this project is included in WordPress 5.1. For the first time, WordPress will catch and pause the problem code, so you can log in to your Dashboard and see what the problem is (<a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/44458">#44458</a>). Before, you’d have to FTP in to your files or get in touch with your host.</p>



<p>Additionally, in April 2019, <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2018/12/08/updating-the-minimum-php-version/">WordPress&#8217; will increase its minimum supported PHP version to 5.6</a>. To help you check if you&#8217;re prepared for this change, WordPress 5.1 will show you a warning and help you upgrade your version of PHP, if necessary.</p>



<h2>For Developers</h2>



<ul><li>The Cron system can now be more easily replaced with a custom cron handler (<a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/32656">#32656</a>).</li><li>When starting cron under PHP-FPM, the connection will return a response immediately, even for long running cron jobs (<a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2019/01/09/cron-improvements-with-php-fpm-in-wordpress-5-1/">dev note</a>).</li><li><code>WP_DEBUG_LOG</code> can be set to a custom log location (<a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/18391">#18391</a>).</li><li>Introduced the <code>wp_blogmeta</code> table (<a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/37923">#37923</a>).</li><li>Added <code>LIKE</code> support to <code>meta_key</code> comparisons in <code>WP_Meta_Query</code> (<a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/42409">#42409</a>).</li></ul>



<p>There have been <a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/query?status=closed&milestone=5.1&group=resolution&col=id&col=summary&col=component&col=owner&col=type&col=priority&col=version&order=priority">over 360 tickets closed</a> in WordPress 5.1, with numerous small bug fixes and improvements to help smooth your WordPress experience.</p>



<p>Keep your eyes on the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/">Make WordPress Core blog</a> for more developer notes (which are <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/tag/5-1+dev-notes/">assigned</a> the <code>dev-notes</code> tag) in the coming weeks detailing other changes in 5.1 that you should be aware of.</p>



<h2>How to Help</h2>



<p>Do you speak a language other than English?&nbsp;<a href="https://translate.wordpress.org/projects/wp/dev">Help us translate WordPress into more than 100 languages!</a></p>



<p><strong><em>If you think you’ve found a bug</em></strong><em>, you can post to the&nbsp;</em><a href="https://wordpress.org/support/forum/alphabeta"><em>Alpha/Beta area</em></a><em>&nbsp;in the support forums. We’d love to hear from you! If you’re comfortable writing a reproducible bug report,&nbsp;</em><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/reports/"><em>file one on WordPress Trac</em></a><em>, where you can also find&nbsp;</em><a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/tickets/major"><em>a list of known bugs</em></a><em>.</em></p>



<hr class="wp-block-separator" />



<p><em>Miss my haiku?<br />I will have plenty for you<br />in the coming weeks.</em></p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Fri, 11 Jan 2019 00:58:20 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:15:"Gary Pendergast";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:19;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:97:"WPTavern: Jetpack 6.9 Introduces New Blocks for Subscriptions, Related Posts, and Tiled Galleries";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:29:"https://wptavern.com/?p=86719";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:106:"https://wptavern.com/jetpack-6-9-introduces-new-blocks-for-subscriptions-related-posts-and-tiled-galleries";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:2988:"<p><a href="https://jetpack.com/2019/01/10/jetpack-6-9-introducing-more-tools-for-the-new-block-editor/">Jetpack 6.9</a> was released today with three new blocks for the editor. Subscriptions, Related Posts, and Tiled Galleries are now available as blocks under Jetpack in the block inserter tool.</p>



<img />New blocks in Jetpack: Related Posts, Subscription Form, and Tiled Galleries



<p>The most exciting thing for both Related Posts and the Subscription form is that they can now be placed anywhere within post or page content with a live preview. Previously these modules were limited to wherever the theme placed them, or widgetized areas in the case of the Subscription form. Below is an example:</p>



<div class="wp-block-jetpack-subscriptions"><div class="jetpack_subscription_widget">			<form action="https://wptavern.com/feed" method="post" accept-charset="utf-8" id="subscribe-blog-522">
				<p>Join 42,970 other subscribers</p>
					<p id="subscribe-email">
						<label id="jetpack-subscribe-label" for="subscribe-field-522">
							Email Address						</label>
						<input type="email" name="email" class="required" value="" id="subscribe-field-522" />
					</p>

					<p id="subscribe-submit">
						<input type="hidden" name="action" value="subscribe" />
						<input type="hidden" name="source" value="https://wptavern.com/feed" />
						<input type="hidden" name="sub-type" value="widget" />
						<input type="hidden" name="redirect_fragment" value="522" />
												<input type="submit" value="Subscribe" name="jetpack_subscriptions_widget" />
					</p>
							</form>

			
		
</div></div>



<p>Tiled galleries can now easily be inserted, manipulated, and previewed in the new editor with all of the same features they had before. Styles and link settings for the galleries can be found in the block sidebar, but they are somewhat limited when <a href="https://wptavern.com/new-block-gallery-plugin-offers-a-suite-of-photo-gallery-blocks-for-gutenberg">compared to other plugins like Block Gallery</a>. Now that the Jetpack team has the basic block in place, they can easily update it with new features.</p>



<p>Users will need to have their Jetpack accounts connected to WordPress.com to access any of these new blocks, but they will all work on the Free plan.</p>



<p>If you have been missing Jetpack shortlinks since Gutenberg was released, you will be pleased to find that Jetpack 6.9 brings them back under a new Jetpack icon at the top right of the block editor. Clicking on it reveals Jetpack&#8217;s publicize options as well as the shortlink.</p>



<img />New Jetpack icon menu



<p>Jetpack is constantly evolving its admin menu and user flows. This release brings changes to various screens, including a new “My Plan” section in the Jetpack dashboard, as well as a reorganization of the sections and cards under Jetpack > Settings. It also improves the notices displayed to users who have not connected their WordPress.com accounts.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Fri, 11 Jan 2019 00:14:41 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:20;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:74:"WPTavern: Google Launches Opensource.dev as an Introduction to Open Source";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:29:"https://wptavern.com/?p=86688";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:85:"https://wptavern.com/google-launches-opensource-dev-as-an-introduction-to-open-source";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:2463:"<p>Google has launched a new educational site at <a href="https://opensource.dev/">opensource.dev</a> that offers a succinct and approachable introduction to open source software and licensing. WordPress is cited as one of the more well-known examples in the opening paragraphs:</p>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>It&#8217;s in your phone, your car, your TV, and your wifi-connected light bulbs. Open source components enable engineers to build on the work of a global community of developers to deliver better products faster and at lower cost. Linux, the Apache web server, Android, Firefox, and WordPress are examples of open source projects you may have heard of.<br /></p></blockquote>



<p>Google relies heavily on open source for both internal tools and consumer-facing products. A few of the company&#8217;s more widely used open source projects include Android, Chromium, Chromium OS, Go, and Material Design icons, but there are also many smaller projects. Google has created <a href="https://opensource.google.com/">more than 2,000 open source projects</a> in the last decade, which you can browse through using a fun, <a href="https://opensource.google.com/projects/explore/featured">interactive explorer</a>.</p>



<img />



<p>The new Opensource.dev site gives an important nod to <a href="https://opensource.org/">Open Source Initiative</a> (OSI) as the maintainer of the <a href="https://opensource.org/osd-annotated">Open Source Definition</a> (OSD) and the globally-recognized authority on open source licensing.</p>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>Google and many other OSI <a href="https://opensource.org/sponsors">sponsors</a> and <a href="https://opensource.org/affiliates">affiliates</a> recognize the OSD as the definition of open source and OSI&#8217;s <a href="https://opensource.org/authority">authority</a> as the maintainer of the OSD. Licenses which do not comply with the OSD might still provide access to the source code, but they&#8217;re not &#8220;open source&#8221;.</p></blockquote>



<p>The site ends with a solid list of curated links to important open source organizations, foundations, and other resources for further exploration. Overall, <a href="https://opensource.dev/">opensource.dev</a> provides a nice summary that answers the question, &#8220;What is open source?&#8221; It&#8217;s a resource agencies and freelancers might consider sharing with clients who are new to the concept.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Thu, 10 Jan 2019 19:53:44 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:21;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:83:"WPTavern: Elementor Acquires Layers WP to Expand Compatible Theme Options for Users";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:29:"https://wptavern.com/?p=86701";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:94:"https://wptavern.com/elementor-acquires-layers-wp-to-expand-compatible-theme-options-for-users";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5844:"<p>Elementor has <a href="https://elementor.com/blog/elementor-acquires-layers/">acquired Layers WP</a>, a WordPress site builder that was previously marketed as an all-in-one theme solution for getting a business online. Layers co-founders David and Marc Perel identified Gutenberg as the main reason for the sale in their farewell <a href="https://www.layerswp.com/2019/01/elementor-acquires-layers-wp/">announcement</a>:</p>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>With the arrival of Gutenberg we realized that a big change was required for Layers to keep pace. A massive investment of time and money was needed so we had to assess the best way forward. Having spent all of our 20&#8217;s working 18 hour days to build beautiful WordPress products we reached a point where we felt it best to partner with another company to try take Layers to the next level.</p></blockquote>



<p>Elementor is the leading WordPress page builder, with more than a million active installations. CMO Ben Pines said they estimate that number to be closer to 2 million, based on the daily install rate. The company has grown from 6 employees to 55 since it launched in June 2016.</p>



<p>Elementor was well-prepared for Gutenberg&#8217;s inclusion in 5.0. While other page builders are still considering how to move forward with the new editor, Elementor released its <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/block-builder/" target="_blank">Elementor Blocks for Gutenberg</a> plugin in October 2018, making it possible for users to insert any Elementor template into Gutenberg with one click.</p>



<p>In the past, Layers didn&#8217;t meet the requirements for being listed in the WordPress.org themes directory, because the team decided not to follow best practices for keeping plugin and theme functionality separate. In 2016, <a href="https://wptavern.com/layers-ends-exclusive-arrangement-with-envato-launches-new-marketplace">Perel said they were opting to maintain Layers as a hybrid product</a>, a theme that included plugin-like functionality, in order to keep third-party conflicts to a minimum, which he said also lessened their support burden. This prevented the product from receiving greater exposure on WordPress.org. As larger page builders began to dominate the market, Layers failed to gain the traction it needed to compete. Add Gutenberg to the mix and Layers&#8217; founders were in need of an exit.</p>



<p>&#8220;We feel that this acquisition has come just at the right moment when WordPress itself is going through a huge amount of change,&#8221; Perel said. &#8220;With the release of Gutenberg and the new built-in post editor we realized that much of Layers would need to change in order to keep pace with the new look of WordPress and feel that <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://layerswp.us10.list-manage.com/track/click?u=5b9a020fcf797987098cc7bca&id=c493b36eaa&e=4441ba6d29" target="_blank">Elementor</a> is the best company to respond to the shifting tide of the industry.&#8221;</p>



<h3>Layers&#8217; Theme Collection Is Now Free and Fully Compatible with Elementor</h3>



<p>Elementor has released all 11 of <a href="https://www.layerswp.com/product-category/themes/">Layers&#8217; themes</a> for free and Ben Pines said they are considering listing them on WordPress.org to make it easier for users to find them and stay updated. All of the themes have been updated to be fully compatible with both Gutenberg and Elementor. Existing Layers&#8217; customers will receive two months of support before support is handed over to the Layers user community.</p>



<p>&#8220;Updating themes for compatibility is no easy matter, and we get thousands of requests asking for a theme that is compatible with Elementor,&#8221; Pines said. Finding a theme that is fully compatible with the page builder can be challenging. Pines said users often decide to use Elementor first and then look for a theme. There&#8217;s even a Facebook group called <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/126645814685793/?ref=br_rs">Elementor + Which Theme?</a> with more than 2,400 members.</p>



<p>&#8220;Themes still pose an issue for users,&#8221; Elementor&#8217;s head of business development, Zvi Shapira, said. &#8220;We saw value in continuing the Layers project, and not leaving thousands of Layers users without a home. Layers is a well worthy project, and offering a theme that is compatible with Elementor and Gutenberg for free for our users and for all WordPress users has great value.&#8221;</p>



<p>Pines identified Layers&#8217; advanced Customizer panel as one of its chief selling points. Along with the acquisition, all of the Layers Pro features, such as resizing the logo, customizing buttons, and styling menus, are now rolled into the free version.</p>



<p>Gutenberg is forcing some consolidation among page builders, as smaller operations struggle to keep pace with the technical updates required. Gutenberg is expected to standardize a way of layout building further along in the site customization phase. Pines said his team isn&#8217;t worried about how that will impact Elementor, even if core ends up overlapping with some of the solutions they offer in the plugin.</p>



<p>&#8220;I really don&#8217;t know if there will be an impact and of what sort,&#8221; Pines said. &#8220;It&#8217;s like the blocks we developed for Gutenberg. We adapted to provide our users with the maximum flexibility.&#8221; The plugin ensures that users don&#8217;t have to choose between using Gutenberg and the page builder. Acquiring Layers&#8217; theme collection means Elementor users no longer have to look so hard to find a compatible theme.</p>



<p>&#8220;Our hope is that Layers themes will help less tech-savvy users manage the entire site design hassle-free,&#8221; Pines said.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Wed, 09 Jan 2019 23:29:12 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:22;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:45:"Dev Blog: WordPress 5.0.3 Maintenance Release";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:34:"https://wordpress.org/news/?p=6530";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:71:"https://wordpress.org/news/2019/01/wordpress-5-0-3-maintenance-release/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:4566:"<p>WordPress 5.0.3 is now available!</p>



<p>5.0.3 is a maintenance release that includes 37 bug fixes and 7 performance updates. The focus of this release was fine-tuning the new block editor, and fixing any major bugs or regressions.</p>



<p>Here are a few of the highlights:</p>



<ul><li>15 block editor related bug fixes and improvements have been added to bundled themes. Make sure to update these for an improved block editing experience.</li><li><a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/query?status=closed&component=I18N&milestone=5.0.3&group=component&order=priority">2 block editor related internationalization (I18N) bugs</a> have been fixed</li><li>Users with JavaScript disabled <a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/45453">now see a notice</a> when attempting to use the block editor.</li><li>A few <a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/44770">PHP</a> <a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/44809">errors</a> in the Customizer have been fixed.</li><li>Some <a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/45615">issues uploading common file types</a>, like CSVs, have been fixed.</li></ul>



<p>For a full list of changes, please consult the <a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/query?status=closed&milestone=5.0.3&group=component">list of tickets on Trac</a>, <a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/log/branches/5.0?action=stop_on_copy&mode=stop_on_copy&rev=44522&stop_rev=44342&limit=100&sfp_email=&sfph_mail=">changelog</a>, or read a <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/?p=36158">more technical summary</a> on the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/">Make WordPress Core blog</a>.</p>



<p>You can <a href="https://wordpress.org/download/">download WordPress 5.0.3</a> or visit Dashboard → Updates on your site and click <em>Update Now</em>. Sites that support automatic background updates have already started to update automatically.</p>



<p>Thank you to everyone who contributed to WordPress 5.0.3:</p>



<p><a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/jorbin/">Aaron Jorbin</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/tellyworth/">Alex Shiels</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/allancole/">allancole</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/afercia/">Andrea Fercia</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/anevins/">Andrew Nevins</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/azaozz/">Andrew Ozz</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/birgire/">Birgir Erlendsson (birgire)</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/bobbingwide/">bobbingwide</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/littlebigthing/">Csaba (LittleBigThings)</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/davidbinda/">David Binovec</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/dlh/">David Herrera</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/ocean90/">Dominik Schilling (ocean90)</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/flixos90/">Felix Arntz</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/pento/">Gary Pendergast</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/kloon/">Gerhard Potgieter</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/gziolo/">Grzegorz (Greg) Ziółkowski</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/audrasjb/">Jb Audras</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/jobthomas/">Job</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/joemcgill/">Joe McGill</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/joen/">Joen Asmussen</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/johnbillion/">John Blackbourn</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/desrosj/">Jonathan Desrosiers</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/kjellr/">kjellr</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/laurelfulford/">laurelfulford</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/mkaz/">Marcus Kazmierczak</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/dimadin/">Milan Dinić</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/mmaumio/">Muntasir Mahmud</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/celloexpressions/">Nick Halsey</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/panchen/">panchen</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/swissspidy/">Pascal Birchler</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/superpoincare/">Ramanan</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/youknowriad/">Riad Benguella</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/rickalee/">Ricky Lee Whittemore</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/sergeybiryukov/">Sergey Biryukov</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/westonruter/">Weston Ruter</a>, and <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/earnjam/">William Earnhardt</a>.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Wed, 09 Jan 2019 18:56:31 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:19:"Jonathan Desrosiers";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:23;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:82:"WPTavern: WordPress 5.1 to Replace “Blogging” References with “Publishing”";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:29:"https://wptavern.com/?p=86675";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:81:"https://wptavern.com/wordpress-5-1-to-replace-blogging-references-with-publishing";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:1627:"<p>WordPress 5.1 will replace the &#8220;Happy blogging&#8221; language in wp-config-sample.php with &#8220;Happy Publishing.&#8221; The next major release also cleans up a few other &#8220;blog&#8221; references by replacing them with the word &#8220;site.&#8221; A lot of tutorials and documentation will need to be updated. WordPress contributors are continuing to fine-tune the wording in various files to reflect its expanded capabilities as a publishing platform.</p>



<img />



<p>&#8220;As of this commit, WordPress is no longer a simple blogging platform,&#8221; Gary Pendergast wrote in the <a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/44455">commit message</a>. &#8220;It&#8217;s now a comprehensive publishing solution.&#8221;</p>



<p>This commit signifies the end of an era, which actually ended a long time ago but is now formally recognized in the software&#8217;s language. WordPress can still be used for blogging, but it&#8217;s so much more dynamic. These days, successful blogs can easily transition into e-commerce stores or online magazines without having to migrate to a new platform.</p>



<p>With Gutenberg now in the hands of millions of users, publishing different types of content is becoming more accessible for those who don&#8217;t know how to code. The new era of &#8220;Happy Publishing&#8221; in 2019 will bring even more progress on that roadmap, enabling users to have a more unified editing experience for other aspects of content management, including <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2018/12/08/9-priorities-for-2019/">widgets and menus</a>.</p>



<p><br /><br /></p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Tue, 08 Jan 2019 23:44:39 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:24;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:63:"WPTavern: GitHub Announces Free, Unlimited Private Repositories";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:29:"https://wptavern.com/?p=86657";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:73:"https://wptavern.com/github-announces-free-unlimited-private-repositories";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:3488:"<p>GitHub users no longer have to pay to keep code private. The company is now offering <a href="https://blog.github.com/2019-01-07-new-year-new-github/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">unlimited private repositories to Free account users</a>, with up to three collaborators. Developers have different reasons for wanting to keep their code private &#8211; it may not be ready, they may be working on a side project, or may just be starting out in their coding journey. GitHub now makes it possible for users with free accounts to do that work in private, without having to upgrade to a Pro account for $7/month.</p>
<p>This change brings the code hosting site more in line with competitors like GitLab.com, which allows for unlimited private projects and collaborators, and Bitbucket, a platform that has offered this for much longer. Bitbucket was actually <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4428278" rel="noopener" target="_blank">GitLab&#8217;s inspiration for this model</a>. </p>
<p>GitHub&#8217;s announcement was well-received but for many who have already moved to GitLab, this news come too late. Some are also wary of giving GitHub access to their private projects after Microsoft acquired the company for $7.5 billion last year. However, GitHub seems to be focusing its efforts less on monetizing the small fish and more on evolving the company&#8217;s Enterprise offering. It has combined its Business Cloud and Enterprise products into one unified &#8220;GitHub Enterprise&#8221; product that starts at $21/user/month.</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<p lang="en" dir="ltr">Of course the GitHub update is so bigmega giantcorp can get you to give them more info &amp; in turn more power &amp; in turn more money, if that's annoying &amp;/or unsavory to you there are alternatives (that are less convenient but that's what this is all about anyway) no grump just fact</p>
<p>&mdash; Jon Christopher (@jchristopher) <a href="https://twitter.com/jchristopher/status/1082353226329001985?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 7, 2019</a></p></blockquote>
<p></p>
<p>&#8220;At GitLab we think that repositories will become a commodity,&#8221; GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij <a href="https://about.gitlab.com/2019/01/07/github-offering-free-private-repos-for-up-to-three-collaborators/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">said</a> in reaction to GitHub&#8217;s announcement. &#8220;I think Microsoft will try to generate more revenue with people using Azure more instead of paying for repos. We&#8217;re focusing on making a single application for the entire DevOps lifecycle that can replace a lot of other tools.&#8221;  </p>
<p>Every inch given in this space makes code sharing platforms more competitive. In terms of private repositories, GitHub has come close to offering what its smaller competitors have been giving away for free for a long time. If GitHub were to add Continuous Integration (CI) for free users to match GitLab&#8217;s free tier, for example, it might capture even more of the market. Different features sway different types of users to adopt one platform or another and eventually some of those turn into paying customers.</p>
<p>For existing GitHub Free users, unlimited private repositories means the opportunity to keep their incomplete projects out of the public eye, instead of having people stumble on them and wonder why they don&#8217;t work as expected. It also frees up a few more dollars for Pro users who want to downgrade to Free accounts.  </p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Tue, 08 Jan 2019 18:46:55 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:25;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:47:"Dev Blog: The Month in WordPress: December 2018";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:34:"https://wordpress.org/news/?p=6527";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:72:"https://wordpress.org/news/2019/01/the-month-in-wordpress-december-2018/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:3528:"<p>New features, a big event, and important announcements marked December as a milestone month for the WordPress community. </p>



