 Okay everybody here now. So today we're gonna share like a pretty casual walk through and discussion of WordPress 6.1 and how the release is coming along. So just a few housekeeping items to start us off. This call is being recorded and we'll have a make WordPress core blog post in a few days. The call should also be on WordPress TV and I believe our WordPress YouTube channel too. So just give us a few days to get those links up and shared. We also have live captioning I believe and a text transcription enabled. So for the folks attendees following you can use the Q&A question and answer option in your zoom menu bar. You can also post over at the walkthrough channel on WordPress Slack if you have questions and we'll have a Q&A session toward the end of this call to kind of cover everybody's questions. So hey I'm Justin Tadlock. I'm a developer advocate. I focus on like our WordPress communities developers and extenders and we have several people from the WordPress 6.1 release team and I just want to do a quick thank you for everybody joining us for our core tech co-lead Dave Baumwald and Jeff Paul, editor Triage, Nick Diego, on the design team, Rich Tableau, themes Sarah Norris, release coordinator and our note taker today Jonathan Desrosiers. If I got your name right I hope I did. And our lead project architect is Matthias Ventura. So in a moment I'm going to give the mic over to meet Matthias and he'll discuss like the main goals and features of 6.1 then we'll have our panelists introduce their sales and share a comment or two about their role and the release and like interesting things they're working on. And then after that section we'll do the Q&A. But so Matthias you're ready to kick things off? Sure thank you. Hello everyone. Let me get things started. I'll jump straight into it. Last time we've run a bit out of time so I hope I don't derail too much into into conversations. So the first thing is to do a quick recap of what was the plan for 6.1. We had planned work on the main template editor on patterns, global styles, block design tools and there was this sort of appendix about gradual adoption of these tools. And that ended up being the theme for at least the Gutenberg side of the work for 6.1. There's been a lot of refinement, consolidation and expansion of the features. And so if we jump into it, we're again packing about 11 releases that right now that amounts to around 360 updates and 370 block themes on the plugin. We'll probably have a bit more once the latest releases come out and during the beta period. So I'll jump straight into the one that's most exciting probably, which is the new default theme 2023. And 2023 is going to look kind of like just this white theme by default, but the beauty of it is going to be in the style variations that it packages. That was a pretty fun, like the first time that we did this sort of call to the community to submit styles for a default theme. So it's really pushing what the features that we introduced, I guess theme JSON was 5.9 or maybe 5.8 even. I don't remember, but it's been a it's been a couple of releases. And this thing really pushes that to its almost. So let's just right now we have these, I guess it was 10, but I don't see nine. I don't know. Anyways, so these style variations just drastically change everything in the theme. It's pretty fun. You might see that we have a bug here in trunk, which is the query loop is supposed to be full width. But I'm running trunk where we added the latest feature, which is this thing where you can just align. And we don't have like something is wrong there that is not making it full width. So I guess it's supposed to be something like, is that correct, Sarah? I think it's it should be something like this. Yeah, that looks right. Okay. So anyways, we'll just play with it there. Going to jump. This is not probably not making it into 6.1, but this is you can toggle this in the plugins and experimental mode. But it's really nice to see the it's fun to do with the style variations because you see more of the whole thing at once. So the idea here is just to like again showcase a lot of variety in all the styles, buttons and so on. This one is quite nice. It works with like smaller sized titles, but it's and this is the default. Quite like this one, which is like just default it's like lower case typography, all the same size. That's quite interesting. It's nice that there's actually like an animation between the transitions between the styles. And of course, the cool thing about style variations not being just CSS is that the user would always be able to pick the one they want, but actually get to modify exactly all the details if they want to. So that's tricky. It's actually switches to this pattern. Yeah, so this layout is not that bad. So this is I guess there's still some work being done on the templates and whatnot. I was seeing the see the front end here. Yeah, I don't know if we want to, for example, like if the default template is going to crop the feature images. So it's all aligned because otherwise we have this sort of staircase thing. There are some details there on the on the thing that I guess will be polished, but it's pretty cool to just see the amount of change that you can get just with the with the style variations. Any any any reactions so far to this? I'll start jumping into the next pieces. Because we have a lot to cover. So when the next step that is important to highlight, we had the template editor introduced before. This time there's a ton of new templates being added. This was possible to do from a if you just open the theme folder and modify the code, but now it's exposed to users in a match. You can create custom templates. Directly