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Our view at Stack - we've been using WP Engine in our business for 12 years so that should say it all! WP Engine offers optimized performance, enterprise-grade security, award-winning support, unique WordPress features, scalability, and developer trust. So what makes wp engine hosting different? If you want the best hosting then WP Engine is the answer 🚀🌟

Welcome to the WordPress Roundup, your monthly digest of the latest news and updates from the WordPress community.

We bring you essential WordPress developments for all experience levels each month, keeping you informed about the latest core updates and upcoming releases.

Whether you’re a seasoned developer, a dedicated site owner, or launching your first WordPress site, these updates promise to enhance your site-building experience by making it more seamless and powerful. You’re a vital part of our community, and we’re here to support you every step of the way.

We’ll also spotlight plugins and themes that elevate your site, highlight important community events and notable contributions from WordPress developers, and share tips to keep you ahead in this ever-evolving ecosystem.

This month’s edition covers WordCamp Minneapolis, Etch for WordPress, Twenty Twenty-Five, WordPress Accessibility Day, and more. Let’s dive in!

WordCamp Minneapolis

WordCamp Minneapolis/St. Paul 2024 was an inspiring experience. The event began with a keynote by E Daniel Swain on “The Importance of Community,” emphasizing how the WordPress community thrives on collaboration and shared knowledge. Sessions like “AI Tools and Techniques: What’s Helpful and What’s Hype-ful?” offered valuable insights into the practical applications of AI in WordPress. At the same time, “Design in an AI World” explored how AI is reshaping design trends and what that means for creativity.

It was also great to connect with Nick Diego, Developer Advocate at WP Engine, who brought even more depth to the discussions. I recently had the pleasure of chatting with Nick on the Press This podcast about the importance of child themes in WordPress development, which added an extra layer of relevance to the event’s conversations.

On LinkedIn, I shared my excitement about the energy and passion among attendees. This WordCamp reminded me of the strength of our community and the endless possibilities when we come together to innovate.

Accessibility was another primary focus, with sessions like “Improving WordPress Accessibility: Tools, Techniques, and Real-World Solutions” and “Inclusive Design: Website Accessibility with WordPress” providing actionable strategies to ensure all users can navigate and engage with websites seamlessly. These sessions reinforced the importance of building more inclusive web experiences, making WordPress sites accessible to everyone.

Overall, WordCamp Minneapolis 2024 was a great reminder of the power of community and collaboration in the WordPress ecosystem. With diverse sessions ranging from AI to accessibility,  I left with fresh ideas and a renewed enthusiasm for WordPress.

Dear WordPress

In his YouTube video “Dear WordPress,” Kevin Geary expresses a hopeful perspective for the future of WordPress, outlining fundamental changes to help the platform thrive. He believes that with the proper focus, WordPress can continue to grow and support its community for years.

Kevin, a respected voice in the WordPress community, continues to challenge the project to improve. He advocates for a renewed focus on quality, user experience, and innovation, encouraging the community to embrace change while staying true to WordPress’s core values.

He outlines five key actions that need to happen:

1. WordPress leadership must recommit to the core of the product, the content management system (CMS).
2. We need a freeze on all new major Gutenberg features to focus on user experience.
3. The Admin UI must be fully unified and modernized.
4. We must recommit to standards and craftsmanship in everything we do.
5. Etch for WordPress.

In his fifth point, Kevin introduces Etch for WordPress, a new initiative to enhance the WordPress experience by focusing on user needs and high-quality standards. Etch for WordPress seeks to elevate the platform by offering tools and resources that align with the core principles of WordPress, ensuring a seamless and efficient workflow for users.

Kevin invites everyone to sign up for live webinars on the Etch for WordPress website to learn more about how this new product can transform their WordPress journey.

By addressing these areas, Kevin envisions a stronger, more user-friendly WordPress that remains at the forefront of the industry, continuing to innovate and inspire its vast community of users and developers.

Twenty Twenty-Five theme

Twenty Twenty-Five, set to debut with WordPress 6.7, is being developed under the guidance of co-lead developers Carolina Nymark and Juan Aldasoro. It will offer a modern yet versatile aesthetic that caters to a wide range of WordPress users, from bloggers to business owners.

With its focus on simplicity and functionality, Twenty Twenty-Five provides a clean, adaptable canvas, perfect for showcasing content stylishly and user-friendly.

Building on the groundwork of past default themes, Twenty Twenty-Five finds a sweet spot between minimalism and versatility, bringing a design that’s both fresh and classic. Whether setting up a personal blog or building a professional portfolio, this theme gives you the tools to bring your vision to life.

One of the standout features of the Twenty Twenty-Five theme is its flexibility. It includes a variety of new block patterns and templates, making it easier than ever to craft unique and engaging layouts. The theme is fully optimized for the latest block editor enhancements, ensuring a seamless and dynamic website-building experience.

To learn more about the Twenty Twenty-Five theme, watch this overview by Matt Medeiros, where he explores the theme’s unique features and discusses how users can maximize its customization options.

Additionally, you can explore the following resources for more information and to get involved in the development:

These resources offer valuable insights into the design process, the current progress of development, and various ways you can actively contribute to creating and refining this exciting new theme for WordPress.

WordPress Accessibility Day

WordPress Accessibility Day is a 24-hour global event on October 9th-10th, featuring live-streamed presentations and workshops. It aims to help developers, designers, and content creators make WordPress sites more accessible for everyone, including people with disabilities.

The event emphasizes the importance of inclusive design, ensuring all users can access and engage with websites, broadening audience reach, and supporting WordPress’s democratizing publishing mission.

WP Engine proudly supports WordPress Accessibility Day as part of our commitment to giving back to the community. Our sponsorship reflects our core values and dedication to promoting a more accessible and inclusive web.

Join the movement to make WordPress more inclusive! Visit the WordPress Accessibility Day website to learn more, register for the event, or volunteer your skills. Your participation can help create a more accessible web for all.

Featured community member

Meet Maestro Stevens, a digital strategist and founder of The Iconic Expressions, who specializes in crafting personalized marketing strategies for brands and businesses. With a WordPress development and SEO background, Maestro brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to every project he undertakes.

Maestro calls himself “The Fresh Prince Of WordPress” and is deeply committed to community-building. He regularly shares his digital marketing insights through workshops, webinars, and his YouTube channel, driven by a belief in the power of education and a passion for mentoring others.

Connect with Maestro for a fresh perspective on digital strategy, WordPress development, and the latest trends in digital marketing.

That’s it for this month. Stay tuned as we await more details on Etch for WordPress, get closer to WordPress Accessibility Day, and make progress with the Twenty Twenty-Five theme.

Hopefully you've now see what makes wp engine hosting different. If WP Engine is of interest and you'd like more information, please do make contact or take a look in more detail here.

 

Credit: Original article published here.

Our view at Stack - we've been using WP Engine in our business for 12 years so that should say it all! WP Engine offers optimized performance, enterprise-grade security, award-winning support, unique WordPress features, scalability, and developer trust. So what makes wp engine hosting different? If you want the best hosting then WP Engine is the answer 🚀🌟

Welcome to the WordPress Roundup, your monthly digest of the latest news and updates from the WordPress community.

We bring you essential WordPress developments for all experience levels each month, keeping you informed about the latest core updates and upcoming releases.

Whether you’re a seasoned developer, a dedicated site owner, or launching your first WordPress site, these updates promise to enhance your site-building experience by making it more seamless and powerful. You’re a vital part of our community, and we’re here to support you every step of the way.

We’ll also spotlight plugins and themes that elevate your site, highlight important community events and notable contributions from WordPress developers, and share tips to keep you ahead in this ever-evolving ecosystem.

This month’s edition examines Ollie Pro, the Create Block Theme plugin, the upcoming WordPress 6.7 release, and more. Let’s dive in!

Ollie Pro

Ollie is the theme that will elevate your site-building experience, and Ollie Pro gives you access to even more. Imagine combining the power of the block editor with the finesse of professionally designed patterns—Ollie Pro does just that and then some. Ollie isn’t just another theme; it’s your new secret weapon for creating stunning, customizable websites with unparalleled ease.

