 Hello, everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project, some insight into the community that supports it, and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I'm your host, Josepha Hayden-Champosy. Here we go. I have with me today Hector Prieto. You all may know him from the WordPress Slack. He recently was, I believe, a release coordinator, maybe for the last release. Was that for 6.1? Yes, it was for 6.1 and also 6.0, in fact. 6.0? All right. Well, welcome to the WordPress Briefing today. How are you doing? Well, I'm excited to be here. I'm a long-time listener of the podcast since the first episode, so I'm super excited to be here with you today. Long-time listener, first-time caller. All right. Well, we're going to have a topic that just dumps you right in the soup, as they say in the United States. So we are actually here to talk about phase three of Gutenberg. It's been a long time coming, and there are a lot of questions that folks have about what's going into it and what's not going into it. And as someone who works really closely with our Gutenberg technical architect, Matthias Finchura, I figured you would be exactly the right person to come and talk about your favorite things. From your perspective, what is going to be the biggest enhancement that we start to approach in phase three? Like which thing, which API is going to take the most work, do you think? Well, the most work. That's a very hard question to answer, because we are still, we are going to start an exploration phase to determine how far we want to go with each of these APIs. So in general, all of these APIs and these products are the standalone projects and some of them are shorter, some of them are longer. I would say in general, the real-time collaboration sounds the most technically challenging because of what it represents and all the changes needed to how we interact with WordPress from async to sync, basically. That would be the hardest part of the thing. There's already a few prototypes working, but we need to see how that scales, for example. Yeah. So speaking of a few prototypes, I know that there are like two or three different prototypes specifically for collaborative editing, but do we have people or groups, working groups in the community that have built any other prototypes or is it just kind of like first passes at collaborative editing that we've seen? Well, apart from a real Bangalas exploration, there's a public repository with that exploration. There's a few plugins trying the same, trying real-time collaboration. Yeah. I can think of co-blocks and as-blocks. And then I feel like there was a third one. Yeah. We'll find the links to all these. Let's have into the show notes. Excellent. So that's going to be the biggest one. Is there of the list of APIs? And this is based on that post that Mattias sent out last week. If you all haven't seen that, we'll put that in the show notes as well. But from the APIs that Mattias sort of helped us to identify last week, is there anyone that you are particularly excited about for fixing things in WordPress or just generally like an interesting topic of development for you? Well, I would say all of them and how they all play together, but if I need to pick one of them. Everything's the best. I cheat anyway, and I'm going to pick two out of them because they solve issues at two different levels. I am very excited about visual revisions. I think it helps a lot of users and it affects even non-technical users. So it's one of the parts that lowers how hard or complex WordPress can be to do sometimes, and it's going to be a huge improvement. It's going to, I mean, bringing blocks to the region system. I mean, it's just a dream come true for me. I'm also going to highlight the search everywhere or quick search feature. And Mattias already opened an issue in the GitHub repository right now. So the idea for this project is to have like a power user shortcut that opens searching an Alfred-like or Spotlight-like interface for those familiar with Mac OS systems, operating systems, where you can type anything, any place you want to go or you want to search for any specific text in the document. And it's like it's supposed to be your power user command tool so that you can do most things there. Oh, and I mean, not only power user command tool, but also there are some applications there for folks who have mobility issues, people who are using primarily keyboard as opposed to keyboard and mouse, all that kind of stuff, right? Exactly. And just think in long term, with the rise of AI, it could be possible even to add some natural language processing to this interface so that users could just write in plain text in natural language what they want to do and WordPress will provide the action for them. Very nice. My two favorites, since you gave two favorites and I can't just give one at that point. My two favorite projects, which are also probably really, really hard projects, is those explorations around fixing notifications. That is a real big project and one that I think in general the WordPress project is going to be really excited to have some input on. And so that's one that I really will have an eye on. And the other one that I'm going to definitely have my eye on is the Media Gallery redesign. I realize that this shows, like between you and I, that shows our two specific focuses, because of course you work directly with guiding all of our developers. And I am very much like our user advocate and WordPress every man. I don't know if that's a term that makes sense outside the US, but I do a lot of advocacy for folks who are using WordPress from the user side as opposed to from the developer side, because of course we have a lot of excellent developers and so y'all don't need my help with your advocacy. But yeah, that really shows that you and I have different focuses, which I think is good too. Yes, also it's worth noting that at the end of the day any improvement we make for developers is so that developers can build better things for users. So at the end of the day everything is for the best interest of the users. That's right, that's definitely a good point. Yeah. So final question about this particular thing, because we're trying