you can create a template for a specific post type. You can pick the post you want to create a template for. This is really I'm really excited about this because it really opens up a lot of the power of WordPress to any user. Now if you want to say, I don't know, you have a special category of travel and you want to create a template for that category, you can do it. And there's another improvement here. Let's see if we create one. Yeah, so before when you were creating a template, it will start completely blank. Now it loads the most relevant template for this. In this case, it was the archive. So it's using you. You're modifying the tag template, but it's using the archive type as its basis. So you don't need to start from scratch. Obviously here in the future, we'll probably have different starting points. Like the same way that we have patterns when you create a new page and so on. You know, remove these. I think you just did a cool post sort of reviewing all the new templates. There's quite a bit to dig through there. So if people want to check that out because we have page specific templates, custom post types, taxonomy based templates and so on. The other really cool thing. In this release, we're going to have a lot of developer focus tools as well. So to sort of leverage a lot of this stuff. Shampoos quickly into that. For example, in 6.0, we introduced the this started pattern. So if you register a block pattern with and you're restricted to these block types, so it only shows on post content. When you were creating a new post, you would get to choose a or a new page. You would get to choose a starter pattern. Now that's open up to any post type. So you can, if you have a custom post type, you can restrict a pattern to a specific custom post type and also the post content. So that would allow you to imagine you have a book or something and when you create a new book, you will see like these are the patterns for books and only for that custom post type. I think that's going to be a pretty cool flow for people to hook into. So the other one, we have improved the locking tools a lot and I'll quickly show some of that. This is like the next step of locking and what it does is here I have a full block. That's like a full pattern, but it feels like I cannot really do anything to mess up the design. Like if you see the block tools, I don't have movers. I cannot remove. I cannot really do anything with this. I can only just replace the content from my media library and so on. But I cannot do like again anything to the, let's find one that's taller. I cannot really get rid of stuff. I can modify the text force, but I cannot do even here. It's only, again, I have access to alignment, bold and so on, but nothing else. And the cool thing is that if you open the, the insertor, it's like, it feels like it's like its own set of things. So you can jump between the elements of this pattern quickly. And the only access you have again is to these things that get exposed. So this is, you can imagine this as a really nice way to create custom logs in a sense. Like especially if you like this is now open up for the pattern directory. So you can create a pattern where again, everything is locked down and you get this sort of experience. So you don't need to dive into code at any point to create these kind of patterns. I have a few others. Yeah, so this pattern is from like the the directory. And again, you get access to like, again, some of these tools, but nothing, nothing else. I think this one is pretty, to me, it's pretty exciting what we, what we can do with this. I think in the future, we want to expose like a few other style properties here said you want to allow, I don't know, some colors for the, restrict the amount of colors, but still allow them for some of these that should also be, should also be possible. And let's see if I, and right now it's not exposing this set of tools, but it will be here for like admin users and so on. I'll skip this one. This is a briefly show there, but it essentially allows you. Yeah, so this before like, if you were locking many blocks at once, it was a bit painful because you had to go like one by one. Now you have access to this, that you can apply the locking properties to all the blocks inside so you can quickly create this stuff. Oh yes, this is, we're bundling now a few header and footer patterns. These patterns are specific to, let's go back to this side. So these patterns are specific to template parts. So here I have my header and if I go to replace header, I can see these are all bundled patterns, so I can quickly swap out, say like, I actually prefer this header and users. These are right now bundled in core. The idea is that this will be just surfacing the pattern directory, but they affect only the semantic template parts, right? So in case the header and the footer also has, yeah, so you have like some specific footers and these are using like relevant blocks, like the site logo, site title, your navigation and so on. So it's pretty nice. Footers, we already went through these. Cool. So the other area where there's been a lot of work is in design tools. I really like the, actually let's see if we switch to the one that have the gigantic font. This one, yes. Well, the other thing is like, again, I replaced the header thing and it still like, still works with a like style variation. So you can start to imagine all the combinations that you can do. Well, I wanted to check here. Yes. So if we go to, yeah, mobile or table, like the, we have some of the fluid typography working there and fluid typography is enabled. The theme has to opt in into it, but the cool thing is that the theme doesn't need to define, it