 Yeah. Okay. Welcome. Thank you for joining us. Whether you're here live or you're watching this as a recording, this is the WordPress 6.3 kind of release announcement where Anne McCarthy and Rich Tabor are going to lay out all of the new bits and pieces that we can manage to get in something around an hour, probably 40 minutes and then a little bit of time for Q&A at the end. Speaking of that, if you've got any questions, please put them in to Zoom. There are several people here who are going to try and make sure that those questions make it in my direction and then hopefully if there's time at the end we can collate those and then get them out and hopefully get them answered. So yeah, without further ado, I've already introduced them by name but hello Anne, how are you doing. Great. How are you? Yeah, great. Thank you. And also, hello Rich. How are you doing? Yeah, Nathan. Yeah, I'm doing really awesome. Great. So it's my job just to step out the way. So that's exactly what I'm going to do and I will hand over to Rich so that he can take it from here. Yeah, you know Nathan, I'm thrilled to showcase WordPress 6.3. It really is a monumental release that marks the tail end of the customization phase of the Gutenberg project and sets the stage for Phase 3 which is focusing on collaboration and workflow. So some of what you'll see today is starting to lean in that direction. But before I really dive into it I wanted to share that what Anne and I are sharing throughout all this demo is a collective effort across hundreds of contributors from all over the world. And for those folks like you know who you are and thank you for caring about the future of WordPress and really the future of the web. So I want to start there but let's dive in. Alright, can everybody see my screen here? Yes. Awesome. So one of the more exciting parts of this release is the addition of what is called the WordPress command palette. So this is accessible within the post and the site editor and allows you to quickly navigate and command WordPress. So you can pull it up using command K or control K depending on your OS. So as soon as you hit it you'll see this new dialogue right here where you can start searching for commands. Let's push the O command so you can see that there's quite a few commands that lets you open up different panels on the left. So if we go to pages we can open up the style variations and we'll dive into each of these in a bit templates. But if you go into the editor here you actually have quite a few more commands because this is very contextual. So we can go into here and then let me refresh here. You can go into the editor and then run commands like opening the CSS panel over here. Let me see if I can get it open. There it is. We can also, I think Zoom is messing with my keyboard shortcuts here. You can also run the command palette from the superior so you can open it here, navigate specific pages. So if I go to my about page I can actually pull it up within the editor here. And then also commanding the editor to do other toggling options like setting the spotlight mode for example to where only the block that you're selected on is highlighted. And you can also turn it back off. So if you toggle spotlight off. Really the command palette is, you know, the first iteration of what is going into WordPress 6.3. I'm really excited about the WordPress command palette API and how folks can start leveraging that and plugins can add additional commands not only to, you know, open up different settings views, but actually toggle controls or fetch data to render all custom post types or different settings within more advanced plugins. And I even can imagine an idea where the command palette not only launches experiences but maybe even holds experiences so if you're selecting an image and you run the command or you run the command palette. And you'll see maybe a transform command and that lets you transform that block into something else so there's many experiences within the command palette so I'm really excited to see how this evolves. Alright, so let's jump on the topic to that all. I'm going to try and share but I can't see a way to message everyone right now but I'll drop it in a second for anyone who's interested with the nerdy details. Yeah, and the API the WordPress command palette API is ready to for folks to start working with. So that's, that's ready for 6.3 and all these plugins I'm really, really interested so if you do add commands to your plugins like please share them with folks so that we can get more feedback and continuously improve where this is headed. Alright, so this is the site editor view there's a couple of enhancements here, you know, a quick one but this is a nice touch is to be able to resize here and it's a much better resize action than previous versions of WordPress. And it lets you see the, the really all the responsive views from tablet all the way down, just to see exactly what you need to adjust if you need to a mobile. We have a couple of menu items over here that are different and new. So we have navigation styles templates was existing but it's been evolved quite a bit pages and patterns. I'm going to jump into pages because this is probably the bigger hitter here. When you open up pages here this is a relatively new concept in the site editor but it's not new to WordPress where you can publish pages so within the pages view here we have all the pages listed and now you can browse and then also edit pages within the site editor. So if I opened up the about page here, I see my about page in full with header and footer all the template parts anything that you would see on the front end of the site over here within the frame. And on the left I have my details view where I have the slug so if I wanted to quickly open this up into a new tab and view it on the front end. There's also the excerpt some details this is showing us a status you know the word count time to read. Also, when was this last modified down here at the bottom, but I can go into this by clicking the frame, and now I can edit this actual post title and the post content. These items are split out here on the right so you can identify what is editable from this view, and this title bar here at the top is letting you know that you're editing a page, and it's the about page. So if I go in here, change this to about WordPress you'll see it changing wherever it's relevant. And then I can go in here and actually start manipulating the post content up so I can add any of my blocks I can add any patterns. All of this is exactly like you would see in the post editor, but now it's accessible here in the site editor. Now if you wanted to go in and actually edit the template itself as soon as you click on any of the template areas so like the header where the footer. You'll see this little notice here at the bottom. We also have this button right here that indicates that you're going to that if you want to edit the page template you would click this will click edit template. And now we have place a placeholder content for the actual page, you