\nA Unified Publishing Flow\n\n\n\nAnd more!\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n","livestream_chat_log":"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1CYn04wFycG2Czl-o_HyWI-NQD9XcoVTT\/view?usp=sharing","livestream_live_transcript_url":"https:\/\/otter.ai\/u\/EamxQIon_6oe6gCgXdRfFRRztX4?utm_source=copy_url","livestream_live_transcript_text":"slides today and this is all live demos so nothing to download. Edie? Yes 6.6 dropped Well, the first notice I got was about an hour ago. They usually slowly roll that out\r\n\r\nfor your sites, gradually notice that it's available\r\n\r\nagain, welcome everybody. If you're just joining us open up the chat say hello. Caption should now be working for everyone.\r\n\r\nLooking forward to a demo of WordPress six, six with Timothy Jacobs. He's going to walk us through all the things and answer your questions.\r\n\r\nHey Kylie, welcome.\r\n\r\nA bin both Ben's class welcome. Hey Ken.\r\n\r\nAll right, I'm going to drop in a link bundle. Again, no downloads today but the replay link is there. We'll have that up about an hour after we finish. So you can share that out with folks. Also, if you haven't registered for tomorrow's news roundup that's a free live stream one o'clock Central the same time tomorrow, looking at all the WordPress news over the last month or so.\r\n\r\nWe've got about three minutes to go before we get started officially with Welcome to WordPress 6.6 which just dropped a little bit of go you can download it for real now\r\n\r\nbut as you're coming in, open up the chat say hi, tell us where you are logging in from today. Hey, John from Chicago welcome.\r\n\r\nCouple of Greensboro folks getting connected there in the chat.\r\n\r\nSo Sue is what would you is it Green's burrow Ian, what would you say?\r\n\r\nHey, Richard from Tampa, Stephanie from Germany. Welcome.\r\n\r\nCouple minutes to go, folks, before we get started officially we'll get going at three minutes after all about WordPress 6.6 which just dropped a little while ago. Hey Bill from Virginia welcome also Vern from West Virginia.\r\n\r\nGreat to see everybody coming in.\r\n\r\nNo slides today this is all live live demo. So Timothy will be walking us through all the things right here live. This is being recorded though, and we'll have the replay up at the link that I just dropped in the chat. And if you've not already done so register for tomorrow's news roundup. That will be the same time tomorrow.\r\n\r\nJust a little over a minute to go.\r\n\r\nOnce again, welcome everybody. If you more folks just joining open the chat say hi and tell us where you are logging in from today. Just about a minute to go before we get started.\r\n\r\nAll live demo today nothing to download. Hey Sadie from Scotland.\r\n\r\nAbout 30 seconds to go hey Teresa from Germany welcome\r\n\r\nI probably just mispronounced your name\r\n\r\nis it Teresita perhaps.\r\n\r\nYeah, it is Prime Day on a another little rabbit trail there.\r\n\r\nHopefully everybody's not spending all their money today.\r\n\r\nJust about ready to get started. Alright, it's three minutes after. Let's start. The recording and we'll dive in with WordPress 6.6.\r\n\r\nWell, good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening. Welcome everybody to another solid Academy livestream and glad you're all with us today. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at solid Academy joined today by Timothy Jacobs, the lead developer for solid WP Welcome back, Timothy. How are things in your world today? Doing good, you know, trying to survive.\r\n\r\nHeatwave number 75 or whatever it is right up in New York but yeah, doing okay. Excellent. So WordPress 6.6. Just started appearing in WordPress installs in the last couple of hours. So we didn't talk about this, but how does this rollout actually work? When they're dropping a new version of WordPress, you guys so it's kind of a multi step thing.\r\n\r\nA bit before the WordPress release goes out there. It's kind of like a, hey, we all know this is coming type of thing. And then yeah, the basically the API gets updated. And sites check kind of like I think every hour at this point and I'll check for that. Update and then start auto updating if you have that available, which has been the default since I think WordPress five, six.\r\n\r\nAnd then yeah, you can go to what's the page I think wordpress.org\/stats will give you a live feed which is kind of fun to watch during the first. No, this isn't the one. I mean, if you're going to find it, and I know you've gotten me off on a tangent. Yeah, we didn't talk about this at all. I just came to me right as we were starting. But there's a cool little I think it's called counter. Let me see one right yeah, here we go. Um, so this fun one during release, because what you'll see is when we get up to like WordPress 6.7 It's about time to do it. This number will be way higher.\r\n\r\nBut it's, yeah, it gets quite out there but this is a fun one to watch. And the day of the release. Because yeah, you'll see all the sites across the Web Start to update. So yeah, usually it starts happening basically immediately if you're the luck of the draw the first new checks that our but yeah, it's there's a big old button kind of you can think of that they pressed to make the disco go out. Amazing. So for those of you that aren't aware, as I mentioned before, Timothy is the lead developer for us here at solid WP Timothy is also a core committer to WordPress and one of the maintainers of the WordPress REST API. So Timothy you do a lot of work with core\r\n\r\nit when these updates come out, are we at a point now where you'd recommend auto updating core WordPress? So yeah, I am a big proponent of auto updating repurpose for when we had this conversation around WordPress 5.6 and make chat in Slack Yeah, I was all for it. Um, I am a big believer in auto updates in general, particularly with WordPress core itself. I think the thing that you want to consider is that if you have lots of plugins that are breaking your site on every update that you potentially consider switching plugin that always astonishes me and you know, maybe one day I'll get caught by this but it always astonishes me when WordPress 6.6 releases and XYZ very large theme or XYZ very large plugin releases an update 12 hours later that's like fixed compatibly with WordPress 6.6. We've known that WordPress 6.6 has been a release from the state for like four months.\r\n\r\nSo yeah, I'm kind of in the opinion, yes, you should use auto updates. And if you find your site breaking all the time after it gets auto updated.\r\n\r\nThat you know maybe there's a different plugin out there that solves your needs.\r\n\r\nYeah, I mean, when we add salad, we start running our automated tests on trunk, you know, so we're testing the latest version. Basically, immediately we're I guess, starting tomorrow our tests are gonna be running on against WordPress 6.7. And so that doesn't catch everything. But it does always surprise me when you see a plugin or theme that like fatal airing on WordPress on the new version of WordPress. And it's in a code path that like runs against everything because I think as developers we should be running WordPress nightly. Basically, always well writing code and testing your plugins and have automated tests running. So it's one thing if there's an edge case and an edge case and this thing over here, there's an issue. Yeah, but when it's like, yeah, we need to release this update. So 200 out of our 300,000 users use the plugin. I feel like it's\r\n\r\nthere's another conversation that needs to be had. I love it. Well, thanks for letting me take you down that trail. We hadn't talked about that. But I think it's interesting and this I think this is the first time we've shown this counter and we're 1.7 million installs already. All right. So keep going. You know, if I if I had a more sophisticated setup, I would like share that in the corner of my screen and we could see where it lands we could place bets to see where we'd be in an hour. Anyway, I'm gonna navigate away from this and everyone can bet what they think it'll be when we finish which is both betting one how fast the number of installs are gonna go up into how long I'm going to demo for and either those two things yet so we'll see. Okay, so I'm game for that. So right now folks put your there's no price other than you know, just the personal thrill of knowing that you won this, but drop it in the chat your guests for how many downloads will be when Timothy completes the demo. Before we go to q&a. I will go back to the camera card and just say an hour from now.\r\n\r\nRight. All right. So I'll grab these chats and we'll come back to this at the end. So today we're going to walk through all the new features in WordPress six 610 Many thanks for doing this. i One other note of housekeeping before I disappear. There were a few notes first, there are no downloads. This is all live demo. There's no there's not a slide deck. Second of all, if you'd like to ask questions, please use the zoom q&a. You can find that by mousing over the shared screen and clicking on the q&a icon there. And I would just invite you to keep that window open the whole time because other folks questions will appear there. And if you also have that question, click the thumbs up icon and we'll take the questions on the order of votes. This is being recorded. I'll drop in the links to the replay which will be available about an hour after we wrap up today. So with that I'll disappear Timothy. Let's get into six six. Yeah, let's do it. So as usual, per the last couple years releases most of this is gonna be about Gutenberg excited or block editor stuff. But there are two things that I wanted to cover first.\r\n\r\nOne is rollbacks for plugin auto updates. So this is pretty cool.\r\n\r\nIf you have auto updates enabled, which like we just talked about, I'm a big fan of a new feature in WordPress 6.6 is that after an update happens WordPress is going to check and make a request back to your site and make sure it's still online. And if it detects that there is a fatal error, it's going to roll back that plugin update for you automatically. Now this isn't just like a general purpose feature like there's the WP rollbacks plug in and things like that, where you can go into WP admin and say hey, roll back to the previous or something like that. This is an automated kind of level of protection around auto updates specifically. So if you know the plugin starts crashing, you know 10 hours from now this feature isn't going to check it recovery mode. Well. We did a talk on recovery mode, I think a long time ago at this point.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, it's a pretty cool feature to add. A little bit of resiliency and another another band aid along WordPress auto updates, you can feel a bit more confident enabling it.\r\n\r\nThe other thing, which I don't even think yeah is listed in this page because it really shouldn't affect anyone, but I think it is part of the field guide which if you haven't seen the field guide is this awesome post over and make that wordpress.org that talks about all of the new features and bug fixes that happened in the release. And the big thing here to mention is that dropping support for PHP seven Neto and 7.1 has happened so if you are one on if you're one of those few people back and one of these ancient PHP versions get updated.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, that is no longer gonna be supported as a WordPress 6.6 Your Site won't crash. It just won't update to WordPress six months, I guess if you're on those older versions, WordPress 6.6 is gonna get a little bit challenging to say all the time. Let's see how it goes. All right. With those two things out of the way, let's dive in. So we're gonna start with a site editor. The site editor has a feature that we've talked about before called data views. And this is kind of like the technical code word kind of similar to WP list tables if you're familiar with that and WordPress, and I did if you've got a quote update in WordPress 6.6. So we have this Pages section here which I've showed off in 6.5. It's been enhanced a bit. So I can go through and I can see all of my published pages. I can see my drafts, things that are private trash, etc.\r\n\r\nWhat's really cool is that this list area over here update what I see in the main canvas. So if I want to take a look at the sample page, I can take a look at the sample page and it's gonna update really quickly. If I want I can dive in and start editing this content right away.\r\n\r\nData views also give me more control over how I can view this information. So right now I'm viewing it in this view, but if I want I can view it as a table and I get this kind of familiar interface similar to what you'd see in WP admin. Or I can go ahead and switch it over to a grid view. And this will bring in the featured images for me, but I'm gonna go ahead and set it back to the list view because I think that's a pretty helpful way to get a quick browse to the content of your site.\r\n\r\nData views have also get used throughout this kind of like site editor designed the other places in the templates manager. So we can see the templates now show these four previews. Previously, there was also this kind of like intermediary page that was kind of really confusing when you started thinking about it where if you would click on this, it would give you some details over here in the sidebar, but now they just simply drop you into the editor. So if you want to go ahead and edit a template, it's just one click away from the data Views section.\r\n\r\nThe next place that we get an update is over in the pattern section and that's also going to take us to my favorite feature I think of WordPress 6.6. But we'll see our patterns, we can browse our template parts here as well. They're kind of all combined into this pattern section. But another thing that's pretty cool is that list the data views give me kind of similar to bulk actions that we have in lists tables I can do in the data views view. So I can select multiple patterns going over here and I can click this export as JSON button. And it's going to export all of these patterns for me in one big JSON file that I could go ahead and import into another site. And so this is all kind of being powered by the diffuse API. Now, I mentioned this next cool feature that has to do with patterns. It's called pattern overrides. And this is something I'm very excited about. I've given a couple of variations of like talks about a feature like this, which is hey, how do we give all the power of the block editor and this really rich interactive editing, but how do we constrain it down for users in a way that's more understandable? And how can we use it in places across our site?\r\n\r\nAnd this has been building up for kind of a number of releases. Now we got content only editing mode and number WordPress, really physical at this point. And we'll see that in preview here. This is kind of working similarly to the changes where we got synced patterns. And then that's the transition. If you remember from reusable blocks, we started talking about them in synced patterns a couple of releases ago. And this also is a little bit similar, I think to the block bindings API and HTML stuff and all of that combined to do something that I think is really cool. So I took this pattern here from the pattern directory on make that work best Edward is this cool one here?\r\n\r\nLet him roll. And what I've done is I've added in my new pattern and pasted in that HTML.\r\n\r\nAnd then what I've done is I've said, hey, I want the users of my site to be able to edit this pattern. But I don't want them to see like the full power of this editor. I want them to be able to like change all of these colors, change the background change the structure. I want to make the editing experience for them. Very simple. And the way that you do that is if you select your block, you'll probably need to open up the block toolbar. There's this new section in advance called overrides and what you do is for each bit of content that you want a user to be able to override, you click the button here right now it says disabled overrides. So if I go ahead and hit disable overrides this text is now going to always be part of the pattern. And it's not something that my users would be able to edit. But I hitting enable overrides and giving it a title. In this case description.\r\n\r\nThis now becomes a property that of the pattern that my users are able to customize whenever they use the pattern. So let's see what that looks like. I'm gonna navigate over to the Pages section, going over to the sample page. And I've inserted this pattern into my content. So I'm going to go ahead and delete this and reinsert it so you can see exactly what happens. We go into the inserter select for patterns, my patterns and that block you CTA is what I called it and so now if we open up the sidebar, we can see that I have this content only mode. So I don't have the ability to like change this color, change the structure move text around, but what I can do is that at this text, so if I wanted to say you know do some live chat history here, say it was recorded in 1975. I can make that change this shop now button. I could say let's make it by now. And I can change the link. That's the link gone over to amazon.com.\r\n\r\nAnd, you know, we want to get grammatically correct on them or something like that, let's say let them roll, you know, really take the personality out of this pattern. But you can see now I've made all these changes here and I can go ahead and hit Save. And when I go to the front end of my website, I have this pattern with my changes, but because this is still a sync pattern, if I go back on over, and I think yeah, I even get this handy little button here. Let's let's try and use it. Edit original.\r\n\r\nI can now make modifications to this pattern. So if I wanted to change this color, let's say to this red and hit save.\r\n\r\nI am right now editing the pattern here.\r\n\r\nAnd if I refresh the page, you can see that that's been changed. So what synced patterns with overrides are doing is they're letting me create a pattern. Say hey, these are the specific bits that I want you to be able to edit. But I as like you know the site designer or you know the site owner or anything like that. I can make structural changes to this pattern. And those will be reflected across my site without the user needing to make any changes, update the post anything like that they just happen automatically. And so in this case, I'm using it for a CTA there's lots of other places where you can use this that I think would be very effective things like a testimonial section. You know, you perhaps have a testimonial style that you want to use throughout your site. You want to make it really easy to insert your testimonials. But of course each testimonial is different. And you can't just say hey, use the same testimonial everywhere you want to say use a testimonial on this page. Use another testimonial on the other page, but we decide hey, we want to change the font that we use for the testimonial. You can easily do that.\r\n\r\nRight now the way patterns ended up getting stored into the post.\r\n\r\nLet's see how do I go back here?\r\n\r\nThey're not a back button.\r\n\r\nI don't think so we're just going to refresh.\r\n\r\nThe way that the pattern actually gets stored is if we take a look at the code editor you can see that the overrides are all in the block attributes. So it's just a part of the actual page content. What I would love to see in the future is potentially the ability to save those to like post meta, like we do with kind of other block bindings, which I think would be very cool and kind of bridges that gap between like custom post types and the thing that a developer would set up for you and something that an end user could potentially just do in the block Editor inside editor all by themselves.\r\n\r\nOkay, we're gonna go back on into the site editor now for some more features.\r\n\r\nSo this is another cool one, which is the ability to update a background image for your entire site. So we've had this feature in the customizer for a long time where you can like add theme support background images, but we can now do this in the actual site as well. So if I go over into the Layout tab for global styles, I can say add a background image and I'm going to go ahead and choose a subtle pattern that I got from subtle patterns.com. And we can see that this pattern is now applied as the main background for my site. So I'm gonna go ahead and save that and we can view the changes here.\r\n\r\nAnd so this works very similarly to how the custom background images worked with the customizer, where this is applying a background to the body tag places where there is you know, a background color applied like we see here in this menu item will of course lay over it.\r\n\r\nBut this lets you set up a background image across your entire site.\r\n\r\nI'm gonna go ahead and remove that. I'm gonna do that by just hitting reset all and it will remove all of the background images for me as well. This control is pretty nice, and you'll also see it for just editing elsewhere. In your site on a per block basis like a group Bach for instance, you can set a background image using the same kind of control but most new is being able to do it for the entire site.\r\n\r\nAnother cool feature is pattern switching. So I have this header here and my theme 2024 comes with a bunch of different variations for it. Previously, you could kind of head up into the sidebar or into the navigation excuse me and switch between patterns there. But the sidebar gains a new option here which is this design tab. And you know show me all the different patterns for the template part that I have on my site. So if I want to easily switch between them.\r\n\r\nI can do that with just one click and get a small visual preview of what they look like. In the sidebar here. I'm going to try and figure out which one was it that I have before that one\r\n\r\nbetter, let's stick with this one. I think that's what it was. Yes.\r\n\r\nThe next thing that I want to go over is some changes to the featured image block or two featured images in general. So I'm gonna go ahead and pull up the template for a single which one do we want it we could do the single page or we could do\r\n\r\nlet's do the single page I guess. So let's grab page with sidebar.\r\n\r\nAnd so this is the featured image block. But the featured image block doesn't give you a lot of controls. So let's say I want to have a little bit of a cooler coolers of beings objective layout here I'm gonna go ahead and insert the media and TextBlock and what I can do with the media and textbox now is that I can select Hey, for the image here I want to use the featured image and so I'm gonna then get rid of the featured image block. And what I'm also going to do is put the title in there as well and get rid of the paragraph. And I'll go ahead and press Delete.\r\n\r\nAnd so we can see now I have this media and textbox and I have all of the controls on here that I'm used to but when I've used my site, it's going to be doing this with the featured image as opposed to just a static image that I would always be using.\r\n\r\nLet's see if we can get a good demo of that. I think we might need to\r\n\r\nhere we go page with sidebar.\r\n\r\nIt save the page. And there we go. So you can see that it's using the featured image that I have selected.\r\n\r\nSo if I went ahead and changed the featured image to that say this one\r\n\r\nwill see the front end of my site has been updated. There.\r\n\r\nYou also have more controls with shadow. So let me see if I can.\r\n\r\nI thought this was enabled on the media and textbook but maybe it isn't.\r\n\r\nOkay, so let's undo these changes that we made to this template.\r\n\r\nSo we can use the new box shadow features. So I can now enable box shadows for the featured image block so by default, we get a couple of different options. So this one looks kind of cool. So we'll select that one.\r\n\r\nAnd we'll go ahead and hit Save.\r\n\r\nAnd we can see we're now using the box shadow feature here. But let's say none of these box shadows really speak to me. And I want to do something about custom. We can do that now. So if I go into shadows, you can see here the different shadows that are provided by default with WordPress. But if I wanted to I could create a custom shadow. So I'll go in here and now I have a whole bunch of controls. I can select a color. I can make it an inset shadow versus an outside shadow I could change the positioning is a blur, make it spread less or more all of these different options here that's maybe position it like this very funky and we'll hit save.\r\n\r\nLet's call this I don't know, big pink shadow.\r\n\r\nNow when I go over into the featured image box, I can select that shadow instead.\r\n\r\nVery I'm a very good designer, folks, you know this looks perfect but yeah, so you get more and more control over shadows now with WordPress 6.6. You can use them in your featured image block, apparently not media and text or I just missed the button for it. And you can also create custom shadows and edit the shadows that come with WordPress for the next feature I'm going to talk about I found a little bit confusing, I'll be honest, but it is called color palettes. Oops. I just thought color palettes and section styling. So I'm going to enable this theme here this kind of like I think a beta theme it's still being worked on actively called assembler.\r\n\r\nAnd the reason why I'm switching to assembler is because it provides these color palettes and section styles.\r\n\r\nSo if we go on into the site editor, we can see this is the homepage that I have set up and under styles you can see we only really have one style, but we have tons of different palettes use me and so this is that kind of feature that WordPress is introducing here, where you kind of get like a lightweight version of theme style. So while theme styles can control tons of different things like shape and layout and ordering and sizing and all this different stuff. The kind of like color palettes are just color palettes are just about defining a set of colors and using them and you can also set kind of like font packs. So you can see that here where it's changing like the body font and the header fonts all in one go.\r\n\r\nSo I'm gonna go back to I think I had this one selected was maybe it.\r\n\r\nYeah, maybe this is right, I don't know. But another cool way that this interacts is that we then get these features called Section styling so I'm going to select this parent group here and hop on over to the Style section and you can see a control that's similar to what you have on blocks. But this is for sections. So this is applying basically a set of colors to an entire section. of content in one go. So it's setting both like inner blocks and outer blocks, and it's using the color palettes that my team has set up.\r\n\r\nI'm also able to I believe, customize these. So if I go on into browsing the styles oops No, not that one into the group block.\r\n\r\nI can see these different style variations and if I wanted to I can make changes. So for instance, if I want this text color to be a custom color, not one from my themes, color palette, I could go ahead and change that.\r\n\r\nFrom what I can tell your theme kind of has to like get this started for you. I don't think there's any way to like create style variations entirely within the site editor on your own yet, but they are able to be done in different like feedback, JSON configurations through PHP, stuff like that. So this is a pretty cool feature. I think it could be helpful for like agencies and things like that where you might want to have a couple of different options for how people can assemble sections of content and color them without needing to create patterns for every different variation or needing to tell people that hey, when you want this to look like this, you need to go ahead and switch the background to this color, the text color to this color, the link color to that color. You can kind of all wrapped up in one of these like default styles.\r\n\r\nThese aren't really part of WordPress, the 2024 default theme, I imagine they will be with the 2025 theme. So that's why I'm demoing it with this some of the theme is supposed to 2024 but it is a possibility.\r\n\r\nNow as we get into the block editor, or before we get into the block editor, I wanted to talk about another kind of cool feature that comes to non full site editor block seeds. So I'm gonna switch over to Kadence.\r\n\r\nHere what you'll see is we've had this patterns menu here for a long time but it kind of gave you a really might say ugly interface that WordPress generated by default, where it's just like another list table kind of like this one, and you didn't get a really visual experience that was nice. But now patterns even in non full site editor themes, use the new site editor patterns of view. And so we can see here this is Kadence Kadence isn't a full site editor theme but of course has some cool patterns available. You can see a whole bunch of these ones that come from WooCommerce. You can also see the patterns that I've created and you can do all the things that you would expect to do. We can go in and you know, edit this pattern. Go back. And if we're done, we can just go back to the WordPress dashboard.\r\n\r\nThere's two reasons why I wanted to mention it. One I think this is cool if you're not yet using a false identity or theme to be able to get much better pattern management experience because I think patterns are one of the best features about the block editor and full site editing. But the other thing I think is really interesting about this is that is kind of like the first step of what you might have heard of as the WP admin redesign. So this is a project that is a big thing and phase three of Gutenberg where we find ourselves and we'll be seeing over the next couple of WordPress releases. And what I think is super interesting here is that this is this first foray into this kind of new navigation experience even if I'm not using a full site editor for you. So we can see that here have kind of like maybe a preview of what it might look like for the site and redesign for themes that aren't all aboard the full site editor train.\r\n\r\nBut we're gonna go ahead back and I'm going to switch on over to 2024 again as we dive into the block editor.\r\n\r\nSo you might have seen one of these changes when I was going about some of my demos earlier, which is that the site editor and the page editor have kind of merged together.\r\n\r\nPreviously, we first had the page editor slash post editor and then WordPress introduced the site editor a whole number of releases ago, and there were two distinct editors they made use of a lot of the same building blocks, but there were two pretty big code bases that were different.\r\n\r\nAnd so that led to some kind of like tricky experiences. If you were a theme developer plugin developer, where you kind of had to extend the editor differently in different contexts, which was annoying. For the WordPress core team. It also meant they had to maintain more kind of duplicate code than they wanted to. And so what's happened in WordPress 6.6 Is that the site editors and the post editors have kind of combined, they're still not 100% exactly the same code, but they're kind of like built on top of each other in a more thoughtful manner to share more bits. So it should be easier if you're plugin developer to write code that works in both the site editor and the post editor without as much complication.\r\n\r\nThere are though some changes that have actually populated their way into the user side of this. This is like a kind of like technical change, but there are some user ramifications. And one of those which you might have seen when we were looking at it earlier, when I was changing the template is that the kind of like post meta information handled here is different. It looks a lot more like what it looks like in the site editor. And these are all now pretty consistent with each other. So if I want to change the status, I open this up and a panel appears to the left. If I want to change the date that has to be published, the link, the author, any of these things, they all kind of have a very unified interface whereas before it was a little bit hodgepodge.\r\n\r\nI can also easily set a featured image just from the top here, whereas previously this was kind of like embedded in its own panel down below. And I can also quickly add an expert. So if I want to say come to my cool event on some date, I can go ahead and do that. And my excerpt gets populated and it's all in this one panel.\r\n\r\nThe other thing that I want to mention here while we're looking at this bit of code, I'm not going to go through the full demo for block bindings. You can check out the WordPress 6.5 review that we did to kind of like see how this is built. But this is a block pattern that I have set up with a block binding for the URL for this button here. And what's new, as you can see that this is now populated in the actual editor UI. So you can see that hey, the URL for this button block is being saved to post meta. It doesn't say what post meta key it does specifically, which I find a bit unfortunate and I think it'd be valuable if we did display that information or made it accessible. But you can now at least see what attributes are bound together. The other thing is that now if I make changes here, slash WordPress this value is now actually getting saved to post meta. Previously, you would have to update the post meta value separately. But now this is actually editable through the UI. So there have been some new features here, available for folks that are using block binding and so still a really like kind of complicated developer feature at this point, but is making forward progress, which is what we'd like to see.\r\n\r\nrounding the corners, we have a couple other block editor features that I want to go ahead and show you I'm going to create a new post here and\r\n\r\nwe're going to drop in a pattern and then I'm going to go into a call to action. Let's say I want to call to action pattern here. And or maybe we want a banner pattern.\r\n\r\nYeah, sure. Let's just pick this banner pattern here. What you'll see is that we now have a new ability to quickly cycle through patterns. So I inserted this one, maybe I want to get a preview of another one. I can click this shuffle button. And as you can choose another pattern of the same category for me. And so I can quickly cycle through a lot of different options. It would be great books.\r\n\r\nDid the editor crash? Nope. It just got into weird selection state.\r\n\r\nI think it'd be cool to I don't know maybe I can just like Undo to go back. Yeah, I can so I can cycle through them. See if there's one that I like oh, here we go. Another weird focus state thing that happens but you have to be on is the actual pattern route selection to see this shuffle up. But that's a little bit odd that it kind of keeps doing that. Whoa.\r\n\r\nWell, I would say hey, it's beta software, but WordPress 6.6. did release a few hours ago.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, there's a cool feature if you want to more easily find patterns that you have available to you go ahead and create another new page here to talk about CSS grid.\r\n\r\nSo we've had CSS grid has actually kind of been in WordPress for a little bit. It just hasn't really made itself known but it is now an official part of the group block. And CSS grid itself is a super big feature. There's a lot that it can do.\r\n\r\nAnd one of the things that I think the Gutenberg team is trying to figure out is exactly what CSS Grid features they want to expose to users and half. Right now there's kind of like two main modes in which CSS Grid works. One is I can do the manual mode. And so this says, hey, I want to use this many specific columns. So if I wanted to, for instance, I could set up like a, you know, a traditional 12 column grid. The thing to be aware of, though, is that if I'm setting up this 12 column grid, this isn't really responsive, so to speak. I'm going to get those 12 columns and that set.\r\n\r\nThe auto mode is kind of how CSS Grid takes on responsiveness, which is to say, hey, I want to create this layout and I need each grid item to take up at least this much space. That's how much it would be to look good. And beyond that point, you know, lay it out however you want. If they're using an iPad, a super wide desktop screen and iPhone, you figure it out. I just need each column to be at least this wide, and kind of fill as much space as you can with columns. And so this gives you the kind of more responsive option. So what do you do once you have CSS grids? Well, it's kind of like a combo box where you get your inserter. So I can go ahead and let's say create a paragraph block here. And we'll dump in some lorem ipsum text.\r\n\r\nI could in this next block, we could say let's put an image or grab something from the media library.\r\n\r\nWell grab some more text let's say let's make this text longer\r\n\r\nwell\r\n\r\nand I don't know if everyone another image that's put it in or maybe we put it out video. I don't have I spent another image we get one from the media library.\r\n\r\nOkay, so we can see I kind of have my columns. And if I go ahead and view this page, you can see it looks kind of like what I have here.\r\n\r\nBut the CSS Grid support doesn't kind of stop here. One of the things that's cool about CSS Grid is that I can do stylings on individual grid items. So let's say I want this text here, which is quite long. I want it to stretch across multiple columns. I can go ahead and do that. I can do that one just by dragging in the actual editor. But if I want I can go to the individual block, go into the dimensions panel and see that hey, this has been set to span two columns. So I want to I could also do this image and say, Hey, let's make this one span three columns. Now once in start spanning three columns, you can see that hey, I could also have things set up to span multiple rows. So if we go over here we can set this one to span two rows, and two columns. And we can see how it makes all of those changes happen.\r\n\r\nTo you know, take a look.\r\n\r\nBut we'll see that this also becomes responsive, where things shrink down, depending on the size of my screen.\r\n\r\nSo I think this is a pretty cool feature.\r\n\r\nThere's a lot more work that's kind of like going on with CSS Grid, one of which is like, right now you can see hey, I have this UI here, but I kind of have to like to keep going through the inserter to add in a new item that I want to add in. Maybe a cover block or something like that.\r\n\r\nMaybe uses\r\n\r\nthis whole thing in here and we could set the column span.\r\n\r\nSo I kind of have to like keep working through the inserter. But one of the things that the team is looking at, which I think could be very useful is the ability to just kind of draw things. So if we get rid of, let's say, this image here, there's kind of like an experiment where I could draw an item and say, hey, I want this to take over these two columns here and put it here.\r\n\r\nYeah, so that's what that's what I was showing you just a second ago, which is where as you kind of move through different screen sizes, because we're saying that each column must be a minimum amount of size, at least 12 rams. If they were to become smaller than 12 rams, it's going to collapse them.\r\n\r\nSo you can kind of like see that in action here. And then of course, when we get all the way small enough, you can really only have a one column layout, you're gonna have a one column layout.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, so this is kind of like taking those CSS Grid features and it's the start of making them accessible to folks who don't want to just use custom CSS. There isn't a way to make the columns even height right now. So that is a kind of mode of CSS Grid. And so that's kind of what I refer to with like, hey, the the team kind of has to figure out, you got another weird bug here.\r\n\r\nThe team kind of has to figure out what CSS Grid features they actually want to expose, and how they want to expose them.\r\n\r\nBecause yeah, what you can do with CSS Grid is you can say hey, I want each row height to be the same and distributed evenly. Or you can have the child items determine what the row height is. And so you have obviously different options that you're going to have to I guess wait and see how they get exposed. I think I think the team is still trying to figure it out.\r\n\r\nSo the next thing I really don't know what's I don't know if this is a safari thing, and what but the strange.\r\n\r\nThe last kind of feature that I want to talk about is negative margins. So I wonder actually, if there's a good pattern here that we could use to start showing this off\r\n\r\nyeah, let's start with this. So negative margins are a pretty powerful design tool.\r\n\r\nAnd I think partly because of that the team has decided that they don't want to make it\r\n\r\njust globally available.\r\n\r\nI think I need to be in the site editor right.\r\n\r\nNegative margins kind of let you overlay content and kind of break out of the box model.\r\n\r\nLet's see if we can get this to show up here. I'm not sure why I'm not seeing it in the image block I would have expected to maybe it's just not available on the image block at all.\r\n\r\nHere we go. So I have this dimensions thing here. And you'll see I can you know change the margin for my dimensions. We're going to unlock all of them. But I can't actually go negative through the UI and drag. But if I change this to an actual value, I can now set this value should be negative. And so what this lets me do is kind of overlay content on to each other. And kind of gives you the ability for more powerful designs. Now I think what I would really I don't know where the bug is here in terms of why one thing is gonna go the other thing but I guess you can see why. negative margins are something that you can't just do through the UI automatically.\r\n\r\nI think we probably need to like set a background of maybe like even Z index on this to like get it to appear more highly. But yeah, this is a feature that people have been kind of asking for it to be able to do. And you can now do it. But you just don't really get a lot of help. Basically, negative margins you get supported as value. The editor is not going to reject them anymore.\r\n\r\nBut it's not actually a control that I can just use in the site editor or the block editor itself. I need to actually input those values manually. But it lets you do kind of like cool things around like layering content layering images together.\r\n\r\nThey can let you achieve more powerful designs than you've been able to previously.\r\n\r\nThat being said it's time to check the counter because we are done with our official demo for WordPress 6.6 2.5 2 million. So congrats to anyone who got that one close. So all right. This is hilarious. So we had a few people guessed 2.5 million and then a late entry from Bill Christiansen said that okay, Susa 2.5 So I'm changing my guests to 2,500,001 So using the prices right strategy Bill has won the prize was competition. So congratulations.\r\n\r\nThe next vote up was Sadie with 3.2 million so Okay, everybody can give Bill their favorite emoji in the chat.\r\n\r\nWe're gonna have to remember to do this next time, Timothy. This was fun.\r\n\r\nYeah, he gets a new car. No. So yeah, everybody build their favorite emoji there in the chat be nice. And with that, we will turn our attention to some questions. Folks, if you have a question you haven't asked yet, use the zoom q&a to do that. Please also open that up and upvote any questions that you would like to hear answered? So that's funny. All right. First question here is from Teresa. This is a great one Timothy. The accessibility reinforcement act is going to be coming up in 2025. Is there an alert or anything planned for color combinations in WordPress in the block editor when you have, you know, maybe contrast issues? Yes, this is one of my favorite features that we've had for a long time in the WordPress editor is that it does this automatically if you are using the block editor. So I've got this white background and if I make this text well, don't you love demo fails.\r\n\r\nLet's see why isn't interfering? Here we go.\r\n\r\nIt's pretty curious why it is able to detect that this light tan is unreadable but white on white. Oh, there we go. Maybe it's the transparent background that's causing the issue.\r\n\r\nMaybe but now it's appearing for you see, like it appeared for it and then it went away.\r\n\r\nI don't know.\r\n\r\nSeems a little finicky.\r\n\r\nAnd now it's not\r\n\r\nlike this is perfectly readable. Well, there's this feature WordPress called the color contrast detector that is usually very reliable, but it looks like a matter of regression WordPress 6.6 And yeah, is exactly for this is to help detect and help surface to you when your color choices have become very hard to read like this one.\r\n\r\nIt takes into account Yeah, that colors and because of using the block editor all those things are kind of like done in a very declarative way. So WordPress is kind of able to detect a reliable usually and match what's going on there. It probably is related to this transparency thing but even then see, like black on black. It should that's that has worked perfectly. I've seen that working in the past.\r\n\r\nI don't know. Let's change that. Welcome to live remote folks. Yep, um, but yeah, so that's definitely a thing. That's their narrow you know, WordPress has to blend the line of that you can do whatever you want in the site and or on the block editor. You can make content that is very ugly and unreadable and inaccessible.\r\n\r\nBut for the most part, we're best just trying to guide you towards the right. pattern. That is, that is awesome. Okay, question from Vern about the download counter. Does it differentiate between automated downloads and manual ones? I don't think so. No, I think this is just all hits to the API.\r\n\r\nYeah.\r\n\r\nLet's see. Sue would like to know if there are any popular plugins or tools that you've heard of that have report reported problems on 6.6?\r\n\r\nNot that I've heard of yet.\r\n\r\nIf we go on over to the forums, though, there is a post that comes up every release. Yep.\r\n\r\nFor\r\n\r\nthe forum is for hey, here are bugs here issues. And we also get a link gone over to a page with themes and plugins and kind of other things to be aware of. So if you're not already in the WordPress forums, that WordPress forums team is staff staff, that is the wrong word is I'm gonna use the word staff because it's the correct word for what I'm about to say, which is staff with a team of great volunteers. So be kind, but yeah, if you're not over in the WordPress forms, all the volunteers over there, do a fantastic job.\r\n\r\nAnd yeah, you'll see things get reported in here and they'll make their way to kind of like no issues, lists, and things like that. But yeah, always, always check out the forums. They're an exciting time as well, right after release comes out. Because it's when everyone comes and says, Hey, this is broken.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, the forum is the best place to check that.\r\n\r\nIndeed. Final question, folks. By the way, if you have a question to ask if you haven't done so drop that in now, this is our last question in the list from John. Is there a way to have rounded corners on maybe a row or a column? Absolutely. It's just not done how you would think they were done is probably issue it's not exposed as rounded corners being an option but through borders so I'm gonna go ahead and put this block into a group then go over into border and set a radius\r\n\r\nokay, this is there are two layers of black that are happening here. Let me get this background out of the way and go here and put a background on our group block\r\n\r\nadded some padding to make this not horrible.\r\n\r\nAnd you can see we've got our rounded corners here. But yeah, so there's no option in the UI that's just like, hey, here's how you do rounded corners, but they're exposed through the border controls. But yeah, the thing you have to be aware of is that border controls aren't available in everything. I can see here. This is just text. They don't have border controls. They need to be kind of like on block elements like groups. So a handy thing that you can do whenever you need that ability is to just put a put a group block around what you're trying to style.\r\n\r\nYeah, and we are working here in core WordPress and the core blocks if you're a Kadence user, it is way easier to do all of this. Virtually, virtually every element will have some sort of a rounded corner ability. Yeah.\r\n\r\nLet's see.\r\n\r\nTheresa is WordPress thinking about working with AI? This question was asked this weekend this past weekend. at WordCamp Canada. Is there any discussion of moving any sort of AI something into core WordPress that you're aware of Timothy?\r\n\r\nNot that I've seen yet. So it's tricky because most\r\n\r\nAI features are things that you usually need a service to connect to. And so it would be super cost prohibitive for wordpress.org to just offer this for free. So what we're seeing is different plugins build integrations with either open AI or their own hosted models and things like that. Now.\r\n\r\nThere is a feature and I think one of Google Chrome's Canary builds where they are added a JavaScript API that talks to I believe, a locally hosted version of one of their Gemini models.\r\n\r\nGoogle being Google isn't going through any standards track as of yet to develop this API and it's not prefixed with Google or anything like that. But it creates I think, it's like a window.ai dot txt generator object or things like that, that lets you do things with AI through JavaScript with a model that's local to your computer, which kind of solves the problem of hey, we need to either pay open API money to get our you know, API request. Fulfilled. So I haven't seen anything with WordPress Core specifically yet, because there's that problem, but as locally hosted models become more and more of a thing. I think that can be pretty interesting. For instance, the Mac OS features that are coming later this year, around like AI, content writing and editing and things like that, where I can just, you know, select Content Anywhere in an app that has, you know, a native text input that works with text, and I can just say, hey, rewrite this for me to make it shorter, more professional, etc. In my personal opinion, that's where I see like more of these AI features going I think it's strange that I would need to, you know, have a grammerly ai extension and an AI extension inside of WordPress and like, tons of different AI things to like, help me write text better to me that feels like a feature that makes sense to just have built into the EO s. And so I think as we see those things, kind of like expand more and get integrated into browser API's and things like that. You can imagine a browser API that lets you, as a developer, say, hey, rewrite this to be shorter and it rely entirely on the local model on your Mac.\r\n\r\nI think that is, in my opinion, that like more exciting place for things to go particularly with like a privacy perspective and all these other things.\r\n\r\nThere's probably still room for like, for instance, jetpack has like just lock that lets you like ask it to help you write a blog post and things like that. There's probably still room for that for folks who don't have computers that can run vocally hosted models that are advanced enough to be useful, but at least me personally, I find it more exciting.\r\n\r\nThat the ability to like you know, help rewrite content and do things like that is just available natively in my iOS so I can use it in pages, or Ulysses, which is my Markdown editor of choice or anywhere on the web, and I don't have to think about oh, do I have an open AI subscription here? Is there a plugin that specific to whatever content authoring tool I'm using? If I'm writing a readme in my IDE for writing code, it could help me there like I feel like that is the better way this Bucha Yeah, that's a great answer. It's this age old question of what should be in core versus what should be a plug in WordPress, being open source and being built with extendibility. as just part of the, you know, the way we do things, it's a question that's asked about a lot of things that you could even say that as popular as SEO is, SEO is not built into core other than a sitemap.\r\n\r\nYeah, I and I did see I think I think it was a ticket and might have just been to make thread or make common response, right. I think I saw a ticket on adding in support. We have this feature WordPress for a long time. That says, hey, please discourage search engines reading. Please discourage search engines from indexing the site. I saw someone bring up like, hey, maybe WordPress should offer another button here that says discourage MLMs from scraping my website for content and add the necessary robots dot txt entries for that as like a place that you know, core would be speaking there. I kind of happen to think that it would make sense for us to offer a button to make that easy for folks who want to but yeah, there's a lot of questions about what should be the core what are the defaults when you've got to hit Close the counter page? But it's gonna say when you got X million sites updated to WordPress, there's a lot of out of consideration on on what features make it into core indeed. Or Timothy As always, this has been great. Appreciate your expertise and information. Any final thoughts as we wrapping up?\r\n\r\nI try our best to explain six if you haven't played around with a full site editor theme. Thank you, Bill and try it out. I think it's always exciting to see where things are going and play with block patterns. I would say really think about pattern overrides and how you can use them. If you're building sites for clients. i It's the feature that I'm personally most excited about and we're best six months six. I think it's extraordinarily powerful.\r\n\r\nAnd really gets you into that space of okay, this site looks like the front end of my website, but my client can't just completely break the layout, maybe hitting the delete key one too many times. So I think it's really cool feature I play with it if you haven't.\r\n\r\nVery good we'll focus on dropping in the link bundle one final time before we wrap up here. We'll have the replay of this event up in about an hour as soon as the video renders. So you can share this out this excellent overview of six dots six out with all your friends. Also if you are not already signed up for our news roundup that's coming up tomorrow at one o'clock Central that's give me an hour and I'll get you up to date on all the things in WordPress. All the news specifically aimed at those of us who are doing WordPress things with clients. So that's going to wrap us up for it today. Timothy, thanks once again, and we'll see you all back tomorrow for news roundup, one o'clock Central here on the solid Academy where we go further together.\r\n\r\nTranscribed by https:\/\/otter.ai\r\n","livestream_vimeo_video_id":985173199,"livestream-resources-group":"s:34:\"a:1:{s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}\";","multi-day_replay_details":"s:102:\"a:2:{s:16:\"course-resources\";a:1:{i:0;a:1:{s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}}s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}\";"}},"postCountOnPage":1,"postCountTotal":1,"postID":448554,"postFormat":"standard","geoCloudflareCountryCode":"US"}; dataLayer.push( dataLayer_content ); \nNegative Margins\n\n\n\nA Unified Publishing Flow\n\n\n\nAnd more!