can define its own boundaries like max and minimum size, but it works for user values as well, which is really nice. Spacing presets, this is improvements to existing tools. So let's see if we have the, let's check merging. Yeah. So here, like now the spacing tools like go in increments, like a theme can define the sort of the presets that it's using. So you can achieve, like you cannot like do random arbitrary values. You can stay within the boundaries. And if it's open up, you can always like go into like custom values, but I think can control this, which is called spacing presets. I'll keep going fast because, but please anyone, if, if I went too fast on something and someone who has a question or a thumbs in to point out, let me know. We have other border tools to a couple of blocks. So images. And while I'm here, you see like you can achieve these effects, but there's also seeing, so images can have borders. And if we do it to the, it's interesting. Okay. There it is. There's some weird back there on selection because I'm adding it to the future image, so it should be adding it to all of them, but it's only showing on selection for some reason. It's fine. And columns as well got access to border properties. There's also some work on elements. Elements is like a new API that defines things that are relevant across blocks. So some obvious ones are like captions where you can have them on images and videos and galleries and so on. Buttons as well. So these are right now, captions are not exposed to users just yet, but you can control them through theme JSON. So you can ensure that image, image captions, anything else that they all look like you want to. And it will be unlocked in mobile styles in the same way that we have links, text, headings. You will see one for, for captions here. And I have a lot of effort went into consistency in, in this release. And that meant we used to have many blocks that were exposed in some, but not all the tools in typography colors and so on. So there was, there's been a lot of work in and, and I really mean like a lot of work because there's, yeah, there's a lot of pull requests merge, just consolidating these design tools in blocks so that you get the consistent and, and more familiar experience. Oh, and hover states were also added for both links. And what else did we add them? I think it's not here, but it might be button. We have it on buttons. Okay. Yeah. So there's support for hover states and focus states and in buttons on links, but I cannot access it now. So that's more or less the same tools. There's one more that's important. And this is more relevant for, for classic themes. There's a new theme support that people cannot team to that is out theme support for appearance tools. And that would allow you, if you're not using a theme JSON file on a classic theme to still expose a lot of these design tools to blocks, if you want to. That's part of the, the gradual adoption milestone. And another one that people were really asking for was consolidating the classes output on blocks. So again, container classes, layout classes that showed now show up on the front end. That that was also a big part of the part of the effort in the 61. Where was I? Okay, blocks. What time? Okay, we're fine. Before you stray too far, I can point you to where the hover states are. I think it's a really cool feature. So if you go back to the site editor. And then you go to the global styles and then under colors. There you go. And then if you click on buttons and links. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, I was, I was expecting that we were also exposing it on, on the blocking instances. Right. So we're not fully integrated through everything, but it isn't there. Yeah, we need to and on group blocks. I was also trying to find it. Right. But yeah, it's like one step at a time. Yeah. So here, and you can see here, like again, I don't have a hover, but I'll put a hover and then you'll see that you get the two color circles as well. And the same for buttons. I guess here in buttons, we could actually probably fix this. In buttons, it's not showing. Yeah. The color background. I guess buttons still, buttons has it, but I guess only on the theme Jason is not exposed on the UI just yet. But yeah, it's like, that's one, one example of like the consolidation stuff that is, there's a lot of volume to, to consolidate. Thanks for shining. So for blocks, well, let's talk like quickly about the one of the big ones, which is that quotes and lists now support nested blocks, which is pretty cool. Like the, especially on quotes, that was a big limitation that you couldn't have images or lists inside quotes. So sometimes even when you were transforming classic content, it would fail because you might have nested content that wasn't supported. And for leases, the same thing. The other thing that it allows is now you can just again, reorder list items because each item is again a block. So you get access to all of them. There are some, still some refinements that need to happen on the writing experience, like with a keyboard, like because sometimes it focuses on the, on the block wrapper that we need to address. But it's like these were some of the longstanding pending improvements is 5.0 even to have all these supports on, on quotes and lists. The other thing that improved a lot and some of that was visible here. Let me see. Yeah. So if we add a, let's add an image. Yeah. So if you have, like the image placeholders have all been updated and they have the, so before, if we had this thing just with the outline, in some cases, it would be hard to visualize it. So now if you have it inside a cover, there's this blur out effect. So you can