can see here we're now editing the page. So this is the template icon and anything that's purple is being reused across the site so this is the page template that's being reused across all of your pages. So if I take this title, let's say move it to the center. Let's go ahead and add the featured image block as well. And then think I want to add some space here, just to make sure this looks nice. And then down here we'll rearrange this make that a little bit bigger as well. And what I'm doing is actually editing this one template that'll be applied on every page. So I hit save. We'll go back now I'm on my about page itself, I have the featured image title and content. And now you can see also have the featured image that's editable so I can click this. Let's say add this image here. Now we have this featured image that I can actually edit on my page within the site editor and I can see all the elements of this template in context with the rest of my site. So it really kind of brings together, or the start of bringing together the two editor experiences into one cohesive experience while also putting some guardrails around editing templates that are applied everywhere versus editing content on this one particular post. So it's a huge feature to have now to be able to publish posts directly in here and part of what I think Richard talked about earlier of the complete experience where you're able to do everything within the site or without leaving and this was a big piece of feedback. We got from the outreach program from the community, but that was the main reason people would be leading the site editor and having to switch back and forth between the two. So this is definitely a neat thing and paves the way for the future, possibly with some of the editor experiences whenever you're in post editor and you can add the template there. There's a lot we can we can learn. Exactly and it's really like browsing and editing is is really nice but then we're going to go a step further here and drafting. So I can draft a new title. I'm going to page here I'm going to do my page. Create draft. And now I've drafted a page is using that same exact template that uses a feature image here. I can start adding my content to this page and save it is still a draft here but if I want to set this as publishing, I can do so like this. And now this page is published on my website, and I can hook it up to my navigation I can put it wherever I need to elsewhere so this really reduces the amount of times you have to go in and out of all the complex areas of WordPress and kind of keeps you in this one contained environment for creating pages, drafts and posts that are published but also editing them further. It really is a really is a very capable engine for publishing and I think it's a great improvement for 6.3. And you want to talk about the navigation front. Yes, navigation is definitely a hugely critical part of your site and so that comes up a lot. When we look at the site editor and so now there's a dedicated navigation section so before in 6.2, you had to go into a template or a type of part and actually find your navigation for your site to make changes. It wasn't exactly clear how to access all of them. There are a number of pain points and now it is a top level item that gives you direct access and actually is contextual so that's another thing that you'll probably hear that word a lot is contextual and that's part of like the requirement that's coming to this release. So depending upon how many menus you actually have, you'll see a different sidebar to grant so if you just have one menu, you'll see this the menu listed in this sidebar in this case we have to see you see them all listed there. And if you have many, you'll see them all listed. And depending upon the complexity you can also have different views in terms of going in and actually making direct changes. But with each of them you can actually select and edit an isolation and like a focus mode. Within the experience itself, which is what Rich is showing right now. Make changes to whatever you'd like it there. You can go back, you can also drag and drop and move these around and just make really simple high level changes. Kind of like the most common actions you might take within the sidebar. And I love this is another area that is a great spot to give feedback on to continue iterating on, but it's a huge, huge step forward in terms of the experience of trying to find and manage navigation. This is definitely something that came up a lot of me to go and search through all the templates and figure out where your, your menu was and hopefully this is something that helps make that a lot easier. And I love personally that it changes based on the number of menus that you have and the complexity. I won't go into the micro detail of all that but expect for documentation to be up to date and for this to be streamlined. Do you want to jump into styles next that's. Yeah, let's do that. This is another section that's new with the site editor and 6.3 at a high level it shows the style variations that come with a theme, as well as an option to access the style book, which you can turn on right here, which shows all your styles and the impact of those different style changes. There's also an easy access to get directly into styles as well as star revision so what you see at the very bottom where it says last modified few seconds ago it's just basically quick links to get you where you want to go. And this jumps into star visions here which I think we go in the future I think I jumped ahead. I get too excited about this stuff. But in the future that whole style section one of the things that's being discussed right now and GitHub is around having font management there. So you can imagine this style section being a home for more things in the future potentially. It's still TBD on how they'll evolve. And basically it could be a home for more more options in the future and I'd love to hear feedback on this as well as another feedback on all of it really but this section in particular I think for themes without star variations what do you want to see what would be most helpful. How can we elevate the experience in a way that is intuitive and make sense and gives you access to the things that you want to see. Yeah. Do you want to jump into templates. So the fourth item here is templates and templates really have evolved and some of the updated mechanisms for adding templates have been quite enhanced here so I'm going to go into here. Adding a new template we have this new model view here where you can select the type of template you want to apply. You can also create custom templates which can be applied manually to any page or post when you're editing those. We're going to create a custom template here. We're going to name it my custom template. It create. And this is where we see something pretty new here previously in other versions of WordPress you would have to copy and paste and kind of get smart with when you're creating new templates across different templates. Now we WordPress is