\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n","livestream_chat_log":"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1CYn04wFycG2Czl-o_HyWI-NQD9XcoVTT\/view?usp=sharing","livestream_live_transcript_url":"https:\/\/otter.ai\/u\/EamxQIon_6oe6gCgXdRfFRRztX4?utm_source=copy_url","livestream_live_transcript_text":"slides today and this is all live demos so nothing to download. Edie? Yes 6.6 dropped Well, the first notice I got was about an hour ago. They usually slowly roll that out\r\n\r\nfor your sites, gradually notice that it's available\r\n\r\nagain, welcome everybody. If you're just joining us open up the chat say hello. Caption should now be working for everyone.\r\n\r\nLooking forward to a demo of WordPress six, six with Timothy Jacobs. He's going to walk us through all the things and answer your questions.\r\n\r\nHey Kylie, welcome.\r\n\r\nA bin both Ben's class welcome. Hey Ken.\r\n\r\nAll right, I'm going to drop in a link bundle. Again, no downloads today but the replay link is there. We'll have that up about an hour after we finish. So you can share that out with folks. Also, if you haven't registered for tomorrow's news roundup that's a free live stream one o'clock Central the same time tomorrow, looking at all the WordPress news over the last month or so.\r\n\r\nWe've got about three minutes to go before we get started officially with Welcome to WordPress 6.6 which just dropped a little bit of go you can download it for real now\r\n\r\nbut as you're coming in, open up the chat say hi, tell us where you are logging in from today. Hey, John from Chicago welcome.\r\n\r\nCouple of Greensboro folks getting connected there in the chat.\r\n\r\nSo Sue is what would you is it Green's burrow Ian, what would you say?\r\n\r\nHey, Richard from Tampa, Stephanie from Germany. Welcome.\r\n\r\nCouple minutes to go, folks, before we get started officially we'll get going at three minutes after all about WordPress 6.6 which just dropped a little while ago. Hey Bill from Virginia welcome also Vern from West Virginia.\r\n\r\nGreat to see everybody coming in.\r\n\r\nNo slides today this is all live live demo. So Timothy will be walking us through all the things right here live. This is being recorded though, and we'll have the replay up at the link that I just dropped in the chat. And if you've not already done so register for tomorrow's news roundup. That will be the same time tomorrow.\r\n\r\nJust a little over a minute to go.\r\n\r\nOnce again, welcome everybody. If you more folks just joining open the chat say hi and tell us where you are logging in from today. Just about a minute to go before we get started.\r\n\r\nAll live demo today nothing to download. Hey Sadie from Scotland.\r\n\r\nAbout 30 seconds to go hey Teresa from Germany welcome\r\n\r\nI probably just mispronounced your name\r\n\r\nis it Teresita perhaps.\r\n\r\nYeah, it is Prime Day on a another little rabbit trail there.\r\n\r\nHopefully everybody's not spending all their money today.\r\n\r\nJust about ready to get started. Alright, it's three minutes after. Let's start. The recording and we'll dive in with WordPress 6.6.\r\n\r\nWell, good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening. Welcome everybody to another solid Academy livestream and glad you're all with us today. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at solid Academy joined today by Timothy Jacobs, the lead developer for solid WP Welcome back, Timothy. How are things in your world today? Doing good, you know, trying to survive.\r\n\r\nHeatwave number 75 or whatever it is right up in New York but yeah, doing okay. Excellent. So WordPress 6.6. Just started appearing in WordPress installs in the last couple of hours. So we didn't talk about this, but how does this rollout actually work? When they're dropping a new version of WordPress, you guys so it's kind of a multi step thing.\r\n\r\nA bit before the WordPress release goes out there. It's kind of like a, hey, we all know this is coming type of thing. And then yeah, the basically the API gets updated. And sites check kind of like I think every hour at this point and I'll check for that. Update and then start auto updating if you have that available, which has been the default since I think WordPress five, six.\r\n\r\nAnd then yeah, you can go to what's the page I think wordpress.org\/stats will give you a live feed which is kind of fun to watch during the first. No, this isn't the one. I mean, if you're going to find it, and I know you've gotten me off on a tangent. Yeah, we didn't talk about this at all. I just came to me right as we were starting. But there's a cool little I think it's called counter. Let me see one right yeah, here we go. Um, so this fun one during release, because what you'll see is when we get up to like WordPress 6.7 It's about time to do it. This number will be way higher.\r\n\r\nBut it's, yeah, it gets quite out there but this is a fun one to watch. And the day of the release. Because yeah, you'll see all the sites across the Web Start to update. So yeah, usually it starts happening basically immediately if you're the luck of the draw the first new checks that our but yeah, it's there's a big old button kind of you can think of that they pressed to make the disco go out. Amazing. So for those of you that aren't aware, as I mentioned before, Timothy is the lead developer for us here at solid WP Timothy is also a core committer to WordPress and one of the maintainers of the WordPress REST API. So Timothy you do a lot of work with core\r\n\r\nit when these updates come out, are we at a point now where you'd recommend auto updating core WordPress? So yeah, I am a big proponent of auto updating repurpose for when we had this conversation around WordPress 5.6 and make chat in Slack Yeah, I was all for it. Um, I am a big believer in auto updates in general, particularly with WordPress core itself. I think the thing that you want to consider is that if you have lots of plugins that are breaking your site on every update that you potentially consider switching plugin that always astonishes me and you know, maybe one day I'll get caught by this but it always astonishes me when WordPress 6.6 releases and XYZ very large theme or XYZ very large plugin releases an update 12 hours later that's like fixed compatibly with WordPress 6.6. We've known that WordPress 6.6 has been a release from the state for like four months.\r\n\r\nSo yeah, I'm kind of in the opinion, yes, you should use auto updates. And if you find your site breaking all the time after it gets auto updated.\r\n\r\nThat you know maybe there's a different plugin out there that solves your needs.\r\n\r\nYeah, I mean, when we add salad, we start running our automated tests on trunk, you know, so we're testing the latest version. Basically, immediately we're I guess, starting tomorrow our tests are gonna be running on against WordPress 6.7. And so that doesn't catch everything. But it does always surprise me when you see a plugin or theme that like fatal airing on WordPress on the new version of WordPress. And it's in a code path that like runs against everything because I think as developers we should be running WordPress nightly. Basically, always well writing code and testing your plugins and have automated tests running. So it's one thing if there's an edge case and an edge case and this thing over here, there's an issue. Yeah, but when it's like, yeah, we need to release this update. So 200 out of our 300,000 users use the plugin. I feel like it's\r\n\r\nthere's another conversation that needs to be had. I love it. Well, thanks for letting me take you down that trail. We hadn't talked about that. But I think it's interesting and this I think this is the first time we've shown this counter and we're 1.7 million installs already. All right. So keep going. You know, if I if I had a more sophisticated setup, I would like share that in the corner of my screen and we could see where it lands we could place bets to see where we'd be in an hour. Anyway, I'm gonna navigate away from this and everyone can bet what they think it'll be when we finish which is both betting one how fast the number of installs are gonna go up into how long I'm going to demo for and either those two things yet so we'll see. Okay, so I'm game for that. So right now folks put your there's no price other than you know, just the personal thrill of knowing that you won this, but drop it in the chat your guests for how many downloads will be when Timothy completes the demo. Before we go to q&a. I will go back to the camera card and just say an hour from now.\r\n\r\nRight. All right. So I'll grab these chats and we'll come back to this at the end. So today we're going to walk through all the new features in WordPress six 610 Many thanks for doing this. i One other note of housekeeping before I disappear. There were a few notes first, there are no downloads. This is all live demo. There's no there's not a slide deck. Second of all, if you'd like to ask questions, please use the zoom q&a. You can find that by mousing over the shared screen and clicking on the q&a icon there. And I would just invite you to keep that window open the whole time because other folks questions will appear there. And if you also have that question, click the thumbs up icon and we'll take the questions on the order of votes. This is being recorded. I'll drop in the links to the replay which will be available about an hour after we wrap up today. So with that I'll disappear Timothy. Let's get into six six. Yeah, let's do it. So as usual, per the last couple years releases most of this is gonna be about Gutenberg excited or block editor stuff. But there are two things that I wanted to cover first.\r\n\r\nOne is rollbacks for plugin auto updates. So this is pretty cool.\r\n\r\nIf you have auto updates enabled, which like we just talked about, I'm a big fan of a new feature in WordPress 6.6 is that after an update happens WordPress is going to check and make a request back to your site and make sure it's still online. And if it detects that there is a fatal error, it's going to roll back that plugin update for you automatically. Now this isn't just like a general purpose feature like there's the WP rollbacks plug in and things like that, where you can go into WP admin and say hey, roll back to the previous or something like that. This is an automated kind of level of protection around auto updates specifically. So if you know the plugin starts crashing, you know 10 hours from now this feature isn't going to check it recovery mode. Well. We did a talk on recovery mode, I think a long time ago at this point.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, it's a pretty cool feature to add. A little bit of resiliency and another another band aid along WordPress auto updates, you can feel a bit more confident enabling it.\r\n\r\nThe other thing, which I don't even think yeah is listed in this page because it really shouldn't affect anyone, but I think it is part of the field guide which if you haven't seen the field guide is this awesome post over and make that wordpress.org that talks about all of the new features and bug fixes that happened in the release. And the big thing here to mention is that dropping support for PHP seven Neto and 7.1 has happened so if you are one on if you're one of those few people back and one of these ancient PHP versions get updated.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, that is no longer gonna be supported as a WordPress 6.6 Your Site won't crash. It just won't update to WordPress six months, I guess if you're on those older versions, WordPress 6.6 is gonna get a little bit challenging to say all the time. Let's see how it goes. All right. With those two things out of the way, let's dive in. So we're gonna start with a site editor. The site editor has a feature that we've talked about before called data views. And this is kind of like the technical code word kind of similar to WP list tables if you're familiar with that and WordPress, and I did if you've got a quote update in WordPress 6.6. So we have this Pages section here which I've showed off in 6.5. It's been enhanced a bit. So I can go through and I can see all of my published pages. I can see my drafts, things that are private trash, etc.\r\n\r\nWhat's really cool is that this list area over here update what I see in the main canvas. So if I want to take a look at the sample page, I can take a look at the sample page and it's gonna update really quickly. If I want I can dive in and start editing this content right away.\r\n\r\nData views also give me more control over how I can view this information. So right now I'm viewing it in this view, but if I want I can view it as a table and I get this kind of familiar interface similar to what you'd see in WP admin. Or I can go ahead and switch it over to a grid view. And this will bring in the featured images for me, but I'm gonna go ahead and set it back to the list view because I think that's a pretty helpful way to get a quick browse to the content of your site.\r\n\r\nData views have also get used throughout this kind of like site editor designed the other places in the templates manager. So we can see the templates now show these four previews. Previously, there was also this kind of like intermediary page that was kind of really confusing when you started thinking about it where if you would click on this, it would give you some details over here in the sidebar, but now they just simply drop you into the editor. So if you want to go ahead and edit a template, it's just one click away from the data Views section.\r\n\r\nThe next place that we get an update is over in the pattern section and that's also going to take us to my favorite feature I think of WordPress 6.6. But we'll see our patterns, we can browse our template parts here as well. They're kind of all combined into this pattern section. But another thing that's pretty cool is that list the data views give me kind of similar to bulk actions that we have in lists tables I can do in the data views view. So I can select multiple patterns going over here and I can click this export as JSON button. And it's going to export all of these patterns for me in one big JSON file that I could go ahead and import into another site. And so this is all kind of being powered by the diffuse API. Now, I mentioned this next cool feature that has to do with patterns. It's called pattern overrides. And this is something I'm very excited about. I've given a couple of variations of like talks about a feature like this, which is hey, how do we give all the power of the block editor and this really rich interactive editing, but how do we constrain it down for users in a way that's more understandable? And how can we use it in places across our site?\r\n\r\nAnd this has been building up for kind of a number of releases. Now we got content only editing mode and number WordPress, really physical at this point. And we'll see that in preview here. This is kind of working similarly to the changes where we got synced patterns. And then that's the transition. If you remember from reusable blocks, we started talking about them in synced patterns a couple of releases ago. And this also is a little bit similar, I think to the block bindings API and HTML stuff and all of that combined to do something that I think is really cool. So I took this pattern here from the pattern directory on make that work best Edward is this cool one here?\r\n\r\nLet him roll. And what I've done is I've added in my new pattern and pasted in that HTML.\r\n\r\nAnd then what I've done is I've said, hey, I want the users of my site to be able to edit this pattern. But I don't want them to see like the full power of this editor. I want them to be able to like change all of these colors, change the background change the structure. I want to make the editing experience for them. Very simple. And the way that you do that is if you select your block, you'll probably need to open up the block toolbar. There's this new section in advance called overrides and what you do is for each bit of content that you want a user to be able to override, you click the button here right now it says disabled overrides. So if I go ahead and hit disable overrides this text is now going to always be part of the pattern. And it's not something that my users would be able to edit. But I hitting enable overrides and giving it a title. In this case description.\r\n\r\nThis now becomes a property that of the pattern that my users are able to customize whenever they use the pattern. So let's see what that looks like. I'm gonna navigate over to the Pages section, going over to the sample page. And I've inserted this pattern into my content. So I'm going to go ahead and delete this and reinsert it so you can see exactly what happens. We go into the inserter select for patterns, my patterns and that block you CTA is what I called it and so now if we open up the sidebar, we can see that I have this content only mode. So I don't have the ability to like change this color, change the structure move text around, but what I can do is that at this text, so if I wanted to say you know do some live chat history here, say it was recorded in 1975. I can make that change this shop now button. I could say let's make it by now. And I can change the link. That's the link gone over to amazon.com.\r\n\r\nAnd, you know, we want to get grammatically correct on them or something like that, let's say let them roll, you know, really take the personality out of this pattern. But you can see now I've made all these changes here and I can go ahead and hit Save. And when I go to the front end of my website, I have this pattern with my changes, but because this is still a sync pattern, if I go back on over, and I think yeah, I even get this handy little button here. Let's let's try and use it. Edit original.\r\n\r\nI can now make modifications to this pattern. So if I wanted to change this color, let's say to this red and hit save.\r\n\r\nI am right now editing the pattern here.\r\n\r\nAnd if I refresh the page, you can see that that's been changed. So what synced patterns with overrides are doing is they're letting me create a pattern. Say hey, these are the specific bits that I want you to be able to edit. But I as like you know the site designer or you know the site owner or anything like that. I can make structural changes to this pattern. And those will be reflected across my site without the user needing to make any changes, update the post anything like that they just happen automatically. And so in this case, I'm using it for a CTA there's lots of other places where you can use this that I think would be very effective things like a testimonial section. You know, you perhaps have a testimonial style that you want to use throughout your site. You want to make it really easy to insert your testimonials. But of course each testimonial is different. And you can't just say hey, use the same testimonial everywhere you want to say use a testimonial on this page. Use another testimonial on the other page, but we decide hey, we want to change the font that we use for the testimonial. You can easily do that.\r\n\r\nRight now the way patterns ended up getting stored into the post.\r\n\r\nLet's see how do I go back here?\r\n\r\nThey're not a back button.\r\n\r\nI don't think so we're just going to refresh.\r\n\r\nThe way that the pattern actually gets stored is if we take a look at the code editor you can see that the overrides are all in the block attributes. So it's just a part of the actual page content. What I would love to see in the future is potentially the ability to save those to like post meta, like we do with kind of other block bindings, which I think would be very cool and kind of bridges that gap between like custom post types and the thing that a developer would set up for you and something that an end user could potentially just do in the block Editor inside editor all by themselves.\r\n\r\nOkay, we're gonna go back on into the site editor now for some more features.\r\n\r\nSo this is another cool one, which is the ability to update a background image for your entire site. So we've had this feature in the customizer for a long time where you can like add theme support background images, but we can now do this in the actual site as well. So if I go over into the Layout tab for global styles, I can say add a background image and I'm going to go ahead and choose a subtle pattern that I got from subtle patterns.com. And we can see that this pattern is now applied as the main background for my site. So I'm gonna go ahead and save that and we can view the changes here.\r\n\r\nAnd so this works very similarly to how the custom background images worked with the customizer, where this is applying a background to the body tag places where there is you know, a background color applied like we see here in this menu item will of course lay over it.\r\n\r\nBut this lets you set up a background image across your entire site.\r\n\r\nI'm gonna go ahead and remove that. I'm gonna do that by just hitting reset all and it will remove all of the background images for me as well. This control is pretty nice, and you'll also see it for just editing elsewhere. In your site on a per block basis like a group Bach for instance, you can set a background image using the same kind of control but most new is being able to do it for the entire site.\r\n\r\nAnother cool feature is pattern switching. So I have this header here and my theme 2024 comes with a bunch of different variations for it. Previously, you could kind of head up into the sidebar or into the navigation excuse me and switch between patterns there. But the sidebar gains a new option here which is this design tab. And you know show me all the different patterns for the template part that I have on my site. So if I want to easily switch between them.\r\n\r\nI can do that with just one click and get a small visual preview of what they look like. In the sidebar here. I'm going to try and figure out which one was it that I have before that one\r\n\r\nbetter, let's stick with this one. I think that's what it was. Yes.\r\n\r\nThe next thing that I want to go over is some changes to the featured image block or two featured images in general. So I'm gonna go ahead and pull up the template for a single which one do we want it we could do the single page or we could do\r\n\r\nlet's do the single page I guess. So let's grab page with sidebar.\r\n\r\nAnd so this is the featured image block. But the featured image block doesn't give you a lot of controls. So let's say I want to have a little bit of a cooler coolers of beings objective layout here I'm gonna go ahead and insert the media and TextBlock and what I can do with the media and textbox now is that I can select Hey, for the image here I want to use the featured image and so I'm gonna then get rid of the featured image block. And what I'm also going to do is put the title in there as well and get rid of the paragraph. And I'll go ahead and press Delete.\r\n\r\nAnd so we can see now I have this media and textbox and I have all of the controls on here that I'm used to but when I've used my site, it's going to be doing this with the featured image as opposed to just a static image that I would always be using.\r\n\r\nLet's see if we can get a good demo of that. I think we might need to\r\n\r\nhere we go page with sidebar.\r\n\r\nIt save the page. And there we go. So you can see that it's using the featured image that I have selected.\r\n\r\nSo if I went ahead and changed the featured image to that say this one\r\n\r\nwill see the front end of my site has been updated. There.\r\n\r\nYou also have more controls with shadow. So let me see if I can.\r\n\r\nI thought this was enabled on the media and textbook but maybe it isn't.\r\n\r\nOkay, so let's undo these changes that we made to this template.\r\n\r\nSo we can use the new box shadow features. So I can now enable box shadows for the featured image block so by default, we get a couple of different options. So this one looks kind of cool. So we'll select that one.\r\n\r\nAnd we'll go ahead and hit Save.\r\n\r\nAnd we can see we're now using the box shadow feature here. But let's say none of these box shadows really speak to me. And I want to do something about custom. We can do that now. So if I go into shadows, you can see here the different shadows that are provided by default with WordPress. But if I wanted to I could create a custom shadow. So I'll go in here and now I have a whole bunch of controls. I can select a color. I can make it an inset shadow versus an outside shadow I could change the positioning is a blur, make it spread less or more all of these different options here that's maybe position it like this very funky and we'll hit save.\r\n\r\nLet's call this I don't know, big pink shadow.\r\n\r\nNow when I go over into the featured image box, I can select that shadow instead.\r\n\r\nVery I'm a very good designer, folks, you know this looks perfect but yeah, so you get more and more control over shadows now with WordPress 6.6. You can use them in your featured image block, apparently not media and text or I just missed the button for it. And you can also create custom shadows and edit the shadows that come with WordPress for the next feature I'm going to talk about I found a little bit confusing, I'll be honest, but it is called color palettes. Oops. I just thought color palettes and section styling. So I'm going to enable this theme here this kind of like I think a beta theme it's still being worked on actively called assembler.\r\n\r\nAnd the reason why I'm switching to assembler is because it provides these color palettes and section styles.\r\n\r\nSo if we go on into the site editor, we can see this is the homepage that I have set up and under styles you can see we only really have one style, but we have tons of different palettes use me and so this is that kind of feature that WordPress is introducing here, where you kind of get like a lightweight version of theme style. So while theme styles can control tons of different things like shape and layout and ordering and sizing and all this different stuff. The kind of like color palettes are just color palettes are just about defining a set of colors and using them and you can also set kind of like font packs. So you can see that here where it's changing like the body font and the header fonts all in one go.\r\n\r\nSo I'm gonna go back to I think I had this one selected was maybe it.\r\n\r\nYeah, maybe this is right, I don't know. But another cool way that this interacts is that we then get these features called Section styling so I'm going to select this parent group here and hop on over to the Style section and you can see a control that's similar to what you have on blocks. But this is for sections. So this is applying basically a set of colors to an entire section. of content in one go. So it's setting both like inner blocks and outer blocks, and it's using the color palettes that my team has set up.\r\n\r\nI'm also able to I believe, customize these. So if I go on into browsing the styles oops No, not that one into the group block.\r\n\r\nI can see these different style variations and if I wanted to I can make changes. So for instance, if I want this text color to be a custom color, not one from my themes, color palette, I could go ahead and change that.\r\n\r\nFrom what I can tell your theme kind of has to like get this started for you. I don't think there's any way to like create style variations entirely within the site editor on your own yet, but they are able to be done in different like feedback, JSON configurations through PHP, stuff like that. So this is a pretty cool feature. I think it could be helpful for like agencies and things like that where you might want to have a couple of different options for how people can assemble sections of content and color them without needing to create patterns for every different variation or needing to tell people that hey, when you want this to look like this, you need to go ahead and switch the background to this color, the text color to this color, the link color to that color. You can kind of all wrapped up in one of these like default styles.\r\n\r\nThese aren't really part of WordPress, the 2024 default theme, I imagine they will be with the 2025 theme. So that's why I'm demoing it with this some of the theme is supposed to 2024 but it is a possibility.\r\n\r\nNow as we get into the block editor, or before we get into the block editor, I wanted to talk about another kind of cool feature that comes to non full site editor block seeds. So I'm gonna switch over to Kadence.\r\n\r\nHere what you'll see is we've had this patterns menu here for a long time but it kind of gave you a really might say ugly interface that WordPress generated by default, where it's just like another list table kind of like this one, and you didn't get a really visual experience that was nice. But now patterns even in non full site editor themes, use the new site editor patterns of view. And so we can see here this is Kadence Kadence isn't a full site editor theme but of course has some cool patterns available. You can see a whole bunch of these ones that come from WooCommerce. You can also see the patterns that I've created and you can do all the things that you would expect to do. We can go in and you know, edit this pattern. Go back. And if we're done, we can just go back to the WordPress dashboard.\r\n\r\nThere's two reasons why I wanted to mention it. One I think this is cool if you're not yet using a false identity or theme to be able to get much better pattern management experience because I think patterns are one of the best features about the block editor and full site editing. But the other thing I think is really interesting about this is that is kind of like the first step of what you might have heard of as the WP admin redesign. So this is a project that is a big thing and phase three of Gutenberg where we find ourselves and we'll be seeing over the next couple of WordPress releases. And what I think is super interesting here is that this is this first foray into this kind of new navigation experience even if I'm not using a full site editor for you. So we can see that here have kind of like maybe a preview of what it might look like for the site and redesign for themes that aren't all aboard the full site editor train.\r\n\r\nBut we're gonna go ahead back and I'm going to switch on over to 2024 again as we dive into the block editor.\r\n\r\nSo you might have seen one of these changes when I was going about some of my demos earlier, which is that the site editor and the page editor have kind of merged together.\r\n\r\nPreviously, we first had the page editor slash post editor and then WordPress introduced the site editor a whole number of releases ago, and there were two distinct editors they made use of a lot of the same building blocks, but there were two pretty big code bases that were different.\r\n\r\nAnd so that led to some kind of like tricky experiences. If you were a theme developer plugin developer, where you kind of had to extend the editor differently in different contexts, which was annoying. For the WordPress core team. It also meant they had to maintain more kind of duplicate code than they wanted to. And so what's happened in WordPress 6.6 Is that the site editors and the post editors have kind of combined, they're still not 100% exactly the same code, but they're kind of like built on top of each other in a more thoughtful manner to share more bits. So it should be easier if you're plugin developer to write code that works in both the site editor and the post editor without as much complication.\r\n\r\nThere are though some changes that have actually populated their way into the user side of this. This is like a kind of like technical change, but there are some user ramifications. And one of those which you might have seen when we were looking at it earlier, when I was changing the template is that the kind of like post meta information handled here is different. It looks a lot more like what it looks like in the site editor. And these are all now pretty consistent with each other. So if I want to change the status, I open this up and a panel appears to the left. If I want to change the date that has to be published, the link, the author, any of these things, they all kind of have a very unified interface whereas before it was a little bit hodgepodge.\r\n\r\nI can also easily set a featured image just from the top here, whereas previously this was kind of like embedded in its own panel down below. And I can also quickly add an expert. So if I want to say come to my cool event on some date, I can go ahead and do that. And my excerpt gets populated and it's all in this one panel.\r\n\r\nThe other thing that I want to mention here while we're looking at this bit of code, I'm not going to go through the full demo for block bindings. You can check out the WordPress 6.5 review that we did to kind of like see how this is built. But this is a block pattern that I have set up with a block binding for the URL for this button here. And what's new, as you can see that this is now populated in the actual editor UI. So you can see that hey, the URL for this button block is being saved to post meta. It doesn't say what post meta key it does specifically, which I find a bit unfortunate and I think it'd be valuable if we did display that information or made it accessible. But you can now at least see what attributes are bound together. The other thing is that now if I make changes here, slash WordPress this value is now actually getting saved to post meta. Previously, you would have to update the post meta value separately. But now this is actually editable through the UI. So there have been some new features here, available for folks that are using block binding and so still a really like kind of complicated developer feature at this point, but is making forward progress, which is what we'd like to see.\r\n\r\nrounding the corners, we have a couple other block editor features that I want to go ahead and show you I'm going to create a new post here and\r\n\r\nwe're going to drop in a pattern and then I'm going to go into a call to action. Let's say I want to call to action pattern here. And or maybe we want a banner pattern.\r\n\r\nYeah, sure. Let's just pick this banner pattern here. What you'll see is that we now have a new ability to quickly cycle through patterns. So I inserted this one, maybe I want to get a preview of another one. I can click this shuffle button. And as you can choose another pattern of the same category for me. And so I can quickly cycle through a lot of different options. It would be great books.\r\n\r\nDid the editor crash? Nope. It just got into weird selection state.\r\n\r\nI think it'd be cool to I don't know maybe I can just like Undo to go back. Yeah, I can so I can cycle through them. See if there's one that I like oh, here we go. Another weird focus state thing that happens but you have to be on is the actual pattern route selection to see this shuffle up. But that's a little bit odd that it kind of keeps doing that. Whoa.\r\n\r\nWell, I would say hey, it's beta software, but WordPress 6.6. did release a few hours ago.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, there's a cool feature if you want to more easily find patterns that you have available to you go ahead and create another new page here to talk about CSS grid.\r\n\r\nSo we've had CSS grid has actually kind of been in WordPress for a little bit. It just hasn't really made itself known but it is now an official part of the group block. And CSS grid itself is a super big feature. There's a lot that it can do.\r\n\r\nAnd one of the things that I think the Gutenberg team is trying to figure out is exactly what CSS Grid features they want to expose to users and half. Right now there's kind of like two main modes in which CSS Grid works. One is I can do the manual mode. And so this says, hey, I want to use this many specific columns. So if I wanted to, for instance, I could set up like a, you know, a traditional 12 column grid. The thing to be aware of, though, is that if I'm setting up this 12 column grid, this isn't really responsive, so to speak. I'm going to get those 12 columns and that set.\r\n\r\nThe auto mode is kind of how CSS Grid takes on responsiveness, which is to say, hey, I want to create this layout and I need each grid item to take up at least this much space. That's how much it would be to look good. And beyond that point, you know, lay it out however you want. If they're using an iPad, a super wide desktop screen and iPhone, you figure it out. I just need each column to be at least this wide, and kind of fill as much space as you can with columns. And so this gives you the kind of more responsive option. So what do you do once you have CSS grids? Well, it's kind of like a combo box where you get your inserter. So I can go ahead and let's say create a paragraph block here. And we'll dump in some lorem ipsum text.\r\n\r\nI could in this next block, we could say let's put an image or grab something from the media library.\r\n\r\nWell grab some more text let's say let's make this text longer\r\n\r\nwell\r\n\r\nand I don't know if everyone another image that's put it in or maybe we put it out video. I don't have I spent another image we get one from the media library.\r\n\r\nOkay, so we can see I kind of have my columns. And if I go ahead and view this page, you can see it looks kind of like what I have here.\r\n\r\nBut the CSS Grid support doesn't kind of stop here. One of the things that's cool about CSS Grid is that I can do stylings on individual grid items. So let's say I want this text here, which is quite long. I want it to stretch across multiple columns. I can go ahead and do that. I can do that one just by dragging in the actual editor. But if I want I can go to the individual block, go into the dimensions panel and see that hey, this has been set to span two columns. So I want to I could also do this image and say, Hey, let's make this one span three columns. Now once in start spanning three columns, you can see that hey, I could also have things set up to span multiple rows. So if we go over here we can set this one to span two rows, and two columns. And we can see how it makes all of those changes happen.\r\n\r\nTo you know, take a look.\r\n\r\nBut we'll see that this also becomes responsive, where things shrink down, depending on the size of my screen.\r\n\r\nSo I think this is a pretty cool feature.\r\n\r\nThere's a lot more work that's kind of like going on with CSS Grid, one of which is like, right now you can see hey, I have this UI here, but I kind of have to like to keep going through the inserter to add in a new item that I want to add in. Maybe a cover block or something like that.\r\n\r\nMaybe uses\r\n\r\nthis whole thing in here and we could set the column span.\r\n\r\nSo I kind of have to like keep working through the inserter. But one of the things that the team is looking at, which I think could be very useful is the ability to just kind of draw things. So if we get rid of, let's say, this image here, there's kind of like an experiment where I could draw an item and say, hey, I want this to take over these two columns here and put it here.\r\n\r\nYeah, so that's what that's what I was showing you just a second ago, which is where as you kind of move through different screen sizes, because we're saying that each column must be a minimum amount of size, at least 12 rams. If they were to become smaller than 12 rams, it's going to collapse them.\r\n\r\nSo you can kind of like see that in action here. And then of course, when we get all the way small enough, you can really only have a one column layout, you're gonna have a one column layout.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, so this is kind of like taking those CSS Grid features and it's the start of making them accessible to folks who don't want to just use custom CSS. There isn't a way to make the columns even height right now. So that is a kind of mode of CSS Grid. And so that's kind of what I refer to with like, hey, the the team kind of has to figure out, you got another weird bug here.\r\n\r\nThe team kind of has to figure out what CSS Grid features they actually want to expose, and how they want to expose them.\r\n\r\nBecause yeah, what you can do with CSS Grid is you can say hey, I want each row height to be the same and distributed evenly. Or you can have the child items determine what the row height is. And so you have obviously different options that you're going to have to I guess wait and see how they get exposed. I think I think the team is still trying to figure it out.\r\n\r\nSo the next thing I really don't know what's I don't know if this is a safari thing, and what but the strange.\r\n\r\nThe last kind of feature that I want to talk about is negative margins. So I wonder actually, if there's a good pattern here that we could use to start showing this off\r\n\r\nyeah, let's start with this. So negative margins are a pretty powerful design tool.\r\n\r\nAnd I think partly because of that the team has decided that they don't want to make it\r\n\r\njust globally available.\r\n\r\nI think I need to be in the site editor right.\r\n\r\nNegative margins kind of let you overlay content and kind of break out of the box model.\r\n\r\nLet's see if we can get this to show up here. I'm not sure why I'm not seeing it in the image block I would have expected to maybe it's just not available on the image block at all.\r\n\r\nHere we go. So I have this dimensions thing here. And you'll see I can you know change the margin for my dimensions. We're going to unlock all of them. But I can't actually go negative through the UI and drag. But if I change this to an actual value, I can now set this value should be negative. And so what this lets me do is kind of overlay content on to each other. And kind of gives you the ability for more powerful designs. Now I think what I would really I don't know where the bug is here in terms of why one thing is gonna go the other thing but I guess you can see why. negative margins are something that you can't just do through the UI automatically.\r\n\r\nI think we probably need to like set a background of maybe like even Z index on this to like get it to appear more highly. But yeah, this is a feature that people have been kind of asking for it to be able to do. And you can now do it. But you just don't really get a lot of help. Basically, negative margins you get supported as value. The editor is not going to reject them anymore.\r\n\r\nBut it's not actually a control that I can just use in the site editor or the block editor itself. I need to actually input those values manually. But it lets you do kind of like cool things around like layering content layering images together.\r\n\r\nThey can let you achieve more powerful designs than you've been able to previously.\r\n\r\nThat being said it's time to check the counter because we are done with our official demo for WordPress 6.6 2.5 2 million. So congrats to anyone who got that one close. So all right. This is hilarious. So we had a few people guessed 2.5 million and then a late entry from Bill Christiansen said that okay, Susa 2.5 So I'm changing my guests to 2,500,001 So using the prices right strategy Bill has won the prize was competition. So congratulations.\r\n\r\nThe next vote up was Sadie with 3.2 million so Okay, everybody can give Bill their favorite emoji in the chat.\r\n\r\nWe're gonna have to remember to do this next time, Timothy. This was fun.\r\n\r\nYeah, he gets a new car. No. So yeah, everybody build their favorite emoji there in the chat be nice. And with that, we will turn our attention to some questions. Folks, if you have a question you haven't asked yet, use the zoom q&a to do that. Please also open that up and upvote any questions that you would like to hear answered? So that's funny. All right. First question here is from Teresa. This is a great one Timothy. The accessibility reinforcement act is going to be coming up in 2025. Is there an alert or anything planned for color combinations in WordPress in the block editor when you have, you know, maybe contrast issues? Yes, this is one of my favorite features that we've had for a long time in the WordPress editor is that it does this automatically if you are using the block editor. So I've got this white background and if I make this text well, don't you love demo fails.\r\n\r\nLet's see why isn't interfering? Here we go.\r\n\r\nIt's pretty curious why it is able to detect that this light tan is unreadable but white on white. Oh, there we go. Maybe it's the transparent background that's causing the issue.\r\n\r\nMaybe but now it's appearing for you see, like it appeared for it and then it went away.\r\n\r\nI don't know.\r\n\r\nSeems a little finicky.\r\n\r\nAnd now it's not\r\n\r\nlike this is perfectly readable. Well, there's this feature WordPress called the color contrast detector that is usually very reliable, but it looks like a matter of regression WordPress 6.6 And yeah, is exactly for this is to help detect and help surface to you when your color choices have become very hard to read like this one.\r\n\r\nIt takes into account Yeah, that colors and because of using the block editor all those things are kind of like done in a very declarative way. So WordPress is kind of able to detect a reliable usually and match what's going on there. It probably is related to this transparency thing but even then see, like black on black. It should that's that has worked perfectly. I've seen that working in the past.\r\n\r\nI don't know. Let's change that. Welcome to live remote folks. Yep, um, but yeah, so that's definitely a thing. That's their narrow you know, WordPress has to blend the line of that you can do whatever you want in the site and or on the block editor. You can make content that is very ugly and unreadable and inaccessible.\r\n\r\nBut for the most part, we're best just trying to guide you towards the right. pattern. That is, that is awesome. Okay, question from Vern about the download counter. Does it differentiate between automated downloads and manual ones? I don't think so. No, I think this is just all hits to the API.\r\n\r\nYeah.\r\n\r\nLet's see. Sue would like to know if there are any popular plugins or tools that you've heard of that have report reported problems on 6.6?\r\n\r\nNot that I've heard of yet.\r\n\r\nIf we go on over to the forums, though, there is a post that comes up every release. Yep.\r\n\r\nFor\r\n\r\nthe forum is for hey, here are bugs here issues. And we also get a link gone over to a page with themes and plugins and kind of other things to be aware of. So if you're not already in the WordPress forums, that WordPress forums team is staff staff, that is the wrong word is I'm gonna use the word staff because it's the correct word for what I'm about to say, which is staff with a team of great volunteers. So be kind, but yeah, if you're not over in the WordPress forms, all the volunteers over there, do a fantastic job.\r\n\r\nAnd yeah, you'll see things get reported in here and they'll make their way to kind of like no issues, lists, and things like that. But yeah, always, always check out the forums. They're an exciting time as well, right after release comes out. Because it's when everyone comes and says, Hey, this is broken.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, the forum is the best place to check that.\r\n\r\nIndeed. Final question, folks. By the way, if you have a question to ask if you haven't done so drop that in now, this is our last question in the list from John. Is there a way to have rounded corners on maybe a row or a column? Absolutely. It's just not done how you would think they were done is probably issue it's not exposed as rounded corners being an option but through borders so I'm gonna go ahead and put this block into a group then go over into border and set a radius\r\n\r\nokay, this is there are two layers of black that are happening here. Let me get this background out of the way and go here and put a background on our group block\r\n\r\nadded some padding to make this not horrible.\r\n\r\nAnd you can see we've got our rounded corners here. But yeah, so there's no option in the UI that's just like, hey, here's how you do rounded corners, but they're exposed through the border controls. But yeah, the thing you have to be aware of is that border controls aren't available in everything. I can see here. This is just text. They don't have border controls. They need to be kind of like on block elements like groups. So a handy thing that you can do whenever you need that ability is to just put a put a group block around what you're trying to style.\r\n\r\nYeah, and we are working here in core WordPress and the core blocks if you're a Kadence user, it is way easier to do all of this. Virtually, virtually every element will have some sort of a rounded corner ability. Yeah.\r\n\r\nLet's see.\r\n\r\nTheresa is WordPress thinking about working with AI? This question was asked this weekend this past weekend. at WordCamp Canada. Is there any discussion of moving any sort of AI something into core WordPress that you're aware of Timothy?\r\n\r\nNot that I've seen yet. So it's tricky because most\r\n\r\nAI features are things that you usually need a service to connect to. And so it would be super cost prohibitive for wordpress.org to just offer this for free. So what we're seeing is different plugins build integrations with either open AI or their own hosted models and things like that. Now.\r\n\r\nThere is a feature and I think one of Google Chrome's Canary builds where they are added a JavaScript API that talks to I believe, a locally hosted version of one of their Gemini models.\r\n\r\nGoogle being Google isn't going through any standards track as of yet to develop this API and it's not prefixed with Google or anything like that. But it creates I think, it's like a window.ai dot txt generator object or things like that, that lets you do things with AI through JavaScript with a model that's local to your computer, which kind of solves the problem of hey, we need to either pay open API money to get our you know, API request. Fulfilled. So I haven't seen anything with WordPress Core specifically yet, because there's that problem, but as locally hosted models become more and more of a thing. I think that can be pretty interesting. For instance, the Mac OS features that are coming later this year, around like AI, content writing and editing and things like that, where I can just, you know, select Content Anywhere in an app that has, you know, a native text input that works with text, and I can just say, hey, rewrite this for me to make it shorter, more professional, etc. In my personal opinion, that's where I see like more of these AI features going I think it's strange that I would need to, you know, have a grammerly ai extension and an AI extension inside of WordPress and like, tons of different AI things to like, help me write text better to me that feels like a feature that makes sense to just have built into the EO s. And so I think as we see those things, kind of like expand more and get integrated into browser API's and things like that. You can imagine a browser API that lets you, as a developer, say, hey, rewrite this to be shorter and it rely entirely on the local model on your Mac.\r\n\r\nI think that is, in my opinion, that like more exciting place for things to go particularly with like a privacy perspective and all these other things.\r\n\r\nThere's probably still room for like, for instance, jetpack has like just lock that lets you like ask it to help you write a blog post and things like that. There's probably still room for that for folks who don't have computers that can run vocally hosted models that are advanced enough to be useful, but at least me personally, I find it more exciting.\r\n\r\nThat the ability to like you know, help rewrite content and do things like that is just available natively in my iOS so I can use it in pages, or Ulysses, which is my Markdown editor of choice or anywhere on the web, and I don't have to think about oh, do I have an open AI subscription here? Is there a plugin that specific to whatever content authoring tool I'm using? If I'm writing a readme in my IDE for writing code, it could help me there like I feel like that is the better way this Bucha Yeah, that's a great answer. It's this age old question of what should be in core versus what should be a plug in WordPress, being open source and being built with extendibility. as just part of the, you know, the way we do things, it's a question that's asked about a lot of things that you could even say that as popular as SEO is, SEO is not built into core other than a sitemap.\r\n\r\nYeah, I and I did see I think I think it was a ticket and might have just been to make thread or make common response, right. I think I saw a ticket on adding in support. We have this feature WordPress for a long time. That says, hey, please discourage search engines reading. Please discourage search engines from indexing the site. I saw someone bring up like, hey, maybe WordPress should offer another button here that says discourage MLMs from scraping my website for content and add the necessary robots dot txt entries for that as like a place that you know, core would be speaking there. I kind of happen to think that it would make sense for us to offer a button to make that easy for folks who want to but yeah, there's a lot of questions about what should be the core what are the defaults when you've got to hit Close the counter page? But it's gonna say when you got X million sites updated to WordPress, there's a lot of out of consideration on on what features make it into core indeed. Or Timothy As always, this has been great. Appreciate your expertise and information. Any final thoughts as we wrapping up?\r\n\r\nI try our best to explain six if you haven't played around with a full site editor theme. Thank you, Bill and try it out. I think it's always exciting to see where things are going and play with block patterns. I would say really think about pattern overrides and how you can use them. If you're building sites for clients. i It's the feature that I'm personally most excited about and we're best six months six. I think it's extraordinarily powerful.\r\n\r\nAnd really gets you into that space of okay, this site looks like the front end of my website, but my client can't just completely break the layout, maybe hitting the delete key one too many times. So I think it's really cool feature I play with it if you haven't.\r\n\r\nVery good we'll focus on dropping in the link bundle one final time before we wrap up here. We'll have the replay of this event up in about an hour as soon as the video renders. So you can share this out this excellent overview of six dots six out with all your friends. Also if you are not already signed up for our news roundup that's coming up tomorrow at one o'clock Central that's give me an hour and I'll get you up to date on all the things in WordPress. All the news specifically aimed at those of us who are doing WordPress things with clients. So that's going to wrap us up for it today. Timothy, thanks once again, and we'll see you all back tomorrow for news roundup, one o'clock Central here on the solid Academy where we go further together.\r\n\r\nTranscribed by https:\/\/otter.ai\r\n","livestream_vimeo_video_id":985173199,"livestream-resources-group":"s:34:\"a:1:{s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}\";","multi-day_replay_details":"s:102:\"a:2:{s:16:\"course-resources\";a:1:{i:0;a:1:{s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}}s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}\";"}},"postCountOnPage":1,"postCountTotal":1,"postID":448554,"postFormat":"standard","geoCloudflareCountryCode":"US"}; dataLayer.push( dataLayer_content ); \nGrid Block\n\n\n\nNegative Margins\n\n\n\nA Unified Publishing Flow\n\n\n\nAnd more!