[00:00:00] Sé Reed: It’s gonna be a live one?
[00:00:10] Jason Tucker: This is episode number 465 of WPwatercooler. What’s new in WordPress 6. 4 beta one. I’m Jason Tucker. Go to my website. You can find stuff about me over there
[00:00:24] Sé Reed: Or don’t. He doesn’t care. Hey, I’m Sé Reed. I, I do things on the internet, and so do you. Hey, that’s Sé Reed Media.
[00:00:34] Jason Cosper: And Sé talked over my intro, so I’m Jason Cosper. What up?
[00:00:40] Sé Reed: The whole thing.
[00:00:40] Jason Tucker: and go find us wherever it is that great podcasts are found, especially WordPress ones. And you can come hang out with us in our discord.
[00:00:50] Jason Cosper: We’re, we’re real, we’re real loose today. Tucker has been sick and, he, the,
[00:00:57] Jason Tucker: I, I.
[00:00:58] Jason Cosper: coronavirus has finally caught up with him.
[00:01:01] Sé Reed: The energy level of our crew today.
[00:01:05] Jason Tucker: the amount of, I don’t care is very strong over here.
[00:01:09] Sé Reed: Actually, oh, I don’t have my, my bag in here, but I got a really cool present at, WordCamp US. That was, someone was giving out these etched, little etched, I don’t know what you would call them. 3D printed, maybe? words. And the word was the F word. And it was like, here, here’s one of these.
[00:01:24] Sé Reed: You can have one. So that you could give one, or you could just have one. We’re all probably out of them. Anyway, I’m definitely out of them. I want everyone who listens to this show to know that, that I am out of them. I have that one and I’m not giving it to anybody. But I also, I also just want to say to anyone who’s listening on this show and who’s anyone who’s been a listener, this is just me going off the cuff here.
[00:01:51] Sé Reed: But if you ever have any questions, If you want me to answer, you can just message me on Twitter or, wherever in our server, in our discord. Like, you know, I’m a, I’m a, I’m a, what’s the sunshine, sunlight, big, big proponent of sunlight. And, I’m happy to share information and, answer questions about whatever.
[00:02:18] Jason Tucker: Well, all questions should go to Sé. If you have any questions for me, I don’t, I don’t give a crap.
[00:02:22] Sé Reed: Do not,
[00:02:25] Jason Tucker: I don’t care at all.
[00:02:26] Sé Reed: does not care.
[00:02:27] Jason Tucker: And Sé also has, Sé also has like, I don’t know, like six comments waiting for her on the website to like go through and
[00:02:35] Sé Reed: Oh, no,
[00:02:35] Jason Tucker: So
[00:02:36] Sé Reed: do I?
[00:02:38] Jason Tucker: I don’t know how this like multi admin, multi author BS works, but it’s obviously not working. So
[00:02:46] Jason Tucker: no, I gotta, I, I should look at those. I stopped looking at those because, honestly, they were, some of them were hard to deal with. of them are blog posts themselves that,
[00:02:55] Sé Reed: yeah. I was like, weren’t, didn’t you mean to write this on Twitter?
[00:02:58] Jason Tucker: I’m like, wow, I’m surprised they didn’t use blocks. Is there a way to like use blocks and comments? Cause they might as well. Oh no, that’s awful. Yeah.
[00:03:04] Sé Reed: Yes, that was on, on, on the website. On, in Plugin Yeah, it’s had some rough, rough onboarding. Hey, speaking of the block editor and all that,
[00:03:14] Jason Cosper: Oh, yeah,
[00:03:15] Sé Reed: you know, even though we just kind of covered that, anyway, we were thinking about just talking about the software today and like, you know, going to the core.
[00:03:25] Sé Reed: of why are we actually here, what are we doing, that kind of stuff. That was my take on why we would just talk about software today. and also because Beta 1 came out on Tuesday, and I am, for the first time, part of the Release Squad, as it is called, which always makes me think of Taylor Swift. I’m like, da na na na!
[00:03:48] Sé Reed: And 4th of
[00:03:48] Jason Tucker: sell a lot of jerseys is what’s going to happen.
[00:03:51] Sé Reed: All right, media phenomenons are really interesting to watch, including my own, because now having been the subject of, And, other media where I am not even involved or notified. And I am like referred to as just like, you know, I’m like, wow, I am really, you’re just referring to me.
[00:04:10] Sé Reed: Like I’m the same as Matt Mullenweg, which, you know, let’s be clear. He has a seven, his
[00:04:16] Jason Tucker: a PR team though. So you’re good.
[00:04:17] Sé Reed: company was valued at 7. 5 billion.
[00:04:24] Sé Reed: So, I, you know, I appreciate that one of us is a multi millionaire, with 2000 people that work for them and the other one of us had a sick toddler home with a fever all week and probably, you There’s probably hand, foot, mouth disease. So, it’s totally the same. It’s exactly the same. I see why people would think that.
[00:04:48] Sé Reed: One is,
[00:04:48] Jason Tucker: be, I had a 17 year old that had that, or 16 year old that had that. It was not fun.