finding the most associated templates so right now I created a custom template and I have an existing page template. And it's using this this as a suggestion for what I could start with now you can also register and create your own patterns so you could have different template patterns that would be considered starter templates. So I can pick this here and now instead of trying to bounce between two pages and make sure my templates are one to one I have exactly what my existing template was that we edited earlier now I can go in and make changes. So say I wanted this template to be much more minimal removing the the title and the featured image I can even modify the header here so let's replace this. Save something a little bit bigger. Maybe do this bigger as little changes as you want for each template and now this template when I save it will be available for editing within this templates view here and I can also apply it to other pages now. We also have details views for templates so if you go to index here. I have a post per page that is pulled out of the other general settings within WordPress and to the relative template, I can set this to six. Can just allow comments on new posts if you want. And let's save this year. And now I have six posts on my index view here. This is also neat where some of the areas that are used within WordPress templates are pulled out for reference so if you want to identify the footer, you can just zoom right in on the footer and make contextual changes right here. Navigation is the same thing this navigation block is pulled out into context within the sidebar. This is the first iteration in the direction but ideally we could start pulling out other top level key features like the site logo maybe even site title when you're focusing in on a navigation or a header as well. That way you don't have to dive all the way into a block to change its settings we can pull out the most important and significant settings. Yeah and as part of this the details to cure some of the stuff that's come up and that there's an ongoing discussion about is continuing to surface the reading settings and making that as intuitive as possible. And another thing that I'm really excited about is in the future I think there's going to be some work around turning off templates so let's say your theme comes with the front page template but you don't want to use that being able to turn that off and then also just duplicating templates with ease and having that as part of the process of creation for sites. So I think there are there's some use cases where folks are running into already. I don't want to use these templates from this thing I want to use my own template. And that leads into the future of the future of blocking searching. I want to put some this site or this theme and I want to use them on my site and I want to use these operations in this thing. So there's some interesting groundwork already for that future. Right yeah templates don't have to be associated to a specific team where patterns or styles it's really kind of got made these all components of a site. And I think kind of just put some together in a nice fashion. And speaking of components and compositions we have the newest item here and the last one will go over in the site editor and this is the patterns item. So WordPress 6.3 leans quite heavily on patterns and patterns are compositions of blocks that can be added to a page all at once. This includes both new patterns that are added to the patterns directory and also the ability to create and manage patterns directly in the site editor. So here we have all your patterns set out visually those patterns included by from your theme and plugins that would be listed right here. For now they're not editable but I imagine in the future we would be able to replicate and edit maybe something similar to how template parts can be editable. And you can go through here and create patterns to add to your pattern section up here so let's run through that here. We're going to hit this plus it create pattern we're going to name it I'll name this pattern. And then we can toggle these patterns to keep them all synchronized across every instance that this pattern is in use. One thing to note with synced patterns is that when you do edit one of them they're going to be edited at the same edits are going to be applied throughout all the synced patterns. Let's create this pattern here and let's run through that. Let's start with a blank slate here. I'm going to pick an existing pattern to roll with a really like this one here to a cool double cover type design. And I saw where one of them is set to fixed and the other one's not. Let's go in and make some changes. Perhaps actually I want to use this new do a tone control this is pulled into the inspector here to kind of surface some of the design controls a little bit better. I'm going to apply the do a tone effects there. We're going to hit save and go back out to patterns. Now we have our new pattern that I created that my pattern right here. It's purple again purple is synced and used everywhere. We're going to go to the homepage and I'll show you how to add it. So you can if it's a synced pattern you can actually search for it with the this insert here. So you save my pattern and also through this existing tab here. And you may know that these reusable blocks and synced patterns are very similar and you want to touch on the feedback that we received on that front. Yeah, let's dive into that so with the concepts of simple parts reusable blocks and patterns a lot of confusion came up to the point that I created a user doc on it, comparing the different options and distinguishing each and this release brings us into kind of a gathering of the concepts consolidate how much people need to know. So reusable blocks as a concept is now known as synced patterns and patterns in general now become the way in which you create content that you can use across your site. So synced and un-synced. Un-synced is how patterns have worked before or each instance is unique and can be customized. Synced patterns work exactly as reusable blocks you sort. So any reusable block you've had in the past will continue to work exactly the same. It'll just be named differently in the interface. There's some nudges built throughout like Richard showing here. When you first create a new pattern you also see the option to create reusable block or pattern listed in the interface and if you dismiss that nudge, that will just change to create a pattern. So I know this is an adjustment. There is going to be a Wordpress.org news post on the topic to make sure we get the word out. So I know that's very important to folks. Again, there's an effort underway for documentation from the docs folks and the training team is aware. So there's a lot to update, but this is also a big step forward to consolidate the number of concepts. This is something that I got feedback on. I think for the entire three years of the outreach program of there's another thing we have to learn is not going to have to learn