<hr class="wp-block-separator" />



<h2>Release of WordPress 5.0</h2>



<p>On December 6 <a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2018/12/bebo/">WordPress 5.0 was released</a>. This release includes the much anticipated new block editor as the default editing experience. While some users have chosen to continue using the <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor/">Classic Editor</a> on their sites, many site owners have quickly upgraded to this latest version.<br /></p>



<p>Two security and maintenance releases came out over the course of the month, with <a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2018/12/wordpress-5-0-2-maintenance-release/">the latest update</a> providing a huge boost to performance and stability.<br /></p>



<p>The new version of WordPress comes a new default theme: <a href="https://wordpress.org/themes/twentynineteen/">Twenty Nineteen</a>. This theme is designed to highlight how the block editor can be used.<br /></p>



<p>Want to get involved in developing WordPress Core? Follow <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core">the Core team blog</a> and join the #core channel in <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/chat/">the Making WordPress Slack group</a>.</p>



<h2>Gutenberg Phase 2</h2>



<p><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2018/12/08/gutenberg-phase-2/">The next phase of Gutenberg</a> is being decided, starting with widgets, which will make it easier for users to customize their sites. This will be done with features being added to the Gutenberg plugin.<br /></p>



<p>Want to get involved in develop the future of the WordPress dashboard? Follow <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core">the Core team blog</a> and join the #core channel in <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/chat/">the Making WordPress Slack group</a>.</p>



<h2>9 Projects for 2019</h2>



<p>WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg outlined <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2018/12/08/9-priorities-for-2019/">9 projects for the year 2019</a>. These projects range from creating a block for navigations menus, porting all existing widgets into blocks, forming a triage team to tackle open issues on Trac and more.<br /></p>



<p>A <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2018/12/17/status-update-porting-widgets-to-blocks/">status update</a> for porting existing widgets to blocks has been posted by Mel Choyce.</p>



<h2>WordCamp US 2019 Dates announced</h2>



<p><a href="https://2019.us.wordcamp.org/2018/12/12/wordcamp-us-2019-announcing-our-dates/">WordCamp US 2019</a> will be held during Nov. 1-3, 2019, in St Louis, Missouri. It will be one of our largest events of the year and will feature Matt Mullenweg’s annual State of the Word address.<br /></p>



<hr class="wp-block-separator" />



<h2>Further Reading:</h2>



<ul><li>v1.2.1 of the WordPress Coding Standards library <a href="https://github.com/WordPress-Coding-Standards/WordPress-Coding-Standards/releases/tag/1.2.1">has been released</a>.</li><li>A few revisions <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2018/12/18/proposed-revisions-to-javascript-coding-standards/">have been proposed</a> for the WordPress JavaScript coding standards.</li></ul>



<p><em>If you have a story we should consider including in the next “Month in WordPress” post, please </em><a href="https://make.wordpress.org/community/month-in-wordpress-submissions/"><em>submit it here</em></a><em>.</em></p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Tue, 08 Jan 2019 09:18:48 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:11:"Aditya Kane";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:26;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:96:"WPTavern: WordPress Governance Project Flagged as Unsanctioned, First Meeting Set for January 15";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:29:"https://wptavern.com/?p=86573";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:106:"https://wptavern.com/wordpress-governance-project-flagged-as-unsanctioned-first-meeting-set-for-january-15";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:10550:"<p>The WordPress Governance Project is a new community initiative, led by Rachel Cherry and Morten Rand-Hendriksen, that will <a href="https://wpgovernance.com/">host its first meeting Tuesday, January 15 2019.</a></p>



<p>The purpose of the project is to address two objectives:</p>



<ol><li>The governance of the WordPress open source project and its various community components, and</li><li>WordPress’ role in the governance of the open web including representation in forums where decisions about the web platform and the Internet are made.</li></ol>



<p>Hendriksen advocated for open governance when he introduced the project at WordCamp US in his presentation, <a href="https://wordpress.tv/2018/12/30/morten-rand-hendriksen-moving-the-web-forward-with-wordpress/">Moving the Web forward with WordPress</a>. He discussed how the decisions made for WordPress&#8217; future affect a large portion the web. The project will first look at WordPress&#8217; internal governance structure and then move into the second aspect of getting WordPress a seat at the table in important discussions affecting the broader web.</p>



<img />



<p>Contributors on the project are aiming to propose a governance model for WordPress at or before WordCamp Europe 2019 or the Community Summit, if one is planned for 2019. The group plans to research existing governance models from corporations, government, and the open web community and submit their proposal to WordPress&#8217; current leadership for consideration.</p>



<h3>WordPress Governance Project Seeks to Change Leadership Structure, Rand-Hendriksen Says Status Quo is &#8220;Not Tenable&#8221;</h3>



<p>The governance project has piqued the public&#8217;s interest but some have found its objectives confusing. It is not clear what actions will be within the realm of possibility with the current benevolent dictator model WordPress has used. Part of the scope of the project is to &#8220;propose a leadership and governance model for the WordPress open source project and its communities.&#8221;</p>



<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">That's part of the job: to figure out how it can and should work. The status quo is not tenable, and leaves us out of important conversations about where the web and the internet is headed.</p>&mdash; Morten i Norge <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/11/72x72/1f1f8-1f1ef.png" alt="??" class="wp-smiley" /><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/11/72x72/1f328.png" alt="?" class="wp-smiley" /><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/11/72x72/1f976.png" alt="?" class="wp-smiley" /> (@mor10) <a href="https://twitter.com/mor10/status/1075145343019302912?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 18, 2018</a></blockquote>
</div>



<p>The idea of governance means different things to audiences across cultures. The second aspect of the project that aims to get WordPress a seat at the table seems more feasible and more likely to be well-received by the project&#8217;s leadership. It might make more sense to split up the two objectives into different projects. WordPress&#8217; internal governance and its role in the greater web are very different topics, but the project&#8217;s creators seem to view them as inseparable.</p>



<p>Matt Mullenweg hasn&#8217;t joined in the Twitter conversation about governance but he did address the topic on a recent <a href="https://poststatus.com/matt-mullenweg-on-gutenberg/">Post Status podcast episode</a>.</p>



<p>&#8220;When he was talking about open governance, my take was that he was talking about getting WordPress a seat at the table, and discussing these regulation changes and et cetera happening,&#8221; Mullenweg said. &#8220;I think the example last year was that there was this meeting at 10 Downing Street. Who was there? Was WordPress represented?</p>



<p>&#8220;And he started talking about the Web Foundation, and I began thinking, “Wow, WordPress only represents a third of websites, and not even, really. It’s a third of the top 10 million. Another foundation like the Web Foundation actually might be a better vehicle to try to advocate on the open Web as a whole, versus just the people who happen to be using a single CMS.&#8221;</p>



<p>When asked more about WordPress&#8217; leadership structure, Mullenweg reviewed the different approaches he has taken with the project. In 2018, the expression of his BDFL-style leadership was manifestly more overt than previous years, which may have influenced or even inspired the creation of the WordPress Governance Project.</p>



<p>&#8220;There’s been a lot more leaders, but I would actually argue the point that WordPress has always been sort of my vision being set, or even my direct leadership,&#8221; Mullenweg said. &#8220;There was a good four or five years there where the leadership structure, because we’ve experimented with lots of different &#8211; we don’t call it governance &#8211; but essentially leadership structures in WordPress. For a while, we had kind of the … It wasn’t a committee approach, but essentially like the lead developers consensus approach. We did that for a few years.</p>



<p>&#8220;Even from the beginning it wasn’t just me. It was me and Mike Little, so it’s never been solo. Then we went to where the release lead was the final decider, including over me, so that was probably, I don’t know, 3.9 to 4.7 maybe, that included overruling me as project lead for what was in the release or not, and that was to try to give a little more autonomy and flexibility to release leads. But the big change was a few years ago I said, &#8216;Okay, I’m going to take back over core WordPress development,&#8217; and that was to try to make some of these big changes happen. So right now it is much more of a benevolent dictator model, although both of those words are questionable. But, I don’t see that as the permanent forever structure.&#8221;</p>



<p>Mullenweg may not be able to sustain this level of involvement in core leadership indefinitely, with all of his other responsibilities at Automattic. He said he is open to WordPress empowering other leaders in the future.</p>



<p>&#8220;I’m not saying it always has to be me, but what I want is a strong, opinionated, thoughtful leader setting a bold direction, taking experiments and being willing to fail, comfortable with failure, is I think what you need to create great software,&#8221; he said.</p>



<p>Brian DeConinck, a WordPress developer who has recently been a vocal critic of the project&#8217;s leadership, called for more transparency around the decision-making process in his <a href="http://www.briandeconinck.com/initial-thoughts-wordpress-governance/">initial thoughts on the governance project.</a></p>



<p>&#8220;Matt is the central figure of the WordPress project,&#8221; DeConinck said. &#8220;He’s been a guiding force since the beginning. Without a doubt, he’s an important and valued member of our community. I don’t imagine governance as a means of usurping him.</p>



<p>&#8220;But should there be a single human face at the head of a project and a community at this scale? When people are critical of decision-making, having Matt at the center makes it easy to make criticism needlessly personal. This dynamic is hard on Matt and others in the project leadership, and ultimately toxic for the community.&#8221;</p>



<p>DeConinck said in order for the governance project to be successful he thinks it needs to be international, multicultural, and multilingual, with diverse voices, as well as clear mechanisms for WordPress users to provide feedback. He outlined a detailed list of success criteria that hasn&#8217;t officially been embraced by governance project as it has yet to hold its first meeting.</p>



<p>DeConinck&#8217;s suggestions are incompatible with the current BDFL-style leadership, as he claims that &#8220;feedback from a community of millions of users can’t adequately be processed and acted upon by a single individual listening and making decisions for the project.&#8221; WordPress has risen to become a dominant force on the web during the past 15 years under this style of leadership. Any meaningful proposal of change to the leadership structure will need to demonstrate how the new model can continue to enable WordPress to make rapid progress and maintain its relevance on the web.</p>



<h3>WordPress Governance Project Flagged as Unofficial and Removed from WordPress.org</h3>



<p>Earlier this morning, WordPress Community Team representative Francesca Marano <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/community/2019/01/07/wordpress-governance-project-change-of-venue/">posted a notice</a> on behalf of the governance project&#8217;s leadership to announce that the project has been removed from WordPress.org.</p>



<p>&#8220;Concerns have been raised about the posting of news about the WordPress Governance Project on make.wordpress.org and use of the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/community/tag/community-team/">#community-team</a> Slack channel giving the impression the project is sanctioned as an official WordPress project,&#8221; Marano said. &#8220;It has not received such sanctions from WordPress leadership.&#8221;</p>



<p>&#8220;We went through what we believed were the appropriate channels for launching the project through the Community group (ie speaking to group members, asking for access to the Make blog, coordinating with the team and others to find a meeting time which didn’t collide with others, etc),&#8221; Morten Rand-Hendriksen said. &#8220;We were later informed the project was not sanctioned by WordPress leadership and therefore cannot use the Make blog or Slack.&#8221; He would not comment further on what transpired or the communication his team received.</p>



<p>For the time being, it looks like the governance project will need to prove its worth independently before being officially adopted by WordPress. Many other community-led efforts and tools have followed this same process before coming under the umbrella of core. </p>



<p>The project now has its own dedicated website at <a href="https://wpgovernance.com/">wpgovernance.com</a> and a Slack instance at <a href="https://join.slack.com/t/twgp/signup?x=x-517030675360-517548723457">twgp.slack.com</a>. The first meeting was set for January 8 but has been postponed to January, 15, 1600 UTC to allow participants to sign up at the new Slack workspace.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Mon, 07 Jan 2019 19:49:27 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:27;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:85:"WPTavern: Beaver Builder Doubles Down on Serving Power Users in Response to Gutenberg";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:29:"https://wptavern.com/?p=86569";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:96:"https://wptavern.com/beaver-builder-doubles-down-on-serving-power-users-in-response-to-gutenberg";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:3074:"<p>At WordCamp US I had the opportunity to chat with <a href="https://www.wpbeaverbuilder.com/">Beaver Builder</a> co-founder Robby McCullough about how the page builder is navigating the Gutenberg era. The proliferation of blocks for the new editor has made it easy for non-technical WordPress users to add things like pricing tables, maps, tabs, accordions, and other UI elements. Future iterations of Gutenberg will soon tackle layouts. These improvements to core will radically change how page builder products are marketed to WordPress users.</p>



<p>&#8220;One of the decisions we made in response to the news of Gutenberg early on is that we wanted to double down on our professional power users,&#8221; McCullough said. &#8220;It took us a long time in our growth as a business to figure out who our customers were. We realized there were two distinct camps: one that was like a do-it-yourselfer type, someone who maybe had a small business or a hobby website who wanted to use WordPress but wasn&#8217;t familiar with writing code. The other was more of a freelancer &#8211; maybe a one or two person agency, people who were building lots of websites and had development and frontend skills. We see that as the space where we want to live now. We&#8217;re hoping to continue solving problems and making the experience better for folks with a few more skills in their tool belts.&#8221;</p>



<p>Following up with McCullough later, he said that applying this new direction to Beaver Builder is already translating into the features they are prioritizing for the plugin.</p>



<p>&#8220;For example, in our latest major release, we added percent, em, rem, and viewport-based units for things like font sizes, margins, and padding,&#8221; McCullough said. &#8220;Without a basic understanding of CSS, this feature wouldn&#8217;t be too helpful. We also added dozens of pre-built row templates. So, instead of creating single-page designs, our goal was to create a modular system of rows that can be mixed and matched to build out sites. We&#8217;re working to build features that better enable folks who build lots of websites.&#8221;</p>



<p>In the interview below we discussed the current integration between Gutenberg and Beaver Builder. McCullough said his team is considering bringing blocks into Beaver Builder or bringing Beaver Builder content into Gutenberg; both are possibilities. His team has been waiting to see how quickly the community adopts Gutenberg before making any major decisions.</p>



<p>&#8220;My hope is that there&#8217;s still going to be a place for page builders, Beaver Builder and everyone in this space, to have a little bit more agility,&#8221; McCullough said. &#8220;We can see Gutenberg kind of be like Instagram in that it&#8217;s going to appeal to a mass audience. We like to live in the Photoshop space where you&#8217;re going to get a lot of fine-tuned controls, solving problems and creating features that are going to help people build websites every day.&#8221;</p>



<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">

</div>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Fri, 04 Jan 2019 20:20:37 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:28;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:75:"WPTavern: WP Storybook: A Handy Reference for WordPress React UI Components";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:29:"https://wptavern.com/?p=86604";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:85:"https://wptavern.com/wp-storybook-a-handy-reference-for-wordpress-react-ui-components";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:1553:"<p><a href="https://lubus.in/">LUBUS</a>, a web design agency in Mumbai, has published a site called <a href="https://wp-storybook.netlify.com/">WP Storybook</a> that offers an interactive way to explore various WordPress React components. It allows developers to browse and search UI components and see a live preview of the component next to example source code. </p>



<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<a href="https://cloudup.com/cpA4-xaPukn"><img src="https://i0.wp.com/cldup.com/yCZSRiLkVv.gif?resize=627%2C297&ssl=1" alt="Wp storybook" width="627" height="297" /></a>
</div>



<p>WP Storybook lets you view different states for various UI components and even test them on different viewports. The development team at LUBUS is adding more as they discover them while building projects with Gutenberg using reusable components. Their goal in publishing the project is to help developers work faster by making components easier to discover and reference.</p>



<p>LUBUS&#8217; roadmap for WP Storybook includes the following:</p>



<ul><li>Add as many possible components and cases as possible</li><li>Capability to view and copy the example source</li><li>Playground to test out various props and options using knobs addon</li><li>Categorize components into groups for better discoverability</li><li>Recipe stories showcasing composing of various components</li></ul>



<p>If you want to contribute to WP Storybook or log an issue, the code is open source (MIT license) on <a href="https://github.com/lubusIN/wp-storybook">GitHub</a>.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Thu, 03 Jan 2019 23:51:43 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:29;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:73:"WPTavern: WordPress.com Launches New “Do Anything” Marketing Campaign";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:29:"https://wptavern.com/?p=86590";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:78:"https://wptavern.com/wordpress-com-launches-new-do-anything-marketing-campaign";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:4698:"<img />Hilde Lysiak reports on local news in her community on her WordPress.com-powered <a href="https://orangestreetnews.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Orange Street News</a> website



<p>WordPress.com is kicking off 2019 with a new national marketing campaign that features 14 entrepreneurs, writers, and non-profit organizations who are using the platform to make a big difference for their communities. The campaign is focused around the question: &#8220;What Would You Do If You Could Do Anything?&#8221; </p>



<p>WordPress.com published its inaugural <a href="https://en.blog.wordpress.com/2019/01/03/introducing-the-2019-anything-is-possible-list/">‘Anything Is Possible’ List</a>, which includes 10 mini-documentaries ranging from 1 minute to 1:44. A few of the stories highlighted include Congolese-American sisters operating a successful hair salon in NYC, a 12-year-old journalist running her own online publication, a blogger who went viral and published her own book, and a non-profit fighting misinformation and extremist narratives. Each is presented more in depth on a new <a href="https://wordpress.com/do-anything/">Do Anything</a> campaign site that was launched today.</p>



<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">

</div>



<p>Do Anything is WordPress.com&#8217;s first large-scale national brand campaign. It will debut TV, print, and digital advertising spots in The New Yorker and on TV networks, including The History Channel, CNN, and National Geographic. WordPress.com will also be running ads on podcasts, including The Daily and NPR. The new 30-second TV ad was created by <a href="http://interestingdevelopment.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Interesting Development</a>, an agency based in New York.</p>



<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">

</div>



<p>Much like gym memberships, WordPress.com tends to see more action at the beginning of a new year with 20% more sites are created in January than the average, according to Mark Armstrong at Automattic. The timing for the campaign is aimed at tapping into the motivation that millions of users have for starting a new business or blog at this time of year.</p>



<p>In 2016, Automattic started <a href="https://ma.tt/2016/01/marketing-at-automattic/">hiring for more marketing positions</a> as an answer to Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, Web.com, EIG, and Godaddy, competitors that Matt Mullenweg identified as having spent over $350M in advertising that year. In 2017, the company created <a href="https://design.blog/2017/05/18/how-a-detroit-hackathon-turned-into-wordpress-coms-first-ever-tv-spots/">five commercials</a>, its first ever TV spots, as part of a series called &#8220;Free to be.&#8221; Many found the commercials to be confusing and the <a href="https://wptavern.com/wordpress-coms-tv-commercials-are-confusing">messaging wasn&#8217;t clear</a>.</p>



<p>By contrast, the 2019 &#8220;Do Anything&#8221; campaign is much better at demonstrating what people can do with WordPress.  &#8220;As we share new work with the world we realize that some things will hit and some things will miss,&#8221; Automattic’s SVP of Brand, Michelle Broderick said. The company has continued to evolve its marketing based on feedback. This particular campaign was directly inspired by the people who are making things happen with WordPress.</p>



<p>&#8220;We were inspired by the people who use WordPress to imagine a better world,&#8221; Broderick said. &#8220;We saw everyone from bloggers to business owners to scientists to politicians using WordPress to share their story.&#8221;<br /></p>



<p>The new TV spot is an improvement over previous campaigns in terms of communicating a clear message, but it doesn&#8217;t carry the same authenticity as the mini-documentaries. Each one is relatable and inspiring in telling the stories of people who have already answered the question &#8220;What would you do if you could do anything?&#8221; Many of those who were featured have carried on with their dreams through perseverance, despite tragedy and struggle along the way. The documentaries are more poignant than the TV spot, which has the added constraint of having to capture the viewer&#8217;s attention with a shorter amount of time. </p>