[00:04:54] Sé Reed: I don’t actually think it was hand, foot, mouth. There is a hand, foot, mouth outbreak at her daycare, where I actually sent her anywhere, anyway today because in theory all those kids are sick already. So, we totally have the same concerns, Matt, and I do. And I appreciate people putting us on the same level.
[00:05:10] Sé Reed: And if anyone has a 7. 5 billion valuation that they would like to give to me, I have lots of things I could do with that. And a lot of cool people who I would like to hire. So I’m just putting it out there since we’re equating me with a multimillionaire.
[00:05:26] Jason Tucker: Yeah. So about that beta one,
[00:05:29] Sé Reed: look at beta one. Let’s talk about that software.
[00:05:32] Jason Tucker: that software, which. you know, livesonwordpress. org, which is interesting, you know, I’ve really been thinking about that a lot, is like, where, what, what is WordPress? It is, is it, is it a website? Is it a Slack channel? Software? it’s two different directories on a server and one of them is org and the other one’s com.
[00:05:52] Jason Tucker: I don’t know what it is, to be honest, these days, but what I do know is that there is a software attached to it, and that software has specific code that changes on a fairly regular basis because this is now a, a, a timed release, not a feature based release. And boy, do I have thoughts on that. So time to release. How, how does, so
[00:06:15] Sé Reed: this is, there’s three releases a year that has been decided. And actually, I remember very clearly when, the sort of timed releases and the automatic releases were that conversation that’s been happening a long time. but decided at some point, I don’t know what year it was. I just remember that it happened.
[00:06:33] Sé Reed: at some point. It became three releases a year. This year, 6. 4 was shortened because there’s been a lot of feedback over the years, over many years, that pushing a release at the end of, at the end of the year, the beginning or end of December is really rough for like most of the world.
[00:06:53] Jason Tucker: Yeah.
[00:06:54] Jason Cosper: back, back when I was working at WP Engine, God, like seven years ago, eight years, I mean, but like the whole time I was working there for like five years, it was really a thing of, oh crap. WordPress is pushing a release, in like late November, early December. And, you know, when you have a lot of customers who are selling stuff off of their site, making money off of their site during a very busy holiday season,
[00:07:24] Jason Tucker: to
[00:07:24] Jason Cosper: for.
[00:07:25] Sé Reed: holiday season are you in? Does something happen in like November, December with e commerce?
[00:07:29] Jason Cosper: How, like, and
[00:07:31] Sé Reed: I don’t know.
[00:07:32] Jason Cosper: not, not only, is something happening in, in November, December, but it’s happening for most of the religions, like,
[00:07:41] Sé Reed: That’s what I think is fun. It’s like literally like all humans. Like a lot, like most humans have stuff going on in December. I just, I find that charming.
[00:07:51] Jason Cosper: and
[00:07:51] Sé Reed: human being. I don’t know, something about that makes me feel like… I don’t know. Let’s not plan movements at that time, which is, so, sorry, go ahead.
[00:07:59] Jason Cosper: no, I was going to say, and the argument has been like, it’s hard to schedule a release when something is not going on. That was, kind of the, the pushback, that it’s like, there’s always going to be,
[00:08:12] Sé Reed: There’s always something.
[00:08:14] Jason Cosper: Yeah, there’s always, yeah, but,
[00:08:17] Sé Reed: and yet,
[00:08:18] Jason Cosper: right. This is when like the most somethings are happening.
[00:08:23] Sé Reed: yeah, so this was a direct, finally, I mean, so this is, this is, this is the test version of doing it sooner. yes, and holidays have already started. It’s already holidays. You know, and so, yeah, so this is the push sooner, this is a, I don’t know if you’d call it an abridged release. In, in the very beginning of discussions, everyone kept saying it was a polishing, and I was like, okay, so I just want us to talk about all the nuances.
[00:08:53] Sé Reed: And, and completely, like, clean ones, by the way, but all of the nuances that go along with the word polishing and cleaning, for example, that could be associated with underrepresented genders like women, historically. so we didn’t chain, we didn’t call it, like, it’s not a polishing one anymore, but it’s definitely, meant to refine.
[00:09:16] Sé Reed: We’ve changed the language a bit, so it’s meant to refine sort of what’s been built upon. Because it is the shorter release, so, you know, notwithstanding anything about the, you know, it being a specific, squad and whether the gender represented squad should be the shorter. Time period or whatever.
[00:09:33] Sé Reed: That’s n neither here nor that. But, just looking at it from terms of this one was pushed and it’s going to, it’s intended to, and it, I think it will because a lot of things have been punted and beta one went really well, so I don’t, I, I, I think it will launch on schedule. It’s scheduled to, 6. 4 is scheduled to launch on November 7th, Tuesday, November 7th.
[00:09:54] Sé Reed: so, I mean, that’s much sooner, you know, it’s pre Thanksgiving. again, people are already purchasing and doing that stuff, so I don’t know that anyone’s still going to push any updates until… Until afterwards, until after those seasons have ended, until January. But, I definitely feel, as someone who is, on this squad, and witnessing the compressed timeline.