\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n","livestream_chat_log":"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1CYn04wFycG2Czl-o_HyWI-NQD9XcoVTT\/view?usp=sharing","livestream_live_transcript_url":"https:\/\/otter.ai\/u\/EamxQIon_6oe6gCgXdRfFRRztX4?utm_source=copy_url","livestream_live_transcript_text":"slides today and this is all live demos so nothing to download. Edie? Yes 6.6 dropped Well, the first notice I got was about an hour ago. They usually slowly roll that out\r\n\r\nfor your sites, gradually notice that it's available\r\n\r\nagain, welcome everybody. If you're just joining us open up the chat say hello. Caption should now be working for everyone.\r\n\r\nLooking forward to a demo of WordPress six, six with Timothy Jacobs. He's going to walk us through all the things and answer your questions.\r\n\r\nHey Kylie, welcome.\r\n\r\nA bin both Ben's class welcome. Hey Ken.\r\n\r\nAll right, I'm going to drop in a link bundle. Again, no downloads today but the replay link is there. We'll have that up about an hour after we finish. So you can share that out with folks. Also, if you haven't registered for tomorrow's news roundup that's a free live stream one o'clock Central the same time tomorrow, looking at all the WordPress news over the last month or so.\r\n\r\nWe've got about three minutes to go before we get started officially with Welcome to WordPress 6.6 which just dropped a little bit of go you can download it for real now\r\n\r\nbut as you're coming in, open up the chat say hi, tell us where you are logging in from today. Hey, John from Chicago welcome.\r\n\r\nCouple of Greensboro folks getting connected there in the chat.\r\n\r\nSo Sue is what would you is it Green's burrow Ian, what would you say?\r\n\r\nHey, Richard from Tampa, Stephanie from Germany. Welcome.\r\n\r\nCouple minutes to go, folks, before we get started officially we'll get going at three minutes after all about WordPress 6.6 which just dropped a little while ago. Hey Bill from Virginia welcome also Vern from West Virginia.\r\n\r\nGreat to see everybody coming in.\r\n\r\nNo slides today this is all live live demo. So Timothy will be walking us through all the things right here live. This is being recorded though, and we'll have the replay up at the link that I just dropped in the chat. And if you've not already done so register for tomorrow's news roundup. That will be the same time tomorrow.\r\n\r\nJust a little over a minute to go.\r\n\r\nOnce again, welcome everybody. If you more folks just joining open the chat say hi and tell us where you are logging in from today. Just about a minute to go before we get started.\r\n\r\nAll live demo today nothing to download. Hey Sadie from Scotland.\r\n\r\nAbout 30 seconds to go hey Teresa from Germany welcome\r\n\r\nI probably just mispronounced your name\r\n\r\nis it Teresita perhaps.\r\n\r\nYeah, it is Prime Day on a another little rabbit trail there.\r\n\r\nHopefully everybody's not spending all their money today.\r\n\r\nJust about ready to get started. Alright, it's three minutes after. Let's start. The recording and we'll dive in with WordPress 6.6.\r\n\r\nWell, good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening. Welcome everybody to another solid Academy livestream and glad you're all with us today. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at solid Academy joined today by Timothy Jacobs, the lead developer for solid WP Welcome back, Timothy. How are things in your world today? Doing good, you know, trying to survive.\r\n\r\nHeatwave number 75 or whatever it is right up in New York but yeah, doing okay. Excellent. So WordPress 6.6. Just started appearing in WordPress installs in the last couple of hours. So we didn't talk about this, but how does this rollout actually work? When they're dropping a new version of WordPress, you guys so it's kind of a multi step thing.\r\n\r\nA bit before the WordPress release goes out there. It's kind of like a, hey, we all know this is coming type of thing. And then yeah, the basically the API gets updated. And sites check kind of like I think every hour at this point and I'll check for that. Update and then start auto updating if you have that available, which has been the default since I think WordPress five, six.\r\n\r\nAnd then yeah, you can go to what's the page I think wordpress.org\/stats will give you a live feed which is kind of fun to watch during the first. No, this isn't the one. I mean, if you're going to find it, and I know you've gotten me off on a tangent. Yeah, we didn't talk about this at all. I just came to me right as we were starting. But there's a cool little I think it's called counter. Let me see one right yeah, here we go. Um, so this fun one during release, because what you'll see is when we get up to like WordPress 6.7 It's about time to do it. This number will be way higher.\r\n\r\nBut it's, yeah, it gets quite out there but this is a fun one to watch. And the day of the release. Because yeah, you'll see all the sites across the Web Start to update. So yeah, usually it starts happening basically immediately if you're the luck of the draw the first new checks that our but yeah, it's there's a big old button kind of you can think of that they pressed to make the disco go out. Amazing. So for those of you that aren't aware, as I mentioned before, Timothy is the lead developer for us here at solid WP Timothy is also a core committer to WordPress and one of the maintainers of the WordPress REST API. So Timothy you do a lot of work with core\r\n\r\nit when these updates come out, are we at a point now where you'd recommend auto updating core WordPress? So yeah, I am a big proponent of auto updating repurpose for when we had this conversation around WordPress 5.6 and make chat in Slack Yeah, I was all for it. Um, I am a big believer in auto updates in general, particularly with WordPress core itself. I think the thing that you want to consider is that if you have lots of plugins that are breaking your site on every update that you potentially consider switching plugin that always astonishes me and you know, maybe one day I'll get caught by this but it always astonishes me when WordPress 6.6 releases and XYZ very large theme or XYZ very large plugin releases an update 12 hours later that's like fixed compatibly with WordPress 6.6. We've known that WordPress 6.6 has been a release from the state for like four months.\r\n\r\nSo yeah, I'm kind of in the opinion, yes, you should use auto updates. And if you find your site breaking all the time after it gets auto updated.\r\n\r\nThat you know maybe there's a different plugin out there that solves your needs.\r\n\r\nYeah, I mean, when we add salad, we start running our automated tests on trunk, you know, so we're testing the latest version. Basically, immediately we're I guess, starting tomorrow our tests are gonna be running on against WordPress 6.7. And so that doesn't catch everything. But it does always surprise me when you see a plugin or theme that like fatal airing on WordPress on the new version of WordPress. And it's in a code path that like runs against everything because I think as developers we should be running WordPress nightly. Basically, always well writing code and testing your plugins and have automated tests running. So it's one thing if there's an edge case and an edge case and this thing over here, there's an issue. Yeah, but when it's like, yeah, we need to release this update. So 200 out of our 300,000 users use the plugin. I feel like it's\r\n\r\nthere's another conversation that needs to be had. I love it. Well, thanks for letting me take you down that trail. We hadn't talked about that. But I think it's interesting and this I think this is the first time we've shown this counter and we're 1.7 million installs already. All right. So keep going. You know, if I if I had a more sophisticated setup, I would like share that in the corner of my screen and we could see where it lands we could place bets to see where we'd be in an hour. Anyway, I'm gonna navigate away from this and everyone can bet what they think it'll be when we finish which is both betting one how fast the number of installs are gonna go up into how long I'm going to demo for and either those two things yet so we'll see. Okay, so I'm game for that. So right now folks put your there's no price other than you know, just the personal thrill of knowing that you won this, but drop it in the chat your guests for how many downloads will be when Timothy completes the demo. Before we go to q&a. I will go back to the camera card and just say an hour from now.\r\n\r\nRight. All right. So I'll grab these chats and we'll come back to this at the end. So today we're going to walk through all the new features in WordPress six 610 Many thanks for doing this. i One other note of housekeeping before I disappear. There were a few notes first, there are no downloads. This is all live demo. There's no there's not a slide deck. Second of all, if you'd like to ask questions, please use the zoom q&a. You can find that by mousing over the shared screen and clicking on the q&a icon there. And I would just invite you to keep that window open the whole time because other folks questions will appear there. And if you also have that question, click the thumbs up icon and we'll take the questions on the order of votes. This is being recorded. I'll drop in the links to the replay which will be available about an hour after we wrap up today. So with that I'll disappear Timothy. Let's get into six six. Yeah, let's do it. So as usual, per the last couple years releases most of this is gonna be about Gutenberg excited or block editor stuff. But there are two things that I wanted to cover first.\r\n\r\nOne is rollbacks for plugin auto updates. So this is pretty cool.\r\n\r\nIf you have auto updates enabled, which like we just talked about, I'm a big fan of a new feature in WordPress 6.6 is that after an update happens WordPress is going to check and make a request back to your site and make sure it's still online. And if it detects that there is a fatal error, it's going to roll back that plugin update for you automatically. Now this isn't just like a general purpose feature like there's the WP rollbacks plug in and things like that, where you can go into WP admin and say hey, roll back to the previous or something like that. This is an automated kind of level of protection around auto updates specifically. So if you know the plugin starts crashing, you know 10 hours from now this feature isn't going to check it recovery mode. Well. We did a talk on recovery mode, I think a long time ago at this point.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, it's a pretty cool feature to add. A little bit of resiliency and another another band aid along WordPress auto updates, you can feel a bit more confident enabling it.\r\n\r\nThe other thing, which I don't even think yeah is listed in this page because it really shouldn't affect anyone, but I think it is part of the field guide which if you haven't seen the field guide is this awesome post over and make that wordpress.org that talks about all of the new features and bug fixes that happened in the release. And the big thing here to mention is that dropping support for PHP seven Neto and 7.1 has happened so if you are one on if you're one of those few people back and one of these ancient PHP versions get updated.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, that is no longer gonna be supported as a WordPress 6.6 Your Site won't crash. It just won't update to WordPress six months, I guess if you're on those older versions, WordPress 6.6 is gonna get a little bit challenging to say all the time. Let's see how it goes. All right. With those two things out of the way, let's dive in. So we're gonna start with a site editor. The site editor has a feature that we've talked about before called data views. And this is kind of like the technical code word kind of similar to WP list tables if you're familiar with that and WordPress, and I did if you've got a quote update in WordPress 6.6. So we have this Pages section here which I've showed off in 6.5. It's been enhanced a bit. So I can go through and I can see all of my published pages. I can see my drafts, things that are private trash, etc.\r\n\r\nWhat's really cool is that this list area over here update what I see in the main canvas. So if I want to take a look at the sample page, I can take a look at the sample page and it's gonna update really quickly. If I want I can dive in and start editing this content right away.\r\n\r\nData views also give me more control over how I can view this information. So right now I'm viewing it in this view, but if I want I can view it as a table and I get this kind of familiar interface similar to what you'd see in WP admin. Or I can go ahead and switch it over to a grid view. And this will bring in the featured images for me, but I'm gonna go ahead and set it back to the list view because I think that's a pretty helpful way to get a quick browse to the content of your site.\r\n\r\nData views have also get used throughout this kind of like site editor designed the other places in the templates manager. So we can see the templates now show these four previews. Previously, there was also this kind of like intermediary page that was kind of really confusing when you started thinking about it where if you would click on this, it would give you some details over here in the sidebar, but now they just simply drop you into the editor. So if you want to go ahead and edit a template, it's just one click away from the data Views section.\r\n\r\nThe next place that we get an update is over in the pattern section and that's also going to take us to my favorite feature I think of WordPress 6.6. But we'll see our patterns, we can browse our template parts here as well. They're kind of all combined into this pattern section. But another thing that's pretty cool is that list the data views give me kind of similar to bulk actions that we have in lists tables I can do in the data views view. So I can select multiple patterns going over here and I can click this export as JSON button. And it's going to export all of these patterns for me in one big JSON file that I could go ahead and import into another site. And so this is all kind of being powered by the diffuse API. Now, I mentioned this next cool feature that has to do with patterns. It's called pattern overrides. And this is something I'm very excited about. I've given a couple of variations of like talks about a feature like this, which is hey, how do we give all the power of the block editor and this really rich interactive editing, but how do we constrain it down for users in a way that's more understandable? And how can we use it in places across our site?\r\n\r\nAnd this has been building up for kind of a number of releases. Now we got content only editing mode and number WordPress, really physical at this point. And we'll see that in preview here. This is kind of working similarly to the changes where we got synced patterns. And then that's the transition. If you remember from reusable blocks, we started talking about them in synced patterns a couple of releases ago. And this also is a little bit similar, I think to the block bindings API and HTML stuff and all of that combined to do something that I think is really cool. So I took this pattern here from the pattern directory on make that work best Edward is this cool one here?\r\n\r\nLet him roll. And what I've done is I've added in my new pattern and pasted in that HTML.\r\n\r\nAnd then what I've done is I've said, hey, I want the users of my site to be able to edit this pattern. But I don't want them to see like the full power of this editor. I want them to be able to like change all of these colors, change the background change the structure. I want to make the editing experience for them. Very simple. And the way that you do that is if you select your block, you'll probably need to open up the block toolbar. There's this new section in advance called overrides and what you do is for each bit of content that you want a user to be able to override, you click the button here right now it says disabled overrides. So if I go ahead and hit disable overrides this text is now going to always be part of the pattern. And it's not something that my users would be able to edit. But I hitting enable overrides and giving it a title. In this case description.\r\n\r\nThis now becomes a property that of the pattern that my users are able to customize whenever they use the pattern. So let's see what that looks like. I'm gonna navigate over to the Pages section, going over to the sample page. And I've inserted this pattern into my content. So I'm going to go ahead and delete this and reinsert it so you can see exactly what happens. We go into the inserter select for patterns, my patterns and that block you CTA is what I called it and so now if we open up the sidebar, we can see that I have this content only mode. So I don't have the ability to like change this color, change the structure move text around, but what I can do is that at this text, so if I wanted to say you know do some live chat history here, say it was recorded in 1975. I can make that change this shop now button. I could say let's make it by now. And I can change the link. That's the link gone over to amazon.com.\r\n\r\nAnd, you know, we want to get grammatically correct on them or something like that, let's say let them roll, you know, really take the personality out of this pattern. But you can see now I've made all these changes here and I can go ahead and hit Save. And when I go to the front end of my website, I have this pattern with my changes, but because this is still a sync pattern, if I go back on over, and I think yeah, I even get this handy little button here. Let's let's try and use it. Edit original.\r\n\r\nI can now make modifications to this pattern. So if I wanted to change this color, let's say to this red and hit save.\r\n\r\nI am right now editing the pattern here.\r\n\r\nAnd if I refresh the page, you can see that that's been changed. So what synced patterns with overrides are doing is they're letting me create a pattern. Say hey, these are the specific bits that I want you to be able to edit. But I as like you know the site designer or you know the site owner or anything like that. I can make structural changes to this pattern. And those will be reflected across my site without the user needing to make any changes, update the post anything like that they just happen automatically. And so in this case, I'm using it for a CTA there's lots of other places where you can use this that I think would be very effective things like a testimonial section. You know, you perhaps have a testimonial style that you want to use throughout your site. You want to make it really easy to insert your testimonials. But of course each testimonial is different. And you can't just say hey, use the same testimonial everywhere you want to say use a testimonial on this page. Use another testimonial on the other page, but we decide hey, we want to change the font that we use for the testimonial. You can easily do that.\r\n\r\nRight now the way patterns ended up getting stored into the post.\r\n\r\nLet's see how do I go back here?\r\n\r\nThey're not a back button.\r\n\r\nI don't think so we're just going to refresh.\r\n\r\nThe way that the pattern actually gets stored is if we take a look at the code editor you can see that the overrides are all in the block attributes. So it's just a part of the actual page content. What I would love to see in the future is potentially the ability to save those to like post meta, like we do with kind of other block bindings, which I think would be very cool and kind of bridges that gap between like custom post types and the thing that a developer would set up for you and something that an end user could potentially just do in the block Editor inside editor all by themselves.\r\n\r\nOkay, we're gonna go back on into the site editor now for some more features.\r\n\r\nSo this is another cool one, which is the ability to update a background image for your entire site. So we've had this feature in the customizer for a long time where you can like add theme support background images, but we can now do this in the actual site as well. So if I go over into the Layout tab for global styles, I can say add a background image and I'm going to go ahead and choose a subtle pattern that I got from subtle patterns.com. And we can see that this pattern is now applied as the main background for my site. So I'm gonna go ahead and save that and we can view the changes here.\r\n\r\nAnd so this works very similarly to how the custom background images worked with the customizer, where this is applying a background to the body tag places where there is you know, a background color applied like we see here in this menu item will of course lay over it.\r\n\r\nBut this lets you set up a background image across your entire site.\r\n\r\nI'm gonna go ahead and remove that. I'm gonna do that by just hitting reset all and it will remove all of the background images for me as well. This control is pretty nice, and you'll also see it for just editing elsewhere. In your site on a per block basis like a group Bach for instance, you can set a background image using the same kind of control but most new is being able to do it for the entire site.\r\n\r\nAnother cool feature is pattern switching. So I have this header here and my theme 2024 comes with a bunch of different variations for it. Previously, you could kind of head up into the sidebar or into the navigation excuse me and switch between patterns there. But the sidebar gains a new option here which is this design tab. And you know show me all the different patterns for the template part that I have on my site. So if I want to easily switch between them.\r\n\r\nI can do that with just one click and get a small visual preview of what they look like. In the sidebar here. I'm going to try and figure out which one was it that I have before that one\r\n\r\nbetter, let's stick with this one. I think that's what it was. Yes.\r\n\r\nThe next thing that I want to go over is some changes to the featured image block or two featured images in general. So I'm gonna go ahead and pull up the template for a single which one do we want it we could do the single page or we could do\r\n\r\nlet's do the single page I guess. So let's grab page with sidebar.\r\n\r\nAnd so this is the featured image block. But the featured image block doesn't give you a lot of controls. So let's say I want to have a little bit of a cooler coolers of beings objective layout here I'm gonna go ahead and insert the media and TextBlock and what I can do with the media and textbox now is that I can select Hey, for the image here I want to use the featured image and so I'm gonna then get rid of the featured image block. And what I'm also going to do is put the title in there as well and get rid of the paragraph. And I'll go ahead and press Delete.\r\n\r\nAnd so we can see now I have this media and textbox and I have all of the controls on here that I'm used to but when I've used my site, it's going to be doing this with the featured image as opposed to just a static image that I would always be using.\r\n\r\nLet's see if we can get a good demo of that. I think we might need to\r\n\r\nhere we go page with sidebar.\r\n\r\nIt save the page. And there we go. So you can see that it's using the featured image that I have selected.\r\n\r\nSo if I went ahead and changed the featured image to that say this one\r\n\r\nwill see the front end of my site has been updated. There.\r\n\r\nYou also have more controls with shadow. So let me see if I can.\r\n\r\nI thought this was enabled on the media and textbook but maybe it isn't.\r\n\r\nOkay, so let's undo these changes that we made to this template.\r\n\r\nSo we can use the new box shadow features. So I can now enable box shadows for the featured image block so by default, we get a couple of different options. So this one looks kind of cool. So we'll select that one.\r\n\r\nAnd we'll go ahead and hit Save.\r\n\r\nAnd we can see we're now using the box shadow feature here. But let's say none of these box shadows really speak to me. And I want to do something about custom. We can do that now. So if I go into shadows, you can see here the different shadows that are provided by default with WordPress. But if I wanted to I could create a custom shadow. So I'll go in here and now I have a whole bunch of controls. I can select a color. I can make it an inset shadow versus an outside shadow I could change the positioning is a blur, make it spread less or more all of these different options here that's maybe position it like this very funky and we'll hit save.\r\n\r\nLet's call this I don't know, big pink shadow.\r\n\r\nNow when I go over into the featured image box, I can select that shadow instead.\r\n\r\nVery I'm a very good designer, folks, you know this looks perfect but yeah, so you get more and more control over shadows now with WordPress 6.6. You can use them in your featured image block, apparently not media and text or I just missed the button for it. And you can also create custom shadows and edit the shadows that come with WordPress for the next feature I'm going to talk about I found a little bit confusing, I'll be honest, but it is called color palettes. Oops. I just thought color palettes and section styling. So I'm going to enable this theme here this kind of like I think a beta theme it's still being worked on actively called assembler.\r\n\r\nAnd the reason why I'm switching to assembler is because it provides these color palettes and section styles.\r\n\r\nSo if we go on into the site editor, we can see this is the homepage that I have set up and under styles you can see we only really have one style, but we have tons of different palettes use me and so this is that kind of feature that WordPress is introducing here, where you kind of get like a lightweight version of theme style. So while theme styles can control tons of different things like shape and layout and ordering and sizing and all this different stuff. The kind of like color palettes are just color palettes are just about defining a set of colors and using them and you can also set kind of like font packs. So you can see that here where it's changing like the body font and the header fonts all in one go.\r\n\r\nSo I'm gonna go back to I think I had this one selected was maybe it.\r\n\r\nYeah, maybe this is right, I don't know. But another cool way that this interacts is that we then get these features called Section styling so I'm going to select this parent group here and hop on over to the Style section and you can see a control that's similar to what you have on blocks. But this is for sections. So this is applying basically a set of colors to an entire section. of content in one go. So it's setting both like inner blocks and outer blocks, and it's using the color palettes that my team has set up.\r\n\r\nI'm also able to I believe, customize these. So if I go on into browsing the styles oops No, not that one into the group block.\r\n\r\nI can see these different style variations and if I wanted to I can make changes. So for instance, if I want this text color to be a custom color, not one from my themes, color palette, I could go ahead and change that.\r\n\r\nFrom what I can tell your theme kind of has to like get this started for you. I don't think there's any way to like create style variations entirely within the site editor on your own yet, but they are able to be done in different like feedback, JSON configurations through PHP, stuff like that. So this is a pretty cool feature. I think it could be helpful for like agencies and things like that where you might want to have a couple of different options for how people can assemble sections of content and color them without needing to create patterns for every different variation or needing to tell people that hey, when you want this to look like this, you need to go ahead and switch the background to this color, the text color to this color, the link color to that color. You can kind of all wrapped up in one of these like default styles.\r\n\r\nThese aren't really part of WordPress, the 2024 default theme, I imagine they will be with the 2025 theme. So that's why I'm demoing it with this some of the theme is supposed to 2024 but it is a possibility.\r\n\r\nNow as we get into the block editor, or before we get into the block editor, I wanted to talk about another kind of cool feature that comes to non full site editor block seeds. So I'm gonna switch over to Kadence.\r\n\r\nHere what you'll see is we've had this patterns menu here for a long time but it kind of gave you a really might say ugly interface that WordPress generated by default, where it's just like another list table kind of like this one, and you didn't get a really visual experience that was nice. But now patterns even in non full site editor themes, use the new site editor patterns of view. And so we can see here this is Kadence Kadence isn't a full site editor theme but of course has some cool patterns available. You can see a whole bunch of these ones that come from WooCommerce. You can also see the patterns that I've created and you can do all the things that you would expect to do. We can go in and you know, edit this pattern. Go back. And if we're done, we can just go back to the WordPress dashboard.\r\n\r\nThere's two reasons why I wanted to mention it. One I think this is cool if you're not yet using a false identity or theme to be able to get much better pattern management experience because I think patterns are one of the best features about the block editor and full site editing. But the other thing I think is really interesting about this is that is kind of like the first step of what you might have heard of as the WP admin redesign. So this is a project that is a big thing and phase three of Gutenberg where we find ourselves and we'll be seeing over the next couple of WordPress releases. And what I think is super interesting here is that this is this first foray into this kind of new navigation experience even if I'm not using a full site editor for you. So we can see that here have kind of like maybe a preview of what it might look like for the site and redesign for themes that aren't all aboard the full site editor train.\r\n\r\nBut we're gonna go ahead back and I'm going to switch on over to 2024 again as we dive into the block editor.\r\n\r\nSo you might have seen one of these changes when I was going about some of my demos earlier, which is that the site editor and the page editor have kind of merged together.\r\n\r\nPreviously, we first had the page editor slash post editor and then WordPress introduced the site editor a whole number of releases ago, and there were two distinct editors they made use of a lot of the same building blocks, but there were two pretty big code bases that were different.\r\n\r\nAnd so that led to some kind of like tricky experiences. If you were a theme developer plugin developer, where you kind of had to extend the editor differently in different contexts, which was annoying. For the WordPress core team. It also meant they had to maintain more kind of duplicate code than they wanted to. And so what's happened in WordPress 6.6 Is that the site editors and the post editors have kind of combined, they're still not 100% exactly the same code, but they're kind of like built on top of each other in a more thoughtful manner to share more bits. So it should be easier if you're plugin developer to write code that works in both the site editor and the post editor without as much complication.\r\n\r\nThere are though some changes that have actually populated their way into the user side of this. This is like a kind of like technical change, but there are some user ramifications. And one of those which you might have seen when we were looking at it earlier, when I was changing the template is that the kind of like post meta information handled here is different. It looks a lot more like what it looks like in the site editor. And these are all now pretty consistent with each other. So if I want to change the status, I open this up and a panel appears to the left. If I want to change the date that has to be published, the link, the author, any of these things, they all kind of have a very unified interface whereas before it was a little bit hodgepodge.\r\n\r\nI can also easily set a featured image just from the top here, whereas previously this was kind of like embedded in its own panel down below. And I can also quickly add an expert. So if I want to say come to my cool event on some date, I can go ahead and do that. And my excerpt gets populated and it's all in this one panel.\r\n\r\nThe other thing that I want to mention here while we're looking at this bit of code, I'm not going to go through the full demo for block bindings. You can check out the WordPress 6.5 review that we did to kind of like see how this is built. But this is a block pattern that I have set up with a block binding for the URL for this button here. And what's new, as you can see that this is now populated in the actual editor UI. So you can see that hey, the URL for this button block is being saved to post meta. It doesn't say what post meta key it does specifically, which I find a bit unfortunate and I think it'd be valuable if we did display that information or made it accessible. But you can now at least see what attributes are bound together. The other thing is that now if I make changes here, slash WordPress this value is now actually getting saved to post meta. Previously, you would have to update the post meta value separately. But now this is actually editable through the UI. So there have been some new features here, available for folks that are using block binding and so still a really like kind of complicated developer feature at this point, but is making forward progress, which is what we'd like to see.\r\n\r\nrounding the corners, we have a couple other block editor features that I want to go ahead and show you I'm going to create a new post here and\r\n\r\nwe're going to drop in a pattern and then I'm going to go into a call to action. Let's say I want to call to action pattern here. And or maybe we want a banner pattern.\r\n\r\nYeah, sure. Let's just pick this banner pattern here. What you'll see is that we now have a new ability to quickly cycle through patterns. So I inserted this one, maybe I want to get a preview of another one. I can click this shuffle button. And as you can choose another pattern of the same category for me. And so I can quickly cycle through a lot of different options. It would be great books.\r\n\r\nDid the editor crash? Nope. It just got into weird selection state.\r\n\r\nI think it'd be cool to I don't know maybe I can just like Undo to go back. Yeah, I can so I can cycle through them. See if there's one that I like oh, here we go. Another weird focus state thing that happens but you have to be on is the actual pattern route selection to see this shuffle up. But that's a little bit odd that it kind of keeps doing that. Whoa.\r\n\r\nWell, I would say hey, it's beta software, but WordPress 6.6. did release a few hours ago.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, there's a cool feature if you want to more easily find patterns that you have available to you go ahead and create another new page here to talk about CSS grid.\r\n\r\nSo we've had CSS grid has actually kind of been in WordPress for a little bit. It just hasn't really made itself known but it is now an official part of the group block. And CSS grid itself is a super big feature. There's a lot that it can do.\r\n\r\nAnd one of the things that I think the Gutenberg team is trying to figure out is exactly what CSS Grid features they want to expose to users and half. Right now there's kind of like two main modes in which CSS Grid works. One is I can do the manual mode. And so this says, hey, I want to use this many specific columns. So if I wanted to, for instance, I could set up like a, you know, a traditional 12 column grid. The thing to be aware of, though, is that if I'm setting up this 12 column grid, this isn't really responsive, so to speak. I'm going to get those 12 columns and that set.\r\n\r\nThe auto mode is kind of how CSS Grid takes on responsiveness, which is to say, hey, I want to create this layout and I need each grid item to take up at least this much space. That's how much it would be to look good. And beyond that point, you know, lay it out however you want. If they're using an iPad, a super wide desktop screen and iPhone, you figure it out. I just need each column to be at least this wide, and kind of fill as much space as you can with columns. And so this gives you the kind of more responsive option. So what do you do once you have CSS grids? Well, it's kind of like a combo box where you get your inserter. So I can go ahead and let's say create a paragraph block here. And we'll dump in some lorem ipsum text.\r\n\r\nI could in this next block, we could say let's put an image or grab something from the media library.\r\n\r\nWell grab some more text let's say let's make this text longer\r\n\r\nwell\r\n\r\nand I don't know if everyone another image that's put it in or maybe we put it out video. I don't have I spent another image we get one from the media library.\r\n\r\nOkay, so we can see I kind of have my columns. And if I go ahead and view this page, you can see it looks kind of like what I have here.\r\n\r\nBut the CSS Grid support doesn't kind of stop here. One of the things that's cool about CSS Grid is that I can do stylings on individual grid items. So let's say I want this text here, which is quite long. I want it to stretch across multiple columns. I can go ahead and do that. I can do that one just by dragging in the actual editor. But if I want I can go to the individual block, go into the dimensions panel and see that hey, this has been set to span two columns. So I want to I could also do this image and say, Hey, let's make this one span three columns. Now once in start spanning three columns, you can see that hey, I could also have things set up to span multiple rows. So if we go over here we can set this one to span two rows, and two columns. And we can see how it makes all of those changes happen.\r\n\r\nTo you know, take a look.\r\n\r\nBut we'll see that this also becomes responsive, where things shrink down, depending on the size of my screen.\r\n\r\nSo I think this is a pretty cool feature.\r\n\r\nThere's a lot more work that's kind of like going on with CSS Grid, one of which is like, right now you can see hey, I have this UI here, but I kind of have to like to keep going through the inserter to add in a new item that I want to add in. Maybe a cover block or something like that.\r\n\r\nMaybe uses\r\n\r\nthis whole thing in here and we could set the column span.\r\n\r\nSo I kind of have to like keep working through the inserter. But one of the things that the team is looking at, which I think could be very useful is the ability to just kind of draw things. So if we get rid of, let's say, this image here, there's kind of like an experiment where I could draw an item and say, hey, I want this to take over these two columns here and put it here.\r\n\r\nYeah, so that's what that's what I was showing you just a second ago, which is where as you kind of move through different screen sizes, because we're saying that each column must be a minimum amount of size, at least 12 rams. If they were to become smaller than 12 rams, it's going to collapse them.\r\n\r\nSo you can kind of like see that in action here. And then of course, when we get all the way small enough, you can really only have a one column layout, you're gonna have a one column layout.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, so this is kind of like taking those CSS Grid features and it's the start of making them accessible to folks who don't want to just use custom CSS. There isn't a way to make the columns even height right now. So that is a kind of mode of CSS Grid. And so that's kind of what I refer to with like, hey, the the team kind of has to figure out, you got another weird bug here.\r\n\r\nThe team kind of has to figure out what CSS Grid features they actually want to expose, and how they want to expose them.\r\n\r\nBecause yeah, what you can do with CSS Grid is you can say hey, I want each row height to be the same and distributed evenly. Or you can have the child items determine what the row height is. And so you have obviously different options that you're going to have to I guess wait and see how they get exposed. I think I think the team is still trying to figure it out.\r\n\r\nSo the next thing I really don't know what's I don't know if this is a safari thing, and what but the strange.\r\n\r\nThe last kind of feature that I want to talk about is negative margins. So I wonder actually, if there's a good pattern here that we could use to start showing this off\r\n\r\nyeah, let's start with this. So negative margins are a pretty powerful design tool.\r\n\r\nAnd I think partly because of that the team has decided that they don't want to make it\r\n\r\njust globally available.\r\n\r\nI think I need to be in the site editor right.\r\n\r\nNegative margins kind of let you overlay content and kind of break out of the box model.\r\n\r\nLet's see if we can get this to show up here. I'm not sure why I'm not seeing it in the image block I would have expected to maybe it's just not available on the image block at all.\r\n\r\nHere we go. So I have this dimensions thing here. And you'll see I can you know change the margin for my dimensions. We're going to unlock all of them. But I can't actually go negative through the UI and drag. But if I change this to an actual value, I can now set this value should be negative. And so what this lets me do is kind of overlay content on to each other. And kind of gives you the ability for more powerful designs. Now I think what I would really I don't know where the bug is here in terms of why one thing is gonna go the other thing but I guess you can see why. negative margins are something that you can't just do through the UI automatically.\r\n\r\nI think we probably need to like set a background of maybe like even Z index on this to like get it to appear more highly. But yeah, this is a feature that people have been kind of asking for it to be able to do. And you can now do it. But you just don't really get a lot of help. Basically, negative margins you get supported as value. The editor is not going to reject them anymore.\r\n\r\nBut it's not actually a control that I can just use in the site editor or the block editor itself. I need to actually input those values manually. But it lets you do kind of like cool things around like layering content layering images together.\r\n\r\nThey can let you achieve more powerful designs than you've been able to previously.\r\n\r\nThat being said it's time to check the counter because we are done with our official demo for WordPress 6.6 2.5 2 million. So congrats to anyone who got that one close. So all right. This is hilarious. So we had a few people guessed 2.5 million and then a late entry from Bill Christiansen said that okay, Susa 2.5 So I'm changing my guests to 2,500,001 So using the prices right strategy Bill has won the prize was competition. So congratulations.\r\n\r\nThe next vote up was Sadie with 3.2 million so Okay, everybody can give Bill their favorite emoji in the chat.\r\n\r\nWe're gonna have to remember to do this next time, Timothy. This was fun.\r\n\r\nYeah, he gets a new car. No. So yeah, everybody build their favorite emoji there in the chat be nice. And with that, we will turn our attention to some questions. Folks, if you have a question you haven't asked yet, use the zoom q&a to do that. Please also open that up and upvote any questions that you would like to hear answered? So that's funny. All right. First question here is from Teresa. This is a great one Timothy. The accessibility reinforcement act is going to be coming up in 2025. Is there an alert or anything planned for color combinations in WordPress in the block editor when you have, you know, maybe contrast issues? Yes, this is one of my favorite features that we've had for a long time in the WordPress editor is that it does this automatically if you are using the block editor. So I've got this white background and if I make this text well, don't you love demo fails.\r\n\r\nLet's see why isn't interfering? Here we go.\r\n\r\nIt's pretty curious why it is able to detect that this light tan is unreadable but white on white. Oh, there we go. Maybe it's the transparent background that's causing the issue.\r\n\r\nMaybe but now it's appearing for you see, like it appeared for it and then it went away.\r\n\r\nI don't know.\r\n\r\nSeems a little finicky.\r\n\r\nAnd now it's not\r\n\r\nlike this is perfectly readable. Well, there's this feature WordPress called the color contrast detector that is usually very reliable, but it looks like a matter of regression WordPress 6.6 And yeah, is exactly for this is to help detect and help surface to you when your color choices have become very hard to read like this one.\r\n\r\nIt takes into account Yeah, that colors and because of using the block editor all those things are kind of like done in a very declarative way. So WordPress is kind of able to detect a reliable usually and match what's going on there. It probably is related to this transparency thing but even then see, like black on black. It should that's that has worked perfectly. I've seen that working in the past.\r\n\r\nI don't know. Let's change that. Welcome to live remote folks. Yep, um, but yeah, so that's definitely a thing. That's their narrow you know, WordPress has to blend the line of that you can do whatever you want in the site and or on the block editor. You can make content that is very ugly and unreadable and inaccessible.\r\n\r\nBut for the most part, we're best just trying to guide you towards the right. pattern. That is, that is awesome. Okay, question from Vern about the download counter. Does it differentiate between automated downloads and manual ones? I don't think so. No, I think this is just all hits to the API.\r\n\r\nYeah.\r\n\r\nLet's see. Sue would like to know if there are any popular plugins or tools that you've heard of that have report reported problems on 6.6?\r\n\r\nNot that I've heard of yet.\r\n\r\nIf we go on over to the forums, though, there is a post that comes up every release. Yep.\r\n\r\nFor\r\n\r\nthe forum is for hey, here are bugs here issues. And we also get a link gone over to a page with themes and plugins and kind of other things to be aware of. So if you're not already in the WordPress forums, that WordPress forums team is staff staff, that is the wrong word is I'm gonna use the word staff because it's the correct word for what I'm about to say, which is staff with a team of great volunteers. So be kind, but yeah, if you're not over in the WordPress forms, all the volunteers over there, do a fantastic job.\r\n\r\nAnd yeah, you'll see things get reported in here and they'll make their way to kind of like no issues, lists, and things like that. But yeah, always, always check out the forums. They're an exciting time as well, right after release comes out. Because it's when everyone comes and says, Hey, this is broken.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, the forum is the best place to check that.\r\n\r\nIndeed. Final question, folks. By the way, if you have a question to ask if you haven't done so drop that in now, this is our last question in the list from John. Is there a way to have rounded corners on maybe a row or a column? Absolutely. It's just not done how you would think they were done is probably issue it's not exposed as rounded corners being an option but through borders so I'm gonna go ahead and put this block into a group then go over into border and set a radius\r\n\r\nokay, this is there are two layers of black that are happening here. Let me get this background out of the way and go here and put a background on our group block\r\n\r\nadded some padding to make this not horrible.\r\n\r\nAnd you can see we've got our rounded corners here. But yeah, so there's no option in the UI that's just like, hey, here's how you do rounded corners, but they're exposed through the border controls. But yeah, the thing you have to be aware of is that border controls aren't available in everything. I can see here. This is just text. They don't have border controls. They need to be kind of like on block elements like groups. So a handy thing that you can do whenever you need that ability is to just put a put a group block around what you're trying to style.\r\n\r\nYeah, and we are working here in core WordPress and the core blocks if you're a Kadence user, it is way easier to do all of this. Virtually, virtually every element will have some sort of a rounded corner ability. Yeah.\r\n\r\nLet's see.\r\n\r\nTheresa is WordPress thinking about working with AI? This question was asked this weekend this past weekend. at WordCamp Canada. Is there any discussion of moving any sort of AI something into core WordPress that you're aware of Timothy?\r\n\r\nNot that I've seen yet. So it's tricky because most\r\n\r\nAI features are things that you usually need a service to connect to. And so it would be super cost prohibitive for wordpress.org to just offer this for free. So what we're seeing is different plugins build integrations with either open AI or their own hosted models and things like that. Now.\r\n\r\nThere is a feature and I think one of Google Chrome's Canary builds where they are added a JavaScript API that talks to I believe, a locally hosted version of one of their Gemini models.\r\n\r\nGoogle being Google isn't going through any standards track as of yet to develop this API and it's not prefixed with Google or anything like that. But it creates I think, it's like a window.ai dot txt generator object or things like that, that lets you do things with AI through JavaScript with a model that's local to your computer, which kind of solves the problem of hey, we need to either pay open API money to get our you know, API request. Fulfilled. So I haven't seen anything with WordPress Core specifically yet, because there's that problem, but as locally hosted models become more and more of a thing. I think that can be pretty interesting. For instance, the Mac OS features that are coming later this year, around like AI, content writing and editing and things like that, where I can just, you know, select Content Anywhere in an app that has, you know, a native text input that works with text, and I can just say, hey, rewrite this for me to make it shorter, more professional, etc. In my personal opinion, that's where I see like more of these AI features going I think it's strange that I would need to, you know, have a grammerly ai extension and an AI extension inside of WordPress and like, tons of different AI things to like, help me write text better to me that feels like a feature that makes sense to just have built into the EO s. And so I think as we see those things, kind of like expand more and get integrated into browser API's and things like that. You can imagine a browser API that lets you, as a developer, say, hey, rewrite this to be shorter and it rely entirely on the local model on your Mac.\r\n\r\nI think that is, in my opinion, that like more exciting place for things to go particularly with like a privacy perspective and all these other things.\r\n\r\nThere's probably still room for like, for instance, jetpack has like just lock that lets you like ask it to help you write a blog post and things like that. There's probably still room for that for folks who don't have computers that can run vocally hosted models that are advanced enough to be useful, but at least me personally, I find it more exciting.\r\n\r\nThat the ability to like you know, help rewrite content and do things like that is just available natively in my iOS so I can use it in pages, or Ulysses, which is my Markdown editor of choice or anywhere on the web, and I don't have to think about oh, do I have an open AI subscription here? Is there a plugin that specific to whatever content authoring tool I'm using? If I'm writing a readme in my IDE for writing code, it could help me there like I feel like that is the better way this Bucha Yeah, that's a great answer. It's this age old question of what should be in core versus what should be a plug in WordPress, being open source and being built with extendibility. as just part of the, you know, the way we do things, it's a question that's asked about a lot of things that you could even say that as popular as SEO is, SEO is not built into core other than a sitemap.\r\n\r\nYeah, I and I did see I think I think it was a ticket and might have just been to make thread or make common response, right. I think I saw a ticket on adding in support. We have this feature WordPress for a long time. That says, hey, please discourage search engines reading. Please discourage search engines from indexing the site. I saw someone bring up like, hey, maybe WordPress should offer another button here that says discourage MLMs from scraping my website for content and add the necessary robots dot txt entries for that as like a place that you know, core would be speaking there. I kind of happen to think that it would make sense for us to offer a button to make that easy for folks who want to but yeah, there's a lot of questions about what should be the core what are the defaults when you've got to hit Close the counter page? But it's gonna say when you got X million sites updated to WordPress, there's a lot of out of consideration on on what features make it into core indeed. Or Timothy As always, this has been great. Appreciate your expertise and information. Any final thoughts as we wrapping up?\r\n\r\nI try our best to explain six if you haven't played around with a full site editor theme. Thank you, Bill and try it out. I think it's always exciting to see where things are going and play with block patterns. I would say really think about pattern overrides and how you can use them. If you're building sites for clients. i It's the feature that I'm personally most excited about and we're best six months six. I think it's extraordinarily powerful.\r\n\r\nAnd really gets you into that space of okay, this site looks like the front end of my website, but my client can't just completely break the layout, maybe hitting the delete key one too many times. So I think it's really cool feature I play with it if you haven't.\r\n\r\nVery good we'll focus on dropping in the link bundle one final time before we wrap up here. We'll have the replay of this event up in about an hour as soon as the video renders. So you can share this out this excellent overview of six dots six out with all your friends. Also if you are not already signed up for our news roundup that's coming up tomorrow at one o'clock Central that's give me an hour and I'll get you up to date on all the things in WordPress. All the news specifically aimed at those of us who are doing WordPress things with clients. So that's going to wrap us up for it today. Timothy, thanks once again, and we'll see you all back tomorrow for news roundup, one o'clock Central here on the solid Academy where we go further together.\r\n\r\nTranscribed by https:\/\/otter.ai\r\n","livestream_vimeo_video_id":985173199,"livestream-resources-group":"s:34:\"a:1:{s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}\";","multi-day_replay_details":"s:102:\"a:2:{s:16:\"course-resources\";a:1:{i:0;a:1:{s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}}s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}\";"}},"postCountOnPage":1,"postCountTotal":1,"postID":448554,"postFormat":"standard","geoCloudflareCountryCode":"US"}; dataLayer.push( dataLayer_content ); \nOverride Synced Patterns\n\n\n\nGrid Block\n\n\n\nNegative Margins\n\n\n\nA Unified Publishing Flow\n\n\n\nAnd more!