go here and select the image. So placeholders in general have been addressed and improved quite a bit. The navigation block is a, let's remove this one and add a new one. Where am I? I messed up the color. Let's have a navigation here. Yeah. So now the navigation in most cases is just going to work. It's going to pull from the most relevant navigation that you have. Before when you inserted an empty navigation, you would have this weird placeholder thing. This is, there's been a lot of work on that. There's still some pending work on the navigation block, which is again, you can, it's, we have some more stuff exposed here. Yeah. So you can select the menu from here and so on. But it's the placeholder was a pretty big, a pretty big issue before that it was showing in that weird state. So that's pretty cool. Let's move on. This feature image on blocks is just quickly. Again, there are some cases. Let's restore the header I had. Yeah. So if I'm using this one. Yeah. So now you can use the feature image on like the, like we have it on cover and stuff, but you can also use it on, I guess, if we wish us insert after cover. Yeah. You can select to use the feature image by the pole there. So that would be set up already for you. Prioritized transform. This is super recent. It's not even on one of the releases just yet. Let me see. So let's add some text. So the prioritize transform is that now headings list and quotes and paragraph are all going to be at the top all the time. This started to get a bit out of hand as we added a lot more transforms. You may end up with, I don't know, a block that wasn't easy to transform into a heading because you just ended up with all these options. So these basic transforms are now always going to be at the top just to simplify the writing experience. So from list back to paragraph and so on. So these basics are always there. This is an anxious quality of life improvements to the way that the post content and so on, the templates are presented if we go to single. Yeah. So these, the content of these blogs post title on the content was before was just saying post content. Now it's like it actually has a few paragraphs so you can more correctly guess what it what it's doing. The query block itself got a lot of improvements. So what one that I'm really like glad we finally got to is the exposing the so one of these is the so the query block is actually now registers all these variations like post list. And if you have some custom post type, it should also be available. So you can, you don't need to like a user doesn't need to figure out what a query is. They can just insert the post list and they can also start from one of the patterns. By the way, if we're taking notes, we should point out that the is really underwhelming the patterns we have for query. We should have some nicer like block patterns here. And they are all like fairly image heavy. Like it'd be nice to have some without feature images, I think. But anyways, like this is the this is all powered by the query, but it's exposed as post list and it only deals with the post post types. So and and this is again offered for all custom post types and developers if you have will products or portfolio items or whatever it is, you will be able to discover this. The same for taxonomies. I don't have anything registered here. But yeah, like categories list. These are all auto generated from a general taxonomy list. So if you have different taxonomies created, you will get access to these blocks by their name by the taxonomy name as variations of the taxonomy block or you are sure because I'll skip that. Okay. Yeah. And the last one I wanted to mention here on on depth tools is the we're opening up. We're adding filters for theme JSON for all of the stuff that theme JSON is doing. We're adding some low level filters for developers so that you can essentially interact with the theme level of stuff with the block level of stuff and with the user level of stuff. Like it's a because the how how we end up computing this is what the thing what work process it should be what the theme says it should be what the blocks as it should be and what the user there are many layers to this all of these should have hooks now so that you can again a plugin can register its own set of the fall thing JSON properties through this which is going to be pretty fun. I think some interest I'm curious if people are going to be extending it to support. I don't know different like either tailwind or bootstrap or whatever like there's there's probably some opportunities there for people to hook up at this low level and try to figure out again if they have a design system from somewhere else and they want to hook it in that you can do some of that stuff. I think that's about it from me so we should have more time for questions. I'll leave everything open so like maybe we can answer some questions by showing stuff we can do that but yeah otherwise I'll stop sharing. Okay well thanks MacDais as very walkthrough so let's just kind of move it along to each individual panelist. I've just kind of go go down the list David can you tell us about you know what your role is and you know some about things you've been working on on this release. Sure so for core we've mainly been focused on bug fixes from there was a lot of a lot of caching improvements that were made in 6.0 that have been there were a couple of bugs found and so just kind of improving on that as we've gotten more feedback and more testing on different environments and such so we've gotten a good handle on fixing some of these caching bugs that remain on the core side. A lot of the features are still a little bit in limbo some are probably going to be