On today's episode, we are gonna talk about WordPress news. We're gonna talk about Dustin's updates and life things, and what's been going on there and just where I've been for the last few months, right here on Your Website, Engineer podcast, episode number 520.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Your Website Engineer podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler, and today I am going to continue or pick up the show. Haven't talked about WordPress in a long time here on the podcast, and I'm excited to be back. It is the first day of school here in Dayton, Ohio for my kids.

And so the house is quiet. I've moved down into my new office. I haven't talked about that at all since the last time I've been on, so I just wanna share a few things that are going on here in my world. We'll talk about some WordPress things and things that have changed and things that we probably should discuss because they've been out for a while or things have changed in the WordPress space.

So let's go ahead and just dive right in. The first thing is just some announcements for me. Basically what's happening is I was on a WordPress or I guess an Automattic Developer Apprenticeship program. On the VIP team, the WordPress VIP team. And that was from July till, about July, about a year long cycle.

And it was supposed to be the end of my apprenticeship. And the, the thing is that the, the VIP team is very different than the other engineering teams across Automattic. So I got an extension, probably about three months extension or so, and I am now working on Crowdsignal. You can find out more over at crowdsignal.com, but it's basically a way to create forms, to create polls to create feedback, surveys, things along those lines, and you could do it from WordPress.

And so I'll be talking about more about how Crowdsignal works in the upcoming upcoming shows, just cuz I'm still pretty new. I started there on August 1st. And that was the first day of my, my second apprenticeship, if you will.

So I'm still getting up to speed. I'm still getting my test system set up and whatnot and still learning all about the platform. So I'll be sharing more about that in the future. Basically that's what happened. I just didn't get quite enough experience to be able to go into any branch of engineering and Automattic.

So I made this transition and we're gonna be doing some really cool things about building blocks and upgrading blocks and doing a bunch of block editor type things, which I'm excited to share in the upcoming, weeks in, in months, if you will.

I'm mostly done with my basement project. I'm down here in the basement. Now there's some sound treatment things that need to happen in my office for. For podcast recording and whatnot. So there's things along those lines. My wife has a couple businesses. She's now full-time entrepreneur. So I'm helping her with those things on the side.

And so that's a lot of like website updates and that's a lot of like figuring out how to use this tool and how it integrates with WordPress and how we can use it with WooCommerce and all of those types of things. So I feel like over the last couple months, I've just been kind of coming up with this big list of things that I could talk about, but I just never really had enough time.

My wife has a podcast that I edit each week and just things just keep piling on and on and on. And so I just wanna try to make a commitment that I am gonna be back and continue to tell you and give you some updates about things that are happening in the WordPress land. The first thing today that I wanna share in way of news.

Is all about WordPress, a 6.0, it's called Arturo. And if you haven't updated yet, I highly recommend updating the, the release came out, in late May. So it's been a few months since this came out, but it adds more templates and patterns, style switching, block, locking UI, a whole bunch of things that is now in the new version.

Most likely you're already upgraded. If you're using a WordPress centered host. They've probably already upgraded you for you. And so this is probably completely old news. The other thing that's completely old news is WordPress turned 19. That happened back in late May as well. And so that it's just something to say like 19 years old, it's hardly believe that's been almost 20 years, that WordPress has been out.

Another thing that you might have noticed if you've been looking for themes on the WordPress sites or the WordPress repository is now there is a filter there and it gives there's a filter to be able. Filter through block themes. Block themes are all the new rage. I got a little glimpse of it over on VIP we were starting to build a theme that was over there on, on the, in the new block editor style.

And it is completely different. So I'm sure someday that I'm gonna go through and wanna update all of my sites to block themes, just to make things easier and, and more efficient to use. And so someday we'll probably talk about that on an upcoming podcast.

Let's see, we've got, Accessibility Day is coming up.

That is November 2nd and third. I'm sure there'll be more talk about that as we get closer to that event, it's a free 24 hour virtual event and it was founded in 2020 and will, can be, be continued to. And it was founded in 2020 and will continue this year, led by Joel Dolson and Amber Heinz. And so there's some details in the show notes.

If you're interested, there's gonna be some talks, just to kind of give you an idea of what there is to work on and what the things that need to be, what you can do to improve the accessibility on website.

Next thing on my list today is WordCamp US. And that is coming up. The, the schedule and the speakers are out there. The live stream is all gonna be available. And so all of that information is in the show notes, but I will be heading out to San Diego in September. It's I think three weeks from today, I am actually heading out there.

And so it is going to be a fun time to meet up with more people and see people. This is my first work trip since WordCamp US 2019. I am so pumped that I can finally get to travel again and go to places for work. And so that's coming up. If you are going to word camp us, if you were one of the lucky ones that snagged one of the few hundred tickets that were out there, please let me know.

Let's let's say hello and see each other at WordCamp US. So I am a volunteer organizer, and so I will be there just helping getting the volunteers to do the things, to make sure that the event runs smoothly. That's my only responsibility. And so I should have some extra time to just kind of hang out and, and say, hello, you can email me at Dustin@YourWebsiteEngineer.com, or mention me on Twitter or something like that, and make sure that I know that you're coming and we can set up a time to, to meet up and hang out.

One of the newer pieces of news that I wanna share with you today is about ServerPress; is shutting down. It's the maker of Desktop Server. It's a WordPress, a local development tool. It is shutting down after 12 years in business, the company emailed all of its customers, posted a farewell message on its website after disabling new purchases.