\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n","livestream_chat_log":"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1CYn04wFycG2Czl-o_HyWI-NQD9XcoVTT\/view?usp=sharing","livestream_live_transcript_url":"https:\/\/otter.ai\/u\/EamxQIon_6oe6gCgXdRfFRRztX4?utm_source=copy_url","livestream_live_transcript_text":"slides today and this is all live demos so nothing to download. Edie? Yes 6.6 dropped Well, the first notice I got was about an hour ago. They usually slowly roll that out\r\n\r\nfor your sites, gradually notice that it's available\r\n\r\nagain, welcome everybody. If you're just joining us open up the chat say hello. Caption should now be working for everyone.\r\n\r\nLooking forward to a demo of WordPress six, six with Timothy Jacobs. He's going to walk us through all the things and answer your questions.\r\n\r\nHey Kylie, welcome.\r\n\r\nA bin both Ben's class welcome. Hey Ken.\r\n\r\nAll right, I'm going to drop in a link bundle. Again, no downloads today but the replay link is there. We'll have that up about an hour after we finish. So you can share that out with folks. Also, if you haven't registered for tomorrow's news roundup that's a free live stream one o'clock Central the same time tomorrow, looking at all the WordPress news over the last month or so.\r\n\r\nWe've got about three minutes to go before we get started officially with Welcome to WordPress 6.6 which just dropped a little bit of go you can download it for real now\r\n\r\nbut as you're coming in, open up the chat say hi, tell us where you are logging in from today. Hey, John from Chicago welcome.\r\n\r\nCouple of Greensboro folks getting connected there in the chat.\r\n\r\nSo Sue is what would you is it Green's burrow Ian, what would you say?\r\n\r\nHey, Richard from Tampa, Stephanie from Germany. Welcome.\r\n\r\nCouple minutes to go, folks, before we get started officially we'll get going at three minutes after all about WordPress 6.6 which just dropped a little while ago. Hey Bill from Virginia welcome also Vern from West Virginia.\r\n\r\nGreat to see everybody coming in.\r\n\r\nNo slides today this is all live live demo. So Timothy will be walking us through all the things right here live. This is being recorded though, and we'll have the replay up at the link that I just dropped in the chat. And if you've not already done so register for tomorrow's news roundup. That will be the same time tomorrow.\r\n\r\nJust a little over a minute to go.\r\n\r\nOnce again, welcome everybody. If you more folks just joining open the chat say hi and tell us where you are logging in from today. Just about a minute to go before we get started.\r\n\r\nAll live demo today nothing to download. Hey Sadie from Scotland.\r\n\r\nAbout 30 seconds to go hey Teresa from Germany welcome\r\n\r\nI probably just mispronounced your name\r\n\r\nis it Teresita perhaps.\r\n\r\nYeah, it is Prime Day on a another little rabbit trail there.\r\n\r\nHopefully everybody's not spending all their money today.\r\n\r\nJust about ready to get started. Alright, it's three minutes after. Let's start. The recording and we'll dive in with WordPress 6.6.\r\n\r\nWell, good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening. Welcome everybody to another solid Academy livestream and glad you're all with us today. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at solid Academy joined today by Timothy Jacobs, the lead developer for solid WP Welcome back, Timothy. How are things in your world today? Doing good, you know, trying to survive.\r\n\r\nHeatwave number 75 or whatever it is right up in New York but yeah, doing okay. Excellent. So WordPress 6.6. Just started appearing in WordPress installs in the last couple of hours. So we didn't talk about this, but how does this rollout actually work? When they're dropping a new version of WordPress, you guys so it's kind of a multi step thing.\r\n\r\nA bit before the WordPress release goes out there. It's kind of like a, hey, we all know this is coming type of thing. And then yeah, the basically the API gets updated. And sites check kind of like I think every hour at this point and I'll check for that. Update and then start auto updating if you have that available, which has been the default since I think WordPress five, six.\r\n\r\nAnd then yeah, you can go to what's the page I think wordpress.org\/stats will give you a live feed which is kind of fun to watch during the first. No, this isn't the one. I mean, if you're going to find it, and I know you've gotten me off on a tangent. Yeah, we didn't talk about this at all. I just came to me right as we were starting. But there's a cool little I think it's called counter. Let me see one right yeah, here we go. Um, so this fun one during release, because what you'll see is when we get up to like WordPress 6.7 It's about time to do it. This number will be way higher.\r\n\r\nBut it's, yeah, it gets quite out there but this is a fun one to watch. And the day of the release. Because yeah, you'll see all the sites across the Web Start to update. So yeah, usually it starts happening basically immediately if you're the luck of the draw the first new checks that our but yeah, it's there's a big old button kind of you can think of that they pressed to make the disco go out. Amazing. So for those of you that aren't aware, as I mentioned before, Timothy is the lead developer for us here at solid WP Timothy is also a core committer to WordPress and one of the maintainers of the WordPress REST API. So Timothy you do a lot of work with core\r\n\r\nit when these updates come out, are we at a point now where you'd recommend auto updating core WordPress? So yeah, I am a big proponent of auto updating repurpose for when we had this conversation around WordPress 5.6 and make chat in Slack Yeah, I was all for it. Um, I am a big believer in auto updates in general, particularly with WordPress core itself. I think the thing that you want to consider is that if you have lots of plugins that are breaking your site on every update that you potentially consider switching plugin that always astonishes me and you know, maybe one day I'll get caught by this but it always astonishes me when WordPress 6.6 releases and XYZ very large theme or XYZ very large plugin releases an update 12 hours later that's like fixed compatibly with WordPress 6.6. We've known that WordPress 6.6 has been a release from the state for like four months.\r\n\r\nSo yeah, I'm kind of in the opinion, yes, you should use auto updates. And if you find your site breaking all the time after it gets auto updated.\r\n\r\nThat you know maybe there's a different plugin out there that solves your needs.\r\n\r\nYeah, I mean, when we add salad, we start running our automated tests on trunk, you know, so we're testing the latest version. Basically, immediately we're I guess, starting tomorrow our tests are gonna be running on against WordPress 6.7. And so that doesn't catch everything. But it does always surprise me when you see a plugin or theme that like fatal airing on WordPress on the new version of WordPress. And it's in a code path that like runs against everything because I think as developers we should be running WordPress nightly. Basically, always well writing code and testing your plugins and have automated tests running. So it's one thing if there's an edge case and an edge case and this thing over here, there's an issue. Yeah, but when it's like, yeah, we need to release this update. So 200 out of our 300,000 users use the plugin. I feel like it's\r\n\r\nthere's another conversation that needs to be had. I love it. Well, thanks for letting me take you down that trail. We hadn't talked about that. But I think it's interesting and this I think this is the first time we've shown this counter and we're 1.7 million installs already. All right. So keep going. You know, if I if I had a more sophisticated setup, I would like share that in the corner of my screen and we could see where it lands we could place bets to see where we'd be in an hour. Anyway, I'm gonna navigate away from this and everyone can bet what they think it'll be when we finish which is both betting one how fast the number of installs are gonna go up into how long I'm going to demo for and either those two things yet so we'll see. Okay, so I'm game for that. So right now folks put your there's no price other than you know, just the personal thrill of knowing that you won this, but drop it in the chat your guests for how many downloads will be when Timothy completes the demo. Before we go to q&a. I will go back to the camera card and just say an hour from now.\r\n\r\nRight. All right. So I'll grab these chats and we'll come back to this at the end. So today we're going to walk through all the new features in WordPress six 610 Many thanks for doing this. i One other note of housekeeping before I disappear. There were a few notes first, there are no downloads. This is all live demo. There's no there's not a slide deck. Second of all, if you'd like to ask questions, please use the zoom q&a. You can find that by mousing over the shared screen and clicking on the q&a icon there. And I would just invite you to keep that window open the whole time because other folks questions will appear there. And if you also have that question, click the thumbs up icon and we'll take the questions on the order of votes. This is being recorded. I'll drop in the links to the replay which will be available about an hour after we wrap up today. So with that I'll disappear Timothy. Let's get into six six. Yeah, let's do it. So as usual, per the last couple years releases most of this is gonna be about Gutenberg excited or block editor stuff. But there are two things that I wanted to cover first.\r\n\r\nOne is rollbacks for plugin auto updates. So this is pretty cool.\r\n\r\nIf you have auto updates enabled, which like we just talked about, I'm a big fan of a new feature in WordPress 6.6 is that after an update happens WordPress is going to check and make a request back to your site and make sure it's still online. And if it detects that there is a fatal error, it's going to roll back that plugin update for you automatically. Now this isn't just like a general purpose feature like there's the WP rollbacks plug in and things like that, where you can go into WP admin and say hey, roll back to the previous or something like that. This is an automated kind of level of protection around auto updates specifically. So if you know the plugin starts crashing, you know 10 hours from now this feature isn't going to check it recovery mode. Well. We did a talk on recovery mode, I think a long time ago at this point.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, it's a pretty cool feature to add. A little bit of resiliency and another another band aid along WordPress auto updates, you can feel a bit more confident enabling it.\r\n\r\nThe other thing, which I don't even think yeah is listed in this page because it really shouldn't affect anyone, but I think it is part of the field guide which if you haven't seen the field guide is this awesome post over and make that wordpress.org that talks about all of the new features and bug fixes that happened in the release. And the big thing here to mention is that dropping support for PHP seven Neto and 7.1 has happened so if you are one on if you're one of those few people back and one of these ancient PHP versions get updated.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, that is no longer gonna be supported as a WordPress 6.6 Your Site won't crash. It just won't update to WordPress six months, I guess if you're on those older versions, WordPress 6.6 is gonna get a little bit challenging to say all the time. Let's see how it goes. All right. With those two things out of the way, let's dive in. So we're gonna start with a site editor. The site editor has a feature that we've talked about before called data views. And this is kind of like the technical code word kind of similar to WP list tables if you're familiar with that and WordPress, and I did if you've got a quote update in WordPress 6.6. So we have this Pages section here which I've showed off in 6.5. It's been enhanced a bit. So I can go through and I can see all of my published pages. I can see my drafts, things that are private trash, etc.\r\n\r\nWhat's really cool is that this list area over here update what I see in the main canvas. So if I want to take a look at the sample page, I can take a look at the sample page and it's gonna update really quickly. If I want I can dive in and start editing this content right away.\r\n\r\nData views also give me more control over how I can view this information. So right now I'm viewing it in this view, but if I want I can view it as a table and I get this kind of familiar interface similar to what you'd see in WP admin. Or I can go ahead and switch it over to a grid view. And this will bring in the featured images for me, but I'm gonna go ahead and set it back to the list view because I think that's a pretty helpful way to get a quick browse to the content of your site.\r\n\r\nData views have also get used throughout this kind of like site editor designed the other places in the templates manager. So we can see the templates now show these four previews. Previously, there was also this kind of like intermediary page that was kind of really confusing when you started thinking about it where if you would click on this, it would give you some details over here in the sidebar, but now they just simply drop you into the editor. So if you want to go ahead and edit a template, it's just one click away from the data Views section.\r\n\r\nThe next place that we get an update is over in the pattern section and that's also going to take us to my favorite feature I think of WordPress 6.6. But we'll see our patterns, we can browse our template parts here as well. They're kind of all combined into this pattern section. But another thing that's pretty cool is that list the data views give me kind of similar to bulk actions that we have in lists tables I can do in the data views view. So I can select multiple patterns going over here and I can click this export as JSON button. And it's going to export all of these patterns for me in one big JSON file that I could go ahead and import into another site. And so this is all kind of being powered by the diffuse API. Now, I mentioned this next cool feature that has to do with patterns. It's called pattern overrides. And this is something I'm very excited about. I've given a couple of variations of like talks about a feature like this, which is hey, how do we give all the power of the block editor and this really rich interactive editing, but how do we constrain it down for users in a way that's more understandable? And how can we use it in places across our site?\r\n\r\nAnd this has been building up for kind of a number of releases. Now we got content only editing mode and number WordPress, really physical at this point. And we'll see that in preview here. This is kind of working similarly to the changes where we got synced patterns. And then that's the transition. If you remember from reusable blocks, we started talking about them in synced patterns a couple of releases ago. And this also is a little bit similar, I think to the block bindings API and HTML stuff and all of that combined to do something that I think is really cool. So I took this pattern here from the pattern directory on make that work best Edward is this cool one here?\r\n\r\nLet him roll. And what I've done is I've added in my new pattern and pasted in that HTML.\r\n\r\nAnd then what I've done is I've said, hey, I want the users of my site to be able to edit this pattern. But I don't want them to see like the full power of this editor. I want them to be able to like change all of these colors, change the background change the structure. I want to make the editing experience for them. Very simple. And the way that you do that is if you select your block, you'll probably need to open up the block toolbar. There's this new section in advance called overrides and what you do is for each bit of content that you want a user to be able to override, you click the button here right now it says disabled overrides. So if I go ahead and hit disable overrides this text is now going to always be part of the pattern. And it's not something that my users would be able to edit. But I hitting enable overrides and giving it a title. In this case description.\r\n\r\nThis now becomes a property that of the pattern that my users are able to customize whenever they use the pattern. So let's see what that looks like. I'm gonna navigate over to the Pages section, going over to the sample page. And I've inserted this pattern into my content. So I'm going to go ahead and delete this and reinsert it so you can see exactly what happens. We go into the inserter select for patterns, my patterns and that block you CTA is what I called it and so now if we open up the sidebar, we can see that I have this content only mode. So I don't have the ability to like change this color, change the structure move text around, but what I can do is that at this text, so if I wanted to say you know do some live chat history here, say it was recorded in 1975. I can make that change this shop now button. I could say let's make it by now. And I can change the link. That's the link gone over to amazon.com.\r\n\r\nAnd, you know, we want to get grammatically correct on them or something like that, let's say let them roll, you know, really take the personality out of this pattern. But you can see now I've made all these changes here and I can go ahead and hit Save. And when I go to the front end of my website, I have this pattern with my changes, but because this is still a sync pattern, if I go back on over, and I think yeah, I even get this handy little button here. Let's let's try and use it. Edit original.\r\n\r\nI can now make modifications to this pattern. So if I wanted to change this color, let's say to this red and hit save.\r\n\r\nI am right now editing the pattern here.\r\n\r\nAnd if I refresh the page, you can see that that's been changed. So what synced patterns with overrides are doing is they're letting me create a pattern. Say hey, these are the specific bits that I want you to be able to edit. But I as like you know the site designer or you know the site owner or anything like that. I can make structural changes to this pattern. And those will be reflected across my site without the user needing to make any changes, update the post anything like that they just happen automatically. And so in this case, I'm using it for a CTA there's lots of other places where you can use this that I think would be very effective things like a testimonial section. You know, you perhaps have a testimonial style that you want to use throughout your site. You want to make it really easy to insert your testimonials. But of course each testimonial is different. And you can't just say hey, use the same testimonial everywhere you want to say use a testimonial on this page. Use another testimonial on the other page, but we decide hey, we want to change the font that we use for the testimonial. You can easily do that.\r\n\r\nRight now the way patterns ended up getting stored into the post.\r\n\r\nLet's see how do I go back here?\r\n\r\nThey're not a back button.\r\n\r\nI don't think so we're just going to refresh.\r\n\r\nThe way that the pattern actually gets stored is if we take a look at the code editor you can see that the overrides are all in the block attributes. So it's just a part of the actual page content. What I would love to see in the future is potentially the ability to save those to like post meta, like we do with kind of other block bindings, which I think would be very cool and kind of bridges that gap between like custom post types and the thing that a developer would set up for you and something that an end user could potentially just do in the block Editor inside editor all by themselves.\r\n\r\nOkay, we're gonna go back on into the site editor now for some more features.\r\n\r\nSo this is another cool one, which is the ability to update a background image for your entire site. So we've had this feature in the customizer for a long time where you can like add theme support background images, but we can now do this in the actual site as well. So if I go over into the Layout tab for global styles, I can say add a background image and I'm going to go ahead and choose a subtle pattern that I got from subtle patterns.com. And we can see that this pattern is now applied as the main background for my site. So I'm gonna go ahead and save that and we can view the changes here.\r\n\r\nAnd so this works very similarly to how the custom background images worked with the customizer, where this is applying a background to the body tag places where there is you know, a background color applied like we see here in this menu item will of course lay over it.\r\n\r\nBut this lets you set up a background image across your entire site.\r\n\r\nI'm gonna go ahead and remove that. I'm gonna do that by just hitting reset all and it will remove all of the background images for me as well. This control is pretty nice, and you'll also see it for just editing elsewhere. In your site on a per block basis like a group Bach for instance, you can set a background image using the same kind of control but most new is being able to do it for the entire site.\r\n\r\nAnother cool feature is pattern switching. So I have this header here and my theme 2024 comes with a bunch of different variations for it. Previously, you could kind of head up into the sidebar or into the navigation excuse me and switch between patterns there. But the sidebar gains a new option here which is this design tab. And you know show me all the different patterns for the template part that I have on my site. So if I want to easily switch between them.\r\n\r\nI can do that with just one click and get a small visual preview of what they look like. In the sidebar here. I'm going to try and figure out which one was it that I have before that one\r\n\r\nbetter, let's stick with this one. I think that's what it was. Yes.\r\n\r\nThe next thing that I want to go over is some changes to the featured image block or two featured images in general. So I'm gonna go ahead and pull up the template for a single which one do we want it we could do the single page or we could do\r\n\r\nlet's do the single page I guess. So let's grab page with sidebar.\r\n\r\nAnd so this is the featured image block. But the featured image block doesn't give you a lot of controls. So let's say I want to have a little bit of a cooler coolers of beings objective layout here I'm gonna go ahead and insert the media and TextBlock and what I can do with the media and textbox now is that I can select Hey, for the image here I want to use the featured image and so I'm gonna then get rid of the featured image block. And what I'm also going to do is put the title in there as well and get rid of the paragraph. And I'll go ahead and press Delete.\r\n\r\nAnd so we can see now I have this media and textbox and I have all of the controls on here that I'm used to but when I've used my site, it's going to be doing this with the featured image as opposed to just a static image that I would always be using.\r\n\r\nLet's see if we can get a good demo of that. I think we might need to\r\n\r\nhere we go page with sidebar.\r\n\r\nIt save the page. And there we go. So you can see that it's using the featured image that I have selected.\r\n\r\nSo if I went ahead and changed the featured image to that say this one\r\n\r\nwill see the front end of my site has been updated. There.\r\n\r\nYou also have more controls with shadow. So let me see if I can.\r\n\r\nI thought this was enabled on the media and textbook but maybe it isn't.\r\n\r\nOkay, so let's undo these changes that we made to this template.\r\n\r\nSo we can use the new box shadow features. So I can now enable box shadows for the featured image block so by default, we get a couple of different options. So this one looks kind of cool. So we'll select that one.\r\n\r\nAnd we'll go ahead and hit Save.\r\n\r\nAnd we can see we're now using the box shadow feature here. But let's say none of these box shadows really speak to me. And I want to do something about custom. We can do that now. So if I go into shadows, you can see here the different shadows that are provided by default with WordPress. But if I wanted to I could create a custom shadow. So I'll go in here and now I have a whole bunch of controls. I can select a color. I can make it an inset shadow versus an outside shadow I could change the positioning is a blur, make it spread less or more all of these different options here that's maybe position it like this very funky and we'll hit save.\r\n\r\nLet's call this I don't know, big pink shadow.\r\n\r\nNow when I go over into the featured image box, I can select that shadow instead.\r\n\r\nVery I'm a very good designer, folks, you know this looks perfect but yeah, so you get more and more control over shadows now with WordPress 6.6. You can use them in your featured image block, apparently not media and text or I just missed the button for it. And you can also create custom shadows and edit the shadows that come with WordPress for the next feature I'm going to talk about I found a little bit confusing, I'll be honest, but it is called color palettes. Oops. I just thought color palettes and section styling. So I'm going to enable this theme here this kind of like I think a beta theme it's still being worked on actively called assembler.\r\n\r\nAnd the reason why I'm switching to assembler is because it provides these color palettes and section styles.\r\n\r\nSo if we go on into the site editor, we can see this is the homepage that I have set up and under styles you can see we only really have one style, but we have tons of different palettes use me and so this is that kind of feature that WordPress is introducing here, where you kind of get like a lightweight version of theme style. So while theme styles can control tons of different things like shape and layout and ordering and sizing and all this different stuff. The kind of like color palettes are just color palettes are just about defining a set of colors and using them and you can also set kind of like font packs. So you can see that here where it's changing like the body font and the header fonts all in one go.\r\n\r\nSo I'm gonna go back to I think I had this one selected was maybe it.\r\n\r\nYeah, maybe this is right, I don't know. But another cool way that this interacts is that we then get these features called Section styling so I'm going to select this parent group here and hop on over to the Style section and you can see a control that's similar to what you have on blocks. But this is for sections. So this is applying basically a set of colors to an entire section. of content in one go. So it's setting both like inner blocks and outer blocks, and it's using the color palettes that my team has set up.\r\n\r\nI'm also able to I believe, customize these. So if I go on into browsing the styles oops No, not that one into the group block.\r\n\r\nI can see these different style variations and if I wanted to I can make changes. So for instance, if I want this text color to be a custom color, not one from my themes, color palette, I could go ahead and change that.\r\n\r\nFrom what I can tell your theme kind of has to like get this started for you. I don't think there's any way to like create style variations entirely within the site editor on your own yet, but they are able to be done in different like feedback, JSON configurations through PHP, stuff like that. So this is a pretty cool feature. I think it could be helpful for like agencies and things like that where you might want to have a couple of different options for how people can assemble sections of content and color them without needing to create patterns for every different variation or needing to tell people that hey, when you want this to look like this, you need to go ahead and switch the background to this color, the text color to this color, the link color to that color. You can kind of all wrapped up in one of these like default styles.\r\n\r\nThese aren't really part of WordPress, the 2024 default theme, I imagine they will be with the 2025 theme. So that's why I'm demoing it with this some of the theme is supposed to 2024 but it is a possibility.\r\n\r\nNow as we get into the block editor, or before we get into the block editor, I wanted to talk about another kind of cool feature that comes to non full site editor block seeds. So I'm gonna switch over to Kadence.\r\n\r\nHere what you'll see is we've had this patterns menu here for a long time but it kind of gave you a really might say ugly interface that WordPress generated by default, where it's just like another list table kind of like this one, and you didn't get a really visual experience that was nice. But now patterns even in non full site editor themes, use the new site editor patterns of view. And so we can see here this is Kadence Kadence isn't a full site editor theme but of course has some cool patterns available. You can see a whole bunch of these ones that come from WooCommerce. You can also see the patterns that I've created and you can do all the things that you would expect to do. We can go in and you know, edit this pattern. Go back. And if we're done, we can just go back to the WordPress dashboard.\r\n\r\nThere's two reasons why I wanted to mention it. One I think this is cool if you're not yet using a false identity or theme to be able to get much better pattern management experience because I think patterns are one of the best features about the block editor and full site editing. But the other thing I think is really interesting about this is that is kind of like the first step of what you might have heard of as the WP admin redesign. So this is a project that is a big thing and phase three of Gutenberg where we find ourselves and we'll be seeing over the next couple of WordPress releases. And what I think is super interesting here is that this is this first foray into this kind of new navigation experience even if I'm not using a full site editor for you. So we can see that here have kind of like maybe a preview of what it might look like for the site and redesign for themes that aren't all aboard the full site editor train.\r\n\r\nBut we're gonna go ahead back and I'm going to switch on over to 2024 again as we dive into the block editor.\r\n\r\nSo you might have seen one of these changes when I was going about some of my demos earlier, which is that the site editor and the page editor have kind of merged together.\r\n\r\nPreviously, we first had the page editor slash post editor and then WordPress introduced the site editor a whole number of releases ago, and there were two distinct editors they made use of a lot of the same building blocks, but there were two pretty big code bases that were different.\r\n\r\nAnd so that led to some kind of like tricky experiences. If you were a theme developer plugin developer, where you kind of had to extend the editor differently in different contexts, which was annoying. For the WordPress core team. It also meant they had to maintain more kind of duplicate code than they wanted to. And so what's happened in WordPress 6.6 Is that the site editors and the post editors have kind of combined, they're still not 100% exactly the same code, but they're kind of like built on top of each other in a more thoughtful manner to share more bits. So it should be easier if you're plugin developer to write code that works in both the site editor and the post editor without as much complication.\r\n\r\nThere are though some changes that have actually populated their way into the user side of this. This is like a kind of like technical change, but there are some user ramifications. And one of those which you might have seen when we were looking at it earlier, when I was changing the template is that the kind of like post meta information handled here is different. It looks a lot more like what it looks like in the site editor. And these are all now pretty consistent with each other. So if I want to change the status, I open this up and a panel appears to the left. If I want to change the date that has to be published, the link, the author, any of these things, they all kind of have a very unified interface whereas before it was a little bit hodgepodge.\r\n\r\nI can also easily set a featured image just from the top here, whereas previously this was kind of like embedded in its own panel down below. And I can also quickly add an expert. So if I want to say come to my cool event on some date, I can go ahead and do that. And my excerpt gets populated and it's all in this one panel.\r\n\r\nThe other thing that I want to mention here while we're looking at this bit of code, I'm not going to go through the full demo for block bindings. You can check out the WordPress 6.5 review that we did to kind of like see how this is built. But this is a block pattern that I have set up with a block binding for the URL for this button here. And what's new, as you can see that this is now populated in the actual editor UI. So you can see that hey, the URL for this button block is being saved to post meta. It doesn't say what post meta key it does specifically, which I find a bit unfortunate and I think it'd be valuable if we did display that information or made it accessible. But you can now at least see what attributes are bound together. The other thing is that now if I make changes here, slash WordPress this value is now actually getting saved to post meta. Previously, you would have to update the post meta value separately. But now this is actually editable through the UI. So there have been some new features here, available for folks that are using block binding and so still a really like kind of complicated developer feature at this point, but is making forward progress, which is what we'd like to see.\r\n\r\nrounding the corners, we have a couple other block editor features that I want to go ahead and show you I'm going to create a new post here and\r\n\r\nwe're going to drop in a pattern and then I'm going to go into a call to action. Let's say I want to call to action pattern here. And or maybe we want a banner pattern.\r\n\r\nYeah, sure. Let's just pick this banner pattern here. What you'll see is that we now have a new ability to quickly cycle through patterns. So I inserted this one, maybe I want to get a preview of another one. I can click this shuffle button. And as you can choose another pattern of the same category for me. And so I can quickly cycle through a lot of different options. It would be great books.\r\n\r\nDid the editor crash? Nope. It just got into weird selection state.\r\n\r\nI think it'd be cool to I don't know maybe I can just like Undo to go back. Yeah, I can so I can cycle through them. See if there's one that I like oh, here we go. Another weird focus state thing that happens but you have to be on is the actual pattern route selection to see this shuffle up. But that's a little bit odd that it kind of keeps doing that. Whoa.\r\n\r\nWell, I would say hey, it's beta software, but WordPress 6.6. did release a few hours ago.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, there's a cool feature if you want to more easily find patterns that you have available to you go ahead and create another new page here to talk about CSS grid.\r\n\r\nSo we've had CSS grid has actually kind of been in WordPress for a little bit. It just hasn't really made itself known but it is now an official part of the group block. And CSS grid itself is a super big feature. There's a lot that it can do.\r\n\r\nAnd one of the things that I think the Gutenberg team is trying to figure out is exactly what CSS Grid features they want to expose to users and half. Right now there's kind of like two main modes in which CSS Grid works. One is I can do the manual mode. And so this says, hey, I want to use this many specific columns. So if I wanted to, for instance, I could set up like a, you know, a traditional 12 column grid. The thing to be aware of, though, is that if I'm setting up this 12 column grid, this isn't really responsive, so to speak. I'm going to get those 12 columns and that set.\r\n\r\nThe auto mode is kind of how CSS Grid takes on responsiveness, which is to say, hey, I want to create this layout and I need each grid item to take up at least this much space. That's how much it would be to look good. And beyond that point, you know, lay it out however you want. If they're using an iPad, a super wide desktop screen and iPhone, you figure it out. I just need each column to be at least this wide, and kind of fill as much space as you can with columns. And so this gives you the kind of more responsive option. So what do you do once you have CSS grids? Well, it's kind of like a combo box where you get your inserter. So I can go ahead and let's say create a paragraph block here. And we'll dump in some lorem ipsum text.\r\n\r\nI could in this next block, we could say let's put an image or grab something from the media library.\r\n\r\nWell grab some more text let's say let's make this text longer\r\n\r\nwell\r\n\r\nand I don't know if everyone another image that's put it in or maybe we put it out video. I don't have I spent another image we get one from the media library.\r\n\r\nOkay, so we can see I kind of have my columns. And if I go ahead and view this page, you can see it looks kind of like what I have here.\r\n\r\nBut the CSS Grid support doesn't kind of stop here. One of the things that's cool about CSS Grid is that I can do stylings on individual grid items. So let's say I want this text here, which is quite long. I want it to stretch across multiple columns. I can go ahead and do that. I can do that one just by dragging in the actual editor. But if I want I can go to the individual block, go into the dimensions panel and see that hey, this has been set to span two columns. So I want to I could also do this image and say, Hey, let's make this one span three columns. Now once in start spanning three columns, you can see that hey, I could also have things set up to span multiple rows. So if we go over here we can set this one to span two rows, and two columns. And we can see how it makes all of those changes happen.\r\n\r\nTo you know, take a look.\r\n\r\nBut we'll see that this also becomes responsive, where things shrink down, depending on the size of my screen.\r\n\r\nSo I think this is a pretty cool feature.\r\n\r\nThere's a lot more work that's kind of like going on with CSS Grid, one of which is like, right now you can see hey, I have this UI here, but I kind of have to like to keep going through the inserter to add in a new item that I want to add in. Maybe a cover block or something like that.\r\n\r\nMaybe uses\r\n\r\nthis whole thing in here and we could set the column span.\r\n\r\nSo I kind of have to like keep working through the inserter. But one of the things that the team is looking at, which I think could be very useful is the ability to just kind of draw things. So if we get rid of, let's say, this image here, there's kind of like an experiment where I could draw an item and say, hey, I want this to take over these two columns here and put it here.\r\n\r\nYeah, so that's what that's what I was showing you just a second ago, which is where as you kind of move through different screen sizes, because we're saying that each column must be a minimum amount of size, at least 12 rams. If they were to become smaller than 12 rams, it's going to collapse them.\r\n\r\nSo you can kind of like see that in action here. And then of course, when we get all the way small enough, you can really only have a one column layout, you're gonna have a one column layout.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, so this is kind of like taking those CSS Grid features and it's the start of making them accessible to folks who don't want to just use custom CSS. There isn't a way to make the columns even height right now. So that is a kind of mode of CSS Grid. And so that's kind of what I refer to with like, hey, the the team kind of has to figure out, you got another weird bug here.\r\n\r\nThe team kind of has to figure out what CSS Grid features they actually want to expose, and how they want to expose them.\r\n\r\nBecause yeah, what you can do with CSS Grid is you can say hey, I want each row height to be the same and distributed evenly. Or you can have the child items determine what the row height is. And so you have obviously different options that you're going to have to I guess wait and see how they get exposed. I think I think the team is still trying to figure it out.\r\n\r\nSo the next thing I really don't know what's I don't know if this is a safari thing, and what but the strange.\r\n\r\nThe last kind of feature that I want to talk about is negative margins. So I wonder actually, if there's a good pattern here that we could use to start showing this off\r\n\r\nyeah, let's start with this. So negative margins are a pretty powerful design tool.\r\n\r\nAnd I think partly because of that the team has decided that they don't want to make it\r\n\r\njust globally available.\r\n\r\nI think I need to be in the site editor right.\r\n\r\nNegative margins kind of let you overlay content and kind of break out of the box model.\r\n\r\nLet's see if we can get this to show up here. I'm not sure why I'm not seeing it in the image block I would have expected to maybe it's just not available on the image block at all.\r\n\r\nHere we go. So I have this dimensions thing here. And you'll see I can you know change the margin for my dimensions. We're going to unlock all of them. But I can't actually go negative through the UI and drag. But if I change this to an actual value, I can now set this value should be negative. And so what this lets me do is kind of overlay content on to each other. And kind of gives you the ability for more powerful designs. Now I think what I would really I don't know where the bug is here in terms of why one thing is gonna go the other thing but I guess you can see why. negative margins are something that you can't just do through the UI automatically.\r\n\r\nI think we probably need to like set a background of maybe like even Z index on this to like get it to appear more highly. But yeah, this is a feature that people have been kind of asking for it to be able to do. And you can now do it. But you just don't really get a lot of help. Basically, negative margins you get supported as value. The editor is not going to reject them anymore.\r\n\r\nBut it's not actually a control that I can just use in the site editor or the block editor itself. I need to actually input those values manually. But it lets you do kind of like cool things around like layering content layering images together.\r\n\r\nThey can let you achieve more powerful designs than you've been able to previously.\r\n\r\nThat being said it's time to check the counter because we are done with our official demo for WordPress 6.6 2.5 2 million. So congrats to anyone who got that one close. So all right. This is hilarious. So we had a few people guessed 2.5 million and then a late entry from Bill Christiansen said that okay, Susa 2.5 So I'm changing my guests to 2,500,001 So using the prices right strategy Bill has won the prize was competition. So congratulations.\r\n\r\nThe next vote up was Sadie with 3.2 million so Okay, everybody can give Bill their favorite emoji in the chat.\r\n\r\nWe're gonna have to remember to do this next time, Timothy. This was fun.\r\n\r\nYeah, he gets a new car. No. So yeah, everybody build their favorite emoji there in the chat be nice. And with that, we will turn our attention to some questions. Folks, if you have a question you haven't asked yet, use the zoom q&a to do that. Please also open that up and upvote any questions that you would like to hear answered? So that's funny. All right. First question here is from Teresa. This is a great one Timothy. The accessibility reinforcement act is going to be coming up in 2025. Is there an alert or anything planned for color combinations in WordPress in the block editor when you have, you know, maybe contrast issues? Yes, this is one of my favorite features that we've had for a long time in the WordPress editor is that it does this automatically if you are using the block editor. So I've got this white background and if I make this text well, don't you love demo fails.\r\n\r\nLet's see why isn't interfering? Here we go.\r\n\r\nIt's pretty curious why it is able to detect that this light tan is unreadable but white on white. Oh, there we go. Maybe it's the transparent background that's causing the issue.\r\n\r\nMaybe but now it's appearing for you see, like it appeared for it and then it went away.\r\n\r\nI don't know.\r\n\r\nSeems a little finicky.\r\n\r\nAnd now it's not\r\n\r\nlike this is perfectly readable. Well, there's this feature WordPress called the color contrast detector that is usually very reliable, but it looks like a matter of regression WordPress 6.6 And yeah, is exactly for this is to help detect and help surface to you when your color choices have become very hard to read like this one.\r\n\r\nIt takes into account Yeah, that colors and because of using the block editor all those things are kind of like done in a very declarative way. So WordPress is kind of able to detect a reliable usually and match what's going on there. It probably is related to this transparency thing but even then see, like black on black. It should that's that has worked perfectly. I've seen that working in the past.\r\n\r\nI don't know. Let's change that. Welcome to live remote folks. Yep, um, but yeah, so that's definitely a thing. That's their narrow you know, WordPress has to blend the line of that you can do whatever you want in the site and or on the block editor. You can make content that is very ugly and unreadable and inaccessible.\r\n\r\nBut for the most part, we're best just trying to guide you towards the right. pattern. That is, that is awesome. Okay, question from Vern about the download counter. Does it differentiate between automated downloads and manual ones? I don't think so. No, I think this is just all hits to the API.\r\n\r\nYeah.\r\n\r\nLet's see. Sue would like to know if there are any popular plugins or tools that you've heard of that have report reported problems on 6.6?\r\n\r\nNot that I've heard of yet.\r\n\r\nIf we go on over to the forums, though, there is a post that comes up every release. Yep.\r\n\r\nFor\r\n\r\nthe forum is for hey, here are bugs here issues. And we also get a link gone over to a page with themes and plugins and kind of other things to be aware of. So if you're not already in the WordPress forums, that WordPress forums team is staff staff, that is the wrong word is I'm gonna use the word staff because it's the correct word for what I'm about to say, which is staff with a team of great volunteers. So be kind, but yeah, if you're not over in the WordPress forms, all the volunteers over there, do a fantastic job.\r\n\r\nAnd yeah, you'll see things get reported in here and they'll make their way to kind of like no issues, lists, and things like that. But yeah, always, always check out the forums. They're an exciting time as well, right after release comes out. Because it's when everyone comes and says, Hey, this is broken.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, the forum is the best place to check that.\r\n\r\nIndeed. Final question, folks. By the way, if you have a question to ask if you haven't done so drop that in now, this is our last question in the list from John. Is there a way to have rounded corners on maybe a row or a column? Absolutely. It's just not done how you would think they were done is probably issue it's not exposed as rounded corners being an option but through borders so I'm gonna go ahead and put this block into a group then go over into border and set a radius\r\n\r\nokay, this is there are two layers of black that are happening here. Let me get this background out of the way and go here and put a background on our group block\r\n\r\nadded some padding to make this not horrible.\r\n\r\nAnd you can see we've got our rounded corners here. But yeah, so there's no option in the UI that's just like, hey, here's how you do rounded corners, but they're exposed through the border controls. But yeah, the thing you have to be aware of is that border controls aren't available in everything. I can see here. This is just text. They don't have border controls. They need to be kind of like on block elements like groups. So a handy thing that you can do whenever you need that ability is to just put a put a group block around what you're trying to style.\r\n\r\nYeah, and we are working here in core WordPress and the core blocks if you're a Kadence user, it is way easier to do all of this. Virtually, virtually every element will have some sort of a rounded corner ability. Yeah.\r\n\r\nLet's see.\r\n\r\nTheresa is WordPress thinking about working with AI? This question was asked this weekend this past weekend. at WordCamp Canada. Is there any discussion of moving any sort of AI something into core WordPress that you're aware of Timothy?\r\n\r\nNot that I've seen yet. So it's tricky because most\r\n\r\nAI features are things that you usually need a service to connect to. And so it would be super cost prohibitive for wordpress.org to just offer this for free. So what we're seeing is different plugins build integrations with either open AI or their own hosted models and things like that. Now.\r\n\r\nThere is a feature and I think one of Google Chrome's Canary builds where they are added a JavaScript API that talks to I believe, a locally hosted version of one of their Gemini models.\r\n\r\nGoogle being Google isn't going through any standards track as of yet to develop this API and it's not prefixed with Google or anything like that. But it creates I think, it's like a window.ai dot txt generator object or things like that, that lets you do things with AI through JavaScript with a model that's local to your computer, which kind of solves the problem of hey, we need to either pay open API money to get our you know, API request. Fulfilled. So I haven't seen anything with WordPress Core specifically yet, because there's that problem, but as locally hosted models become more and more of a thing. I think that can be pretty interesting. For instance, the Mac OS features that are coming later this year, around like AI, content writing and editing and things like that, where I can just, you know, select Content Anywhere in an app that has, you know, a native text input that works with text, and I can just say, hey, rewrite this for me to make it shorter, more professional, etc. In my personal opinion, that's where I see like more of these AI features going I think it's strange that I would need to, you know, have a grammerly ai extension and an AI extension inside of WordPress and like, tons of different AI things to like, help me write text better to me that feels like a feature that makes sense to just have built into the EO s. And so I think as we see those things, kind of like expand more and get integrated into browser API's and things like that. You can imagine a browser API that lets you, as a developer, say, hey, rewrite this to be shorter and it rely entirely on the local model on your Mac.\r\n\r\nI think that is, in my opinion, that like more exciting place for things to go particularly with like a privacy perspective and all these other things.\r\n\r\nThere's probably still room for like, for instance, jetpack has like just lock that lets you like ask it to help you write a blog post and things like that. There's probably still room for that for folks who don't have computers that can run vocally hosted models that are advanced enough to be useful, but at least me personally, I find it more exciting.\r\n\r\nThat the ability to like you know, help rewrite content and do things like that is just available natively in my iOS so I can use it in pages, or Ulysses, which is my Markdown editor of choice or anywhere on the web, and I don't have to think about oh, do I have an open AI subscription here? Is there a plugin that specific to whatever content authoring tool I'm using? If I'm writing a readme in my IDE for writing code, it could help me there like I feel like that is the better way this Bucha Yeah, that's a great answer. It's this age old question of what should be in core versus what should be a plug in WordPress, being open source and being built with extendibility. as just part of the, you know, the way we do things, it's a question that's asked about a lot of things that you could even say that as popular as SEO is, SEO is not built into core other than a sitemap.\r\n\r\nYeah, I and I did see I think I think it was a ticket and might have just been to make thread or make common response, right. I think I saw a ticket on adding in support. We have this feature WordPress for a long time. That says, hey, please discourage search engines reading. Please discourage search engines from indexing the site. I saw someone bring up like, hey, maybe WordPress should offer another button here that says discourage MLMs from scraping my website for content and add the necessary robots dot txt entries for that as like a place that you know, core would be speaking there. I kind of happen to think that it would make sense for us to offer a button to make that easy for folks who want to but yeah, there's a lot of questions about what should be the core what are the defaults when you've got to hit Close the counter page? But it's gonna say when you got X million sites updated to WordPress, there's a lot of out of consideration on on what features make it into core indeed. Or Timothy As always, this has been great. Appreciate your expertise and information. Any final thoughts as we wrapping up?\r\n\r\nI try our best to explain six if you haven't played around with a full site editor theme. Thank you, Bill and try it out. I think it's always exciting to see where things are going and play with block patterns. I would say really think about pattern overrides and how you can use them. If you're building sites for clients. i It's the feature that I'm personally most excited about and we're best six months six. I think it's extraordinarily powerful.\r\n\r\nAnd really gets you into that space of okay, this site looks like the front end of my website, but my client can't just completely break the layout, maybe hitting the delete key one too many times. So I think it's really cool feature I play with it if you haven't.\r\n\r\nVery good we'll focus on dropping in the link bundle one final time before we wrap up here. We'll have the replay of this event up in about an hour as soon as the video renders. So you can share this out this excellent overview of six dots six out with all your friends. Also if you are not already signed up for our news roundup that's coming up tomorrow at one o'clock Central that's give me an hour and I'll get you up to date on all the things in WordPress. All the news specifically aimed at those of us who are doing WordPress things with clients. So that's going to wrap us up for it today. Timothy, thanks once again, and we'll see you all back tomorrow for news roundup, one o'clock Central here on the solid Academy where we go further together.\r\n\r\nTranscribed by https:\/\/otter.ai\r\n","livestream_vimeo_video_id":985173199,"livestream-resources-group":"s:34:\"a:1:{s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}\";","multi-day_replay_details":"s:102:\"a:2:{s:16:\"course-resources\";a:1:{i:0;a:1:{s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}}s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}\";"}},"postCountOnPage":1,"postCountTotal":1,"postID":448554,"postFormat":"standard","geoCloudflareCountryCode":"US"}; dataLayer.push( dataLayer_content ); \nStyle Variations\n\n\n\nOverride Synced Patterns\n\n\n\nGrid Block\n\n\n\nNegative Margins\n\n\n\nA Unified Publishing Flow\n\n\n\nAnd more!