Jason Tucker 0:10
This is episode number 385 of WPwatercooler WordPress 5.7.
Brought to you by ServerPress, makers of DesktopServer. They make local WordPress development easy. Check them out at ServerPress.com dot com.
support us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com slash WP watercolor. You can help us out over there, we’d appreciate it.
I’m Jason Tucker. I’m an IT director. You find me over at Jason Tucker on Twitter.
Steve Zehngut 0:46
I’m Steve Zehngut. I’m the founder of Zeek interactive and I run the OC WordPress meetup.
Unknown Speaker 0:53
I’m Se Reed, she does some stuff on the internet, you should go check it out. On all the things WordPress, and y’all know who it is.
Jason Cosper 1:02
sperosperIt’s your boy Jason Cosper, AKA Fat Mullenwig at booger on Twitter and all the things.
Jason Tucker 1:08
Go help us out, go over to Apple podcasts search for us real quick, leave us a review. Even if you don’t listen to us, just leave us a review over there, we’d really appreciate it. I’m just trying to trying to get people to listen to us as a podcast, or at least make it look like people are listening to us as podcasts. So we’d appreciate that things. I know I was out. I was out last weekend. And I listened to us as a podcast this morning, just so I could make sure that I didn’t miss anything to carry over from last week, but not so much. Nice.
Steve’s never listened to us, I think Steve knows that we put this on the internet, I’m not listening to you now.
So WordPress 5.7. has arrived, people have updated their sites, some people have not updated their sites. Some people like Steve haven’t even thought about updating their sites yet. There, he’s just gonna, he’s just gonna hold out and wait, give it a couple of weeks or something like that, right, Steve 5725723, maybe three. Nice. So we’re gonna kind of go through a little rundown of what’s changed there. If we’ve we’ve heard anything having our ear to the ground of if anything’s broken, and people are pissed about it, or anything like that, or any of those sorts of things and just kind of work through some of those things. So WordPress, 5.7, where, you know, most sites are really good at going through like new sites and stuff going through and kind of, you know, writing the little lists of all the things that are going on, and have a you know, updates are happening within it. And you can kind of tell when the they’ve copied each other because I’ve kind of used the exact same formatting, the exact same ordering and whatnot. But I think one of the the biggest, the biggest sleeper ones that I’m thinking is happening in this I’m going to skip around a little bit is the HTTP to HTTPS migration.
I have a feeling that people are just gonna, you know, look at this one and go like, Oh, yeah,
that’s been in there forever. It hasn’t it and you know, Cosper, even during the pre show, you’re saying that, you know, some web hosts just kind of manage this for us. Right?
Well, what do you what do you guys think about that of having HTTPS just kind of, you flip a switch, and it just kind of does what it needs to do?
Jason Cosper 3:28
Well, I know that a lot of manage WordPress hosts, over the years have kind of done a pretty good job of when, when you especially after Let’s Encrypt came out, and everybody could start adding HTTPS to their site.
They could basically run what was effectively a simple search and replace. In a lot of cases, I know I’ve worked at a few manage hosts over my career, they normally just use wp selye, the search, replace command and run that. It’s not perfect, because sometimes you’ll run into something where you’re still, you know, you still see an HTTP request on an HTTPS page, and you get the next content warning. But building this into WordPress, so everybody gets it not just the people who can afford to shell out for a manage host who, who tries to make those processes as pain free as possible, I think is great. Is that essentially all it’s doing is doing kind of a find replace inside of your database, or I mean, it’s not, it’s not issuing a Let’s Encrypt certificate, right? So if you’re not, no, not HTTPS, it’s not it’s not gonna do any. It’s not gonna work. Right?
Steve Zehngut 4:42
As a matter of fact, it might break something right. So I mean, let’s listen. Let’s let’s be clear. Everybody that’s hosting your site should be on HTTPS and should have a certificate. Let’s let’s get that out of the way first, but for those that aren’t, I’m assuming I’m assuming what this feature is doing is doing what you just described is an easier way to do kind of a search and replace of all
The HTTP
strings that are inside of your database.