to keep it a little brief, and also because we'll have a few other podcasts that are specifically about Phase 3 as our explorations get going. Final question here on this. If you felt like there was one API or one project in particular that could benefit from a lot of community involvement, which would you guess that was? Hmm, I don't think I can single out any of them. I think getting user feedback is going to be a vital part of this phase, as always. So I would encourage our listeners to just participate in discussions, provide feedback as we start releasing the first prototypes and the Gutenberg plugin. I don't think I can pick one of them, to be completely honest. Yeah. My guess for that is going to be the rework of the dashboard, the admin, the WP admin. I think that a lot of people are going to have a lot to say about what they use it for, what they would like to be able to use it for, how to make it look more modern, how to make it feel more modern. I think that that probably is going to benefit from a lot of early testing and possibly some specific user testing around the concepts of design in there. And so that's one that I think probably is going to take a lot of feedback from the community. Yeah. And community in this case, I think, is not only our developers and designers and copy folks who are working to build the CMS, but probably also all of our folks who are extending WordPress, everybody who is working in agencies, things like that. Well, if I need to pick one, I would say the publishing flows could use also lots of feedback and testing because we are going to implement editorial requirements and customized user flows. And of course, there's many, many different workflows out there that we might not be able to think of ourselves. So just imagine the sheer amount of different use cases that is going to be or the currently is with customizations of third party clients. So yeah, I would like to listen how people would like the publishing flows to be. What are the specific use cases? So really just everything. Do you need a lot of user feedback on everything? Yes, that's the summary. I don't think that's a bad summary. I know that we talk a bit about how WordPress is made better by the activity of our co-creators, the people who are using the software and testing the software and telling us how it could be better. Those are the groups of people that make sure that we are the best version or headed in the best direction on any of our things with the software. So I guess it's probably not super unusual for everyone to hear, like, we need your feedback on everything, because that's probably what we do half the time. Yeah, absolutely. So the publishing workflows, that reminds me that there has been a little bit of a conversation lately around the naming of this phase, basically. And I know that the phases don't necessarily need names, like that's why they're numbered and that's a great idea, like numbers are wonderful ways to reference things. But it also is just easier to reference it in kind of general conversation. So the first phase was easier editing and it really focused on the editing experience itself. The second one was customization. And now the third phase has been called collaboration for quite a bit of time. But as we got closer and closer to this phase and we had more and more conversations that were coming out of phase one and two, it became really clear that really what we're looking at here is more around workflows. And I love that that is an option for how to refer to this. Probably that's how I will refer to it for most of the time that I talk about it as we're looking at phase three because I remember that when we were first building the prototypes of Gutenberg, one of the big flags that I had was that breaking changes are not just about what we can see or any sort of visual regressions or what causes the white screen of death. Also, some of the things that are breaking changes should be considered in those workflows when we change where things are or how you accomplish a task and our users weren't ready for it. That is something that is breaking for them, right? Yes. As you mentioned, this phase was referenced as collaboration or real-time collaboration for a long time but we think of what this collaboration looks is much more than just editing at the same time. A very big part of collaboration is also a synchronous collaboration by adding inline comments and improving these notifications when you have a comment in your draft. I think the power of this phase is how everything comes together. These individual pieces come together. Yes. I don't know where that first flag that sparked the discussion around like, okay, but collaborative editing is not quite big enough and also means a bunch of different things for a bunch of different people. It depends on the size of your organization or the type of content you're writing. I don't know where that conversation started. My guess is some word camp somewhere and an attendee was like, did anybody ever think about these problems? They kind of worked their way around the make-core site or otherwise made their way around to Matias' ears but yeah, I think that was a really smart choice. And you're exactly right. Collaborative editing, like, that can refer to the synchronous kind or the asynchronous kind and both of those types of collaboration are equally valuable and probably equally used. Yes, and one important point to note here is that these editorial flows and this collaboration is crucial to implement multilingual and going to Phase 4. We need to think that as soon as we have posts and pages in different languages there's going to be requirements in terms of how to translate these pieces of content so this will need collaboration and all forms of collaboration. Yeah, absolutely. This maybe was before your time with the project but I was team a multilingual first for a long time or at least thinking that we could do the multilingual part of this work alongside the collaborative editing part of the work. I've spent a lot of time trying to understand what we think is going in Phase 3 versus what probably we need to be able to do as far as having native multilingual support in the project and I