<p>The &#8220;Do Anything&#8221; campaign as a whole is a good representation of the power of WordPress and should also help boost name recognition for the software in general. Broderick said Automattic is expecting tens of millions of impressions across TV, print, digital, and podcasts. The campaign is aimed at the American market but Armstrong said they hope to branch out into international markets in the future.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Thu, 03 Jan 2019 20:05:22 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:30;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:34:"HeroPress: YOU Make The Difference";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:56:"https://heropress.com/?post_type=heropress-essays&p=2672";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:120:"https://heropress.com/essays/you-make-the-difference/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=you-make-the-difference";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:10124:"<img width="960" height="480" src="https://s20094.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/010219-min-1024x512.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="Pull Quote: WordPress still attracts the same types of people. Those who are brave, who are kind, who are looking to the future." /><blockquote><p>“A place is only as good as the people you know in it. It&#8217;s the people that make the place.”</p>
<p>― Pittacus Lore, I Am Number Four</p></blockquote>
<p>This quote is a large part of the space WordPress holds within me.</p>
<p>Coming from a career in Civil Engineering and a background of Industrial Technology WordPress as a software drew me as a tool. It was a means to an end. I wasn’t blogging, I wasn’t looking to create an online voice, I was looking to build something and I needed a tool.</p>
<p>I was good at learning software, had used over a dozen very complicated systems by that point in my life, so I found WordPress and started learning it too.</p>
<p>A very melodramatic discovery story of WordPress for a HeroPress piece, I know.</p>
<p>The truth is I probably wouldn’t have stuck around were it not for the people. The story has evolved for me over the years but that’s the beginning. The beginnings are usually far less romantic than the endings in any story.</p>
<p>So why was I looking for a tool? Well, that’s a bit better of a story.</p>
<h3>Looking For A Tool</h3>
<p>I’ll prep you with the fact that I was driven, opinionated, blunt, and defensive. I had spent my college years and first years in my chosen career in a male-dominated industry. I learned how to navigate and thrive and took a job at a very large Engineering firm. About a year in I was granted a fantastic opportunity to work on a small startup team that was doing amazing work in 3D scanning.</p>
<p>Being a startup team demanded that we produce more and more work to determine the viability of the investment the firm was making in my boss’s plans. As we worked on landing deals that required overnight travel and training that required days away it brought to the surface a reality that wasn’t so good for me. As the only woman on the team, I doubled the travel budget. They needed two of everything for me since I couldn’t bunk up with my male coworkers.</p>
<p>The next months were a perfect storm of events. I made an opinionated comment to a division supervisor that was above my pay grade which enhanced my visibility as a problem. Then I got pregnant.</p>
<blockquote><p>You can’t walk around 3D scanning a PVC manufacturing facility while with child. They also don’t make maternity coveralls.</p></blockquote>
<p>I was officially dead weight. I lost the pregnancy and became depressed, anxious. It was easy for them to let me go then, I had stopped being productive. I found out a couple weeks after losing my job I was pregnant again. Talk about a whirlwind.</p>
<p>My husband was in the process of changing careers from Retail to Healthcare and maternity leave is not something you like to bring up on an interview, so I decided to find something to do from home. I started a local family newsletter and decided to create an online marketplace for moms who craft out of their homes, like a local Etsy. This is where my search for a tool began.</p>
<h3>Starting Again</h3>
<p>A few months later, with no WordPress experience other than what I managed to rake together while I was learning and building, I got a job at WPMUDEV doing product support. I needed the extra cash so my other projects took a backseat and I was soon completely engulfed. Through that job, I came to learn about the ecosystem that was WordPress. I had no idea that there was a place that existed outside of the corporate universe that could exist without sexist politics, hierarchy, and status quo. It was mind-blowing.</p>
<p>I was so hungry for people to interact with after being in such a team-oriented environment for so long. I loved working with others and I felt very alone until I found this great group of people. And oh what joy when I found it! I was a new mom at home with a baby trying to learn how to handle that new space in my life. My husband had completed a successful career change and we had moved. I had another baby. I met my friend Mason and we started a business together. I lost another pregnancy.</p>
<blockquote><p>In the space of two short years, my life had completely turned upside down and landed me in the place that would help me survive it all.</p></blockquote>
<p>You see, without the people, I wouldn’t have made it. I wouldn’t have been able to navigate the overwhelming waters that surrounded me outside of my day to day work. The people who befriended me, who were kind to me, who made jokes with me, who valued my contribution and intelligence without ever having set eyes on me, those were the people who kept me sane. They let me see I didn’t need to be defensive, that I didn’t have to be sorry about being opinionated, that I was different and that I should lean into that.</p>
<p>When I left product support to work with Mason at, what was formerly called, WP Valet it was yet another major shift in my life. The product space was so different than the agency space and I quickly adapted to the new pace. There was a rush of excitement while learning new things and applying skills that had laid dormant for some time. My father was a Navy man and an entrepreneur and shaped so much of how I applied myself, now I was in a place to push myself even further and define my own path. I was spoiled by my first interactions at WP Valet with developers like Zé Fontainhas and Mario Peshev. The whole thing was thrilling!</p>
<h3>And Then I Went To WordCamp</h3>
<p>My first WordCamp was WordCamp Miami 2013. It was probably the first time I’d traveled alone in some time and I was meeting my work family for the first time. On top of that, I was in MIAMI, so it was bound to be a great trip. I got to meet David Bisset and Lisa Sabin Wilson that year, and so many other wonderful people. I was on cloud 9, each and every personality was inspiring to me, all so different than what my former colleagues and field specialists were like. To top it off I walked into my first talk at a WordCamp, Pippin Wilson was talking about how developers should share code. I was beside myself, sharing your code and supporting each other? Not cutthroat over projects and billable hours?! I was swooning over the idea of ‘community’ and what I had stumbled into.</p>
<blockquote><p>Needless to say, I left 100% hooked on my path. WordPress was my life from that time on.</p></blockquote>
<p>We as people have long-tailed stories that weave and zigzag and turn back on themselves. We are products of ALL the things going on in our lives at any given moment. Without the personal struggles and the professional push, I would not have been able to value the community as much as I do. The overlapping of personal and professional trials and successes are what gives depth to our experiences. Their overlapping is what colors the story of our lives.</p>
<p>Fast forward a few years through a cross-state move, speaking selections, the birth of another child, a company expansion, another pregnancy loss, a company rebranding, a company restructuring, a return to school for Yoga training, and all the other things life throws in your path with family and work and here I sit typing my story at my counter while my middle child hums ‘Mamma Mia’ next to me. I am forever grateful for the life that I’ve been able to live through a whole new career in WordPress.</p>
<h3>You Make The Difference</h3>
<p>I am grateful for every soul I have met. I had the privilege to work with and become friendly with some of the nicest and most genuine people I will ever meet online and face to face. The ecosystem of WP has changed a lot over the years as most ecosystems do, but it still attracts the same types of people. Those who are brave, who are kind, who are looking to the future. My world is so much bigger because of all you. Thank You  <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/11/72x72/1f642.png" alt="?" class="wp-smiley" /></p>
<div class="rtsocial-container rtsocial-container-align-right rtsocial-horizontal"><div class="rtsocial-twitter-horizontal"><div class="rtsocial-twitter-horizontal-button"><a title="Tweet: YOU Make The Difference" class="rtsocial-twitter-button" href="https://twitter.com/share?text=YOU%20Make%20The%20Difference&via=heropress&url=https%3A%2F%2Fheropress.com%2Fessays%2Fyou-make-the-difference%2F" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a></div></div><div class="rtsocial-fb-horizontal fb-light"><div class="rtsocial-fb-horizontal-button"><a title="Like: YOU Make The Difference" class="rtsocial-fb-button rtsocial-fb-like-light" href="https://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fheropress.com%2Fessays%2Fyou-make-the-difference%2F" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a></div></div><div class="rtsocial-linkedin-horizontal"><div class="rtsocial-linkedin-horizontal-button"><a class="rtsocial-linkedin-button" href="https://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=https%3A%2F%2Fheropress.com%2Fessays%2Fyou-make-the-difference%2F&title=YOU+Make+The+Difference" rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title="Share: YOU Make The Difference"></a></div></div><div class="rtsocial-pinterest-horizontal"><div class="rtsocial-pinterest-horizontal-button"><a class="rtsocial-pinterest-button" href="https://pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=https://heropress.com/essays/you-make-the-difference/&media=https://heropress.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/010219-min-150x150.jpg&description=YOU Make The Difference" rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title="Pin: YOU Make The Difference"></a></div></div><a rel="nofollow" class="perma-link" href="https://heropress.com/essays/you-make-the-difference/" title="YOU Make The Difference"></a></div><p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://heropress.com/essays/you-make-the-difference/">YOU Make The Difference</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://heropress.com">HeroPress</a>.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Wed, 02 Jan 2019 20:15:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:15:"Kimberly Lipari";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:31;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:39:"Matt: Democratize Publishing, Revisited";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:22:"https://ma.tt/?p=48797";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:55:"https://ma.tt/2018/12/democratize-publishing-revisited/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:1674:"<p>During my <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2aNNlC8TUE">State of the Word Q&amp;A</a> I received some blogging homework from <a href="https://torumiki.com/">Toru Miki</a>, a WordPress contributor based in Tokyo. He asked me to revisit the WordPress mission, “Democratize Publishing,” and reflect on what that mission means to me today. So here you go, Toru: <br /></p>



<p>For many years, my definition of “Democratize Publishing” has been simply to help make the web a more open place. That foundation begins with the software itself, as outlined by the <a href="https://ma.tt/2014/01/four-freedoms/">Four Freedoms</a>: <br /></p>



<p>0. The freedom to run the program, for any purpose.</p>



<p>1. The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish.</p>



<p>2. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.</p>



<p>3. The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions, giving the community a chance to benefit from your changes.<br /></p>



<p>In 2018, the mission of “Democratize Publishing” to me means that people of all backgrounds, interests, and abilities should be able to access Free-as-in-speech software that empowers them to express themselves on the open web and to own their content.<br /></p>



<p>But as Toru noted in the original question, “Democratize Publishing” has come to mean many things to many people in the WordPress community. That’s one reason I like it. The WordPress mission is not just for one person to define. <br /></p>



<p>So I’d like to ask everyone: What does “Democratize Publishing” mean to you? &nbsp;<br /></p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Thu, 27 Dec 2018 00:06:36 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:4:"Matt";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:32;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:19:"Matt: Sponcon Posts";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:22:"https://ma.tt/?p=48788";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:36:"https://ma.tt/2018/12/sponcon-posts/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:422:"<p>I found <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/12/influencers-are-faking-brand-deals/578401/">this post by Taylor Lorenz</a> describing how aspiring influencers are posting fake, unpaid sponsored content to raise their status or hoping to nab a real sponsorship <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/12/influencers-are-faking-brand-deals/578401/">is totally bananas</a>.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Mon, 24 Dec 2018 16:08:34 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:4:"Matt";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:33;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:86:"WPTavern: WordPress Designers Explore Ideas for Moving Navigation to a Block Interface";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:29:"https://wptavern.com/?p=86518";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:97:"https://wptavern.com/wordpress-designers-explore-ideas-for-moving-navigation-to-a-block-interface";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5176:"<p>Creating a block for navigation menus is one of the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2018/12/08/9-priorities-for-2019/">nine projects</a> Matt Mullenweg identified for 2019 that will make a big impact for WordPress users. It&#8217;s also one of the most challenging from a UI perspective. At WordCamp US&#8217; contributor day, the design team <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/design/2018/12/18/exploring-a-nav-block-at-wordcamp-us/">explored ideas for what a navigation block might look like in the new editor</a>.</p>



<img />



<p>The team&#8217;s designs for a navigation block are still in the rough sketches stage, but it&#8217;s interesting to see different approaches as the project develops.</p>



<p>&#8220;If the Nav block could live in a container block (columns perhaps), then the settings for it could be tweaked in the sidebar,&#8221; XWP designer Joshua Wold said. &#8220;A further problem comes up when you try to figure out how much of the design of the nav should be controlled by the theme vs the Gutenberg editor.&#8221;</p>



<p>This is an important question  that will need to be answered in the near future &#8211; not only for navigation but also more broadly for the future of the role of themes in WordPress. We will be exploring this in more depth in future posts.</p>



<p>Designer Mel Choyce and Riad Benguella (one of the leads for Gutenberg phase 2), are currently soliciting ideas from the wider WordPress community about how the project should tackle the upcoming customization focus.</p>



<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">You care about WordPress and you don't have the time to contribute day to day, I'd love to hear your thoughts to get some inspiration about Phase 2 of Gutenberg, Site building, Customization&#8230; A tweet, a blog post, whatever works best for you. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/gutenideas?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#gutenideas</a> <a href="https://t.co/Y7tod5DoB2">https://t.co/Y7tod5DoB2</a></p>&mdash; Riad Benguella (@riadbenguella) <a href="https://twitter.com/riadbenguella/status/1075458929579167745?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 19, 2018</a></blockquote>
</div>



<p>One of the chief complaints about the first phase of the Gutenberg project was the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2018/10/05/gutenberg-phase-2-leads/#comment-34092">lack of public discussion</a> about the goals and the process of creating the editor. The Gutenberg team&#8217;s willingness to collate ideas across multiple mediums demonstrates a strong effort to seek out more diverse perspectives for phase 2. Ideas have already started rolling in.  </p>



<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Riffing on something <a href="https://twitter.com/photomatt?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@photomatt</a> said at <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/SOTW?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#SOTW</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/WCUS?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#WCUS</a>: To map out the future of themes / <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Gutenberg?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Gutenberg</a> 2.0 / <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/WordPress?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#WordPress</a> Next, maybe ship a Block Zen Garden type thing and asking designers / devs to create solutions, then work backwards to find a UI / UX to make that possible.</p>&mdash; Morten i Norge <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/11/72x72/1f1f8-1f1ef.png" alt="??" class="wp-smiley" /><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/11/72x72/1f328.png" alt="?" class="wp-smiley" /><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/11/72x72/1f976.png" alt="?" class="wp-smiley" /> (@mor10) <a href="https://twitter.com/mor10/status/1073664020471660544?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 14, 2018</a></blockquote>
</div>



<p>&#8220;Rather than starting with the back-end UI, we can start with the front-end result and build a UI to make the building of that front-end possible without messing up the accessibility and resilience of the root HTML document,&#8221; Morten Rand-Hendricksen said. &#8220;At the root of this would be CSS Grid as the main layout module to allow drag-and-drop style block layouts without making changes to the HTML source order.&#8221;</p>



<p>Many of the ideas that are coming in so far relate more broadly to site customization. These include <a href="http://theme.tips/blog/2018/12/21/random-thoughts-about-gutenizer-phase-2/">questions about what role the Customizer will play</a> and requests for features like creating <a href="https://twitter.com/alihs707/status/1075640228470243329">custom widths on the fly</a> and the <a href="https://twitter.com/alihs707/status/1075640228470243329">ability to drag content across columns.</a> If you have ideas about how navigation can be implemented in a block, take some time before the end of the year and drop your comments on the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/design/2018/12/18/exploring-a-nav-block-at-wordcamp-us/">make/design post</a> or write your own post and leave a link for others to share feedback.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Fri, 21 Dec 2018 23:52:26 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:34;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:26:"Matt: Seneca on Friendship";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:22:"https://ma.tt/?p=48764";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:43:"https://ma.tt/2018/12/seneca-on-friendship/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:705:"<blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>But nothing delights the mind so much as fond and loyal friendship. What a blessing it is to have hearts that are ready and willing to receive all your secrets in safety, with whom you are less afraid to share knowledge of something than keep it to yourself, whose conversation soothes your distress, whose advice helps you make up your mind, whose cheerfulness dissolves your sorrow, whose very appearance cheers you up!</p></blockquote>



<p>You can read <em>On Tranquility of Mind</em> <a href="https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Of_Peace_of_Mind">online for free here</a> or I enjoyed <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BCU07LO">this edition from Penguin</a>.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Fri, 21 Dec 2018 20:55:37 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:4:"Matt";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:35;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:54:"WPTavern: 9 Year Old Shares his Journey Learning React";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:29:"https://wptavern.com/?p=86488";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:65:"https://wptavern.com/9-year-old-shares-her-journey-learning-react";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:819:"<p>If learning React is among your New Year&#8217;s goals, here&#8217;s some inspiration from nine-year-old Revel Carlberg West. The video below is a recording of his presentation at the <a href="https://www.meetup.com/ReactNYC/">React NYC</a> meetup. West describes how he learned basic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and then moved on to learn React using the <a href="https://codesandbox.io/">CodeSandbox</a> online code editor. He also gives a live demo of <a href="https://reactjs.org/docs/hooks-intro.html">React Hooks</a> in action, a new feature that Sophie Alpert and Dan Abramov introduced at React Conf 2018. The code for West&#8217;s traffic light demo is <a href="https://codesandbox.io/s/xlw615w7ow">available on CodeSandbox</a> if you want to follow along.</p>



<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">

</div>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Fri, 21 Dec 2018 19:59:12 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:36;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:87:"WPTavern: WordPress 5.0.2 Released with Performance Gains of 330% for Block-Heavy Posts";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:29:"https://wptavern.com/?p=86510";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:97:"https://wptavern.com/wordpress-5-0-2-released-with-performance-gains-of-330-for-block-heavy-posts";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:1544:"<p><a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2018/12/wordpress-5-0-2-maintenance-release/">WordPress 5.0.2</a>, the of first of two rapid releases following 5.0, is now available. Sites with automatic background updates enabled should already be on the latest version. </p>



<p>This release addresses performance issues, one of the chief complaints for users who have adopted the block editor. It brings 45 improvements to the editor, with 14 of those related to performance and 31 bug fixes. According to Gary Pendergast, &#8220;the cumulated performance gains make it 330% faster for a post with 200 blocks.&#8221;</p>



<p>This maintenance release also fixes 17 editor-related bugs in the default WordPress themes as well as internationalization issues related to script loading.</p>



<p>Overall, 5.0.2 updates have gone smoothly, with the exception of a few conflicts with a handful of plugins. Most notably, WooCommerce store administrators found that the <a href="https://github.com/woocommerce/woocommerce/issues/22271">Orders tab had disappeared</a> after their sites updated. WooCommerce has fixed the issue in a quick patch release (version 3.5.3) that was pushed out this morning.</p>



<p>NextGEN Gallery creator Erick Danzer also reported <a href="https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C02RQBWTW/p1545334477273500">a minor issue with the Classic block</a> that prevents users from editing galleries via the placeholder the plugin had added. A fix for that issue should be forthcoming in an update to the plugin.<br /></p>



<p></p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Thu, 20 Dec 2018 21:14:58 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:37;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:78:"WPTavern: Gutenberg-Inspired Jenga Game “Gutenblox” Now Available for Sale";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:29:"https://wptavern.com/?p=86500";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:83:"https://wptavern.com/gutenberg-inspired-jenga-game-gutenblox-now-available-for-sale";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:1691:"<div class="wp-block-image"><img />photo credit: <a href="https://xwp.co/">XWP</a></div>



<p>XWP&#8217;s Gutenberg-inspired Jenga sets were arguably the most innovative swag at WordCamp US this year, but there weren&#8217;t enough to go around. Gutenblox, fondly dubbed &#8220;the Other Block Building Interface,&#8221; is now available on its own website where anyone can buy a set.</p>



<p>The <a href="https://gutenblox.fun">Gutenblox.fun</a> store is running on <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/bigcommerce/">BigCommerce</a> with the new <a href="https://wordpress.org/themes/twentynineteen/">Twenty Nineteen</a> theme active. It includes the rules of the game, cleverly adapted to the concept of Gutenblox:</p>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>Blocks treat Paragraphs, Headings, Media, etc. all as components that strung together make up the tower. Replacing the traditional concept of board games, Gutenblox is designed with progressive enhancement, meaning as new blocks are added to the top of the tower, they are backward compatible with all legacy content (although the legacy structure may become unstable as new blocks are added on).</p><p>We hope to offer rich value to players who will start with the foundation of a stable, accessible, and secure architecture, and then use a simple drag-and-drop method for modification.</p></blockquote>



<p>If you&#8217;re looking for a last-minute holiday gift or birthday gift for a friend who loves WordPress, Gutenblox is fun option. It also helps support a good cause. XWP is donating all profits from the sales of the game to the <a href="https://wordpressfoundation.org/">WordPress Foundation</a>. </p>



<p></p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Thu, 20 Dec 2018 17:02:35 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:38;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:79:"WPTavern: Introduction to the WPGraphQL Project with Jason Bahl and Ryan Kanner";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:29:"https://wptavern.com/?p=86483";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:90:"https://wptavern.com/introduction-to-the-wpgraphql-project-with-jason-bahl-and-ryan-kanner";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:1187:"<p>At WordCamp US 2018 I had the chance to sit down with <a href="https://twitter.com/jasonbahl">Jason Bahl</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/CodeProKid">Ryan Kanner</a>, both engineers at Digital First Media in Denver, Colorado, and contributors to the <a href="https://www.wpgraphql.com/">WPGraphQL</a> project. WPGraphQL is an open source plugin that provides an extendable GraphQL schema and API for any WordPress site.</p>



<p>Bahl, who created and maintains the project, also gave a lightning talk at WCUS on <a href="https://2018.us.wordcamp.org/session/gutenberg-graphql-and-building-blocks/">using GraphQL with Gutenberg</a> to improve the performance of custom blocks, as well as the developer experience of building them.</p>



<p>In our interview, Bahl and Kanner offer a general overview of the differences between GraphQL and REST. They explained how Digital First Media improved performance for the company&#8217;s publications by switching from REST to GraphQL. We also discussed how Gutenberg is a great use case for GraphQL and whether the project is something that could someday be included in WordPress core.</p>



<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">

</div>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Thu, 20 Dec 2018 04:00:02 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:39;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:45:"Dev Blog: WordPress 5.0.2 Maintenance Release";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:34:"https://wordpress.org/news/?p=6509";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:71:"https://wordpress.org/news/2018/12/wordpress-5-0-2-maintenance-release/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:4589:"<p>WordPress 5.0.2 is now available!</p>



<p>5.0.2 is a maintenance release that addresses 73 bugs. The primary focus of this release was performance improvements in the block editor: the cumulated performance gains make it 330% faster for a post with 200 blocks.</p>



<p>Here are a few of the additional highlights:</p>



<ul><li>45 total Block Editor improvements are included (14 performance enhancements &amp; 31 bug fixes).</li><li><a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/query?component=Bundled+Theme&milestone=5.0.2&col=id&col=summary&col=milestone&col=owner&col=type&col=status&col=priority&order=priority">17 Block Editor related bugs</a> have been fixed across all of the bundled themes.</li><li>Some <a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/query?component=I18N&milestone=5.0.2&col=id&col=summary&col=status&col=owner&col=type&col=priority&col=milestone&order=priority">internationalization (i18n) issues</a> related to script loading have also been fixed.</li></ul>



<p>For a full list of changes, please consult the <a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/query?status=closed&milestone=5.0.2&group=component">list of tickets on Trac</a> or the <a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/log/branches/5.0?action=stop_on_copy&mode=stop_on_copy&rev=44339&stop_rev=44183&limit=100&sfp_email=&sfph_mail=">changelog</a>.</p>



<p>You can <a href="https://wordpress.org/download/">download WordPress 5.0.2</a> or visit Dashboard → Updates and click <em>Update Now</em>. Sites that support automatic background updates have already started to update automatically.</p>



