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For long-form interviews, news, and commentary about the WordPress ecosystem. This is the companion show to The WP Minute, your favorite 5-minutes of WordPress news every week.
Eric Karkovack (00:00)
Hi everyone and welcome to the WP Minute. I'm Eric Karkovack. So are you excited about WordPress 7.1? If not, maybe you should be. Some powerful and long-awaited features are on the way. My guest today knows all about them. Anne McCarthy serves as the release lead for this version and is here to introduce us to what's new. Anne, welcome to the WP Minute.
Anne McCarthy (00:23)
Thanks for having me, Eric. Excited to talk about all the good things coming to seven point one.
Eric Karkovack (00:28)
Yeah, I I have now the first beta as we as we discussed this has been released. It's been out for what, about a week or so. it it definitely and we were talking about this off camera, it's definitely one where you notice that WordPress has been updated, right? There there's a lot here.
Anne McCarthy (00:48)
Yeah, that was something in WordPress 7.0 in the product review call that we did with Matt that he talked about like whenever our people update to a new version of WordPress, he wants them to feel it. And so that was something with this release that I'm really excited about. There are many different things, whether it's the omnibar or a new on this day widget or a new functionality, new blocks that you feel as you're using different parts of the experience that make it just yeah, more powerful, easier to use. And that's some of it's subtle, some of it's more in your face. but I'm excited to see how the community reacts to it and how
It helps improve the user experience.
Eric Karkovack (01:19)
I've been having a lot of fun with it so far, but I wanted to dig in first because this is your first time as release lead, right? So so I I read, you have a blog post, we'll put it in the show notes, about some sleepless nights and you know waking up in the middle of the night and trying to fix things. How have you been dealing with this? How how has it been different for you? Because I know you've contributed for a long time. What what's different about being a release lead?
Anne McCarthy (01:26)
Yes, yeah.
Yeah, so I've been on different release squads in the past. I've held test roles, release coordinator roles, documentation like just different roles. And usually every release I'm involved somehow. it's different. I I have a lot of respect. I've always had a lot of respect for people who are the ones making the final call, who are talking to many different people and having to step in and make that decision. I definitely feeling that differently. I think there's something when you're on the pitch,
Not to use a soccer thing after, you know, the World Cup, but it feels different to be actually, you know, on the starting eleven, so to speak. and it feels like a lot more pressure. and it makes me kind of internalize the WordPress philosophy a bit deeper, even than whenever I was in different release squad roles. Cause a lot of times there would be, you know, you could go to someone else to help make it the decision. And now it's like, okay, your voice carries a lot of weight, and I'm pretty
Eric Karkovack (02:16)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anne McCarthy (02:40)
verbose, so I've had to really be mindful of whenever I'm chiming in on a discussion or sharing a design idea, not to say too much or not to guide things too much. because I I do and recognize the responsibility that I have in that role. And it's also been really fun. Like it's been really cool. I held a call with two different calls with the release squad because we have a pretty big time zone spread. And it's just fun to to get on a call with people. There's some folks where it's their first time on a release squad and like that is such a precious, important moment and it's a a contributor's journey. And
being able to set the tone for the release and yeah kind of do it do it in a different way, do it in in a way that kind of leaves a mark. I think is really fun and and it's it's really an honor. I I can think of a lot of people who would probably be better suited for this, but I'm I'm doing my best. And right now it's it's a combination of really digging into the details and then making sure we're making really good decisions along the way. I think no one wants to ha have what happened with 7.0 happen again. Like it makes sense why we were trying to give space real time collaboration.
But that's been one of my goals with some point one is to just really bring the temperature down, make it predictable, get get ahead of things as early as possible, and have it go as smoothly as possible for everyone.
Eric Karkovack (03:50)
Yeah, it just sounds like a whole different way of thinking, right? y when you have one task, that's what you're focused on. But when you're overseeing an entire operation the size of of a WordPress release, that that requires a little bit of a mindset difference, doesn't it?
Anne McCarthy (04:06)
Hundred percent.