\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n","livestream_chat_log":"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1CYn04wFycG2Czl-o_HyWI-NQD9XcoVTT\/view?usp=sharing","livestream_live_transcript_url":"https:\/\/otter.ai\/u\/EamxQIon_6oe6gCgXdRfFRRztX4?utm_source=copy_url","livestream_live_transcript_text":"slides today and this is all live demos so nothing to download. Edie? Yes 6.6 dropped Well, the first notice I got was about an hour ago. They usually slowly roll that out\r\n\r\nfor your sites, gradually notice that it's available\r\n\r\nagain, welcome everybody. If you're just joining us open up the chat say hello. Caption should now be working for everyone.\r\n\r\nLooking forward to a demo of WordPress six, six with Timothy Jacobs. He's going to walk us through all the things and answer your questions.\r\n\r\nHey Kylie, welcome.\r\n\r\nA bin both Ben's class welcome. Hey Ken.\r\n\r\nAll right, I'm going to drop in a link bundle. Again, no downloads today but the replay link is there. We'll have that up about an hour after we finish. So you can share that out with folks. Also, if you haven't registered for tomorrow's news roundup that's a free live stream one o'clock Central the same time tomorrow, looking at all the WordPress news over the last month or so.\r\n\r\nWe've got about three minutes to go before we get started officially with Welcome to WordPress 6.6 which just dropped a little bit of go you can download it for real now\r\n\r\nbut as you're coming in, open up the chat say hi, tell us where you are logging in from today. Hey, John from Chicago welcome.\r\n\r\nCouple of Greensboro folks getting connected there in the chat.\r\n\r\nSo Sue is what would you is it Green's burrow Ian, what would you say?\r\n\r\nHey, Richard from Tampa, Stephanie from Germany. Welcome.\r\n\r\nCouple minutes to go, folks, before we get started officially we'll get going at three minutes after all about WordPress 6.6 which just dropped a little while ago. Hey Bill from Virginia welcome also Vern from West Virginia.\r\n\r\nGreat to see everybody coming in.\r\n\r\nNo slides today this is all live live demo. So Timothy will be walking us through all the things right here live. This is being recorded though, and we'll have the replay up at the link that I just dropped in the chat. And if you've not already done so register for tomorrow's news roundup. That will be the same time tomorrow.\r\n\r\nJust a little over a minute to go.\r\n\r\nOnce again, welcome everybody. If you more folks just joining open the chat say hi and tell us where you are logging in from today. Just about a minute to go before we get started.\r\n\r\nAll live demo today nothing to download. Hey Sadie from Scotland.\r\n\r\nAbout 30 seconds to go hey Teresa from Germany welcome\r\n\r\nI probably just mispronounced your name\r\n\r\nis it Teresita perhaps.\r\n\r\nYeah, it is Prime Day on a another little rabbit trail there.\r\n\r\nHopefully everybody's not spending all their money today.\r\n\r\nJust about ready to get started. Alright, it's three minutes after. Let's start. The recording and we'll dive in with WordPress 6.6.\r\n\r\nWell, good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening. Welcome everybody to another solid Academy livestream and glad you're all with us today. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at solid Academy joined today by Timothy Jacobs, the lead developer for solid WP Welcome back, Timothy. How are things in your world today? Doing good, you know, trying to survive.\r\n\r\nHeatwave number 75 or whatever it is right up in New York but yeah, doing okay. Excellent. So WordPress 6.6. Just started appearing in WordPress installs in the last couple of hours. So we didn't talk about this, but how does this rollout actually work? When they're dropping a new version of WordPress, you guys so it's kind of a multi step thing.\r\n\r\nA bit before the WordPress release goes out there. It's kind of like a, hey, we all know this is coming type of thing. And then yeah, the basically the API gets updated. And sites check kind of like I think every hour at this point and I'll check for that. Update and then start auto updating if you have that available, which has been the default since I think WordPress five, six.\r\n\r\nAnd then yeah, you can go to what's the page I think wordpress.org\/stats will give you a live feed which is kind of fun to watch during the first. No, this isn't the one. I mean, if you're going to find it, and I know you've gotten me off on a tangent. Yeah, we didn't talk about this at all. I just came to me right as we were starting. But there's a cool little I think it's called counter. Let me see one right yeah, here we go. Um, so this fun one during release, because what you'll see is when we get up to like WordPress 6.7 It's about time to do it. This number will be way higher.\r\n\r\nBut it's, yeah, it gets quite out there but this is a fun one to watch. And the day of the release. Because yeah, you'll see all the sites across the Web Start to update. So yeah, usually it starts happening basically immediately if you're the luck of the draw the first new checks that our but yeah, it's there's a big old button kind of you can think of that they pressed to make the disco go out. Amazing. So for those of you that aren't aware, as I mentioned before, Timothy is the lead developer for us here at solid WP Timothy is also a core committer to WordPress and one of the maintainers of the WordPress REST API. So Timothy you do a lot of work with core\r\n\r\nit when these updates come out, are we at a point now where you'd recommend auto updating core WordPress? So yeah, I am a big proponent of auto updating repurpose for when we had this conversation around WordPress 5.6 and make chat in Slack Yeah, I was all for it. Um, I am a big believer in auto updates in general, particularly with WordPress core itself. I think the thing that you want to consider is that if you have lots of plugins that are breaking your site on every update that you potentially consider switching plugin that always astonishes me and you know, maybe one day I'll get caught by this but it always astonishes me when WordPress 6.6 releases and XYZ very large theme or XYZ very large plugin releases an update 12 hours later that's like fixed compatibly with WordPress 6.6. We've known that WordPress 6.6 has been a release from the state for like four months.\r\n\r\nSo yeah, I'm kind of in the opinion, yes, you should use auto updates. And if you find your site breaking all the time after it gets auto updated.\r\n\r\nThat you know maybe there's a different plugin out there that solves your needs.\r\n\r\nYeah, I mean, when we add salad, we start running our automated tests on trunk, you know, so we're testing the latest version. Basically, immediately we're I guess, starting tomorrow our tests are gonna be running on against WordPress 6.7. And so that doesn't catch everything. But it does always surprise me when you see a plugin or theme that like fatal airing on WordPress on the new version of WordPress. And it's in a code path that like runs against everything because I think as developers we should be running WordPress nightly. Basically, always well writing code and testing your plugins and have automated tests running. So it's one thing if there's an edge case and an edge case and this thing over here, there's an issue. Yeah, but when it's like, yeah, we need to release this update. So 200 out of our 300,000 users use the plugin. I feel like it's\r\n\r\nthere's another conversation that needs to be had. I love it. Well, thanks for letting me take you down that trail. We hadn't talked about that. But I think it's interesting and this I think this is the first time we've shown this counter and we're 1.7 million installs already. All right. So keep going. You know, if I if I had a more sophisticated setup, I would like share that in the corner of my screen and we could see where it lands we could place bets to see where we'd be in an hour. Anyway, I'm gonna navigate away from this and everyone can bet what they think it'll be when we finish which is both betting one how fast the number of installs are gonna go up into how long I'm going to demo for and either those two things yet so we'll see. Okay, so I'm game for that. So right now folks put your there's no price other than you know, just the personal thrill of knowing that you won this, but drop it in the chat your guests for how many downloads will be when Timothy completes the demo. Before we go to q&a. I will go back to the camera card and just say an hour from now.\r\n\r\nRight. All right. So I'll grab these chats and we'll come back to this at the end. So today we're going to walk through all the new features in WordPress six 610 Many thanks for doing this. i One other note of housekeeping before I disappear. There were a few notes first, there are no downloads. This is all live demo. There's no there's not a slide deck. Second of all, if you'd like to ask questions, please use the zoom q&a. You can find that by mousing over the shared screen and clicking on the q&a icon there. And I would just invite you to keep that window open the whole time because other folks questions will appear there. And if you also have that question, click the thumbs up icon and we'll take the questions on the order of votes. This is being recorded. I'll drop in the links to the replay which will be available about an hour after we wrap up today. So with that I'll disappear Timothy. Let's get into six six. Yeah, let's do it. So as usual, per the last couple years releases most of this is gonna be about Gutenberg excited or block editor stuff. But there are two things that I wanted to cover first.\r\n\r\nOne is rollbacks for plugin auto updates. So this is pretty cool.\r\n\r\nIf you have auto updates enabled, which like we just talked about, I'm a big fan of a new feature in WordPress 6.6 is that after an update happens WordPress is going to check and make a request back to your site and make sure it's still online. And if it detects that there is a fatal error, it's going to roll back that plugin update for you automatically. Now this isn't just like a general purpose feature like there's the WP rollbacks plug in and things like that, where you can go into WP admin and say hey, roll back to the previous or something like that. This is an automated kind of level of protection around auto updates specifically. So if you know the plugin starts crashing, you know 10 hours from now this feature isn't going to check it recovery mode. Well. We did a talk on recovery mode, I think a long time ago at this point.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, it's a pretty cool feature to add. A little bit of resiliency and another another band aid along WordPress auto updates, you can feel a bit more confident enabling it.\r\n\r\nThe other thing, which I don't even think yeah is listed in this page because it really shouldn't affect anyone, but I think it is part of the field guide which if you haven't seen the field guide is this awesome post over and make that wordpress.org that talks about all of the new features and bug fixes that happened in the release. And the big thing here to mention is that dropping support for PHP seven Neto and 7.1 has happened so if you are one on if you're one of those few people back and one of these ancient PHP versions get updated.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, that is no longer gonna be supported as a WordPress 6.6 Your Site won't crash. It just won't update to WordPress six months, I guess if you're on those older versions, WordPress 6.6 is gonna get a little bit challenging to say all the time. Let's see how it goes. All right. With those two things out of the way, let's dive in. So we're gonna start with a site editor. The site editor has a feature that we've talked about before called data views. And this is kind of like the technical code word kind of similar to WP list tables if you're familiar with that and WordPress, and I did if you've got a quote update in WordPress 6.6. So we have this Pages section here which I've showed off in 6.5. It's been enhanced a bit. So I can go through and I can see all of my published pages. I can see my drafts, things that are private trash, etc.\r\n\r\nWhat's really cool is that this list area over here update what I see in the main canvas. So if I want to take a look at the sample page, I can take a look at the sample page and it's gonna update really quickly. If I want I can dive in and start editing this content right away.\r\n\r\nData views also give me more control over how I can view this information. So right now I'm viewing it in this view, but if I want I can view it as a table and I get this kind of familiar interface similar to what you'd see in WP admin. Or I can go ahead and switch it over to a grid view. And this will bring in the featured images for me, but I'm gonna go ahead and set it back to the list view because I think that's a pretty helpful way to get a quick browse to the content of your site.\r\n\r\nData views have also get used throughout this kind of like site editor designed the other places in the templates manager. So we can see the templates now show these four previews. Previously, there was also this kind of like intermediary page that was kind of really confusing when you started thinking about it where if you would click on this, it would give you some details over here in the sidebar, but now they just simply drop you into the editor. So if you want to go ahead and edit a template, it's just one click away from the data Views section.\r\n\r\nThe next place that we get an update is over in the pattern section and that's also going to take us to my favorite feature I think of WordPress 6.6. But we'll see our patterns, we can browse our template parts here as well. They're kind of all combined into this pattern section. But another thing that's pretty cool is that list the data views give me kind of similar to bulk actions that we have in lists tables I can do in the data views view. So I can select multiple patterns going over here and I can click this export as JSON button. And it's going to export all of these patterns for me in one big JSON file that I could go ahead and import into another site. And so this is all kind of being powered by the diffuse API. Now, I mentioned this next cool feature that has to do with patterns. It's called pattern overrides. And this is something I'm very excited about. I've given a couple of variations of like talks about a feature like this, which is hey, how do we give all the power of the block editor and this really rich interactive editing, but how do we constrain it down for users in a way that's more understandable? And how can we use it in places across our site?\r\n\r\nAnd this has been building up for kind of a number of releases. Now we got content only editing mode and number WordPress, really physical at this point. And we'll see that in preview here. This is kind of working similarly to the changes where we got synced patterns. And then that's the transition. If you remember from reusable blocks, we started talking about them in synced patterns a couple of releases ago. And this also is a little bit similar, I think to the block bindings API and HTML stuff and all of that combined to do something that I think is really cool. So I took this pattern here from the pattern directory on make that work best Edward is this cool one here?\r\n\r\nLet him roll. And what I've done is I've added in my new pattern and pasted in that HTML.\r\n\r\nAnd then what I've done is I've said, hey, I want the users of my site to be able to edit this pattern. But I don't want them to see like the full power of this editor. I want them to be able to like change all of these colors, change the background change the structure. I want to make the editing experience for them. Very simple. And the way that you do that is if you select your block, you'll probably need to open up the block toolbar. There's this new section in advance called overrides and what you do is for each bit of content that you want a user to be able to override, you click the button here right now it says disabled overrides. So if I go ahead and hit disable overrides this text is now going to always be part of the pattern. And it's not something that my users would be able to edit. But I hitting enable overrides and giving it a title. In this case description.\r\n\r\nThis now becomes a property that of the pattern that my users are able to customize whenever they use the pattern. So let's see what that looks like. I'm gonna navigate over to the Pages section, going over to the sample page. And I've inserted this pattern into my content. So I'm going to go ahead and delete this and reinsert it so you can see exactly what happens. We go into the inserter select for patterns, my patterns and that block you CTA is what I called it and so now if we open up the sidebar, we can see that I have this content only mode. So I don't have the ability to like change this color, change the structure move text around, but what I can do is that at this text, so if I wanted to say you know do some live chat history here, say it was recorded in 1975. I can make that change this shop now button. I could say let's make it by now. And I can change the link. That's the link gone over to amazon.com.\r\n\r\nAnd, you know, we want to get grammatically correct on them or something like that, let's say let them roll, you know, really take the personality out of this pattern. But you can see now I've made all these changes here and I can go ahead and hit Save. And when I go to the front end of my website, I have this pattern with my changes, but because this is still a sync pattern, if I go back on over, and I think yeah, I even get this handy little button here. Let's let's try and use it. Edit original.\r\n\r\nI can now make modifications to this pattern. So if I wanted to change this color, let's say to this red and hit save.\r\n\r\nI am right now editing the pattern here.\r\n\r\nAnd if I refresh the page, you can see that that's been changed. So what synced patterns with overrides are doing is they're letting me create a pattern. Say hey, these are the specific bits that I want you to be able to edit. But I as like you know the site designer or you know the site owner or anything like that. I can make structural changes to this pattern. And those will be reflected across my site without the user needing to make any changes, update the post anything like that they just happen automatically. And so in this case, I'm using it for a CTA there's lots of other places where you can use this that I think would be very effective things like a testimonial section. You know, you perhaps have a testimonial style that you want to use throughout your site. You want to make it really easy to insert your testimonials. But of course each testimonial is different. And you can't just say hey, use the same testimonial everywhere you want to say use a testimonial on this page. Use another testimonial on the other page, but we decide hey, we want to change the font that we use for the testimonial. You can easily do that.\r\n\r\nRight now the way patterns ended up getting stored into the post.\r\n\r\nLet's see how do I go back here?\r\n\r\nThey're not a back button.\r\n\r\nI don't think so we're just going to refresh.\r\n\r\nThe way that the pattern actually gets stored is if we take a look at the code editor you can see that the overrides are all in the block attributes. So it's just a part of the actual page content. What I would love to see in the future is potentially the ability to save those to like post meta, like we do with kind of other block bindings, which I think would be very cool and kind of bridges that gap between like custom post types and the thing that a developer would set up for you and something that an end user could potentially just do in the block Editor inside editor all by themselves.\r\n\r\nOkay, we're gonna go back on into the site editor now for some more features.\r\n\r\nSo this is another cool one, which is the ability to update a background image for your entire site. So we've had this feature in the customizer for a long time where you can like add theme support background images, but we can now do this in the actual site as well. So if I go over into the Layout tab for global styles, I can say add a background image and I'm going to go ahead and choose a subtle pattern that I got from subtle patterns.com. And we can see that this pattern is now applied as the main background for my site. So I'm gonna go ahead and save that and we can view the changes here.\r\n\r\nAnd so this works very similarly to how the custom background images worked with the customizer, where this is applying a background to the body tag places where there is you know, a background color applied like we see here in this menu item will of course lay over it.\r\n\r\nBut this lets you set up a background image across your entire site.\r\n\r\nI'm gonna go ahead and remove that. I'm gonna do that by just hitting reset all and it will remove all of the background images for me as well. This control is pretty nice, and you'll also see it for just editing elsewhere. In your site on a per block basis like a group Bach for instance, you can set a background image using the same kind of control but most new is being able to do it for the entire site.\r\n\r\nAnother cool feature is pattern switching. So I have this header here and my theme 2024 comes with a bunch of different variations for it. Previously, you could kind of head up into the sidebar or into the navigation excuse me and switch between patterns there. But the sidebar gains a new option here which is this design tab. And you know show me all the different patterns for the template part that I have on my site. So if I want to easily switch between them.\r\n\r\nI can do that with just one click and get a small visual preview of what they look like. In the sidebar here. I'm going to try and figure out which one was it that I have before that one\r\n\r\nbetter, let's stick with this one. I think that's what it was. Yes.\r\n\r\nThe next thing that I want to go over is some changes to the featured image block or two featured images in general. So I'm gonna go ahead and pull up the template for a single which one do we want it we could do the single page or we could do\r\n\r\nlet's do the single page I guess. So let's grab page with sidebar.\r\n\r\nAnd so this is the featured image block. But the featured image block doesn't give you a lot of controls. So let's say I want to have a little bit of a cooler coolers of beings objective layout here I'm gonna go ahead and insert the media and TextBlock and what I can do with the media and textbox now is that I can select Hey, for the image here I want to use the featured image and so I'm gonna then get rid of the featured image block. And what I'm also going to do is put the title in there as well and get rid of the paragraph. And I'll go ahead and press Delete.\r\n\r\nAnd so we can see now I have this media and textbox and I have all of the controls on here that I'm used to but when I've used my site, it's going to be doing this with the featured image as opposed to just a static image that I would always be using.\r\n\r\nLet's see if we can get a good demo of that. I think we might need to\r\n\r\nhere we go page with sidebar.\r\n\r\nIt save the page. And there we go. So you can see that it's using the featured image that I have selected.\r\n\r\nSo if I went ahead and changed the featured image to that say this one\r\n\r\nwill see the front end of my site has been updated. There.\r\n\r\nYou also have more controls with shadow. So let me see if I can.\r\n\r\nI thought this was enabled on the media and textbook but maybe it isn't.\r\n\r\nOkay, so let's undo these changes that we made to this template.\r\n\r\nSo we can use the new box shadow features. So I can now enable box shadows for the featured image block so by default, we get a couple of different options. So this one looks kind of cool. So we'll select that one.\r\n\r\nAnd we'll go ahead and hit Save.\r\n\r\nAnd we can see we're now using the box shadow feature here. But let's say none of these box shadows really speak to me. And I want to do something about custom. We can do that now. So if I go into shadows, you can see here the different shadows that are provided by default with WordPress. But if I wanted to I could create a custom shadow. So I'll go in here and now I have a whole bunch of controls. I can select a color. I can make it an inset shadow versus an outside shadow I could change the positioning is a blur, make it spread less or more all of these different options here that's maybe position it like this very funky and we'll hit save.\r\n\r\nLet's call this I don't know, big pink shadow.\r\n\r\nNow when I go over into the featured image box, I can select that shadow instead.\r\n\r\nVery I'm a very good designer, folks, you know this looks perfect but yeah, so you get more and more control over shadows now with WordPress 6.6. You can use them in your featured image block, apparently not media and text or I just missed the button for it. And you can also create custom shadows and edit the shadows that come with WordPress for the next feature I'm going to talk about I found a little bit confusing, I'll be honest, but it is called color palettes. Oops. I just thought color palettes and section styling. So I'm going to enable this theme here this kind of like I think a beta theme it's still being worked on actively called assembler.\r\n\r\nAnd the reason why I'm switching to assembler is because it provides these color palettes and section styles.\r\n\r\nSo if we go on into the site editor, we can see this is the homepage that I have set up and under styles you can see we only really have one style, but we have tons of different palettes use me and so this is that kind of feature that WordPress is introducing here, where you kind of get like a lightweight version of theme style. So while theme styles can control tons of different things like shape and layout and ordering and sizing and all this different stuff. The kind of like color palettes are just color palettes are just about defining a set of colors and using them and you can also set kind of like font packs. So you can see that here where it's changing like the body font and the header fonts all in one go.\r\n\r\nSo I'm gonna go back to I think I had this one selected was maybe it.\r\n\r\nYeah, maybe this is right, I don't know. But another cool way that this interacts is that we then get these features called Section styling so I'm going to select this parent group here and hop on over to the Style section and you can see a control that's similar to what you have on blocks. But this is for sections. So this is applying basically a set of colors to an entire section. of content in one go. So it's setting both like inner blocks and outer blocks, and it's using the color palettes that my team has set up.\r\n\r\nI'm also able to I believe, customize these. So if I go on into browsing the styles oops No, not that one into the group block.\r\n\r\nI can see these different style variations and if I wanted to I can make changes. So for instance, if I want this text color to be a custom color, not one from my themes, color palette, I could go ahead and change that.\r\n\r\nFrom what I can tell your theme kind of has to like get this started for you. I don't think there's any way to like create style variations entirely within the site editor on your own yet, but they are able to be done in different like feedback, JSON configurations through PHP, stuff like that. So this is a pretty cool feature. I think it could be helpful for like agencies and things like that where you might want to have a couple of different options for how people can assemble sections of content and color them without needing to create patterns for every different variation or needing to tell people that hey, when you want this to look like this, you need to go ahead and switch the background to this color, the text color to this color, the link color to that color. You can kind of all wrapped up in one of these like default styles.\r\n\r\nThese aren't really part of WordPress, the 2024 default theme, I imagine they will be with the 2025 theme. So that's why I'm demoing it with this some of the theme is supposed to 2024 but it is a possibility.\r\n\r\nNow as we get into the block editor, or before we get into the block editor, I wanted to talk about another kind of cool feature that comes to non full site editor block seeds. So I'm gonna switch over to Kadence.\r\n\r\nHere what you'll see is we've had this patterns menu here for a long time but it kind of gave you a really might say ugly interface that WordPress generated by default, where it's just like another list table kind of like this one, and you didn't get a really visual experience that was nice. But now patterns even in non full site editor themes, use the new site editor patterns of view. And so we can see here this is Kadence Kadence isn't a full site editor theme but of course has some cool patterns available. You can see a whole bunch of these ones that come from WooCommerce. You can also see the patterns that I've created and you can do all the things that you would expect to do. We can go in and you know, edit this pattern. Go back. And if we're done, we can just go back to the WordPress dashboard.\r\n\r\nThere's two reasons why I wanted to mention it. One I think this is cool if you're not yet using a false identity or theme to be able to get much better pattern management experience because I think patterns are one of the best features about the block editor and full site editing. But the other thing I think is really interesting about this is that is kind of like the first step of what you might have heard of as the WP admin redesign. So this is a project that is a big thing and phase three of Gutenberg where we find ourselves and we'll be seeing over the next couple of WordPress releases. And what I think is super interesting here is that this is this first foray into this kind of new navigation experience even if I'm not using a full site editor for you. So we can see that here have kind of like maybe a preview of what it might look like for the site and redesign for themes that aren't all aboard the full site editor train.\r\n\r\nBut we're gonna go ahead back and I'm going to switch on over to 2024 again as we dive into the block editor.\r\n\r\nSo you might have seen one of these changes when I was going about some of my demos earlier, which is that the site editor and the page editor have kind of merged together.\r\n\r\nPreviously, we first had the page editor slash post editor and then WordPress introduced the site editor a whole number of releases ago, and there were two distinct editors they made use of a lot of the same building blocks, but there were two pretty big code bases that were different.\r\n\r\nAnd so that led to some kind of like tricky experiences. If you were a theme developer plugin developer, where you kind of had to extend the editor differently in different contexts, which was annoying. For the WordPress core team. It also meant they had to maintain more kind of duplicate code than they wanted to. And so what's happened in WordPress 6.6 Is that the site editors and the post editors have kind of combined, they're still not 100% exactly the same code, but they're kind of like built on top of each other in a more thoughtful manner to share more bits. So it should be easier if you're plugin developer to write code that works in both the site editor and the post editor without as much complication.\r\n\r\nThere are though some changes that have actually populated their way into the user side of this. This is like a kind of like technical change, but there are some user ramifications. And one of those which you might have seen when we were looking at it earlier, when I was changing the template is that the kind of like post meta information handled here is different. It looks a lot more like what it looks like in the site editor. And these are all now pretty consistent with each other. So if I want to change the status, I open this up and a panel appears to the left. If I want to change the date that has to be published, the link, the author, any of these things, they all kind of have a very unified interface whereas before it was a little bit hodgepodge.\r\n\r\nI can also easily set a featured image just from the top here, whereas previously this was kind of like embedded in its own panel down below. And I can also quickly add an expert. So if I want to say come to my cool event on some date, I can go ahead and do that. And my excerpt gets populated and it's all in this one panel.\r\n\r\nThe other thing that I want to mention here while we're looking at this bit of code, I'm not going to go through the full demo for block bindings. You can check out the WordPress 6.5 review that we did to kind of like see how this is built. But this is a block pattern that I have set up with a block binding for the URL for this button here. And what's new, as you can see that this is now populated in the actual editor UI. So you can see that hey, the URL for this button block is being saved to post meta. It doesn't say what post meta key it does specifically, which I find a bit unfortunate and I think it'd be valuable if we did display that information or made it accessible. But you can now at least see what attributes are bound together. The other thing is that now if I make changes here, slash WordPress this value is now actually getting saved to post meta. Previously, you would have to update the post meta value separately. But now this is actually editable through the UI. So there have been some new features here, available for folks that are using block binding and so still a really like kind of complicated developer feature at this point, but is making forward progress, which is what we'd like to see.\r\n\r\nrounding the corners, we have a couple other block editor features that I want to go ahead and show you I'm going to create a new post here and\r\n\r\nwe're going to drop in a pattern and then I'm going to go into a call to action. Let's say I want to call to action pattern here. And or maybe we want a banner pattern.\r\n\r\nYeah, sure. Let's just pick this banner pattern here. What you'll see is that we now have a new ability to quickly cycle through patterns. So I inserted this one, maybe I want to get a preview of another one. I can click this shuffle button. And as you can choose another pattern of the same category for me. And so I can quickly cycle through a lot of different options. It would be great books.\r\n\r\nDid the editor crash? Nope. It just got into weird selection state.\r\n\r\nI think it'd be cool to I don't know maybe I can just like Undo to go back. Yeah, I can so I can cycle through them. See if there's one that I like oh, here we go. Another weird focus state thing that happens but you have to be on is the actual pattern route selection to see this shuffle up. But that's a little bit odd that it kind of keeps doing that. Whoa.\r\n\r\nWell, I would say hey, it's beta software, but WordPress 6.6. did release a few hours ago.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, there's a cool feature if you want to more easily find patterns that you have available to you go ahead and create another new page here to talk about CSS grid.\r\n\r\nSo we've had CSS grid has actually kind of been in WordPress for a little bit. It just hasn't really made itself known but it is now an official part of the group block. And CSS grid itself is a super big feature. There's a lot that it can do.\r\n\r\nAnd one of the things that I think the Gutenberg team is trying to figure out is exactly what CSS Grid features they want to expose to users and half. Right now there's kind of like two main modes in which CSS Grid works. One is I can do the manual mode. And so this says, hey, I want to use this many specific columns. So if I wanted to, for instance, I could set up like a, you know, a traditional 12 column grid. The thing to be aware of, though, is that if I'm setting up this 12 column grid, this isn't really responsive, so to speak. I'm going to get those 12 columns and that set.\r\n\r\nThe auto mode is kind of how CSS Grid takes on responsiveness, which is to say, hey, I want to create this layout and I need each grid item to take up at least this much space. That's how much it would be to look good. And beyond that point, you know, lay it out however you want. If they're using an iPad, a super wide desktop screen and iPhone, you figure it out. I just need each column to be at least this wide, and kind of fill as much space as you can with columns. And so this gives you the kind of more responsive option. So what do you do once you have CSS grids? Well, it's kind of like a combo box where you get your inserter. So I can go ahead and let's say create a paragraph block here. And we'll dump in some lorem ipsum text.\r\n\r\nI could in this next block, we could say let's put an image or grab something from the media library.\r\n\r\nWell grab some more text let's say let's make this text longer\r\n\r\nwell\r\n\r\nand I don't know if everyone another image that's put it in or maybe we put it out video. I don't have I spent another image we get one from the media library.\r\n\r\nOkay, so we can see I kind of have my columns. And if I go ahead and view this page, you can see it looks kind of like what I have here.\r\n\r\nBut the CSS Grid support doesn't kind of stop here. One of the things that's cool about CSS Grid is that I can do stylings on individual grid items. So let's say I want this text here, which is quite long. I want it to stretch across multiple columns. I can go ahead and do that. I can do that one just by dragging in the actual editor. But if I want I can go to the individual block, go into the dimensions panel and see that hey, this has been set to span two columns. So I want to I could also do this image and say, Hey, let's make this one span three columns. Now once in start spanning three columns, you can see that hey, I could also have things set up to span multiple rows. So if we go over here we can set this one to span two rows, and two columns. And we can see how it makes all of those changes happen.\r\n\r\nTo you know, take a look.\r\n\r\nBut we'll see that this also becomes responsive, where things shrink down, depending on the size of my screen.\r\n\r\nSo I think this is a pretty cool feature.\r\n\r\nThere's a lot more work that's kind of like going on with CSS Grid, one of which is like, right now you can see hey, I have this UI here, but I kind of have to like to keep going through the inserter to add in a new item that I want to add in. Maybe a cover block or something like that.\r\n\r\nMaybe uses\r\n\r\nthis whole thing in here and we could set the column span.\r\n\r\nSo I kind of have to like keep working through the inserter. But one of the things that the team is looking at, which I think could be very useful is the ability to just kind of draw things. So if we get rid of, let's say, this image here, there's kind of like an experiment where I could draw an item and say, hey, I want this to take over these two columns here and put it here.\r\n\r\nYeah, so that's what that's what I was showing you just a second ago, which is where as you kind of move through different screen sizes, because we're saying that each column must be a minimum amount of size, at least 12 rams. If they were to become smaller than 12 rams, it's going to collapse them.\r\n\r\nSo you can kind of like see that in action here. And then of course, when we get all the way small enough, you can really only have a one column layout, you're gonna have a one column layout.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, so this is kind of like taking those CSS Grid features and it's the start of making them accessible to folks who don't want to just use custom CSS. There isn't a way to make the columns even height right now. So that is a kind of mode of CSS Grid. And so that's kind of what I refer to with like, hey, the the team kind of has to figure out, you got another weird bug here.\r\n\r\nThe team kind of has to figure out what CSS Grid features they actually want to expose, and how they want to expose them.\r\n\r\nBecause yeah, what you can do with CSS Grid is you can say hey, I want each row height to be the same and distributed evenly. Or you can have the child items determine what the row height is. And so you have obviously different options that you're going to have to I guess wait and see how they get exposed. I think I think the team is still trying to figure it out.\r\n\r\nSo the next thing I really don't know what's I don't know if this is a safari thing, and what but the strange.\r\n\r\nThe last kind of feature that I want to talk about is negative margins. So I wonder actually, if there's a good pattern here that we could use to start showing this off\r\n\r\nyeah, let's start with this. So negative margins are a pretty powerful design tool.\r\n\r\nAnd I think partly because of that the team has decided that they don't want to make it\r\n\r\njust globally available.\r\n\r\nI think I need to be in the site editor right.\r\n\r\nNegative margins kind of let you overlay content and kind of break out of the box model.\r\n\r\nLet's see if we can get this to show up here. I'm not sure why I'm not seeing it in the image block I would have expected to maybe it's just not available on the image block at all.\r\n\r\nHere we go. So I have this dimensions thing here. And you'll see I can you know change the margin for my dimensions. We're going to unlock all of them. But I can't actually go negative through the UI and drag. But if I change this to an actual value, I can now set this value should be negative. And so what this lets me do is kind of overlay content on to each other. And kind of gives you the ability for more powerful designs. Now I think what I would really I don't know where the bug is here in terms of why one thing is gonna go the other thing but I guess you can see why. negative margins are something that you can't just do through the UI automatically.\r\n\r\nI think we probably need to like set a background of maybe like even Z index on this to like get it to appear more highly. But yeah, this is a feature that people have been kind of asking for it to be able to do. And you can now do it. But you just don't really get a lot of help. Basically, negative margins you get supported as value. The editor is not going to reject them anymore.\r\n\r\nBut it's not actually a control that I can just use in the site editor or the block editor itself. I need to actually input those values manually. But it lets you do kind of like cool things around like layering content layering images together.\r\n\r\nThey can let you achieve more powerful designs than you've been able to previously.\r\n\r\nThat being said it's time to check the counter because we are done with our official demo for WordPress 6.6 2.5 2 million. So congrats to anyone who got that one close. So all right. This is hilarious. So we had a few people guessed 2.5 million and then a late entry from Bill Christiansen said that okay, Susa 2.5 So I'm changing my guests to 2,500,001 So using the prices right strategy Bill has won the prize was competition. So congratulations.\r\n\r\nThe next vote up was Sadie with 3.2 million so Okay, everybody can give Bill their favorite emoji in the chat.\r\n\r\nWe're gonna have to remember to do this next time, Timothy. This was fun.\r\n\r\nYeah, he gets a new car. No. So yeah, everybody build their favorite emoji there in the chat be nice. And with that, we will turn our attention to some questions. Folks, if you have a question you haven't asked yet, use the zoom q&a to do that. Please also open that up and upvote any questions that you would like to hear answered? So that's funny. All right. First question here is from Teresa. This is a great one Timothy. The accessibility reinforcement act is going to be coming up in 2025. Is there an alert or anything planned for color combinations in WordPress in the block editor when you have, you know, maybe contrast issues? Yes, this is one of my favorite features that we've had for a long time in the WordPress editor is that it does this automatically if you are using the block editor. So I've got this white background and if I make this text well, don't you love demo fails.\r\n\r\nLet's see why isn't interfering? Here we go.\r\n\r\nIt's pretty curious why it is able to detect that this light tan is unreadable but white on white. Oh, there we go. Maybe it's the transparent background that's causing the issue.\r\n\r\nMaybe but now it's appearing for you see, like it appeared for it and then it went away.\r\n\r\nI don't know.\r\n\r\nSeems a little finicky.\r\n\r\nAnd now it's not\r\n\r\nlike this is perfectly readable. Well, there's this feature WordPress called the color contrast detector that is usually very reliable, but it looks like a matter of regression WordPress 6.6 And yeah, is exactly for this is to help detect and help surface to you when your color choices have become very hard to read like this one.\r\n\r\nIt takes into account Yeah, that colors and because of using the block editor all those things are kind of like done in a very declarative way. So WordPress is kind of able to detect a reliable usually and match what's going on there. It probably is related to this transparency thing but even then see, like black on black. It should that's that has worked perfectly. I've seen that working in the past.\r\n\r\nI don't know. Let's change that. Welcome to live remote folks. Yep, um, but yeah, so that's definitely a thing. That's their narrow you know, WordPress has to blend the line of that you can do whatever you want in the site and or on the block editor. You can make content that is very ugly and unreadable and inaccessible.\r\n\r\nBut for the most part, we're best just trying to guide you towards the right. pattern. That is, that is awesome. Okay, question from Vern about the download counter. Does it differentiate between automated downloads and manual ones? I don't think so. No, I think this is just all hits to the API.\r\n\r\nYeah.\r\n\r\nLet's see. Sue would like to know if there are any popular plugins or tools that you've heard of that have report reported problems on 6.6?\r\n\r\nNot that I've heard of yet.\r\n\r\nIf we go on over to the forums, though, there is a post that comes up every release. Yep.\r\n\r\nFor\r\n\r\nthe forum is for hey, here are bugs here issues. And we also get a link gone over to a page with themes and plugins and kind of other things to be aware of. So if you're not already in the WordPress forums, that WordPress forums team is staff staff, that is the wrong word is I'm gonna use the word staff because it's the correct word for what I'm about to say, which is staff with a team of great volunteers. So be kind, but yeah, if you're not over in the WordPress forms, all the volunteers over there, do a fantastic job.\r\n\r\nAnd yeah, you'll see things get reported in here and they'll make their way to kind of like no issues, lists, and things like that. But yeah, always, always check out the forums. They're an exciting time as well, right after release comes out. Because it's when everyone comes and says, Hey, this is broken.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, the forum is the best place to check that.\r\n\r\nIndeed. Final question, folks. By the way, if you have a question to ask if you haven't done so drop that in now, this is our last question in the list from John. Is there a way to have rounded corners on maybe a row or a column? Absolutely. It's just not done how you would think they were done is probably issue it's not exposed as rounded corners being an option but through borders so I'm gonna go ahead and put this block into a group then go over into border and set a radius\r\n\r\nokay, this is there are two layers of black that are happening here. Let me get this background out of the way and go here and put a background on our group block\r\n\r\nadded some padding to make this not horrible.\r\n\r\nAnd you can see we've got our rounded corners here. But yeah, so there's no option in the UI that's just like, hey, here's how you do rounded corners, but they're exposed through the border controls. But yeah, the thing you have to be aware of is that border controls aren't available in everything. I can see here. This is just text. They don't have border controls. They need to be kind of like on block elements like groups. So a handy thing that you can do whenever you need that ability is to just put a put a group block around what you're trying to style.\r\n\r\nYeah, and we are working here in core WordPress and the core blocks if you're a Kadence user, it is way easier to do all of this. Virtually, virtually every element will have some sort of a rounded corner ability. Yeah.\r\n\r\nLet's see.\r\n\r\nTheresa is WordPress thinking about working with AI? This question was asked this weekend this past weekend. at WordCamp Canada. Is there any discussion of moving any sort of AI something into core WordPress that you're aware of Timothy?\r\n\r\nNot that I've seen yet. So it's tricky because most\r\n\r\nAI features are things that you usually need a service to connect to. And so it would be super cost prohibitive for wordpress.org to just offer this for free. So what we're seeing is different plugins build integrations with either open AI or their own hosted models and things like that. Now.\r\n\r\nThere is a feature and I think one of Google Chrome's Canary builds where they are added a JavaScript API that talks to I believe, a locally hosted version of one of their Gemini models.\r\n\r\nGoogle being Google isn't going through any standards track as of yet to develop this API and it's not prefixed with Google or anything like that. But it creates I think, it's like a window.ai dot txt generator object or things like that, that lets you do things with AI through JavaScript with a model that's local to your computer, which kind of solves the problem of hey, we need to either pay open API money to get our you know, API request. Fulfilled. So I haven't seen anything with WordPress Core specifically yet, because there's that problem, but as locally hosted models become more and more of a thing. I think that can be pretty interesting. For instance, the Mac OS features that are coming later this year, around like AI, content writing and editing and things like that, where I can just, you know, select Content Anywhere in an app that has, you know, a native text input that works with text, and I can just say, hey, rewrite this for me to make it shorter, more professional, etc. In my personal opinion, that's where I see like more of these AI features going I think it's strange that I would need to, you know, have a grammerly ai extension and an AI extension inside of WordPress and like, tons of different AI things to like, help me write text better to me that feels like a feature that makes sense to just have built into the EO s. And so I think as we see those things, kind of like expand more and get integrated into browser API's and things like that. You can imagine a browser API that lets you, as a developer, say, hey, rewrite this to be shorter and it rely entirely on the local model on your Mac.\r\n\r\nI think that is, in my opinion, that like more exciting place for things to go particularly with like a privacy perspective and all these other things.\r\n\r\nThere's probably still room for like, for instance, jetpack has like just lock that lets you like ask it to help you write a blog post and things like that. There's probably still room for that for folks who don't have computers that can run vocally hosted models that are advanced enough to be useful, but at least me personally, I find it more exciting.\r\n\r\nThat the ability to like you know, help rewrite content and do things like that is just available natively in my iOS so I can use it in pages, or Ulysses, which is my Markdown editor of choice or anywhere on the web, and I don't have to think about oh, do I have an open AI subscription here? Is there a plugin that specific to whatever content authoring tool I'm using? If I'm writing a readme in my IDE for writing code, it could help me there like I feel like that is the better way this Bucha Yeah, that's a great answer. It's this age old question of what should be in core versus what should be a plug in WordPress, being open source and being built with extendibility. as just part of the, you know, the way we do things, it's a question that's asked about a lot of things that you could even say that as popular as SEO is, SEO is not built into core other than a sitemap.\r\n\r\nYeah, I and I did see I think I think it was a ticket and might have just been to make thread or make common response, right. I think I saw a ticket on adding in support. We have this feature WordPress for a long time. That says, hey, please discourage search engines reading. Please discourage search engines from indexing the site. I saw someone bring up like, hey, maybe WordPress should offer another button here that says discourage MLMs from scraping my website for content and add the necessary robots dot txt entries for that as like a place that you know, core would be speaking there. I kind of happen to think that it would make sense for us to offer a button to make that easy for folks who want to but yeah, there's a lot of questions about what should be the core what are the defaults when you've got to hit Close the counter page? But it's gonna say when you got X million sites updated to WordPress, there's a lot of out of consideration on on what features make it into core indeed. Or Timothy As always, this has been great. Appreciate your expertise and information. Any final thoughts as we wrapping up?\r\n\r\nI try our best to explain six if you haven't played around with a full site editor theme. Thank you, Bill and try it out. I think it's always exciting to see where things are going and play with block patterns. I would say really think about pattern overrides and how you can use them. If you're building sites for clients. i It's the feature that I'm personally most excited about and we're best six months six. I think it's extraordinarily powerful.\r\n\r\nAnd really gets you into that space of okay, this site looks like the front end of my website, but my client can't just completely break the layout, maybe hitting the delete key one too many times. So I think it's really cool feature I play with it if you haven't.\r\n\r\nVery good we'll focus on dropping in the link bundle one final time before we wrap up here. We'll have the replay of this event up in about an hour as soon as the video renders. So you can share this out this excellent overview of six dots six out with all your friends. Also if you are not already signed up for our news roundup that's coming up tomorrow at one o'clock Central that's give me an hour and I'll get you up to date on all the things in WordPress. All the news specifically aimed at those of us who are doing WordPress things with clients. So that's going to wrap us up for it today. Timothy, thanks once again, and we'll see you all back tomorrow for news roundup, one o'clock Central here on the solid Academy where we go further together.\r\n\r\nTranscribed by https:\/\/otter.ai\r\n","livestream_vimeo_video_id":985173199,"livestream-resources-group":"s:34:\"a:1:{s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}\";","multi-day_replay_details":"s:102:\"a:2:{s:16:\"course-resources\";a:1:{i:0;a:1:{s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}}s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}\";"}},"postCountOnPage":1,"postCountTotal":1,"postID":448554,"postFormat":"standard","geoCloudflareCountryCode":"US"}; dataLayer.push( dataLayer_content ); \nRollback Failed Theme & Plugin Updates\n\n\n\nStyle Variations\n\n\n\nOverride Synced Patterns\n\n\n\nGrid Block\n\n\n\nNegative Margins\n\n\n\nA Unified Publishing Flow\n\n\n\nAnd more!