And you'll be able to continue to use ServerPress or Desktop Server. Through the, the life of your subscription. And then it will start to shut down. It was founded back in 2010 by Steve Carum and his leadership helped the company remain independent of large hosting companies. And they've scooped up WordPress development tools like Local by Flywheel and some of those other ones.

And so it looks like they're not planning on continuing, they're just gonna shut down the company. And it is kind of sad news in the WordPress space. It's one of those tools that I've recommended for years and years and years, and I'm sad to see them shut it down.

Another piece of news this week is the new 2023 default theme is now in development. It is something that is going to be kind of mocked up and created off of the TwentyTwentyTwo version. So it's going to be another block level theme. And so there's a, a news about that. If you're interested in reading about the, the development of how these themes come.

The wordpress.org site launches a new homepage. The downloads page gets new designs and it is a fresh new, I guess back to school look, if you will, if the homepage bring, brings more attention to the benefits and experience of using WordPress while also highlighting the community and resources to get started.

So the new downloads page also greets to visitors with a new layout that makes getting started with WordPress, even easier by presenting both the download and hosting options right there on the same page. So if you haven't been over to wordpress.org a little while I recommend a checking it out.

And then lastly, we were talking about, a Gutenberg. The Gutenberg is one of the, the, my favorite things to talk about these days because I am working on block development. And so it's a really neat, new technology. It's really neat to see, like being able to create a checkbox or a, a toggle switch, a you toggle it and then. Different options appear and hide all at the same time.

It's super cool. But Gutenberg designers are exploring, adding configuration options to the block editor onboarding module. So they're considering replacing the current welcome guide with an onboarding screen that prompts users to configure some of the editors, many individual preferences. Instead if you've installed WordPress lately and you want to in you start it.

If you start blah. If you create a brand new site and then go into a, a poster, a page, the WordPress block editor is going to say like, oh, Hey, I've noticed you've never been here before, and it's got a popup module. And it says like, here's how to make your block your own. And here's how to customize this.

And there's buttons to do like, to kind of do a walkthrough how some of these things different work, but then they're thinking about proposing users configure some of these settings when gets started with the editor for the right, for the very first time. So for an example, You go into a page and it's going to say, oh, well, maybe you can customize this paragraph tag or the color of the paragraph or the background of the paragraph or things along those lines.

So it's a kind of a module or kind of a modal thing that pulls over to the side and it gives you some ideas of how you can make customizations to your texts that are on maybe on the hello world page or a page that's already there. And so this is something that I thought was kind of interesting and always pushing the envelope and trying to get a newer.

Things into WordPress and just helping people understand that block editor and how that works getting just getting used to it and getting, understanding how that works. And so that's kind of like the really exciting piece too, for me. Like, just seeing how WordPress uses the block editor were using the block editor on Crowdsignal.

And just trying to, to figure out like some of those best practices from WordPress and using those over on crowd signal. So those are some things and news items and things that I wanted to talk about in today's show.

I do have a plugin for you that, I was able to find oh, probably months ago when I put it here in my, my list of things to do here.

And it is called Admin Bar Fix. And so this will fix the broken layout when too many items are displayed in your admin bar. So you can remove annoying top margin. You can hide some unnecessary items from your ma admin bar. So basically you can remove the 32 pixel margin inserted by WordPress. You can hide the admin bar for.

A specific user role. You can hide admin bar on small screens. You can hide admin bar for you can hide the admin bar items that you do not need. You can select from three different admin bar styles. So ghost sets a lower capacity and small, smaller Heights to expand on hover. You can do a vertical one show.

Admin bars says icons in a vertical panel. You can set icons. So hide admin bar into a single small icon and expand it on a hover. So you can do all of these things and you can have setting so you can set the position or inactivity, uh, opacity, the inactive size animation. Just think it's kind of a neat way to, to highlight or to, to animate where, fix the admin bar, which shows up on every single post or page.

If you have that enabled on, in as an editor. And so I thought this was a cool plugin it's it was developed about a month ago. And I wanted to shout out some highlights there by a QBQ. That is the plugin developer there. So that is what I wanted to share with you today. Kind of a quick update of what's happening, what's going on and what is to come.

Like I said, there's gonna be a lot more about plugin development. We're gonna be talking about like the build process. I'm learning more about how to use composer and package .json to, to pull in the different dependencies to build a file. There's all kinds of things that I'm learning about. Just setting up test environments and getting those ready and like how they can take entire days to do that sometimes.

And just kind of go over some of the things that I'm learning. Some of the things that I helping my wife with and just learning on her side of the business. Some tools that we're using over there and things like that. So I think I've got some content coming. It's a matter of when I squeeze all this into, into my weekly, weekly timeline.

And I'm gonna, I'm certainly gonna try. I know then I really had a pride and joy of doing this podcast every week for years and years and years. Life is tricky sometimes and just gets in the way, and there are so many things to do and so many things to learn and I just could not do it all.

So I am committing to coming back in a more regular fashion here and bringing you more WordPress information, keeping up on the news, highlighting those new plugins, and then sharing something actionable that you can do each week with WordPress. So that's what I wanna share with you this week.

Take care and we'll talk again soon. Bye bye. For more great WordPress information, head on over to your website. engineer.com.