<p>Thank you to everyone who contributed to WordPress 5.0.2:</p>



<p><a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/babaevan/">Alexander Babaev</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/akirk/">Alex Kirk</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/allancole/">allancole</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/afercia/">Andrea Fercia</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/azaozz/">Andrew Ozz</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/atimmer/">Anton Timmermans</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/davidbinda/">David Binovec</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/jdtrower/">David Trower</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/ocean90/">Dominik Schilling</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/edpittol/">Eduardo Pittol</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/pento/">Gary Pendergast</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/greg-raven/">Greg Raven</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/gziolo/">gziolo</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/herregroen/">herregroen</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/icaleb/">iCaleb</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/audrasjb/">Jb Audras</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/joen/">Joen Asmussen</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/johnbillion/">John Blackbourn</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/desrosj/">Jonathan Desrosiers</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/khleomix/">khleomix</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/kjellr/">kjellr</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/laurelfulford/">laurelfulford</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/jeffpaul/">Jeff&nbsp;Paul</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/mihaivalentin/">mihaivalentin</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/dimadin/">Milan Dinić</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/more/"></a><a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/mmaumio/">Muntasir Mahmud</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/swissspidy/">Pascal Birchler</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/pratikthink/">Pratik K. Yadav</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/youknowriad/">Riad Benguella</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/richtabor/">Rich Tabor</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/strategio/">strategio</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/subrataemfluence/">Subrata Sarkar</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/tmatsuur/">tmatsuur</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/torontodigits/">TorontoDigits</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/grapplerulrich/">Ulrich</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/vaishalipanchal/">Vaishali Panchal</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/volodymyrkolesnykov/">volodymyrkolesnykov</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/westonruter/">Weston Ruter</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/fierevere/">Yui</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/ze3kr/">ze3kr</a>, and <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/mypacecreator/">のむらけい</a>.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Wed, 19 Dec 2018 23:47:55 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:15:"Gary Pendergast";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:40;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:107:"WPTavern: Happy Developers, Happy Ecosystem: The Intangible Impact of WordPress’ Minimum PHP Version Bump";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:29:"https://wptavern.com/?p=86464";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:113:"https://wptavern.com/happy-developers-happy-ecosystem-the-intangible-impact-of-wordpress-minimum-php-version-bump";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:6401:"<div class="wp-block-image">
<img />
</div>
<p>The following is a guest post by <a href="https://twitter.com/ChrisVanPatten">Chris Van Patten</a>, founder of <a href="https://tomodomo.co">Tomodomo</a>, a digital agency for magazine publishers. </p>
<hr class="wp-block-separator" />
<p>For years, WordPress has been ever-so-slightly behind the times on PHP version support&#8230;to put it kindly.</p>
<p>However, WordPress&#8217; legendary support for PHP versions back to 5.2 — versions long unsupported by the PHP project itself — wasn&#8217;t born out of a &#8220;we hate developers&#8221; strategy (although you&#8217;d be forgiven for thinking so given the reaction that policy often gets from developers). Instead, it was a genuinely noble and pragmatic effort to make WordPress, and thus publishing on the web, as widely available as possible.</p>
<p>Despite the reaction from many developers (and security-minded sysadmins), that strategy worked: WordPress <a href="https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management/all" rel="noopener" target="_blank">powers over 30% of the web</a>, and a <a href="https://wordpress.org/about/stats/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">significant chunk of those installations are on unsupported PHP versions</a>. For those users, it&#8217;s not that they don&#8217;t care that they are on an unsupported version of PHP; they just don&#8217;t know, or don&#8217;t know how to solve the problem.</p>
<p>But the winds of progress are blowing, and in 2019 WordPress is planning to make a change. Assuming everything goes according to plan, PHP 5.6 will become the minimum supported version in the first half of the year, and the minimum version will be bumped again to PHP 7 in the second half of 2019.</p>
<p>There are obvious benefits here from a security perspective. The oldest versions of PHP supported by WordPress today stopped receiving official security updates ages ago (PHP 5.2 hit EOL, or &#8220;end-of-life,&#8221; nearly 8 years ago). The speed improvements will be tremendous as well, particularly in PHP 7. Speaking from my own experience, I have several sites that once needed aggressive caching to prevent server overload. Since PHP 7, they run faster than ever, without caching of any kind.</p>
<p>Speed and security are the two most-cited reasons (and the most measurable reasons) for bumping the minimum version, but there are also other less tangible benefits that will filter well beyond WordPress core development.</p>
<h3>Simplified support</h3>
<p>While plugin developers have never been obligated to support all the versions of PHP that WordPress core does, many still chose to do so. That&#8217;s understandable: it could be tough to explain to a user why they can install WordPress in a certain development environment but couldn&#8217;t install a certain plugin.</p>
<p>For plugins that tried to match core&#8217;s backward compatibility support, that means testing and supporting up to nine versions of PHP: 5.2 through 5.6, and 7.0 through 7.3. (There was no PHP 6. I won&#8217;t bother explaining the <a href="https://ma.ttias.be/php6-missing-version-number/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">boring reasons why</a>.)</p>
<p>By pushing to 5.6, and eventually some version of PHP 7+, that cuts the number of versions that developers will feel compelled to support in half. In some way, Core will likely continue to support these old versions (through security backports to old versions of WordPress, for instance) but plugin developers can be assured that they don&#8217;t need to — and don&#8217;t need to feel any semblance of guilt about it either.</p>
<h3>Happier developers</h3>
<p>Even developers who are excited about the WordPress platform as a whole are likely to admit that it&#8217;s maybe not the most exciting code-base in the world. Over the past few years, I&#8217;ve seen a number of examples of developers who once limited themselves to WordPress now stretching into other frameworks and languages: Laravel, JavaScript, and Go are all popular new homes for WordPress expats.</p>
<p>Bumping the minimum version won&#8217;t change that apathy or exodus overnight, but it will give developers something to feel excited about. Modern PHP versions (especially PHP 7) offer genuinely cool new language features that make it easy to write performant, well-designed, and interesting code. I would even argue that it makes it fun. Modern PHP contains plenty of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_sugar" rel="noopener" target="_blank">syntactic sugar</a>, and while you shouldn&#8217;t base your diet on sugar it certainly makes for a nice treat.</p>
<p>Again, it is unlikely that core will start adopting these new language features on day one. The real benefit is that developers will feel empowered and secure in their decisions to start using these new capabilities, and will start to build plugins and themes that can borrow ideas from best practices in the broader PHP community.</p>
<h3>Celebrating the intangible</h3>
<p>While the measurable justifications for changing the minimum PHP version are certainly compelling, I think it&#8217;s also important to acknowledge these intangibles and indeed celebrate them. Bumping these versions will create a ripple effect across the ecosystem that will make developers more comfortable with writing modern code. It will reduce support and QA loads for companies that no longer need to support 9 different versions of PHP. It will make WordPress core a more attractive place to contribute.</p>
<p>Gutenberg, and all the modern tooling and architecture it brought, has already reinvigorated developers across the ecosystem and brought a huge number of new core contributors (<a href="https://wptavern.com/contributing-to-gutenberg-a-new-contributors-experience" rel="noopener" target="_blank">myself among them</a>). Embracing modern PHP is another step forward, and with other changes on the horizon (such as a <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2018/12/09/on-wordpress-git/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">move from SVN to Git</a>, coding standards changes, and projects like <a href="https://www.wptide.org/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Tide</a> which embrace new languages and architectures) I hope that 2019 will be the year WordPress delivers not only a best-in-class user experience, but a best-in-class developer experience too.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Wed, 19 Dec 2018 17:57:52 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:16:"Chris Van Patten";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:41;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:83:"WPTavern: Gutenberg for Writers: How to Configure the Editor for Fewer Distractions";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:29:"https://wptavern.com/?p=86427";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:93:"https://wptavern.com/gutenberg-for-writers-how-to-configure-the-editor-for-fewer-distractions";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:4740:"<img />photo credit: <a href="https://stocksnap.io/photo/8Y0EDX4VP9">Green Chameleon</a>



<p>For a long time I could not compose posts with the Gutenberg editor. I tested each release of the plugin throughout its journey into WordPress 5.0, but found it too distracting for my basic needs. It seemed better suited for building a brochure website, not for someone who uses WordPress primarily for writing. </p>



<p>This is the first thing you see on a vanilla install of WordPress when you go to the &#8220;Add New&#8221; post page:</p>



<div class="wp-block-image"><a href="https://i2.wp.com/wptavern.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Screen-Shot-2018-12-17-at-10.14.35-AM.png?ssl=1"><img /></a></div>



<p>Although it may not be immediately evident, the new editor actually has some built-in controls for improving the writing experience. They are tucked away behind the vertical ellipsis menu at the top of the screen. Here&#8217;s how to configure Gutenberg for writing:</p>



<h3>Step 1: Hide the Settings Sidebar</h3>



<p>The first step towards a more distraction-free writing experience is to hide the settings. Click the X at the top right of the screen.  If you&#8217;re trying to stay in the flow of writing, it&#8217;s not necessary to keep the block and document settings in view at all times. You can always toggle them on later when you&#8217;re finished getting your thoughts onto the screen.</p>



<h3>Step 2: Turn on &#8220;Fullscreen Mode&#8221;</h3>



<p>Many new and experienced WordPress users are not aware of Gutenberg&#8217;s &#8220;Fullscreen mode&#8221; that places the writing area in the center of the page and hides WordPress&#8217; admin menu sidebar.  This setting is a must for keeping distractions at bay. You can find it at the top right corner in the vertical ellipsis menu:</p>



<img />



<p>Once Fullscreen Mode is enabled, the writing area is greatly improved, with distractions removed from both sides of the content area. </p>



<img />



<h3>Step 3: Fix the Toolbar to the Top (optional)</h3>



<p>The block toolbar popping in and out of view was the bane of my Gutenberg experience until they developed the &#8220;Top Toolbar&#8221; setting. By default, the block-level toolbar obscures part of the content above it (as seen in the image below) and an obtrusive blue outline follows your mouse as you move over the paragraphs you have already written.</p>



<img />



<p>The psychological affect of all these boxes popping in and out of view may be more taxing for some writers, so this step is optional. The &#8220;Top Toolbar&#8221; setting to hide the block-level toolbar, as well as the blue block outlines, is also inside the vertical ellipsis menu at the top. The best way to see the difference in the experience is to experiment with turning it on and off.</p>



<p>Spotlight mode takes it one step further and greys out all the content except the current block, allowing writers to focus on one block at a time. When it is enabled, the blocks that are not being edited will partially fade away and no block outlines will be visible. </p>



<img />Spotlight mode



<p>Gutenberg still has a way to go before it can provide a truly distraction-free editing experience. None of the modes highlighted above will hide the metaboxes at the bottom or the menu bar at the top. They do, however, allow you to compose in an area without the block-level toolbar and sidebars getting in the way.</p>



<p>My thoughts don&#8217;t always come out in full sentences and paragraphs. Sometimes they are scattered throughout a document in half sentences, single words, quotes, and fragments of quotes that I&#8217;m not certain I will use. How do I reconcile this with Gutenberg? Sometimes the Classic Block is a good option for a first draft that looks more like a pile of messy notes than a document of well-formed thoughts. Here&#8217;s what that looks like if you have never used it:</p>



<img />Classic Block



<p>Even with these settings available, some writers may still prefer to use a dedicated writing app instead of the WordPress editor. Fortunately, Gutenberg has very good support for copying and pasting from other applications.</p>



<p>Top Toolbar, Spotlight, and Fullscreen modes are not the easiest features to discover but they can make a significant impact on your experience writing in the new editor. WordPress core may never provide a truly distraction-free writing experience, but that&#8217;s where the beauty of the plugin system comes into play. It gives developers the opportunity to create new and interesting approaches towards a better default writing experience. I hope to see some of those popping up in the directory as more users adopt Gutenberg.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Tue, 18 Dec 2018 03:17:37 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:42;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:92:"WPTavern: WordPress 5.0.2 to Bring Major Performance Improvements, Scheduled for December 19";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:29:"https://wptavern.com/?p=86358";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:102:"https://wptavern.com/wordpress-5-0-2-to-bring-major-performance-improvements-scheduled-for-december-19";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:3081:"<p><a href="https://i0.wp.com/wptavern.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/stopwatch.jpg?ssl=1"><img /></a>Processed with VSCOcam with c1 preset</p>
<p><a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2018/12/wordpress-5-0-1-security-release/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">WordPress 5.0.1</a> was released yesterday as a security release with fixes for seven vulnerabilities that were privately disclosed. It includes a few <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2018/12/13/backwards-compatibility-breaks-in-5-0-1/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">breaks in backwards compatibility</a> that plugin developers will want to review.</p>
<p>WordPress 5.0.2 will be the first planned followup release to 5.0 and is now scheduled to be released December 19, 2018. Gary Pendergast posted a <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2018/12/13/dev-chat-summary-december-12th/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">summary</a> of this week&#8217;s dev chat that includes the schedule and scope for the upcoming release. It will include Gutenberg 4.7, Twenty Nineteen bug fixes, and a few PHP 7.3 compatibility fixes.</p>
<p><a href="https://gschoppe.com/wordpress/benchmarking-gutenberg/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Slow performance</a> as compared to the classic editor has been a commonly-reported <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/6466" rel="noopener" target="_blank">issue</a> with Gutenberg. The project has a label for it on GitHub with <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/labels/%5BType%5D%20Performance" rel="noopener" target="_blank">26 open issues</a>. 140 performance-related issues have already been closed so the team is making progress on speeding it up. 5.0.2 will bring major performance improvements to the editor, particularly for content that includes hundreds of blocks. </p>
<p>&#8220;The cumulated performance gains are around 330% faster for a post with 200 blocks,&#8221; Matias Ventura said in an <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2018/12/13/5-0-2-editor-performance-and-bug-fixes/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">update</a> on the editor. &#8220;This might be even bigger for certain setups and plugin configurations — seeing the same test post be 540% faster with Yoast, for example.&#8221;</p>
<p>These changes are already in version 4.7 of the Gutenberg plugin, which users can run alongside WordPress 5.0.1 to test the latest. </p>
<p>RC 1 for 5.0.2 is planned for today and RC 2 (if necessary) is targeted for December 17. The official release is scheduled for December 19.</p>
<p>Gary Pendergast also outlined the scope and schedule for WordPress 5.1, which will be led by Matt Mullenweg. Pendergast proposed a relatively short release cycle with an official release February 21, since there are already more than <a href="https://core.trac.wordpress.org/query?status=closed&milestone=5.1" rel="noopener" target="_blank">200 tickets fixed for 5.1</a>. Focuses for the release include the REST API (particularly authentication solutions), core JS, and core themes. Beta 1 is planned for January 10, with RC 1 following February 7. </p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Fri, 14 Dec 2018 16:52:01 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:43;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:60:"WPTavern: WPWeekly Episode 341 – Recap of WordCamp US 2018";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:58:"https://wptavern.com?p=86395&preview=true&preview_id=86395";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:67:"https://wptavern.com/wpweekly-episode-341-recap-of-wordcamp-us-2018";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:1333:"<p>In this episode, <a href="http://jjj.me">John James Jacoby</a> and I recap WordCamp US 2018. We discuss what&#8217;s new in WordPress 5.0.1 and when users can expect to see 5.0.2.</p>
<p>We also chat about the new path that WordPress is on and where it may lead. John shares his perspective on what the atmosphere was like at the event and compares it to last year.</p>
<p>Near the end of the show, we explain why the Question and Answer process at the end of the State of the Word will likely undergo changes.</p>
<h2>Stories Discussed:</h2>
<p><a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2018/12/wordpress-5-0-1-security-release/">WordPress 5.0.1 Security Release</a></p>
<h2>WPWeekly Meta:</h2>
<p><strong>Next Episode:</strong> Wednesday, December 19th 3:00 P.M. Eastern</p>
<p>Subscribe to <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/wordpress-weekly/id694849738">WordPress Weekly via Itunes</a></p>
<p>Subscribe to <a href="https://www.wptavern.com/feed/podcast">WordPress Weekly via RSS</a></p>
<p>Subscribe to <a href="http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/wordpress-weekly-podcast?refid=stpr">WordPress Weekly via Stitcher Radio</a></p>
<p>Subscribe to <a href="https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/ps/Ir3keivkvwwh24xy7qiymurwpbe">WordPress Weekly via Google Play</a></p>
<p><strong>Listen To Episode #341:</strong><br />
</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Fri, 14 Dec 2018 01:59:19 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Jeff Chandler";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:44;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:63:"WPTavern: WordCamp US 2019 to be Held November 1-3 in St. Louis";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:29:"https://wptavern.com/?p=86379";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:73:"https://wptavern.com/wordcamp-us-2019-to-be-held-november-1-3-in-st-louis";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:4527:"<p><a href="https://i1.wp.com/wptavern.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/st-louis.jpg?ssl=1"><img /></a>photo credit: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:St_Louis_night_expblend.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></p>
<p>Dates for WordCamp US 2019 were <a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2018/12/wordcamp-us-2019-dates-announced/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">announced</a> today, less than a week after wrapping up a successful camp in Nashville. Unlike all previous years held in December, next year&#8217;s event will take place November 1-3 in <a href="https://2018.us.wordcamp.org/2018/06/15/matt-mullenweg-announces-st-louis-as-wordcamp-us-2019-2020-host-city/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">St. Louis, Missouri</a>. </p>
<p>For the most part, community reactions to the new dates were positive. Early November dates place the event well ahead of the end of the year holidays that attendees had previously bemoaned.</p>
<p>&#8220;I love this date set better than the previous one. It’s so much easier to attend/speak pre-Thanksgiving,&#8221; WordPress developer Mitch Cantor <a href="https://twitter.com/thatmitchcanter/status/1073307921851867136" rel="noopener" target="_blank">said</a>.</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<p lang="en" dir="ltr"><a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/WordCamp?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#WordCamp</a> US, November 1-3, 2019. This is great news! December is always a mad dash to an arbitrary solstice-based finish line. Moving <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/WCUS?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#WCUS</a> to November takes a huge load off! <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/WordPress?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#WordPress</a> <a href="https://t.co/WUToY3eiam">https://t.co/WUToY3eiam</a></p>
<p>&mdash; Morten Rand-Hendriksen (@mor10) <a href="https://twitter.com/mor10/status/1073308742488227840?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 13, 2018</a></p></blockquote>
<p></p>
<p>There is always a conflict for some demographic of attendees. This year the hardest hit are parents of small children who will likely miss taking their kids trick-or-treating due to traveling on or before Halloween in order to make it to the event. WordCamp US is a family-friendly event but bringing children to a WordCamp can be extraordinarily challenging, even when the event includes childcare. (This particular event doesn&#8217;t.) For a few attendees, missing Halloween with their children is a deal-breaker. </p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<p lang="en" dir="ltr">Exactly what I was thinking. I'd have to fly in on Halloween, no way I'm missing Halloween with my 2 year old.</p>
<p>&mdash; Katie Thompson (@katietdesign) <a href="https://twitter.com/katietdesign/status/1073341329021775875?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 13, 2018</a></p></blockquote>
<p></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<p lang="en" dir="ltr">That’s a good point! <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/11/72x72/1f640.png" alt="?" class="wp-smiley" /></p>
<p>&mdash; Tessa Kriesel (@tessak22) <a href="https://twitter.com/tessak22/status/1073333517646467075?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 13, 2018</a></p></blockquote>
<p></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<p lang="en" dir="ltr">Though this one is something a lot of parents really enjoy spending with their small children especially in the US. We're not talking about national hotdog day here.</p>
<p>&mdash; Patrick Garman (@pmgarman) <a href="https://twitter.com/pmgarman/status/1073317197194428421?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 13, 2018</a></p></blockquote>
<p></p>
<p>One possible solution for the parents who feel they have to miss WordCamp US because of their kids, might be for the organizers to schedule the contributor day as the first day of the camp. That might enable people to fly in on an early morning flight and still get to experience part of the contributor day and all of the main event. </p>
<p>In a community this large, with many other holidays and WordCamps already on the calendar, it&#8217;s difficult to find a date for WordCamp US that doesn&#8217;t have conflicts. This is a good problem for the community to have. Matt Mullenweg shared during the State of the Word that the community has experienced 50% year over year growth with more than 350K members in 687 meetup groups and more than 5,000 meetup events. With this rate of growth, the community can expect more regional and local camps to spring up in the coming years, which means more conflicts but also more options for getting together in the future.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Fri, 14 Dec 2018 00:43:48 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:45;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:93:"WPTavern: WordPress Plugin Directory Now Features a Curated Section for Block-Enabled Plugins";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:29:"https://wptavern.com/?p=86331";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:104:"https://wptavern.com/wordpress-plugin-directory-now-features-a-curated-section-for-block-enabled-plugins";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:4065:"<p>If you visit the <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">plugin directory</a>, you will notice a new section at the top featuring block-enabled plugins. WordPress 5.0 has been downloaded more than 8 million times, just one week after its release, and users are looking for blocks to extend the new editing experience. WordPress.org is highlighting plugins to push the block ecosystem forward and will soon be doing the same for themes.</p>
<p><a href="https://i1.wp.com/wptavern.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Screen-Shot-2018-12-13-at-9.35.13-AM.png?ssl=1"><img /></a></p>
<p>There are currently 94 blocks in the featured section. In a <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/plugins/2018/12/07/blocks-plugins-and-you/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">post</a> on make.wordpress.org/plugins, Samuel (Otto) Wood invited developers to email the plugins team at plugins@wordpress.org if they have a block-enabled plugin that they want to be included. The basic requirements are a plugin that introduces or improves blocks.</p>
<p>I asked Otto how they select from submissions. He said the plugins team is curating the list manually and adding those they think are good or interesting.</p>
<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s not a high bar; if it has a neat block, we&#8217;ll add it for now,&#8221; Otto said. &#8220;We may raise the bar depending on how big the section gets, and the section is not final by any means. We&#8217;ll change the inclusions according to how it works out. The goal is to promote neat and cool integrations, but there aren&#8217;t a lot of those yet. It&#8217;s new.&#8221;</p>
<p>Assigning a tag to block-enabled plugins that authors could opt into would eliminate the need for manual approval on the section, but Otto said they are currently handling it more like a showcase.</p>
<p>&#8220;Letting the plugin authors just add a tag would reduce the available tags (it&#8217;s already limited to 5) as well as reducing the value of curation,&#8221; Otto said. &#8220;We may change that as well in the future, somehow. Nothing is set in stone right now, we just want to see people making cool blocks and see what happens with that.&#8221;</p>
<p>A directory devoted entirely to blocks may also be coming to WordPress.org next year. In a recent post, Matt Mullenweg identified <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2018/12/08/9-priorities-for-2019/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">9 Projects for 2019</a>, including &#8220;building a WordPress.org directory for discovering blocks, and a way to seamlessly install them.&#8221; This is a much larger task and requires WordPress to answer a few questions: Will plugins continue to be the primary delivery mechanism for blocks? Or will WordPress.org implement a system where users can download JS-only blocks, similar to the Gutenberg Cloud project? </p>
<p>Three months ago, Otto <a href="https://wptavern.com/gutenberg-cloud-a-cross-platform-community-library-for-custom-gutenberg-blocks#comment-260894" rel="noopener" target="_blank">commented</a> on a post about Gutenberg Cloud, saying that js-only blocks are likely only suited to frontend enhancements.</p>
<p>&#8220;I remain unconvinced that js-only blocks have a place which is meaningful other than the trivial layout based things that blocks can do,&#8221; Otto said. &#8220;Yes, you can build great looking blocks with JavaScript only, and since it’s an editor, that is a really big deal. But without any actual support on the backend to &#8216;do stuff of substance,&#8217; it is just visual glitter.&#8221;</p>
<p>Offering JS-only blocks through WordPress.org might also complicate block discovery if users don&#8217;t know whether to look for blocks in a plugin or via the JS-only block delivery system. There are a lot of unknowns in the block era that will require WordPress to make some decisions. Meanwhile, the ecosystem of block-enabled plugins will continue expanding as more users adopt the new editor and especially as widgets and menus are ported to blocks in phase 2 of the Gutenberg project.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Thu, 13 Dec 2018 21:32:13 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:46;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:42:"Dev Blog: WordCamp US 2019 dates announced";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:34:"https://wordpress.org/news/?p=6496";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:68:"https://wordpress.org/news/2018/12/wordcamp-us-2019-dates-announced/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:705:"<p>Save the date! <a href="https://2019.us.wordcamp.org/2018/12/12/wordcamp-us-2019-announcing-our-dates/">The next WordCamp US</a> will be held on November 1-3, 2019, in beautiful <a href="https://2018.us.wordcamp.org/2018/06/15/matt-mullenweg-announces-st-louis-as-wordcamp-us-2019-2020-host-city/">St Louis, Missouri</a>. One of our largest events of the year, WordCamp US is a great chance to connect with WordPress enthusiasts from around the world. This is also the event that features Matt Mullenweg&#8217;s annual <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5b-N2RmxS8">State of the Word</a> address. </p>



