Birgit Pauli-Haack and Jessica Lyschik talked about Gutenberg Releases 20.2, 20.3, 20.4, WordPress 6.8 and WordCamp Asia
- Editor: Sandy Reed
- Logo: Mark Uraine
- Production: Birgit Pauli-Haack
Show Notes
Special guest: Jessica Lyschik
Community Contributions
What’s released
- What’s new in Gutenberg 20.1 and 20.2?
- What’s new in Gutenberg 20.3? (18 February)
- Gutenberg 20.4 Changelog
What’s in active development or discussed
- WordPress 6.8 Beta 1
- Help test WordPress 6.8.
- Speculative Loading in 6.8
- WordPress 6.8 will use bcrypt for password hashing
Stay in Touch
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- Ping us on X (formerly known as Twitter) or send DMs with questions. @gutenbergtimes and @bph.
- If you have questions or suggestions, or news you want us to include, send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com.
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Transcript
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Hello and welcome to our 115th episode of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. In today’s episode, we will talk about Gutenberg releases 20.2, 20.3, and 20 .4, and a little bit of WordPress 6.8 and WordCamp Asia. I’m your host, Birgit Pauli-Haack, curator at the Gutenberg Times and a WordPress developer advocate working for Automattic and still recovering from my cold that I brought back from Manila.
And today, I’m happy to get to chat again, it was Jessica Lyschik, front-end developer at Greyd and also core contributor to the WordPress open source project. We both just returned from WordCamp Asia.
Hello, Jessica. How are you today? How is your jet lag?
Jessica Lyschik: Hey, thanks for having me. I think the jet lag is, by now, done, I would say. So I’m back to the European time zone, but I also caught a bug after returning and had to take off a couple of days to get better. But by now, it’s like another week has passed. I’ve been working normally and yeah, I’m back to normal and preparing for the next event next week, which is CloudFest.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: You’re going to CloudFest. Wonderful.
Jessica Lyschik: Yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: I had to cancel my participation in CloudFest because I have a bum knee. And my doctor said, “Well, going to another congress where you run around like crazy from one thing to the next, it’s probably not conducive to your healing that bum knee.” It sucks at one point, yeah. But on the other hand, “Okay. I don’t have to travel.” It’s another… Yeah, I can concentrate on some of the work again.
Jessica Lyschik: And get enough sleep, which is something you do not get on conferences and stuff like that.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right. Especially, CloudFest. I think every evening there is a festival or a party or something.
Jessica Lyschik: You can actually make it work. I do it the same on WordCamps. It’s the same for me. So it’s just when you are deciding where do you want to go, maybe not just be there as the first person and leave as the last person. But come late, leave early, and then just try to make it work for you. And it’s, of course, different for everyone. Some people are just like, they want to be everywhere and they need to go everywhere. And I’m more like, I need some breaks in between because otherwise that’s not going to work.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I’m pretty much the same way. However, sometimes I’m just so present in the moment, in the conversation, that I can really lose track of time. And then these are people I’ve never going to see for the next year or so, or maybe two. So at least, that was at WordCamp Asia. Where you’re only going to go to that particular family reunion and almost feels like that. Once a year and you need to catch up on what happened with other people, and there were so many good things to happen.
WordCamp Asia
So, what are your takeaways from WordCamp Asia? Do you have anything that will say, “Okay. Yeah, that was very surprising”? Interesting. New.
Jessica Lyschik: It has been my first time to the Philippines, I don’t know about you, but I think it has been a very interesting couple of days there in Manila. I did not get to see so much about Manila itself, unfortunately. The jet lag coming to Manila also hit me very hard. So the day I had planned to do something, go out somewhere did not happen. But I saw the Mall of Asia, which was like a gigantic mall where you could get your daily steps in very easily and not walk around the same circle for 10 times or something like that.