Yeah, I definitely am thinking both bigger picture and more detailed than I have in the past. It's been really fun to kind of stretch the the extreme on either on either end. and to try and use it as a as ch a chance to also document for other people in the future. That's one of the things that I immediately noticed is there's not a lot of documentation. I think I found a post from Andrew Nason from
ten years ago or something. I think it was like WordPress four point three or four point two where there's like a short little paragraph where he describes like a release lead. And I like, Cool, okay, we need to get that updated. so that's one of my goals as well is to make it a little bit easier for other folks to follow in the future.
Eric Karkovack (04:35)
Yeah.
That th it's kinda nice to have a little bit of a handbook, I'd imagine, when you take on a role like this and kind of see what other people have done before and have it documented. Yeah, that's I think people will be thanking you for that ten years from now.
Anne McCarthy (04:51)
Yeah.
Hope so, I hope
so, yeah.
Eric Karkovack (05:01)
Well, I I I've been playing around with the beta and I've been really excited about it. Like I said, it i it there's a lot of in your face stuff that that you that you see in the block editor. I was hoping you might be able to show us around a little bit. if you want to share your screen we can take a look at it maybe some of the features you think are are really what makes seven point one unique.
Anne McCarthy (05:17)
Yeah. Let's take a look. So
the first one I'm gonna demo is actually I'm doing this on my personal site. just because I like I like to see real content. I don't know, I'm a nerd and I like to see things as they actually are. And so this is looking at responsive styling. And so I actually added these changes. I test everything every day, multiple times a day. so I actually added
Eric Karkovack (05:41)
Ha ha ha.
Anne McCarthy (05:43)
these changes ahead of time. as I was messing with my site, I ch I changed my theme also probably every couple months. so kind of you think about a buildup across the releases. So this is something I think is really important. People sometimes fixate on just one release. When in truth, a lot of the times we're shipping things in different releases across them. So you can imagine I think it was WordPress 6.9, you were able to show hide blocks, WordPress 7.0 you were able to show hide based on screen size. And so
When you combine this with responsive styling, which is new to this release, along with things like the custom navigation overlay, all of a sudden you kind of have these suite of tools that allow you to have way more responsive control. And back in the day I ran the full siding outreach program and this was like number one feedback. so in this release, there's this new option that says responsive styling. And I'll just kind of switch back and forth between these two.
so whenever it's off, you're basically just pro previewing the different modes. But whenever you turn this on, and let's say you go into mobile, this allows you to style things mobile. so in this case you'll notice that I or maybe you won't notice this, but I actually changed the font size and removed some images. so this column is actually hidden. So I'm gonna go back and forth so you can see. So the tablet, you'll see this is a little bit smaller, but I have these photos still here. And I decided that on mobile, the photos just looked really distracting.
Eric Karkovack (06:54)
Okay.
Anne McCarthy (07:06)
They were really small. It wasn't really the vibe I wanted. And I more so on mobile wanted folks to see this text. And so when you're in mobile, I made the text larger. which let's see if this will show. Sorry, I'm covering the riverside thing is covering up where I want to be. let me hide you over there. But you'll see this little indication of mobile to show whenever things are set. And you can basically go through and style things across each and then also use that show hide as a way to
Eric Karkovack (07:23)
no problem.
Anne McCarthy (07:36)
Further the responsive control and what you want to see across different viewports. There's also in this release the ability to customize viewports via theme JSON. So for any theme developers, this also ties in and adds more control. But you'll notice here you can have these like show hide things. So this is like hidden on mobile, and this is where the images are. You'll see them here. So kind of pulling all the features together across the different releases.
It comes together really nicely. Like seven point one feels like a landing in that sense because you can actually have multiple different ways of controlling how your site looks across screen sizes. So that's just one small example.
Eric Karkovack (08:15)
Yeah, that
I was just gonna say that was something I I noticed like you you do have that kind of progression where you okay, we can hide a block now. Well now we can hide it on just the phone if we want to, and now we can actually, you know, change that paragraph block or remove that image or whatever you want to do on on mobile. That's something that I know has been a long time coming. Like what kind of obstacles did you face with this? Like what w you know, I I imagine there were some challenges.
Anne McCarthy (08:41)
Yeah. there
definitely are. Right now there's a debate about what this should look like in the future. so there's there's a ton of challenges mainly around like what this is using is something that the concept of block states, which is some similar Figma has something like this, where you basically are able to combine different attributes to allow a block to display. So that's why you see this mobile thing right here, to indicate what you're using and what you're on.