punted but we do have a few that are going in one in particular for developers we have a big ticket that I actually forgot that I had committed for uh escaping identifiers and MySQL queries which was a big uh developers probably know you had to write all sorts of ignores or disables around any sort of WPDB queries because you're hardcoding your table names in there throwing them into a variable that weren't being escaped by prepare so now we have support in there for that we don't yet we haven't converted the rest of core to actually use it yet we'd like to see it in the wild and see if we get any feedback if it can be in actual implementation can be improved so hopefully we can actually get core converted over in 6.2 maybe and then set an example for everybody else going forward and to how you know safer ways to run a db query with db prepare but I think other than that webp as everybody knows has been kind of scaled back for now and I think really focus on making it really a really really good feature for for the public to pick up once it becomes available as a what's seemingly been called a canonical plugin for now but yeah other than that it's just a bunch of bunch of bunch of bug fixes so some of them are really old some of them are newer from some of the bundle themes recently but but yeah we're we're still moving forward great and y'all definitely ask questions about anything about our our panelists are talking about in the q&a and we'll get to them Jeff do you want to kind of take off from there now sure yeah and his background I'm director of open source at top thanks them for the time to be able to contribute and participate here um been part of other release squads in the past different in my role to davids and and mics as the other cortex lead and not being a committer I have to lean a bit more on some of the other skills out there as as David mentioned kind of heavy focus had been on some of the back channels and supporting ever it's on webp and now that that's shifting to a canonical plugin trying to help with that as it may relate to 6.1 a bit too early to really fully tell on that there some of the other things that have led it in that end users will will see are some new OM bed partners with pocketcasts in google data studio and then some of the areas that I tend to focus in on focus wise is internationalization privacy accessibility right to left and and mobile items and trying to find new contributors to help craft patches prs you know testing writing copy etc there just trying to help pull more people into the contribution funnel so that's been more of my focus is kind of the back channel coordination aspects thanks Jeff that's great and I'm going to kick it over to Nick tell us about you know your your role in the release and yeah great some awesome things you're working on so I'm the editor triage lead for 6.1 this is a relatively new position on the team we started it in 6.0 and now again in 6.1 the goal here is to kind of triage all the prs and especially the bugs as we move as we get past our initial release candidates and betas and all that sort of stuff so we're starting to consolidate all the all the things that need to get tightened up before 6.1 goes out the door taking notes on our walk through today on a few things but the thing that I'm honestly most excited about and dedicated most of my personal time to Mitya's mention this is that's consistency you know throughout the block editor and the site editor you know we have things like introduction of font family you know the ability to change the font type on different blocks and any team developer who's working with with blocks is probably this resonates with you is that you could change font family maybe headings but not paragraphs we use paragraphs everywhere and so now you can the 6.1 and that same functionality is across all sorts of blocks so there's been a huge effort especially like in the last month to really standardize things and I could it seems really small but it's going to have a huge impact on adoption of kind of all this new stuff also editing more block heavy themes and I couldn't be more excited if you've if you've been waiting to jump on board 6.1 is the time to do so we have a lot more consistency and it's it's it's really exciting yeah I'll say uh the consistency like just add in the font family to a paragraph is like uh one of my favorite like just small feature it is small but it's it's a big thing for you theme authors so thanks for the work you've been doing there and I worried everybody yeah and it really shines through on the style variations as well because otherwise a lot of that wouldn't be really be possible so like that consistency really unlocks the the ability to put together these things and actually affect everything and have the user be able to manipulate them as well all of those things at once requires that yeah it makes it a delightful experience like yeah all right uh smooth on over to rich hey everyone I'm rich taber design lead for 6.1 I would say I'm probably most excited about the style variations included in 2023 like Matias said they were community submitted I think we went from 38 submitted designs either in figma or in json down to nine or 10 which is pretty cool I think that just having that sort of interest from design the design community around WordPress really inspired and it kind of helps us look forward to the tools that we should build to help and further empower that sort of innovative innovative front and WordPress along the design tool in front I'm also very keen on the tools that really level up the capacity to design so like the margin and padding controls that use the scaled scale scale the design systems so