have softened my very hard position on that. We're big fans of strong positions, loosely held, strong opinions, loosely held and this was one of those moments where I had that really strong opinion that we could just do them concurrently and we can do them at the same time and I think it was a conversation that you and I were having when you were pointing out the complexities of translating WordPress at all let alone being able to translate all your content as well and it makes a lot of sense and you're right, I think that there are a lot of interactions, a lot of workflows that we're going to have to kind of refresh or redesign or rebuild and it really makes sense for us to help make that a nice streamlined option for multilingual offerings. Yes, absolutely. As a Spanish-speaking person, I'm super excited about having multilingual in-core but I also understand that we need some tooling ready before implementing multilingual in-core. There really are no easy problems left in WordPress, right? Like we all agree with this now? That's correct and creating something incrementally. If we look at the phases, they are ordered sequentially but that doesn't mean that when we start Phase 3, we are finishing Phase 2 completely in the same way we have not finished Phase 1. That would be like saying when is WordPress finished, when is the development finished? So it's an incremental project and it's always going to be to need refining. Of course, multilingual needs to come after collaboration because we need those tools but that doesn't mean we need to finish the collaboration phase or have a very advanced Phase 3 before we can start Phase 4. That will be determined in the next months as we start explorations. So if you all which I know you are are interested in better workflows, more streamlined ways of working inside WordPress and or interested in how we are going to get multilingual settled in the future. We have time to get involved in this project and in the community. Like I said, we've got that post up that Matias shipped last week which again, if you have not read it go read it because it's got excellent information in there for you. Ektor, before we head out is there anything that you want to make sure that you let the listeners know either about Phase 3 or just about WordPress in general? Well, tomorrow is WordPress 6.2 release day so half be 6.2 everybody. Half be 6.2 Oh, yeah. Yeah. Which means today is the dry run like probably in three hours we're doing the dry run. Depends on when you are listening to this but yes. That's a good point. Right. Not everybody listens to this the second it becomes available. Time zones, that's right. No man, look at us being a global project pretending like everybody listens to this particular thing the moment it's available. I apologize to everybody who's listening to it after the release or in the middle of the release party or whenever you're doing. Regardless, tomorrow if you're listening to it today is the WordPress 6.2 release and it's going to be great. Well, Ektor, thank you so much for joining me today. I really enjoyed having you on letting me interview you. Thank you for having me. It was my pleasure to be here. So that brings us now to our smallest of big things and as is frequently the case it's actually kind of a big list of big things so we're going to hop right in here as Ektor and I mentioned in the episode the release WordPress 6.2 is coming out tomorrow depending on when you're listening to this. If you listened to it on the 27th that comes out on the 28th of March if you have a chance to drop by the release party I would encourage you to. They're pretty interesting just to get an idea of everything that it takes to build WordPress. It is of course the last few hours before a release and so you don't get a full scope but it's always nice to see the way that everybody in the community works together especially there in that last moment when we're trying to package something and test it in a bunch of environments all across the world. I love attending those and so I encourage it. The next episode of the WordPress briefing is going to have the release run down. I'll go through the key features and highlights that finally made it into 6.2. The reason we don't do those beforehand is just in case we have to remove anything at the last minute from a release. It doesn't happen too often but it does happen sometimes and so next episode of WP Briefing that's what we'll be talking about. The next thing on my list is a new developer blog so there is a brand new developer blog. It was launched last Wednesday. It's a great resource for WordPress developers to stay up to date and hear the latest in the WordPress development world and also we have been hearing some feedback from our developers in recent years that if you are like exploring how to extend WordPress if you're in that group of extenders, people who are building themes or building plugins you kind of feel like you've lost a place and you can have those exploratory conversations. This is going to be one of those places. We'll put a link in the show notes so far the content that's planned I think is really interesting. Next thing on our smallest big list of big things is WordCamp Europe's contributor day. So registration for contributor day is now open and it does require a separate registration than regular attendance at WordCamp Europe so if you are registered to WordCamp Europe, you already have your ticket for that but you are not registered for contributor day, click the link in the show notes and come on down to spend a little time giving back to the WordPress project. And the last thing on our list today is that we have a WP20 Wapu coloring giveaway. So put on your little party hats, grab your crayons, the 20th anniversary Wapu coloring giveaway is here. There is an opportunity to color in your own community driven Wapu and tweet it to us using Wapu WP20 for your chance to win a sweet haul of WP20 swag items. You can check out the full rules at the link in our show notes. And that my friends is your smallest of big things. Thanks for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. I'm your host Joseph Hayden-Champosi and I'll see you again in a couple of weeks.