and this should help reduce that confusion and also house them in the same place and kind of get folks familiar with the different options and honestly I hope it causes people to use these synced options more. I ran into so many folks who did not know about reusable blocks and I think this is a really good way to surface a powerful feature in the WordPress experience so I'm quite excited about it and I hope it helps reduce the cognitive load of how much that you need to know. I also wanted to quickly note with the patterns to one of the things that I am looking forward to in the future is also being able to create a pattern and assign it to a template or a post or a page. So that functionality of having like a starter option when you're creating a new thing like rich showed with the templates. I think it'd be really cool to be able to create that interface it's not currently an option but I think in the future that definitely will be. Yeah, I agree. It's really neat to you could you could see these now visually, you can even delete duplicate stuff we wanted to duplicate one of these. Now we have two copies and we can go into one of them and make our changes. Say we want to change the styles of this one to sneak yellowish orange one and save it now we have two copies of it. And I mentioned earlier about the idea of detaching patterns so for going to our homepage here right now this pattern is synced again we have this purple outline indicating that it is a synced pattern. You can detach it now so detaching a pattern will now remove it from all the other instances that are synced together and I can make changes to just this one so let's go with this purple yellow one. Here. And maybe change that to make it something a little bit cool. There we go. So now we can have these changes only applied to this one pattern so I'll save this page. And this existing pattern is still the same as well. So really patterns are are a much really like an advantage advantage UI, especially for folks building sites. So you can build and manage the different components of a site with this visual visual library of patterns here and you can also zoom into each individual one make your changes have them applied everywhere and not based if they're synced. And really just kind of abstracts the complexities of sometimes of an entire page of blocks into one component of blocks. So I'm really excited about this patterns work that's been going on and there's even future ideas and implementations around potentially having partial syncing where some parts of a pattern could be synced together. Maybe maybe the text could be changed or maybe the styles are all the same, or maybe the opposite. There's a lot of ways that we can work with on the idea of syncing and partially syncing. But for now they're they're one to one copies or not at all. And I'm really intrigued on the direction of what that's going to roll. Right, so that's it for diving into the site editor. I wanted to do a little segment on design and blocks, though, and do you want to kick off cover some revision stuff. Yeah, let's actually dive into the revisions because I am beyond stoked about the revisions and we've gotten really good feedback around this timeline view so briefly revealed earlier, you can actually go back in time and look at how your site appeared before. And it shows you made the changes when you'll see this site if you scroll for a really long time we've edited this site over and over and over again. I've actually used it for some calls for testing. I've used it for the last demo which is pretty cool. But there is some work being done around template and template part revisions to that did not make it into this release but I expect in the future. And these things combined to have a really robust revision system just makes the site editor more powerful more trustworthy for a better word you want to be able to roll back you want to be able to have access to changes that have been made. So the way that we're showing these star revisions, I think is a really interesting look at what could possibly be explored for the future with phase three, there's a whole post dedicated to revision so that'll drop in a second when we're done. Yammering about revisions, and I think the more feedback we can get on that and the more we can kind of see what works about this visual system. So I'm very excited about star visions in the future template and to put part revisions. Rich, are you cool with showing them the deep linking in the style so if you go to blocks here. Yeah, so one of the things I love if you're trying to have this is like a quality of life. You can open up styles and then turn on the style book or go to the block section and just click on each individual blocks this works whether the style book is on or off and you just click on a block on your page. But it opens up the specific settings for that block. So you can just edit quickly and directly, which I find to be just, I don't know, a really nice quality of life improvement, and allows you to make changes quickly to exactly what you want in the context of the page which is also really cool. And of course these changes are applied globally, but it does allow you to get a very quick and fast look. And I think this is one of those features that folks might miss so I was wanting to specifically called out. I'd also love to dig into some of the top toolbar enhancements if you don't mind changing that on. So the top toolbar got some improvements in the top to where if you haven't used it it's basically an option that when enabled allows you to access all the block document tools in one place at the top of the editor. So it's a way to just have it up there at all times for you to use. And this option was enhanced and kind of brought into the new site editor features so that it works nicely with the title bar. And it also allows you to select a selector which is I think what rich was about to show. And it basically allows for specific options when selecting different multiple blocks. It totally got overhauled in a really exciting way. It also allows you to have easy access to the undo and redo. There's just a lot of improvements to make it a bit more elegant and yeah user friendly for folks who want to use that option if you haven't tried it out I definitely recommend it. It's really expensive on if you've been using it more, which is pretty exciting. Yeah, I agree. And I forgot to mention the show and hide which I think is what you were showing. Yes. Yeah. So yeah there's a way to show and hide it in line with the title bar. So whenever you're in the center and trying to use it. There's a lot of neat, neat features. The top floor was really, really interesting, especially when you're trying to edit and sometimes you know some stuff gets in the way and not so much here because I have things spaced out very well. But there are times when it's nice to just have everything condensed at the top. Another thing that I think is pretty nice is the idea of the distraction free mode coming to the site editor now. So this was only