Jason Tucker 5:05
Yeah, that’s part of site health. So the the site health part of WordPress, which is on your dashboard, if you wanted to go look there, there’s other places where it’s available as well. But it gives you that idea of like, you know, how bad is my site, what’s messed up about it, what things have detected, and one of these in particular is if it notices that choosing HTTP, and you want to switch it, it’ll it’ll take care of that through HTTPS. Yeah. I don’t know. So seems like it’s one of those things where like, the the cat bloggers out there need to be able to make this thing work and just kind of have it happen and not have to go through a whole bunch of extra stuff. Is that a group? Now the cat bloggers is that? Well, you know, I got a,
I got to make sure that we’re using all the correct terminology here. And if I’m gonna make up my own terminology, then I might as well just keep adding to that lexicon.
Steve Zehngut 5:54
I’m not faulting you. I like it. I think
Jason Cosper 5:58
what so you guys, are
Jason Tucker 6:00
I I still haven’t joined the Gutenberg train. But I know, I know, you folks have. What are you guys looking at with these, these new blocks and new functionality that they’ve added within the block editor? How are you guys feeling about that?
Steve Zehngut 6:17
Yeah, there’s quite a bit coming forth. for the, for the block editor, I’m going to pull up the feature list, because I was reading through it. The this week.
Jason Tucker 6:29
One in particular that I saw was the the full height block.
Steve Zehngut 6:33
But before I get there, I was gonna ask you, why are you not using Gutenberg? What’s what what are you? What’s the hesitation there?
Jason Tucker 6:42
I don’t know. I think I think I’m kind of I’m currently set in my ways. I’m not gonna say that I’m fully set in my ways. But I’m currently set in my ways. I’ve been jumping around a little bit intervention, using I know, I’ve been using, I’ve been using Beaver Builder and Divi kind of jumping between those on a couple different sites that I have, just kind of figuring out what’s out there. And what why people are using these things. I’ve been using Beaver Builder since it came out. So for me, it’s like, you know, I don’t write a whole lot of blog posts themselves. It’s more along the lines of pages. And so if I’m going to do a page, then I want to have something that’s going to be able to do the entire page, not just the content section of it.
Steve Zehngut 7:21
Sure. And so. So, I mean, there are a ton of improvements coming for the block editor. And in five, seven, it just keeps getting better. But essentially, I think where they’re going and this is this is happening under the hood, is the block editor is going to become a full Site Builder. I mean, that’s, you know, that it’s not a secret. That’s, that’s in this feature set. It’s not it’s not fully baked yet. But that’s, that’s what’s happening here. And so a lot of these features are geared toward that, like the one you mentioned, the full, you know, full height blocks. You know, that’s, that’s kind of a site building feature is what, huh?
Jason Cosper 7:59
Yeah, actually, the, they’re looking to put, I mean, we’re talking about five, seven, and it’s release, they’re looking to put full site editing in five, eight, we were talking about this before the before the show, where it’s kind of like a go or no go in just a month, just posted a post on the make WordPress blog about how full site editing is coming in, potentially in five, eight, as long as by April 14, everything looks good. So I mean, Steve said, it’s coming. It’s coming sooner than we think.
Steve Zehngut 8:38
To put it in the WordPress terms, it’s imminent as the emails every time, every time a new major version of WordPress comes out, I get I get those emails from the plugin repository.
Jason Tucker 8:48
And then they tell you how nominal WordPress is as well.
So stacked buttons, being able to do sizes of social network icons, you know that they’re adding a bunch of stuff to the block editor and maybe by the time I actually get to it, I won’t even realize that I’m not using Beaver Builder anymore. And I’m just using the block editor because they’re
Jason Cosper 9:12
awesome. It’s I I got tasked, gosh, I would say probably around Thanksgiving maybe a little bit before at work to take a page that we had built in Beaver Builder and just see what it looks like trying to do it in Gutenberg. And I managed to build a very close facsimile of the page between Beaver Builder and Gutenberg and it’s not even with full site editing. Just the fact that I could take Astra and put, you know all the blocks in place and get a decent facsimile. And one of the points was is to test it and then see how much faster was once we got Beaver Builder out of the mix nothing it’s Beaver Builder. I love those guys. But I mean, Gutenberg has really been pushing on PageSpeed and making things faster for end users. So I think that that was really eye opening and the fact that you know, we’re coming up on full site editing in the next three or four months when WordPress five, eight ships. Yeah, I think that’s really exciting. Yep. Yeah. That might actually be a challenge to you, Jason. See, if you’ve got hosting with a staging environment, I think
Jason Tucker 10:38
oh, yeah, totally.