But yeah, the experience, it's like this is only styling the tablet. It's not styling tablet and mobile below. What should the user experience be? Right? Should it always be on? I just talked to someone who was like, this should always be on. Why would this ever be off? Like we should just have this on constantly. and I was like, I disagree. Like there are times whenever I just want to make changes and I don't want to think about if it's gonna apply everywhere. And so there's there's an interesting tension user experience wise, and also technically.
There wasn't a super clear path forward until pseudo state styling landing landed. So that's another thing that landed. Being able to style things on hover for a button block also is landing in this release. So it's another part of the responsive tooling that's come for the release. And whenever that initially landed, suddenly the user experience became a bit clearer, which is always really interesting with WordPress. Like I think whenever you build features across a release, suddenly it's almost like you converge on a solution. And
Eric Karkovack (10:04)
Yeah.
Anne McCarthy (10:05)
Some developers were able to just jump in and go, wait a second, they just implemented this over here. Can't we do something similar with responsive styling as a whole? And that's what led to this. And so I'm really excited to see how it evolves. Like one of the future ideas around it is to have like animation as well. but we'll see what let's see if this will come up.
for anyone who really wants to get into the nerdy details, this is kind of the foundational piece of this. And this was a big part to figure out both technically and user experience wise, to make sure it would scale over time. Cause if you imagine adding all these different block states, what does the API look like? How do we make that sustainable and scalable and clear both to us humans and AI? So that's another thing to piece about is like think about is like how to have the API shape something that's easily understood and readable.
and that was something that dev spent a lot of time on. And then I would say there still is an open debate around you'll see issues open in the GitHub repo around what the experience should look like in terms of this drop down, which let me switch back over. Share this tab and stuff. There we go.
Eric Karkovack (11:11)
Yeah,
there I mean so many page builders and things like that that exist that have their own way of doing it. So I I imag that is kind of a challenge, right? Just to figure out what's the most obvious way for the user to understand what's there and how it works.
Anne McCarthy (11:14)
Mm-hmm.
Exactly.
Yeah. So I'm really keen to see feedback during the release process during beta one to see if there's stuff that we can do to iterate. there have been some small iterations. So for example, this intentionally says responsive styles. So for for now, if I go to mobile and let's say I delete a block, that will just fully delete the block. that's another piece of this that's I think confusing for folks. that I'm I'm you know, we've started using this style word a lot here. But it basically takes style changes, but it doesn't take
layout changes is the is the description that I would add. and that's where using the hide and show helps a lot. But it's something that I think will take some like getting used to and something that we can hopefully continue to iterate on
So the command palette has some updates and you'll see like recently used. You'll also see suggested. So if I go to editor, and then I pull up the command palette again, you'll see suggestions based on where you are, which I think is just, yeah, I think it's just a really nice quality of life improvement. because sometimes you do just want like, yeah, what's the obvious next thing for me to do?
Eric Karkovack (12:25)
Okay, that's handy.
Anne McCarthy (12:35)
In this case, I'm also going to demo this new identity section. This is actually something that I worked on based on user feedback. It was super easy to implement, which was kind of cool. I'm technical, but not like overly technical. But it surfaces common every day. You're just trying to change something small here. And you want to have, you know, without getting into the editor. And so I'm thinking about like the base user experience. Someone's just starting out with the site, they want to set their site identity. and you can
set it all here and you'll see it reflected on the page as you go. And then you can go in and edit this, make it smaller. Let me save changes.
Eric Karkovack (13:14)
And traditionally
we would have gone into the theme customizer for this if we're using an old school PHP theme.
Anne McCarthy (13:20)
Exactly. Yeah. So yeah,
it was like how do we bring that kind of experience back into this is the bug that I'm running into right now. Do you see that? Yep. That's what betas are for. Yep. This is exactly it's so funny. I can't tell so I'm for for context for folks, I'm using WordPress playground and so I can't tell if it's a playground issue or but it's reported and I just commented on it this morning after messing with it. So
Eric Karkovack (13:28)
Yeah, it's blank. But that's okay. That's what beta's are for.