\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n","livestream_chat_log":"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1CYn04wFycG2Czl-o_HyWI-NQD9XcoVTT\/view?usp=sharing","livestream_live_transcript_url":"https:\/\/otter.ai\/u\/EamxQIon_6oe6gCgXdRfFRRztX4?utm_source=copy_url","livestream_live_transcript_text":"slides today and this is all live demos so nothing to download. Edie? Yes 6.6 dropped Well, the first notice I got was about an hour ago. They usually slowly roll that out\r\n\r\nfor your sites, gradually notice that it's available\r\n\r\nagain, welcome everybody. If you're just joining us open up the chat say hello. Caption should now be working for everyone.\r\n\r\nLooking forward to a demo of WordPress six, six with Timothy Jacobs. He's going to walk us through all the things and answer your questions.\r\n\r\nHey Kylie, welcome.\r\n\r\nA bin both Ben's class welcome. Hey Ken.\r\n\r\nAll right, I'm going to drop in a link bundle. Again, no downloads today but the replay link is there. We'll have that up about an hour after we finish. So you can share that out with folks. Also, if you haven't registered for tomorrow's news roundup that's a free live stream one o'clock Central the same time tomorrow, looking at all the WordPress news over the last month or so.\r\n\r\nWe've got about three minutes to go before we get started officially with Welcome to WordPress 6.6 which just dropped a little bit of go you can download it for real now\r\n\r\nbut as you're coming in, open up the chat say hi, tell us where you are logging in from today. Hey, John from Chicago welcome.\r\n\r\nCouple of Greensboro folks getting connected there in the chat.\r\n\r\nSo Sue is what would you is it Green's burrow Ian, what would you say?\r\n\r\nHey, Richard from Tampa, Stephanie from Germany. Welcome.\r\n\r\nCouple minutes to go, folks, before we get started officially we'll get going at three minutes after all about WordPress 6.6 which just dropped a little while ago. Hey Bill from Virginia welcome also Vern from West Virginia.\r\n\r\nGreat to see everybody coming in.\r\n\r\nNo slides today this is all live live demo. So Timothy will be walking us through all the things right here live. This is being recorded though, and we'll have the replay up at the link that I just dropped in the chat. And if you've not already done so register for tomorrow's news roundup. That will be the same time tomorrow.\r\n\r\nJust a little over a minute to go.\r\n\r\nOnce again, welcome everybody. If you more folks just joining open the chat say hi and tell us where you are logging in from today. Just about a minute to go before we get started.\r\n\r\nAll live demo today nothing to download. Hey Sadie from Scotland.\r\n\r\nAbout 30 seconds to go hey Teresa from Germany welcome\r\n\r\nI probably just mispronounced your name\r\n\r\nis it Teresita perhaps.\r\n\r\nYeah, it is Prime Day on a another little rabbit trail there.\r\n\r\nHopefully everybody's not spending all their money today.\r\n\r\nJust about ready to get started. Alright, it's three minutes after. Let's start. The recording and we'll dive in with WordPress 6.6.\r\n\r\nWell, good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening. Welcome everybody to another solid Academy livestream and glad you're all with us today. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at solid Academy joined today by Timothy Jacobs, the lead developer for solid WP Welcome back, Timothy. How are things in your world today? Doing good, you know, trying to survive.\r\n\r\nHeatwave number 75 or whatever it is right up in New York but yeah, doing okay. Excellent. So WordPress 6.6. Just started appearing in WordPress installs in the last couple of hours. So we didn't talk about this, but how does this rollout actually work? When they're dropping a new version of WordPress, you guys so it's kind of a multi step thing.\r\n\r\nA bit before the WordPress release goes out there. It's kind of like a, hey, we all know this is coming type of thing. And then yeah, the basically the API gets updated. And sites check kind of like I think every hour at this point and I'll check for that. Update and then start auto updating if you have that available, which has been the default since I think WordPress five, six.\r\n\r\nAnd then yeah, you can go to what's the page I think wordpress.org\/stats will give you a live feed which is kind of fun to watch during the first. No, this isn't the one. I mean, if you're going to find it, and I know you've gotten me off on a tangent. Yeah, we didn't talk about this at all. I just came to me right as we were starting. But there's a cool little I think it's called counter. Let me see one right yeah, here we go. Um, so this fun one during release, because what you'll see is when we get up to like WordPress 6.7 It's about time to do it. This number will be way higher.\r\n\r\nBut it's, yeah, it gets quite out there but this is a fun one to watch. And the day of the release. Because yeah, you'll see all the sites across the Web Start to update. So yeah, usually it starts happening basically immediately if you're the luck of the draw the first new checks that our but yeah, it's there's a big old button kind of you can think of that they pressed to make the disco go out. Amazing. So for those of you that aren't aware, as I mentioned before, Timothy is the lead developer for us here at solid WP Timothy is also a core committer to WordPress and one of the maintainers of the WordPress REST API. So Timothy you do a lot of work with core\r\n\r\nit when these updates come out, are we at a point now where you'd recommend auto updating core WordPress? So yeah, I am a big proponent of auto updating repurpose for when we had this conversation around WordPress 5.6 and make chat in Slack Yeah, I was all for it. Um, I am a big believer in auto updates in general, particularly with WordPress core itself. I think the thing that you want to consider is that if you have lots of plugins that are breaking your site on every update that you potentially consider switching plugin that always astonishes me and you know, maybe one day I'll get caught by this but it always astonishes me when WordPress 6.6 releases and XYZ very large theme or XYZ very large plugin releases an update 12 hours later that's like fixed compatibly with WordPress 6.6. We've known that WordPress 6.6 has been a release from the state for like four months.\r\n\r\nSo yeah, I'm kind of in the opinion, yes, you should use auto updates. And if you find your site breaking all the time after it gets auto updated.\r\n\r\nThat you know maybe there's a different plugin out there that solves your needs.\r\n\r\nYeah, I mean, when we add salad, we start running our automated tests on trunk, you know, so we're testing the latest version. Basically, immediately we're I guess, starting tomorrow our tests are gonna be running on against WordPress 6.7. And so that doesn't catch everything. But it does always surprise me when you see a plugin or theme that like fatal airing on WordPress on the new version of WordPress. And it's in a code path that like runs against everything because I think as developers we should be running WordPress nightly. Basically, always well writing code and testing your plugins and have automated tests running. So it's one thing if there's an edge case and an edge case and this thing over here, there's an issue. Yeah, but when it's like, yeah, we need to release this update. So 200 out of our 300,000 users use the plugin. I feel like it's\r\n\r\nthere's another conversation that needs to be had. I love it. Well, thanks for letting me take you down that trail. We hadn't talked about that. But I think it's interesting and this I think this is the first time we've shown this counter and we're 1.7 million installs already. All right. So keep going. You know, if I if I had a more sophisticated setup, I would like share that in the corner of my screen and we could see where it lands we could place bets to see where we'd be in an hour. Anyway, I'm gonna navigate away from this and everyone can bet what they think it'll be when we finish which is both betting one how fast the number of installs are gonna go up into how long I'm going to demo for and either those two things yet so we'll see. Okay, so I'm game for that. So right now folks put your there's no price other than you know, just the personal thrill of knowing that you won this, but drop it in the chat your guests for how many downloads will be when Timothy completes the demo. Before we go to q&a. I will go back to the camera card and just say an hour from now.\r\n\r\nRight. All right. So I'll grab these chats and we'll come back to this at the end. So today we're going to walk through all the new features in WordPress six 610 Many thanks for doing this. i One other note of housekeeping before I disappear. There were a few notes first, there are no downloads. This is all live demo. There's no there's not a slide deck. Second of all, if you'd like to ask questions, please use the zoom q&a. You can find that by mousing over the shared screen and clicking on the q&a icon there. And I would just invite you to keep that window open the whole time because other folks questions will appear there. And if you also have that question, click the thumbs up icon and we'll take the questions on the order of votes. This is being recorded. I'll drop in the links to the replay which will be available about an hour after we wrap up today. So with that I'll disappear Timothy. Let's get into six six. Yeah, let's do it. So as usual, per the last couple years releases most of this is gonna be about Gutenberg excited or block editor stuff. But there are two things that I wanted to cover first.\r\n\r\nOne is rollbacks for plugin auto updates. So this is pretty cool.\r\n\r\nIf you have auto updates enabled, which like we just talked about, I'm a big fan of a new feature in WordPress 6.6 is that after an update happens WordPress is going to check and make a request back to your site and make sure it's still online. And if it detects that there is a fatal error, it's going to roll back that plugin update for you automatically. Now this isn't just like a general purpose feature like there's the WP rollbacks plug in and things like that, where you can go into WP admin and say hey, roll back to the previous or something like that. This is an automated kind of level of protection around auto updates specifically. So if you know the plugin starts crashing, you know 10 hours from now this feature isn't going to check it recovery mode. Well. We did a talk on recovery mode, I think a long time ago at this point.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, it's a pretty cool feature to add. A little bit of resiliency and another another band aid along WordPress auto updates, you can feel a bit more confident enabling it.\r\n\r\nThe other thing, which I don't even think yeah is listed in this page because it really shouldn't affect anyone, but I think it is part of the field guide which if you haven't seen the field guide is this awesome post over and make that wordpress.org that talks about all of the new features and bug fixes that happened in the release. And the big thing here to mention is that dropping support for PHP seven Neto and 7.1 has happened so if you are one on if you're one of those few people back and one of these ancient PHP versions get updated.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, that is no longer gonna be supported as a WordPress 6.6 Your Site won't crash. It just won't update to WordPress six months, I guess if you're on those older versions, WordPress 6.6 is gonna get a little bit challenging to say all the time. Let's see how it goes. All right. With those two things out of the way, let's dive in. So we're gonna start with a site editor. The site editor has a feature that we've talked about before called data views. And this is kind of like the technical code word kind of similar to WP list tables if you're familiar with that and WordPress, and I did if you've got a quote update in WordPress 6.6. So we have this Pages section here which I've showed off in 6.5. It's been enhanced a bit. So I can go through and I can see all of my published pages. I can see my drafts, things that are private trash, etc.\r\n\r\nWhat's really cool is that this list area over here update what I see in the main canvas. So if I want to take a look at the sample page, I can take a look at the sample page and it's gonna update really quickly. If I want I can dive in and start editing this content right away.\r\n\r\nData views also give me more control over how I can view this information. So right now I'm viewing it in this view, but if I want I can view it as a table and I get this kind of familiar interface similar to what you'd see in WP admin. Or I can go ahead and switch it over to a grid view. And this will bring in the featured images for me, but I'm gonna go ahead and set it back to the list view because I think that's a pretty helpful way to get a quick browse to the content of your site.\r\n\r\nData views have also get used throughout this kind of like site editor designed the other places in the templates manager. So we can see the templates now show these four previews. Previously, there was also this kind of like intermediary page that was kind of really confusing when you started thinking about it where if you would click on this, it would give you some details over here in the sidebar, but now they just simply drop you into the editor. So if you want to go ahead and edit a template, it's just one click away from the data Views section.\r\n\r\nThe next place that we get an update is over in the pattern section and that's also going to take us to my favorite feature I think of WordPress 6.6. But we'll see our patterns, we can browse our template parts here as well. They're kind of all combined into this pattern section. But another thing that's pretty cool is that list the data views give me kind of similar to bulk actions that we have in lists tables I can do in the data views view. So I can select multiple patterns going over here and I can click this export as JSON button. And it's going to export all of these patterns for me in one big JSON file that I could go ahead and import into another site. And so this is all kind of being powered by the diffuse API. Now, I mentioned this next cool feature that has to do with patterns. It's called pattern overrides. And this is something I'm very excited about. I've given a couple of variations of like talks about a feature like this, which is hey, how do we give all the power of the block editor and this really rich interactive editing, but how do we constrain it down for users in a way that's more understandable? And how can we use it in places across our site?\r\n\r\nAnd this has been building up for kind of a number of releases. Now we got content only editing mode and number WordPress, really physical at this point. And we'll see that in preview here. This is kind of working similarly to the changes where we got synced patterns. And then that's the transition. If you remember from reusable blocks, we started talking about them in synced patterns a couple of releases ago. And this also is a little bit similar, I think to the block bindings API and HTML stuff and all of that combined to do something that I think is really cool. So I took this pattern here from the pattern directory on make that work best Edward is this cool one here?\r\n\r\nLet him roll. And what I've done is I've added in my new pattern and pasted in that HTML.\r\n\r\nAnd then what I've done is I've said, hey, I want the users of my site to be able to edit this pattern. But I don't want them to see like the full power of this editor. I want them to be able to like change all of these colors, change the background change the structure. I want to make the editing experience for them. Very simple. And the way that you do that is if you select your block, you'll probably need to open up the block toolbar. There's this new section in advance called overrides and what you do is for each bit of content that you want a user to be able to override, you click the button here right now it says disabled overrides. So if I go ahead and hit disable overrides this text is now going to always be part of the pattern. And it's not something that my users would be able to edit. But I hitting enable overrides and giving it a title. In this case description.\r\n\r\nThis now becomes a property that of the pattern that my users are able to customize whenever they use the pattern. So let's see what that looks like. I'm gonna navigate over to the Pages section, going over to the sample page. And I've inserted this pattern into my content. So I'm going to go ahead and delete this and reinsert it so you can see exactly what happens. We go into the inserter select for patterns, my patterns and that block you CTA is what I called it and so now if we open up the sidebar, we can see that I have this content only mode. So I don't have the ability to like change this color, change the structure move text around, but what I can do is that at this text, so if I wanted to say you know do some live chat history here, say it was recorded in 1975. I can make that change this shop now button. I could say let's make it by now. And I can change the link. That's the link gone over to amazon.com.\r\n\r\nAnd, you know, we want to get grammatically correct on them or something like that, let's say let them roll, you know, really take the personality out of this pattern. But you can see now I've made all these changes here and I can go ahead and hit Save. And when I go to the front end of my website, I have this pattern with my changes, but because this is still a sync pattern, if I go back on over, and I think yeah, I even get this handy little button here. Let's let's try and use it. Edit original.\r\n\r\nI can now make modifications to this pattern. So if I wanted to change this color, let's say to this red and hit save.\r\n\r\nI am right now editing the pattern here.\r\n\r\nAnd if I refresh the page, you can see that that's been changed. So what synced patterns with overrides are doing is they're letting me create a pattern. Say hey, these are the specific bits that I want you to be able to edit. But I as like you know the site designer or you know the site owner or anything like that. I can make structural changes to this pattern. And those will be reflected across my site without the user needing to make any changes, update the post anything like that they just happen automatically. And so in this case, I'm using it for a CTA there's lots of other places where you can use this that I think would be very effective things like a testimonial section. You know, you perhaps have a testimonial style that you want to use throughout your site. You want to make it really easy to insert your testimonials. But of course each testimonial is different. And you can't just say hey, use the same testimonial everywhere you want to say use a testimonial on this page. Use another testimonial on the other page, but we decide hey, we want to change the font that we use for the testimonial. You can easily do that.\r\n\r\nRight now the way patterns ended up getting stored into the post.\r\n\r\nLet's see how do I go back here?\r\n\r\nThey're not a back button.\r\n\r\nI don't think so we're just going to refresh.\r\n\r\nThe way that the pattern actually gets stored is if we take a look at the code editor you can see that the overrides are all in the block attributes. So it's just a part of the actual page content. What I would love to see in the future is potentially the ability to save those to like post meta, like we do with kind of other block bindings, which I think would be very cool and kind of bridges that gap between like custom post types and the thing that a developer would set up for you and something that an end user could potentially just do in the block Editor inside editor all by themselves.\r\n\r\nOkay, we're gonna go back on into the site editor now for some more features.\r\n\r\nSo this is another cool one, which is the ability to update a background image for your entire site. So we've had this feature in the customizer for a long time where you can like add theme support background images, but we can now do this in the actual site as well. So if I go over into the Layout tab for global styles, I can say add a background image and I'm going to go ahead and choose a subtle pattern that I got from subtle patterns.com. And we can see that this pattern is now applied as the main background for my site. So I'm gonna go ahead and save that and we can view the changes here.\r\n\r\nAnd so this works very similarly to how the custom background images worked with the customizer, where this is applying a background to the body tag places where there is you know, a background color applied like we see here in this menu item will of course lay over it.\r\n\r\nBut this lets you set up a background image across your entire site.\r\n\r\nI'm gonna go ahead and remove that. I'm gonna do that by just hitting reset all and it will remove all of the background images for me as well. This control is pretty nice, and you'll also see it for just editing elsewhere. In your site on a per block basis like a group Bach for instance, you can set a background image using the same kind of control but most new is being able to do it for the entire site.\r\n\r\nAnother cool feature is pattern switching. So I have this header here and my theme 2024 comes with a bunch of different variations for it. Previously, you could kind of head up into the sidebar or into the navigation excuse me and switch between patterns there. But the sidebar gains a new option here which is this design tab. And you know show me all the different patterns for the template part that I have on my site. So if I want to easily switch between them.\r\n\r\nI can do that with just one click and get a small visual preview of what they look like. In the sidebar here. I'm going to try and figure out which one was it that I have before that one\r\n\r\nbetter, let's stick with this one. I think that's what it was. Yes.\r\n\r\nThe next thing that I want to go over is some changes to the featured image block or two featured images in general. So I'm gonna go ahead and pull up the template for a single which one do we want it we could do the single page or we could do\r\n\r\nlet's do the single page I guess. So let's grab page with sidebar.\r\n\r\nAnd so this is the featured image block. But the featured image block doesn't give you a lot of controls. So let's say I want to have a little bit of a cooler coolers of beings objective layout here I'm gonna go ahead and insert the media and TextBlock and what I can do with the media and textbox now is that I can select Hey, for the image here I want to use the featured image and so I'm gonna then get rid of the featured image block. And what I'm also going to do is put the title in there as well and get rid of the paragraph. And I'll go ahead and press Delete.\r\n\r\nAnd so we can see now I have this media and textbox and I have all of the controls on here that I'm used to but when I've used my site, it's going to be doing this with the featured image as opposed to just a static image that I would always be using.\r\n\r\nLet's see if we can get a good demo of that. I think we might need to\r\n\r\nhere we go page with sidebar.\r\n\r\nIt save the page. And there we go. So you can see that it's using the featured image that I have selected.\r\n\r\nSo if I went ahead and changed the featured image to that say this one\r\n\r\nwill see the front end of my site has been updated. There.\r\n\r\nYou also have more controls with shadow. So let me see if I can.\r\n\r\nI thought this was enabled on the media and textbook but maybe it isn't.\r\n\r\nOkay, so let's undo these changes that we made to this template.\r\n\r\nSo we can use the new box shadow features. So I can now enable box shadows for the featured image block so by default, we get a couple of different options. So this one looks kind of cool. So we'll select that one.\r\n\r\nAnd we'll go ahead and hit Save.\r\n\r\nAnd we can see we're now using the box shadow feature here. But let's say none of these box shadows really speak to me. And I want to do something about custom. We can do that now. So if I go into shadows, you can see here the different shadows that are provided by default with WordPress. But if I wanted to I could create a custom shadow. So I'll go in here and now I have a whole bunch of controls. I can select a color. I can make it an inset shadow versus an outside shadow I could change the positioning is a blur, make it spread less or more all of these different options here that's maybe position it like this very funky and we'll hit save.\r\n\r\nLet's call this I don't know, big pink shadow.\r\n\r\nNow when I go over into the featured image box, I can select that shadow instead.\r\n\r\nVery I'm a very good designer, folks, you know this looks perfect but yeah, so you get more and more control over shadows now with WordPress 6.6. You can use them in your featured image block, apparently not media and text or I just missed the button for it. And you can also create custom shadows and edit the shadows that come with WordPress for the next feature I'm going to talk about I found a little bit confusing, I'll be honest, but it is called color palettes. Oops. I just thought color palettes and section styling. So I'm going to enable this theme here this kind of like I think a beta theme it's still being worked on actively called assembler.\r\n\r\nAnd the reason why I'm switching to assembler is because it provides these color palettes and section styles.\r\n\r\nSo if we go on into the site editor, we can see this is the homepage that I have set up and under styles you can see we only really have one style, but we have tons of different palettes use me and so this is that kind of feature that WordPress is introducing here, where you kind of get like a lightweight version of theme style. So while theme styles can control tons of different things like shape and layout and ordering and sizing and all this different stuff. The kind of like color palettes are just color palettes are just about defining a set of colors and using them and you can also set kind of like font packs. So you can see that here where it's changing like the body font and the header fonts all in one go.\r\n\r\nSo I'm gonna go back to I think I had this one selected was maybe it.\r\n\r\nYeah, maybe this is right, I don't know. But another cool way that this interacts is that we then get these features called Section styling so I'm going to select this parent group here and hop on over to the Style section and you can see a control that's similar to what you have on blocks. But this is for sections. So this is applying basically a set of colors to an entire section. of content in one go. So it's setting both like inner blocks and outer blocks, and it's using the color palettes that my team has set up.\r\n\r\nI'm also able to I believe, customize these. So if I go on into browsing the styles oops No, not that one into the group block.\r\n\r\nI can see these different style variations and if I wanted to I can make changes. So for instance, if I want this text color to be a custom color, not one from my themes, color palette, I could go ahead and change that.\r\n\r\nFrom what I can tell your theme kind of has to like get this started for you. I don't think there's any way to like create style variations entirely within the site editor on your own yet, but they are able to be done in different like feedback, JSON configurations through PHP, stuff like that. So this is a pretty cool feature. I think it could be helpful for like agencies and things like that where you might want to have a couple of different options for how people can assemble sections of content and color them without needing to create patterns for every different variation or needing to tell people that hey, when you want this to look like this, you need to go ahead and switch the background to this color, the text color to this color, the link color to that color. You can kind of all wrapped up in one of these like default styles.\r\n\r\nThese aren't really part of WordPress, the 2024 default theme, I imagine they will be with the 2025 theme. So that's why I'm demoing it with this some of the theme is supposed to 2024 but it is a possibility.\r\n\r\nNow as we get into the block editor, or before we get into the block editor, I wanted to talk about another kind of cool feature that comes to non full site editor block seeds. So I'm gonna switch over to Kadence.\r\n\r\nHere what you'll see is we've had this patterns menu here for a long time but it kind of gave you a really might say ugly interface that WordPress generated by default, where it's just like another list table kind of like this one, and you didn't get a really visual experience that was nice. But now patterns even in non full site editor themes, use the new site editor patterns of view. And so we can see here this is Kadence Kadence isn't a full site editor theme but of course has some cool patterns available. You can see a whole bunch of these ones that come from WooCommerce. You can also see the patterns that I've created and you can do all the things that you would expect to do. We can go in and you know, edit this pattern. Go back. And if we're done, we can just go back to the WordPress dashboard.\r\n\r\nThere's two reasons why I wanted to mention it. One I think this is cool if you're not yet using a false identity or theme to be able to get much better pattern management experience because I think patterns are one of the best features about the block editor and full site editing. But the other thing I think is really interesting about this is that is kind of like the first step of what you might have heard of as the WP admin redesign. So this is a project that is a big thing and phase three of Gutenberg where we find ourselves and we'll be seeing over the next couple of WordPress releases. And what I think is super interesting here is that this is this first foray into this kind of new navigation experience even if I'm not using a full site editor for you. So we can see that here have kind of like maybe a preview of what it might look like for the site and redesign for themes that aren't all aboard the full site editor train.\r\n\r\nBut we're gonna go ahead back and I'm going to switch on over to 2024 again as we dive into the block editor.\r\n\r\nSo you might have seen one of these changes when I was going about some of my demos earlier, which is that the site editor and the page editor have kind of merged together.\r\n\r\nPreviously, we first had the page editor slash post editor and then WordPress introduced the site editor a whole number of releases ago, and there were two distinct editors they made use of a lot of the same building blocks, but there were two pretty big code bases that were different.\r\n\r\nAnd so that led to some kind of like tricky experiences. If you were a theme developer plugin developer, where you kind of had to extend the editor differently in different contexts, which was annoying. For the WordPress core team. It also meant they had to maintain more kind of duplicate code than they wanted to. And so what's happened in WordPress 6.6 Is that the site editors and the post editors have kind of combined, they're still not 100% exactly the same code, but they're kind of like built on top of each other in a more thoughtful manner to share more bits. So it should be easier if you're plugin developer to write code that works in both the site editor and the post editor without as much complication.\r\n\r\nThere are though some changes that have actually populated their way into the user side of this. This is like a kind of like technical change, but there are some user ramifications. And one of those which you might have seen when we were looking at it earlier, when I was changing the template is that the kind of like post meta information handled here is different. It looks a lot more like what it looks like in the site editor. And these are all now pretty consistent with each other. So if I want to change the status, I open this up and a panel appears to the left. If I want to change the date that has to be published, the link, the author, any of these things, they all kind of have a very unified interface whereas before it was a little bit hodgepodge.\r\n\r\nI can also easily set a featured image just from the top here, whereas previously this was kind of like embedded in its own panel down below. And I can also quickly add an expert. So if I want to say come to my cool event on some date, I can go ahead and do that. And my excerpt gets populated and it's all in this one panel.\r\n\r\nThe other thing that I want to mention here while we're looking at this bit of code, I'm not going to go through the full demo for block bindings. You can check out the WordPress 6.5 review that we did to kind of like see how this is built. But this is a block pattern that I have set up with a block binding for the URL for this button here. And what's new, as you can see that this is now populated in the actual editor UI. So you can see that hey, the URL for this button block is being saved to post meta. It doesn't say what post meta key it does specifically, which I find a bit unfortunate and I think it'd be valuable if we did display that information or made it accessible. But you can now at least see what attributes are bound together. The other thing is that now if I make changes here, slash WordPress this value is now actually getting saved to post meta. Previously, you would have to update the post meta value separately. But now this is actually editable through the UI. So there have been some new features here, available for folks that are using block binding and so still a really like kind of complicated developer feature at this point, but is making forward progress, which is what we'd like to see.\r\n\r\nrounding the corners, we have a couple other block editor features that I want to go ahead and show you I'm going to create a new post here and\r\n\r\nwe're going to drop in a pattern and then I'm going to go into a call to action. Let's say I want to call to action pattern here. And or maybe we want a banner pattern.\r\n\r\nYeah, sure. Let's just pick this banner pattern here. What you'll see is that we now have a new ability to quickly cycle through patterns. So I inserted this one, maybe I want to get a preview of another one. I can click this shuffle button. And as you can choose another pattern of the same category for me. And so I can quickly cycle through a lot of different options. It would be great books.\r\n\r\nDid the editor crash? Nope. It just got into weird selection state.\r\n\r\nI think it'd be cool to I don't know maybe I can just like Undo to go back. Yeah, I can so I can cycle through them. See if there's one that I like oh, here we go. Another weird focus state thing that happens but you have to be on is the actual pattern route selection to see this shuffle up. But that's a little bit odd that it kind of keeps doing that. Whoa.\r\n\r\nWell, I would say hey, it's beta software, but WordPress 6.6. did release a few hours ago.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, there's a cool feature if you want to more easily find patterns that you have available to you go ahead and create another new page here to talk about CSS grid.\r\n\r\nSo we've had CSS grid has actually kind of been in WordPress for a little bit. It just hasn't really made itself known but it is now an official part of the group block. And CSS grid itself is a super big feature. There's a lot that it can do.\r\n\r\nAnd one of the things that I think the Gutenberg team is trying to figure out is exactly what CSS Grid features they want to expose to users and half. Right now there's kind of like two main modes in which CSS Grid works. One is I can do the manual mode. And so this says, hey, I want to use this many specific columns. So if I wanted to, for instance, I could set up like a, you know, a traditional 12 column grid. The thing to be aware of, though, is that if I'm setting up this 12 column grid, this isn't really responsive, so to speak. I'm going to get those 12 columns and that set.\r\n\r\nThe auto mode is kind of how CSS Grid takes on responsiveness, which is to say, hey, I want to create this layout and I need each grid item to take up at least this much space. That's how much it would be to look good. And beyond that point, you know, lay it out however you want. If they're using an iPad, a super wide desktop screen and iPhone, you figure it out. I just need each column to be at least this wide, and kind of fill as much space as you can with columns. And so this gives you the kind of more responsive option. So what do you do once you have CSS grids? Well, it's kind of like a combo box where you get your inserter. So I can go ahead and let's say create a paragraph block here. And we'll dump in some lorem ipsum text.\r\n\r\nI could in this next block, we could say let's put an image or grab something from the media library.\r\n\r\nWell grab some more text let's say let's make this text longer\r\n\r\nwell\r\n\r\nand I don't know if everyone another image that's put it in or maybe we put it out video. I don't have I spent another image we get one from the media library.\r\n\r\nOkay, so we can see I kind of have my columns. And if I go ahead and view this page, you can see it looks kind of like what I have here.\r\n\r\nBut the CSS Grid support doesn't kind of stop here. One of the things that's cool about CSS Grid is that I can do stylings on individual grid items. So let's say I want this text here, which is quite long. I want it to stretch across multiple columns. I can go ahead and do that. I can do that one just by dragging in the actual editor. But if I want I can go to the individual block, go into the dimensions panel and see that hey, this has been set to span two columns. So I want to I could also do this image and say, Hey, let's make this one span three columns. Now once in start spanning three columns, you can see that hey, I could also have things set up to span multiple rows. So if we go over here we can set this one to span two rows, and two columns. And we can see how it makes all of those changes happen.\r\n\r\nTo you know, take a look.\r\n\r\nBut we'll see that this also becomes responsive, where things shrink down, depending on the size of my screen.\r\n\r\nSo I think this is a pretty cool feature.\r\n\r\nThere's a lot more work that's kind of like going on with CSS Grid, one of which is like, right now you can see hey, I have this UI here, but I kind of have to like to keep going through the inserter to add in a new item that I want to add in. Maybe a cover block or something like that.\r\n\r\nMaybe uses\r\n\r\nthis whole thing in here and we could set the column span.\r\n\r\nSo I kind of have to like keep working through the inserter. But one of the things that the team is looking at, which I think could be very useful is the ability to just kind of draw things. So if we get rid of, let's say, this image here, there's kind of like an experiment where I could draw an item and say, hey, I want this to take over these two columns here and put it here.\r\n\r\nYeah, so that's what that's what I was showing you just a second ago, which is where as you kind of move through different screen sizes, because we're saying that each column must be a minimum amount of size, at least 12 rams. If they were to become smaller than 12 rams, it's going to collapse them.\r\n\r\nSo you can kind of like see that in action here. And then of course, when we get all the way small enough, you can really only have a one column layout, you're gonna have a one column layout.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, so this is kind of like taking those CSS Grid features and it's the start of making them accessible to folks who don't want to just use custom CSS. There isn't a way to make the columns even height right now. So that is a kind of mode of CSS Grid. And so that's kind of what I refer to with like, hey, the the team kind of has to figure out, you got another weird bug here.\r\n\r\nThe team kind of has to figure out what CSS Grid features they actually want to expose, and how they want to expose them.\r\n\r\nBecause yeah, what you can do with CSS Grid is you can say hey, I want each row height to be the same and distributed evenly. Or you can have the child items determine what the row height is. And so you have obviously different options that you're going to have to I guess wait and see how they get exposed. I think I think the team is still trying to figure it out.\r\n\r\nSo the next thing I really don't know what's I don't know if this is a safari thing, and what but the strange.\r\n\r\nThe last kind of feature that I want to talk about is negative margins. So I wonder actually, if there's a good pattern here that we could use to start showing this off\r\n\r\nyeah, let's start with this. So negative margins are a pretty powerful design tool.\r\n\r\nAnd I think partly because of that the team has decided that they don't want to make it\r\n\r\njust globally available.\r\n\r\nI think I need to be in the site editor right.\r\n\r\nNegative margins kind of let you overlay content and kind of break out of the box model.\r\n\r\nLet's see if we can get this to show up here. I'm not sure why I'm not seeing it in the image block I would have expected to maybe it's just not available on the image block at all.\r\n\r\nHere we go. So I have this dimensions thing here. And you'll see I can you know change the margin for my dimensions. We're going to unlock all of them. But I can't actually go negative through the UI and drag. But if I change this to an actual value, I can now set this value should be negative. And so what this lets me do is kind of overlay content on to each other. And kind of gives you the ability for more powerful designs. Now I think what I would really I don't know where the bug is here in terms of why one thing is gonna go the other thing but I guess you can see why. negative margins are something that you can't just do through the UI automatically.\r\n\r\nI think we probably need to like set a background of maybe like even Z index on this to like get it to appear more highly. But yeah, this is a feature that people have been kind of asking for it to be able to do. And you can now do it. But you just don't really get a lot of help. Basically, negative margins you get supported as value. The editor is not going to reject them anymore.\r\n\r\nBut it's not actually a control that I can just use in the site editor or the block editor itself. I need to actually input those values manually. But it lets you do kind of like cool things around like layering content layering images together.\r\n\r\nThey can let you achieve more powerful designs than you've been able to previously.\r\n\r\nThat being said it's time to check the counter because we are done with our official demo for WordPress 6.6 2.5 2 million. So congrats to anyone who got that one close. So all right. This is hilarious. So we had a few people guessed 2.5 million and then a late entry from Bill Christiansen said that okay, Susa 2.5 So I'm changing my guests to 2,500,001 So using the prices right strategy Bill has won the prize was competition. So congratulations.\r\n\r\nThe next vote up was Sadie with 3.2 million so Okay, everybody can give Bill their favorite emoji in the chat.\r\n\r\nWe're gonna have to remember to do this next time, Timothy. This was fun.\r\n\r\nYeah, he gets a new car. No. So yeah, everybody build their favorite emoji there in the chat be nice. And with that, we will turn our attention to some questions. Folks, if you have a question you haven't asked yet, use the zoom q&a to do that. Please also open that up and upvote any questions that you would like to hear answered? So that's funny. All right. First question here is from Teresa. This is a great one Timothy. The accessibility reinforcement act is going to be coming up in 2025. Is there an alert or anything planned for color combinations in WordPress in the block editor when you have, you know, maybe contrast issues? Yes, this is one of my favorite features that we've had for a long time in the WordPress editor is that it does this automatically if you are using the block editor. So I've got this white background and if I make this text well, don't you love demo fails.\r\n\r\nLet's see why isn't interfering? Here we go.\r\n\r\nIt's pretty curious why it is able to detect that this light tan is unreadable but white on white. Oh, there we go. Maybe it's the transparent background that's causing the issue.\r\n\r\nMaybe but now it's appearing for you see, like it appeared for it and then it went away.\r\n\r\nI don't know.\r\n\r\nSeems a little finicky.\r\n\r\nAnd now it's not\r\n\r\nlike this is perfectly readable. Well, there's this feature WordPress called the color contrast detector that is usually very reliable, but it looks like a matter of regression WordPress 6.6 And yeah, is exactly for this is to help detect and help surface to you when your color choices have become very hard to read like this one.\r\n\r\nIt takes into account Yeah, that colors and because of using the block editor all those things are kind of like done in a very declarative way. So WordPress is kind of able to detect a reliable usually and match what's going on there. It probably is related to this transparency thing but even then see, like black on black. It should that's that has worked perfectly. I've seen that working in the past.\r\n\r\nI don't know. Let's change that. Welcome to live remote folks. Yep, um, but yeah, so that's definitely a thing. That's their narrow you know, WordPress has to blend the line of that you can do whatever you want in the site and or on the block editor. You can make content that is very ugly and unreadable and inaccessible.\r\n\r\nBut for the most part, we're best just trying to guide you towards the right. pattern. That is, that is awesome. Okay, question from Vern about the download counter. Does it differentiate between automated downloads and manual ones? I don't think so. No, I think this is just all hits to the API.\r\n\r\nYeah.\r\n\r\nLet's see. Sue would like to know if there are any popular plugins or tools that you've heard of that have report reported problems on 6.6?\r\n\r\nNot that I've heard of yet.\r\n\r\nIf we go on over to the forums, though, there is a post that comes up every release. Yep.\r\n\r\nFor\r\n\r\nthe forum is for hey, here are bugs here issues. And we also get a link gone over to a page with themes and plugins and kind of other things to be aware of. So if you're not already in the WordPress forums, that WordPress forums team is staff staff, that is the wrong word is I'm gonna use the word staff because it's the correct word for what I'm about to say, which is staff with a team of great volunteers. So be kind, but yeah, if you're not over in the WordPress forms, all the volunteers over there, do a fantastic job.\r\n\r\nAnd yeah, you'll see things get reported in here and they'll make their way to kind of like no issues, lists, and things like that. But yeah, always, always check out the forums. They're an exciting time as well, right after release comes out. Because it's when everyone comes and says, Hey, this is broken.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, the forum is the best place to check that.\r\n\r\nIndeed. Final question, folks. By the way, if you have a question to ask if you haven't done so drop that in now, this is our last question in the list from John. Is there a way to have rounded corners on maybe a row or a column? Absolutely. It's just not done how you would think they were done is probably issue it's not exposed as rounded corners being an option but through borders so I'm gonna go ahead and put this block into a group then go over into border and set a radius\r\n\r\nokay, this is there are two layers of black that are happening here. Let me get this background out of the way and go here and put a background on our group block\r\n\r\nadded some padding to make this not horrible.\r\n\r\nAnd you can see we've got our rounded corners here. But yeah, so there's no option in the UI that's just like, hey, here's how you do rounded corners, but they're exposed through the border controls. But yeah, the thing you have to be aware of is that border controls aren't available in everything. I can see here. This is just text. They don't have border controls. They need to be kind of like on block elements like groups. So a handy thing that you can do whenever you need that ability is to just put a put a group block around what you're trying to style.\r\n\r\nYeah, and we are working here in core WordPress and the core blocks if you're a Kadence user, it is way easier to do all of this. Virtually, virtually every element will have some sort of a rounded corner ability. Yeah.\r\n\r\nLet's see.\r\n\r\nTheresa is WordPress thinking about working with AI? This question was asked this weekend this past weekend. at WordCamp Canada. Is there any discussion of moving any sort of AI something into core WordPress that you're aware of Timothy?\r\n\r\nNot that I've seen yet. So it's tricky because most\r\n\r\nAI features are things that you usually need a service to connect to. And so it would be super cost prohibitive for wordpress.org to just offer this for free. So what we're seeing is different plugins build integrations with either open AI or their own hosted models and things like that. Now.\r\n\r\nThere is a feature and I think one of Google Chrome's Canary builds where they are added a JavaScript API that talks to I believe, a locally hosted version of one of their Gemini models.\r\n\r\nGoogle being Google isn't going through any standards track as of yet to develop this API and it's not prefixed with Google or anything like that. But it creates I think, it's like a window.ai dot txt generator object or things like that, that lets you do things with AI through JavaScript with a model that's local to your computer, which kind of solves the problem of hey, we need to either pay open API money to get our you know, API request. Fulfilled. So I haven't seen anything with WordPress Core specifically yet, because there's that problem, but as locally hosted models become more and more of a thing. I think that can be pretty interesting. For instance, the Mac OS features that are coming later this year, around like AI, content writing and editing and things like that, where I can just, you know, select Content Anywhere in an app that has, you know, a native text input that works with text, and I can just say, hey, rewrite this for me to make it shorter, more professional, etc. In my personal opinion, that's where I see like more of these AI features going I think it's strange that I would need to, you know, have a grammerly ai extension and an AI extension inside of WordPress and like, tons of different AI things to like, help me write text better to me that feels like a feature that makes sense to just have built into the EO s. And so I think as we see those things, kind of like expand more and get integrated into browser API's and things like that. You can imagine a browser API that lets you, as a developer, say, hey, rewrite this to be shorter and it rely entirely on the local model on your Mac.\r\n\r\nI think that is, in my opinion, that like more exciting place for things to go particularly with like a privacy perspective and all these other things.\r\n\r\nThere's probably still room for like, for instance, jetpack has like just lock that lets you like ask it to help you write a blog post and things like that. There's probably still room for that for folks who don't have computers that can run vocally hosted models that are advanced enough to be useful, but at least me personally, I find it more exciting.\r\n\r\nThat the ability to like you know, help rewrite content and do things like that is just available natively in my iOS so I can use it in pages, or Ulysses, which is my Markdown editor of choice or anywhere on the web, and I don't have to think about oh, do I have an open AI subscription here? Is there a plugin that specific to whatever content authoring tool I'm using? If I'm writing a readme in my IDE for writing code, it could help me there like I feel like that is the better way this Bucha Yeah, that's a great answer. It's this age old question of what should be in core versus what should be a plug in WordPress, being open source and being built with extendibility. as just part of the, you know, the way we do things, it's a question that's asked about a lot of things that you could even say that as popular as SEO is, SEO is not built into core other than a sitemap.\r\n\r\nYeah, I and I did see I think I think it was a ticket and might have just been to make thread or make common response, right. I think I saw a ticket on adding in support. We have this feature WordPress for a long time. That says, hey, please discourage search engines reading. Please discourage search engines from indexing the site. I saw someone bring up like, hey, maybe WordPress should offer another button here that says discourage MLMs from scraping my website for content and add the necessary robots dot txt entries for that as like a place that you know, core would be speaking there. I kind of happen to think that it would make sense for us to offer a button to make that easy for folks who want to but yeah, there's a lot of questions about what should be the core what are the defaults when you've got to hit Close the counter page? But it's gonna say when you got X million sites updated to WordPress, there's a lot of out of consideration on on what features make it into core indeed. Or Timothy As always, this has been great. Appreciate your expertise and information. Any final thoughts as we wrapping up?\r\n\r\nI try our best to explain six if you haven't played around with a full site editor theme. Thank you, Bill and try it out. I think it's always exciting to see where things are going and play with block patterns. I would say really think about pattern overrides and how you can use them. If you're building sites for clients. i It's the feature that I'm personally most excited about and we're best six months six. I think it's extraordinarily powerful.\r\n\r\nAnd really gets you into that space of okay, this site looks like the front end of my website, but my client can't just completely break the layout, maybe hitting the delete key one too many times. So I think it's really cool feature I play with it if you haven't.\r\n\r\nVery good we'll focus on dropping in the link bundle one final time before we wrap up here. We'll have the replay of this event up in about an hour as soon as the video renders. So you can share this out this excellent overview of six dots six out with all your friends. Also if you are not already signed up for our news roundup that's coming up tomorrow at one o'clock Central that's give me an hour and I'll get you up to date on all the things in WordPress. All the news specifically aimed at those of us who are doing WordPress things with clients. So that's going to wrap us up for it today. Timothy, thanks once again, and we'll see you all back tomorrow for news roundup, one o'clock Central here on the solid Academy where we go further together.\r\n\r\nTranscribed by https:\/\/otter.ai\r\n","livestream_vimeo_video_id":985173199,"livestream-resources-group":"s:34:\"a:1:{s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}\";","multi-day_replay_details":"s:102:\"a:2:{s:16:\"course-resources\";a:1:{i:0;a:1:{s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}}s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}\";"}},"postCountOnPage":1,"postCountTotal":1,"postID":448554,"postFormat":"standard","geoCloudflareCountryCode":"US"}; dataLayer.push( dataLayer_content ); \n\nRollback Failed Theme & Plugin Updates\n\n\n\nStyle Variations\n\n\n\nOverride Synced Patterns\n\n\n\nGrid Block\n\n\n\nNegative Margins\n\n\n\nA Unified Publishing Flow\n\n\n\nAnd more!