 So Konstantin's down from Ventura. He's worked full time for automatic on both the core, as well as the WordPress.org. And he's into bourbon and craft beer. So I'm sure we'll see some great stuff from him today. And I'll just turn it over. Big round of applause. Thank you. Alex, are you ready to go? OK. Let's talk about shiny updates, a feature plug-in into X. And that subtitle is actually outdated already. We recently had a change that was made, renaming feature plugins into feature projects. I'm going to talk about that a little later on, what that entails in detail. A few of you might have noticed. Last week, there was a new release of WordPress, which was WordPress 4.5 that came out. Who here has not updated yet to WordPress 4.5? Come on, you guys. Come on, you guys. You should totally do that. There's a plenty of reasons to update. And I want to show you the release video that outlines the most important reasons why you should update to a WordPress 4.5. WordPress 4.5, Coleman, named for jazz legend, Coleman Hawkins. Streamlines your workflow, whether you're writing your content or building your website. With responsive previews in the customizer, you don't need your phone to check out your site on the mobile web. Just use the layout toggles to preview your website on different size screens. While you're there, stop by the site identity settings. And if your theme supports it, add a logo to your website. We've made subtle changes in the editor that will improve your writing experience. Now, when you click to insert a link, a field appears in line, allowing you to insert a URL, whether it's on your site or elsewhere on the web. And this release sees the introduction of even more formatting shortcuts to keep you typing and improve your flow. Enclose your text in bat ticks to turn it into code. Or add three dashes to insert a horizontal line. And that's just a glimpse at WordPress 4.5, a release focused on making it easier for you to write and to publish. WordPress 4.5, Coleman, for a more streamlined experience. Exciting news. With the release of 4.5, this also means that we now started working on WordPress 4.6, which is scheduled to be released August 16 of this year. This will become important in just a few minutes. Before we move on to actually talking about shiny updates, I want to introduce you to a project that is happening today, rather, yeah, tomorrow, which is the Global Translation Day. It's a 24-hour life training session on WordPress internationalization and localization, starting at 5 p.m. today with more than 30 contributor events worldwide. So there's meetups worldwide that tune in to these live streaming sessions. And it's all about translating WordPress, translating plugins and themes. And so if you speak a second language, like Spanish, for example, I hear that's very popular around here, you might want to consider hanging out in there, learning something about how you can give back to WordPress through translating core plugins and themes. Going on today, starting at 5 p.m. Going on for 24 hours. But let's talk about shiny updates, which is, in my opinion, the 4.6's freshest feature coming hopefully in this upcoming release, hopefully in user's hands by August this year. With a switch to feature projects rather than plugins, one of the new requirements or things that we do is to formulate a statement of purpose. This sounds kind of dry, but it serves the purpose of having a focused mission or a focused goal that people can turn back to and orient themselves at. And the main goal for shiny updates is getting rid of the bleak screen of sadness. And I'm going to show you just now what I mean with that. And it's also, we want to improve the experience when installing, updating, and deleting plugins and themes. So this is what shiny updates is. Part of that was already done in WordPress 4.2, but we want to expand that in WordPress 4.6. So the bleak screen of sadness is the reason that a lot of users react that way when there's new updates available. It's something people don't want to deal with, right? When you install a new plugin, for example, this is how it currently looks like. This is the process that you have to go through when installing a plugin. You click on the installer, the install now button, and you get this screen, right? With tons of information that you don't really hear about and it's really, really confusing. Actual WordPress user, by the way. So how can we improve that? Improving updates is something that has received a lot of attention over the last two or three years, especially. We introduced, WordPress introduced automatic updates for minor versions over two years ago in WordPress 3.7. We had a dedicated release, almost, to introduce that feature and make sure that we get that right. And the goal for that is, the goal for automatic updates, really, is to combat update fatigue, like some of you here, who have not had a chance to update to 4.5 yet. Combat update fatigue and improve security, of course. And so by pushing out background updates, the core team is now able to close security holes in 12 to maybe 24 hours, even faster if need be. And that is not only true for WordPress core. This is also true for plugins, for example, which has happened before. And as far as I know, themes as well, if that is ever necessary. I don't think we ever had a case where we had to ship a background update for an automatic update for themes. But for plugins, we had two or three cases where we actually did do that. Just to keep WordPress users around the world safe from security holes. And so tying into that idea of making updates as easy as possible for users. In WordPress 4.2, we saw the first iteration on Shiny updates getting into WordPress. So that would be act one, if you want. Smoother updates from the plugin list page. So when you click on update now, everything happens in line. You never leave your plugin screen at all. It also includes smoother updates and was supposed to include installations as well from the plugin install screen. So when you're on the installation screen, like the one that you saw just now, you can update from there as well and it's all in line within the page without any reloads and it goes super, super fast. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, Shiny installations and bulk updates had to be removed before the first release candidate of WordPress 4.2. So we were left with inline updates for plugins only. The idea for improving the update experience in that way actually was formulated in WordPress 4.1, so even three months earlier than that. And unfortunately, since WordPress 4.2, we never really had any new improvements or any major movement on that project. Before I wanna go further into what we did with version two, I wanna take a quick detour and talk about future projects and the idea behind them and why we develop core that way or new features for core rather. In WordPress 3.6, we were working on the plugin, I'm sorry, the post-formats user interface and it was a feature that needed a lot of work and it extended the release of 3.6 by over a month. So it delayed the release, it was a really painful experience because it had to be pulled out entirely in the end of the day. And it was something that really made the core team rethink the way that features are developed for WordPress core. And so starting in WordPress 3.7, we used the idea of using plugins to develop features before they go into release with the advantage being that it's just faster for people to iterate on these plugins because you're not restricted by committers or the committer bottleneck, right? There's only a limited amount of people who have commit access to WordPress. And so if you work on a plugin, for example, on GitHub or something, it's a lot easier to give a lot more people access to this plugin and iterate on the development there. It also doesn't tie features to releases anymore and the risk of delaying a release through that is greatly reduced, right? So now we're in a position where the core team is in a position where it can say, is this feature ready to be used to integrate it into core? And if it's not, it doesn't matter the release won't really be delayed or have any bad repercussions through that. But if it is ready, it's very easy to integrate into the core and ship that feature with a new release. And so one of the things that the committer group kind of talked about during our last meetup right before WorkCamp US in December was that it's really, really hard to find great examples for feature plugins for the rest of the community to look up to and orient themselves at. And so there was a need for a new plugin to kind of serve as a best practice example for how feature plugins are being made. And one of my suggestions was Shiny Updates doing a version two of Shiny Updates as a plugin first, not have it be core patches, but rather interplugin, as I said. And so a lot of effort was really put into building it by the book, right? We had regular meetings, especially throughout the months of December and January. Regular meetings, a lot of documentation. We had user tests, pretty much everything that the requirements laid out for. We did for Shiny Updates, too. One of the downsides, though, was that there was really a lack of participation. There was, I think, three or four contributors other than me who showed interest into contributing to Shiny Updates. So it took a little bit longer than we would have liked, but we got most of the work done in January. Shiny Updates, as I said, wants to improve the installation experience for plugins and themes, the update experience as well. Themes currently don't have the benefit of inline updates while plugins do. And so for plugins, it was more about bringing the bulk update feature up to par with that. Deleting plugins and themes as well. So those were the actions that we focused on. We decided not to really go into bulk actions with themes, because it turned out that it doesn't make a difference if you select themes first and then an action, or if you just trigger the action directly on the theme tile if you want. So we didn't do that. We also decided not to bother with making activations, something that would happen without a page refresh, because a lot of plugins actually go ahead and redirect you to a setting screen or something after that activation page refresh. So that led to a really, really weird user experience when you activate a plugin and then you go to write a new post or something, but you end up on the new plugins settings page and you don't know how you got there, right? So this is something that we didn't bother really, trying to figure out. There was also problems with making sure that if you activate a plugin that it doesn't fatal the entire site. So you're left with a white screen after that. And it was just a lot of challenges that we felt was not worth our time just to save that one page refresh. And also activating a Plunger theme did not bring you to the screen of sadness that we talked about earlier. So it wasn't really a big focus of ours. There are five places within the Workplace admin to manage plugins and four places to manage themes. I don't know if you were aware of that, but you can manage plugins from, of course, the plugin install screen, the plugin list screen of already installed plugins, and you have the same screens for multi-site as well. So that is four. And then there's also a details iframe if you click on a link in the plugin list. This shows you the plugins page in the plugin directory. And you can of course install and update plugins from there as well. So that is five places that we had to make sure that we captured and dealt with in terms of actions that were triggered through these updates and installations. The plugin has been in the repository for three or four months now. A few people have tested it already and gave me some feedback. I wanna share some of that feedback with you. People were really enthusiastic about it. One friend of mine is specific. He was, he asked me, is it magic? It's so fast, is it magic? He said, it's amazeballs. I loved it. I know. Another person said, it looks professional. And I was like, this is awesome. This is what we go for. So I wanna show you through a live demo Yes, a live demo. I wanna show you how Shiny updates now work and how they look going forward, hopefully coming to you in WordPress 4.6. So, this is a great resolution. All right, let's see. Okay, so this is your plugin's