[00:10:17] Sé Reed: And so I haven’t experienced the full timeline, which would be interesting to observe. I will observe more closely whether or not I’m on a squad. You know, probably not. But, I… Sorry, just laughing at that, but I will observe the length of it to see if it’s, you know, really impacted. But I feel like having such a compressed time frame absolutely forces, reliance on full time sponsored contributors.
[00:10:47] Jason Tucker: Mm.
[00:10:48] Sé Reed: So without that, you can’t move at the pace that’s required for especially this release, but I would argue probably also for three releases a year, because you’re always scrambling, you’re always trying to get all this stuff together. And now they’ve introduced a microsite, which was launched in 6. 3. Did I mention this last?
[00:11:07] Sé Reed: I might’ve mentioned this previously.
[00:11:09] Jason Cosper: I think you did. Yeah. I do remember you, since, since Tucker’s a little, out of it still. yeah, I, I do recall you mentioning the microsite.
[00:11:18] Sé Reed: Yeah, so there’s a microsite that goes with it. That’s essentially a landing page, but, there’s assets, you know, all of the features get, you know,images that go along with it to explain it. There’s, there’s just a lot that happens. Obviously there’s social media posts that need to be written. And with the pace of, you know, honestly.
[00:11:38] Sé Reed: What month is it? So this was, this started like kicked off basically right after WordCamp US. So September, this is October and it’ll come out in November, like two months essentially of, of work and the, you know, and pushing up all of the deadlines, including the about page, which got pushed up. So it’s like, you know, it’s just really compressed. and it, it, it forces complete reliance on full time sponsored contributors. So that is. it’s own problem, but one that I’ve really noticed in this, release that’s been my, my main thing is that not only are the full time sponsored contributors there, but they’re, they’re, they’re not leading, they’re definitely leading from behind, even the designs that are taking place, you know, there is heavy, heavy, Design Influence from the design team, and, you know, there’s all sorts of, I’m not saying that’s inherently bad.
[00:12:33] Sé Reed: I don’t know that it’s inherently bad, but it does feel a little disingenuous that it is an underrepresented gender led, program when it is really being led by, you know, full time sponsored contributors that may or may not be underrepresented genders. For the most part, they’re not underrepresented genders.
[00:12:53] Sé Reed: so I can’t imagine, like, I don’t know who’s, you know, I, I know that there are various full time sponsored contributors on every release squad. I don’t know. I, I’ve, I know a lot about what’s happening in Beta 1, so we can talk about that instead of the experience itself,
[00:13:07] Jason Cosper: So, so one thing that I know is
[00:13:09] Sé Reed: We’re not talking about the damn software.
[00:13:11] Sé Reed: God.
[00:13:11] Jason Cosper: Yeah, one thing I know that is not making it into 6. 4 that I was excited about is a friend of the show, Andy Fragon, has been really pushing, this, plugin, rollback and, effectively, when you do a plugin update, if there’s a bad plugin update, it will, roll that update back.
[00:13:33] Jason Cosper: That works if you are doing an update. Manually in the dashboard right now. but the thing that I was excited about, a thing that we’ve all kind of been, really, looking forward to, and Courtney, said it in the chat, rollback is fantastic. It, it works. Great. But there have been some regressions that have happened in the last component, which is, rollback of like automatic upgrades.
[00:14:00] Jason Cosper: So basically if you set your plugins to automatically upgrade, There have been some issues with it. So they ended up punting that into, 6. 5. Like it will not make it into the 6. 4 release as expected. And I am super bummed about that. So we won’t see that until March. which,
[00:14:21] Sé Reed: Well, right, because it’s the next release. So, I actually, I learned in this, I asked and have learned and clarified in this release, specifically what blessed means. and what blessed means is that the feature, whatever feature is blessed does not have to be completely done. for beta 1. So it is, it is, something is either punted, so it goes over and is moved over to 6.
[00:14:45] Sé Reed: 5, but if it stays and it’s not quite ready, again, this is because of this timed release thing, and if it’s not quite ready, it can be blessed, and that blessed thing, in this case, is the, the font manager and the font library. So that component, which is a big component, that’s coming out in Gutenberg.
[00:15:04] Sé Reed: 16. 7, I believe? There’s a lot of numbers to remember, or a non number remember er, like me, but, the, the, there’s this whole really big conversation about what version of Gutenberg goes into the latest version, like, what is the most What is the latest version of Gutenberg? Which iterates like, I don’t know, every two weeks or something?
[00:15:28] Sé Reed: Wild? Or every, really often? which version of that is the last one that goes into the WordPress release? So there’s like this whole conversation that keeps happening about, oh, that’s in 16. 7 in Gutenberg, but it doesn’t work properly in core, but it’s gonna be in there. So it’s, it’s just, it’s really A very interesting conversation that’s happening right now.
[00:15:50] Sé Reed: So I don’t have a lot of, you know, I don’t, I know that it’s matters, but I don’t understand like really the nuances of the Gutenberg core love.