\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n","livestream_chat_log":"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1CYn04wFycG2Czl-o_HyWI-NQD9XcoVTT\/view?usp=sharing","livestream_live_transcript_url":"https:\/\/otter.ai\/u\/EamxQIon_6oe6gCgXdRfFRRztX4?utm_source=copy_url","livestream_live_transcript_text":"slides today and this is all live demos so nothing to download. Edie? Yes 6.6 dropped Well, the first notice I got was about an hour ago. They usually slowly roll that out\r\n\r\nfor your sites, gradually notice that it's available\r\n\r\nagain, welcome everybody. If you're just joining us open up the chat say hello. Caption should now be working for everyone.\r\n\r\nLooking forward to a demo of WordPress six, six with Timothy Jacobs. He's going to walk us through all the things and answer your questions.\r\n\r\nHey Kylie, welcome.\r\n\r\nA bin both Ben's class welcome. Hey Ken.\r\n\r\nAll right, I'm going to drop in a link bundle. Again, no downloads today but the replay link is there. We'll have that up about an hour after we finish. So you can share that out with folks. Also, if you haven't registered for tomorrow's news roundup that's a free live stream one o'clock Central the same time tomorrow, looking at all the WordPress news over the last month or so.\r\n\r\nWe've got about three minutes to go before we get started officially with Welcome to WordPress 6.6 which just dropped a little bit of go you can download it for real now\r\n\r\nbut as you're coming in, open up the chat say hi, tell us where you are logging in from today. Hey, John from Chicago welcome.\r\n\r\nCouple of Greensboro folks getting connected there in the chat.\r\n\r\nSo Sue is what would you is it Green's burrow Ian, what would you say?\r\n\r\nHey, Richard from Tampa, Stephanie from Germany. Welcome.\r\n\r\nCouple minutes to go, folks, before we get started officially we'll get going at three minutes after all about WordPress 6.6 which just dropped a little while ago. Hey Bill from Virginia welcome also Vern from West Virginia.\r\n\r\nGreat to see everybody coming in.\r\n\r\nNo slides today this is all live live demo. So Timothy will be walking us through all the things right here live. This is being recorded though, and we'll have the replay up at the link that I just dropped in the chat. And if you've not already done so register for tomorrow's news roundup. That will be the same time tomorrow.\r\n\r\nJust a little over a minute to go.\r\n\r\nOnce again, welcome everybody. If you more folks just joining open the chat say hi and tell us where you are logging in from today. Just about a minute to go before we get started.\r\n\r\nAll live demo today nothing to download. Hey Sadie from Scotland.\r\n\r\nAbout 30 seconds to go hey Teresa from Germany welcome\r\n\r\nI probably just mispronounced your name\r\n\r\nis it Teresita perhaps.\r\n\r\nYeah, it is Prime Day on a another little rabbit trail there.\r\n\r\nHopefully everybody's not spending all their money today.\r\n\r\nJust about ready to get started. Alright, it's three minutes after. Let's start. The recording and we'll dive in with WordPress 6.6.\r\n\r\nWell, good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening. Welcome everybody to another solid Academy livestream and glad you're all with us today. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at solid Academy joined today by Timothy Jacobs, the lead developer for solid WP Welcome back, Timothy. How are things in your world today? Doing good, you know, trying to survive.\r\n\r\nHeatwave number 75 or whatever it is right up in New York but yeah, doing okay. Excellent. So WordPress 6.6. Just started appearing in WordPress installs in the last couple of hours. So we didn't talk about this, but how does this rollout actually work? When they're dropping a new version of WordPress, you guys so it's kind of a multi step thing.\r\n\r\nA bit before the WordPress release goes out there. It's kind of like a, hey, we all know this is coming type of thing. And then yeah, the basically the API gets updated. And sites check kind of like I think every hour at this point and I'll check for that. Update and then start auto updating if you have that available, which has been the default since I think WordPress five, six.\r\n\r\nAnd then yeah, you can go to what's the page I think wordpress.org\/stats will give you a live feed which is kind of fun to watch during the first. No, this isn't the one. I mean, if you're going to find it, and I know you've gotten me off on a tangent. Yeah, we didn't talk about this at all. I just came to me right as we were starting. But there's a cool little I think it's called counter. Let me see one right yeah, here we go. Um, so this fun one during release, because what you'll see is when we get up to like WordPress 6.7 It's about time to do it. This number will be way higher.\r\n\r\nBut it's, yeah, it gets quite out there but this is a fun one to watch. And the day of the release. Because yeah, you'll see all the sites across the Web Start to update. So yeah, usually it starts happening basically immediately if you're the luck of the draw the first new checks that our but yeah, it's there's a big old button kind of you can think of that they pressed to make the disco go out. Amazing. So for those of you that aren't aware, as I mentioned before, Timothy is the lead developer for us here at solid WP Timothy is also a core committer to WordPress and one of the maintainers of the WordPress REST API. So Timothy you do a lot of work with core\r\n\r\nit when these updates come out, are we at a point now where you'd recommend auto updating core WordPress? So yeah, I am a big proponent of auto updating repurpose for when we had this conversation around WordPress 5.6 and make chat in Slack Yeah, I was all for it. Um, I am a big believer in auto updates in general, particularly with WordPress core itself. I think the thing that you want to consider is that if you have lots of plugins that are breaking your site on every update that you potentially consider switching plugin that always astonishes me and you know, maybe one day I'll get caught by this but it always astonishes me when WordPress 6.6 releases and XYZ very large theme or XYZ very large plugin releases an update 12 hours later that's like fixed compatibly with WordPress 6.6. We've known that WordPress 6.6 has been a release from the state for like four months.\r\n\r\nSo yeah, I'm kind of in the opinion, yes, you should use auto updates. And if you find your site breaking all the time after it gets auto updated.\r\n\r\nThat you know maybe there's a different plugin out there that solves your needs.\r\n\r\nYeah, I mean, when we add salad, we start running our automated tests on trunk, you know, so we're testing the latest version. Basically, immediately we're I guess, starting tomorrow our tests are gonna be running on against WordPress 6.7. And so that doesn't catch everything. But it does always surprise me when you see a plugin or theme that like fatal airing on WordPress on the new version of WordPress. And it's in a code path that like runs against everything because I think as developers we should be running WordPress nightly. Basically, always well writing code and testing your plugins and have automated tests running. So it's one thing if there's an edge case and an edge case and this thing over here, there's an issue. Yeah, but when it's like, yeah, we need to release this update. So 200 out of our 300,000 users use the plugin. I feel like it's\r\n\r\nthere's another conversation that needs to be had. I love it. Well, thanks for letting me take you down that trail. We hadn't talked about that. But I think it's interesting and this I think this is the first time we've shown this counter and we're 1.7 million installs already. All right. So keep going. You know, if I if I had a more sophisticated setup, I would like share that in the corner of my screen and we could see where it lands we could place bets to see where we'd be in an hour. Anyway, I'm gonna navigate away from this and everyone can bet what they think it'll be when we finish which is both betting one how fast the number of installs are gonna go up into how long I'm going to demo for and either those two things yet so we'll see. Okay, so I'm game for that. So right now folks put your there's no price other than you know, just the personal thrill of knowing that you won this, but drop it in the chat your guests for how many downloads will be when Timothy completes the demo. Before we go to q&a. I will go back to the camera card and just say an hour from now.\r\n\r\nRight. All right. So I'll grab these chats and we'll come back to this at the end. So today we're going to walk through all the new features in WordPress six 610 Many thanks for doing this. i One other note of housekeeping before I disappear. There were a few notes first, there are no downloads. This is all live demo. There's no there's not a slide deck. Second of all, if you'd like to ask questions, please use the zoom q&a. You can find that by mousing over the shared screen and clicking on the q&a icon there. And I would just invite you to keep that window open the whole time because other folks questions will appear there. And if you also have that question, click the thumbs up icon and we'll take the questions on the order of votes. This is being recorded. I'll drop in the links to the replay which will be available about an hour after we wrap up today. So with that I'll disappear Timothy. Let's get into six six. Yeah, let's do it. So as usual, per the last couple years releases most of this is gonna be about Gutenberg excited or block editor stuff. But there are two things that I wanted to cover first.\r\n\r\nOne is rollbacks for plugin auto updates. So this is pretty cool.\r\n\r\nIf you have auto updates enabled, which like we just talked about, I'm a big fan of a new feature in WordPress 6.6 is that after an update happens WordPress is going to check and make a request back to your site and make sure it's still online. And if it detects that there is a fatal error, it's going to roll back that plugin update for you automatically. Now this isn't just like a general purpose feature like there's the WP rollbacks plug in and things like that, where you can go into WP admin and say hey, roll back to the previous or something like that. This is an automated kind of level of protection around auto updates specifically. So if you know the plugin starts crashing, you know 10 hours from now this feature isn't going to check it recovery mode. Well. We did a talk on recovery mode, I think a long time ago at this point.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, it's a pretty cool feature to add. A little bit of resiliency and another another band aid along WordPress auto updates, you can feel a bit more confident enabling it.\r\n\r\nThe other thing, which I don't even think yeah is listed in this page because it really shouldn't affect anyone, but I think it is part of the field guide which if you haven't seen the field guide is this awesome post over and make that wordpress.org that talks about all of the new features and bug fixes that happened in the release. And the big thing here to mention is that dropping support for PHP seven Neto and 7.1 has happened so if you are one on if you're one of those few people back and one of these ancient PHP versions get updated.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, that is no longer gonna be supported as a WordPress 6.6 Your Site won't crash. It just won't update to WordPress six months, I guess if you're on those older versions, WordPress 6.6 is gonna get a little bit challenging to say all the time. Let's see how it goes. All right. With those two things out of the way, let's dive in. So we're gonna start with a site editor. The site editor has a feature that we've talked about before called data views. And this is kind of like the technical code word kind of similar to WP list tables if you're familiar with that and WordPress, and I did if you've got a quote update in WordPress 6.6. So we have this Pages section here which I've showed off in 6.5. It's been enhanced a bit. So I can go through and I can see all of my published pages. I can see my drafts, things that are private trash, etc.\r\n\r\nWhat's really cool is that this list area over here update what I see in the main canvas. So if I want to take a look at the sample page, I can take a look at the sample page and it's gonna update really quickly. If I want I can dive in and start editing this content right away.\r\n\r\nData views also give me more control over how I can view this information. So right now I'm viewing it in this view, but if I want I can view it as a table and I get this kind of familiar interface similar to what you'd see in WP admin. Or I can go ahead and switch it over to a grid view. And this will bring in the featured images for me, but I'm gonna go ahead and set it back to the list view because I think that's a pretty helpful way to get a quick browse to the content of your site.\r\n\r\nData views have also get used throughout this kind of like site editor designed the other places in the templates manager. So we can see the templates now show these four previews. Previously, there was also this kind of like intermediary page that was kind of really confusing when you started thinking about it where if you would click on this, it would give you some details over here in the sidebar, but now they just simply drop you into the editor. So if you want to go ahead and edit a template, it's just one click away from the data Views section.\r\n\r\nThe next place that we get an update is over in the pattern section and that's also going to take us to my favorite feature I think of WordPress 6.6. But we'll see our patterns, we can browse our template parts here as well. They're kind of all combined into this pattern section. But another thing that's pretty cool is that list the data views give me kind of similar to bulk actions that we have in lists tables I can do in the data views view. So I can select multiple patterns going over here and I can click this export as JSON button. And it's going to export all of these patterns for me in one big JSON file that I could go ahead and import into another site. And so this is all kind of being powered by the diffuse API. Now, I mentioned this next cool feature that has to do with patterns. It's called pattern overrides. And this is something I'm very excited about. I've given a couple of variations of like talks about a feature like this, which is hey, how do we give all the power of the block editor and this really rich interactive editing, but how do we constrain it down for users in a way that's more understandable? And how can we use it in places across our site?\r\n\r\nAnd this has been building up for kind of a number of releases. Now we got content only editing mode and number WordPress, really physical at this point. And we'll see that in preview here. This is kind of working similarly to the changes where we got synced patterns. And then that's the transition. If you remember from reusable blocks, we started talking about them in synced patterns a couple of releases ago. And this also is a little bit similar, I think to the block bindings API and HTML stuff and all of that combined to do something that I think is really cool. So I took this pattern here from the pattern directory on make that work best Edward is this cool one here?\r\n\r\nLet him roll. And what I've done is I've added in my new pattern and pasted in that HTML.\r\n\r\nAnd then what I've done is I've said, hey, I want the users of my site to be able to edit this pattern. But I don't want them to see like the full power of this editor. I want them to be able to like change all of these colors, change the background change the structure. I want to make the editing experience for them. Very simple. And the way that you do that is if you select your block, you'll probably need to open up the block toolbar. There's this new section in advance called overrides and what you do is for each bit of content that you want a user to be able to override, you click the button here right now it says disabled overrides. So if I go ahead and hit disable overrides this text is now going to always be part of the pattern. And it's not something that my users would be able to edit. But I hitting enable overrides and giving it a title. In this case description.\r\n\r\nThis now becomes a property that of the pattern that my users are able to customize whenever they use the pattern. So let's see what that looks like. I'm gonna navigate over to the Pages section, going over to the sample page. And I've inserted this pattern into my content. So I'm going to go ahead and delete this and reinsert it so you can see exactly what happens. We go into the inserter select for patterns, my patterns and that block you CTA is what I called it and so now if we open up the sidebar, we can see that I have this content only mode. So I don't have the ability to like change this color, change the structure move text around, but what I can do is that at this text, so if I wanted to say you know do some live chat history here, say it was recorded in 1975. I can make that change this shop now button. I could say let's make it by now. And I can change the link. That's the link gone over to amazon.com.\r\n\r\nAnd, you know, we want to get grammatically correct on them or something like that, let's say let them roll, you know, really take the personality out of this pattern. But you can see now I've made all these changes here and I can go ahead and hit Save. And when I go to the front end of my website, I have this pattern with my changes, but because this is still a sync pattern, if I go back on over, and I think yeah, I even get this handy little button here. Let's let's try and use it. Edit original.\r\n\r\nI can now make modifications to this pattern. So if I wanted to change this color, let's say to this red and hit save.\r\n\r\nI am right now editing the pattern here.\r\n\r\nAnd if I refresh the page, you can see that that's been changed. So what synced patterns with overrides are doing is they're letting me create a pattern. Say hey, these are the specific bits that I want you to be able to edit. But I as like you know the site designer or you know the site owner or anything like that. I can make structural changes to this pattern. And those will be reflected across my site without the user needing to make any changes, update the post anything like that they just happen automatically. And so in this case, I'm using it for a CTA there's lots of other places where you can use this that I think would be very effective things like a testimonial section. You know, you perhaps have a testimonial style that you want to use throughout your site. You want to make it really easy to insert your testimonials. But of course each testimonial is different. And you can't just say hey, use the same testimonial everywhere you want to say use a testimonial on this page. Use another testimonial on the other page, but we decide hey, we want to change the font that we use for the testimonial. You can easily do that.\r\n\r\nRight now the way patterns ended up getting stored into the post.\r\n\r\nLet's see how do I go back here?\r\n\r\nThey're not a back button.\r\n\r\nI don't think so we're just going to refresh.\r\n\r\nThe way that the pattern actually gets stored is if we take a look at the code editor you can see that the overrides are all in the block attributes. So it's just a part of the actual page content. What I would love to see in the future is potentially the ability to save those to like post meta, like we do with kind of other block bindings, which I think would be very cool and kind of bridges that gap between like custom post types and the thing that a developer would set up for you and something that an end user could potentially just do in the block Editor inside editor all by themselves.\r\n\r\nOkay, we're gonna go back on into the site editor now for some more features.\r\n\r\nSo this is another cool one, which is the ability to update a background image for your entire site. So we've had this feature in the customizer for a long time where you can like add theme support background images, but we can now do this in the actual site as well. So if I go over into the Layout tab for global styles, I can say add a background image and I'm going to go ahead and choose a subtle pattern that I got from subtle patterns.com. And we can see that this pattern is now applied as the main background for my site. So I'm gonna go ahead and save that and we can view the changes here.\r\n\r\nAnd so this works very similarly to how the custom background images worked with the customizer, where this is applying a background to the body tag places where there is you know, a background color applied like we see here in this menu item will of course lay over it.\r\n\r\nBut this lets you set up a background image across your entire site.\r\n\r\nI'm gonna go ahead and remove that. I'm gonna do that by just hitting reset all and it will remove all of the background images for me as well. This control is pretty nice, and you'll also see it for just editing elsewhere. In your site on a per block basis like a group Bach for instance, you can set a background image using the same kind of control but most new is being able to do it for the entire site.\r\n\r\nAnother cool feature is pattern switching. So I have this header here and my theme 2024 comes with a bunch of different variations for it. Previously, you could kind of head up into the sidebar or into the navigation excuse me and switch between patterns there. But the sidebar gains a new option here which is this design tab. And you know show me all the different patterns for the template part that I have on my site. So if I want to easily switch between them.\r\n\r\nI can do that with just one click and get a small visual preview of what they look like. In the sidebar here. I'm going to try and figure out which one was it that I have before that one\r\n\r\nbetter, let's stick with this one. I think that's what it was. Yes.\r\n\r\nThe next thing that I want to go over is some changes to the featured image block or two featured images in general. So I'm gonna go ahead and pull up the template for a single which one do we want it we could do the single page or we could do\r\n\r\nlet's do the single page I guess. So let's grab page with sidebar.\r\n\r\nAnd so this is the featured image block. But the featured image block doesn't give you a lot of controls. So let's say I want to have a little bit of a cooler coolers of beings objective layout here I'm gonna go ahead and insert the media and TextBlock and what I can do with the media and textbox now is that I can select Hey, for the image here I want to use the featured image and so I'm gonna then get rid of the featured image block. And what I'm also going to do is put the title in there as well and get rid of the paragraph. And I'll go ahead and press Delete.\r\n\r\nAnd so we can see now I have this media and textbox and I have all of the controls on here that I'm used to but when I've used my site, it's going to be doing this with the featured image as opposed to just a static image that I would always be using.\r\n\r\nLet's see if we can get a good demo of that. I think we might need to\r\n\r\nhere we go page with sidebar.\r\n\r\nIt save the page. And there we go. So you can see that it's using the featured image that I have selected.\r\n\r\nSo if I went ahead and changed the featured image to that say this one\r\n\r\nwill see the front end of my site has been updated. There.\r\n\r\nYou also have more controls with shadow. So let me see if I can.\r\n\r\nI thought this was enabled on the media and textbook but maybe it isn't.\r\n\r\nOkay, so let's undo these changes that we made to this template.\r\n\r\nSo we can use the new box shadow features. So I can now enable box shadows for the featured image block so by default, we get a couple of different options. So this one looks kind of cool. So we'll select that one.\r\n\r\nAnd we'll go ahead and hit Save.\r\n\r\nAnd we can see we're now using the box shadow feature here. But let's say none of these box shadows really speak to me. And I want to do something about custom. We can do that now. So if I go into shadows, you can see here the different shadows that are provided by default with WordPress. But if I wanted to I could create a custom shadow. So I'll go in here and now I have a whole bunch of controls. I can select a color. I can make it an inset shadow versus an outside shadow I could change the positioning is a blur, make it spread less or more all of these different options here that's maybe position it like this very funky and we'll hit save.\r\n\r\nLet's call this I don't know, big pink shadow.\r\n\r\nNow when I go over into the featured image box, I can select that shadow instead.\r\n\r\nVery I'm a very good designer, folks, you know this looks perfect but yeah, so you get more and more control over shadows now with WordPress 6.6. You can use them in your featured image block, apparently not media and text or I just missed the button for it. And you can also create custom shadows and edit the shadows that come with WordPress for the next feature I'm going to talk about I found a little bit confusing, I'll be honest, but it is called color palettes. Oops. I just thought color palettes and section styling. So I'm going to enable this theme here this kind of like I think a beta theme it's still being worked on actively called assembler.\r\n\r\nAnd the reason why I'm switching to assembler is because it provides these color palettes and section styles.\r\n\r\nSo if we go on into the site editor, we can see this is the homepage that I have set up and under styles you can see we only really have one style, but we have tons of different palettes use me and so this is that kind of feature that WordPress is introducing here, where you kind of get like a lightweight version of theme style. So while theme styles can control tons of different things like shape and layout and ordering and sizing and all this different stuff. The kind of like color palettes are just color palettes are just about defining a set of colors and using them and you can also set kind of like font packs. So you can see that here where it's changing like the body font and the header fonts all in one go.\r\n\r\nSo I'm gonna go back to I think I had this one selected was maybe it.\r\n\r\nYeah, maybe this is right, I don't know. But another cool way that this interacts is that we then get these features called Section styling so I'm going to select this parent group here and hop on over to the Style section and you can see a control that's similar to what you have on blocks. But this is for sections. So this is applying basically a set of colors to an entire section. of content in one go. So it's setting both like inner blocks and outer blocks, and it's using the color palettes that my team has set up.\r\n\r\nI'm also able to I believe, customize these. So if I go on into browsing the styles oops No, not that one into the group block.\r\n\r\nI can see these different style variations and if I wanted to I can make changes. So for instance, if I want this text color to be a custom color, not one from my themes, color palette, I could go ahead and change that.\r\n\r\nFrom what I can tell your theme kind of has to like get this started for you. I don't think there's any way to like create style variations entirely within the site editor on your own yet, but they are able to be done in different like feedback, JSON configurations through PHP, stuff like that. So this is a pretty cool feature. I think it could be helpful for like agencies and things like that where you might want to have a couple of different options for how people can assemble sections of content and color them without needing to create patterns for every different variation or needing to tell people that hey, when you want this to look like this, you need to go ahead and switch the background to this color, the text color to this color, the link color to that color. You can kind of all wrapped up in one of these like default styles.\r\n\r\nThese aren't really part of WordPress, the 2024 default theme, I imagine they will be with the 2025 theme. So that's why I'm demoing it with this some of the theme is supposed to 2024 but it is a possibility.\r\n\r\nNow as we get into the block editor, or before we get into the block editor, I wanted to talk about another kind of cool feature that comes to non full site editor block seeds. So I'm gonna switch over to Kadence.\r\n\r\nHere what you'll see is we've had this patterns menu here for a long time but it kind of gave you a really might say ugly interface that WordPress generated by default, where it's just like another list table kind of like this one, and you didn't get a really visual experience that was nice. But now patterns even in non full site editor themes, use the new site editor patterns of view. And so we can see here this is Kadence Kadence isn't a full site editor theme but of course has some cool patterns available. You can see a whole bunch of these ones that come from WooCommerce. You can also see the patterns that I've created and you can do all the things that you would expect to do. We can go in and you know, edit this pattern. Go back. And if we're done, we can just go back to the WordPress dashboard.\r\n\r\nThere's two reasons why I wanted to mention it. One I think this is cool if you're not yet using a false identity or theme to be able to get much better pattern management experience because I think patterns are one of the best features about the block editor and full site editing. But the other thing I think is really interesting about this is that is kind of like the first step of what you might have heard of as the WP admin redesign. So this is a project that is a big thing and phase three of Gutenberg where we find ourselves and we'll be seeing over the next couple of WordPress releases. And what I think is super interesting here is that this is this first foray into this kind of new navigation experience even if I'm not using a full site editor for you. So we can see that here have kind of like maybe a preview of what it might look like for the site and redesign for themes that aren't all aboard the full site editor train.\r\n\r\nBut we're gonna go ahead back and I'm going to switch on over to 2024 again as we dive into the block editor.\r\n\r\nSo you might have seen one of these changes when I was going about some of my demos earlier, which is that the site editor and the page editor have kind of merged together.\r\n\r\nPreviously, we first had the page editor slash post editor and then WordPress introduced the site editor a whole number of releases ago, and there were two distinct editors they made use of a lot of the same building blocks, but there were two pretty big code bases that were different.\r\n\r\nAnd so that led to some kind of like tricky experiences. If you were a theme developer plugin developer, where you kind of had to extend the editor differently in different contexts, which was annoying. For the WordPress core team. It also meant they had to maintain more kind of duplicate code than they wanted to. And so what's happened in WordPress 6.6 Is that the site editors and the post editors have kind of combined, they're still not 100% exactly the same code, but they're kind of like built on top of each other in a more thoughtful manner to share more bits. So it should be easier if you're plugin developer to write code that works in both the site editor and the post editor without as much complication.\r\n\r\nThere are though some changes that have actually populated their way into the user side of this. This is like a kind of like technical change, but there are some user ramifications. And one of those which you might have seen when we were looking at it earlier, when I was changing the template is that the kind of like post meta information handled here is different. It looks a lot more like what it looks like in the site editor. And these are all now pretty consistent with each other. So if I want to change the status, I open this up and a panel appears to the left. If I want to change the date that has to be published, the link, the author, any of these things, they all kind of have a very unified interface whereas before it was a little bit hodgepodge.\r\n\r\nI can also easily set a featured image just from the top here, whereas previously this was kind of like embedded in its own panel down below. And I can also quickly add an expert. So if I want to say come to my cool event on some date, I can go ahead and do that. And my excerpt gets populated and it's all in this one panel.\r\n\r\nThe other thing that I want to mention here while we're looking at this bit of code, I'm not going to go through the full demo for block bindings. You can check out the WordPress 6.5 review that we did to kind of like see how this is built. But this is a block pattern that I have set up with a block binding for the URL for this button here. And what's new, as you can see that this is now populated in the actual editor UI. So you can see that hey, the URL for this button block is being saved to post meta. It doesn't say what post meta key it does specifically, which I find a bit unfortunate and I think it'd be valuable if we did display that information or made it accessible. But you can now at least see what attributes are bound together. The other thing is that now if I make changes here, slash WordPress this value is now actually getting saved to post meta. Previously, you would have to update the post meta value separately. But now this is actually editable through the UI. So there have been some new features here, available for folks that are using block binding and so still a really like kind of complicated developer feature at this point, but is making forward progress, which is what we'd like to see.\r\n\r\nrounding the corners, we have a couple other block editor features that I want to go ahead and show you I'm going to create a new post here and\r\n\r\nwe're going to drop in a pattern and then I'm going to go into a call to action. Let's say I want to call to action pattern here. And or maybe we want a banner pattern.\r\n\r\nYeah, sure. Let's just pick this banner pattern here. What you'll see is that we now have a new ability to quickly cycle through patterns. So I inserted this one, maybe I want to get a preview of another one. I can click this shuffle button. And as you can choose another pattern of the same category for me. And so I can quickly cycle through a lot of different options. It would be great books.\r\n\r\nDid the editor crash? Nope. It just got into weird selection state.\r\n\r\nI think it'd be cool to I don't know maybe I can just like Undo to go back. Yeah, I can so I can cycle through them. See if there's one that I like oh, here we go. Another weird focus state thing that happens but you have to be on is the actual pattern route selection to see this shuffle up. But that's a little bit odd that it kind of keeps doing that. Whoa.\r\n\r\nWell, I would say hey, it's beta software, but WordPress 6.6. did release a few hours ago.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, there's a cool feature if you want to more easily find patterns that you have available to you go ahead and create another new page here to talk about CSS grid.\r\n\r\nSo we've had CSS grid has actually kind of been in WordPress for a little bit. It just hasn't really made itself known but it is now an official part of the group block. And CSS grid itself is a super big feature. There's a lot that it can do.\r\n\r\nAnd one of the things that I think the Gutenberg team is trying to figure out is exactly what CSS Grid features they want to expose to users and half. Right now there's kind of like two main modes in which CSS Grid works. One is I can do the manual mode. And so this says, hey, I want to use this many specific columns. So if I wanted to, for instance, I could set up like a, you know, a traditional 12 column grid. The thing to be aware of, though, is that if I'm setting up this 12 column grid, this isn't really responsive, so to speak. I'm going to get those 12 columns and that set.\r\n\r\nThe auto mode is kind of how CSS Grid takes on responsiveness, which is to say, hey, I want to create this layout and I need each grid item to take up at least this much space. That's how much it would be to look good. And beyond that point, you know, lay it out however you want. If they're using an iPad, a super wide desktop screen and iPhone, you figure it out. I just need each column to be at least this wide, and kind of fill as much space as you can with columns. And so this gives you the kind of more responsive option. So what do you do once you have CSS grids? Well, it's kind of like a combo box where you get your inserter. So I can go ahead and let's say create a paragraph block here. And we'll dump in some lorem ipsum text.\r\n\r\nI could in this next block, we could say let's put an image or grab something from the media library.\r\n\r\nWell grab some more text let's say let's make this text longer\r\n\r\nwell\r\n\r\nand I don't know if everyone another image that's put it in or maybe we put it out video. I don't have I spent another image we get one from the media library.\r\n\r\nOkay, so we can see I kind of have my columns. And if I go ahead and view this page, you can see it looks kind of like what I have here.\r\n\r\nBut the CSS Grid support doesn't kind of stop here. One of the things that's cool about CSS Grid is that I can do stylings on individual grid items. So let's say I want this text here, which is quite long. I want it to stretch across multiple columns. I can go ahead and do that. I can do that one just by dragging in the actual editor. But if I want I can go to the individual block, go into the dimensions panel and see that hey, this has been set to span two columns. So I want to I could also do this image and say, Hey, let's make this one span three columns. Now once in start spanning three columns, you can see that hey, I could also have things set up to span multiple rows. So if we go over here we can set this one to span two rows, and two columns. And we can see how it makes all of those changes happen.\r\n\r\nTo you know, take a look.\r\n\r\nBut we'll see that this also becomes responsive, where things shrink down, depending on the size of my screen.\r\n\r\nSo I think this is a pretty cool feature.\r\n\r\nThere's a lot more work that's kind of like going on with CSS Grid, one of which is like, right now you can see hey, I have this UI here, but I kind of have to like to keep going through the inserter to add in a new item that I want to add in. Maybe a cover block or something like that.\r\n\r\nMaybe uses\r\n\r\nthis whole thing in here and we could set the column span.\r\n\r\nSo I kind of have to like keep working through the inserter. But one of the things that the team is looking at, which I think could be very useful is the ability to just kind of draw things. So if we get rid of, let's say, this image here, there's kind of like an experiment where I could draw an item and say, hey, I want this to take over these two columns here and put it here.\r\n\r\nYeah, so that's what that's what I was showing you just a second ago, which is where as you kind of move through different screen sizes, because we're saying that each column must be a minimum amount of size, at least 12 rams. If they were to become smaller than 12 rams, it's going to collapse them.\r\n\r\nSo you can kind of like see that in action here. And then of course, when we get all the way small enough, you can really only have a one column layout, you're gonna have a one column layout.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, so this is kind of like taking those CSS Grid features and it's the start of making them accessible to folks who don't want to just use custom CSS. There isn't a way to make the columns even height right now. So that is a kind of mode of CSS Grid. And so that's kind of what I refer to with like, hey, the the team kind of has to figure out, you got another weird bug here.\r\n\r\nThe team kind of has to figure out what CSS Grid features they actually want to expose, and how they want to expose them.\r\n\r\nBecause yeah, what you can do with CSS Grid is you can say hey, I want each row height to be the same and distributed evenly. Or you can have the child items determine what the row height is. And so you have obviously different options that you're going to have to I guess wait and see how they get exposed. I think I think the team is still trying to figure it out.\r\n\r\nSo the next thing I really don't know what's I don't know if this is a safari thing, and what but the strange.\r\n\r\nThe last kind of feature that I want to talk about is negative margins. So I wonder actually, if there's a good pattern here that we could use to start showing this off\r\n\r\nyeah, let's start with this. So negative margins are a pretty powerful design tool.\r\n\r\nAnd I think partly because of that the team has decided that they don't want to make it\r\n\r\njust globally available.\r\n\r\nI think I need to be in the site editor right.\r\n\r\nNegative margins kind of let you overlay content and kind of break out of the box model.\r\n\r\nLet's see if we can get this to show up here. I'm not sure why I'm not seeing it in the image block I would have expected to maybe it's just not available on the image block at all.\r\n\r\nHere we go. So I have this dimensions thing here. And you'll see I can you know change the margin for my dimensions. We're going to unlock all of them. But I can't actually go negative through the UI and drag. But if I change this to an actual value, I can now set this value should be negative. And so what this lets me do is kind of overlay content on to each other. And kind of gives you the ability for more powerful designs. Now I think what I would really I don't know where the bug is here in terms of why one thing is gonna go the other thing but I guess you can see why. negative margins are something that you can't just do through the UI automatically.\r\n\r\nI think we probably need to like set a background of maybe like even Z index on this to like get it to appear more highly. But yeah, this is a feature that people have been kind of asking for it to be able to do. And you can now do it. But you just don't really get a lot of help. Basically, negative margins you get supported as value. The editor is not going to reject them anymore.\r\n\r\nBut it's not actually a control that I can just use in the site editor or the block editor itself. I need to actually input those values manually. But it lets you do kind of like cool things around like layering content layering images together.\r\n\r\nThey can let you achieve more powerful designs than you've been able to previously.\r\n\r\nThat being said it's time to check the counter because we are done with our official demo for WordPress 6.6 2.5 2 million. So congrats to anyone who got that one close. So all right. This is hilarious. So we had a few people guessed 2.5 million and then a late entry from Bill Christiansen said that okay, Susa 2.5 So I'm changing my guests to 2,500,001 So using the prices right strategy Bill has won the prize was competition. So congratulations.\r\n\r\nThe next vote up was Sadie with 3.2 million so Okay, everybody can give Bill their favorite emoji in the chat.\r\n\r\nWe're gonna have to remember to do this next time, Timothy. This was fun.\r\n\r\nYeah, he gets a new car. No. So yeah, everybody build their favorite emoji there in the chat be nice. And with that, we will turn our attention to some questions. Folks, if you have a question you haven't asked yet, use the zoom q&a to do that. Please also open that up and upvote any questions that you would like to hear answered? So that's funny. All right. First question here is from Teresa. This is a great one Timothy. The accessibility reinforcement act is going to be coming up in 2025. Is there an alert or anything planned for color combinations in WordPress in the block editor when you have, you know, maybe contrast issues? Yes, this is one of my favorite features that we've had for a long time in the WordPress editor is that it does this automatically if you are using the block editor. So I've got this white background and if I make this text well, don't you love demo fails.\r\n\r\nLet's see why isn't interfering? Here we go.\r\n\r\nIt's pretty curious why it is able to detect that this light tan is unreadable but white on white. Oh, there we go. Maybe it's the transparent background that's causing the issue.\r\n\r\nMaybe but now it's appearing for you see, like it appeared for it and then it went away.\r\n\r\nI don't know.\r\n\r\nSeems a little finicky.\r\n\r\nAnd now it's not\r\n\r\nlike this is perfectly readable. Well, there's this feature WordPress called the color contrast detector that is usually very reliable, but it looks like a matter of regression WordPress 6.6 And yeah, is exactly for this is to help detect and help surface to you when your color choices have become very hard to read like this one.\r\n\r\nIt takes into account Yeah, that colors and because of using the block editor all those things are kind of like done in a very declarative way. So WordPress is kind of able to detect a reliable usually and match what's going on there. It probably is related to this transparency thing but even then see, like black on black. It should that's that has worked perfectly. I've seen that working in the past.\r\n\r\nI don't know. Let's change that. Welcome to live remote folks. Yep, um, but yeah, so that's definitely a thing. That's their narrow you know, WordPress has to blend the line of that you can do whatever you want in the site and or on the block editor. You can make content that is very ugly and unreadable and inaccessible.\r\n\r\nBut for the most part, we're best just trying to guide you towards the right. pattern. That is, that is awesome. Okay, question from Vern about the download counter. Does it differentiate between automated downloads and manual ones? I don't think so. No, I think this is just all hits to the API.\r\n\r\nYeah.\r\n\r\nLet's see. Sue would like to know if there are any popular plugins or tools that you've heard of that have report reported problems on 6.6?\r\n\r\nNot that I've heard of yet.\r\n\r\nIf we go on over to the forums, though, there is a post that comes up every release. Yep.\r\n\r\nFor\r\n\r\nthe forum is for hey, here are bugs here issues. And we also get a link gone over to a page with themes and plugins and kind of other things to be aware of. So if you're not already in the WordPress forums, that WordPress forums team is staff staff, that is the wrong word is I'm gonna use the word staff because it's the correct word for what I'm about to say, which is staff with a team of great volunteers. So be kind, but yeah, if you're not over in the WordPress forms, all the volunteers over there, do a fantastic job.\r\n\r\nAnd yeah, you'll see things get reported in here and they'll make their way to kind of like no issues, lists, and things like that. But yeah, always, always check out the forums. They're an exciting time as well, right after release comes out. Because it's when everyone comes and says, Hey, this is broken.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, the forum is the best place to check that.\r\n\r\nIndeed. Final question, folks. By the way, if you have a question to ask if you haven't done so drop that in now, this is our last question in the list from John. Is there a way to have rounded corners on maybe a row or a column? Absolutely. It's just not done how you would think they were done is probably issue it's not exposed as rounded corners being an option but through borders so I'm gonna go ahead and put this block into a group then go over into border and set a radius\r\n\r\nokay, this is there are two layers of black that are happening here. Let me get this background out of the way and go here and put a background on our group block\r\n\r\nadded some padding to make this not horrible.\r\n\r\nAnd you can see we've got our rounded corners here. But yeah, so there's no option in the UI that's just like, hey, here's how you do rounded corners, but they're exposed through the border controls. But yeah, the thing you have to be aware of is that border controls aren't available in everything. I can see here. This is just text. They don't have border controls. They need to be kind of like on block elements like groups. So a handy thing that you can do whenever you need that ability is to just put a put a group block around what you're trying to style.\r\n\r\nYeah, and we are working here in core WordPress and the core blocks if you're a Kadence user, it is way easier to do all of this. Virtually, virtually every element will have some sort of a rounded corner ability. Yeah.\r\n\r\nLet's see.\r\n\r\nTheresa is WordPress thinking about working with AI? This question was asked this weekend this past weekend. at WordCamp Canada. Is there any discussion of moving any sort of AI something into core WordPress that you're aware of Timothy?\r\n\r\nNot that I've seen yet. So it's tricky because most\r\n\r\nAI features are things that you usually need a service to connect to. And so it would be super cost prohibitive for wordpress.org to just offer this for free. So what we're seeing is different plugins build integrations with either open AI or their own hosted models and things like that. Now.\r\n\r\nThere is a feature and I think one of Google Chrome's Canary builds where they are added a JavaScript API that talks to I believe, a locally hosted version of one of their Gemini models.\r\n\r\nGoogle being Google isn't going through any standards track as of yet to develop this API and it's not prefixed with Google or anything like that. But it creates I think, it's like a window.ai dot txt generator object or things like that, that lets you do things with AI through JavaScript with a model that's local to your computer, which kind of solves the problem of hey, we need to either pay open API money to get our you know, API request. Fulfilled. So I haven't seen anything with WordPress Core specifically yet, because there's that problem, but as locally hosted models become more and more of a thing. I think that can be pretty interesting. For instance, the Mac OS features that are coming later this year, around like AI, content writing and editing and things like that, where I can just, you know, select Content Anywhere in an app that has, you know, a native text input that works with text, and I can just say, hey, rewrite this for me to make it shorter, more professional, etc. In my personal opinion, that's where I see like more of these AI features going I think it's strange that I would need to, you know, have a grammerly ai extension and an AI extension inside of WordPress and like, tons of different AI things to like, help me write text better to me that feels like a feature that makes sense to just have built into the EO s. And so I think as we see those things, kind of like expand more and get integrated into browser API's and things like that. You can imagine a browser API that lets you, as a developer, say, hey, rewrite this to be shorter and it rely entirely on the local model on your Mac.\r\n\r\nI think that is, in my opinion, that like more exciting place for things to go particularly with like a privacy perspective and all these other things.\r\n\r\nThere's probably still room for like, for instance, jetpack has like just lock that lets you like ask it to help you write a blog post and things like that. There's probably still room for that for folks who don't have computers that can run vocally hosted models that are advanced enough to be useful, but at least me personally, I find it more exciting.\r\n\r\nThat the ability to like you know, help rewrite content and do things like that is just available natively in my iOS so I can use it in pages, or Ulysses, which is my Markdown editor of choice or anywhere on the web, and I don't have to think about oh, do I have an open AI subscription here? Is there a plugin that specific to whatever content authoring tool I'm using? If I'm writing a readme in my IDE for writing code, it could help me there like I feel like that is the better way this Bucha Yeah, that's a great answer. It's this age old question of what should be in core versus what should be a plug in WordPress, being open source and being built with extendibility. as just part of the, you know, the way we do things, it's a question that's asked about a lot of things that you could even say that as popular as SEO is, SEO is not built into core other than a sitemap.\r\n\r\nYeah, I and I did see I think I think it was a ticket and might have just been to make thread or make common response, right. I think I saw a ticket on adding in support. We have this feature WordPress for a long time. That says, hey, please discourage search engines reading. Please discourage search engines from indexing the site. I saw someone bring up like, hey, maybe WordPress should offer another button here that says discourage MLMs from scraping my website for content and add the necessary robots dot txt entries for that as like a place that you know, core would be speaking there. I kind of happen to think that it would make sense for us to offer a button to make that easy for folks who want to but yeah, there's a lot of questions about what should be the core what are the defaults when you've got to hit Close the counter page? But it's gonna say when you got X million sites updated to WordPress, there's a lot of out of consideration on on what features make it into core indeed. Or Timothy As always, this has been great. Appreciate your expertise and information. Any final thoughts as we wrapping up?\r\n\r\nI try our best to explain six if you haven't played around with a full site editor theme. Thank you, Bill and try it out. I think it's always exciting to see where things are going and play with block patterns. I would say really think about pattern overrides and how you can use them. If you're building sites for clients. i It's the feature that I'm personally most excited about and we're best six months six. I think it's extraordinarily powerful.\r\n\r\nAnd really gets you into that space of okay, this site looks like the front end of my website, but my client can't just completely break the layout, maybe hitting the delete key one too many times. So I think it's really cool feature I play with it if you haven't.\r\n\r\nVery good we'll focus on dropping in the link bundle one final time before we wrap up here. We'll have the replay of this event up in about an hour as soon as the video renders. So you can share this out this excellent overview of six dots six out with all your friends. Also if you are not already signed up for our news roundup that's coming up tomorrow at one o'clock Central that's give me an hour and I'll get you up to date on all the things in WordPress. All the news specifically aimed at those of us who are doing WordPress things with clients. So that's going to wrap us up for it today. Timothy, thanks once again, and we'll see you all back tomorrow for news roundup, one o'clock Central here on the solid Academy where we go further together.\r\n\r\nTranscribed by https:\/\/otter.ai\r\n","livestream_vimeo_video_id":985173199,"livestream-resources-group":"s:34:\"a:1:{s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}\";","multi-day_replay_details":"s:102:\"a:2:{s:16:\"course-resources\";a:1:{i:0;a:1:{s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}}s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}\";"}},"postCountOnPage":1,"postCountTotal":1,"postID":448554,"postFormat":"standard","geoCloudflareCountryCode":"US"}; dataLayer.push( dataLayer_content ); \nIt's time to celebrate WordPress 6.6 which will be dropping on July 17. Timothy Jacobs, WordPress Core Committer and Lead Devloper for SolidWP, will walk us through the new changes coming today to WordPress. Some notable features include:\n\n\n\n\nRollback Failed Theme & Plugin Updates\n\n\n\nStyle Variations\n\n\n\nOverride Synced Patterns\n\n\n\nGrid Block\n\n\n\nNegative Margins\n\n\n\nA Unified Publishing Flow\n\n\n\nAnd more!