Jason Cosper 10:39
Maybe you should try to rebuild the Beaver Builder pages that you’ve done for the water cooler on in Gutenberg, I think there’s the I mean, you can get a preview of the full site editing stuff in there. I know. It’s still kind of in a beta. But maybe that’s something to try and see. Yeah, what that does for your PageSpeed score, I know you’ve had some PageSpeed was in the past. So maybe this is a thing that will help you?
Jason Tucker 11:11
Yeah, I’ll definitely take a look at it and see, it’s, you know, it’s it’s something I’ve been wanting to do, but it just hasn’t happened yet. But yeah, I’ll definitely take a look at it. Um,
Steve Zehngut 11:22
there is a learning curve. Right. So yeah, I know, we’re here to talk about five, seven. But there, you know, there, there is a learning curve, it does take, you have to wrap your mind around it and play with a little bit. It’s way different than, you know, what you’re used to in classic editor. But anyway, let’s get back to let’s get back to the changes that they made in in five, seven. So I think the whole, the full height one is a is a good is a good place to start. A lot of the improvements are just sort of things that kind of improve the whole drag and drop stuff, the little preview guy, so the the preview bar that’s on the on the left hand side that got an improvement, maybe a couple versions of WordPress ago. And so they’re they’re doing they’re doing a bunch of improvements there. Some stuff with with drag and drop. And then you know, a lot of them are kind of specific, right? I’m just just reading on the list here. And I was looking through it, like I said, I was looking through this earlier, but they’ve they’ve made some improvements for like the, you know, the social icons, you can you can now change the sizes and the social icons block. Right. So those those things are there as well.
Jason Tucker 12:27
Yeah, looks like Like buttons, being able to have vertical buttons versus horizontal buttons and those sorts of things. You know, one of the ones that caught my eye, kind of going through this list is the color palette that they’re proposing. And how we could have that. Yeah, dude, it kind of takes me back to the days and this is obviously gonna, gonna date me and the rest of you as well. But having like web safe colors, it takes me back to like those days where it’s like, you know, is this color web safe or not? Not to say that that’s what this is. Because, you know, we’re beyond those at this point. But the idea that, you know, it’s like, here’s your palette, and here’s the things that you can kind of work with, with these colors. seems interesting. It’s also, it’s also nice, because of the fact that they’re taking into the fact that there’s contrast ratio between those contrasts between each of these that you’re able to make sure that you know that they’re accessible and those sorts of things as well. So I think when you lead by example, like this, it allows for people to know what the constraints are, and how to kind of make sure you’re staying within those constraints. Now, I
Steve Zehngut 13:36
think they should just open up a color wheel on all of them and let people just choose whatever colors they want everywhere. I think that make it geo cities. I think what he’s saying is, there’s actually a designer putting some science behind this right, so that they’re not so that the colors actually work together rather than just having all the colors of the rainbow.
Jason Tucker 13:58
Right.
Jason Cosper 13:59
You know, I hear I hear what you’re saying, Steve, and I do think that it’s great that they’re standardizing this, but I do think maybe, maybe, just maybe we need to bring a little Geocities and a little weird back to the web. Because it’s all
Unknown Speaker 14:17
evenly Steve hasn’t
Jason Tucker 14:17
had a mini player work on his site in years. I mean, but he still he still has a mini player on there. And it’s still trying to play those songs. So it’s just not working. No.
Jason Cosper 14:28
I mean, okay, so I saw something the other day this is only mildly off topic. Guam GW lb. It effectively a designer called Guam, the color of the web which is gray with a little blue. And through that is you look at Facebook, you look at Reddit, you look at Twitter, gray with a little blue that is and it’s so frickin dough? Like, let’s get some better colors in there. Yeah,
Steve Zehngut 15:07
I agree with you. I, like I’m gonna, I’m gonna steal that.
Unknown Speaker 15:14
It’s awesome.