What makes Ollie Pro stand out? It’s all in the details. The enhanced Pattern Browser is a prime example, offering instant access to a wealth of meticulously crafted design patterns. Whether you want a sleek, minimalist look or something more intricate, the Pattern Browser lets you build it faster than you can say “block editor.”

But it’s not just about speed; it’s about giving you the freedom to express your vision without the usual headaches. Ollie Pro’s customization options are robust yet intuitive, offering you the tools to tweak every detail until it’s perfect. This theme will help you simplify the complex, putting professional-grade design within reach of anyone, regardless of their technical expertise.

Ollie co-founder Mike McAlister recently announced Ollie Pro’s impressive milestone of $10,000 in subscriptions within the first month. Community engagement, transparent communication, and prioritizing user feedback were critical to this success. These elements have driven its early success and will shape its growth.

Ollie Pro is a complete design solution. It seamlessly blends aesthetics and usability and is perfect for those who value form and function. With Ollie Pro, you’re crafting an experience, not just building a website.

Create Block Theme

If you’re not ready for a premium block theme like Ollie Pro, consider an alternative: downloading a free theme and using the Create Block Theme plugin to build your custom site. Start with a solid foundation and let the plugin guide you through designing, customizing, and refining every detail.

The Create Block Theme plugin simplifies development, allowing you to create, edit, and manage themes from your WordPress dashboard. You can generate new themes, clone existing ones, and export customizations as standalone themes. It streamlines the process, making it accessible to beginners and experienced developers.

This approach gives you complete control over layouts, color schemes, and typography, making it easy to tailor your site to your vision. Even for beginners, the plugin is user-friendly and accessible, turning the design process into an enjoyable experience.

Opting for this route saves money and enhances your understanding of WordPress themes, giving you the power to maintain and update your site independently. A free starter theme such as Powder Zero paired with the Create Block Theme plugin offers a perfect blend of creativity and practicality, making it a smart and empowering choice.

WordPress 6.7

With WordPress 6.6 released on July 16, users are now looking forward to the next major update. The upcoming WordPress 6.7 release, slated for November 12, 2024, promises many exciting features and improvements. This version enhances user experience and performance with significant updates to the block editor and site health tools.

Expect a streamlined interface, improved navigation, and new block patterns that simplify the design process. Additionally, performance optimizations will ensure faster load times and smoother interactions, which are crucial for maintaining user engagement and satisfaction.

A highlight is the expanded customization options, providing greater design flexibility. WordPress 6.7 will empower users with more control and efficiency, making creating and managing stunning websites more effortless than ever.

Another exciting addition is Twenty Twenty-Five, the new default theme. Built as a block theme, it aims to minimize CSS, configure styles through theme.json, and make it editable via Global Styles. The theme development team is working closely with Gutenberg contributors to enhance design tools in the block editor to achieve this goal.

Other bits

WP Engine’s acquisition of NitroPack, a leading site performance optimization solution, marks a significant step toward a faster web. This strategic move integrates NitroPack’s advanced speed-boosting technologies with our robust platform. 

The partnership aims to deliver unparalleled site performance, enhance user experiences, and drive better business outcomes. We aim to revolutionize website speed and efficiency, paving the way for a more dynamic and responsive web.

Several exciting WordCamps are set to take place around the globe in August. WordCamp Cape Town kicks off the month on August 1-2. Mid-month, WordCamp Rio de Janeiro and WordCamp Minneapolis/St. Paul will take place on August 16-17 and August 16, respectively. Toward the end of the month, WordCamp Cebu and WordCamp Lira are set for August 24, followed by WordCamp Bogotá on August 30-31.

The WordPress Developer Blog has published three new insightful articles. Building a Card Layout with a Hover Reveal Effect offers a step-by-step guide to creating engaging card designs with interactive hover effects. 

15 Ways to Curate the WordPress Editing Experience provides practical tips to enhance and streamline the WordPress editing workflow. Mixing and Matching Styles, Colors, and Typography in WordPress 6.6 explores creative techniques for combining design elements to achieve stunning visual results in your WordPress projects.​

That’s it for this month. Stay tuned as we watch the development of WordPress 6.7 unfold and inch closer toward WordCamp US.

Hopefully you've now see what makes wp engine hosting different. If WP Engine is of interest and you'd like more information, please do make contact or take a look in more detail here.

 

Credit: Original article published here.

Our view at Stack - we've been using WP Engine in our business for 12 years so that should say it all! WP Engine offers optimized performance, enterprise-grade security, award-winning support, unique WordPress features, scalability, and developer trust. So what makes wp engine hosting different? If you want the best hosting then WP Engine is the answer 🚀🌟

AUSTIN, Texas—SEPT. 5, 2024 — WP Engine, a global web enablement company providing premium products and solutions for websites built on WordPress, today announced the hiring of a new Chief Financial Officer, Samuel (“Sam”) Monti. In his new role, Monti is responsible for the leadership and management of all aspects of WP Engine’s financial organization, including corporate development, accounting, tax, treasury, financial reporting and analysis.

With over three decades of experience in public and private equity, Monti excels in driving financial growth and sustainability for technology companies having previously held executive leadership roles with two Fortune 500 companies across global accounting, finance and operations. Most recently Monti was the CEO at Crownpeak where he played a pivotal role in rebuilding the GTM organization and establishing a scalable, sustainable cash profile.

Monti has led several major transactions, including the sale of Mitratech to HgCapital and the merger of Spredfast and Lithium Technologies. Additionally, in his role as CFO of Epicor, a supply chain ERP software company valued at over $7 billion, Monti led a strategic growth transformation that resulted in a 2.5-times increase in the revenue growth rate.

“Sam is a highly accomplished executive whose strategic acumen and proven track record of building sustainable growth is a huge asset to our leadership team as we continue to scale our operations globally,” said Heather Brunner, WP Engine chairwoman and CEO. “We’re thrilled to have Sam join WP Engine in our mission to deliver unparalleled WordPress solutions to our customers.”

“I’m excited to be part of WP Engine’s values-driven team that inspires excellence at all levels and propels the company’s place as a leader in the web enablement space,” Monti said. “I look forward to working with this talented team and enhancing the financial strategies to drive long-term success and give customers confidence online.” 

At WP Engine, Monti is dedicated to ensuring the company’s continued strong financial health and contributing to its strategic growth initiatives. His passion for leadership and financial excellence will drive the company’s robust financial planning and performance.

Monti holds an MBA from The Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University and a BS in accounting from Miami University.

About WP Engine

WP Engine empowers companies and agencies of all sizes to build, power, manage, and optimize their WordPress websites and applications with confidence. Serving 1.5 million customers across 150+ countries, the global technology company provides premium, enterprise-grade solutions, tools, and services, including specialized platforms for WordPress, industry-tailored eCommerce and agency solution suites, and developer-centric tools like Local, Advanced Custom Fields, and more. WP Engine’s innovative technology and industry-leading expertise are why 8% of the web visits a WP Engine-powered site daily. Learn more at wpengine.com.

Hopefully you've now see what makes wp engine hosting different. If WP Engine is of interest and you'd like more information, please do make contact or take a look in more detail here.

 

Credit: Original article published here.

Our view at Stack - we've been using WP Engine in our business for 12 years so that should say it all! WP Engine offers optimized performance, enterprise-grade security, award-winning support, unique WordPress features, scalability, and developer trust. So what makes wp engine hosting different? If you want the best hosting then WP Engine is the answer 🚀🌟

Whether you’re a site owner, a developer, or you lead a digital agency, the demand for faster, more reliable digital experiences has never been higher. In speaking with our customers, we know this isn’t just a constant source of pressure—it’s a critical element of business strategy and success. 

To help meet this demand, we’re proud to introduce Edge Full Page Cache (EFPC) for customers on our Advanced Network. This powerful new caching solution enhances website performance by extending caching to static HTML, ensuring content is delivered quickly and efficiently to users worldwide. 

Building on Cloudflare’s CDN, which already caches files like images and JavaScript for sites on our Advanced Network, EFPC ensures your site’s data is hosted closer to your customers. This reduces the travel time required to serve content and leads to faster load times and a smoother user experience.

How does this fit with other caches?