\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n","livestream_chat_log":"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1CYn04wFycG2Czl-o_HyWI-NQD9XcoVTT\/view?usp=sharing","livestream_live_transcript_url":"https:\/\/otter.ai\/u\/EamxQIon_6oe6gCgXdRfFRRztX4?utm_source=copy_url","livestream_live_transcript_text":"slides today and this is all live demos so nothing to download. Edie? Yes 6.6 dropped Well, the first notice I got was about an hour ago. They usually slowly roll that out\r\n\r\nfor your sites, gradually notice that it's available\r\n\r\nagain, welcome everybody. If you're just joining us open up the chat say hello. Caption should now be working for everyone.\r\n\r\nLooking forward to a demo of WordPress six, six with Timothy Jacobs. He's going to walk us through all the things and answer your questions.\r\n\r\nHey Kylie, welcome.\r\n\r\nA bin both Ben's class welcome. Hey Ken.\r\n\r\nAll right, I'm going to drop in a link bundle. Again, no downloads today but the replay link is there. We'll have that up about an hour after we finish. So you can share that out with folks. Also, if you haven't registered for tomorrow's news roundup that's a free live stream one o'clock Central the same time tomorrow, looking at all the WordPress news over the last month or so.\r\n\r\nWe've got about three minutes to go before we get started officially with Welcome to WordPress 6.6 which just dropped a little bit of go you can download it for real now\r\n\r\nbut as you're coming in, open up the chat say hi, tell us where you are logging in from today. Hey, John from Chicago welcome.\r\n\r\nCouple of Greensboro folks getting connected there in the chat.\r\n\r\nSo Sue is what would you is it Green's burrow Ian, what would you say?\r\n\r\nHey, Richard from Tampa, Stephanie from Germany. Welcome.\r\n\r\nCouple minutes to go, folks, before we get started officially we'll get going at three minutes after all about WordPress 6.6 which just dropped a little while ago. Hey Bill from Virginia welcome also Vern from West Virginia.\r\n\r\nGreat to see everybody coming in.\r\n\r\nNo slides today this is all live live demo. So Timothy will be walking us through all the things right here live. This is being recorded though, and we'll have the replay up at the link that I just dropped in the chat. And if you've not already done so register for tomorrow's news roundup. That will be the same time tomorrow.\r\n\r\nJust a little over a minute to go.\r\n\r\nOnce again, welcome everybody. If you more folks just joining open the chat say hi and tell us where you are logging in from today. Just about a minute to go before we get started.\r\n\r\nAll live demo today nothing to download. Hey Sadie from Scotland.\r\n\r\nAbout 30 seconds to go hey Teresa from Germany welcome\r\n\r\nI probably just mispronounced your name\r\n\r\nis it Teresita perhaps.\r\n\r\nYeah, it is Prime Day on a another little rabbit trail there.\r\n\r\nHopefully everybody's not spending all their money today.\r\n\r\nJust about ready to get started. Alright, it's three minutes after. Let's start. The recording and we'll dive in with WordPress 6.6.\r\n\r\nWell, good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening. Welcome everybody to another solid Academy livestream and glad you're all with us today. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at solid Academy joined today by Timothy Jacobs, the lead developer for solid WP Welcome back, Timothy. How are things in your world today? Doing good, you know, trying to survive.\r\n\r\nHeatwave number 75 or whatever it is right up in New York but yeah, doing okay. Excellent. So WordPress 6.6. Just started appearing in WordPress installs in the last couple of hours. So we didn't talk about this, but how does this rollout actually work? When they're dropping a new version of WordPress, you guys so it's kind of a multi step thing.\r\n\r\nA bit before the WordPress release goes out there. It's kind of like a, hey, we all know this is coming type of thing. And then yeah, the basically the API gets updated. And sites check kind of like I think every hour at this point and I'll check for that. Update and then start auto updating if you have that available, which has been the default since I think WordPress five, six.\r\n\r\nAnd then yeah, you can go to what's the page I think wordpress.org\/stats will give you a live feed which is kind of fun to watch during the first. No, this isn't the one. I mean, if you're going to find it, and I know you've gotten me off on a tangent. Yeah, we didn't talk about this at all. I just came to me right as we were starting. But there's a cool little I think it's called counter. Let me see one right yeah, here we go. Um, so this fun one during release, because what you'll see is when we get up to like WordPress 6.7 It's about time to do it. This number will be way higher.\r\n\r\nBut it's, yeah, it gets quite out there but this is a fun one to watch. And the day of the release. Because yeah, you'll see all the sites across the Web Start to update. So yeah, usually it starts happening basically immediately if you're the luck of the draw the first new checks that our but yeah, it's there's a big old button kind of you can think of that they pressed to make the disco go out. Amazing. So for those of you that aren't aware, as I mentioned before, Timothy is the lead developer for us here at solid WP Timothy is also a core committer to WordPress and one of the maintainers of the WordPress REST API. So Timothy you do a lot of work with core\r\n\r\nit when these updates come out, are we at a point now where you'd recommend auto updating core WordPress? So yeah, I am a big proponent of auto updating repurpose for when we had this conversation around WordPress 5.6 and make chat in Slack Yeah, I was all for it. Um, I am a big believer in auto updates in general, particularly with WordPress core itself. I think the thing that you want to consider is that if you have lots of plugins that are breaking your site on every update that you potentially consider switching plugin that always astonishes me and you know, maybe one day I'll get caught by this but it always astonishes me when WordPress 6.6 releases and XYZ very large theme or XYZ very large plugin releases an update 12 hours later that's like fixed compatibly with WordPress 6.6. We've known that WordPress 6.6 has been a release from the state for like four months.\r\n\r\nSo yeah, I'm kind of in the opinion, yes, you should use auto updates. And if you find your site breaking all the time after it gets auto updated.\r\n\r\nThat you know maybe there's a different plugin out there that solves your needs.\r\n\r\nYeah, I mean, when we add salad, we start running our automated tests on trunk, you know, so we're testing the latest version. Basically, immediately we're I guess, starting tomorrow our tests are gonna be running on against WordPress 6.7. And so that doesn't catch everything. But it does always surprise me when you see a plugin or theme that like fatal airing on WordPress on the new version of WordPress. And it's in a code path that like runs against everything because I think as developers we should be running WordPress nightly. Basically, always well writing code and testing your plugins and have automated tests running. So it's one thing if there's an edge case and an edge case and this thing over here, there's an issue. Yeah, but when it's like, yeah, we need to release this update. So 200 out of our 300,000 users use the plugin. I feel like it's\r\n\r\nthere's another conversation that needs to be had. I love it. Well, thanks for letting me take you down that trail. We hadn't talked about that. But I think it's interesting and this I think this is the first time we've shown this counter and we're 1.7 million installs already. All right. So keep going. You know, if I if I had a more sophisticated setup, I would like share that in the corner of my screen and we could see where it lands we could place bets to see where we'd be in an hour. Anyway, I'm gonna navigate away from this and everyone can bet what they think it'll be when we finish which is both betting one how fast the number of installs are gonna go up into how long I'm going to demo for and either those two things yet so we'll see. Okay, so I'm game for that. So right now folks put your there's no price other than you know, just the personal thrill of knowing that you won this, but drop it in the chat your guests for how many downloads will be when Timothy completes the demo. Before we go to q&a. I will go back to the camera card and just say an hour from now.\r\n\r\nRight. All right. So I'll grab these chats and we'll come back to this at the end. So today we're going to walk through all the new features in WordPress six 610 Many thanks for doing this. i One other note of housekeeping before I disappear. There were a few notes first, there are no downloads. This is all live demo. There's no there's not a slide deck. Second of all, if you'd like to ask questions, please use the zoom q&a. You can find that by mousing over the shared screen and clicking on the q&a icon there. And I would just invite you to keep that window open the whole time because other folks questions will appear there. And if you also have that question, click the thumbs up icon and we'll take the questions on the order of votes. This is being recorded. I'll drop in the links to the replay which will be available about an hour after we wrap up today. So with that I'll disappear Timothy. Let's get into six six. Yeah, let's do it. So as usual, per the last couple years releases most of this is gonna be about Gutenberg excited or block editor stuff. But there are two things that I wanted to cover first.\r\n\r\nOne is rollbacks for plugin auto updates. So this is pretty cool.\r\n\r\nIf you have auto updates enabled, which like we just talked about, I'm a big fan of a new feature in WordPress 6.6 is that after an update happens WordPress is going to check and make a request back to your site and make sure it's still online. And if it detects that there is a fatal error, it's going to roll back that plugin update for you automatically. Now this isn't just like a general purpose feature like there's the WP rollbacks plug in and things like that, where you can go into WP admin and say hey, roll back to the previous or something like that. This is an automated kind of level of protection around auto updates specifically. So if you know the plugin starts crashing, you know 10 hours from now this feature isn't going to check it recovery mode. Well. We did a talk on recovery mode, I think a long time ago at this point.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, it's a pretty cool feature to add. A little bit of resiliency and another another band aid along WordPress auto updates, you can feel a bit more confident enabling it.\r\n\r\nThe other thing, which I don't even think yeah is listed in this page because it really shouldn't affect anyone, but I think it is part of the field guide which if you haven't seen the field guide is this awesome post over and make that wordpress.org that talks about all of the new features and bug fixes that happened in the release. And the big thing here to mention is that dropping support for PHP seven Neto and 7.1 has happened so if you are one on if you're one of those few people back and one of these ancient PHP versions get updated.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, that is no longer gonna be supported as a WordPress 6.6 Your Site won't crash. It just won't update to WordPress six months, I guess if you're on those older versions, WordPress 6.6 is gonna get a little bit challenging to say all the time. Let's see how it goes. All right. With those two things out of the way, let's dive in. So we're gonna start with a site editor. The site editor has a feature that we've talked about before called data views. And this is kind of like the technical code word kind of similar to WP list tables if you're familiar with that and WordPress, and I did if you've got a quote update in WordPress 6.6. So we have this Pages section here which I've showed off in 6.5. It's been enhanced a bit. So I can go through and I can see all of my published pages. I can see my drafts, things that are private trash, etc.\r\n\r\nWhat's really cool is that this list area over here update what I see in the main canvas. So if I want to take a look at the sample page, I can take a look at the sample page and it's gonna update really quickly. If I want I can dive in and start editing this content right away.\r\n\r\nData views also give me more control over how I can view this information. So right now I'm viewing it in this view, but if I want I can view it as a table and I get this kind of familiar interface similar to what you'd see in WP admin. Or I can go ahead and switch it over to a grid view. And this will bring in the featured images for me, but I'm gonna go ahead and set it back to the list view because I think that's a pretty helpful way to get a quick browse to the content of your site.\r\n\r\nData views have also get used throughout this kind of like site editor designed the other places in the templates manager. So we can see the templates now show these four previews. Previously, there was also this kind of like intermediary page that was kind of really confusing when you started thinking about it where if you would click on this, it would give you some details over here in the sidebar, but now they just simply drop you into the editor. So if you want to go ahead and edit a template, it's just one click away from the data Views section.\r\n\r\nThe next place that we get an update is over in the pattern section and that's also going to take us to my favorite feature I think of WordPress 6.6. But we'll see our patterns, we can browse our template parts here as well. They're kind of all combined into this pattern section. But another thing that's pretty cool is that list the data views give me kind of similar to bulk actions that we have in lists tables I can do in the data views view. So I can select multiple patterns going over here and I can click this export as JSON button. And it's going to export all of these patterns for me in one big JSON file that I could go ahead and import into another site. And so this is all kind of being powered by the diffuse API. Now, I mentioned this next cool feature that has to do with patterns. It's called pattern overrides. And this is something I'm very excited about. I've given a couple of variations of like talks about a feature like this, which is hey, how do we give all the power of the block editor and this really rich interactive editing, but how do we constrain it down for users in a way that's more understandable? And how can we use it in places across our site?\r\n\r\nAnd this has been building up for kind of a number of releases. Now we got content only editing mode and number WordPress, really physical at this point. And we'll see that in preview here. This is kind of working similarly to the changes where we got synced patterns. And then that's the transition. If you remember from reusable blocks, we started talking about them in synced patterns a couple of releases ago. And this also is a little bit similar, I think to the block bindings API and HTML stuff and all of that combined to do something that I think is really cool. So I took this pattern here from the pattern directory on make that work best Edward is this cool one here?\r\n\r\nLet him roll. And what I've done is I've added in my new pattern and pasted in that HTML.\r\n\r\nAnd then what I've done is I've said, hey, I want the users of my site to be able to edit this pattern. But I don't want them to see like the full power of this editor. I want them to be able to like change all of these colors, change the background change the structure. I want to make the editing experience for them. Very simple. And the way that you do that is if you select your block, you'll probably need to open up the block toolbar. There's this new section in advance called overrides and what you do is for each bit of content that you want a user to be able to override, you click the button here right now it says disabled overrides. So if I go ahead and hit disable overrides this text is now going to always be part of the pattern. And it's not something that my users would be able to edit. But I hitting enable overrides and giving it a title. In this case description.\r\n\r\nThis now becomes a property that of the pattern that my users are able to customize whenever they use the pattern. So let's see what that looks like. I'm gonna navigate over to the Pages section, going over to the sample page. And I've inserted this pattern into my content. So I'm going to go ahead and delete this and reinsert it so you can see exactly what happens. We go into the inserter select for patterns, my patterns and that block you CTA is what I called it and so now if we open up the sidebar, we can see that I have this content only mode. So I don't have the ability to like change this color, change the structure move text around, but what I can do is that at this text, so if I wanted to say you know do some live chat history here, say it was recorded in 1975. I can make that change this shop now button. I could say let's make it by now. And I can change the link. That's the link gone over to amazon.com.\r\n\r\nAnd, you know, we want to get grammatically correct on them or something like that, let's say let them roll, you know, really take the personality out of this pattern. But you can see now I've made all these changes here and I can go ahead and hit Save. And when I go to the front end of my website, I have this pattern with my changes, but because this is still a sync pattern, if I go back on over, and I think yeah, I even get this handy little button here. Let's let's try and use it. Edit original.\r\n\r\nI can now make modifications to this pattern. So if I wanted to change this color, let's say to this red and hit save.\r\n\r\nI am right now editing the pattern here.\r\n\r\nAnd if I refresh the page, you can see that that's been changed. So what synced patterns with overrides are doing is they're letting me create a pattern. Say hey, these are the specific bits that I want you to be able to edit. But I as like you know the site designer or you know the site owner or anything like that. I can make structural changes to this pattern. And those will be reflected across my site without the user needing to make any changes, update the post anything like that they just happen automatically. And so in this case, I'm using it for a CTA there's lots of other places where you can use this that I think would be very effective things like a testimonial section. You know, you perhaps have a testimonial style that you want to use throughout your site. You want to make it really easy to insert your testimonials. But of course each testimonial is different. And you can't just say hey, use the same testimonial everywhere you want to say use a testimonial on this page. Use another testimonial on the other page, but we decide hey, we want to change the font that we use for the testimonial. You can easily do that.\r\n\r\nRight now the way patterns ended up getting stored into the post.\r\n\r\nLet's see how do I go back here?\r\n\r\nThey're not a back button.\r\n\r\nI don't think so we're just going to refresh.\r\n\r\nThe way that the pattern actually gets stored is if we take a look at the code editor you can see that the overrides are all in the block attributes. So it's just a part of the actual page content. What I would love to see in the future is potentially the ability to save those to like post meta, like we do with kind of other block bindings, which I think would be very cool and kind of bridges that gap between like custom post types and the thing that a developer would set up for you and something that an end user could potentially just do in the block Editor inside editor all by themselves.\r\n\r\nOkay, we're gonna go back on into the site editor now for some more features.\r\n\r\nSo this is another cool one, which is the ability to update a background image for your entire site. So we've had this feature in the customizer for a long time where you can like add theme support background images, but we can now do this in the actual site as well. So if I go over into the Layout tab for global styles, I can say add a background image and I'm going to go ahead and choose a subtle pattern that I got from subtle patterns.com. And we can see that this pattern is now applied as the main background for my site. So I'm gonna go ahead and save that and we can view the changes here.\r\n\r\nAnd so this works very similarly to how the custom background images worked with the customizer, where this is applying a background to the body tag places where there is you know, a background color applied like we see here in this menu item will of course lay over it.\r\n\r\nBut this lets you set up a background image across your entire site.\r\n\r\nI'm gonna go ahead and remove that. I'm gonna do that by just hitting reset all and it will remove all of the background images for me as well. This control is pretty nice, and you'll also see it for just editing elsewhere. In your site on a per block basis like a group Bach for instance, you can set a background image using the same kind of control but most new is being able to do it for the entire site.\r\n\r\nAnother cool feature is pattern switching. So I have this header here and my theme 2024 comes with a bunch of different variations for it. Previously, you could kind of head up into the sidebar or into the navigation excuse me and switch between patterns there. But the sidebar gains a new option here which is this design tab. And you know show me all the different patterns for the template part that I have on my site. So if I want to easily switch between them.\r\n\r\nI can do that with just one click and get a small visual preview of what they look like. In the sidebar here. I'm going to try and figure out which one was it that I have before that one\r\n\r\nbetter, let's stick with this one. I think that's what it was. Yes.\r\n\r\nThe next thing that I want to go over is some changes to the featured image block or two featured images in general. So I'm gonna go ahead and pull up the template for a single which one do we want it we could do the single page or we could do\r\n\r\nlet's do the single page I guess. So let's grab page with sidebar.\r\n\r\nAnd so this is the featured image block. But the featured image block doesn't give you a lot of controls. So let's say I want to have a little bit of a cooler coolers of beings objective layout here I'm gonna go ahead and insert the media and TextBlock and what I can do with the media and textbox now is that I can select Hey, for the image here I want to use the featured image and so I'm gonna then get rid of the featured image block. And what I'm also going to do is put the title in there as well and get rid of the paragraph. And I'll go ahead and press Delete.\r\n\r\nAnd so we can see now I have this media and textbox and I have all of the controls on here that I'm used to but when I've used my site, it's going to be doing this with the featured image as opposed to just a static image that I would always be using.\r\n\r\nLet's see if we can get a good demo of that. I think we might need to\r\n\r\nhere we go page with sidebar.\r\n\r\nIt save the page. And there we go. So you can see that it's using the featured image that I have selected.\r\n\r\nSo if I went ahead and changed the featured image to that say this one\r\n\r\nwill see the front end of my site has been updated. There.\r\n\r\nYou also have more controls with shadow. So let me see if I can.\r\n\r\nI thought this was enabled on the media and textbook but maybe it isn't.\r\n\r\nOkay, so let's undo these changes that we made to this template.\r\n\r\nSo we can use the new box shadow features. So I can now enable box shadows for the featured image block so by default, we get a couple of different options. So this one looks kind of cool. So we'll select that one.\r\n\r\nAnd we'll go ahead and hit Save.\r\n\r\nAnd we can see we're now using the box shadow feature here. But let's say none of these box shadows really speak to me. And I want to do something about custom. We can do that now. So if I go into shadows, you can see here the different shadows that are provided by default with WordPress. But if I wanted to I could create a custom shadow. So I'll go in here and now I have a whole bunch of controls. I can select a color. I can make it an inset shadow versus an outside shadow I could change the positioning is a blur, make it spread less or more all of these different options here that's maybe position it like this very funky and we'll hit save.\r\n\r\nLet's call this I don't know, big pink shadow.\r\n\r\nNow when I go over into the featured image box, I can select that shadow instead.\r\n\r\nVery I'm a very good designer, folks, you know this looks perfect but yeah, so you get more and more control over shadows now with WordPress 6.6. You can use them in your featured image block, apparently not media and text or I just missed the button for it. And you can also create custom shadows and edit the shadows that come with WordPress for the next feature I'm going to talk about I found a little bit confusing, I'll be honest, but it is called color palettes. Oops. I just thought color palettes and section styling. So I'm going to enable this theme here this kind of like I think a beta theme it's still being worked on actively called assembler.\r\n\r\nAnd the reason why I'm switching to assembler is because it provides these color palettes and section styles.\r\n\r\nSo if we go on into the site editor, we can see this is the homepage that I have set up and under styles you can see we only really have one style, but we have tons of different palettes use me and so this is that kind of feature that WordPress is introducing here, where you kind of get like a lightweight version of theme style. So while theme styles can control tons of different things like shape and layout and ordering and sizing and all this different stuff. The kind of like color palettes are just color palettes are just about defining a set of colors and using them and you can also set kind of like font packs. So you can see that here where it's changing like the body font and the header fonts all in one go.\r\n\r\nSo I'm gonna go back to I think I had this one selected was maybe it.\r\n\r\nYeah, maybe this is right, I don't know. But another cool way that this interacts is that we then get these features called Section styling so I'm going to select this parent group here and hop on over to the Style section and you can see a control that's similar to what you have on blocks. But this is for sections. So this is applying basically a set of colors to an entire section. of content in one go. So it's setting both like inner blocks and outer blocks, and it's using the color palettes that my team has set up.\r\n\r\nI'm also able to I believe, customize these. So if I go on into browsing the styles oops No, not that one into the group block.\r\n\r\nI can see these different style variations and if I wanted to I can make changes. So for instance, if I want this text color to be a custom color, not one from my themes, color palette, I could go ahead and change that.\r\n\r\nFrom what I can tell your theme kind of has to like get this started for you. I don't think there's any way to like create style variations entirely within the site editor on your own yet, but they are able to be done in different like feedback, JSON configurations through PHP, stuff like that. So this is a pretty cool feature. I think it could be helpful for like agencies and things like that where you might want to have a couple of different options for how people can assemble sections of content and color them without needing to create patterns for every different variation or needing to tell people that hey, when you want this to look like this, you need to go ahead and switch the background to this color, the text color to this color, the link color to that color. You can kind of all wrapped up in one of these like default styles.\r\n\r\nThese aren't really part of WordPress, the 2024 default theme, I imagine they will be with the 2025 theme. So that's why I'm demoing it with this some of the theme is supposed to 2024 but it is a possibility.\r\n\r\nNow as we get into the block editor, or before we get into the block editor, I wanted to talk about another kind of cool feature that comes to non full site editor block seeds. So I'm gonna switch over to Kadence.\r\n\r\nHere what you'll see is we've had this patterns menu here for a long time but it kind of gave you a really might say ugly interface that WordPress generated by default, where it's just like another list table kind of like this one, and you didn't get a really visual experience that was nice. But now patterns even in non full site editor themes, use the new site editor patterns of view. And so we can see here this is Kadence Kadence isn't a full site editor theme but of course has some cool patterns available. You can see a whole bunch of these ones that come from WooCommerce. You can also see the patterns that I've created and you can do all the things that you would expect to do. We can go in and you know, edit this pattern. Go back. And if we're done, we can just go back to the WordPress dashboard.\r\n\r\nThere's two reasons why I wanted to mention it. One I think this is cool if you're not yet using a false identity or theme to be able to get much better pattern management experience because I think patterns are one of the best features about the block editor and full site editing. But the other thing I think is really interesting about this is that is kind of like the first step of what you might have heard of as the WP admin redesign. So this is a project that is a big thing and phase three of Gutenberg where we find ourselves and we'll be seeing over the next couple of WordPress releases. And what I think is super interesting here is that this is this first foray into this kind of new navigation experience even if I'm not using a full site editor for you. So we can see that here have kind of like maybe a preview of what it might look like for the site and redesign for themes that aren't all aboard the full site editor train.\r\n\r\nBut we're gonna go ahead back and I'm going to switch on over to 2024 again as we dive into the block editor.\r\n\r\nSo you might have seen one of these changes when I was going about some of my demos earlier, which is that the site editor and the page editor have kind of merged together.\r\n\r\nPreviously, we first had the page editor slash post editor and then WordPress introduced the site editor a whole number of releases ago, and there were two distinct editors they made use of a lot of the same building blocks, but there were two pretty big code bases that were different.\r\n\r\nAnd so that led to some kind of like tricky experiences. If you were a theme developer plugin developer, where you kind of had to extend the editor differently in different contexts, which was annoying. For the WordPress core team. It also meant they had to maintain more kind of duplicate code than they wanted to. And so what's happened in WordPress 6.6 Is that the site editors and the post editors have kind of combined, they're still not 100% exactly the same code, but they're kind of like built on top of each other in a more thoughtful manner to share more bits. So it should be easier if you're plugin developer to write code that works in both the site editor and the post editor without as much complication.\r\n\r\nThere are though some changes that have actually populated their way into the user side of this. This is like a kind of like technical change, but there are some user ramifications. And one of those which you might have seen when we were looking at it earlier, when I was changing the template is that the kind of like post meta information handled here is different. It looks a lot more like what it looks like in the site editor. And these are all now pretty consistent with each other. So if I want to change the status, I open this up and a panel appears to the left. If I want to change the date that has to be published, the link, the author, any of these things, they all kind of have a very unified interface whereas before it was a little bit hodgepodge.\r\n\r\nI can also easily set a featured image just from the top here, whereas previously this was kind of like embedded in its own panel down below. And I can also quickly add an expert. So if I want to say come to my cool event on some date, I can go ahead and do that. And my excerpt gets populated and it's all in this one panel.\r\n\r\nThe other thing that I want to mention here while we're looking at this bit of code, I'm not going to go through the full demo for block bindings. You can check out the WordPress 6.5 review that we did to kind of like see how this is built. But this is a block pattern that I have set up with a block binding for the URL for this button here. And what's new, as you can see that this is now populated in the actual editor UI. So you can see that hey, the URL for this button block is being saved to post meta. It doesn't say what post meta key it does specifically, which I find a bit unfortunate and I think it'd be valuable if we did display that information or made it accessible. But you can now at least see what attributes are bound together. The other thing is that now if I make changes here, slash WordPress this value is now actually getting saved to post meta. Previously, you would have to update the post meta value separately. But now this is actually editable through the UI. So there have been some new features here, available for folks that are using block binding and so still a really like kind of complicated developer feature at this point, but is making forward progress, which is what we'd like to see.\r\n\r\nrounding the corners, we have a couple other block editor features that I want to go ahead and show you I'm going to create a new post here and\r\n\r\nwe're going to drop in a pattern and then I'm going to go into a call to action. Let's say I want to call to action pattern here. And or maybe we want a banner pattern.\r\n\r\nYeah, sure. Let's just pick this banner pattern here. What you'll see is that we now have a new ability to quickly cycle through patterns. So I inserted this one, maybe I want to get a preview of another one. I can click this shuffle button. And as you can choose another pattern of the same category for me. And so I can quickly cycle through a lot of different options. It would be great books.\r\n\r\nDid the editor crash? Nope. It just got into weird selection state.\r\n\r\nI think it'd be cool to I don't know maybe I can just like Undo to go back. Yeah, I can so I can cycle through them. See if there's one that I like oh, here we go. Another weird focus state thing that happens but you have to be on is the actual pattern route selection to see this shuffle up. But that's a little bit odd that it kind of keeps doing that. Whoa.\r\n\r\nWell, I would say hey, it's beta software, but WordPress 6.6. did release a few hours ago.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, there's a cool feature if you want to more easily find patterns that you have available to you go ahead and create another new page here to talk about CSS grid.\r\n\r\nSo we've had CSS grid has actually kind of been in WordPress for a little bit. It just hasn't really made itself known but it is now an official part of the group block. And CSS grid itself is a super big feature. There's a lot that it can do.\r\n\r\nAnd one of the things that I think the Gutenberg team is trying to figure out is exactly what CSS Grid features they want to expose to users and half. Right now there's kind of like two main modes in which CSS Grid works. One is I can do the manual mode. And so this says, hey, I want to use this many specific columns. So if I wanted to, for instance, I could set up like a, you know, a traditional 12 column grid. The thing to be aware of, though, is that if I'm setting up this 12 column grid, this isn't really responsive, so to speak. I'm going to get those 12 columns and that set.\r\n\r\nThe auto mode is kind of how CSS Grid takes on responsiveness, which is to say, hey, I want to create this layout and I need each grid item to take up at least this much space. That's how much it would be to look good. And beyond that point, you know, lay it out however you want. If they're using an iPad, a super wide desktop screen and iPhone, you figure it out. I just need each column to be at least this wide, and kind of fill as much space as you can with columns. And so this gives you the kind of more responsive option. So what do you do once you have CSS grids? Well, it's kind of like a combo box where you get your inserter. So I can go ahead and let's say create a paragraph block here. And we'll dump in some lorem ipsum text.\r\n\r\nI could in this next block, we could say let's put an image or grab something from the media library.\r\n\r\nWell grab some more text let's say let's make this text longer\r\n\r\nwell\r\n\r\nand I don't know if everyone another image that's put it in or maybe we put it out video. I don't have I spent another image we get one from the media library.\r\n\r\nOkay, so we can see I kind of have my columns. And if I go ahead and view this page, you can see it looks kind of like what I have here.\r\n\r\nBut the CSS Grid support doesn't kind of stop here. One of the things that's cool about CSS Grid is that I can do stylings on individual grid items. So let's say I want this text here, which is quite long. I want it to stretch across multiple columns. I can go ahead and do that. I can do that one just by dragging in the actual editor. But if I want I can go to the individual block, go into the dimensions panel and see that hey, this has been set to span two columns. So I want to I could also do this image and say, Hey, let's make this one span three columns. Now once in start spanning three columns, you can see that hey, I could also have things set up to span multiple rows. So if we go over here we can set this one to span two rows, and two columns. And we can see how it makes all of those changes happen.\r\n\r\nTo you know, take a look.\r\n\r\nBut we'll see that this also becomes responsive, where things shrink down, depending on the size of my screen.\r\n\r\nSo I think this is a pretty cool feature.\r\n\r\nThere's a lot more work that's kind of like going on with CSS Grid, one of which is like, right now you can see hey, I have this UI here, but I kind of have to like to keep going through the inserter to add in a new item that I want to add in. Maybe a cover block or something like that.\r\n\r\nMaybe uses\r\n\r\nthis whole thing in here and we could set the column span.\r\n\r\nSo I kind of have to like keep working through the inserter. But one of the things that the team is looking at, which I think could be very useful is the ability to just kind of draw things. So if we get rid of, let's say, this image here, there's kind of like an experiment where I could draw an item and say, hey, I want this to take over these two columns here and put it here.\r\n\r\nYeah, so that's what that's what I was showing you just a second ago, which is where as you kind of move through different screen sizes, because we're saying that each column must be a minimum amount of size, at least 12 rams. If they were to become smaller than 12 rams, it's going to collapse them.\r\n\r\nSo you can kind of like see that in action here. And then of course, when we get all the way small enough, you can really only have a one column layout, you're gonna have a one column layout.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, so this is kind of like taking those CSS Grid features and it's the start of making them accessible to folks who don't want to just use custom CSS. There isn't a way to make the columns even height right now. So that is a kind of mode of CSS Grid. And so that's kind of what I refer to with like, hey, the the team kind of has to figure out, you got another weird bug here.\r\n\r\nThe team kind of has to figure out what CSS Grid features they actually want to expose, and how they want to expose them.\r\n\r\nBecause yeah, what you can do with CSS Grid is you can say hey, I want each row height to be the same and distributed evenly. Or you can have the child items determine what the row height is. And so you have obviously different options that you're going to have to I guess wait and see how they get exposed. I think I think the team is still trying to figure it out.\r\n\r\nSo the next thing I really don't know what's I don't know if this is a safari thing, and what but the strange.\r\n\r\nThe last kind of feature that I want to talk about is negative margins. So I wonder actually, if there's a good pattern here that we could use to start showing this off\r\n\r\nyeah, let's start with this. So negative margins are a pretty powerful design tool.\r\n\r\nAnd I think partly because of that the team has decided that they don't want to make it\r\n\r\njust globally available.\r\n\r\nI think I need to be in the site editor right.\r\n\r\nNegative margins kind of let you overlay content and kind of break out of the box model.\r\n\r\nLet's see if we can get this to show up here. I'm not sure why I'm not seeing it in the image block I would have expected to maybe it's just not available on the image block at all.\r\n\r\nHere we go. So I have this dimensions thing here. And you'll see I can you know change the margin for my dimensions. We're going to unlock all of them. But I can't actually go negative through the UI and drag. But if I change this to an actual value, I can now set this value should be negative. And so what this lets me do is kind of overlay content on to each other. And kind of gives you the ability for more powerful designs. Now I think what I would really I don't know where the bug is here in terms of why one thing is gonna go the other thing but I guess you can see why. negative margins are something that you can't just do through the UI automatically.\r\n\r\nI think we probably need to like set a background of maybe like even Z index on this to like get it to appear more highly. But yeah, this is a feature that people have been kind of asking for it to be able to do. And you can now do it. But you just don't really get a lot of help. Basically, negative margins you get supported as value. The editor is not going to reject them anymore.\r\n\r\nBut it's not actually a control that I can just use in the site editor or the block editor itself. I need to actually input those values manually. But it lets you do kind of like cool things around like layering content layering images together.\r\n\r\nThey can let you achieve more powerful designs than you've been able to previously.\r\n\r\nThat being said it's time to check the counter because we are done with our official demo for WordPress 6.6 2.5 2 million. So congrats to anyone who got that one close. So all right. This is hilarious. So we had a few people guessed 2.5 million and then a late entry from Bill Christiansen said that okay, Susa 2.5 So I'm changing my guests to 2,500,001 So using the prices right strategy Bill has won the prize was competition. So congratulations.\r\n\r\nThe next vote up was Sadie with 3.2 million so Okay, everybody can give Bill their favorite emoji in the chat.\r\n\r\nWe're gonna have to remember to do this next time, Timothy. This was fun.\r\n\r\nYeah, he gets a new car. No. So yeah, everybody build their favorite emoji there in the chat be nice. And with that, we will turn our attention to some questions. Folks, if you have a question you haven't asked yet, use the zoom q&a to do that. Please also open that up and upvote any questions that you would like to hear answered? So that's funny. All right. First question here is from Teresa. This is a great one Timothy. The accessibility reinforcement act is going to be coming up in 2025. Is there an alert or anything planned for color combinations in WordPress in the block editor when you have, you know, maybe contrast issues? Yes, this is one of my favorite features that we've had for a long time in the WordPress editor is that it does this automatically if you are using the block editor. So I've got this white background and if I make this text well, don't you love demo fails.\r\n\r\nLet's see why isn't interfering? Here we go.\r\n\r\nIt's pretty curious why it is able to detect that this light tan is unreadable but white on white. Oh, there we go. Maybe it's the transparent background that's causing the issue.\r\n\r\nMaybe but now it's appearing for you see, like it appeared for it and then it went away.\r\n\r\nI don't know.\r\n\r\nSeems a little finicky.\r\n\r\nAnd now it's not\r\n\r\nlike this is perfectly readable. Well, there's this feature WordPress called the color contrast detector that is usually very reliable, but it looks like a matter of regression WordPress 6.6 And yeah, is exactly for this is to help detect and help surface to you when your color choices have become very hard to read like this one.\r\n\r\nIt takes into account Yeah, that colors and because of using the block editor all those things are kind of like done in a very declarative way. So WordPress is kind of able to detect a reliable usually and match what's going on there. It probably is related to this transparency thing but even then see, like black on black. It should that's that has worked perfectly. I've seen that working in the past.\r\n\r\nI don't know. Let's change that. Welcome to live remote folks. Yep, um, but yeah, so that's definitely a thing. That's their narrow you know, WordPress has to blend the line of that you can do whatever you want in the site and or on the block editor. You can make content that is very ugly and unreadable and inaccessible.\r\n\r\nBut for the most part, we're best just trying to guide you towards the right. pattern. That is, that is awesome. Okay, question from Vern about the download counter. Does it differentiate between automated downloads and manual ones? I don't think so. No, I think this is just all hits to the API.\r\n\r\nYeah.\r\n\r\nLet's see. Sue would like to know if there are any popular plugins or tools that you've heard of that have report reported problems on 6.6?\r\n\r\nNot that I've heard of yet.\r\n\r\nIf we go on over to the forums, though, there is a post that comes up every release. Yep.\r\n\r\nFor\r\n\r\nthe forum is for hey, here are bugs here issues. And we also get a link gone over to a page with themes and plugins and kind of other things to be aware of. So if you're not already in the WordPress forums, that WordPress forums team is staff staff, that is the wrong word is I'm gonna use the word staff because it's the correct word for what I'm about to say, which is staff with a team of great volunteers. So be kind, but yeah, if you're not over in the WordPress forms, all the volunteers over there, do a fantastic job.\r\n\r\nAnd yeah, you'll see things get reported in here and they'll make their way to kind of like no issues, lists, and things like that. But yeah, always, always check out the forums. They're an exciting time as well, right after release comes out. Because it's when everyone comes and says, Hey, this is broken.\r\n\r\nBut yeah, the forum is the best place to check that.\r\n\r\nIndeed. Final question, folks. By the way, if you have a question to ask if you haven't done so drop that in now, this is our last question in the list from John. Is there a way to have rounded corners on maybe a row or a column? Absolutely. It's just not done how you would think they were done is probably issue it's not exposed as rounded corners being an option but through borders so I'm gonna go ahead and put this block into a group then go over into border and set a radius\r\n\r\nokay, this is there are two layers of black that are happening here. Let me get this background out of the way and go here and put a background on our group block\r\n\r\nadded some padding to make this not horrible.\r\n\r\nAnd you can see we've got our rounded corners here. But yeah, so there's no option in the UI that's just like, hey, here's how you do rounded corners, but they're exposed through the border controls. But yeah, the thing you have to be aware of is that border controls aren't available in everything. I can see here. This is just text. They don't have border controls. They need to be kind of like on block elements like groups. So a handy thing that you can do whenever you need that ability is to just put a put a group block around what you're trying to style.\r\n\r\nYeah, and we are working here in core WordPress and the core blocks if you're a Kadence user, it is way easier to do all of this. Virtually, virtually every element will have some sort of a rounded corner ability. Yeah.\r\n\r\nLet's see.\r\n\r\nTheresa is WordPress thinking about working with AI? This question was asked this weekend this past weekend. at WordCamp Canada. Is there any discussion of moving any sort of AI something into core WordPress that you're aware of Timothy?\r\n\r\nNot that I've seen yet. So it's tricky because most\r\n\r\nAI features are things that you usually need a service to connect to. And so it would be super cost prohibitive for wordpress.org to just offer this for free. So what we're seeing is different plugins build integrations with either open AI or their own hosted models and things like that. Now.\r\n\r\nThere is a feature and I think one of Google Chrome's Canary builds where they are added a JavaScript API that talks to I believe, a locally hosted version of one of their Gemini models.\r\n\r\nGoogle being Google isn't going through any standards track as of yet to develop this API and it's not prefixed with Google or anything like that. But it creates I think, it's like a window.ai dot txt generator object or things like that, that lets you do things with AI through JavaScript with a model that's local to your computer, which kind of solves the problem of hey, we need to either pay open API money to get our you know, API request. Fulfilled. So I haven't seen anything with WordPress Core specifically yet, because there's that problem, but as locally hosted models become more and more of a thing. I think that can be pretty interesting. For instance, the Mac OS features that are coming later this year, around like AI, content writing and editing and things like that, where I can just, you know, select Content Anywhere in an app that has, you know, a native text input that works with text, and I can just say, hey, rewrite this for me to make it shorter, more professional, etc. In my personal opinion, that's where I see like more of these AI features going I think it's strange that I would need to, you know, have a grammerly ai extension and an AI extension inside of WordPress and like, tons of different AI things to like, help me write text better to me that feels like a feature that makes sense to just have built into the EO s. And so I think as we see those things, kind of like expand more and get integrated into browser API's and things like that. You can imagine a browser API that lets you, as a developer, say, hey, rewrite this to be shorter and it rely entirely on the local model on your Mac.\r\n\r\nI think that is, in my opinion, that like more exciting place for things to go particularly with like a privacy perspective and all these other things.\r\n\r\nThere's probably still room for like, for instance, jetpack has like just lock that lets you like ask it to help you write a blog post and things like that. There's probably still room for that for folks who don't have computers that can run vocally hosted models that are advanced enough to be useful, but at least me personally, I find it more exciting.\r\n\r\nThat the ability to like you know, help rewrite content and do things like that is just available natively in my iOS so I can use it in pages, or Ulysses, which is my Markdown editor of choice or anywhere on the web, and I don't have to think about oh, do I have an open AI subscription here? Is there a plugin that specific to whatever content authoring tool I'm using? If I'm writing a readme in my IDE for writing code, it could help me there like I feel like that is the better way this Bucha Yeah, that's a great answer. It's this age old question of what should be in core versus what should be a plug in WordPress, being open source and being built with extendibility. as just part of the, you know, the way we do things, it's a question that's asked about a lot of things that you could even say that as popular as SEO is, SEO is not built into core other than a sitemap.\r\n\r\nYeah, I and I did see I think I think it was a ticket and might have just been to make thread or make common response, right. I think I saw a ticket on adding in support. We have this feature WordPress for a long time. That says, hey, please discourage search engines reading. Please discourage search engines from indexing the site. I saw someone bring up like, hey, maybe WordPress should offer another button here that says discourage MLMs from scraping my website for content and add the necessary robots dot txt entries for that as like a place that you know, core would be speaking there. I kind of happen to think that it would make sense for us to offer a button to make that easy for folks who want to but yeah, there's a lot of questions about what should be the core what are the defaults when you've got to hit Close the counter page? But it's gonna say when you got X million sites updated to WordPress, there's a lot of out of consideration on on what features make it into core indeed. Or Timothy As always, this has been great. Appreciate your expertise and information. Any final thoughts as we wrapping up?\r\n\r\nI try our best to explain six if you haven't played around with a full site editor theme. Thank you, Bill and try it out. I think it's always exciting to see where things are going and play with block patterns. I would say really think about pattern overrides and how you can use them. If you're building sites for clients. i It's the feature that I'm personally most excited about and we're best six months six. I think it's extraordinarily powerful.\r\n\r\nAnd really gets you into that space of okay, this site looks like the front end of my website, but my client can't just completely break the layout, maybe hitting the delete key one too many times. So I think it's really cool feature I play with it if you haven't.\r\n\r\nVery good we'll focus on dropping in the link bundle one final time before we wrap up here. We'll have the replay of this event up in about an hour as soon as the video renders. So you can share this out this excellent overview of six dots six out with all your friends. Also if you are not already signed up for our news roundup that's coming up tomorrow at one o'clock Central that's give me an hour and I'll get you up to date on all the things in WordPress. All the news specifically aimed at those of us who are doing WordPress things with clients. So that's going to wrap us up for it today. Timothy, thanks once again, and we'll see you all back tomorrow for news roundup, one o'clock Central here on the solid Academy where we go further together.\r\n\r\nTranscribed by https:\/\/otter.ai\r\n","livestream_vimeo_video_id":985173199,"livestream-resources-group":"s:34:\"a:1:{s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}\";","multi-day_replay_details":"s:102:\"a:2:{s:16:\"course-resources\";a:1:{i:0;a:1:{s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}}s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}\";"}},"postCountOnPage":1,"postCountTotal":1,"postID":448554,"postFormat":"standard","geoCloudflareCountryCode":"US"}; dataLayer.push( dataLayer_content );

Welcome to WordPress 6.6!