<p>We&#8217;d love to see you in St. Louis next year, so mark your calendar now!<br /></p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Thu, 13 Dec 2018 19:47:21 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:16:"Andrea Middleton";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:47;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:111:"WPTavern: Interview with Rachel Cherry: Automattic Pledges to Fund WPCampus’ Accessibility Audit of Gutenberg";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:29:"https://wptavern.com/?p=86293";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:118:"https://wptavern.com/interview-with-rachel-cherry-automattic-pledges-to-fund-wpcampus-accessibility-audit-of-gutenberg";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:2477:"<p>While at WordCamp US, I had the opportunity to catch up with <a href="https://wpcampus.org/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">WPCampus</a> director Rachel Cherry, who is coordinating an audit on Gutenberg for the organization she leads. WPCampus <a href="https://wptavern.com/wpcampus-seeks-to-raise-30k-for-gutenberg-accessibility-audit" rel="noopener" target="_blank">launched its crowdfunding campaign</a> at the end of November and more than $10K has come in towards the <a href="https://wpcampus.org/2018/11/fundraising-for-wpcampus-gutenberg-accessibility-audit/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">$30K goal</a>.</p>
<p>The day before WordPress 5.0 was released, WPCampus announced that Automattic has pledged to ensure WPCampus&#8217; accessibility audit of Gutenberg is fully funded. </p>
<p>&#8220;I think that they [Automattic] see that it is important,&#8221; Cherry said. &#8220;Even when they said they weren&#8217;t going to do it, I don&#8217;t think it was ever &#8216;We&#8217;re never going to;&#8217; it was just &#8216;Not right now.&#8217; For us, we couldn&#8217;t necessarily wait for &#8216;maybe we&#8217;ll do it later,&#8217; so that&#8217;s why we jumped on it and got the ball rolling. I think they saw an opportunity where they could step in and have the means to move this along even further. They see the value and I think that&#8217;s why they wanted to jump in. They also saw all the community effort going on.&#8221;</p>
<p>In the interview below, Cherry discusses how leaders in the WPCampus community rallied to get the audit in motion. The organization has received seven responses from vendors and is currently in the selection process. She also shared a little bit about her conversation with Matt Mullenweg during his community office hours and their discussion about how WordPress is used in higher education.</p>
<p>Cherry&#8217;s strategy in advocating for accessibility is to focus on slicing through the confusion surrounding accessibility problems with an emphasis on education and communication. Although WordPress has set accessibility standards, the project has fallen short on enforcing them. In addition to putting automated accessibility testing in place for core, Cherry said she would also like to get more support for helping theme and plugin authors meet accessibility standards. This would help ensure that the code WordPress.org puts on the web is more accessible for those who are creating customized sites.</p>
<p></p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Thu, 13 Dec 2018 04:29:42 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sarah Gooding";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:48;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:42:"Dev Blog: WordPress 5.0.1 Security Release";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:34:"https://wordpress.org/news/?p=6498";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:68:"https://wordpress.org/news/2018/12/wordpress-5-0-1-security-release/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:4797:"<p>WordPress 5.0.1 is now available. This is a <strong>security release</strong> for all versions since WordPress 3.7. We strongly encourage you to update your sites immediately.</p>



<p>Plugin authors are encouraged to <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2018/12/13/backwards-compatibility-breaks-in-5-0-1/">read the 5.0.1 developer notes</a> for information on backwards-compatibility.</p>



<p>WordPress versions 5.0 and earlier are affected by the following bugs, which are fixed in version 5.0.1. Updated versions of WordPress 4.9 and older releases are also available, for users who have not yet updated to 5.0.</p>



<ul><li><a href="https://ripstech.com">Karim El Ouerghemmi</a> discovered that authors could alter meta data to delete files that they weren&#8217;t authorized to.</li><li>Simon Scannell of <a href="https://blog.ripstech.com">RIPS Technologies</a> discovered that authors could create posts of unauthorized post types with specially crafted input.</li><li><a href="https://twitter.com/_s_n_t">Sam Thomas</a> discovered that contributors could craft meta data in a way that resulted in PHP object injection. </li><li><a href="https://security-consulting.icu">Tim Coen</a> discovered that contributors could edit new comments from higher-privileged users, potentially leading to a cross-site scripting vulnerability.</li><li><a href="https://security-consulting.icu">Tim Coen</a> also discovered that specially crafted URL inputs could lead to a cross-site scripting vulnerability in some circumstances. WordPress itself was not affected, but plugins could be in some situations. </li><li><a href="https://yoast.com/">Team Yoast</a> discovered that the user activation screen could be indexed by search engines in some uncommon configurations, leading to exposure of email addresses, and in some rare cases, default generated passwords.</li><li><a href="https://security-consulting.icu">Tim Coen</a> and <a href="https://medium.com/websec">Slavco</a> discovered that authors on Apache-hosted sites could upload specifically crafted files that bypass MIME verification, leading to a cross-site scripting vulnerability. </li></ul>



<p>Thank you to all of the reporters for <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/testing/reporting-security-vulnerabilities/">privately disclosing the vulnerabilities</a>, which gave us time to fix them before WordPress sites could be attacked.</p>



<p><a href="https://wordpress.org/download/">Download WordPress 5.0.1</a>, or venture over to <code>Dashboard → Updates</code> and click <code>Update Now</code>. Sites that support automatic background updates are already beginning to update automatically.</p>



<p>In addition to the security researchers mentioned above, thank you to everyone who contributed to WordPress 5.0.1:</p>



<p><a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/tellyworth">Alex Shiels</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/xknown">Alex Concha</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/atimmer">Anton Timmermans</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/azaozz">Andrew Ozz</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/aaroncampbell">Aaron Campbell</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/andreamiddleton">Andrea Middleton</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/vortfu">Ben Bidner</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/barry">Barry Abrahamson</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/chriscct7">Chris Christoff</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/darthhexx/">David Newman</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/apokalyptik">Demitrious Kelly</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/dd32">Dion Hulse</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/hnotess/">Hannah Notess</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/pento">Gary Pendergast</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/herregroen">Herre Groen</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/iandunn">Ian Dunn</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/jeremyfelt">Jeremy Felt</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/joemcgill">Joe McGill</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/johnjamesjacoby/">John James Jacoby</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/desrosj">Jonathan Desrosiers</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/chanthaboune">Josepha Haden</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/joostdevalk">Joost de Valk</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/batmoo/">Mo Jangda</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/nickdaugherty">Nick Daugherty</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/peterwilsoncc">Peter Wilson</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/swissspidy">Pascal Birchler</a>, <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/SergeyBiryukov">Sergey Biryukov</a>, and <a href="https://twitter.com/p_valentyn">Valentyn Pylypchuk</a>.</p>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Thu, 13 Dec 2018 03:13:50 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:8:"Ian Dunn";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:49;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:13:"
	
	
	
	
	