available in the post editor where it hides all the UI and makes things distraction free. But now you can add it, apply it to the site editor here. You can still make any changes. So if you wanted to change this make any copy changes you can even replace an image. Let me drop this other image into here. You can replace images and make you know slight changes and add blocks as well, like when the inserter comes up you can add blocks. But it's meant to be more of a trailer tailored trim down experience that takes a lot of the UI away so that you can see exactly what what is here and what you're doing and make some side adjustments. I think it's a nice way to really just kind of finesse and fine tune your site and then to turn it off is come back up here. And there's a there's a shortcut as well but you can just log on that. And there we go. Alright, so let's move into a few design tools. I went to add a pattern before here and they created earlier. This is the my patterns that I've created. I'm going to add this in here. This is a neat like matted photo type pattern. I thought it'd be cool to kind of have the the blue come into this area as well. That's just using a gradient with the hard stop. But that's just an aside. The cool part here is this new aspect ratio control. So the aspect ratio control allows you to set an aspect ratio. We have a couple of defaults here so we can do square standard three by two, two by three. And here and whatnot. And it's pretty nice. It's very simple right for now and I think it'll continue evolving. But really the big enhancement on this front is the ability to retain the aspect ratio of an image when you replace it with something else. So let me change this to this nice image here. The aspect ratio is still standing the height and width are set as well and I could replace that image without breaking the layout so this would be super helpful for folks that are creating patterns, especially patterns on the pattern directory where you might have imagery that kind of like this here where it sets like the cool mood for this here but if you replace this with without aspect ratio, it could jump in size or it could be super small it kind of loses its integrity and this aspect ratio control maintains that as well. You can also set it to contain or cover so that would contain makes the image not distort so they so it wouldn't fill all the way up cover is is the traditional zoom in so that your image actually shows at the aspect ratio that you selected. There's been a couple other enhancements to the image sizing over here just cleaning it up and making it flow a little bit better as well. I'm really thrilled about about how the aspect ratio improved and I expect this exact control to move to other areas and other media blocks within the editor. Alright, let's go into a couple new blocks. So we're going to go to our about WordPress page here. And this is the one we we modified earlier with the templates, but I'm going to do what's called I'm going to add what's called the footnotes blocks to this page so if you hit this little more carrot and hit footnote. After you select something you'll have the footnote appended up here and dropped in down here where I can start adding some footnotes about this. Now this is linked together and if I add a second one they would be linked as well, and this is technically a block so it can be moved. You probably wouldn't put it up here but if you had a social or if you had some separators or an author bio block underneath your pattern you might you might adjust where you want this to go but now this block was added automatically and this was linked together so it's a really nice way to to make what used to take, you know, 10 or so actions into one where you just hit, you just select it and add the footnote. And then we also have a new block called the details block. Now the details block is great for showing and hiding content. So let's take this paragraph for example, I want to add a details block so I'm going to add one before type in details. And then I'll put a summary up here so grab this text. Move it here, and then we'll take this paragraph text. And I want to put it inside this block. So technically it's inside the details block and anything inside of it is going to be toggled via the details element. So if we come off of it, there's closed. Now it's open so I can see it. If I go to the block controls you can also open it by default. This might be helpful if you're setting up an FAQ or you have a lot of different details and you want your first one to be open perhaps can also do some some clever styling. So if you wanted to add a background, and then maybe add some padding to this as well. These padding controls have also been improved where you can select individual apply individual paddings at a time or custom to apply all of them, but where block can determine if a few if it wants to connect the vertical and horizontal paddings as well. And there we go. We have the details block. You can add more blocks inside of here it's just an inner blocks component to where you can have different paragraphs you can even put images if you need it to. And there's well. So those are the new blocks added to repress 6.3 the footnotes and the details block. And you want to talk us through the addition for previewing and themes. Yes, I am also strict about this. So along the standing point of feedback that we've had as well as around the ability to preview block. So block thinkers were pretty upset that this wasn't an option because obviously you want folks to try out your stuff. And then also end users in general who might want to taste the site editor and explore how it might impact their site. We're able to do so must setting up a test site because it wasn't a way to preview and a group of lovely folks came together and help create the option to live preview and it's powered by the site editor. So you both are able to preview the actual block theme and then also get a taste of the site editor before switching over. And this is just really a huge gateway open for a lot of folks I imagine will help adoption a lot. It also helps clue you in that you are going to switch to a block theme, which is something that we've also gotten feedback on. How do we tell people they're about to dive into the world of block themes that they just hit activate. It just gives you a really good sense of how it might impact your site and honestly you can customize it same way with the customizer you can go through and make a bunch of changes and activate it and I just I love that it gives you a taste of the site editor experience at the same time. And it just solves a huge pain point for block themes and helps folks decide whether to switch without needing to do any extra testing. So I think this will be a huge feature coming to 6.3 that I can't wait to see the impact of and again definitely want to iterate on this. This is previewing, but if there's any suggestions folks have for 6.4 beyond to make it clear but yeah you can really do everything start building out your entire site here