Anne McCarthy (13:47)
This is part of the fun. Being a release lead, you test this stuff and you find it. the other some of the other cool things that are coming. There's a new playlist block that I'm really excited about. Yeah, and tabs and playlists. So you have all these different options that you can show. I only just have one little thing that I uploaded, but you can see there's a lot of customization for anyone who's an artist. you can also do things. This is kind of fun. You can set up.
Eric Karkovack (13:58)
this one will look cool.
Anne McCarthy (14:16)
Like what you want it to look like. That's kind of hard to see. Maybe we do that. so there's just some basic customization in place that you kind of expect with every core block. and it plays music, which is pretty darn cool. I'm really excited about it. another thing you might notice is that there's this toolbar in the site editor. So this is called the Omnibar, and this is something that Matt specifically noted and requested because
People were having issues, they'd land in the site editor and then not necessarily know how to get back. And so one of the things that it's great to be immersive, but not not so much so that you feel trapped. And so in response to that feedback, this is available everywhere. So if we go to let's see, we'll go actually we'll go to post. We'll just add a new post. I'm not gonna save my changes because I'm wild. you'll see here also there's another small improvement.
Eric Karkovack (14:54)
Yeah.
Anne McCarthy (15:14)
So, whenever there's no title set, it'll show an excerpt. So you don't, it's fine if there's no title, but you don't actually know what's in the post. So there's actually a a Dave Weiner, I think is his name. He writes all of his posts without titles. And so this is feedback that he had where he's like, I can't see what these posts are. which is really it's yes, yeah. It's a small detail, but it's really important. And this was another thing we went back and forth on the design. Like some people didn't want to say,
Eric Karkovack (15:31)
Yeah. You'd have to remember dates.
Anne McCarthy (15:41)
No title at all. I personally always set titles. So for me, I would not want to be confused about it. So I wanted to see no title. Do you do italics to represent excerpt? You know, it's like all these sorts of things to get feedback on. But I think this is another nice quality of life improvement. but if we go in here, you'll see it it remains up here as well. and I think this is just a really nice quality of life improvement, something that makes it easier to to write and interact with.
I'm like, I could go on. We could talk about the release for forever. Is there anything in particular that you were keen on looking at?
Eric Karkovack (16:16)
Well I I think I I did want to talk a about a couple of things that did not make it.
Anne McCarthy (16:21)
Yeah.
Eric Karkovack (16:22)
Now I know there was first of all there was the classic block deprecation, which I guess is still being deprecated, right? But it it's not disappearing completely. There was a talk of a new install would not have a classic block available. What be went behind the dis I first of all, let me know if I'm not accurate on that, but what w what went behind that debate and you know that final decision to just deprecate it and not necessarily just remove it?
Anne McCarthy (16:51)
Yeah,
so a lot of that came from talking with Matt. and a lot of it's looking at stats. So there are certain stats that we have access to that help guide some of these product decisions. And in this case, it was too used. And it was one of those things where when it came down to it, it's kind of flipping the question on its head. Yes, we want to deprecate this. Yes, it's not great to have leftover stuff in the editor for people who aren't using it.
But then let's actually examine why people are still using it and what the what the intent might be and what we could create to help bridge a gap a bit better. and so in this case, Matt, I think, was editing an old friend's site and noticed that there was a deprecation notice that we had in place for this and brought it up, which was great. Like I think flipping the question on its head and that made the developers who are working on it think a bit more deeply and kind of say, Okay, let's pause this. Let's not
Let's not step forward. and so every release that that tends to happen, there tends to be something where it's how do you push into the future while also, you know, backwards compatibility, honoring the past, respecting your users. Like there is like an interesting dance there. and this was a good example of that where the thought process was to take a step back and examine why it's still used and provide other pathways other than just other than just deprecation. What else can we do? Let's zoom out and see the whole problem rather than just this individual.
performance concern.
Eric Karkovack (18:21)
WordPress seems to be a little bit more thoughtful about that process than other software out there. if Microsoft wants to remove something, they just remove it and they don't care. So so you all have have discussions and and try to make, you know, try to get the community feedback involved, which is great because you know, there are still I mean, you look at the just the classic editor plugins still being used by millions of sites, right? So it it there's like this clinging to the past.
Anne McCarthy (18:32)
Yeah. Yes, that's correct.
Eric Karkovack (18:51)
but y do you want to break however many websites are still using it?