What I found very interesting was the food. I think the food was pretty good there. There was a lot of variety. We had a lot of Filipino food during the conference days, which I found pretty amazing. There’s a lot of seafood and fish in there. I’m not such a fan of seafood, but I tried the other things and they were all pretty good. So, I did not have anything that I didn’t like.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. I was really… Not surprised, but it was quite unusual that the vegetarian as well as the vegan options are so particularly tasteful and very… I have a big variety there.
Jessica Lyschik: That’s true.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And I got to chat with Dan, who is a former chef, who was on the organizing team and responsible for all the food. And he just has such a passion for the Filipino food and knows everybody in Manila to pick the right caterer for the events. It was really interesting, yeah. I also got to talk with a lot of Automatticians, but they all had the same T-shirt on, so all of a sudden, I was recognizing my fellow, my coworkers. And we don’t get to see each other during the year, especially in other teams so much. So, it was really interesting for me.
I like to hang out at the Do The Woo. Bob had… I think he started that last year in WordCamp Europe, that he is actually a sponsor and has a spot in the sponsor hall where people can hang out. And he invites his cohorts to spend an hour there. Or other people that he collaborates with, to just spend an hour there. So they can also say to their friends, “Okay. If you want to talk to me, I’m at that hour, at the Do The Woo booth.”
Jessica Lyschik: Oh, nice.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: But that was an interesting experience, yeah. So, I did that. And I was surprised how many people are actually in my talk because the such a niche topic which was about Playground and how to create demos with blueprints. And being the last session before Matt’s keynote and Q&A, I thought maybe they’re not going to be a whole lot of people in that talk, but I was surprised. There were, at least, 50 or 60 people there. Yeah, it was cool.
Jessica Lyschik: Yeah. Well, that’s nice.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Jessica Lyschik: I was there too, I have to say.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Oh, right.
Jessica Lyschik: I was at the very far back. Yeah, but it was quite interesting to go back and see, “Okay, this is…” I already know what blueprints are so it’s not that big of a deal, but going into the details again, it’s like, “Oh yeah, I remember that. Oh, I forgot this. Oh, okay.”
So, it was a very good thing.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: That was good. Yeah, good. So it was something for beginners, for the intermediate, and for the advanced. I was hoping about that. We will have WordCamp Europe.
Oh, I’m not saying that. It’s not out yet. But yeah, announcements will come.
Jessica Lyschik: Nice. I had a pretty good Speed Build as well with Nick, and that was a lot of fun. Nick tried to tackle the website with AI, or at least the top part with the slider with AI. Unfortunately, people said I won. I think Nick also did a great job. I felt a bit sad. Everyone’s clapping for me and cheering for me more than for Nick. It was like a bit disappointing. It’s like he tried. I would’ve never tried this with AI because I do not have the patience in 30 minutes to create something with AI. So I decided just to go, “Okay, do it in normal stuff. Just build some blocks, build some patterns there and do it.” But it was a lot of fun and it was great to see that afterwards, Nick also tried to not fix it, but further enhance it to make it an actual usable block.
That was pretty cool to see. He showed me the demo the next day. That was very nice.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: And I think he blogged about it.
Jessica Lyschik: Yes, he did.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So, I’m going to share that link in the show notes when I find it fast. Yes, Speed Build Carousel Block. Because people are always asking for carousel blocks. Why isn’t that in community, I say. I’m going to put it in a community contributions. You’ll find it in show notes.
I think the two of you saying, “Okay, I’ll go back to what I know, what is fast, and what I know how to accomplish.” And then the other approach was that, “Well, let’s, under pressure, do something new.” But it’s also the, how do you approach learning new things? And sometimes you say, “Okay, I’m not going to learn it because I need to get my stuff done, and I know how to do this and I get it done.” When you learn new things, your task becomes more as an inspiration rather than the success because you might not end up accomplishing your task with the new thing. Because of course you are in a learning mode, you need to learn a lot.