To maximize your website’s performance, WP Engine uses several layers of caches. WP Engine has a Page cache hosted on our servers, which has all of your static website content (including HTML) ready to go and waiting for your users. 

In addition, WP Engine has an Object Cache, that caches all of the most common database queries to help speed up your website’s static and dynamic content. We also have other caching on our servers to optimize PHP output.

When combined with EFPC, these caches work together to serve content from the nearest possible location to the end user—starting with the CDN, then Page Cache, followed by Object Cache, and only as a last resort will the website serve un-cached content dynamically.

Benefits of Edge Full Page Cache

The key metrics that EFPC improves are Time to First Byte (TTFB) and server response time. Websites typically see improvements of 60–90% in their TTFB and server response time improvements of 50–90%. 

While your mileage may vary, most websites will see improvements to their Google Lighthouse Desktop Performance scores of up to 10 points or more. Google Lighthouse Mobile Performance scores typically increase by up to five points.

Unfortunately, EFPC isn’t a magic wand, so better-optimized websites tend to see greater performance gains than websites using JavaScript and/or large image files. Optimizing images and reviewing and minimizing JavaScript code can further boost performance scores.

How to enable Edge Full Page Cache

Enabling EFPC is simple for websites on WP Engine’s Advanced Network.

1. Log into WP Engine’s User Portal. 
2. For websites with custom domains on Advanced Network, you’ll see a new EFPC toggle on the Cache page. 
3. Simply toggle the feature on and wait a few minutes for EFPC to be fully enabled on your website.

Remember to clear your caches when updating content to see changes immediately.

To turn EFPC off, simply toggle it off in the same place and clear your caches.

Is Edge Full Page Cache right for my website?

WP Engine is still testing EFPC with popular features and adjusting our settings to maximize performance for users.

For early adopters, you’ll need to clear your caches or wait for your cache expiration to see content changes on your website. We have an “auto cache clear” feature on our product roadmap that will soon remove this requirement.

We currently recommend EFPC for most static and brochure websites as well as WooCommerce sites. EFPC is also compatible with Smart Search, WPGraphQL, and Page Speed Boost. However, EFPC duplicates some Page Speed Boost functionality, and we recommend using Page Speed Boost on its own if you have that add-on.

EFPC is not yet compatible with GeoTarget when used with WooCommerce.

We’re doing additional compatibility testing with GeoTarget and Instant Store Search. 

You can easily test your website with EFPC by enabling the feature and smoke testing your website. If you notice any compatibility issues, simply disable EFPC and clear cache.

Take the hassle out of caching

With the new caching features available on WP Engine’s platform you’ll be able to speed up your development workflow, rest easy, and “test easy,” with assurances that your caching is optimized for your site.

Click here to learn more about WP Engine’s caching features or speak to a specialist now for answers to your questions!

Hopefully you've now see what makes wp engine hosting different. If WP Engine is of interest and you'd like more information, please do make contact or take a look in more detail here.

 

Credit: Original article published here.

Our view at Stack - we've been using WP Engine in our business for 12 years so that should say it all! WP Engine offers optimized performance, enterprise-grade security, award-winning support, unique WordPress features, scalability, and developer trust. So what makes wp engine hosting different? If you want the best hosting then WP Engine is the answer 🚀🌟

At WP Engine, we’re committed to ensuring your websites are always secure and easy to access. To this end, we use Let’s Encrypt SSL Certificates to safeguard the communication between your site and its visitors, providing peace of mind that your digital presence is well-protected. 

Let’s Encrypt remains a leader in SSL protection, providing SSL certificates to more than 260 million websites worldwide. However, we wanted you to be aware of significant changes coming to its chain of trust hierarchy, which could impact older devices and operating systems

The impacts of these changes are expected to be minimal, but understanding how they might affect your site is important for maintaining uninterrupted service and trust with your site users. 

Read on for a quick breakdown of what you need to know. 

What’s a chain of trust?

A chain of trust is a fundamental concept in cybersecurity that ensures each component in a system—whether it’s hardware or software—can be trusted. 

In relation to SSL/TLS certificates, the chain of trust starts with a trusted root certificate authority (CA) at the top and extends through intermediate certificates down to the SSL certificate installed on your site. 

Each certificate in the chain is verified by the one above it, creating a secure link back to the trusted root. This process ensures the SSL certificate used by your site is authentic and can be trusted by users’ browsers and devices.

In some cases, particularly when a new CA is introduced, its root certificate might not yet be widely trusted by older devices and systems. To address this, a cross-signing method can be used, where an established CA vouches for the new CA by signing its certificate.

This creates an additional link in the chain of trust, allowing older devices to recognize and trust the new CA’s certificates. Cross-signing was particularly useful in the years following Let’s Encrypt’s launch, as it ensured older Android devices could trust its certificates, preventing disruption for those users.

Over time, this approach helped increase the percentage of Android devices capable of natively trusting Let’s Encrypt’s certificates from around 60% to over 93%, significantly reducing the need for cross-signing as newer devices became compliant.

What’s changing with Let’s Encrypt’s chain of trust? 

In June 2024, Let’s Encrypt announced it was discontinuing access to its cross-signed chain, in preparation for the expiration of its cross-signed certificate, on September 30, 2024. 

Both have long extended Let’s Encrypt’s chain of trust to older devices and operating systems that rely on legacy methods to validate SSL certificates. However, the need for cross-signing has diminished in recent years, especially as the percentage of compliant Android devices (capable of natively trusting Let’s Encrypt’s ISRG Root X1 certificate) has risen to over 93%.

The remaining 7% represent unpatched, often unsafe Android devices, and Let’s Encrypt’s decision to shorten the chain of trust is indeed aimed at enhancing privacy and security. By phasing out the cross-signed chain, Let’s Encrypt aims to streamline the trust process, reducing potential vulnerabilities associated with maintaining support for outdated systems.

While this update will improve efficiency and security for most users, it could result in some older, unpatched devices no longer recognizing Let’s Encrypt certificates, leading to potential access issues. 

For the vast majority of users on modern devices, the impact will be negligible. However, it’s important to assess whether your audience includes users on older devices and, if so, to consider potential mitigation strategies.

This is because these older systems may no longer recognize the certificates issued by Let’s Encrypt without the cross-signed chain, leading to potential security warnings or blocked access. 

Again, the effects of this change will be negligible for most websites. However, it’s important to assess whether your audience includes users who may be on older devices and, if so, what potential mitigation strategies might be.

How exactly will it impact my users? 

Every browser and operating system relies on a certificate trust store to verify the authenticity of SSL/TLS certificates presented by websites. This trust store contains a list of trusted certificate authorities (CAs), including Let’s Encrypt, that browsers and other devices use to validate a website’s security. 

When a CA like Let’s Encrypt updates its trust model, devices with outdated or unsupported operating systems may lose their ability to recognize and trust certificates issued by that CA, leading to potential security warnings or blocked access.

For example, Android devices running versions below 7.1.1 are particularly at risk (the current version of Android is 14, and Android 7 reached end-of-security-support in October 2019). 

Let’s Encrypt estimates that around 6% of Android devices will be affected by this change, which could result in users encountering security warnings, being unable to establish a secure connection, or even being blocked from accessing your site. 

The impact on your users will largely depend on the composition of your audience. That said, it’s important to monitor your website access logs to identify the devices your site visitors are using. Specifically, you should look for Android user-agents running version 7 or earlier, such as: ‘Linux; Android 7.0.’”

How can I prepare for potential impacts? 

Being proactive in addressing these issues can help ensure all site users, regardless of their devices, continue to have a secure and seamless experience on your site. 

Additionally, you may want to communicate with your users, particularly if you know a portion of your audience uses older devices, to inform them of the upcoming changes and even suggest they update their operating systems or browsers to avoid potential access issues.

For customers concerned about a wider impact, working with a third-party CA, such as SSL.com may be of interest. WP Engine offers the option to import a third-party SSL certificate, however, there are some additional requirements and stipulations to consider. 

More importantly, many third-party CAs may have also curtailed support for older devices, so customers should verify the following if they choose to pursue this route:

• The CA currently supports older devices and plans to maintain this support 
• The CA is compatible with WP Engine 

You can find more information about third-party CA’s here, as well as additional workarounds for extending Android Device compatibility here.  