Anne McCarthy (18:57)
Yeah, exactly. And I think there's something to be said for
The experience of being upgraded. Like we've all had that moment where something gets switched and you're like, my gosh, my partner, whenever it happens to her. I'm like, some humans made that decision. Cause she's like, gosh, why can't I figure this out? And I was like, a human made that decision. I promise you, I have been one those people. Like, we don't always get it right. You know, like I think there's something interesting about that. and the experience of like how WordPress feels really matters, especially in the age of AI. that familiarity, that ease of use.
Eric Karkovack (19:14)
Yeah.
Anne McCarthy (19:31)
especially with your words, your story, your business, like I think that stuff really matters a lot. And so, that was a decision I was really happy to see made.
Eric Karkovack (19:40)
Yeah, it's it's it's one of those things where there's so much comfort level in WordPress. It does evolve, it does change, but at the same time, you wanna know where things are and how to do the thing you've always done with it, right? So it's it's like, do you really wanna mess with that? And so I I I applaud you guys for just taking a step back and saying, Okay, maybe this isn't the best way right now. 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 (20:25)
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 (22:34)
Of course.
Anne McCarthy (22:59)
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 (23:32)
Sure.
Anne McCarthy (23:54)
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 (24:09)
Yeah.
Anne McCarthy (24:23)
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 (24:36)
Sure.
Anne McCarthy (24:49)
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 (24:53)
Yeah.
Anne McCarthy (25:19)
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 (25:37)
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. the other kind of interesting feature here I thought was client-side media processing.
Anne McCarthy (26:06)
Okay, I'm so
glad you brought this up because I was about to, I was like, I missed all of the media things. And I take so many photos and so many things. Yeah. The client-side media and some of the media improvements. so client-side media at a high level, it's more format support, better performant, more reliable. So that's like the headline takeaway. And Adam Silverstein has been crushing it on this stuff. there have been a couple of folks supporting him, Andrew Sarong, Ramon. that it's just been awesome to see. And that was punted from some point
And a lot of those features are landing for 7.1. So that includes like support for iPhone photos, the H E I I can I've never pronounced that hike photos, whatever they're called. those are gonna be supported. there's also a lot of stuff with converting MP4s to GIFs and back and forth and being able to have the ability to switch back and forth between the two. yeah, I'm really excited about a lot of the stuff that's landing. And there's also in in terms of media, there's a let's see if I can pull this up actually. Maybe I can demo this.
Eric Karkovack (26:44)
Yeah, yeah.
State.
Anne McCarthy (27:06)
Hopefully you can see. So one of the things, there's a combination. So there's this client side media updates. And think of that as like foundational. It's not something you're gonna notice. It's all just the experience of it. Does the upload work? Did the format was it allowed? Like it's it's all that foundational background stuff that makes something feel easy. And so that's one of those things that it's it's more invisible, but it's so important to call it. I'm really glad you brought it up. on top of that.
Eric Karkovack (27:07)
Yeah, there we go.
Anne McCarthy (27:34)
There are a couple different more visual things that are coming. So one of them is this attach images. I think Matt just tweeted about this actually. And this has just been a gap that hasn't been in the block editor. So you've always been able to attach media to a post. In this case, I can do this and add these photos. And then if I'm creating a gallery, you'll see use attached images and it automatically just pulls them in, which is really cool. Of course, I get it way faster, way easier to use.
Eric Karkovack (27:57)
Okay. That is way faster.
Anne McCarthy (28:03)
And so that's a really cool piece to it as well. the other thing is you can just like drag and drop that in, which I think sometimes people don't realize you can do with the inserter. So that's one of the things I like to demo. This is my partner. Hopefully, she's fine with me using these photos. I don't think she minds. The other thing is there's a new media cropper. So I constantly am editing photos like before I upload them to WordPress. And a lot of times it's switch fixed little tiny things.
Eric Karkovack (28:23)
Okay.
Anne McCarthy (28:32)
I will not be doing that now because this cropper is so much more like modern and I don't know, just like follows everything. I've been testing this a bunch because I just really love it. you can also set things as you'd like here. You can flip stuff. so maybe we want to do that. And it just works. And I am just obsessed with this being
Eric Karkovack (28:41)
my gosh, yeah.