So, I compare that with my first experience with the spreadsheet on the computer, MultiPlan was that. So I’m dating myself, but yeah, it was in the early ’90s. MultiPlan was even ahead of Excel from Microsoft. I had a big spreadsheet from the accountant and I said, “Oh, that should be much easier to be done in a spreadsheet on a computer.” So I spent all day, or all night actually, learning how to do this and put the spreadsheet in. But of course, it took me 6 or 8 hours. And if I would’ve done it just with a calculator, I would’ve calculated the whole spreadsheet probably in two hours or something like that. So, it’s not how long it takes to do something the first time when you learn this. It’s how long it takes when you do it a second time, because you need to discard the first time most of the time.
And I found that a lot of people who learn block development, what took me a half an hour with short code took me three days in doing it as a block. I said, “Yeah, that’s the first time you learn of things. Of course, it takes longer. Of course, it takes… You’re all going to changing your brain into the new paradigm. But how long does it take the second time around? Is it faster or is it better?” Anyway, this is the philosophical Birgit in a horsey voice. Let’s go back.
So WordCamp Asia, it was the first time for me in the Manila, and I actually planned a couple of days. Not a couple, a few days. Four days. Did some sightseeing, so I went to the historic sites of the Spanish occupation. I saw the monument for the atrocities that happened in the Second World War, and I learned about the current contemporary arts in two art museums. And I went downtown to the new business district there with a nice park and shops left and right on the street. It’s a pedestrian area. It’s beautifully done. And I also discovered a few street art that were purposefully put on that place as well.
So, that was quite interesting. Of course, I overdid it and I got my bum knee from there. So yeah, it was a little painful than going on the conference and going in the… The venue was quite vast, I found.
Jessica Lyschik: You had to walk a lot?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, you had to walk a lot. But I found all the escalators, so that was good. I didn’t have to do stairs so much. But yeah, it was a walk a lot. I like the Automattic booth was really big, but there was other… Hostinger was really big out of the usual. I also saw Mark Westguard of this WS Forms. He is on every flagship and shows off his plugin. I have to think really hard to get back to that because there’s the whole week, two weeks after that that already took over my life.
Community Contributions
Which brings us back to, “Okay, let’s record that rest of the show.” So, we had a few releases. So on the developer blog, Robert Meszaros published an article on customizing WordPress embeds to match your theme. And I think that’s very interesting to an approach to make sure that all the embeds that you use are actually matching your theme and you don’t use it out of the box. So he has some nice examples in there, and some great code snippets in how to do all of that. It’s definitely something to go back to, to make a better theme or a better site view for that.
Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, I think it’s a nice finishing touch when you’re creating a new website that really embraces embeds. I didn’t know about this, to be honest. I just saw it today. And I think it’s really great. It’s not something super big, but when you have a brand new website and have put so many thoughts and hours into the design, and then there comes this embed that just looks like it’s not meant to be on this website, then I think this is a great example of how tweaking the sites essentially can make an embed also look like it’s part of the website and not just some part of default WordPress that just pops up somewhere.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, that hasn’t gotten a whole lot of love.
Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, that’s true.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So, he shared this. For instance, one example is that out of the box, the featured image of a post that you embed has some border around, and he just shows you how to make that image go all the way to the corners. That’s such a small little detail, but it shows the attention to detail. And when you have all your cards that you have, your postcards in the query loop all having the same design, and all of a sudden, the embed doesn’t… It really stands out. It doesn’t… And it also distracts the reader from, “Why is this different? What I haven’t seen yet?” It has some nice little features on how to change things. Some great sailing pictures here. So, take a look at that and spruce up your site with some of the little things and big things.
What’s Released – Gutenberg 20.2
All right. So now, we come to Gutenberg 20.2 that was released in January, to be exact.
Jessica Lyschik: End of January, I think.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Do you want to start out with what we are talking about?
Jessica Lyschik: Yeah. So, this was one of the two. I think I did the Gutenberg blog post on this one. So yeah, this wasn’t such a big release. It was rather small compared to the previous ones. Also, it was combined with, I think, 21.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: 21, yep. And we talked about that.