Providing you with confidence online

As technology advances, so do the challenges and opportunities that come with securing your digital presence. That’s why we offer a range of resources and tools designed to help you stay ahead of the curve.

From securing your site with SSL certificates to providing advanced security and performance solutions, we’re dedicated to providing you with confidence online. Visit wpengine.com or speak with a representative now to find out more.

Hopefully you've now see what makes wp engine hosting different. If WP Engine is of interest and you'd like more information, please do make contact or take a look in more detail here.

 

Credit: Original article published here.

Our view at Stack - we've been using WP Engine in our business for 12 years so that should say it all! WP Engine offers optimized performance, enterprise-grade security, award-winning support, unique WordPress features, scalability, and developer trust. So what makes wp engine hosting different? If you want the best hosting then WP Engine is the answer 🚀🌟

Welcome to Press This, a podcast that delivers valuable insights and actionable tips for navigating the ever-evolving world of WordPress. 

In this episode, host Brian Gardner and Automattic Product Lead Rich Tabor, unpack WordPress’s design potential, highlighting its evolving features and the power it offers website builders.

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Brian Gardner: Hey everybody, welcome back to the Press This podcast. I’m your host, Brian Gardner, and I am here delightfully today with one of my good friends in WordPress, design enthusiast and fellow admirer of the WordPress block and site editor, Rich Tabor. Rich, thanks for being on the show.

Rich Tabor: Hey Brian, thanks for having me today. I’m happy to start talking about WordPress.

Brian Gardner: I’m going to ask you a question. We’re going to have a little fun here with the show. I’m going to ask you a question. It will be one through 10 questions, and then we will return to that question after we do a little intro on you. As it stands, so WordPress 6.6, not including Gutenberg and all of that, on a scale of one to 10, how do you rate WordPress as a design tool?

Rich Tabor: That’s tricky; I’m supposed to answer with an integer value, right?

Brian Gardner: Yeah, just on a scale of 1 to 10. Ten is like Figma, the creme de la creme, and one is worthless.

Rich Tabor: Like a six or a seven.

Brian Gardner: Let me follow that up quickly and say five years ago, right? Right around WordPress 5.0 or whatever. What would you have given it then?

Rich Tabor: It was a very different tool. The design was mainly in the hands of whoever built the site and was about it. So I would still say, maybe, if we’re talking about the empowerment of the site user, like whoever’s building the site and using it, then it was much smaller, maybe like a two or three, but if it’s, the capabilities of WordPress are still on par where they were five or six years ago, I would say.

Brian Gardner: Okay, that’s fair. And we’ll come back to that here in a second. And so, Rich, you are in charge of or as part of the leadership team that works on products at Automattic, which focuses on the WordPress project. Please give us a little synopsis of who you are, how you came to WordPress, and what you do currently at Automattic. From there, we’ll weave ourselves into the design conversation.

Rich Tabor: Yeah, sure. I started doing web work back in the days of front page and whatnot, just exploring and seeing what was there—MySpace profiles, et cetera. I eventually got into WordPress, mainly around the theming front. I was curious about the design and website ideas and tried to define the intersection of the two that best suited my desire. I learned a little bit from an agency, doing some marketing work and building and designing; I’m primarily designing, at that point, a bunch of websites and landing pages and whatnot. From there, I built and sold my own themes for several years. And when Gutenberg was turning the first corner, it was time to jump on block development. So, I dove into React and JavaScript, trying to find my footing there and figure out how I could best impact the future of WordPress.

And you know, we’re here today, in this future where it is block-based, and there is an avenue of WordPress that is very different from what it used to look like five years ago, even when Gutenberg first came in. But yeah, so I build products, and I enjoy it. It’s just really what I do.

Brian Gardner: Many folks here are very familiar with Mike McAllister. He’s got a product called Oli. I grew people like you and him into the same category. Correct me if I’m wrong. We are usually more designers than we are developers. Capable of building for sure. But the three of us have, and you guys are leagues ahead of me regarding design capabilities. I love everything you guys do.Is that an accurate statement that you’re more of a designer than you are a developer?

Rich Tabor: You know, I think of my blog. Say, like, you know, the fancy multi-disciplinary, you know, the intersection of product design and engineering. I am at the middle point of both, with the product being the center, the experience. So, if you count the experience as design, then I lean that way. But if you count experience as engineering, then I mean that way. But for me, it’s an intersection where all those three pieces are interconnected. You can have more than one or two even. Otherwise, you’ll be in a rough spot.

Brian Gardner: Yeah, so there’s that sort of the adage or running joke in conversation in the tech space for people like us in a room full of developers. I am a designer, and I am a developer in a room full of designers. And that’s generally true for me, for you as well. Okay, so that’s right. And people like us are dangerous, both good and bad.

Rich Tabor: Yeah, yeah, that couldn’t be more accurate.

Brian Gardner: I like the ability to have both skills, but it also means that the sea is more wide open—like the capabilities and the creative brain can go in different directions. My development abilities could be improved when I want to design and vice versa. I can develop this quickly, but I can also make it look good, which sometimes makes shutting the computer at the end of the day or even at the end of the workday more challenging. You know what I’m saying here because you and I are slacking sometimes at 11 or midnight.

Rich Tabor: Yeah, you know, like the part I try to lean on, which I’ve been doing since I was at GoDaddy for a couple of years, and then now I’m at Automattic. Something I’ve been pursuing is scale. How do you scale across design and engineering and help move progress across teams? Something I’m trying not to get too caught up on is the small details that I need to record and share, but how do I get more of that out of team members and inspire them in that sense? So that’s been something I’ve been challenging myself with personally.

Brian Gardner: It’s a pretty good segue here because I asked you to come on the show to talk about WordPress as a design tool—not necessarily a design replacement for other programs, but just given where it’s at and all of that. I feel like where WordPress is now is what you described, sort of the intersection of design and development, way more than it ever used to be in enabling the user to do things.

Previously, WordPress was more HTML, PHP, and CSS-based, and themes were built that way. Custom sites were built that way. And you had more of a user or a customer and then a developer or builder, but now, and this is where WordPress is and is continuing to go, you have a tool that resembles more of the Wix and Squarespace and Webflow and Framer, that kind of a thing, where the software is enabling the user to do design things. Over the last several versions, we’ve seen those capabilities improve and strengthen. Where do you feel right now we are along that journey? Do you feel good about it? Do you feel great about it? Is it okay, but there is still much room for improvement? Then, we’ll break down and get a little more granular and talk about what the actual design capabilities of WordPress are like right now.

Rich Tabor: those who work with me daily probably know I’m one of WordPress’s biggest critics. I’m close to the product; I see and work on it daily. And one of the things I keep pressing on is leaning in on simplicity and intuitiveness. We have a lot of controls; we have a lot of quote-unquote features that we’ve added over the last five years. Some of these propel WordPress ahead, and some are just catching up.

But in all that, the one thing that I want to push from a product perspective is to create that sense of intuitiveness, to create those moments where you use WordPress, you try to do something, you drop in a block, and then you’re like, yeah, that helped me do something that years ago would have been difficult to do, or very challenging. So, leaning in on intuitiveness is where the most significant opportunity is design-wise. We have a lot of controls and stuff. Over time, they’re stacked on each other, and now I see this refinement phase coming up.

Brian Gardner: What is WordPress’s biggest empowerment today and its most significant limitation? It’s a big open-ended question, but let’s get into the nuts and bolts of it all.

Rich Tabor: I think the whole concept of a block theme and having everything editable at the block level so you can go into your header, change your logo to the right or the center, edit your footer, move things around, change your entire templates all from a UI. It’s one of the biggest advantages, and with that comes global styles, such as skinning a theme and having those same JSON styles applied to another website or even another theme and shared between the two. Those are the most significant wins.

The most challenging part is that you can select all the blocks in your header and move them around, or you can accidentally delete your content or your footer. There’s this experience layer on top of the tools that we need to refine and push further a little bit more to where it is still as empowering as the original vision of, you know, being able to edit your entire site with blocks, but then also not restrictions, but almost guardrails to keep you in the right lane. Unless you want to go out and do your own thing, then sure, like WordPress is extendable, and it is, you can delete your entire template and start fresh. And that’s cool. But that initial experience and that intuitiveness are things that we need to push in on.