[00:16:01] Jason Cosper: is, is, is there a possibility that we may not get the font manager in
[00:16:07] Sé Reed: No, because it has been blessed. So what blessed means is that it will be in, it is, I mean, I suppose it might be punted, but I’ve never, I don’t think I’ve heard of a blessed thing. Blessed means they will work the full, everybody is going to work their booties off to make sure that those problems get fixed.
[00:16:24] Jason Cosper: I feel like there’s been one or two, maybe a little more minor features that were blessed that have been punted historically. I, I wish that I had nascent brain and could pull like track tickets, out of my head.
[00:16:39] Sé Reed: Do not have that brain.
[00:16:41] Jason Cosper: No, no, no, no. I, I, I wish I had nascentbrain
[00:16:45] Sé Reed: Yeah, I’m, I didn’t know you, I, I, yeah, I’m the opposite of whatever nascent brain is, which is like, there was a track ticket once, I think, maybe, or maybe it was on GitHub, or maybe it was a tweet.
[00:16:57] Jason Cosper: on, okay, so, so now, now we’ve, now we’ve defined the scale of, Sébrain to nascentbrain,
[00:17:03] Jason Cosper: That’s actually cool. I like this new scale. I’m going to think about that some more. on a scale of Sébrain to nascentbrain, you need
[00:17:13] Sé Reed: much coffee do you need right now?
[00:17:15] Jason Cosper: You need at least a Courtney Robertson brain to know what features have been punted.
[00:17:21] Jason Tucker: Oh, man.
[00:17:23] Sé Reed: Oh my God, that’s really funny, actually. if you know Courtney and me, you’ll know why that’s funny. all right. So anyway, blessed, not blessed. The font manager is blessed. The font manager is pretty cool. It is. It’s pretty cool, but it’s funny the way we’re describing it because, you know, I have media library problems going way back, I don’t know, a decade or so.
[00:17:45] Sé Reed: so when we say it like this, we haven’t fixed the media library, although it’s slated for improvements. I’m sure someone at Automatic is working very hard on it right now. it’s
[00:17:56] Jason Tucker: We, we have the same media library that Canva has right now is what it is, but Canva has fonts.
[00:18:03] Sé Reed: it’s plated for improvements, but the way that we’re describing the font manager is that it’s the media library for fonts, which is a great recommendation, but I get it. I get the point of what we’re talking about, which is you can manage your fonts on your install. Which is pretty cool, right?
[00:18:22] Sé Reed: Like, you go and like, just add Google Fonts. There’s a whole conversation about, should we connect to Google Fonts? Or, you know, what are the privacy ramifications of Google Fonts? For, it’s, it’s really interesting, like, fonts starts to get really nuanced. Nuance of fonts. That’s, that’s, that’s what someone should write.
[00:18:41] Sé Reed: Nuance, the nuance of fonts.
[00:18:43] Jason Cosper: especially when it comes to font licensing, because, occasionally and especially, you. font licensing, font formats, if something, this is something that I discovered working on, some other, software that I’ve been using for, bookmarking on the Fediverse postmarks, they ship with a TTF, like a TrueType font, of an actual like open font licensed.
[00:19:10] Jason Cosper: And, and we basically, I was like, Hey, the, the hot new, widely supported font format is W O F F two. it’s a,
[00:19:22] Sé Reed: Which I don’t know what it stands for and I go, what
[00:19:27] Jason Cosper: that, that is,
[00:19:28] Sé Reed: That’s how I read taglines or, or, file names.
[00:19:32] Jason Cosper: We had to, we, like, I had to figure out, ’cause I was like, Hey, this basically like when I recompress the T T F, as, a WAF two.
[00:19:43] Sé Reed: WAP2.
[00:19:44] Jason Cosper: yeah, not Wpu. Not
[00:19:47] Sé Reed: Not
[00:19:48] Jason Cosper: WAF two. but when I recompress
[00:19:50] Sé Reed: We are saying real words.
[00:19:51] Jason Cosper: we had to make sure that the open font license, said, Hey, you can recompress the font into this new, version.
[00:20:02] Sé Reed: So there are some interesting things to like unpack here. I actually have a, sorry, yeah, go ahead.
[00:20:10] Jason Cosper: No, I was just going to say, like, you don’t run into this with, images that you upload mainly because you normally own the images that you upload or, at least pretend to own the images that you upload. So when you recompress them into WebP or whatever, that’s fine.
[00:20:25] Jason Cosper: so I, I don’t,
[00:20:27] Sé Reed: whole, there’s a whole legal area
[00:20:29] Jason Tucker: You literally make a derivative just by turning it into a different format.
[00:20:34] Jason Cosper: yeah.
[00:20:35] Sé Reed: kind of, but there is a whole copyright industry, you know, going around slapping people with image copyright stuff,
[00:20:43] Jason Cosper: there’s,
[00:20:44] Jason Tucker: not getting what the font integration is, what you’re saying. We’re not going to get like a, what the font
[00:20:48] Sé Reed: I mean, I think of what the font integra that’s actually what I was going to say. What, what the font integration would be cool. What is a plugin that I don’t think exists yet, which would be using this new font manager, which someone should get on, Cosper maybe, I don’t know, is, font licensing in WP.