Jessica Lyschik: 20.1 release? Yeah. So, there isn’t that much going on in this release. It’s rather smaller bug fixes and some polishing overall. And I think one of the interesting things was that in the post content, you can now define the heading colors on a more global level. I think this was also a highlight from my blog post when I remember correctly.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I really like that you can now have the details block be more like an accordion with a name attribute. So it’s not in the UI, but you can do it in the… It’s in the UI, but you have to go to the advanced section to give all.
Jessica Lyschik: Oh, okay.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, to give it all. To get this all done. It’s not for someone who doesn’t know what to do, that kind of thing. It’s not intuitive for site builders, so you need to give it a block name so it shows up as a summary. A block name about a name attribute.
Jessica Lyschik: Oh. So, when you give it the name.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Sorry. Yeah, you need to give it a name attribute in the advanced section so the CSS that is built knows, “Okay. This is all one section. And one is open, the other ones are closed.” So, it kind of has accordion package.
Jessica Lyschik: So they all need to have the same name in this name tag, so then it automatically brings this only one of these sections is open. Okay, got it. Apparently, I missed that one.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, great.
Jessica Lyschik: But it’s okay. Now, we talked about it.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right. Yeah, that’s what we’re here for. Two eyes see more than one. Four eyes see more than two.
Jessica Lyschik: Definitely.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: I also wanted to point out that the WP env local development tool now has WP-MyAdmin support as well as Multisite support. It had it before, but now it’s also documented so you know how to use it. That’s why I wanted to point it out because…
Documentation
Jessica Lyschik: Oh, I didn’t know it had this. You had this phpMyAdmin in the WP env.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah.
Jessica Lyschik: I’m not using PHP. We are so confused. I’m not using WP nth Multi… Multisite or WP env fit-all?
Birgit Pauli-Haack: WP env.
Jessica Lyschik: Ah, okay.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. It’s when you’re working on Gutenberg, on your Gutenberg, something you can do. Just WP nth and it spins up a local WordPress instance with that particular folder. It also supports Multisite that came with 20.8.
Jessica Lyschik: Interesting.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, you’re right. There were quite a few bug fixes in there and some polish in terms of previews. And also, some panel changes that have been in the last few Gutenberg releases, and also for the ones for the next. That’s a refactor of things. It was 20.2. I don’t think there’s anything else.
Jessica Lyschik: It’s a bit tricky with the numbers of 20.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. God.
Jessica Lyschik: … in the brains of WordPress people.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. So that brings us to 20.3, which was released just two weeks ago.
Gutenberg 20.3
Jessica Lyschik: We were all hanging out in Manila.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Well, it was actually before or right on February 18th and it was released. Yes, we were all hanging out already. On travel, on planes. Yeah, my plane was… I was…
Jessica Lyschik: On planes, yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So, it was 12 hours to Singapore and then there’s another 3 1/2 hours from Singapore to Manila.
Jessica Lyschik: Oh, I did the same route.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: It was kind of 15 hours flight, but then you have to be 2 or 3 hours earlier at the airport. You have a layover in Singapore, and then you have to transfer from the airport to the hotel and…
Jessica Lyschik: Yeah. I think I calculated something, like 23, 24-ish hours door to door, so it’s not just like a 15 hour flight. But yeah, you have to count in all the waiting time. I had to travel to Munich airport two hours, so that all adds up to this whole ordeal of…
Traveling to Asia is easy. No, it’s not.
Enhancements
Birgit Pauli-Haack: No, it’s not. Yeah. So Gutenberg 20.3 also has a not particular big features coming in, but some nice additions. And one of them is that the social links now of a Discord logo that you can add to it. The query block now, that is really nice. It has an option to ignore sticky post. It took a while to get the sticky post into the filter, but then there’s also the need that sometimes you need a query loop that ignores the sticky post.