Brian Gardner: I have researched and played with the Create Block Theme plugin. This plugin allows you to install a theme, make changes, and export it. It does several more things than that, and this is where I’m going here, including the ability to start with a blank canvas. And so, when you use that option in the Create Block Theme plugin. It’s mind-blowing because what it does is it just sets up a basic WordPress theme with an index file with no styles. Then it’s just a start-from-scratch thing, which, for, we’ll say that the hobbyist user, somebody trying to get an online presence site up, might be a little overwhelming. But for those like me, I want a blank canvas to design my theme or website. WordPress and the Create Block Theme plugin also allow us to do that. Do you see any future wear capabilities? You can export a theme now, but the full capabilities of that plugin will end up in WordPress Core.

Rich Tabor: There will likely be some overlap; eventually, some of that functionality will move into Core. There is potentially a toolkit for the advanced creators and folks building these themes. That doesn’t suit Core. One of the great things about WordPress is that it can morph into what you need it to be. As you said, Create Block Theme is an exciting project, and Automattic has some of the best theme designers, apart from you, Mike, and a few others. But they’ve been leveraging it, helping to build it, and pushing forward the changes that need to happen. Automattic is pushing a theme or two a week and leaning forward. But yeah, there’s something to bringing some of that to Core.

Brian Gardner: One of the things I love about WordPress now, and it took us some time to get there, because several versions ago, we had the basics in place, but the refinement and the parity of what settings and style controls are in theme.json and marrying them up with an actual user interface inside of the site editor via global styles. In other words, if theme .json could register a color palette, it would be nice for the user in the dashboard to be able to edit those recent changes. One that’s coming to WordPress 6.7 would be the font size.

Theme.json has had that capability for quite some time, where you can register the font sizes for the theme, but you need to get into the code and change that to do that inside the dashboard. These things I’ve discussed in the last couple of episodes excite me from a design perspective. Not myself, because I’m capable, as we discussed earlier, of going into the code and writing it all out through theme.json. However, it allows us to teach people how to design a site using WordPress as a leader. These controls and settings are now available as user interface pieces, which is extremely helpful. And there’s a lot of ongoing work relative to refinement, user interface, and user experience. Do you want to? You’ve been part of that project, which is to go through and click all the buttons and see where there might be opportunities to make even minimal improvements, but ones nonetheless make WordPress better.

Rich Tabor: The font size preset control is exciting. There’s something to be said for Global Styles to be able to configure every piece of a theme. We could be at 80 or 90% of what’s possible in the JSON file. And when I look at Global Styles, all I see is the UI for theme.json. And I think if we make that UI just a little bit simpler and a little bit more intuitive, it’ll be easier for people to use and also potentially export their themes or share themes across sites or be able to make changes on sites instead of having to dive into the code and push changes and try to validate the code on the server versus the code that’s local. There are many workflow things we need to iron out regarding all this. Some of that work is the phase three collaboration and workflow effort. But as a design tool, it’s evolved quite a bit. And there are always things that we can improve. But at the same time, we’re theme-wise, theme creation-wise, and at a pretty good spot.

Brian Gardner: WordPress is not out to feature parity Figma. And I know that Figma has become the de facto design tool, replacing Adobe Photoshop, Sketch, and everything else. And many people have, in various conversations, said, I wish WordPress were more like Figma, which is ridiculous when you think about it because they’re two different things. However, one thing I have appreciated, and this is a little bit less of a design piece, is the ability to rename groups and blocks inside of ListView, which, as you create layers and components in Figma, is a little more like peri there. But the user interface we’re talking about excites me, and I can make the case that, unless it was a sophisticated project, there’s almost no need to use Figma at a light level. Do you agree?

Rich Tabor: The best part of Figma is that there are two significant parts. One is speed. If you’re familiar with this thing, you can use it fast, iterate, and develop many quick ideas. You ideate a lot. So it’s great for that. It’s also great for prototyping, building applications, and trying to flesh out some ideas. It’s a beautiful tool on both of those fronts. And, as a design tool, it’s, like you said, the de facto tool right now.

But when I think about WordPress’s future, I think you can leverage WordPress as a design tool without necessarily having to use Figma. Some folks want to come up with 20 or 30 different ideas fast and fill out what works well, and that’s fine. But it’d be awesome if WordPress was that intuitive to use as a professional tool. Figma is a professional tool. Someone brand new to Figma would be just as I’m familiar with Figma as someone brand new to WordPress. As you do, we have a lot of learning that goes on to develop these tools and get used to how they work. But Figma is still a much easier-to-use tool than WordPress. And it’s a very different animal regarding publishing and whatnot. There’s validity in having a WordPress first design process.

Brian Gardner: I use Figma now more for things that I used to use like Adobe Photoshop for and less for like website design and more like, you know, ideating on like logos and branding and stuff like that, in which case it’s a beautiful tool, more accessible than Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator. Indeed, there is nothing I expect WordPress ever to come close to being able to emulate. But you know, you and I have been friends for a long time. As I know you are, I’m an advocate because I know you’re responsible for some of the wireframe patterns on WordPress.com.

I’m a proponent of wireframe patterns. I have a theme called Frost and a theme called Powder, which embraced that, and in my mind, it was like I had a matching Figma file. Still, it’s gotten to a point where I’m like, I don’t know that I would recommend going to Figma to do the work and then having to go back to WordPress to do the same job, some of which is even easier in WordPress and is figma so there’s just a duplication of effort there. I know there’s been, but I would like to see if you’re familiar with any work here. Still, at one point, there was a hope that you could design in Figma, click a magic button, and have it turn into a theme using tokens. Do you have any insights into that?

Rich Tabor: Yeah, I’m sure some attractive solutions exist. I’ve seen a few that do that. It takes variables and puts them into JSON format, the theme.json format. I’m sure that that’s viable for workflows, for agency workflows, for folks who potentially are designing, you know, like a style guide first, you if you’re trying to figure out the brand colors and the text colors and trying to figure out like what’s the fonts and how are these going to work. And then, Figma is an excellent place for that. We do have a style book in the WordPress experience. It needs more rethinking, but it is like a pleasant experience to see all your headings, paragraphs, buttons, and whatnot and configure from there. So, I do see some validity in the ideation part.

But yeah, I think it’s not; I don’t think it’s a future workflow to be designing these sections of a site, these patterns as individual components in Figma, but more or less having the vibe, having the style, and in WordPress, you’re creating more of these patterns. You’re making what you need now instead of going through a design process flow and approval and then coming back into WordPress and creating it.

Brian Gardner: Let’s talk about the current state of WordPress as a design tool in the sense of, and we can work our way towards your 720 design configuration theme that you’re the brainchild of. And more about that is about the capabilities of WordPress, you know, with typography presets and color presets. What are we calling them these days?

Rich Tabor: Well, they’re all style variations. They’re either theme-style variations or block-style variations. The color ones are color variations or typographies, like typography variations. Just keep the terminology as lean as possible. Yeah.

Brian Gardner: Yep, a problem we’ve had with WordPress for some time is slinging words around and saying, oops, that’s not the best word. So we’ll call it something else. Let’s break down your seven and a hundred, called the Assembler theme. It’s available. I believe on .com. Tell me about what it showcases in WordPress’s current feature set.

Rich Tabor: As simple as an exciting project I worked on, the idea is to have one theme with a lot of variability. You can compose 720 or so unique theme styles. That combines colors and typography settings individually to create those different unique styles. And so I wrote a post, it’s rich .blog slash 720 -themes. And I’m just showcasing that this is possible with minimal effort, like with 45 JSON files for colors and 15 or so for typography. And then, in that combination, the idea that you can maintain something that’s composable in such a simple manner, like the JSON file, is exciting, especially for processes and applications where scalability is essential. For a host trying to build out WordPress theme styles and themes for users to pick from, or even from theme shops, or even for agencies who are like, well, I can maintain all the vibes we use across different agency work. We can put it into this theme and have one file that controls everything.