[00:21:02] Sé Reed: Because I have… Struggled with font licensing, because it’s, it just, some of the things don’t, like if they don’t load properly within whatever theme or plugin you’re using, then you have to, like auto manually include that font. And that is then not being like tallied in your license. That’s being, you know, from your, your, web code.
[00:21:26] Sé Reed: And so, You’re like, I’m like, there’s, I actually have this active problem. A site is like half in compliance with its license, which they’re paying the license, like, but I don’t know how to get these particular areas to count on the license.
[00:21:40] Jason Tucker: It’s a, it’s a difficult one to navigate because you could have a, you could have, say, like a couple of the weights be covered in your license, and then a couple of the other weights would not. And then you have those ones
[00:21:53] Sé Reed: No leak for you.
[00:21:55] Jason Tucker: Yeah, they bold it, but it’s not really, you didn’t change the weight.
[00:21:59] Jason Tucker: You just made it bold. Like you just like added more fat to the outside of, of the glyph.
[00:22:06] Sé Reed: that looks weird oftentimes and
[00:22:08] Jason Tucker: Oh yeah,
[00:22:09] Sé Reed: than the bolded font. So like, fonts are not getting simpler, weirdly. but I think someone should totally make a…
[00:22:16] Jason Tucker: add this to WordPress.
[00:22:17] Sé Reed: Integrable, , it’s, we like to add messy things. we should, someone should make an integrable font licensing plugin. That’s all I’m saying.
[00:22:24] Sé Reed: So what, the font would be cool if they did that. Like, wouldn’t that be rad? You’d be like, you load it in, it’s in your font manager and then you can, you know, your license to pay like a little premium font manager in there.
[00:22:35] Jason Cosper: I would, I would see, I would see something like, just like how right now, you know, they really encourage GPL license stuff in, in WordPress. Like what the font, like some of that stuff is pretty questionably licensed. Like, you know,
[00:22:50] Sé Reed: not the point of it being on there.
[00:22:53] Jason Cosper: right. So like, I, I see this, I see this as sort of, I see this as sort of like an.
[00:22:59] Sé Reed: Sorry.
[00:22:59] Jason Cosper: see this as sort of an unsplash issue, where,
[00:23:02] Sé Reed: Ooh.
[00:23:03] Jason Cosper: the, the licensing of it, you know, if it’s like crystal clear, if it is like an open font license, if it’s available on an open font license from someplace like Google fonts, like they might encourage inclusion of stuff like that. you know, like you can upload stuff that you’ve licensed, like, you know, nobody’s gonna check and see if you actually own the license, except
[00:23:29] Sé Reed: Well, I mean, no one on your website is, your, your website is not going to check it for you. I mean, that would actually be also an interesting feature of a plugin that would check and be like, it’s this license for these fonts, you know, that’d be pretty cool. People don’t know if they are oftentimes or not.
[00:23:45] Sé Reed: So that would also be a useful, you know, like extension, I suppose, of the. Yeah, there’s lots of, there’s lots of Creative Commons fonts, but the question is, does anyone know what they are? Or even what a license is? but so, the font manager is going to be connected to Google Fonts with a prompt, I believe, that says, you know, you’re connecting to Google Fonts and blah, blah, blah.
[00:24:07] Sé Reed: You’re responsible for your GPR, GP, whatever those letters are. I, so, so that’s the funny thing is that we’re talking about that, and that’s the thing that isn’t in beta 1. So,
[00:24:19] Jason Tucker: Nice.
[00:24:21] Sé Reed: it is, it is coming, hopefully in beta two or three. However,
[00:24:25] Jason Tucker: lightboxes,
[00:24:27] Sé Reed: yeah, that’s what I was going to say. I, okay, it’s really important that this is in core. Okay. I’m
[00:24:33] Jason Tucker: wait, lightbox, it’s really important. Lightboxes are in core. I
[00:24:36] Sé Reed: Oh yeah, like, people need to be able to just click on a thing and have something open in a lightbox.
[00:24:41] Jason Tucker: I thought that was a thing already,
[00:24:44] Jason Cosper: Well, okay. It is, but you need to have a plugin in, in a lot of cases to, to do this and some of the plugins, putting put, well, here, hold on. I’m gonna swap.
[00:24:57] Sé Reed: you do a visual…
[00:24:58] Jason Cosper: Put my web performance hat on. And, so basically the, the thing with, having, a built in Lightbox is that, the JavaScript that ships will be effectively like a default JavaScript Lightbox implementation.
[00:25:17] Jason Cosper: So you’re not just pulling some random, JavaScript that. Maybe includes jQuery. It’s like when WordPress standardized on like WordPress ships with this version of jQuery,
[00:25:28] Sé Reed: When did everyone start using jQuery, by the way? Side note, dev branch. We gotta have that conversation, because I just noticed it. Anyway.
[00:25:37] Jason Cosper: No, but like effectively like, Hey, you know, quit using, random ass white box implementations. Let’s all, like move forward and quit including, like a white box JS and, and all like kind of solidify around this one thing.