	
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:2:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:82:"Post Status: Interview with Matt Mullenweg on Gutenberg, WordPress, and the future";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"https://poststatus.com/?p=50403";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:51:"https://poststatus.com/matt-mullenweg-on-gutenberg/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:101863:"<p>Welcome to the Post Status <a href="https://poststatus.com/category/draft">Draft podcast</a>, which you can find <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/post-status-draft-wordpress/id976403008">on iTunes</a>, <a href="https://play.google.com/music/m/Ih5egfxskgcec4qadr3f4zfpzzm?t=Post_Status__Draft_WordPress_Podcast">Google Play</a>, <a href="http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/krogsgard/post-status-draft-wordpress-podcast">Stitcher</a>, and <a href="http://simplecast.fm/podcasts/1061/rss">via RSS</a> for your favorite podcatcher. Post Status Draft is hosted by Brian Krogsgard.</p>
<p>In this episode, I am joined by <a href="https://ma.tt">Matt Mullenweg</a>, the co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic.</p>
<p>Just after releasing WordPress 5.0, and on the heels of WordCamp US, Matt and I review the event, the release, and discuss how he thinks things went, what could have gone better, and what he sees ahead.</p>
<p>We also dig into WooCommerce, various plans around core development processes, Automattic, and more. I hope you enjoy.</p>
<p></p>
<p>And an audio version.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Full transcript is coming soon.</p>
<h3>Episode Links</h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://ma.tt/">Matt&#8217;s blog</a></li>
<li><a href="https://automattic.com">Automattic</a></li>
<li>WordCamp US <a href="https://ma.tt/2018/12/state-of-the-word-2018/">State of the Word</a></li>
<li>Post Status&#8217;s <a href="https://poststatus.com/state-of-the-word-2018/">coverage of WCUS</a></li>
<li><a href="https://grief.com/the-five-stages-of-grief/">5 Stages of Grief</a></li>
</ul>
<h3>Sponsor: iThemes</h3>
<p><a href="https://ithemes.com/?utm_source=post_status&utm_medium=banner&utm_campaign=ps_ads">iThemes</a> makes great WordPress plugins, themes and training to help take the guesswork out of building, maintaining and securing WordPress websites. I talk to iThemes CEO Cory Miller during the break to hear about what they are working on, and excited about for the coming year.</p>
<p>Thanks to <a href="https://ithemes.com/?utm_source=post_status&utm_medium=banner&utm_campaign=ps_ads">iThemes</a> for being a Post Status partner.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<h3>Full Transcript</h3>
<div class="transcript">
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Hello and welcome to Post Status Draft. I hope you enjoy this interview with Matt Mullenweg. It lasts for a while, but I think that it&#8217;s worth catching the whole thing. We cover a whole bunch of topics. I want to thank iThemes for being our partner for this episode. iThemes has been in the WordPress space for so, so long and they make many great products, whether you&#8217;re looking to secure your website, manage your plugins and themes and so much more. Go to iThemes.com to learn more and thanks so much to the team at iThemes for being a Post Status partner. Now here&#8217;s the show. So hello and welcome to Post Status Draft. Fresh off of the release of WordPress 5.0 and WordCamp US, I&#8217;m here with Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of WordPress. Hey Matt.Matt Mullenweg: Howdy, howdy. It&#8217;s good to see everyone again.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah, it&#8217;s great to see you. You look comfortable. You must be somewhere that is something like home.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, I&#8217;m in actually New York City this week. I had a few meetings after the WordCamp and it&#8217;s also just one of my favorite cities to be especially this time of year. The lights and everything around Christmas time are just gorgeous, so it&#8217;s fun.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah. I&#8217;ve never been to New York City in the Christmas season, but it&#8217;s one of those bucket list type of things. So let&#8217;s start off with just how are you feeling post-release, post-event? How do you feel like things went overall?</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Super energized. I&#8217;d say like day before the release was pretty nervewracking, but it went better than I think almost anyone hoped, including myself. There was a great energy at WordCamp of we were able to kind of &#8230; I think instead of arguing about whether we should do a release or not, should it be Thursday or Tuesday or next month or never, or all these sorts of different options, everyone would say, &#8220;Okay, it happens. The world didn&#8217;t end and what can we do next to make things better?&#8221; That kind of making things better conversation is where I find the WordPress community is most productive. It&#8217;s where you can really get all sorts of different ideas and you can really get to the point where it does make things better for our users.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah. And I tend to think generally people cool down when they&#8217;re in person versus when they&#8217;re online. So all the energy, the pent-up energy from working through all the things that have to do with the release over the course of two years and it finally comes on you, sometimes it just feels good to get it out at the end of the day. You let those bygones be bygones.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: I felt like it was actually a pretty drama-free release and event. I didn&#8217;t see any major bugs come across. I asked some of the big hosts and some of the big plugin companies, I was like, &#8220;What are you all seeing? Are you seeing a bunch of stuff come through?&#8221; And I didn&#8217;t get much. Have you heard much feedback in terms of, are there a lot of bugs coming up? Are there are a lot of issues or has it been fairly smooth?</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Well, what I&#8217;ve been telling you all year, that it would be anticlimactic, I was half right. The software was anticlimactic. Everything around the software was pretty intense.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Very climactic, yeah.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: But yeah, I actually didn&#8217;t realize it before I got on for State of the Word, but host site GoDaddy, others have already upgraded over a million sites. They&#8217;re seeing normal support loads, things like that. It&#8217;s like I said, ultimately what drives a release day is, is the software ready? And the software was ready and all the inputs, all the data, all the sort of normal things we look at were there. It was just one of these things where the people, we didn&#8217;t seem ready and that&#8217;s much harder to navigate. Sometimes getting it out there helps a lot, but it&#8217;s one thing that I&#8217;ve seen throughout my entire professional software career is the longer you go between releases the harder they are. I&#8217;ve seen this in small teams, big teams, public, private, inside automatic, outside, whatever it is. If you can get to where you&#8217;re releasing more frequently, it just removes a ton of stress and burden on each individual release and I think makes for ultimately a much better process for everyone involved.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah, and I want to dig into more about the process. I was really surprised. I don&#8217;t think I saw a single person share your old blog post about the version 1.0 and the importance of shipping 1.0. Maybe we&#8217;re just getting really old. So referencing a blog post that&#8217;s that many years old is harder now. But yeah, I&#8217;ve been in the camp for a while now that it just seemed like you&#8217;ve got to get it out there. I felt like we always had an advantage in the WordPress landscape and this is one of the things I was worried about when you announced the big feature release style. Here are our three goals and we&#8217;re going to make the releases strategic to that. We had the benefit of iteration when we had the regular releases. So overall do you feel like the tradeoff of losing the regular major releases was worth it in order to get the big thing shipped?</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: I think of like Drupal, the struggles and the boundaries they had going from 6.0 to 7.0 to 8.0 and it was almost like a whole new thing. This was really our first time, in a really long time at least, maybe ever, that you feel like you update and it&#8217;s in some ways a whole new thing, and it was a long release cycle that led up to that. So do you think that tradeoff was worth it or do you think there was a tradeoff? Is my assumption a poor one?</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Well, there was in that we didn&#8217;t do a major release for a year. We did slip some things that would previously be in major releases in the minor releases, in the 4.9.X kind of releases, so that helped. That&#8217;s a good question. I think that in 2019 we can do both. So we can keep some really super rapid public iteration and the feature plugins, and who knows, I&#8217;d actually love to see a few more kind of areas of WordPress that we want to innovate in or expand in, take more of this plugin approach. And then we also have a lot of great stuff in the hopper for some major releases. I think we&#8217;ll be able to do &#8230; there was a lot of talk at contributor day as we were looking at it.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: It actually slipped my mind that we did that whole code reformatting and JavaScript reorganization in trunk, and that&#8217;s not in 5.0, right? Because we branched off 4.9.8 to make it as stable and as few changes as possible. So we&#8217;ve got actually, I think there&#8217;s another 200 patches already in trunk that weren&#8217;t in 5.0. So we&#8217;ve just got a lot of good stuff already in there, including the whole reorganization that you kind of put that together plus maybe ServeHappy and the white screen protection and some really cool stuff that&#8217;s kind of more like small stuff. That could be a 5.1 right there. I could see that going in the beta January, RC in February.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah, talk about ServeHappy. I mean, for I don&#8217;t know, five, six, seven years, people have wanted, demanded PHP upgrades and it was a footnote in this state of the word.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: I should have done it as one more thing.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: One more thing, yeah. Had to really get all the developers on your team for that one. So you made a commitment to in 2019 have a staggered upgrade process to mandate certain versions of PHP. Remind me if I&#8217;m incorrect, 5.6 in the Spring and 7.0 next winter. Is that basically the timeline?</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, that&#8217;s the idea and we&#8217;re just going to go through. And again this is, just like with Gutenberg, it&#8217;s not about changing a version number or something. It&#8217;s really about bringing the whole community along for the ride, so we need to scan all the plugins. For 5.6, I think we&#8217;ll actually be able to update them or send patches to maintainers, even update and maintain plugins, because those changes are pretty easy. Seven is tougher and I think that is, we&#8217;re targeting December for that. I could see that slipping, just depending on whether host in the meantime and everyone else is able to get there, but even getting to 5.6 opens up a ton of possibilities, including with things like OAuth and GraphQL and namespaces, and there&#8217;s some pretty cool features. 5.6 is ancient at this point. It had a lot of improvements over 5.2.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: And a lot-</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: And we still have a lot of folks on these older versions, so part of the reason we&#8217;re giving ourselves time as well is to, if we can run some analytics to figure out which host these old sites are on Ron and reach out to them, try to work with them.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Do you think a part of the reason why you even think this is possible, for a long time, I mean, people were running WordPress across a huge spectrum of versions of PHP. Do you think part of the reason why you even think this possible is the hosting relationships that had been made between the community and the hosting companies over the past few years? Because that&#8217;s something that I&#8217;ve felt like has been quite significant. The efforts that, if you look at the big ones, the GoDaddy and the Bluehosts of the world, the amount of commitment they&#8217;re giving to the community, do you think that&#8217;s a big part of it? And how hard is the long tail going to be to capture, do you think?</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: That&#8217;s a big question. First, I&#8217;ll say that the improvement of hosts, particularly the big ones in becoming kind of like WordPress first, providing a really first-class WordPress experience from security updates, everything, it&#8217;s probably been the biggest change in the WordPress ecosystem over the past five years. And I have huge admiration for them because they&#8217;re doing this for millions of sites, thousands of support folks. They&#8217;re really moving some really, steering some really large ships and the results have been fantastic. We got, I think it was up to 68% of our WordPress was on 4.9 by the time 5.0 come out.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah, that&#8217;s great.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: But in terms of what&#8217;s going to make the PHP upgrading easier, it&#8217;s really a combination of everything, including time, including some of this white screen protection stuff that we&#8217;re doing. If we can back port that, you know we still backport to 3.7 all of our security updates?</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Mm-hmm (affirmative).</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Which is kind of wild.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: It is. It&#8217;s great for security of the Web broadly, but it&#8217;s quite something.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, if we can do that for some of this, maybe we can put some of this white screen upgrade protection into those old versions, so that way we can kind of protect people who might be doing plugin and theme or core updates from breaking their site in programmatic way. Um, it&#8217;s also the work that&#8217;s gone into updates. We know we migrated to a new data center this year for WordPress.org It&#8217;s like, I forget the exact or something like five or 10 times more powerful than the old one.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Wow.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Almost no one noticed. But you notice that there&#8217;s no more 503s when we run the updates, and things can go faster. This means we can do auto updates better, which means that we&#8217;ll be able to do opt-in for core and plugin and theme auto updates and then maybe move that to opt-out 2020. These are all just things that have been going on that represent thousands of hours of work from hundreds of people that set the stage so we can do stuff. It&#8217;s part of the reason I think that we will be able to move a lot faster in 2019. We had to stop core ,essentially freeze it for Gutenberg, because we were building a new foundation and you can&#8217;t build the house on top while you&#8217;re also pouring the concrete, right? Things will sink. They&#8217;ll get off center. I&#8217;ve never built a house so I don&#8217;t know this analogy all the way, but now we&#8217;ve got the foundation. We&#8217;ve got this framework and things being built on top of that framework. We&#8217;re already starting to see the benefits to things like keyboard navigation and accessibility when they&#8217;re built using Gutenberg fields that already have this kind of baked in.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: So I think that we have the opportunity to do just a massive upgrade not just of the editor but of every single plugin, every single theme, every single person&#8217;s experience with WordPress because think about it. No one just runs core. Cool if we do Gutenberg in core? Ultimately it doesn&#8217;t matter. Everyone&#8217;s got five, 10, 20 different plugins. They&#8217;ve got their theme which might implement who knows how many additional features baked into the theme? Probably dozens, if you think about all the customization options, that&#8217;s all going to be able to be reimagined now and already is. We see some of this, over 100 themes in the plugin directory. You might have noticed we put the Gutenberg-ready plugins at the very top, even above featured. We&#8217;re really trying to get everyone on this train.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Do you think there was a messaging gap in a trying to get across the idea that Gutenberg is a foundation rather than a window dressing or wallpaper or whatever other nonstructural housing component we want to compare it to?</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Well, I think it&#8217;s easy to say that there was a messaging gap and that communication could have been 10 times better or whatever, because there are obviously some people who wren&#8217;t on board and still aren&#8217;t on board. So now, is there anything that could have gotten everyone 100 percent?</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: No.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: I don&#8217;t know, but I think we will always strive to do better. And ultimately, I mean, one of the things that made me pretty confident about the release wasn&#8217;t that Gutenberg is perfect. It&#8217;s not. By the way, it&#8217;s still not right for a ton of people, but that&#8217;s okay. You know WordPress, unlike almost every other SaaS service or software use gives you control. And the fact that we have classic editor as a first party supported official thing and that anyone for whatever reason, literally any reason, can still use the old experience instead. That&#8217;s what I meant when I said 5.0 was going to be anticlimactic, not that it meant Gutenberg was perfect or ready for everyone, but that forever was not wordy. They&#8217;re just a click or two away before or after the release from having the experience that they used to.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah, one of the things I like to remind myself of is that neither was TinyMCE perfect or right for everyone.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Well, no.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: And that&#8217;s why it was being replaced. So I think sometimes we do have to look at what are we trying to replace and what do we have right now? Is that worth getting out into the world and iterating on?</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Did you see those user tests videos?</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: I did. Unfortunately my wife said, &#8220;Do you want to go see the Harlem Globetrotters?&#8221; And I was like, &#8220;Absolutely.&#8221; And I didn&#8217;t have WordCamp US on my calendar yet.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Oh, don&#8217;t worry, don&#8217;t worry.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: So we double booked, so I re-watched the whole State of the Word, including the user tests, the Q and A, the whole thing, and it was pretty amazing seeing those user tests. I&#8217;ve seen people do user tests before. They&#8217;re often really terrible.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Painful.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: That&#8217;s why for years I&#8217;ve tried to make my own message that we need to continually support things that make WordPress easier to use, so I think that was a good thing to highlight in the State of the Word.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: And by the way, I probably would&#8217;ve picked the Harlem Globetrotters over me as well, so o need to apologize.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: It was the first one I&#8217;ve missed since like 2012.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: That&#8217;s awesome. That&#8217;s great. I&#8217;m an average live experience. The Harlem Globetrotters are amazing live.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: They are.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: You can always catch State of the Word on vide later.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: They are. I may as well use the opportunity too to thank [David Bisset 00:15:39], because he did a fantastic job with both tweeting things and just generally keeping people that follow along with Post Status up to date and it turned out to be a good outlet for him because twitter banned his personal account because they thought that he was tweeting so much.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Wasn&#8217;t that wild?</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: I know. That guy is a national treasure of WordPress.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: He is. He is. If there was a community spirit award, he should win it.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Absolutely.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: So he stood up to ask a question during the State of the Word and unfortunately ran out of time, so I would-</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Right, I felt so bad that we didn&#8217;t get to &#8230; There were a lot of people in line, but just some of those earlier questions were a bit longer and I could tell the room was starting to, like I think we were already like an hour 45. We were pretty far into it, so &#8230;</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah, and maybe we&#8217;ve put a 30-second clock next year for people to ask a question.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: I&#8217;ve been thinking about that, like there were some definitely things in the room this year, like it was very dark in the audience so it was a little harder to see. I think that also subdued people. There was a little more distance between the stage and the people which looked a little more theatrical, but I think also made the audience a bit more disconnected. And even, there was a funny thing. You saw the spotlight on the question askers?</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: It was so bright and at an angle that it was shining in the eyes of everyone sitting next to them. So after the first or second question there, there was a huge hole in the audience next to the mic because we were just getting like it had this crazy spotlight on it. I think we can figure out some different ways of doing lighting or doing the questions in the future that might be a bit a bit easier.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Well, you&#8217;ll have that opportunity in St Louis, right, for the next two years.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Woo hoo, St. Louis. I&#8217;m very excited about that.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah, I&#8217;m excited about that too. I haven&#8217;t been there in a long time, and what David-</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: I love that we&#8217;re doing the opposite of Amazon. They had the opportunity to pick any city in America and they go to D.C. and New York.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: I know.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: They&#8217;re both amazing places, but not really shining a light on places that don&#8217;t get as much love already.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah, I think my-</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: And we&#8217;ve had Philly, Nashville and now St. Louis, I really dig the WordCamp US thing.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah. I have feeling that Amazon may have been including some political reasoning and in their strategy for that, but that&#8217;s okay. WordPress doesn&#8217;t have to do that. We can go wherever we want.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: We can go to Canada, which was one of the questions, which I thought was kind of cool.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Including Canada, which was a good question. I actually had that brought up to me before WordCamp about the U.S./Europe thing and whether we can learn from that and have WordCamp Americas or something.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, what&#8217;s your thought on Central America in that equation?</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah, I mean I think that there&#8217;s a lot of cultural differences, but I think anything Americas, there&#8217;s some common themes of people that work hard, people that explored many centuries ago. So I don&#8217;t know, I&#8217;m probably not the best person to answer that type of question, but &#8230;</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: I&#8217;ve been thinking about it a lot, like what are the logical divisions and because we do have some rules in the WordCamp world around like what could be &#8230; I&#8217;d love to see a WordCamp Asia, for example. Asia is obviously geographically, culturally and language-wise, incredibly diverse.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Right, I think the lingual differentiation would be a challenge, so I don&#8217;t know what the best regions would be but perhaps-</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: But then look in Europe.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: It has a ton of languages [inaudible 00:19:08] English.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: I always envy friends in Europe because they all speak like five languages plus, and some of them speak better English than I do.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Oh, for sure. Have you ever seen a map of the lower 48 overlaid over Europe?</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah, it&#8217;s very, very similar in size, so-</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, it&#8217;s actually, you forget how large actually the lower 48 of the U.S. is that it covers kind of like into Europe, pretty far into Russia and Turkey and Middle East.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah. We think of Alabama and Houston or Birmingham, Alabama and Houston, Texas as pretty close, but that could be different countries if we were in Europe with different languages and culture. It&#8217;s a reminder of the diversity in our space and how serving different cultures and people from different backgrounds is extremely important. All right, so David&#8217;s question was, what are the dates for WordCamp next year? Do we have any idea?</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Oh, I think we know them. I&#8217;ll put them out later. They&#8217;ll be in a blog post or something.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Okay, he will be disappointed again.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Well just, I don&#8217;t know if I could tell you the day of the week of my birthday or something. I&#8217;m pretty bad at dates.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: No, that&#8217;s fine.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: As you might guess from-</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Is it going to be in December again, though?</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: I believe so. Don&#8217;t hold me to anything there. I will officially find something.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: But late in the year still.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, yeah, so I think that we&#8217;ll put up like a placeholder site for 2019, and there will definitely be some tweets and some official stuff saying the dates.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Okay.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: But to your earlier point, I actually feel what you just described of going between countries in Europe, I feel that when I&#8217;m, excuse me, on the East Coast of America because I can actually drive eight or 10 hours and still be in Texas. I can drive two hours over here and cross through three different states. And that was one of the points that I tried to make. This was actually I think one of my weaker Q&amp;As. I had two answers that were two of the worst answers I&#8217;ve given probably the past few years, and one was what people heard me say, which I wasn&#8217;t trying to say, to Morton&#8217;s thing.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Which I was trying to make the point that in a distributed organization or where we have people working across things, you can read into someone&#8217;s language and it might not be their first language, so it&#8217;s really good to give the benefit of the doubt and realize that we&#8217;re not all speaking our native tongue. And so things might come across as harsh or worse or rude or things, when it&#8217;s just not at all. It&#8217;s certainly not the intention of the person to communicate that way. And the other was the answer, I think it was Birgit&#8217;s question about being hired to work on things.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah, corporate sponsorship for WordPress work.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, neither &#8230; I think my brain was just a little fried by the end of the day.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: So what would you adjust in terms of, I think that question was around how to &#8230; I was actually with you with Morton, that I didn&#8217;t notice the issue. It seemed like you were pretty clearly speaking about broader communication things, not specifically with his communication, which is-</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: I would never make fun of Morton&#8217;s or anyone&#8217;s skills speaking another language.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah, and that one was pretty clear to me. But the one about corporate sponsorship, do you think there&#8217;s a place for &#8230; How do you encourage independent work on the WordPress community, nonprofit side of things? Is there a place or a way that that can be done without corporate sponsorship? Because I know, I mean I&#8217;m self-employed and I can personally understand if I suddenly gave 10 or 20 hours a week or whatever amount of time to the core project in a non-revenue generating way that would be felt. So is there a way that that can be done, or do you think corporate sponsorship of community work is really the only way to go about it right now?</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Well, let me take a second crack at this one. First and foremost, I never want to downplay the contributions of people doing it in their spare time.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah, and it is, I mean it&#8217;s astonishing and I could be that person, too. I don&#8217;t choose to be that person in this stage of my life, but yeah, it&#8217;s amazing what people are doing completely outside of work time.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, and I also don&#8217;t want to understate how big an impact on the WordPress project, two to four hours a week out of the 168 can have a really huge impact on some big areas. Even a single hour a week, if put in the right place, can move mountains. And WordPress was largely built by volunteers and people doing it in their spare time, and I worry to say, to ever get to a point where we&#8217;re saying we only value people who are doing it full time, or it&#8217;s only possible to make a change if you&#8217;re doing it full time. So that&#8217;s one point I was trying to make, that let&#8217;s never downplay the value that people can do with just a little bit of contributions. Five for the Future is just two hours a week in a work week, right?</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Right, yeah, and that was the question [Daniel Bock Huber 00:24:12] had was if you had plans or iterations that you thought would be good for Five for the Future?</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Oh, for sure. The second is that the WordPress Foundation is not designed to be an employment entity. Now, there&#8217;s no employees. There&#8217;s no HR. There&#8217;s no benefits. There&#8217;s no payroll. There&#8217;s no anything, and going from zero to one there is actually a pretty big thing. It is designed to give grants. We can give money to other organizations. By the way, I think that there&#8217;s also a big opportunity for other nonprofits to be part of this. There&#8217;s no reason to say only for-profit corporations can sponsor people that work on WordPress. I would love to see more nonprofits that by the way have a lot more expertise in some of the areas that we want more contributions in, including design, accessibility, privacy, internationalization.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: These things, there&#8217;s full nonprofits dedicated to that have often sometimes very large staffs and pretty large budgets, journalism. These I think are really fruitful areas, and in fact one of the things that, I don&#8217;t know if you saw Morton&#8217;s talk, a lot of people I thought misread it. Maybe I misread it as well. When he was talking about open governance, my take was that he was talking about getting WordPress a seat at the table, and discussing these regulation changes and et cetera happening. I think the example last year was, there was this meeting at 10 Downing Street. Who was there? Was WordPress represented?</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: And he started talking about the Web Foundation, and I began thinking. I was like, &#8220;Wow, well, WordPress only represents a third of Websites, and not even, really. It&#8217;s a third of the top 10 million. Another foundation like the Web Foundation actually might be a better vehicle to try to advocate on the open Web as a whole, versus just the people who happen to be using a single CMS.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah, and I don&#8217;t want to speak for him in terms of which audience he was trying to, or which group he was trying to represent in terms of within WordPress, or WordPress within the broader Web. I do think that there are often questions about governance of WordPress. You have long been the central vision of the project, and then delegated the execution of that vision to many other people who then lead this project, which is massive at this point. One of the things I&#8217;ve always asked you for several years now was, how many people do you have directly reporting to you?</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Because one of the things I find to be important is under this model, where your vision is required, then if you&#8217;re spread out so thin it requires these sprints to focus towards WordPress, rather than always being able to have kind of a constant flow, even if it&#8217;s a minority of your time, going towards that, establishing that vision for WordPress. So, how have you evolved in that regard? I know you&#8217;re-</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: What was the number last time you asked me?</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: It was high.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: What is high? There was one point it was like 26 or something.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah, it was in the 20s. It was in the 20s last year I think when we talked about it.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, it&#8217;s under half that now.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: That&#8217;s great.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: So, that&#8217;s been really good. There&#8217;s been a lot more leaders, but I would actually argue the point that WordPress has always been sort of my vision being set, or even my direct leadership. There was a good four or five years there where the leadership structure, because we&#8217;ve experimented with lots of different, we don&#8217;t call it governance, but essentially leadership structures in WordPress. For a while, we had kind of the &#8230; It wasn&#8217;t a committee approach, but essentially like the lead developers consensus approach. We did that for a few years.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Even from the beginning it wasn&#8217;t just me. It was me and Mike Little, so it&#8217;s never been solo. Then we went to where the release lead was the final decider, including over me, so that was probably, I don&#8217;t know, 3.9 to 4.7 maybe, that including could overrule me as project lead for what was in the release or not, and that was to try to give a little more autonomy and flexibility to release leads. But the big change was a few years ago I said, &#8220;Okay, I&#8217;m going to take back over core WordPress development,&#8221; and that was to try to provide a &#8230; Try to make some of these big changes happen. So right now it is much more of a benevolent dictator model, although both of those words are questionable. But, I don&#8217;t see that as the permanent forever structure, you know? [crosstalk 00:28:54]-</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: One problem with that is-</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: I don&#8217;t know if I can sustain this forever. I mean, this is a pretty intense period and we&#8217;re doing some pretty intense work, and I&#8217;ll need a break at some point, too.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah, and how do you, or do you think there&#8217;s merit in opening that up in some way to certainly have more community input, but sometimes that&#8217;s not good, you know? Sometimes the central vision idea can be more productive, but when you bring that into open source software versus running a company, maybe there&#8217;s different consequences. So have you given any thought to what does WordPress look like after this phase in terms of a governance structure?</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: It&#8217;s hard, because I haven&#8217;t seen any models where anything resembling voting works, you know?</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah, for running software, you mean.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, and for choosing a direction. It&#8217;s not that many models for consumer-facing software. There&#8217;s some for server-facing software, where sort of like a committee approach works, you know? It seldom creates great user experiences. You kind of want, I&#8217;m not saying it always has to be me, but what I want is a strong, opinionated, thoughtful leader doing, setting a bold direction, taking experiments and being willing to fail, comfortable with failure, is I think what you need to create great software.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: So how do you-</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: And that&#8217;s tough, and by the way, we&#8217;ve had lots of those leaders in the history of WordPress, and I think that&#8217;s been the success. It&#8217;s not just because I&#8217;m doing anything.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Sure.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: It&#8217;s that we have lots of folks and we have, as a community including myself, invested that authority and power in them, and that trust. It doesn&#8217;t mean that it&#8217;s always been right, like we&#8217;ve definitely done things that we might undo later or that were mistakes, but the ability to make those mistakes is what you need for an innovative organization. When you look at any organization, private or public, it&#8217;s too afraid to fail, that&#8217;s when you get this kind of incrementalism. That&#8217;s when you get this kind of fear of change. That&#8217;s when you essentially stagnate, and if you were to point to any place that software goes poorly, whether that&#8217;s in government or companies that don&#8217;t innovate or get disrupted by smaller upstarts, anything, it&#8217;s because one of those happened or probably all of those things happened. They got too successful and then they were afraid to fail, because it was too embarrassing and they had too much to lose, and then they stagnate.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: All right, we&#8217;re here to take a quick break and I want to thank our partner, iThemes, long-time supporter of Post Status. I&#8217;ve got Cory Miller on with me to talk about what they&#8217;ve got going on. Hey, Cory.</p>