list screen, right? All the plugins that you have installed on your site. And this is how it currently looks when there's updates available. And if we activate Shiny updates, it looks a bit more colorful. We have nicer notices. Updating a plugin, let's do this one, still works the same way as before. So that really hasn't changed. But when we now go and install a plugin, let's add a new one. Whoa. All right, there you go. Two-factor. So now when you click the install now button, and everything happens in line, you're installing and it is installed, and that's as fast as it goes. And you're not confronted with all the unnecessary information that we currently display. Let's go back. Deleting that same plugin. Let's refresh the page. Two-factor. Deleting is as easy as that. Gone. Like your plugins, gone. And the same thing goes for themes, of course. And I think I have a theme, oh, actually I do have a theme update. Look at that. Updating. And still updating. And eventually it updated. Adding a new one. Let's try that. Web design. This looks like a great theme. Look at that. When I install that. Installing. Done. And that's as fast as it is in with shiny updates enabled. And also, wait, let's delete one as well. So I don't like web design anymore. So let's delete that. I hope I fixed that bug. Gone. Alex, you missed it. You didn't even see it. I know. I deleted it. It's gone. So this is what shiny updates is in a nutshell. It brings you all these actions way faster. Painless, finally. Yeah. Hopefully soon near you. Oh, I got five minutes left. All right. So let's hope that whoops 4.6 finally gives you shiny updates in the way that it was supposed to. You have the opportunity to get involved if you want to. Help us bring it over the finish line. We have a chat coming up this Tuesday at 1900 GMT which is, I think, 10 o'clock. 12, 10, I think 10 a.m. 12, it's 12 noon, 12 noon. Who set that time? Like I'm on my lunch break. In the future, shiny updates channel on Slack. That's where you can find us. We'll have a chat on Tuesday talking about how we can make sure that we do get it into 4.6, what kind of work is remaining there. And yeah, you can check out the repository on GitHub slash openland slash shiny updates if you want to open any issues or help out with code. You would do as a great favor if you could install the plugin, activate it and just have it run on your website. I promise you I'll try not to break your site. You can download it from the WordPress sort of program repository from the comfort of your WordPress admin and just use it and test it and see if there's any jarring experience that you were just not prepared for that we should fix. Yeah, give us feedback, that would be great. My name is Konstantin Openland. You can find me on the web under at Openland. I have a blog with pretty pictures at Konstantin.Openland.it. As Ben said earlier, I work at Automatic. I'm on a team that is focused on contributing to WordPress core and the WordPress.org infrastructure. One of the things that I am working on currently, outside of shiny updates is actually rewriting the plugin directory of WordPress using WordPress. It's a pretty great project. If you want to help me out with that, if you're interested in creating the new plugin repository for WordPress and make an impact there, please come talk to me, see me after the session and I'm now ready for your questions. If there are any. Put them all the way in the back. I have no idea what you're saying. Are you gonna auto-activate plugins after install? No, we're not. So, the same things that I said about inline activating plugins and themes is true for auto-activating plugins and themes. We're currently not able to make 100% sure that there's no fatal errors when we auto-activate a plugin. Auto-activating it would not bring us the concern of plugins redirecting after a page load. We could probably trigger that, but that would be the main reason why we don't do that in this iteration, which doesn't mean that it couldn't be done at a later point in time, though. Yes. Does the dashboard updates screen change? Do you mean underneath the dashboard, the link? So, yes, we had, there was some work that is still ongoing there. If you want to help contribute to that, you're more than welcome to. Right now, it's not in a state where I think it would be ready for 4.6, but that doesn't mean that if someone would put in some work that it can't be ready for 4.6. Just at this moment, it's not. The things that we were thinking about there is just cleaning up that screen a lot, bringing all these different tables of plugins and theme and core updates together in one table, and getting rid of a lot of the buttons that you have on the very top of the screen just to make it a bit easier to grok when you first get on the screen. Not sure if that is getting into 4.6 though. Alex, has there any thought been given to improving admin notices for plugins and themes? Not really, in a general sense. We did think about it a lot when it comes to bulk actions, right, and how you can handle that information, or the success or failure information for bulk actions, but we haven't really thought about improving that in general for, I know, yeah. Brennan, right, so the question was how can we avoid, with feature projects, how can we avoid stalling projects until they're perfect? And the answer to that is, we kind of have that problem with feature plugins, right, because we were hoping to have a finished feature ready to be merged. Going over to projects, we hope that we can have a more iterative approach to that, meaning if there's parts of that that is ready to merge that already, and not wait for the rest to be done, because that is actually something that was a problem in the past. And so, I mean, Shiny Updates is a great example for that as well, because the parts that I just showed you, they're ready, you know, like they're done. It may need some more testing and user feedback, but basically they're done. But the update core part in the dashboard is not done, right, and so we're not waiting for that to be finished. We just go ahead with what we have right now and continue to iterate on that part. No more questions? No? We're getting ready to clap. Okay, thank you so much.