[00:25:56] Jason Tucker: it’s good to have multiple copies of, SEO plugins installed. I always loved when I would click on an image and then the lightbox would pop up and then I’d click on the image in the lightbox and then the lightbox would pop up,
[00:26:07] Sé Reed: You’ve got a lightbox in your lightbox. You
[00:26:09] Jason Tucker: favorite implementation.
[00:26:11] Sé Reed: lightbox in your
[00:26:14] Jason Tucker: Yeah,
[00:26:15] Sé Reed: lightbox. It’s kind of like looking into a mirror on both sides
[00:26:18] Jason Tucker: but, but,
[00:26:19] Sé Reed: can like see your own face
[00:26:20] Jason Tucker: but there are two different Lightbox plugins that we’re running to make it happen.
[00:26:25] Jason Cosper: Oh yeah.
[00:26:26] Sé Reed: Oh, I have an implementation like that. It’s not with
[00:26:28] Jason Tucker: Oh, it’s the best.
[00:26:29] Sé Reed: My arrows don’t match and it’s so, it’s so terrible. I need to, I need to put it all in one.
[00:26:34] Jason Cosper: Is the, is the next step a, a unified slider, implementation for like, let’s, let’s just, go ahead and, Sherlock, yeah, Sherlock, whole plugin industries.
[00:26:47] Sé Reed: I mean, that’s actually what I was about to ask. So there’s a whole light box, you know, all these light things that we’re bringing into this. And so this is kind of the, it’s not even the beginning, but it is one of the steps in the. kind of the, the eating away at the breadth of innovation, the breadth of solutions that have been offered via plugin, and this conversation of what is in core versus what should be a plugin.
[00:27:13] Sé Reed: And I think we have very quietly… Or maybe not quietly. I think quietly, like, as a project, but kind of loudly, unknowingly, protestingly, been feeling this as a community, is that, things are being put into core, and I think this has been since Gutenberg, things have been putting, been putting into core that are not for 80 percent of the users.
[00:27:34] Sé Reed: It’s not an 80 percent use case. So that, I think that is what we, you know, I think it’s still on the site. I’ve checked it recently. It was the last time I looked. but I don’t know who’s got edit rights. I do sometimes check the web archives to see if, like, the philosophy of WordPress is being just changed on the website and no one notices.
[00:27:53] Sé Reed: but I do believe that the 80 20 rule is still written even if we’re not, you know, going by it. So, you know. While we’re taking, while we’re adding features that almost seem basic, we’re also, like you said, taking this whole area of like innovation, lightbox management and you know, all of that stuff and making it, you know, kind of obsolete, right?
[00:28:16] Sé Reed: Essentially.
[00:28:17] Jason Cosper: I mean, is, is there any room for innovation in Lightboxes?
[00:28:24] Sé Reed: I mean, I have, I have thoughts on that, but there’s a whole other conversation, but I, I also think that we should talk about what to do with the plugins in the directory that are. are duplicates of what is now core features, what is now in core. Because now you have, then you have the people installing the plugin to do the thing that they can already do in core, which is an interesting phenomenon.
[00:28:51] Jason Cosper: You still, you still have page builder plugins, even though we have Gutenberg now. And one might argue that Gutenberg still isn’t quite a full fledged page builder. I’m sure, Tucker might argue that, you know, as, as like given, the, the little problems and everything he’s run into, it keeps getting better.
[00:29:12] Jason Cosper: Every release, but, I mean, you know, like we, we still have, and even once it gets to like, you know, anybody and like, you know, just some person that you set in front of a WordPress install can, can build a page, we’ll still have page builders
[00:29:29] Sé Reed: Well, that’s actually really interesting, because, maybe they will remove Lightbox from Jetpack, but maybe not, you never know. this also brings up kind of a tweet. that came up, which I can still see, even though I’m not allowed to see it from my personal, personal Twitter account is still able to read, that, was retweeted, I don’t know, I just feel weird calling Matt Matt these days, but, was
[00:29:54] Jason Cosper: Matthew?
[00:29:55] Sé Reed: by Matt, Matthew Charles Mullenweg, who’s an Aquarius?
[00:30:00] Sé Reed: Not an Aquarius, by the way, I was totally wrong, he’s a Capricorn. I just need you guys to know that. I found that out this week. Anyway, retweeted a very long tweet post about Elementor, and why would you throw your hat in with Elementor? When, you know, the future of, of, WordPress is obviously, is, you know, Gutenberg, or the site editor.
[00:30:22] Sé Reed: And, it was, you know, I think that’s actually kind of a controversial tweet to retweet, but, you know, reposting, yeah, reposting
[00:30:29] Jason Tucker: up yet.
[00:30:30] Sé Reed: and retweeting does not, you know, include or make it, what is it, it’s not endorsement.
[00:30:36] Jason Tucker: same can be said for BeaverBuilder and BeaverBuilder, I still feel is, is far superior to what, you could do currently using Gutenberg.