and hit activate and go. It's really nice to be able to see all the entities like seeing all the patterns that that are provided, you still have your patterns that you created but then you go into here you see all the patterns created by frost. And this particular theme demo, but it's really nice and then you activate save and it's there. So it's a quite a nice improvement. I'd also love to dive in I know we're coming up on 40 minutes if like Richard I could spend 40 hours talking about 6.3. But I wanted to go through some of the wider core improvements as well. That's okay. So, to start, I'm very excited next week around this time I think there's going to be a hallway hang out around some of the performance benefits myself, and Emily Clark are going to host it I will drop a link to that. Here and I do want to call Courtney Robinson also mentioned that you'd like to practice and go through any of these features together. There will be an online workshop at the top of the hour with a link to the meetup group. So I'm going to solve that question real quick. But that is a very great way to get your hands dirty and actually get involved in this and, you know, we're still are in the RC period so it's a great time to also find any bugs which is my favorite thing to do. But yeah, we're press comes with a load of performance improvements, specifically around low time for content with images. There's a link to a dev note around that that I'll drop in a second but the performance leads have shown for 6.3 reduction for RC one that's the latest. They've been so great they've been literally every single beta, and now RC doing performance tests and really testing to see how each version is is holding up and hot off the press. And basically right now for RC one it shows a reduction of 24% for block things LCP and 19% for classic themes, which is really exciting and it's always good to see this focus on performance and improvement across both the block theme and classic thing world. And I hope you join the hallway hangout next week. I will jump into that. Now let me pull that up. So the performance improvements and then let me drop in the image. Yeah. So the two posts that you can dig in to find out more. There are also some neat improvements around rollback for manual update for themes and plugins. So basically if you are mainly updating a plug in your theme and the process fails, the rollback feature will automatically restore the previously installed version to your website up and to ensure that so works for everyone. This is a wonderful built in future to have in WordPress and some that I am really excited about seeing in place that was one of the first things I ever did to break a WordPress site was ran an update without checking anything back when I was a student on the multi site, which was not fun. So, this is something I'm very excited about dropping support for PHP five is another thing I would like to call out. So the new minimum version supported will be PHP 7.0. The recommended version, of course remains at some point for an above. So I will drop that in real quick. As you can tell I love to drop links so people have all the information. There are also a number of accessibility improvements, and that team is small but mighty and I deeply encourage you to get involved. However you can with that with that group of folks. There, as you can see we just have a ton of stuff. So a lot of improvements coming to the site editors a lot of new features. And so as part of that accessibility needs to also be focused on and a lot of improvements shipped around the site editor, especially on navigating between things. I also want to specifically call out some work done around the list view that list view is a super powerful tool for navigating complex content. And it's important that everyone can use it. And so a number of accessibility related efforts were completed there. And then there are some general block editor experience lots of things there to go through. And then as well as some other wider core and administration upgrade install, and the bundled themes, I will drop a link to that as well. One moment, and just huge props to the folks working on that stuff there is always need to see how much gets done in each release and to pause and actually celebrate some of the improvements and also consider what we need to do going forward. There are also some internationalization improvements specifically around just the time translation loading. So it's basically firing too often if no translations were found. So there's also some neat performance improvements. And then a new preload text domain filter was also introduced, which is useful for plugins to develop and test alternative loading caching strategies for translations. So I will drop that in as well. And Chloe mentioned here but we will also drop all these links into the shag walkthrough channel and slack if you're a more specific slack. And it'll also probably be a part of the roundup. But that is a very fast look at a lot of the behind the scenes kind of infrastructure updates that you can imagine and there's a ton more, but I'm not even getting into around like different API is being updated. And there's a ton of dead notes as well. So this is just scratching the surface of the high level items. Yeah, and really when you think about it, every part of the site editor has been enhanced every single part of it like navigation styles pages templates patterns. And then all sorts of editing capabilities are improved drag and drop this view, replacing media, some link control work like there's, there's hundreds of other smaller things and things that you might not. I've seen but we didn't talk about because we're just in it and we're working we're demoing stuff. But there's so much work that's gone on to 6.3 really is really is a massive step forward for for editing and publishing WordPress and I'm just thrilled to to have been a part of this release and I can probably say the same about everyone here and it's really really something that I'm proud of and I'm excited for where it's going but also where the next iterations and the continuous work later on this year with 6.4 and then really taken off phase three. Thank you very very much indeed that was a full on expose of everything which is coming in 6.3 I know that you guys have put a lot of hard work into that presentation so Bravo. And thank you you managed to cover a lot of ground. Okay, just a couple of bits of housekeeping if the if the chat inside of zoom is is something that you are finding unable to copy from fear not it's all going to end up in the slack channel which is associated with this so hashtag walks through. So there we will make every effort to put all of the links that you currently seem unable to get. So don't worry, they will be put there also to say that if you've enjoyed this but you had to devote your attention. It'll be recorded and it will, it will be put. I'm not entirely sure where it's going to be put in all honesty I don't know if you can help me out with that but they'll they'll definitely be