you can create a design system that scales out within demo json just a few entries and and then use that to have consistent spacing throughout your site with with all those values fluid typography also brings um you know auto responsiveness to text so based on your viewport is really something very interesting especially with some of the themes like even older themes that supported big text right out of the box like 2021 being able to have something like that like a design that looks cool and just up also scaled down without you having to really think about it and then also the locking patterns or functionality is also very intriguing it creates you know Matias also mentioned it creates like basically many blocks that you can manipulate without having to rebuild blocks so kind of taking that atomic component based system and making it much more intuitive and approachable for the editing experience and you know driving towards going to be intuitive and approachable is something we should continue to push forward but 6.1 definitely shoots for those and that's a really good thing sorry but i i didn't i didn't get to to show that part but one thing that is really exciting connected to that is the the ability to use template parts on classic themes and i think i think like there's some articles being written on on that documentation but it'd be really cool to see i don't know i imagine i was thinking about the the Kubrick theme the original Kubrick theme that had this special place where you went to like modify the header and gradients and so on and now you can sort of designate any page on the any part of the site in a classic php theme and just have a built-in interface in the editor where you're just manipulating blocks there and if you combine that with the locked pattern things you can essentially have like build really quickly without touching code like a really rich but really locked down experience that then you can just reference in a php call somewhere in your php templates so the combination of all of those things again it was a it's like the the sum of well not that small i think each one of these took some effort but but all in all put together i think that's really i'm really curious what people are going to do that because opening that up to plugins and that really i don't know like if you have a plugin for you're doing i don't know a subscribe now thing that shows up in a model you can say oh i want to give some design access to the model you can put it in a template part call it there and restrict the design and just let people edit it and so i'm really i just wanted to mention that because i forgot to to go walk through yeah i think that's great yeah okay uh sarah you're up next hey i'm sarah i'm a development lead for 2023 it's also my first time being part of the release squad six nine so i've been working with um our design lead beer on building the most unopinionated base theme possible and so it's designed to allow as much flexibility as possible for many style variations i've really just enjoyed seeing all the designs come in from the community it's been great seeing contributions from both developers and designers this time as well so for 6.1 i think i'm going to echo a lot of what you said rich i'm really excited to see how creative we can be with variations and how far we can push them especially with fluid typography and the spacing presets um i think there's been lots of calls for responsive design and and how that's best achieved and i think both these features combined like really unlocks loads of responsive capabilities and also without thinking too hard like you've just been saying i think that but it really helps um and finally the elements api as well i think that unlocks lots of flexibility just from theme jason itself yeah that was cool how many uh style variations did we end up having for 2023 we will have nine in total and i'm going to say sorry we'll turn in total to 20 at nine um but yeah there'll be 10 included yeah that's awesome there's quite a few submitted so yeah we should we should probably package like the 38 or so in some plugins so that people because there's some pretty cool stuff there even if it's not done really cool yeah we have had um there's been a quick conversation about what we do next um which is also equally exciting actually about whether we just continue creating style variations for 2023 in a separate repo um and you know just all together and then we can bounce off each other test scoop and work and i think that we found we needed to get to the 5000 themes or something this is how we do it yeah uh all right uh jonathan did you want to add some stuff today too yeah if you've heard me talk before i might be a little different sounding i'm i'm recovering from a bug from the weekend but um like jeff i'm kind of in a unique uh a unique role for my skill set so jeff is more in the core tech position and not a as technical person i'm the opposite i'm a core committer and i'm in a release coordinated position um so i still work on things on the side and make sure i can help with the more nitty gritty of uh you know the day to day developer work um so i'm i'm going to be helping urge the new default theme in so that everybody can get that tested in their on their sites um something i've been looking at a lot lately is you know how we can slim down WordPress a little bit uh so for example a couple of areas that identified our uh global terms which is a really old multi site feature that hasn't worked for quite a while and it's kind of disingenuous to continue including it when it doesn't work and we don't want people to stumble upon that and have a bad experience um so in this release my plan is to