[00:30:45] Sé Reed: Yeah, I just think it’s really interesting that it was so open, because it is so sort of like dismissive of an entire industry. Within the ecosystem, you know, Elementor, I think,one of the representatives from Elementor commented on that and mentioned the market share, which is of Elementor, specifically, you know, how they separate out WooCommerce, and then they also separate Elementor, it’s 9 percent of, and I don’t think that’s 9 percent of WordPress websites, I think that’s 9 percent of websites on the internet, you know, kind of like the 43 percent of websites on the internet are in WordPress, well 9 percent of And these are my two favorite sites on the internet, are elementor, which is, you know, not insignificant.
[00:31:27] Sé Reed: And I mean, that’s like, isn’t that’s like more than
[00:31:31] Jason Tucker: See, I, I have a, I have a separate argument, which is, why, hitch your wagon to Elementor when, on their recommendations, for your WordPress memory limit, it says that you should for best performance, increase your WordPress memory limit to 768 megabytes. What the hell? It’s like booting windows.
[00:31:53] Sé Reed: You still have your performance hat on that’s, I was like, look, your performance hat is still on
[00:31:58] Jason Tucker: Let’s boot windows in JavaScript real quick. Okay. Now we’re ready.
[00:32:02] Jason Cosper: I, I think, I think that the innovations that Elementor has made are, you know, phenomenal. It, it is, right now, probably the biggest thing. Some may argue, you know, Divi as well, but really Elementor is
[00:32:16] Sé Reed: you can’t help
[00:32:18] Jason Cosper: is, is the big thing pushing Gutenberg right now. It is, I mean, you know, some, some might argue, yeah, yeah.
[00:32:27] Jason Cosper: Square, Squarespace, Wix, like those are like the outside. Like we need to make things this easy, because WordPress, you know,
[00:32:34] Sé Reed: you mean what’s inspiring Gutenberg’s…
[00:32:38] Jason Cosper: Yes, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s kind of driving it, from within the project, because I mean, you need WordPress to run Elementor at least right now.
[00:32:49] Sé Reed: Right. Yeah, there’s, and actually there in the last, in six three, there were a lot of performance improvements. And in six four, I believe there are additional performance improvements that have been happening because of sponsored contribution from Elementor Via, yeah. Which is because they’re putting a lot of, work into improving, which is, you know, in theory how this ecosystem should work, improving performance, which improves performance for everybody.
[00:33:16] Sé Reed: But it also improves performance for them and their, what, you know, their, what they struggle with, what has been, you know, some of their harder, harder obstacles to, you know, get through. So they’re, they’re, they’re definitely doing the whole. Rising Tide lifts all boats, thing over there. I know it gets paid lip service to a lot in this project, but I, I know for a fact that they are in fact making notable improvements in performance of core through those, through that attention that
[00:33:47] Jason Cosper: I, I just, I just wish that they would, make a few more increases to performance in Elementor, but,
[00:33:55] Sé Reed: elementary should totally hire you. Not that I want you to leave where you are, but they should totally, because you would like… You’d be like, we’re trimming this thing down. You’d be like the best gardener, like you’d be pruning. You’d be like, doop doop doop
[00:34:07] Jason Cosper: oh man, I, I, I’d maybe, I, I don’t, yeah, I, I, I might go a little too overboard there, but,
[00:34:15] Sé Reed: Sometimes you need a hard prune.
[00:34:18] Jason Cosper: Yeah, but
[00:34:20] Sé Reed: That’s a real gardening term, I swear.
[00:34:23] Jason Cosper: so
[00:34:23] Sé Reed: Anyway, the point is, beta, beta is out. You should test it. you should test it out, poke it. The font manager will be in there probably on Tuesdays, beta 2. Maybe the week after that, beta 3, but definitely in one of those. in the meantime, you can test out your lightbox images, which we all need to work.
[00:34:42] Sé Reed: and, there’s, oh, there’s another cool thing, which I didn’t talk about. We can talk about it later when the full thing launches, but, block hooks are pretty cool. Now you can hook blocks to each other, so if, you know, you put one block here, you put another block, like another block automatically shows up, which is kind of like a pattern, which is, they’re all kind of the same thing.
[00:35:02] Sé Reed: And there’s also now Pattern Categories, which
[00:35:05] Jason Cosper: I was going to mention it. I did not want to finish the show without mentioning it. It’s one of the things that I am most excited about is, is having, yeah. being, I mean, having pattern categories, like, Hey, you know, since we’re focusing on, doing stuff to the media library, like media library categories, like having.
[00:35:26] Sé Reed: Hmm? Taxonomy? Hmm? I don’t know. Put a taxonomy
[00:35:29] Jason Cosper: yeah, put, put a taxonomy in categories, put it,
[00:35:34] Sé Reed: it.
[00:35:35] Jason Cosper: yeah, yeah.
[00:35:36] Sé Reed: how I feel about taxonomy. I, I, since I work so much in, I do, you know, a lot of mapping data, public art mapping data. Like, you know, taxonomy is… It’s how you find stuff. That’s like, that’s like what’s, that’s how you feed people information is through taxonomy.