Steve Zehngut 15:19
You’re you’re you are, you’re 100%. Right? The skipping kind of past that stuff that the developer stuff is usually what interests me. Right. And so I do like the what they’ve done with the robots API. I don’t know if you got a chance to look at that and look at the API and look at what’s being done. But that is a welcome. Change, being able to program and affect what’s in your robots. txt file is actually critically important for SEO. Yeah.
Jason Tucker 15:49
Makes me seem like it’s one of those things that like, you know, Android folks always say that, like, this has been an Android forever, but but the iPhone finally got around to it. Is this the same sort of thing where like some other some other CMS has been doing robots, txt files, like perfectly and we just finally get around to it? Or do you think that we’ve kind of finally hit this the stride where we’re actually doing this? Well?
Steve Zehngut 16:14
I think there’s plugins that have been doing this well, for a while, right. I can’t speak to other platforms and what they’ve been doing, but there, there’s this has been handled by either plugins or just custom code for a long time. So this is a welcome addition. Yeah.
Jason Cosper 16:33
Let’s let’s get out, let’s get an ht access or a nginx API in there. So yeah, like, Yeah. Why not?
Unknown Speaker 16:46
Yeah.
Jason Tucker 16:48
So what about lazy loading? iframes? You know, I think I think this is good when you when you have sites where iframes are being used, like crazy. There’s still sites out there that have tons of iframes that are on it. I mean, the church that I worked at, we had forms running through our church management system that was running in an iframe, which I absolutely hated. But now that, you know, it’s like people are using API’s. Now people are having, you know, there’s JavaScript that’s writing this stuff onto the screen, do you necessarily have to have, you know, an iframe. So it’s like, if a JC diagram
Jason Cosper 17:26
is good, the water cooler site has iframes on it as well, you’re in. You’re embedding the YouTube player on your site. I know that there are a lot of people out there who embed YouTube videos on their site, those are using an iframe embed, and basically, to be able to take this out of the hands of adding yet another plugin to your site to and there are a ton of iframe lazy loader plugins out there to basically take this out of their hands. I mean, they added lazy loading on images. You know, the the Google devs, who contributed to WordPress, like you did that with images. Now they’re doing it with iframes. Great from a performance perspective, loading an iframe when you actually need it, or when you’re coming up on it, instead of just right at page load time will be fantastic for performance. Yeah,
Steve Zehngut 18:23
I agree. I agree as well. And you know, we should lazy load all the things as simple as that.
Jason Tucker 18:30
The whole page lazy load.
Steve Zehngut 18:32
Yeah, yeah, that lazy. Oh, what?
Jason Cosper 18:35
Yeah, let’s let’s start lazy loading blocks, like just load the block right before you need it. Not anything else? Why not?
Jason Tucker 18:44
I totally missed this comment. Cosper. But this cracks me up. But yeah, job JD blah,
Steve Zehngut 18:54
blah. Was it gone up? Well,
Unknown Speaker 18:57
yeah. Yeah.
Steve Zehngut 19:01
You should that you should read the comment for anybody that’s listening on audio.
Jason Tucker 19:05
Oh, yeah. It said that Cosper Cosper dress for the occasion gray with a little blue. Yeah, it’s all stuff. Good stuff.
Unknown Speaker 19:12
That’s awesome.
Jason Tucker 19:13
program three things you got jQuery 3.5 point one.
Steve Zehngut 19:18
So let’s, let’s spend a little time on on what’s happening with jQuery. Yeah, let’s let’s do query in the past couple of versions of WordPress and WooCommerce. Tell me more on key Steve. It’s, it’s bad. It’s I know that it’s it’s necessary, right? All the upgrades are necessary. It needs to happen. Right. But it’s been it’s been breaking a lot of stuff for a lot of people. And so if you’re not using a lot of plugins and your your theme is up to date, it’s you’re probably not even going to notice it right. But we’ve inherited a lot of sites. I’ve clients that run you know outdated plugins. I have clients Don’t know not, not the sites that we maintain, right. But I have some clients that like to install their own stuff. And and it, it’s been a nightmare. This jQuery migrate, conflict has just been a nightmare. Have you guys experienced any of this?