Anne McCarthy (29:00)
in place. Again, this is like an everyday thing. You're using WordPress, you're uploading an image, and now you have access to this wonderful new cropper, as well as all these improvements behind the scenes, as well as this attached image. There's just a lot of stuff with images, with styling. There's also a bunch of improvements with notes that Adam Silverstein also led lot of work on. So you can add inline notes rather than just at a block level, you can highlight a sentence, you can do
Eric Karkovack (29:04)
Yeah.
Anne McCarthy (29:26)
Rich text, you can admintion people. We're working on getting notifications in for those admins. I'm pretty sure that should land before beta two. yeah, I know this is a lot, but yeah, there's a lot of cool stuff that like everyday usage. anyone who uses images will probably feel a pretty big big experience change here.
Eric Karkovack (29:46)
so I mean media has always been a a kind of a separate entity, you know, in WordPress and now it's kind of getting more integrated into the editor, which I think is a great thing, because it is a visual editor, you know, as opposed to when we had the classic editor, so I think that that's great. and I guess the only other thing I really wanted to ask you was like, are there any other hidden gems in here that you see that that people may not know about yet?
Anne McCarthy (29:50)
Mm-hmm.
Yes.
Yeah.
I so this is super hold on, let me move this out of the way. this is super nerdy. you're gonna bomb okay, great. I just really like this. So basically, if I change my admin color scheme, and this is just probably I've been too close to the site editor for too long, but it works in the site editor. And from like a user experience, it's not black anymore. And from a user experience point of view, this is just like
Eric Karkovack (30:34)
It does. It's not black anymore.
Anne McCarthy (30:40)
Yes. And the what's behind this is an update to the theme package and and using basic it should look exactly the same, but there's a lot of behind the scenes work that powers this. And this is just like the one tip of the iceberg that you can see the change of. And I think this is something that just will it I don't think people will think a lot about it, but I think it'll matter in terms of being like I'm in my site, I'm in the, you know, user profile settings that I wanted and the admin schemes that I wanted. Like that feeling I think is really important. I also
In the media library, this is not a good example to show, but there's basically infinite scroll, and you can change, turn that in your profile settings. but for me, I have lots of images on my site, and that's always been a pain. and it's something that landed for this release as well. finally, the other thing that I think is like a hidden gem, which I don't know if this is gonna be the best site to show it on.
Yeah, so there's a on this day widget, but it's not showing up because there's not gonna be a post on this day. but
Eric Karkovack (31:39)
Okay. I did see I
did see the about that in the roadmap. So basically it'll show you like what you did ten years ago or
Anne McCarthy (31:44)
Yes.
Exactly. Yeah. And I wanna shout out, let me see if I can find actually the PR that implemented this so we can show it. I wanna s shout out Scott who's designed Scott Riley who's designed Coffee to Code is the one that was actually implemented. and the dev who worked on this really did a lot of work to get this across the line. let me see if I can get a good image of what this looks like in the PR itself. But I'm excited about that. Like to me, that is something that I
really love. Like I have a I use a couple different blogging, like private blogging platforms and use Strava and I don't use in like social media anymore. But I love seeing what I did on this day. And I'm actually sitting right next to one line a day. This is a new one. I did it's a five year journal. So you write every single day in it. And I have an old one that has five years. So I just am obsessed with that kind of continuity and like what makes people log into their dashboard and
Eric Karkovack (32:38)
Right.
Anne McCarthy (32:45)
I think that's like a hidden gem that could be missed. it's an another thing that Matt brought up in the seven point product review and I think it's a long overdue great thing to add to kind of draw people into their dashboard and interact with their WordPress site in a bit more of an emotional way. Like it's kind of like, my gosh, I wrote this thing five years ago, like maybe I should write an update. Like I I can see that kind of thinking happen.
Eric Karkovack (33:00)
Yeah.
Yeah, that that reminds me almost of the you know, we have the photo apps on our phones now, like and you know, I will get pick my my daughter is seventeen and so I'll get things what happened seventeen years ago today, like I'm getting that this summer. And little baby pictures, I'm like, my gosh, how old are we now? but you know, it but it is that kind of cool thing that you can look back and it just kind of a
Anne McCarthy (33:24)
Ha.