<p>Cory Miller: Hey, Brian, thanks for having me on.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah, it&#8217;s my pleasure and I appreciate your support over the years. I was hoping that you could just tell me maybe what&#8217;s a big success iThemes had in 2018, and what you&#8217;re looking forward to next year?</p>
<p>Cory Miller: Yeah, as you know in January of 2018 now we were acquired. iThemes was acquired by a great hosting company named Liquid Web, so this year has been spent integrating. We are almost done with the first round of integrations for our key product, iTheme Sync, which promotes site management for freelancers and agency WordPress Websites, BackupBuddy, our long-time popular plugin, and securities. So we&#8217;re almost done with the final round of that. You know in any transition there&#8217;s always bumps, but it&#8217;s been a really good ride so far.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah, have you been getting good feedback from LiquidWeb customers so far, or I guess are you looking forward to seeing iThemes products more integrated with LiquidWeb&#8217;s stuff?</p>
<p>Cory Miller: Very much so. We saw hosting as the future for WordPress. All of the big hosting companies making significant investments in WordPress, and this was a way to join forces with a great hosting company and for our products, our team, to live on into the future doing really good things in WordPress.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Cool, and iThemes products are still available outside of LiquidWeb as well. You can use them on any host that you choose, or a naked VPS if you want help managing a server that you want to pull all the lever, you can still do that but you can use all the iThemes tools to help you manage the day, and [inaudible 00:33:31] out of your WordPress Website. I&#8217;m really excited for you guys and what you have going on, and look forward to hearing more as next year comes along. Thanks for being on real quick, and if people want to learn more about what you&#8217;ve got going on, where do they go?</p>
<p>Cory Miller: iThemes.com, best place to click some links and see if we are offering something that you&#8217;re in need of. We&#8217;d be happy to serve you.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Awesome, well, thanks for being such a big part of the WordPress community these last 10 years plus, and a partner of Post Status for as long as Post Status has existed.</p>
<p>Cory Miller: Yeah, we love Post Status. Keep doing what you&#8217;re doing, Brian. Thank you.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Thanks, buddy. Bye. We&#8217;ve got another question from Ant in regards to giving people a seat at the table in a governance structure, which was seeking an update on the growth council, whether that was productive this last year, whether it happened. How can it happen going forward? I don&#8217;t know anything about what&#8217;s happened in the last year, so what have you learned there, and what&#8217;s happened?</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, so we created these two growth councils, one consumer one and one enterprise one, and we did these monthly meetings, video chats. And my goal with creating it was one, to bring some people together, so there are direct competitors in these meetings. It&#8217;s enterprise agencies that are bidding on the same clients. It&#8217;s Web posts that are advertising on the same key words and everything. And so you&#8217;d have like that as part of the discussion, and one of the goals also was to produce, improve essentially the WordPress experience.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Some parts were successful, some parts weren&#8217;t, so I was amazed and humbled by how people came together. I think it really showed something I&#8217;ve tried to demonstrate with Automatic in the past, that you can both compete and work together for a greater good. People were both able, because it was a safe space, they were able to share things that were going on in their companies, things they were hearing from clients that they couldn&#8217;t talk about publicly, things they were seeing, experiences, in a safe space that generated some amazing discussions. I&#8217;ll also say selfishly that I learned a ton being part of these meetings, so it was really, really valuable for me.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: And that&#8217;s about how their organizations work and what&#8217;s important to them, or what kind of stuff?</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: And the people they&#8217;re talking to, whether that&#8217;s consumers, kind of the more mass market side particularly with Web posts, but also with people doing trainings, people building small Websites, which is my kind of mental model was like, if it&#8217;s people spending under $100,000 a year for a site that&#8217;s the consumer group. If it&#8217;s over $100,000 a year, that&#8217;s the enterprise group. Not exact, but that was kind of like a rough mental model. And on the enterprise side, what are they seeing? It was so interesting as well, like most of the big agencies started building sites with Gutenberg kind of like February, March, and were launching them over the summer. Now at this point, they&#8217;re basically building everything. They&#8217;ve been building everything new with Gutenberg for the better part of a year.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah, I actually spoke with Tom Wilmot from Human Made and Jake Goldman from 10up both, and they&#8217;ve both expressed that they had an early embrace of Gutenberg and seen success with it. Somebody was telling me, I think it might have been Tom, that they showed off a demo of Gutenberg and instantly blew some Adobe experience manager style feature out of the water. Some company had spent gargantuan sums of money on the alternative experience, and they did a couple customizations with Gutenberg over the course of a couple weeks and showed them this as a prototype. It was already far superior to what their competition was putting forward, so from those-</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: There&#8217;s got to be so much of that.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: At Gutenberg, people have written bad versions of what Gutenberg is, including myself, for five years now. And now we&#8217;ve got this standard we can all build on. I actually had it right here. Human Made had this really cool white paper. I don&#8217;t know if you&#8217;ve seen this.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Nice, yeah, they printed it.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: It&#8217;s glossy, it&#8217;s pretty &#8230; I mean, these are the types of things that for enterprises are really important. PDFs, white papers, case studies, and enterprise section of WordPress.org, important for that user group. For a consumer, a lot of things that that team talked about was the importance of talking about different use cases and allowing users to self-segment over the job they want to get done, and having some guides for that, some recommended plugins, essentially hand-holding them through the process of it.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: So I talked about what was successful about the councils. I&#8217;ll tell you what didn&#8217;t go as I hoped, producing things. I think because it was all often the CEOs of their companies or kind of the head folks, it was difficult for them to get time other than the meetings, in between the meetings, to just do work to produce for example a new enterprise section of WordPress.org. So actually on Saturday morning, I officially dissolved the councils.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Okay.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: What I told the folks was, we&#8217;re not going to schedule out these meetings for the rest of the year. I left the Slack channels up so people could keep chatting if they want, and of course I said if anyone wants to keep meeting on their own, they&#8217;re happy to, or to continue the projects, and both groups said they would like to. The enterprise group wants to get the enterprise subsection of WordPress.org out. The consumer group wants to continue shipping some things, but it was a year and we didn&#8217;t ship these things, that honestly probably any &#8230; It could have happened within a month or two if it had had a lot of focus from any of the people involved. It illustrated to me actually the difficulty of a committee approach.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah, it makes me think of-</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: One of the things that came up was the enterprise. We did drinks on Saturday as a kind of ending thing. It was a combined consumer and enterprise, and one of the things is they were like, &#8220;Hey, if you had just chosen one person to be in charge of this, that person could have said, &#8216;You do this, you do this, you do this,&#8217; it would have shipped probably pretty quickly.&#8221; But because no one knew who was in charge and who could tell other people to do things, I think it was Jake who said, &#8220;I&#8217;m not sure if I can tell Tom, &#8216;You need to finish this page,&#8217; or &#8216;You didn&#8217;t edit it.'&#8221; Who&#8217;s in charge? And so that&#8217;s I think unintentionally illustrated an alternative group and management style that, because if it wasn&#8217;t adjusted and set up correctly, which is my responsibility, my fault, and not getting the results that we wanted. So, great experiment though, and I&#8217;m really, really glad we did it.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah, I wonder, you see movies or you see a senate hearing or something, and you have the primary people at the center table and then you have all their deputies on the outside. They&#8217;re still in a safe space, but they&#8217;re the people that actually go out and do things afterwards. It&#8217;s not like the senator or the CEO on that council necessarily that&#8217;s implementing, but they bring other people from their organization in to help the implementation component.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: I was kind of hoping more of that would happen. It&#8217;s true, some people on the councils were contributing individually, and some lead larger organizations so they can shepherd a lot of resources as well. So, I think there&#8217;s some of both that&#8217;s needed in the WordPress world. Yoast and myself are probably good examples, Yoast the person, not the company, of a leader who&#8217;s really passionate about areas, who also brings along a lot of their company to work on it.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah, they have a lot of manpower there.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Oh, yeah.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: That they&#8217;ve got dedicated to core.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Person power.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Person power, thank you.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Yoast had an incredible effect on Gutenberg and the 5.0 release, even though they&#8217;re smaller than all of the hosts, all of everything else. I think it&#8217;s a great example of Five for the Future.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: So I have one more process question, and then I want to dig into phases two through four, but Darren Ethier I think is how I pronounce his last name, he asked what were your thoughts process-wise on using GitHub for probably the most ambitious-sized project yet with WordPress from a feature plugin or feature point of view? Do you think it was encouraging enough to potentially start moving off track in SVN? I do know there was a make WordPress post that was about this, but I&#8217;m curious your personal experience, whether you liked being in GitHub day to day or using Git in the process, or if you missed track in terms of that development?</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: I mean, I&#8217;m an early adopter of GitHub. My user name is literally the letter M, to show you how early it was, and I really like it. I think it&#8217;s a great product. Having kind of a parallel process, where I&#8217;ve now been involved pretty heavily in something on TRACK, involved pretty heavily on something on GitHub, there&#8217;s pluses and minuses. I wouldn&#8217;t say either is a panacea. The thing that actually makes the real difference is much more your engineering management. It&#8217;s your triage. It&#8217;s your process. It&#8217;s the testing. On both GitHub and TRACK, we made mistakes and had tickets that sat for weeks without anyone responding to them.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: That doesn&#8217;t have to do with the software. It has to do with the people, and I do worry the distraction of effort and time that switching source control and issue trackers and just also all the work that needs to be done to migrate all the tooling at the same time, if it would distract us from what&#8217;s actually most important in 2019, which is to tighten up some of our loose parts of the software. So that&#8217;s the only reason I&#8217;m hesitant to commit to saying that we&#8217;re going to do anything, particularly in 2019.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Also, I am a big fan of GitLab, obviously. I see a lot of, I noticed a lot of comments on Helen&#8217;s post for actually advocating for GitLab. All of these things are getting better pretty rapidly. GitHub was slow for a while, and now they&#8217;re really picking it up. Time is kind of on our side if we switch later, because whatever we switch to will be six or 12 months better than it is today, and probably provide perhaps more of a compelling step function and user experience than is currently there, which is yes, I totally agree the interfaces are more modern and there&#8217;s better tools, and I do strongly prefer Git for branching and all these other things. There&#8217;s almost nothing you could tell me about either way that is an argument I haven&#8217;t heard or made myself. But it&#8217;s more just about a community focus thing, and what is the issues most urgently impacting WordPress users, both current and potential, today?</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: I like what you say there in terms of the urgency factor, because I think I agree with you. Personally, if I were to do something to try to actually make code changes in SVN, I would always have to go remind myself, how do I patch something, and do I have the tools on my modern MacBook to do so? Whereas by &#8230; Go ahead.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: I was just going to say, we&#8217;ve built a lot of bridges between them as well. WordPress is synced to Git. You can do things both ways. We have tools for migrating patches between them. We&#8217;ve got official GitHub for WordPress. There&#8217;s a lot of stuff out there, but there is a point when I really want to focus on the developer experience and really invest some serious, serious time into that, but we&#8217;ve got to get the user experience right first.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah, I think I&#8217;m with you in terms of that priority, but long-term bringing on new people to be comfortable developing on the software, most people in their day to day are in GitHub or in Git more broadly, so even the self-hosted Git version or GitFlow I think in the long run would be good, but I like what you said there about the urgency component.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Well, that&#8217;s one of the things I was looking at a lot, because that is one of the I think better arguments for using something centralized like GitHub, is that a lot of people have GitHub accounts.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Mm-hmm (affirmative).</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Basically there was a while, I&#8217;ve reviewed probably over 10,000 engineering applications for Automatic. Every single one of them has a GitHub link. There&#8217;s definitely something to be said for that. I didn&#8217;t notice that big a difference in type or number of contributions, so it is a barrier to entry to make a WordPress.org account. It doesn&#8217;t appear to be the most salient factor in determining whether people submit patches or are active in TRACK or not-</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Interesting.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Active in [inaudible 00:46:57] TRACK or not.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: I&#8217;d be curious how that ends up working if it was officially there, but nevertheless let&#8217;s move on to-</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Well, just look at the numbers, because Gutenberg was as official as anything, and the numbers of contributors to that versus the number of contributors that we have in any given core release, kind of similar. I think that the hard part is actually deciding that you&#8217;re going to dive into the code. The hard part is saying like, &#8220;I&#8217;m going to take this code. I&#8217;m going to figure out the problem and then submit the patch.&#8221; And once you&#8217;ve been through that, making an account one place or another, I think it&#8217;s probably something you&#8217;ll do one way or another.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: So phase one of Gutenberg mostly complete, or at least out the door, and you&#8217;re going to be iterating on this every two weeks like you told me before. Let&#8217;s talk about phase two through four, and let&#8217;s start with just why do you think that the order that you established things in is the right order? Why do you think this is the right direction, I guess, overall?</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, some of it is sequential and some of it is not. Are you familiar with the Kubler Ross Five Stages of Grief?</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: No, I&#8217;m not.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: It&#8217;s like anger, denial, depression, acceptance. You&#8217;ve probably seen these before.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah, I&#8217;ve seen this in terms of markets. It&#8217;s the same stages of grief are identified in market cycles, so like in the stock market it&#8217;s a very similar thing, but I didn&#8217;t know it was called that.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: I don&#8217;t have one on my desk, but I actually have some glasses that I often use for drinks that have little markers on them, and it actually has the five stages.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Nice.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: We could put that in the show notes for the podcast, a link to those.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: A common misperception, I ended up actually reading one of her books called On Grief and Grieving, and it was actually finished posthumously, so she actually passed away in the process of it. This is I think Elizabeth Kubler Ross, or I forget the exact name, but amazing book. Good to read even if you&#8217;re not going to go through grief or grieving, because we all do at some point. One of the most fascinating things I took from that book was people think of those stages as sequential, and actually they can happen out of order, and they can happen simultaneously. In fact, you can go through anger and denial and acceptance and everything all in the same kind of 10-minute period.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: That was a really fascinating insight to me just of the human condition, because we are often more complex and less sequential than sometimes our simplified systems would like to say, or we&#8217;d like to think. Development is the same way. Phase one is not stopping where phase two is starting, and I think bits of phases one through four have already happened and will continue to happen as we go through it. It&#8217;s just more about priorities. We&#8217;ve gotten the editor experience to the point where I think it&#8217;s pretty darn decent, especially for new users. Now people, if you look at people who started using WordPress in a post-Gutenberg world, of which there are now hundreds of thousands, so they&#8217;ve only known Gutenberg. This is that example of the support person who said, &#8220;Bring me back the simple editor,&#8221; and they meant Gutenberg?</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: What is the new barrier that they&#8217;re running into? What&#8217;s the new wall they&#8217;re hitting? It&#8217;s the rest of the site. It&#8217;s customization. It&#8217;s widgets.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: So for those that don&#8217;t have these phases locked down in their brain, phase two is customizing outside of the post content itself as the next point of emphasis. So this could be widgets, menus and miscellaneous content. David posted a funny picture on Twitter where you looked like you were in deep thought during the State of the Word and he said, &#8220;I wonder what Matt&#8217;s thinking about right now?&#8221; You said it was probably the process of transporting menus to Gutenberg.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Oh, yeah.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Moving, I feel like this is something that&#8217;s happened every few years [crosstalk 00:51:12] in WordPress, it&#8217;s like the old menu system, then the new menu system, then the customizer menu system. Now we&#8217;re talking about menus here, and also not calling it menus but reshaping to navigation.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: And navigation block, I think is probably a good way to put it.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah, it seems like we&#8217;ve got some debt in regards to spending time on things that then we don&#8217;t use for a super long time, so how can we do the Gutenberg way of site customization and content and try to be efficient and long-lasting with that effort?</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Well, I mean first we&#8217;ll start doing it in plugins, in the Gutenberg plugin actually, just like we did for the editor. And so we can have, one of the reasons Gutenberg is where it is is because we did do a lot of user testing along the way, and it wasn&#8217;t just testing mock-ups or ideas. We had the actual working plugin on actual working WordPress sites so they could run. That makes a world of difference, so we&#8217;ll be able to do that for the customize, replacing widgets.PHP, piece of cake. That&#8217;s just taking over the page. The customizer is a little trickier, but we can do it because all of Gutenberg was designed to be responsive.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Essentially, the customizer side bar is very similar to a mobile view, a narrow screen. It&#8217;s kind of like instead of a wide version, it&#8217;s a narrow version of that interface, so I think we can slip in there. Mainly it just requires a lot of rethinking, and there are some tough concepts that currently blocks don&#8217;t have, like the idea of widget visibility, which is [crosstalk 00:52:49].</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah, I was about to say conditionality, or like show it here but not there. That&#8217;s one of the experiences that seems like it could get really confusing, because someone&#8217;s on a post and they change a sidebar, and therefore they think they changed it just there but they changed it everywhere, vice-versa. There&#8217;s a lot of UX things that seem like they could get complicated.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, so we&#8217;ve got to figure that out, to be honest. I don&#8217;t have the answer right now. We&#8217;ve got to experiment and test our way into what works there, because there are some powerful and complex concepts that I think we can maintain, but just make a lot more intuitive and also make not so in people&#8217;s face. So if they don&#8217;t need to have widgets or blocks that only show up on the sidebar of search pages, it&#8217;s not kind of in their face and making them think about things. It&#8217;s that whole thing, making it more powerful and more intuitive at the same time.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: But currently, blocks don&#8217;t have a concept of that, but if we solve it for sidebars, widget areas, whatever you want to call it, perhaps we could solve that for blocks everywhere they&#8217;re used. Showing different headers on different pages is not something that is currently supported by most themes on different types of templates, but why not? That would actually be pretty cool, different footers on different types of pages. I could easily imagine different types of sites that would do this.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: It also raised a good point, which is kind of what has always been one of my bugaboos about front end editing, is that when I&#8217;m writing, I want to focus. I don&#8217;t want to see my header and footer and sidebar and all this other stuff, much less edit them. I think, I mean I&#8217;ve always talked about zooming in and zooming out, Gutenberg essentially being like a new 3D interface for WordPress. I think we want to make it very easy to kind of zoom in and out, including focus on one single area or even one single block, if you really want to work within that.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: And that means in some ways potentially front end editing too, right? When I think about Gutenberg, the one beef I have with writing in WordPress is all the other stuff beyond the editor. Whether it&#8217;s TinyMCE or Gutenberg, I write mostly text and a few images. I&#8217;m not doing a lot of page layout, and I love the tools that Gutenberg&#8217;s brought in. For instance, you brought up some of Nick Hamze&#8217;s blocks. I talk to Nick sometimes, and he&#8217;s got so much creativity and I love that it empowers that. But for 90% of the things I&#8217;m going to do, I&#8217;m just writing. A clear, focused writing area is what I like, so I actually just don&#8217;t like the fact that I can go into the appearance editor and the plug in screen. Those are all one click away, rather than just saying, &#8220;Here&#8217;s the page.&#8221;</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: The best Gutenberg interact I&#8217;ve had yet was actually WordPress.org/Gutenberg, because I was experiencing Gutenberg. It&#8217;s a live demo of Gutenberg. I was able to experience Gutenberg, and none of the other stuff was there. It was just a column of content, and I really enjoyed that, so is that a part, a way that you think we can focus on how to get to writing and not worrying about everything else?</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: We can support both. I mean, you currently have a version of this in Gutenberg where it can show the menu or not, or you can go to the mode which is my preference mode, where Gutenberg takes over the whole screen so you don&#8217;t have a sidebar menu there, even minimized. I actually strongly prefer that.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: See, I didn&#8217;t even know that. I&#8217;ve missed that.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Oh, yeah, yeah, so go in Gutenberg to the top right, the dots. I&#8217;m trying to think exactly where it is. Are you opening your WordPress as well?</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: I am.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: We&#8217;ll go through this together.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: I might take over my screen share here, but that&#8217;s okay.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Oh yeah, do you want me to screen share?</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: No, I mean I&#8217;m recording us.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Oh, got you, got you.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: So people, this might end up on YouTube or something.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: So in the three dots, there is three kind of options there.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Oh, yeah.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Tool bar, spotlight mode and full screen mode. I actually am in full screen mode. I strongly, strongly prefer it.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Neat.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Top tool bar I don&#8217;t think is that useful, but they know that. This was basically, there was a huge kind of fight earlier. If you look at Yoast&#8217;s original post about the plan for Gutenberg, there alternative UI is basically all about the top tool bar. Then spotlight mode I also don&#8217;t love, but some people really like it. It kind of grays out the other blocks and then makes the current block you&#8217;re in more visually prominent.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Cool, and for anyone that happens to be watching this, I just popped it up onto the screen where you can see exactly where that is, so that&#8217;s really cool. I learn new things every day.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, and so even this menu, like I&#8217;m looking at this menu right now. Do you have it open?</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: I do.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: I want to talk through some things that could be really improved here. So for example, originally we didn&#8217;t have this descriptive text under each of these three views.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Mm-hmm (affirmative).</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Well one, the text should be views, not view, and I think that there is, we can improve that text. Under editor, I don&#8217;t know if visual versus code is actually very intuitive, and two, under code editor, I think it&#8217;s a beautiful place to expose that you can actually go into the code editor on a per-block basis, so just a little bit of text there that says, &#8220;Hey, also per block you can go into this.&#8221; Manageable reusable blocks needs the square and the little pointy thing that shows that that&#8217;s going to take you out of Gutenberg, and I think it does open a new window.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: And I think that we should put some sort of star or cool icon next to keyboard shortcuts, because once you learn those, you are off to the races. So just a good example that as far as we&#8217;ve come with Gutenberg, you can look at a single screen and immediately think of four or five things that are very improvable and that are certainly worth testing and getting out there.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah, that&#8217;s neat.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: I always joke I&#8217;m the unhappiest WordPress user in the world. It&#8217;s hard for me to look at anything in WordPress and not see all the things that could be made better, and just be terribly impatient to get them better as soon as possible.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: So, speaking of impatient, you&#8217;re going to have to &#8230; Well, you might be able to work on some of these things at the same time but also there is a phase, a priority, and number three was about collaborative editing. For me, I think of this not even necessarily like me and you might collaborate on a post, but sometimes I want to collaborate with myself. My favorite tool from Automatic that you guys have built is probably Simplenote, because it&#8217;s like the only to-do app-ish thing, and it&#8217;s very unstructured, but it&#8217;s the only to-do app type of thing that I&#8217;ve ever really used in depth, because it&#8217;s really easy to open. It&#8217;s really easy to start writing, and it&#8217;s instantly on my phone. So for me, collaborative editing in some ways is just this simple process back and forth.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Across devices.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah, across devices.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Totally.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Because I do a lot of stuff through my phone, but your collaborative editing is much more than just cross-device. It&#8217;s also cross-individual, and people building things together. Why do you think that&#8217;s an important thing to be in core WordPress experiences?