Jason Cosper 20:14
Yeah, yeah. No, I have a friend of mine, who is a plugin developer who has a lot of plugins, both in the repo and, you know, just publishes them to GitHub because they don’t want to go through the whole repo approval process. They’re just scratching their own edge. They’re like, I have no idea how many of my plugins actually need jQuery migrate? Because I have, like, I don’t keep track of that sort of thing. I just develop for the thing that I need to do, hey, it works great. And now they’re scrambling to figure out what’s what’s breaking, what’s not breaking, etc?
Jason Tucker 20:59
Yeah.
Steve Zehngut 21:01
It’s, um, again, I’m not, I’m not faulting anybody. Right? It has to be done. Right? The Jake, Jake, this stuff has to be updated. There’s no good way to go about this. There’s really no way to win this this war. But there’s, you know, now that WordPress is 40% of the internet, right. And there’s, you know, 10s of 1000s of plugins out there. And many of them, they’re not maintained regularly, we’re gonna have JavaScript conflicts, that’s just what’s happening. Right. And so, you know, a lot of it is is stuff that feels kind of edge, Casey, right. It’s not stuff that’s really breaking a website, a lot of stuffs happening in the dashboard. That’s where we’re noticing that stuff. Right. So. And I’ll give you a for instance, when, you know, a couple versions ago, WooCommerce, when when WordPress was updated, WooCommerce was just not working right. There were just menus inside of word WooCommerce that weren’t visible. So that that is their own plugin that it’s happening to. Right. And so that’s, that’s where we’re seeing it. It’s really on the on the dashboard side versus the versus the front end side.
Jason Cosper 22:07
Yeah, and I did a quick check when you said 10s of 1000s of plugins. We are six plugins short of 58,000 plugins close.
Steve Zehngut 22:18
I knew I was close. Wow. Yeah.
Jason Cosper 22:21
That’s, that’s a 10.
Steve Zehngut 22:23
Yeah, it’s a 10s of
Unknown Speaker 22:24
1000s. Yeah, sure.
Steve Zehngut 22:26
I think that’s a word. Anyway, so um, you know, it’s not, this is not a comfortable transition on this whole jQuery migrate stuff. And so I think with five, seven more of this is coming, just expect it. expect that if you’re upgrading, if you’re just clicking that upgrade button, and and you have some plugins that required jQuery, you’re gonna you’re you may encounter some problems in the dashboard. I’ve seen one of the one of the other plugins, and I hate to mention that on the show, one of the other plugins that I see breaking quite a bit is WP bakery. Right? And so the big one, yeah, I know. I know. And that’s, that’s weird. But if you’re using bakery and you upgrade to the latest version of WordPress, expect in consistencies on the in the dashboard. Look, expect inconsistency with WP bakery anyway, but especially with upgrading to newer versions of WordPress,
Jason Tucker 23:25
good old visual decomposer
Unknown Speaker 23:27
Yeah.
Steve Zehngut 23:30
So that’s, so that’s, that’s one thing. That’s that’s, that’s been a pain. Just Yeah, and we can get into some of the developer stuff. That’s been the that’s been added here. You know, a lot of it. It’s it’s just, you know, kind of cleanup stuff. But that was the biggies. The is the the jQuery
Jason Tucker 23:48
upgrade, which has just been going on and on and on forever. Well, hello.
Steve Zehngut 23:55
Sorry, before we move on from that, how are we? are we up to date with jQuery now? How I wonder what jQuery cycle is right? Like, how often are they upgrading? And how often does WordPress need to bring in that upgrade? And I’m wondering if those can, this is going to be terrible suggestion, but I’m wondering if that can somehow be decoupled so that you can upgrade on different cycles, rather than having WordPress be what upgrades your jQuery for you? Well,
Jason Tucker 24:26
they’re on 3.60.
Unknown Speaker 24:29
Who jQuery?
Steve Zehngut 24:31
And what are we What is WordPress? five, seven now have
Jason Cosper 24:36
was, let’s see here. Oh, my
Jason Tucker 24:39
goodness. I’m sorry. Again,
Steve Zehngut 24:43
it’s a terrible suggestion. I’m just wondering if there would be a way for me to go in and force a jQuery and I and now I’m thinking about I think there is a way for way to do that. Again, it’s the I’m what I’m suggesting is going to break even more stuff.
