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The WP Minute brings you news about WordPress in under 5 minutes -- every week! Follow The WP Minute for the WordPress headlines before you get lost in the headlines. Hosted by Matt Medeiros, host of The Matt Report podcast.
Eric Karkovack (00:00)
Hi everyone and welcome to the WP Minute. I'm Eric Karkovack. So we're nearing the release of WordPress 7.1, and it promises to be a watershed moment. This version will include some highly visible new features, such as responsive styling. Release lead Anne McCarthy stopped by to show us what's new and discuss some items that didn't make the cut. Now you can catch the entire interview over on our WP Minute Plus channel.
Visit the WP Minute.com for all the details.
Eric Karkovack (00:33)
the other thing I I really wanted to talk about was collaborative editing and I I know that's like
That's been a a a challenge just based on what server technology, right? Like how do you make this thing work on a a shared low-cost server in addition to the high enterprise load balancing, you know, high tech install. So how how how has that been going? And I mean I know it's not gonna hit 7.1, but ha ha do you see progress in there in that area?
Anne McCarthy (00:55)
yeah.
Yeah, I do
see a lot of progress. part of why it didn't hit 7.1, there's a few things. One, I started an another outreach program with a couple of other folks, Amy and Justin Tadlock, around collaborative editing. Because one of the biggest things that I think let me zoom out. A couple years ago, I did some phase three research and it was just talking to different, both large and small organizations. I think there are about 25 of them. This is publicly available on Make Core.
Posted a summary about this. and one of the things that became very clear is that we need folks using collaborative editing in real life, not testing, not throwing much people at the editor, but like, what is it like when you're working on an article? You stop working on it, you walk away from your desk, you go to lunch, you come back. Like, what like what does that look like? What is the actual experience of it? And so one of the concerns was that we have folks using it, where Press VIP is part of the group that.
has contributed to this feature and that has folks using the feature now. but I we wanted to see more people. combine that with in 7.0, one of the biggest issues was like, what does it look like on a really good host? How do we cover all the variables? All that sort of stuff. 7.1 became a question more of what could we reasonably land? And so midway through the release, I would say the conversation came up around, okay, well like what if we didn't
provide HTTP polling, which is basically like the default standard works could work everywhere. And what if instead we provided primitives that plugins and hosts could come and bring their own transport server to the experience to basically allow it to work. So like without getting too technical, what if core provided the tools but then a host or plugin could just put them all together and make it work essentially. And so rather than providing an out-of-the-box default experience, what would it look like to do that? And as we started getting deeper into that conversation,
developer debates broke out. And there has been a lot of really like, you know, philosophical, honestly, it's like very philosophical questions around how the experience should work. And it's incredibly complex. And at a certain point, even when it came down to putting the primitives primitives in, I quickly realized just you talk to people in this role and you're having to look across many different opinions and
Eric Karkovack (03:04)
Of course.
Anne McCarthy (03:29)
I both can see the value of it. I also have run into bugs with it. So it's like I can I can feel the tension of it. I can feel the power of it. I've talked to people for years about this feature. It's super interesting. It's super powerful. but similar to you know, people have such a strong connotation of Google Docs and what that means to collaboratively edit. That is just in people's head. and there is a a high chance and a high risk.
Of landing something that doesn't leave a good taste in the mouth. And that's something that I really wanted to avoid. I think everyone wanted to avoid. It's like, how do we land a good enough experience where it allows people to collaborate, but it's not gonna turn people off, especially when I and this is I'm gonna get philosophical for a second because this I think about this a lot. The experience of writing in a Google Doc completely divorced from a website is very different than sitting in WP Admin, sitting in a post where the publish button is right there.
Eric Karkovack (04:02)
Sure.
Anne McCarthy (04:23)
There's different legal responsibility for organizations. That was one of the things I talked about with bigger orgs. There's huge problems if they publish something and they can't track who wrote what. and there's they could get sued. Like there's all this risk that when you're in a Google Doc, you're kind of insulated. You're in a container, right? So to me, collaborative editing didn't we didn't just need to land collaborative editing. We need to land other things around it to have safeguards, to have like there, there's a workflow side of that to actually make it work because it's not just about doing Google Docs.
Eric Karkovack (04:38)
Yeah.
Anne McCarthy (04:53)
for really small news organizations where they really trust each other, no problem. That that was the best use case I heard. Like they want to use it today. There's someone in the cloud revetting outreach program right now who's like, we're chomping at the bit, I think is the phrase you use. Like, we can't wait to use this. my God, help us set it up. Like, and they're like really excited about it. I'm stoked that they're joining and I welcome other people to join. but that psychology of being in that, like I heard from one person something to the effect of like,
Eric Karkovack (05:05)
Sure.
Anne McCarthy (05:18)
we'd really have to lock down access, right? Like there's just an interesting headspace. And I think that that's something that WordPress has to pay attention to from the user experience side. And we just didn't nail it. We didn't have enough time. 7.0 kept getting pushed. The focus was on these hyper technical performance issues at scale. What storage do we use? What database table do we create? What's the structure of that database table? Like it got real deep there. And then 7.1, we kinda it kind of was like we took a step back. And then as we zoomed out, I just could see the writing on the walls. Like there is not enough time. And so that was something that Matt Matias
Eric Karkovack (05:23)
Yeah.
Anne McCarthy (05:49)
And I talked about and I basically was just like, I don't think we should do this. And they all agreed. And so that's like how that dynamics worked. And if they were like, Nope, and we really want this, that would be a different conversation. That could be something that we could we'd probably push back on and go back and forth with. but that was after a lot of a lot of input from a lot of different people.
Eric Karkovack (06:07)
Yeah, that that's an interesting point about, you know, just the privacy concerns and the con the security of it because I think a lot of us in the in the WordPress ecosystem are really just focused on the technical part of it, like, okay, how's it gonna work? How's it gonna work on my host? How do I enable it or disable it? But there's so much more to think about, and so it's good that you brought that up.