a recording made and when that recording is made probably the link will go into the walk slack channel as well. We've got quite a few questions coming in so well let's dedicate the remaining 15 minutes to those. If you if you feel that some of these have been answered already we can just skip over them but I'll just go through them in order. I don't have any names associated with them so they just come as they come so number one is is there a way to get the left and right margins of the content space either for a block or for a whole page I think you did tackle a little bit of that. But yeah, over to either one of you. Yeah I'll share real quick and just pull it up here in the styles, you can select layout, then you can modify vertical and also horizontal padding and this is site wide on every page. And within individual blocks, you can select the block and go over to styles. And down here there's padding dimensions where you can manipulate the padding on either side so if you wanted to increase the amount of space. And you can do that, pretty much on on most container blocks and most other blocks that have that fulfill the like a big chunk of space. So the answer to that is a definitive yes, there we go great. Another question, will we finally get a sidebar template part in 6.3 Probably not an official one but you could create a template part, just like I showed how you can create patterns it's template parts works the exact same way. And you can house that or even use it as a you can create a synced pattern and use that as your sidebar and put that on any template that you would like that might even be easier. Thank you very much. So the next one. If you create a pattern. Will it still be available should you change or update the theme interesting. Yeah, if you remember when I switched to the preview of the frost theme at the very end you could still see the patterns that I created and the site editor so those do persist when you switch the theme they're owned by you you've created them they're not tied to a specific thing. Okay, moving on I seem, there seems to be some confusion and it seems like you were deluged with email or whatever he may have been around the the nomenclature of synced and non synced patterns. And the question is about that will synced versus non sync patterns be identified visually in somewhere and I know that they're separated in menus if you like but is there. The icon. Yeah the icon is different. So filled in or not, and then also just like they're separated in the patterns interface, you can have a view to see all you can see sync you can see unsynced it's also named when you create a new and sync pattern it says like unsynced pattern created versus sync pattern created. It's all over the face. And then you can also pull them in different places so in the insert or you'll see unsynced patterns where you would see patterns in general under my patterns. And there's a section and then for synced patterns. It's reusing the reasonable block section so they're back where you're used to seeing them, and you can pull them up there. So yeah there is like a lot of visual distinction and there's still confusion there again. And open an issue. Please give me back. Yeah I noticed and that you were were pains several times to say well I wrote it down you want suggestions. So if these if you've got any thoughts that you think and ought to know about her door is wide open I think it's fair to say, and any suggestions that you've got will be warmly welcomed and looked at very very carefully. So there we go next one. If I want to know who changes one block of the style book. This might be a revision where all blocks are in. Okay, would be better to see would be better to see it for every block itself I think probably will just tackle the first part of that question. Is there some way who did what. So this is a discussion I think because I answered a different question about star vision so I was trying to answer questions while we're going excited feeling the ground out of time. And so this one was about like, we see star revisions for the style book and the style book is basically just a layer in a way of presenting the changes. It's not necessarily something that separate out in the same way. So it is not. You cannot see star revisions based on that specific block but you can roll back through the overall star revisions and that might be an interesting thing to discuss on on GitHub is having more granular control on that but that is not currently possible in terms of like zooming into that specific block and seeing that specific specific change to the styles, but you can see them in the timeline. So that is an interesting idea. Yeah. Just, just to say we've got about 10 minutes more that's where we're topping out so if you do have any questions burning questions. I think it's highly unlikely that you're going to get and and rich on a call both at the same time, available for questions soon at least anyway so if you've got any thoughts any more questions we do still have 10 minutes there's a few more to go but just drop them in and we'll hopefully get through them that'd be nice. Okay so the next one simply says from my testing I found that you don't need to highlight anything to add a footnote number just place the cursor behind the word where the footnote number should go. Is that a hidden feature, or is that a bog. I would say feature though, though it's much more intuitive to select what you want to apply footnote to, I would say. I would agree. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's how it works. Just in general I think that's in by design. Okay, thank you so moving on love the new oh nice I love when when a question begins with just something pleasant love the new ability to preview block themes it's also on the radar. Sorry, is it also on the radar to let people save site editor customizations to a new theme they are trying out before activating it and ideally share it with others like you do with the customizer drafts via a unique link that's something that users really want and then a little smiley face. Yeah, there's an issue that I pulled up that I will drop a link to and slack that talks about this so there is like an overarching site editor and customizer MVP for basically compatibility and that was one of the things that's come up as around scheduling and saving So another more I couldn't find it while doing all this think the nerves got to me but there is an issue around that of saving and scheduling changes as part of both the site editor and I would see that porting directly into So, not yet. So not to 6.3 but that definitely is something that's on on the mind for future releases. And speaking of I did want to know someone asked a question I answered already where it was like, is this it is this always 6.3. That's what we're going to get with the site editor and know there's a link to an issue around an ongoing customization which will also drop now where work is going to continue going so just because phase two has been marked as done does not mean the work is done