Jason Tucker 24:58
So yeah,
Steve Zehngut 24:59
It’s been a long
Jason Cosper 25:04
it’s been a week already. Yeah, this
Steve Zehngut 25:07
week, this week’s Been a long year.
Jason Cosper 25:09
Yeah, no, um, one thing I’d like to shout out, since we only have a few minutes left, it’s it’s not a huge thing, it’s a huge thing for me, because I have built a little stub plugin to take care of this, a few versions of WordPress ago. But the block editor now, no longer uses Google’s notice RF font. In the block editor, it’s actually using, like a native font, so on windows that will use a native font for Windows on Mac, you know, on Linux, etc. I like this, from a privacy perspective, I really don’t want Google knowing every time I open up my editor to, to write a blog post to edit a page, anything else, you know, having that query there, you know, I didn’t appreciate it. So I personally unhooked it. But I’m glad now that everybody else also gets that. But also it’s it’s about making Gutenberg faster. It’s about having not having to worry about downloading that couple 100k of a web font, even though it’s cached, that first time, you know, oh, I’ve got a load of font now. Like, no, no, no, just use what’s built in. And I mean, at one point, they had disabled using a Google Font in Gutenberg, and they just kind of brought it back quietly, and didn’t make a big deal out of it. So it looks like they’re finally like writing the course there and taking it back out and saying, okay, that’s, we’re good here.
Jason Tucker 26:53
Nice. That’s nice. Yeah, I think anytime you’re able to speed up, you know, speed up the creation process, then you’re not having to sit there and wait for things to load and stuff, especially when it’s something like that, because it’s on the dashboard side, you know, or at least on the logged in version of the site.
Jason Cosper 27:12
Right. And I mean, even with, even even with, you know, like them taking that out of Gutenberg, like, I would implore folks that unless you really need a web font, like why are you adding that extra little bit, I mean, it may be a really cool web font, and then it’s totally fine by me. But I’m using the native fonts, like, if you can get away with it is, it’s just nice, like, you’re not really leaving your customers to download that extra bit of whatever, just so you can get, you know, a nice little ligature on your F or whatever. All right, like maybe you want that for your headline, but I mean, I see it and go, Oh, that’s nice. And then I’m like, But wait, how much? Is this costing me when I look at the page?
Jason Tucker 28:13
Make sense? Yep.
Steve Zehngut 28:16
You know, I, frankly, until you said that, I didn’t really even think about that kind of stuff. And what’s slowing down the dashboard, right, the more the more we can pull out a dashboard and just kind of have native write the better because I find that the dashboards just getting slower and slower with each release. And again, it may not be WordPress fault, maybe plugins, right? There’s a lot going on. But But okay,
Unknown Speaker 28:39
I didn’t
Jason Cosper 28:40
go in. Going back in to actually, I figured out a way to bring back in that podcast that you guys did last week. While I was out like listening into that. You talked about how WordPress like plugins, especially will load CSS and JavaScript that you don’t need. Like, you know, like a theme a load its CSS in the dashboard, and you don’t need it if you’re not on the actual like customizer. Like, let’s, let’s actually, I mean, I would like to put that on theme and plugin developers to like, Hey, man, let’s sort this crap out. What’s actually not load? What let’s load what we need, instead of loading. All this crap or dashboard
Jason Tucker 29:29
specific CSS and JavaScript being loaded on on the front end. It’s like, why is this even here? Why is this why is this even exists? This stuff needs to be only in the dashboard and even then you should really be thinking about how you’re kind of approaching that to.
Jason Cosper 29:46
Absolutely, yeah. Well, look
Jason Tucker 29:49
at the time. Look at that. Guys, thank you. Thank you very much for hanging out. As always, you know,
Steve Zehngut 29:56
this 30 minute show was a long week. I tell you,
Jason Tucker 29:59
it is Here’s our outro Thank you see you go over to WP work where.com slash subscribe where you can subscribe to this podcast as well as the other podcasts that we have on the network and on sugared Apple podcasts and leave us a review. We’d really appreciate that as well until later you have a good one. Bye bye
Leave a Reply