Jessica Lyschik: Yeah. It’s definitely something that you’re used to this when you’re doing classic themes and just have all the opportunity with the WP query nth function. And it’s great to see that these little things and… Even if you do not use them that often, that these are still now available. That just makes transitioning to block themes and block inside it are so much better because you finally have all the options. But maybe not all yet for the query loop, but we are getting there. Let’s put it like that. We are getting there.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: For sure, yeah. There was a major push in that.
Do you want to take the next one?
Jessica Lyschik: The yet another one of completing the options that you have on block is the RSS block got border and spacing support. And also, duotone settings got improved, they now have a reset button and improved toggle rendering. Let’s have a look what this does.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, the reset button has gotten quite the attention now that it was missing on a few of those color pickers or so, or panels. So, what did you find out?
Jessica Lyschik: Oh. I think it’s also, these are such tiny changes. But once you have them, you realize it’s so much easier to clear colors or remove something that you would have needed another four clicks or something, and then it’s just one. So it doesn’t seem like big things, but it slowly improves over time. And I think this is what the editors actually need right now, this refinement. Because there’s always been in the past pushing big projects, new features, and now it’s more like, “Okay, we are in the situation, but the best we can do is basically to do the housekeeping and fix the smaller things and polish it.”
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, and the smaller things.
I think it’s for the user. Very important to have a consistent interface. So, if you put a background color in and you have a reset button, why don’t you have a reset button on the shadows? So, shadow panel. Or why can’t I have a reset button on the text color, for instance, if it was missing. So it’s definitely, you cannot take that cognitive load. You lower that quite a bit by having an inconsistent interface. Also, with border and spacing support, if the block doesn’t have it and all of a sudden it doesn’t match what you want, then you go over looking for things. And the spacer block is not always the best solution for things. It’s not a bad solution, but it’s not the best because once a panel gets or a block gets spacing support, now you have to chase down all the spacer blocks to take them out. So, it’s kind of interesting.
Jessica Lyschik: That’s true, yeah.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: The next one is there was a bug fix or maybe a revert on the quick inserter, that it didn’t search the patterns anymore when you put a search parameter in there. And that has been restored. So I think although that’s bug fix, or I think it’s bug fix, it’s definitely worth pointing out. So, a missing feature comes back. Yay.
Jessica Lyschik: We just talked about it having the same options on blocks. Like, archives and categories got the color support. So, you can now have select colors on the archives and category blocks. Yet another one of those because then, people try.
If you do not have them, it’s like, what do these blocks do not have? Why can I not change the color there? Then, people go to CSS and then it’s not needed actually if these settings would just be provided right from the start. But yeah, it’s like a living project. So, here we are.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Or what I always did when I didn’t have color support, I put it in a group block, and then of course it blows up the nesting of my blocks. So there are always ways around it, but once things then come into the editor, you need to think about how your workaround needs to be worked around.
So, I think those were the few things that I wanted to point out. Did you see anything else that you wanted to point out?
Jessica Lyschik: No, I don’t think so, but I’ve been just scrolling through it. It’s been a good chunk of bug fixes, some accessibility improvements, some performance improvements, good quality tools.
Gutenberg 20.4
Birgit Pauli-Haack: All right. That brings us to Gutenberg 20.4, which is also the last Gutenberg release for which the enhancements made it into 6.8. After that, it’s all bug fixes that go into the release, and any new enhancements coming into Gutenberg will be reserved for the next release. What is it? 6.9? We don’t know yet when that’s going to be, but…
So, what’s in there? There is a conditional enable the new default rendering mode for pages. I highlighted that. And I heard from quite a few people that they like that there is a default rendering mode for pages, but I have not seen yet the use case for it. So, why are people so excited about this? But yeah.
Jessica Lyschik: That’s a very good question. You already had this show template. That’s already in there. That’s a good question. Why it’s so hyped? Maybe, I need to test it out. That’s probably a problem.