and kind of like with 5.0 and the block area coming out in phase one work continues on there and all of these things are blocks. And it's all about how they fit together and so having this like unified approach allows us to make improvements across the board so both of those issues are dropped below. I feel like a YouTuber right now. Yeah, I feel this one may not be pertinent to this but we'll ask it anyway there may be something that you wish to say. Is there any news regarding native multilingual support in core. I can answer that quickly but no I don't have any updates around that I think that is still planned for phase four but I do think there was some stuff with working up Europe, my jet lag brain can remember it around possibly some concurrent work where it's like as phase three starts we kind of have to figure that problem out first, but there could be a future where, you know, towards the end of phase three, we could start doing some of the phase four stuff kind of like the command palette was actually planned for fully phase three and we've released it was 6.3. So I could see work like that happening. Okay, the next one is why is it necessary to put template parts inside patterns because template so question because template so because patterns are not template parts. I don't think it's necessary I think it's possible. So template parts is very close right now to sink to patterns. It's the main difference is you can assign a template part to a header or footer or as to be a general, a general template part and I would say general template parts and sink to patterns are basically the same thing. I expect that in the future will have the ability to set categories for the patterns you create so seeing patterns can be created and added to the header category. So perhaps that is maybe that's the same thing as a header template part where you can have all the same advantages UI that you get with template parts like replacing a template part with another template part but it will just exist for the sink to patterns. So I would say they're pretty close to the same thing right now, but not quite there. Okay. A couple more questions. Oh, I don't know if this question is about to be removed it on the Google Doc that I'm reading from it suddenly been highlighted so I'll go to the one below it and then come back to that one. So the next question then would be regarding the rollback of failed manual plugins and theme updates this will happen even if the update break and make the website fail with a fatal error like some kind of recovery mode. I don't know if you can pause that question. I'm not entirely sure what's meant by that. Yeah, I was trying to parse that as well I am going to lean on the Dev Note for this so I'm going to drop that in again. Just because that would be if you have a way to phrase that to the person here at the Dev Note that might be the easiest way to get up if my understanding is if it's going to cause an error, it will be rolled back for updates. I do know there is some work around at the bottom. So we'll read this. The above and comes as part one and two the robot feature part three hopefully for WordPress 6.4 is the same process but for automatic updates. So specifically rollback part three which is not part of 6.3 checks to see if that the update plugin does not cause a PHP fit or when activated if it does this error is captured and the previous installed version is restored. So all the rollback feature parts one through three are included for testing it will back update failure feature plugin. So that's something that's of interest to you. There is a plugin that you can actually use and install that I have a lot of my test sites to help further this feature as well. Thank you. Okay. A couple left I suppose really. Hey, is there any option to apply global styles and then in brackets themes theme.json variations to different templates separately. And then in a just a nice comment there. This person says by the way, new aspect ratio input is cool. Nice. Yes, it is cool. So there's not there's not the ability to apply a theme adjacent specifically to a template. But there is explorations on the idea of theme.json partials and that is applying a theme.json array of objects of styles to an entity so it could be a template or it could be a pattern. So that way you could style one pattern, perhaps in the pattern directory. And then when your theme inherits that pattern as soon as you install that your, your styles can be reflected in that same partial. So there's some explorations for sure, but not just not quite at that point yet. Okay, thank you possibly the final question then unless there's a deluge suddenly very quickly with 6.3 CSS grids become comes to query builder. So what is the plan for CSS grid in the group block rose stacks and grids. And will that be a full implementation or a limited one as the currently limited flex box implementation in rose features. Thanks. I would say that hopefully in 6.4 we could have some new layout tools introduced I know there's been quite a few explorations on that front. And we're at the point where rose stack grid columns can can kind of become one unit in a sense I don't know that they really would holistically but you maybe you can morph between them and it doesn't doesn't change your content unexpectedly and also have allows for more controls like setting the grid options as well I would expect it probably wouldn't be the most full featured grid to start with, but it would probably have more control than the query loops implementation now which is pretty straight streamlined and turned down. But there's there's definitely an issue on GitHub and we can find that. And if you have feedback and ideas on how to improve layout across the board. That would be something that would be really cool to get into the next release of WordPress. That's all the questions and actually as look what have it that's literally about the perfect amount of timing is now 59 minutes past the hour according to my clock. So let's say that's a wrap thank you very much if you joined us as we said all of the all of the bits and pieces that have been dropping into the chat if you've been unable to access this fear not you can go to the you can go to Slack and you can go to the hashtag walkthrough Slack channel everything will go in there there is being there is a recording being made and I suspect a transcript as well and that will appear somewhere very soon and no doubt be posted about in a blog. I guess the only thing that it remains for me to do is to say certainly thank you to Anne and rich for putting in a lot of time. Honestly, a lot of time I saw the notes. Thank you for all appreciation for that. Thank you. It was a really, really great demonstration of that, but also in the background, Jonathan Meyer and Chloe for setting all of this up as well, much appreciation to you guys as well. Thank you, Nathan. Thank you very much indeed. Well, we'll see you next time hopefully for 6.4. But you never know. Thanks very much for joining us. Have a good day. Thank you. Thank you.