When you take this idea of this JSON style format, it’s much easier to see a future where you can potentially manipulate it with AI and create more of these from a prompt instead of having to style it yourself. For example, if you said you wanted your website yellow, could it find the elements that need to be yellow and change them to yellow? And if you wish to make it less yellow, it finds different elements to make it less yellow. That’s all feasible with the system that we built today.

Brian Gardner: AI is probably a separate conversation and a separate episode. Being a designer or at least a person with a design mindset, I still struggle in the same way copywriters do when you use, you know, things like chatGPTto generate copy. They’re like that, but it’s not the real thing. It’s not the human thought, you know, emotionally driven choice. In this case, most people don’t care because it’s all about speed, at least for them. But for people like me, people who are pure creatives, I’m like, I don’t love the idea of a prompt that says, create me a church website using black and orange as colors with a serif font and just having AI do its thing. Cause I don’t know, not nine times out of 10, but I don’t know that I would necessarily trust it. Many people don’t care or aren’t as particular as I am about that.

Rich Tabor: The prompt example you just said is close to the future. And it’s not like, and maybe the first stage of like a well-designed system is, you know, inputs that are more like a similar or some other theme like Frost where you do have like your definitions of color and it evolves from there rather than, you know, picking random colors. It’s all about the inputs.

Brian Gardner: I’m going off-topic for a moment. Do you have any thoughts on Tailwind CSS and the whole movement, just in terms of color theory?

Rich Tabor: I think it’s okay. I’ve used Tailwind on several projects over time. If you’re very familiar with Tailwind and theme .json, you can draw some similarities in the sense of having JavaScript or JSON-driven style declarations. There’s a lot of parity there, so I think it’s okay. The most significant difference is we have a little bit more prescriptive block styling. So it’s per block versus coming up with something a bit wider. But if you use presets, even exclusively, I would say most sites that you’re doing for production, like if you’re doing something for a client or whatnot, I would lean heavily on these presets, which are almost the same as setting them up in Tailwind, in my opinion.

Brian Gardner: I love one of the parts of my job is I assume it’s yours as well as when you talk to people who are like at the agency level, small business, more than just one person or even, you know, a sophisticated design development shop. That’s one or two people who can easily use the Create Block Theme plugin or just literally locally, just like cloning a theme and then making it your own. I talk to people a lot about this because I have Frost and Powder, and we’ve talked about the conversations around parent-child themes and whether they’re necessary or not.

I like talking to agencies and encouraging them to create their theme or framework per se where they know WebDevStudios is a good example. They forked one of my themes and made it their base theme for something like WDS or something like that. This is the power of where WordPress is now with templates and patterns, JSON files, and these variations, where you can have an internal library like the agency where you could pick and choose which things you want to plug into a particular site for a client. One thing that excites me most about WordPress outside of the hobbyist controls is the ability on the other side of it to understand how WordPress is built, how block themes are built, and how easy it is. I use the phrase copy and pasteability, but I can grab this file and stick it in this theme. Right? How do you feel about that?

Rich Tabor: No, certainly on the way that WordPress has been moving, you know, the idea that a theme is entirely composed of parts, you know, its templates, its template parts, its patterns, its colors, its fonts now, you know, with this typography styles. But then, like the next big thing, and you know, we’re kind of at this point with most parts of the theme, but the idea is that you can reuse these parts across themes. For example, a section or pattern style applied to one theme can now be used on another. Even parts of patterns, know, that’s why we have these pattern libraries like at wordpress.com. There’s a pattern library. WordPress.org has many patterns, and I know Frost and Ollie and everyone’s building patterns now. And the idea that they are limited to one theme is kind of, in my opinion.

A bit shorter-sighted, like the long term, the long tail is that I could drop a pattern on any WordPress site, the theme inherits the styles, and everything looks fine. I can have a newsletter pattern from you, a gallery pattern from me, and a cult action from Mike’s Oli theme, and I can put them all together because that’s how I want to compose my page. And we’re almost to that point. We need to open up templates a bit more so that when you see a beautiful blog template, you can grab it and use it on your blog instead, making it more accessible. Today, you have to copy and paste and build out something you know in a sense that isn’t quite as ideal.

Brian Gardner: Yeah, I was trying to remember how far back it goes. It’s the same software, but it’s so different. Since 2006, there’s still all the code there. And I joke that WordPress is backward and compatible with a fault. There are probably moments where I’m like, at 5.0, when Gutenberg came out, it should have been forked of itself and called WordPress Pro. That’s a different conversation, which would have introduced another round of confusion.

But in the end, I love where it’s at. I love where it’s going. I mean, you and I have been around WordPress for 40 years, probably. We’ve seen it run its whole gambit of things. So, if you have any last parting words about WordPress design or anything that you think might be coming or that might get people excited, let us have it.

Rich Tabor: Yeah, you on the design front, I’ve been curious about how we can still have the flexibility and the design controls that we have today but then also better support either folks that are newer to WordPress or clientele that don’t necessarily need the full, you know, foundational elements of the editing experience. So, I’m leaning in on some ideas there. Think that there are some concepts around section styles and being able to theme whole parts of your site all at once. So it is exciting to me. I suggest that everyone try a block theme. I recently released a new theme called Kanso, and its simple theme is just a blog, just like my blog at rich.blog. Just try a theme like that, like find out how to change the colors, how to change the typography, and then dig into it if you’re curious like I look into the JSON and see how this thing is configured because it is eye-opening when you see how composable these pieces are and how they come together to create a beautiful end product. Still, then you can also take that end product and morph it into whatever you need. And I think that that’s like the beauty of where WordPress has been headed and where we’re seeing the apex of where we’re seeing that vision through.

Brian Gardner: This morning, I downloaded themes from dot org. Many of us were from Automattic this morning to see how people are doing things. That’s probably one of WordPress’s biggest and sometimes most frustrating features. It can be built with and used in several different ways, and they’re perfect. It’s a weird statement, but it’s almost like there’s no wrong way to WordPress. There are many ways to use WordPress. You and I’ve had several conversations around. Should we do it this way or that way? The Scarecrow and the Wizard of Oz people go both ways, right? It can work both ways depending on how you need to use it, even from a design tool perspective. I love

You can use the controls, build with theme.json, and do all sorts of things with it. And the future is bright. At one point, Matt said several years ago, the road ahead of WordPress is a lot longer than the road behind it. And that’s a pretty bold statement, but as far as I know, you and I are still here for it, right?

Rich Tabor: That’s right.

Brian Gardner: All right, everybody. Rich Tabor, who works on products at Automattic, a thought leader in the space, a brilliant designer, and somebody I am thankful for, is part of the project because it allows it to move forward in a way I hope it goes. And so again, thank you for being on the show. Rich, give us a couple of places where people can find you.

Rich Tabor: Yeah, I blog at rich.blog, which feels like the coolest domain. I tweet, or whatever we’re calling it, post on X slash Twitter at richard_tabor.

Brian Gardner: That’s a wrap for today. We’ll cut it short, but we provided much information here, so continue listening to the Press This podcast. We go into the community, both from a product perspective from a business building perspective, and we talk about the ever-evolving world and landscape of WordPress, where it’s been, where it’s going, and how people like you can use it to make money, to build websites, and everything in between. Thanks again for listening, and we’ll talk to you soon.

Hopefully you've now see what makes wp engine hosting different. If WP Engine is of interest and you'd like more information, please do make contact or take a look in more detail here.

 

Credit: Original article published here.

Our view at Stack - we've been using WP Engine in our business for 12 years so that should say it all! WP Engine offers optimized performance, enterprise-grade security, award-winning support, unique WordPress features, scalability, and developer trust. So what makes wp engine hosting different? If you want the best hosting then WP Engine is the answer 🚀🌟

This year’s Crafted With Code showcase has already highlighted five projects recognized by the Webby Awards and WP Engine, each featuring beautifully designed, highly accessible digital experiences. 

Now, Crafted With Code is shining a light on some of the most performant projects submitted to the Webbys this year.

The Webby Awards exist to honor excellence online, and for the past five years, WP Engine has partnered with the organization to curate Crafted with Code: a digital showcase that provides a deep dive into the stories and strategies behind WordPress-powered, Webby-recognized websites.