actually deprecate that uh officially so that will be one of the things that i'm working on the next couple weeks um the link api that i mentioned is a little bit more widely used so that will be more of a long tail deprecation where um we're gonna there's a actual official plugin for that already so we need to actually move some of that functionality into the plugin get everybody that's running it which is the recommended way to use that api now because it's not turned on by default uh to update and then eventually we can deprecate that core and it would only be available in the plugin and kind of get that out of core itself um and then i generally dated i'm a build tool maintainer so i work a lot on github action workflows for core and making sure that tests run properly and all of those things continue to run so um if that interests you take a look at those things i'm always happy to talk with anybody about that but uh it seems github does a lot of great work there and is constantly improving that experience and trying to make sure that we're taking advantage of those new new features and changes that they're making in core and make our lives better as developers and contributors yeah great uh did i get around to everybody thanks so so we're going to move on to uh q and a um y'all we still have a few uh a few minutes left and on this call so you know any more questions y'all have just go ahead and send them in but first uh let me just kind of start walking through i'm a anonymous attendee says they're excited about the functionalities and feature uh that everybody's worked so hard at and developing not really a question but just you know thanks to everybody but let's move on uh i think this will be for matias uh could you stand on the info about block query filters uh i think you just want more general information yeah for sure there's a i can i can also drop in the walkthrough channel a few of the relevant prs but essentially like there's uh the filters there's filters for parents there's filters for uh query variables and there's uh it's just a lot of a lot of that was just like housekeeping like ensuring that the query loop supports a lot of the things that you are used to in wp query and so on um i'll drop some of the because it's a bit more technical than and to show it so i'll put it on the on the channel assuming people are checking their walkthrough channel okay uh i'm not really sure uh what this one is uh will the new theme support dominant color there is uh uh sarah you may be able to tackle this uh there's a core link in the uh q&a section i can uh i can actually handle this one um so this is related to a proposal that was made by the performance team a few months ago a few weeks ago um and essentially what it would do is when an image is uploaded there would be some scripts that run and it determines what the dominant color in the image is and the idea there is that instead of having a blank space on the page that dominant color would be displayed until that image is able to load and whether that's because it's being loaded lazily below the fold or a slow network or whatever that may be to my knowledge a final decision has not been made to actually include this in 6.1 so i don't think that we should assume that the new default theme should support it just yet but we i i like to think that the bundle theme contributors do a very good job of making sure that new features are supported retroactively as best as possible in all the default themes that are supported um so uh i i can say confidently that i think that that's one that if it does land in core we'll go back and we'll make sure that all the default themes can support that properly um that said it's not going to work out of the box i don't think for pre-existing images so this would still be one that would be progressively a progressive enhancement that unless someone takes steps to support older images with that feature um it would only be for newer images so um yeah i think that that's when that one stands not a bad proposal it just needs a little bit more discussion and of course a final decision before we can speak a little more definitively on that okay yeah um i was just kind of waiting to see if we had any other questions coming through it doesn't look like it anybody else want to add anything before we close things out there were a couple of ones that came in that i answered um while we were chatting um i think it'd be good to just mention them out loud someone had asked about any updates for the web fonts api um so this was merged in 6.0 with the plans of reworking some parts of it and iterating on it when it was initially introduced it was done in a way that um it protected itself from being used in certain ways so that we could control how it was used in the ecosystem so as we made these improvements we didn't have to worry about certain aspects of backwards compatibility because we had a certain level of confidence that they they were being used in certain ways um there's no adjustments being planned right now in 6.1 because that there's a team that's actively re-architecting certain parts of it um there are some parts behind the scenes in wordpress that already existed that this api should be able to reuse and and result in some performance improvements and um you know just less code be doing the same thing in multiple locations um and so because of that being a big overt undertaking it's just taking a little bit longer so look for that in 6.2 but it's not something that we're anticipating will be ready in 6.1 um and then finally uh another question was about webp and um if you were on the make blog this weekend you would have seen that there were a couple posts from