[00:35:53] Sé Reed: Like it is absolutely, it is absolutely vital and I’m, I’m really happy that we’re putting them in categories. I know we’re super over time, but this does touch on an interesting discussion in some github somewhere that I was having at one point about Yep, I swear it was on GitHub. The plugin, no, the pattern directory, and whether or not the pat that you can’t search by related, people.
[00:36:19] Sé Reed: So if you go into the pattern directory and you’re like, ooh, I like this pattern, you can’t you can go look and see all the other patterns that that person has made, because you can go look at their So, that person’s patterns, but you cannot go to their, like, you know, their red pattern category, currently.
[00:36:38] Sé Reed: And I believe that this also solves that problem, so that… And I also think people can make their own categories on the pattern. But I am not certain of that, so I will check and let people know. But it is, it is, it is sort of a, a, kind of a similar conversation. The pattern categories are happening inside the admin, so you can categorize, just like you make your own categories for posts, now you can make your own categories for patterns.
[00:37:06] Sé Reed: Like, you know, here’s the, Sales stuff. Here’s the December 2022. You know, these categories are going to be wild, right? For people. It was like…
[00:37:14] Jason Cosper: Oh yeah.
[00:37:15] Jason Tucker: As someone who just
[00:37:16] Sé Reed: December 2022, yeah.
[00:37:18] Jason Tucker: from one publishing provider to another and, and, and had to go through all my categories and figure out, I need 12. I had a 290.
[00:37:27] Sé Reed: Yeah, you’re like, cool, I guess this could
[00:37:29] Jason Tucker: like, I had Christmas, X mas and Christmas 2022.
[00:37:33] Sé Reed: good.
[00:37:33] Jason Tucker: like, that’s so helpful.
[00:37:36] Sé Reed: But you just type Christmas in, and then you just look through all those categories, and then no one ever manages the categories. So, I’m interested to see, I recommend everyone test this component, because it would be cool if we could manage the categories well, like we managed our other ones, and I don’t know how it’s working right now, because I haven’t tested it, I’ve just been writing about it.
[00:37:55] Jason Cosper: Yeah. See, I don’t manage categories very well. on, on the new site that I just spun up, I just renamed uncategorized to general. So that way at the very least, everything is just under the general category.
[00:38:08] Sé Reed: like you’re busy? I, the uncategorized category is really like the bane of like
[00:38:13] Jason Cosper: Oh yeah.
[00:38:13] Sé Reed: every website owner’s existence for the last 10 years. Actually, you know what? That’d be a cool ticket. What if we made it like, that would be a cool ticket to change the uncategorized. and last but not least, the default category, to general. That’s a cool ticket. That’d be a cool little like, hill to die on. If we’re going to die on hills, we’ll just die on that one. I will change all of the uncategorized to general. Not retroactively, obviously,
[00:38:43] Jason Cosper: right. I was going to say on, on new installs.
[00:38:47] Sé Reed: that would be cruel. And really, just like, that’d be like the great categorization, we could like call it that.
[00:38:54] Sé Reed: The great categorization of 2023, where everyone, everyone’s
[00:38:58] Jason Cosper: You know,
[00:38:59] Sé Reed: category became… General.
[00:39:01] Jason Cosper: our, our pal, our, our pal host is hanging out in the chat host. I, I encourage you to go in there and make the ticket. so I don’t have to, and, it sounds like, Megan is also on board.
[00:39:16] Sé Reed: Oh, good. Everyone likes this. Okay, good. I,
[00:39:18] Jason Cosper: so let’s.
[00:39:18] Jason Tucker: works
[00:39:19] Sé Reed: you know, I apologize to everyone who’s always, who’s in the chats. If I look at the chat, I get so distracted and then I even lose track of what I’m thinking and saying more than normal. So, so I really like it’s whatever these two amazing humans bring up onto the screen.
[00:39:35] Sé Reed: Otherwise, I just lose it. You’re all too funny anyway. so yeah, I guess, you know, we’re in overtime. The taxonomy, taxonomining. The great taxonomy. That would be really funny. But it would be cool future times. Maybe I’ll make a ticket for that. Because I don’t have enough WordPress stuff going on. So that seems like a good idea.
[00:39:56] Sé Reed: The good use of my time. It’s cool. Don’t worry, Courtney. I’m not going to do it. You can do it.
[00:40:04] Jason Tucker: And
[00:40:04] Jason Cosper: Now that’s, that’s why I said who should do it?
[00:40:07] Sé Reed: Oh yeah, have him do it. Please someone do it. So it’s not in my brain forever. And then I can just be like, that’s a cool idea. That’s what I would like. Thank you. Plus one. I want a plus one your idea. Okay. We love you all.
[00:40:24] Jason Tucker: Talk to y’all later. Someone’s going to be saying the outro, not me. Here you go.
[00:40:28] Sé Reed: It’ll be me. I’ll do it. Yay.
[00:40:36] Jason Cosper: I guess . So, let’s go ahead and, catch us on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify, our one pal on LinkedIn who’s watching us. Hey, shout out to you. thanks for hanging out with us. Talk to y’all later. Have a good one.
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