Eric Karkovack (33:30)
Especially for bloggers I think. It i it it's a it's it's kind of a nice little feature that you can look back on. You said maybe it it spurs an idea.
Anne McCarthy (33:32)
Yeah.
Yeah,
exactly. Like to me, it's just part of like as someone who writes a lot, like that's a feature I'm really looking forward to. like it's fun. Like obviously I'm using the site editor features and the styling, but for me, the everyday usage, that's some of the things I'm thinking about a lot with this release, whether it's the command palette or on the stay widget or new blocks. that's more of what comes to mind. the last thing I'll mention, which I don't think will be overshadowed or overlooked, because I think people are really excited about this, but you can register,
Custom icons and the icon block. So again, this is again going back to like how do the releases build on each other and how is there continuity across? Cause it really does help to look across releases to see where work and momentum is happening. and the icon block landed in 7.0, but it didn't allow for third party registration. So 7.1 and API was created to allow for that. And so now plug-in theme authors can register their own icons for the icon block to use in the block editor, which is
Long overdue, people were definitely screaming from the rooftops about it. But I definitely want to shout that out. I don't think it'll be missed. but I think it's an exciting addition. 'cause I know that that whenever I used to I do websites for free now, but when I was building for more folks, that was a big, often common use case would be to have custom icons, or just icons in general. So
Eric Karkovack (34:39)
Yeah.
Yeah, that was actually when when Gutenberg first was released, that was one of the first things I looked to do is how do I get a font awesome icon into this headline? And so to have that now is like a really big deal. So thank you all for for for putting that one out. how can people get a hold of the beta and and test and and give feedback?
Anne McCarthy (35:03)
Yep.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, the best way to do it is just look on WordPress.org news. I always tell people to go there because there's a way to to stay tuned to everything happening in the WordPress sphere if you follow that. I use Playground a lot to test. There'll be a link in the WordPress 7.1 beta one post. but I just spun up a playground and it's like I could share the link that you all could use that will basically pull the latest trunk, which is why I'm running into bugs, which is why I'll report them. but it's really
Eric Karkovack (35:43)
Yeah.
Anne McCarthy (35:46)
a key time to test. I always tell people this, but like you find something now, it will prevent so much human time wasted. Like if you really extrapolated it at scale, it's like kind of mind numbing. This is why I have trouble sleeping at night, is because I think about this stuff. but it's yeah, it's like it's but that it's so cool. Like I think this is like the really fun time where it's like, my gosh, I found this bug. It would have wasted everyone 10 seconds who was using this and now hopefully it this doesn't even happen.
Eric Karkovack (35:55)
I can imagine.
I would too.
Anne McCarthy (36:15)
And like human potential-wise, people can go hang out with their loved ones more or something, you know? Like I try to think of it that way. So please help test.
Eric Karkovack (36:20)
Yeah.
You're you're changing people's
lives, you're not just changing their workflow.
Anne McCarthy (36:26)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If something takes way longer, that's a that's a I I talk I talk about this all the time with my loved ones who are not in tech. these decisions matter a lot and it's helpful to provide feedback to the folks who are building them. 'cause anything we do that makes it harder or takes take more time, like think about like the media, the client side media work. That's part of why that's so impactful is this better performance. That saves like a lot of time. If something used to take five seconds, that takes two.
when you extrapolate that out across every image, across every person. it's really like working at scale like this and then finding issues at scale, is pretty darn powerful. That's my pitch.
Eric Karkovack (37:04)
Yeah, I
well well I I will say you you're doing a great job with this release. It is really fun to play with this beta. I'm excited about all these features. So so thanks to you and and the entire team who are pitching in and contributing to this. And I appreciate your time being on the show today.
Anne McCarthy (37:21)
Yeah. Thank you
for having me and thanks for all you do to care for the WordPress community. It it takes all of us, so I appreciate it.
Eric Karkovack (37:29)
Thank you. And also thanks to everyone who watched and listened today. Go play with the with the 7.1 betas that are out. by the time this comes out, there might be another a second beta, or it might be right around the corner. but you can also go visit us over at the wpminute.com/slash subscribe, grab our newsletter, become a member, join our Slack for free. Tell us what you love about WordPress 7.1 and what your experiences are so far. And we will see you next time.