I haven’t gotten to looking at the latest releases on an actual site yet because WordCamp Asia, being sick, being busy at work, life happens. I only heard this week, things were a bit off, and template parts were actually missing from if you had 6.8 Beta 1 running. So there have been some hiccups there as well,
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah. We definitely need to track that down here. So now, there is a persistence. So you could have a show template preferences, but now there are also sport, which is pretty cool. There was a time where you started with a new page, and first you saw all the patterns that are labeled for new pages, page layouts. That modal was removed, and now it’s back. So, it’s a 50/50 thing what people want and what don’t want when they use that. So, that’s also an interesting development.
Jessica Lyschik: I mean, the problem with the modal… I mean, it wasn’t removed. There was an option, because I worked on this part as well. It got an option to be disabled in the settings when you’re on a site where you have to add new pages over and over again, and you know what you want to put on a page. You do not need this modal popping up every time. So, it was more of a user enhancement so that you can decide, “Okay, do I need this model every time or do I just turn it off?” So, there was that part.
I’m not aware if it’s back yet. I heard people saying to remove it completely. But yeah, there’s a lot of different use cases how you would like to… Some people want the model always to be on because they don’t know what they are doing, basically. They just want to pop on a template or a pattern there and are good to go. And there are people who would like to just start writing first. There are people who maybe, want to use it but don’t want to be bothered all the time. It’s one of these things where a lot of different use cases clash together, and then it’s just so hard to actually find what is it, where is the…
Birgit Pauli-Haack: The middle ground there.
Jessica Lyschik: What’s the thing? Where’s the middle ground that we can go and implement it that way? So, kind of everyone or the majority of people is okay with it. There will always be people who are like, “I don’t like this. I want it to be different.”
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right.
Jessica Lyschik: But that’s basically impossible to make it happen for everyone.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right, yeah. Another problem was when you say, “Oh, I don’t want the starter modal,” it was hard to get the layouts, if you wanted, to get to patterns and get the layouts because there was no category for that. So, you had to assemble them from a list of patterns or from multiple pattern categories to put those page layouts together. And I think… I don’t know if it’s here or it was in an earlier version where they restored or created a category for patterns for the starter content. I think that was part of that, or how can we do that better for our users.
So there is now a pop-over on the left-hand side to show post template. If there is one to give you additional options, I think there. The next thing is that pull quote finally has the assignment styles that was missing for a long time. That you couldn’t do left, right and all of that, or wide. So, it has it now. It’s all about persistence. And border control got the reset button.
Jessica Lyschik: Yes. It’s, again, these tiny things that make or break something, or your experience.
Bug Fixes
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Right. And post comments count also have received border support. That’s cool. So now, you can have it stand out some more. Post formats have still be a little bit of a hit-and-miss with the block themes, but sometimes somebody says, “Okay, well let’s fix that some of the things.” And now, you see title and description for post formats in your templates. So in the list of templates, you can now see which are the templates for your image formats, for your link format, and if they are templates for that. So, that’s really cool.
And there’s an interesting bug fix that drove me nuts for a while, was that the text and color picker were overlapping each other in the format library. And that is fixed, thank God. Thank you so much.
Documentation
And then there are some documents updates. There’s obviously, the problem that a lot of features come in and the documentation hasn’t been updated. So, that has been rectified for the block variations using get_block_type_variationblock. And then also, removes the nodes for block hooks that it only supports static theme elements because that’s not true anymore. Block hooks also support dynamic blocks. All right.
Jessica Lyschik: Yeah, nice.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: So, that was that for 20.4. That was just released this week, and we are recording this on March 7th. Just to say that.
What’s in Active Development & Discussed – WordPress 6.8 Beta
So, what’s an active development? And discussion brings us to WordPress 6.8 in Beta has been released. Beta 1 has been released. And you can follow along on the WordPress.org announcements or news. So, there will be Beta 1, Beta 2, Beta 3 and Release Candidate 1, 2, and 3 before the final release on April 15th. The test team has published, for the last few releases, always a Help Test, the next release. And this one is not different. There’s Help Test WordPress 6.8, and it helps… Well, you can help making this release the best that it can be. Finding all the bugs, not all of it, but report them. Find as much many. Try to break it as often as you can. Report the bugs.