</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Hmm, that&#8217;s a good example of something that there&#8217;s not a bajillion people asking for right now. But just like post revisions, which is one of my favorite things I&#8217;ve forced to be in WordPress that I think is really fundamental to have the entire system works, this-</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah, a lot of people have been saved by revisions.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, I think this idea that when you&#8217;re editing in a post, the post is almost like an object and people from different devices, different things, can all come and be simultaneously working on that same object, is a mental model that is technically extraordinarily difficult. But if you get it right, it&#8217;s just a magical user experience. Even simple stuff, like do you remember when Netflix started saving where you&#8217;d watched up to across devices?</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah, that&#8217;s great.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Magical, and it&#8217;s so simple.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah, I use that a good bit. We use that a good bit with our son, because the easiest way for him to be happy in a car is to have somebody&#8217;s phone. You can pull up Super Wings or whatever, right where he left off, so yeah, I do agree. And even when Google Docs came out with that, it was revolutionary in a way but people didn&#8217;t realize how much it would transform the way they write documents, so &#8230;</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Totally, and we&#8217;ve got, the Web now supports technologies like WebRTC, that will perhaps enable us to do this even without centralized service, which is super cool, too. Because before, I was &#8230; Conspiracy theorists won&#8217;t believe this but I was actually really disappointed that it looked like the only way we could do this was in Jetpack. Now, it looks like we&#8217;ll actually be able to do this in a much more distributed fashion.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Interesting. Funny enough, I didn&#8217;t even think about that conspiracy theory and everything. As delightful as that sounds to think about, I didn&#8217;t consider the centralization aspect of it.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, so it&#8217;s definitely, there&#8217;s some stuff out there that&#8217;s possible. By the way, there might still be something where Jetpack can enhance it, or maybe we use Simperium, which is the engine behind Simplenote, to do something even fancier, but we can do a lot without that. But this also requires us to rethink our user flows around what versions, what it means to edit something. Because right now, you and I can kind of be on different paths, and we can save each other and merge over each other. And what is the relationship between what&#8217;s on the edit screen versus what&#8217;s live? That also is going to apply now to the entire site, so maybe what you and I are working on together is the new version of Post Status, and you&#8217;re changing the typography and I&#8217;m moving the widgets around and things like that, and then we&#8217;re setting that to go live at 12:00 pm on a Tuesday.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah, that&#8217;s really cool. Another element of that that is a quirk in WordPress I guess, but you could publish a post and now I want to update it, but I don&#8217;t want to update it right now, but I want to save what I&#8217;ve updated.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Mm-hmm (affirmative).</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Right now it&#8217;s either, it&#8217;s all about your current session. Once it&#8217;s published, you either update it or those changes are basically gone. You don&#8217;t kind of save a draft of an update, so a work flow like this would inherently basically have to solve a problem like that, so that would be nice.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Basically, we&#8217;re going to reimplement Git in the post-content table, in the WP Post table.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah, that sounds like no problem.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Piece of cake.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah, on that note, do you think there are underlying architectural changes that WordPress is going to have to go through to enable both this experience, because this is Gutenberg, but also I mean you&#8217;re probably faced with some of the problems that a tool like WooCommerce has in terms of scalability and being the right tool for the job for that next level of application. These aren&#8217;t blogs anymore, but we basically have the same data base, the same data base structure. You can extend it. You can change things, but do you think there&#8217;s rethinking that needs to be done in that regard?</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Sure, and I actually think that [inaudible 01:04:12] is I think we have the opportunity to readdress and in a very backwards compatible way provide a path for people to upgrade some data structures, some things that have been hanging around for a while. An obvious one is widgets are a serialized array. Now we can move that to being JSON. There&#8217;s the native structure, data structure that Gutenberg uses behind the scenes. For some reason, we have to store this as like HTML plus comments, we can just store it in the native data format, which is pretty cool.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: By the way, as we increase the MySQL version, we can actually query and get things out as JSON objects directly from MySQL. We don&#8217;t have to take them in and out of strings, so there&#8217;s just some clean-up, some fun stuff we can do. When we get higher PHP versions, we can name spacing doing different things. J-Trip&#8217;s been talking about doing some pretty cool composer stuff. All of this is, we&#8217;re getting the user part back on track and so that also means we can start to invest a lot more in that developer experience, which I think is crucial. Also I feel, I have a ton of empathy for, I actually for better or worse, I interact every day a lot more with developers than I do with users, so I really try to get out of my way to interact with users, but you can imagine the gripes and pains of developers is something that is more of my daily experience.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: So we&#8217;ll have time to talk about all these phases over the next few years, but quickly what do you see in terms of the number of sites where having a multilingual setup, and this is around the focus of phase four, how often are you encountering Websites like that, and how much do you think that this being a part of the WordPress experience would be empowering for people to actually support more languages and more language versions of their site?</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: I think it would be a really big fundamental concept. The Web is global. English or single language is actually I think a small minority. People who speak one language is a small minority of the seven billion people in the world. This is obviously very prevalent in places like Quebec, where there&#8217;s officially French and English, and of course all over Europe. This is why I get the question every year for Camp Europe. I am monolingual, ashamedly so.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: But the world is polyglots, and that&#8217;s why I named the mailing list WP Polyglots, not WP translate or WP anything, when I set that up almost 15 years ago now. Even for monolinguists like me, I got someone contacted me the other day saying, &#8220;Hey, can I translate this Gutenberg FAQ into Japanese? Do I have your permission to?&#8221; And they put it on a different site. How cool would it have been if I just could have said, &#8220;Hey, by the way, collaboration and work flow, here, you now have access to make this post into Japanese,&#8221; and now at the top it&#8217;ll have a little link to it, to the Japanese version, and there will be sort of a neural structure in a canonical place for the MA.TT version of the Gutenberg FAQ translated to Japanese by this volunteer, where anyone in the world could live. And by the way-</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: I was about to say, what if it was permissionless, like just if someone wants to make something on my site in other languages, do it. As small as Post Status is, I&#8217;ve had people that want to recreate the members side in Dutch or something.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Cool.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: I&#8217;m like, I can&#8217;t do that, but that sounds amazing if you want to do that. But I&#8217;d be totally down if the structure was there for it to say, translate this post, and it&#8217;s almost like forking software, or almost the way language packs and plugins work. You don&#8217;t have to be responsible for every language pack if you&#8217;re the plug in author. Someone can just come and do it, and I think that&#8217;d be really cool for posts.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: That would be so cool, and by the way, layer that in with other plugins. Layer that in with membership, so you only allow members to translate things, or layer that in with one I&#8217;d love to re-evaluate which is [Blickey 01:08:23]. So there is public revision history and sort of moderated submissions, so maybe I have, maybe my colleague [Nalco 01:08:34] can moderate Japanese translations, but maybe she doesn&#8217;t have time to translate every single one of my posts herself. But when people submit one, she could take a few minutes to just read it through and make sure they&#8217;re not having [crosstalk 01:08:47].</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah, translate my post and make it sound completely different.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, I think it&#8217;s actually WordPress.com.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Assuming good intent is part of the thing there.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Do you remember the Happy Birthday incident?</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: I don&#8217;t.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Someone, because when we opened up kind of like more totally community translations on WordPress.com and made it easy for anyone to do it, someone changed where it said comments, like leave a comment, into Happy Birthday! I forget what language it was, Italian, so all Italian sites under every single post would say Happy Birthday!</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Just Happy Birthday!</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Which I think is kind of like the most brilliant, if you&#8217;re going to troll or vandalize us, that was a really lovely way to do it.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah, we could probably learn some things from Wikipedia&#8217;s own editorial flows and how to implement something like that. I do think that would be really neat. Do you think that still leaves room for other plugins that are doing various multilingual things? Does it leave room for them, or do you think it kind of eats them up and makes that business model go away? Because there&#8217;s been some good-sized businesses in that realm.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: It leaves room for them 100%. In fact, I think it increases them a ton. Same thing with page builders. If you look at where the business model is for a lot of these translation plugins are going, they&#8217;re actually helping you do the translation. That makes total sense. If I&#8217;m a business, I might want my site in five languages. If I can click a button and just say, &#8220;Hey, I&#8217;ll pay you $1,000,&#8221; and by the way the plugins can be in the middle of that or there can sort of be an API for that. I mean, this is kind of incredible, but the downside of them is very similar to page builders, which is each kind of has its own way to do the data and the storage.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Some put it all in post content. Some put it in custom post type. Some put it in meta fields. Some put it in separate tables, so you essentially have actually each of the possible ways you could kind of logically do this exists. So now, if I&#8217;m building a plugin that wants to work with multilingual versions of the site, how do I do it? There&#8217;s no common foundation. Exact same issue we had with blocks. There were blocks on WordPress for years now, but every single visual composer and Beaver Builder and Elementor and Avada and Divi, they all did blocks in a different way.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Matt, there&#8217;s like 100 business questions I want to ask you but we&#8217;re over an hour already, so I will-</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Can we take a few more minutes, like maybe wrap it in like, say 10?</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah, sure. If you&#8217;re down, I&#8217;m down.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: You&#8217;re one of my favorite people to talk to.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Well, I appreciate it. I love talking to you as well, and I appreciate your openness.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Between you all, honestly you all and the Tavern folks, these are so much fun. I actually listen to a lot of these podcasts. It&#8217;s really enjoyable for me, so I appreciate you doing it. My ask of you for 2019 is, I&#8217;d love to see a bit most Post Status on the scene, you know?</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah, that&#8217;s a task for myself as well, so I did a relatively personal update recently.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: I saw that.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: One of the things that I&#8217;ve struggled with is I haven&#8217;t been in the thick of things in about four years, so I&#8217;m actually not spoiled, but I&#8217;m doing some part-time work actually being in WordPress, and back into doing stuff.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Cool.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: It&#8217;s actually on the product side, not the service side. I&#8217;ve worked in an agency. This is going to give me a chance to do some part-time work on the product in SaaS side of things, so I&#8217;m excited about that. I know from history, when I&#8217;m working hard on something, whether it&#8217;s building my own site or working in the industry, it gives me much more to say, so I&#8217;m excited about being inspired by working within our space more, and within the experience more. Because it&#8217;s been four years of not doing that, and over those years I&#8217;ve tried to rely on other people to have a voice more as I felt like mine was fading. Kind of like what you were saying, you&#8217;re around developers all the time and not, like you want to be around more users. I was looking at the industry a lot, and not being in the industry I felt made it more difficult to have good things to say.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Although I would say the outside perspective is really valuable as well.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah, I think at least for a season I need, it&#8217;ll be really beneficial for me.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: I can&#8217;t wait to see, and by the way, as a member of the Post Status community, include us along for the ride. I&#8217;m sure after that personal update you got a ton of people contacting you [crosstalk 01:13:14].</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: I did, which I was very thankful for.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: It&#8217;s one of those things, I think what was beautiful about that is you opened up about the struggle, not just about the good stuff. It&#8217;s really scary to be vulnerable like that, publicly. It was scary of me to put the things we learned and did wrong in the State of the Word, right? I just wanted to talk about all the good stuff, but it&#8217;s like it&#8217;s important for us to talk about what I messed up on. People help when they see that.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah, that was very-</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: And I think the most valuable thing you built is like overall a pretty positive community that cares about WordPress deeply, so that&#8217;s awesome.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah, and thank you, and I was very appreciative of the various responses that I got between feedback and ideas and job offers. But I&#8217;m excited to do some work within the space, and you know actually it did give me, it was beneficial because I got my head kind of out of the space a little bit, which I needed. I&#8217;ve been thinking about WordPress a whole lot since 2010, with basically no break, and I can&#8217;t imagine how you feel at times. But for me to still have a focus on WordPress but at least spend part of my week thinking about other things, doing other things, it gave me some personal benefits I think, and allowed me to look at WordPress things with a bigger picture. So I&#8217;m excited for 2019 and I think it&#8217;ll be a lot of fun. Now for you, just-</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Well, I often tell people if you&#8217;re ever feeling not inspired or burnt out, go to a museum. Watch a show. All of my best ideas for WordPress have always come from the intersection of different fields, different areas, and I think that&#8217;s true of most great art, most great software, most great anything. So if you can get out there and keep, the WordPress stuff or whatever you&#8217;re working on will be in the back of your mind anyway, so if you can kind of focus on something else for a little while, actually really it&#8217;s fun.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: It is.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: I can&#8217;t wait to see what you do. As always, let me know if I can ever be of help.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Well, thank you very much. So a couple of business-y things. One is, what&#8217;s your biggest product right now, from an Automatic perspective? Are you guys seeing a lot of growth in the WooCommerce space, or is dot com still the main revenue driver? What are you seeing there?</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Sure, let me just think through what I can say publicly.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: When are you filing your S-1, Matt?</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, we make the same joke in Automatic that they made at Apple, which is we&#8217;re a ship that leaks from the top.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Hey, I have to commend you, as someone who doesn&#8217;t like it but I can appreciate that this is the case. You guys are pretty good about being tight-lipped on the leaky boat side of things, so it&#8217;s a tight ship. I don&#8217;t get near as many of the leaks as I would like out of Automatic.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Well, I think a big part of that is just most of what we do is in the open. If you want to see the pricing tests we&#8217;re running on the new blogger and e-commerce plan that we just launched on WordPress.com, it&#8217;s in the Calypso GitHub so you can see which prices we&#8217;re charging which people, and how the test is going, and what percentage it&#8217;s going out to. Kind of, it&#8217;s all out there. WordPress.com is still the largest, and it&#8217;s still growing like a weed. I think in 2018 WooCommerce will actually grow faster in a year over year percentage, which is kind of what I started saying. We&#8217;re starting to see what I predicted when we actually first brought WooCommerce in, which is that the e-commerce opportunity has the potential to be bigger than all of the rest of Automatic&#8217;s businesses combined.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah, what&#8217;s Shopify, like eight billion plus market cap, maybe 15? I don&#8217;t know. I think they doubled their size in 2018.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, market cap is just vagaries of the market, but revenue, they&#8217;ll be about a billion dollars this year. So I think it&#8217;s always good to look at kind of, when sort of comparing companies, look at the revenue not just the market cap.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Sure.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: So they&#8217;ll be at a billion dollars and still growing at a really, really good rate. Now, the other reality is that nothing that we do is completely disconnected. A lot of the WooCommerce growth and increasing user experience is sort of amplified, I think, because we&#8217;ve been doing it in Jetpack, which is also amplified by running Jetpack code on WordPress.com and having that sort of stream of new users that are coming there, and so we see the problems that they&#8217;re having, and the struggles, or we build the infrastructure.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: You asked about data structures earlier. I think one thing that we&#8217;ll start to see a lot more of in WordPress, and actually a very common feature of Jetpack that people don&#8217;t know about, that the Jetpack business plan, you can have full Elasticsearch version of your site. So there are certain use cases for which I don&#8217;t think MySQL is the best medium with which to address or query your data, and Elasticsearch is pretty much the cat&#8217;s meow. So the fact that we can in real time, create real time Elasticsearch indexes for every single Jetpack business site, which only costs $300 per year. Before that, it used to cost &#8230; Actually, I think VIP used to charge $5,000 or $10,000 a year for this, maybe even a couple grand a month, actually. Now we can do it for $300 per year.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Wow.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: And that&#8217;s just one of the features in Jetpack Business. That&#8217;s in addition to the real time backup and the activity log and all the other things, the security restores. It just shows that we&#8217;re really surfing the outer edge of Moore&#8217;s Law, and I think that the stuff that we&#8217;re going to be able to do over the next few years is going to be pretty amazing, and I&#8217;m excited about Automatic. We also just moved DNS Perf, we moved back into second place for fastest DNS service, so by the way, way ahead of Amazon, way ahead of Google, and second only to Cloudflare, which Automatic&#8217;s network is tiny but mighty. Cloudflare invests I think over 100 million dollars per year in capex, building out their data centers in their kind of points of presence. We&#8217;ve reached a number two performance ranking with a fraction of that investment, so very proud of that team, very proud of all the folks at Automatic that are really building this out. By the way, then that benefits all the users of Jetpack Photon, the CDN, just so much cool stuff happening.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: That&#8217;s awesome. I heard recently that you all have also been able to lower some of your prices for VIP as you&#8217;re deploying like VIP Go and some of that stuff with scalable Websites. Back when I had my hands in a few VIP sites I think the lowest pricing back then was maybe $3,000 to $4,000 a month, and now you can do it as low as $1,000 a month and you all provide a lot for that, so that&#8217;s impressive.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: That sounds about right, yeah. I&#8217;m not up on the latest there, but fundamentally my business philosophy is to get the best stuff in the hands of as many users for as low a price as possible, and we&#8217;re just relentless in kind of cutting the costs, bringing things down, trying to leverage the best and newest technology to do so.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: How are you attacking the very high end, so that a store that may grow up on WooCommerce doesn&#8217;t feel like they have to leave WooCommerce once it hits a certain scale? One of the things that I feel like people have been, I&#8217;ve been hearing from consultants especially, is that they get to a certain size and then they&#8217;re really struggling with WooCommerce, and then something like Shopify ends up being the answer. How is WooCommerce going to compete in that realm to be the platform for Macy&#8217;s or who knows what? Some big company with lots of orders and lots of stuff, so that you can keep them throughout the life cycle?</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, I think my take on that problem, because ultimately what we want to do is be more scalable in Shopify and also a better user experience, and right now I would say they&#8217;re ahead in both. There hasn&#8217;t been as good a feedback loop. The thing that made WordPress so scalable was there was a tight feedback loop between the host, the agencies building the biggest sites, WordPress.com itself being a big site, and the core development. So that meant that when we had bottlenecks, we were able to solve them often in core in ways that were ultra scalable in Webscale.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: WordPress.com is on its own one of the largest sites on the Internet, so that&#8217;s the same software that you can download and use, which is kind of wild. For WooCommerce, that loop isn&#8217;t as strong so one of the things I&#8217;ve been encouraging the team to try to do myself is get a tighter loop between the host and the people building the big sites and the WooCommerce core team, so that they can figure out versus having five different plugins that try to address the scalability in different and often subpar ways, really get that built into core, with the sort of Web scale, knowing everything we&#8217;ve known in 15 years of building WordPress, what&#8217;s going to make it so it can scale to thousands of orders per second, hundreds of millions of rows.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Two more questions, real quick.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: We can do so, by the way. It&#8217;s a very tractable problem. We will solve that. Solving that is something that will happen within the next six to 18 months. Solving the user experience to catch up with Shopify is also improving the user experience, or BigCommerce rather, I think will take longer. That&#8217;s more of a five to 10 year goal.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: I personally think that gives both the WordPress ecosystem, the WooCommerce ecosystem and Automatic directly a massive value proposition, if that can be accomplished. I think WordPress now people, you never feel like you have to leave WordPress because you got too big.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Yeah.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: And as that can be accomplished, and that was a massive accomplishment for WordPress. For a long time that wasn&#8217;t true, and now that, if that can be done on the e-commerce side of things, or commerce broadly not just necessarily WooCommerce, I think that will be fantastic for everybody involved.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: By the way, I just want to point that out, just to pause. Think how little, how many other examples of software you can think of that the consumer version also works when you run it at an industrial global scale?</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: I have no idea. I&#8217;m not very-</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: It&#8217;s not very common. I think it&#8217;s one of the things the WordPress community should really be proud of, because that is highly unusual. And as we&#8217;re one of the only ultra-successful consumer open source startups, projects, communities, whatever, I think pointing to that sort of scalability is a big thing as well.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: So, one question is Automatic has investors. We just saw Slack, Lyft and Uber all file for becoming public companies. When I think, what&#8217;s the option for Automatic, one of however many successful startups where you have investors, they know you&#8217;re a successful startup. They know that there&#8217;s opportunity for them to succeed in that. That&#8217;s long-term revenue stream, remaining a private company. It&#8217;s private equity. It&#8217;s going public, or it&#8217;s acquisition. Do you have any thoughts in terms of what makes you happiest as a company and as a business owner, and what do you think is best for the way Automatic interfaces with the broader WordPress community?</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: It&#8217;s hard for me to imagine being a public company CEO, any harder than leading an open source project.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: I&#8217;ve thought about that a great deal. I think you actually fit the mold for what Wall Street might like in terms of the leader of a public company. I will say, that&#8217;s my bet. My best is one day Automatic would go public, and we figure out how that works in terms of all the private, public components and the open source side of things. But yeah, I&#8217;m curious-</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: I think it&#8217;s actually a possibility. By the way, I could see other WordPress companies going public, probably WPEngine is the closest to the gates there.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Well good, GoDaddy and EIG are public.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: They are, yeah, so there will be other open source WordPress either based or WordPress will be a part of their business public companies, likely before Automatic as well. I think that&#8217;s a great path for us. Automatic has investors. They are minority investors, so the sort of existential future of the company is in the hand of myself and the other people who own the majority of the shares of Automatic. I think there&#8217;s lots of options. The people you point to, Uber or Lyft, Slack, et cetera, to varying degrees have built some pretty impressive things. I admire some more than others, but also have reached a scale that&#8217;s kind of far beyond where companies generally go public.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Yeah, they really have. It&#8217;s been-</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: What that illustrates is that the private market is actually a lot more liquid and has a lot more capital available for when and how that needs the company or the ecosystem or whatever to grow.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: So I could surmise from that that you don&#8217;t feel like there&#8217;s a rush?</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: I won&#8217;t even speak to my own personal things, but say just in the industry there&#8217;s less of a rush, so that is the plus and minus of so much capital moving from the public markets into the private markets. So people like Fidelity, T. Rowe Price et cetera that used to only do public companies now invest in private companies. That&#8217;s great for the companies, because by the way as a private company, you don&#8217;t have the kind of quarterly scrutiny that you do when you&#8217;re public, and I think it&#8217;s actually easier to out-innovate and out-flank public companies when you are private, which is one thing I personally like. But that said, it does keep more of that growth in the hands of only sophisticated investors.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: I completely agree.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: So there is a lot more of that upside that is no longer in the hands of what is commonly referred to as the retail investor. I would love for anyone who loves Automatic&#8217;s products to be able to own a share of the company, even if it&#8217;s just one share. That&#8217;s not really possible under the current sort of regulatory frameworks, and for good reasons, by the way. As we saw with the kind of ICO craze, there&#8217;s a reason all these protections for consumers and public market, public company standards exist.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: But in the meantime, at Automatic we will continue to hold ourselves to public company standards, but really build in an extremely long-term way. If there&#8217;s an idol there, I&#8217;d say it&#8217;s Amazon, and try to make the best possible user experience, best possible products. If we continue to do that, I think from a business point of view we will have an array of options available to us and any number of choices.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: And as a leader yourself of the WordPress community and Automatic, what&#8217;s one big thing that you learned this year that you hope to improve upon in 2019?</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Hmm, I know you&#8217;re probably thinking about like a big thing, but I&#8217;m actually going to say a small thing.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: It can be small.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: It&#8217;s really important, which is how much you can &#8230; What is the one thing everyone listening to this is doing right now?</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Focusing, I hope?</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Breathing.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: And you probably weren&#8217;t thinking about it, but now you are thinking about it. You&#8217;re breathing right now.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: I am.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: And it is amazing how much you can influence your mindset, your state of mind, your mood, your everything, through breath. Just as an exercise, where everyone puts their hand on their belly and takes a big breath and pushes your hand out as you take it in, Brian, are you doing it?</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Oh, sorry. I do. I feel good.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: It has an immediate effect on you.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: It does. You know, actually that&#8217;s how we discipline our son often. A three-year-old is a very emotional being, so if they&#8217;re upset one of the first things that you can do with them is just tell them, &#8220;Let&#8217;s take a deep breath together.&#8221; So you take that deep breath and the response is also very immediate, the way they calm down and settle down and think more clearly because they took that breath, so that&#8217;s interesting.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: That&#8217;s all of us, and also by the way, this is not something new. This goes back thousands of years.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: You didn&#8217;t just invent this?</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: No, no, you know there&#8217;s so many, there&#8217;s so much prior art here, but I&#8217;d encourage people to check it out. Also check out, when the videos go up, the Joanna Barsh talk, and Alexis Lloyd both had sort of almost like guided meditations and exercises. I think this is one of the next big areas for people who aren&#8217;t familiar with to discover. They&#8217;re actually really, really powerful, and it&#8217;s been huge for me. In an extraordinarily busy and what might otherwise be seen as extremely stressful year, it was actually one of my best years of my life.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: Awesome.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: I do have to watch a clock, and I do have to run now.</p>
<p>Brian Krogsgard: That&#8217;s fine. I&#8217;m happy to hear that. Thank you for spending so much time with me. It was great talking to you, and we&#8217;ll catch everybody next time.</p>
<p>Matt Mullenweg: Thank you. I&#8217;ll see you all, and thank you to all Post Status readers.</p>
</div>";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Wed, 12 Dec 2018 14:45:20 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:15:"Brian Krogsgard";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}s:4:"type";i:128;s:7:"headers";O:42:"Requests_Utility_CaseInsensitiveDictionary":1:{s:7:"*data";a:8:{s:6:"server";s:5:"nginx";s:4:"date";s:29:"Thu, 24 Jan 2019 16:31:06 GMT";s:12:"content-type";s:8:"text/xml";s:4:"vary";s:15:"Accept-Encoding";s:13:"last-modified";s:29:"Thu, 24 Jan 2019 16:15:29 GMT";s:15:"x-frame-options";s:10:"SAMEORIGIN";s:4:"x-nc";s:9:"HIT ord 2";s:16:"content-encoding";s:4:"gzip";}}s:5:"build";s:14:"20130911040210";}