Through video interviews with the teams responsible for these projects, Crafted With Code provides a backstory to explain the whos, hows, and whys that go into building top-tier websites using WordPress.

“Performance is the top priority for our customers when building a website, and it’s the cornerstone of what we do at WP Engine,” said WP Engine Director of Brand Regina Yuan. 

“We take immense pride in delivering that level of excellence and are excited to partner with the Webby Awards to highlight WordPress sites that exemplify this commitment to performance.”

Second edition: Digital performance

Crafted With Code has already released the first batch of recognized projects for 2024, each being lauded for excellent use of design principles and accessible navigation.

Now, we have entered the second phase of the Crafted With Code showcase, which features projects that represent the theme of performance. Each of these digital experiences is designed to deliver lightning-fast load times, seamless user experiences, and optimized content delivery, all powered by WordPress.

Later in the year, the showcase will release its final collection, which will explore the theme of innovation by highlighting sites using cutting-edge WordPress technology to tell their stories.

This year’s high-performing projects

To give you a taste of what’s in store, here are a few of the projects highlighted by this year’s Crafted with Code showcase that were built on WP Engine’s world-class WordPress hosting platform.

These sites do more than perform well—they serve as prime examples of how WordPress can be leveraged to create digital experiences that are fast, responsive, and robust enough to meet the demands of today’s internet users.

Check out the full showcase to see all the projects we’ve highlighted so far this year, or learn about a few of the WP Engine-hosted sites from the showcase below!

[embedded content]

Clooney Foundation for Justice by Redback Solutions

The Clooney Foundation for Justice (CFJ) is a nonprofit organization founded by George and Amal Clooney that works toward global justice by providing free legal support to victims of abuses of power.

In order to tell a story that captures the breadth of the injustices CFJ works to dismantle, they tapped the experts at Redback Solutions to help them build a fast, performant website where they can share updates on key initiatives, collect donations, and showcase high-quality images and videos to tell the stories of the individuals they serve. 

With solid Core Web Vitals scores and lightning-fast page speeds, the site was nominated for a Webby Award for Features & Design in the Best Visual Design – Function category.

[embedded content]

LUMA Vision by WONDR

LUMA Vision is a medical company that’s creating the future of interventional cardiac imaging. The company’s goal is to improve patient health outcomes but equipping cardiologists with the tools they need to gain a fuller, evidence-based understanding of their patient’s hearts.

To build a site that captures the essence of a company on the cutting edge of medical innovation, LUMA Vision sought out WordPress experts at WONDR. The teams collaborated to create the new site, which quickly gets to the heart of the company’s message while serving up content quickly for all users.

This year, the LUMA Vision site was recognized as a Webby Honoree for General Desktop & Mobile Sites in the Health & Wellness category.

[embedded content]

Harvard Law Review by 10UP

As one of the most prestigious names in academia, Harvard has a reputation to uphold. When The Harvard Law Review, a more than 100-year-old student-run publication, was looking to refresh its content in a new digital space, agency experts at 10UP were able to help make that vision a reality.

The new media publishing site is well-organized, easily searchable, and highly performant, achieving a Core Web Vitals Performance score of 98!

The site earned a Webby nomination this year for General Desktop & Mobile Sites in the Law category.

Tune into our Crafted Future event to learn more

Want to learn more about these projects or pose a question to the creators who built them?

Register now for the Crafted Future event in September to hear the stories behind these sites straight from the mouths of the experts whose insight and experience made them possible! 

Hopefully you've now see what makes wp engine hosting different. If WP Engine is of interest and you'd like more information, please do make contact or take a look in more detail here.

 

Credit: Original article published here.

Our view at Stack - we've been using WP Engine in our business for 12 years so that should say it all! WP Engine offers optimized performance, enterprise-grade security, award-winning support, unique WordPress features, scalability, and developer trust. So what makes wp engine hosting different? If you want the best hosting then WP Engine is the answer 🚀🌟

The wonderful thing about hosting more of the top 200,000 WordPress sites and watching site-building workflows evolve over a fourteen-year history is that you start to see patterns. 

Patterns emerge in support queries, customer conversations, and developer behavior, and at WP Engine, these patterns have informed innovations like multi-dev environments, bulk site-management features, our Headless WordPress tooling, and more. 

Over the past year, we’ve observed a new and particular pattern: the creation and use of WordPress sites that don’t belong to the traditional devstageprod workflows. These are usually temporary sites that are created for testing, playing, or early-stage building.

To help our customers better unlock their workflows around this need, we’re excited to announce Sandbox Sites, a new type of site all WP Engine hosting customers now have access to. 

Sandbox Sites are the home for WordPress sites that don’t belong to or aren’t yet ready for primetime. They enable a complete online WordPress experience for the occasions you don’t need to “go live.” Whether playing, testing, or simply just work-in-progress-client-reviewing, Sandbox Sites give you a place to easily explore.

Spin up, spin down, and spin out.

The intent of Sandbox sites is that they are easy to start, easy to stop, and easy to upgrade. Even considerations like “Does this count towards my plan’s site limit?” are removed. If you need a site quickly, without the overhead of where and how it should belong, Sandbox Sites makes it easy.

Let’s have a look!

_{This is a 60-second video walkthrough of the in-portal experience of creating, deleting, and “promoting” a Sandbox site.}

A lovely landing place from Local

You may recall that earlier this year, we rolled out significant improvements to how Local interacts with your WP Engine hosting account. 

Well, these improvements dovetail wonderfully into Sandbox Sites! Consider a site you’ve spun up in Local and now want to deploy “somewhere” online. You might want to quickly share something with friends, colleagues, or clients. It doesn’t justify taking up a full site slot on your plan, but you want to put it somewhere. Hello Sandbox Sites! 

Built for everyone. Perfect for agencies!

Almost every detail described above screams “perfect for agencies!” 

Anyone may want to create a sandbox site in all sorts of scenarios, but agencies are the real winners here. 

Experimentation and collaboration are part of the day-to-day experience of operating as an agency, and we’ve seen many of our agency partners patch together solutions. 

As we’ve been building out the functionality for Sandbox Sites over the last few months, we’ve worked closely with many of our agency partners to understand what and how they can solve their workflow needs. The feedback we’ve already received has been incredible and much of it has informed what we roll out today!

Sandbox Sites are just the next move among many planned for helping our customers level-up the way they build with WordPress. We’re excited to see how you use them!

FAQs

Q: What WP Engine hosting plans have access to Sandbox Site?

A: All paid WP Engine plans have access to Sandbox Sites. The number of available Sandbox Sites is subject to your plan level.

Q: Does a Sandbox Site count against my plan’s site limit? E.g. Does it count towards the 10 sites a Growth plan includes?

A: No. Sandbox Sites are in addition to your normal site limit. They will however share resource limits such as storage etc that your plan has.

Q: Can I have a custom domain on a Sandbox Site?

A: No. Sandbox Sites are not intended for sites that will “go live” and therefore don’t allow custom domains. You can easily upgrade a Sandbox Site to a regular site if you need and then assign a custom domain.

Q: What other limitations do Sandbox Sites have?

A: Sandbox Sites don’t allow multi-site installations of WordPress.

Q: Can I switch or “promote” a Sandbox site to a regular site?

A: Absolutely! We know that the biggest and best websites often have humble beginnings. You can easily upgrade a Sandbox Site to a full site in the WP Engine customer portal.

Q: Who can create Sandbox Sites on WP Engine?

A: All users with site creation permissions in the WP Engine customer portal and where the associated plan has available Sandbox Site slots.

Q: Do Sandbox Sites expire?

A: At the time of launch, no they don’t. Expiration is something we may include in the future to help our customers better manage their plan resources.

Q: How does a Sandbox Site differ from a Dev or Staging Site?

A: A dev or staging environment has a specific role in the more structured workflow around taking a site through to launch or production. A Sandbox Site is designed to be independent of these workflows. They are a space for exploration or collaboration where the immediate intent for the site is not to be subjected to the overheads of a full site workflow.

Visit WP Engine to find out more about our managed WordPress hosting and the tools and themes that come standard with every plan. Or, connect with a representative for answers to your questions.