And I have found another incentive on, actually, heeding to the call for testing is to learn more about the new features because instructions are very well done, compliments to Krupa Nanda, to learn more about the new features or the enhancements and how are they supposed to work so you can distinguish them. So, is it me that I don’t know how this works? That I don’t get it? Or is that a bug? So, they went to great lengths to do that.
You can also use Playground to test things. You don’t have to spin up a new WordPress staging site or something like that to test things. Yeah, you can go to make.wordpress.org/test to find the post or you look for the show notes on the Gutenberg Times and click on that link.
So Jessica, the WordPress 6.8 is characterized as a polished release. Is there anything that stands out for you coming to 6.8 that you’re excited about?
Jessica Lyschik: I do. It’s a polishing that I think is… I mean, as I said before, given the situation that we are in, I think this is the best that we can do. And yeah, I’ve been just scrolling through these Call for Testing blog posts that you just mentioned. And it is really thoroughly, so I would actually be excited to dive into this and do the testing because this is pretty well done.
And I think about 6.8 and the coming releases… I haven’t been paying too much attention to what is in 6.8 apart from a few things that we highlighted today, and I have probably forgotten again because I was just out of the office for two weeks.
Speculative Loading in 6.8
I think what’s also interesting is this speculative loading thing. I think there was also just a blog post these days. So, this speculative loading is, when I understood correctly, something like a browser? Like, the browser offers this API and WordPress has added its performance improvements. The performance team will probably come after me if I do not say this correctly. But from what I understood, it’s improving overall performance of a WordPress website by using these speculation rules. So it’s about what can be prefetched or what makes sense to be prefetched next, so that when you actually click on a link on the website, it loads faster because it already knows what I have, what the browser has to load in this case.
I think this is something very interesting that might be bumping up the performance of a few websites. So, that will be interesting to see what the actual impact will be once 6.8 is out.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Yeah, I’m excited about that too. I think the browsers are now pretty well caught up with that. Not all browsers have all the features all the time, but this is something that, I think, has a big footprint around all the browsers being Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome.
I link in the show notes too, Felix Arntz has published… Has worked on this feature, in the feature plugin before. And now, it’s coming to 6.8 and the dev note has been published now.
Jessica Lyschik: I just checked on Can I Use, and it’s actually Safari and Firefox do not support it at the moment. Chrome, Edge, and Opera do. So, there is still a bit of a… It’s not a hundred percent on all browsers, but a good chunk of browsers already support this. So I hope these other browsers, Safari and Firefox, will catch up on this because it sounds pretty promising from a performance point of view to use these speculation rules.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: I keep scrolling through the dev notes that have been published. They’re not in bulk coming out until Release Candidate 1, but John Blackburn also published a dev notes about the new encryption for the password hashing.
Jessica Lyschik: Oh. Yes, I forgot this one.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Which there’s not a whole lot of things for users to do or even for developers. It’s just to know that the passwords are now hashed differently and increase the security of any of the passwords quite exponentially, which is really good. So, thank you for Felix and John to publish the dev notes early for that.
All right, I’m sure we are going to talk about WordPress 6.8 some more on our next show when we know a little bit more what’s in there and what’s not in there. Thank you so much, Jessica, for being here. As always, the show notes will be published on GutenbergTimes.com/podcast. This is episode 115. And if you have questions and suggestions, just send them to Changelog@GutenbergTimes.com.
And now, a plea for all those who use Spotify for their podcast pleasure, you can leave comments there. And also, check some of the stars so people know what they can expect on the show when they discover that on Spotify. Shopify. Well, yeah. So, thanks for listening and goodbye until the next time. Thank you, Jessica.
Jessica Lyschik: Thank you. Bye.
Birgit Pauli-Haack: Bye.