matt suggesting um that some features be explored more in in a canonical plugin um so core in the past has followed this approach called the feature plugin approach where something that we wanted to add to core would be built in a plugin first tested and and iterated on there before a decision was made if it was ready to be in core or if it should be in core if it wasn't it wasn't a big deal it could just continue to live as a plugin we would officially uh adopt it as a as a core or a team adopted plugin um and so um the suggestion was made that webp while we scale back this for this release maybe it should belong in its own plugin instead of the performance lab plugin um so someone had asked how people would find that if if that was the path that the performance team chose um and I shared a few suggestions that I have there's a beta tab that is on the plugin install screen when you are running WordPress under certain conditions um and we have the ability to pin certain plugins on that screen uh for example Gutenberg comes up there I believe um the design experiments plugin the performance labs plugin also shows up there now so we could also we could pin it there but I also think that there's opportunities to reach out to the groups in the community and ask them to help us install um install the plugin for groups of users to help us get some feedback on that but I also want to explore better ways to collect this feedback because unless the people that install this plugin come to Slack or open GitHub issues there's no real ways to collect this feedback as far as what they're experiencing and so I've been thinking a lot about a more central way to gather feedback for these adopted plugins that we have these these officially recognized plugins to better iterate and improve these these featured plugins to uh you know make them succeed more and potentially increase their opportunity to be merged into core for everybody yeah so we had a couple more questions come through there uh I don't know if they're specific enough um for the query loop will we ever add a way to query multiple posts I don't uh I don't know if that means like like my post id or yeah because that's it that's the what it does it's quite a multiple post so I would imagine maybe like by like specific posts uh sorry uh they're saying okay they updated so uh they're asking if we can uh we'll be able to query uh multiple post types at once okay I see yeah yeah I think that that's also part of the filters infrastructure is being able to move to something that's where you can compose a lot of these things together a bit more um I don't know where we are at right now on that but we can follow up and all right uh next question is uh since WP is unlocking the ability for end users to essentially become theme creators uh via the site editor is there a thought on the horizon for allowing patterns to be created and saved uh with a theme export from an end user end user creators anyone want to jump on that one um I can cover it up was it's uh I think it's really where things are going like the even even right now it would be would be great if we allow people there's this create blog theme plugin that allows you and a lot of people in the community have been building similar things where you can sort of create a theme and then release it and publish it the same should be true for patterns like the the way that you should be able to create a pattern and publish it from your site to the uh to the directory um you should be able to create a style variation and submit it from your site I think all of that really opens up like the creator sort of community to really contribute lower the barrier to contributing a lot more we'll probably be doing that through plugins again canonical plugins at first initially because I think that that would allow us to move faster and experiment a bit faster but yeah I think all of this is uh we should be allowing the software to empower people to to contribute to the whole community through it I think that's really where where things should be going more yeah uh the uh the other question is are there any improvements for the UI in the admin panel just kind of still kind of vague I don't know if that's just general WordPress uh admin uh you know admin or what if it's the general administration um there's uh there's one post on that I think on the design make or design too that is sort of like showing a few paths of general improvements to the admin interface if it's like smaller contained like in the in the editor for example the the post settings and panels have been improved in this release a lot of the components system have been improved and many plugins are using these components so their own admin interfaces should be improving so there's a lot of ongoing work in like those smaller details but for general like WP admin and improvements like probably check out that post we can add it somewhere yeah we can add that and the show notes all right uh that looks like we're we've covered all the questions um and we got about a minute left uh on our time uh so I just want to first I want to thank like you know all our panelists uh Matias for you know screen sharing you know all the stuff that's coming up and uh this we will have a post with the the video and transcript and the details of this call on the make or website in a few days 6.1 beta release uh September 20th so that's just a week away now uh so I'm excited about that um other than that uh everybody have a great week and thanks for joining us thank you you celebrate don't eat too much candy on halloween because November 1st is our uh release day all right David's got to take care everyone it's nice to see you you as well