Hopefully you've now see what makes wp engine hosting different. If WP Engine is of interest and you'd like more information, please do make contact or take a look in more detail here.

 

Credit: Original article published here.

Our view at Stack - we've been using WP Engine in our business for 12 years so that should say it all! WP Engine offers optimized performance, enterprise-grade security, award-winning support, unique WordPress features, scalability, and developer trust. So what makes wp engine hosting different? If you want the best hosting then WP Engine is the answer 🚀🌟

Choosing the right platform to build an online presence is more crucial than ever. With nearly 20 years of experience working with WordPress, I’ve witnessed countless trends rise and fall. Yet, one thing has always stood out: the importance of selecting a website solution that aligns with long-term goals, offers scalability, and ensures complete control.

This decision isn’t just about selecting the right tool for today—it’s about investing in a solution that will grow with us into the future. And that’s where WordPress truly shines.

WordPress isn’t just a website builder; it’s a robust content management system (CMS) that empowers users with the flexibility and control needed to create and scale remarkable digital experiences. Whether we’re DIY enthusiasts, freelance designers, or agency powerhouses, WordPress provides the tools and community support to bring our visions to life.

Based on my experience, let’s explore why WordPress stands head and shoulders above competitors like Webflow, Squarespace, and Wix for every type of user.

WordPress for DIYers

If you’re a DIY user or hobbyist, you’re likely searching for a platform that’s easy to use yet powerful enough to grow with your ambitions. Platforms like Squarespace and Wix might seem like perfect fits—they’re straightforward, with beautiful templates and drag-and-drop functionality. But there’s a catch: what you gain in simplicity, you lose in flexibility.

For instance, many individuals who start with these platforms eventually find themselves boxed in when their needs outgrow the platform’s limitations, such as the inability to fully customize the design or the lack of support for certain types of content.

WordPress strikes a perfect balance. It’s user friendly, especially with managed hosting solutions and beginner-friendly themes. But more importantly, it’s built to evolve with us. Unlike closed systems like Squarespace, WordPress doesn’t restrict our growth. We own our content, data, and the freedom to make our websites our own.

With a vast community of developers and enthusiasts, help is always available, making WordPress a standout choice for DIY users. The Learn WordPress resource is an excellent starting point for guidance, and the community’s unwavering support ensures that the platform grows alongside its users, fostering progress and innovation rather than imposing limits.

WordPress for freelance designers/developers

As freelance designers or developers, our livelihood depends on delivering unique, customized solutions to our clients. While Webflow offers a sleek design interface and Wix has some creative freedom, more is needed to match WordPress’s customization depth and scalability.

Over the years, I’ve seen firsthand how the open-source nature of WordPress enables freelancers to push the boundaries of what’s possible. We can build anything from a simple blog to a complex eCommerce site or membership platform.

Need to add custom functionality? There’s a plugin for that. Want to dive into the code? WordPress provides full access, unlike platforms that restrict us to a sandbox environment.

This flexibility isn’t just about making our job easier—it’s about delivering superior client results. With WordPress, freelancers can start small and scale up, adding features and complexity as clients’ needs grow.

The extensive ecosystem of themes, plugins, and third-party integrations allows freelancers to create bespoke solutions without reinventing the wheel.

For freelancers, WordPress isn’t just a tool; it’s a gateway to limitless creativity and client satisfaction. The ability to tailor each project to perfection while tapping into a vast market of potential add-ons makes WordPress the ideal platform for those who refuse to settle for anything less than extraordinary.

WordPress for agencies of all sizes

Agencies, whether they are focused on serving small local businesses with specific community-driven needs or large enterprises with sophisticated, global demands, require a platform that is as versatile and adaptable as their diverse client base.

For a smaller agency, it might mean developing a streamlined site for a local SMB one day; for a larger firm, it could involve creating a dynamic, content-driven platform for a global brand the next. WordPress delivers the same powerful capabilities that enterprise-level solutions offer—without the hefty price tag—making it an ideal choice for agencies across the spectrum.

Having worked with agencies of all sizes, I’ve seen how WordPress is built to scale, making it perfect for handling multiple clients and complex projects. WordPress’s multisite functionality allows users to oversee multiple sites from a single dashboard, streamlining workflows and saving time, no matter the scale.

Integration is another area where WordPress excels. It seamlessly connects with various tools, from CRM systems to email marketing platforms, helping agencies create setups that deliver results. And because it’s open source, WordPress transcends the limitations of built-in features—anything envisioned can be developed and realized on the platform.

The WordPress community and marketplace further enhance its appeal. With a wealth of premium themes and plugins, agencies can quickly customize sites to fit any client’s needs. Extensive documentation and community support ensure that even the smallest agency can tackle the most complex projects with confidence.

For agencies large and small, partnering with a trusted WordPress hosting provider like WP Engine ensures that every site is optimized for peak performance, robust security, and effortless scalability, regardless of the project’s scope.

Why WordPress is the future

WordPress stands as the gold standard in a crowded marketplace of website builders. Its unmatched flexibility, control, and scalability make it the top choice for DIY users, freelancers, and agencies.

After nearly two decades of working with this platform, I’ve seen that while other options may offer quick fixes or slicker interfaces, none can match WordPress’s long-term value and limitless potential.

Whether starting small or aiming high, WordPress is the platform that evolves alongside its users. Investing the time to learn means joining a community that pushes the boundaries of what’s possible online.

The future is wide open—and WordPress is the key to unlocking it.

Hopefully you've now see what makes wp engine hosting different. If WP Engine is of interest and you'd like more information, please do make contact or take a look in more detail here.

 

Credit: Original article published here.

Our view at Stack - we've been using WP Engine in our business for 12 years so that should say it all! WP Engine offers optimized performance, enterprise-grade security, award-winning support, unique WordPress features, scalability, and developer trust. So what makes wp engine hosting different? If you want the best hosting then WP Engine is the answer 🚀🌟

Generative AI continues to transform search engine optimization (SEO), and as it does, it’s become more important than ever to understand how tools like ChatGPT interpret website content.

With this in mind, the team at Eastern Standard, a leader in digital strategy and design and a WP Engine agency partner, undertook an insightful experiment to uncover how ChatGPT processes and responds to various types of website content. 

In addition to their website, the Eastern Standard team analyzed content from various B2B, healthcare, higher education, and nonprofit websites to evaluate ChatGPT’s ability to understand and interpret different content formats and identify areas for improvement.

The results revealed significant insights you can use in your own SEO strategies as you navigate the evolving age of AI. 

To find out more, we sat down with Eastern Standard Co-founder and Chief Digital & Technology Officer Jim Keller, who provided us with a closer look at the findings. 

Read on for a recap of our conversation.

Thank you, Jim. Before discussing the findings, can you tell us more about Eastern Standard and the projects you specialize in?

Eastern Standard is a branding and digital agency originally based out of Philadelphia but now operating a fully remote team. We help a variety of clients get the most out of their digital presence through audience research and messaging, SEO and content strategy, UX and design, web development and CMS implementation, and ongoing site optimization. 

Our client base is quite varied, but we have a strong portfolio in higher education, healthcare, B2B & professional services, and nonprofit organizations.  

With regard to the exercise you ran using ChatGPT, what exactly did you do, and what were you hoping to find? 

We wanted to better understand how AI tools read and interpret content. Our clients were asking how AI should influence their content strategy, and we needed a way to offer concrete guidance instead of just high-level intuitions.

We conducted an experiment where we ingested content from many websites into an AI-readable format, then fed it into an OpenAI language model. We started asking simple questions: for a university we might ask, “How much does it cost to apply?” or, “How do I schedule a visit?”

At first, we would get pretty unsatisfactory answers, so we refined our prompts and updated our approach. Then something interesting happened.

We would still occasionally get unsatisfactory answers, but it wasn’t because the code was buggy; it was because of actual deficiencies in the content or the content structure. This led us to start using the tool to make specific content strategy improvements. 

In your findings, you note that generative AI doesn’t just ingest keywords but interprets content, making it crucial to create clear, complete, well-structured content. Can you elaborate on the specific nuances content creators should focus on to ensure their work is well-interpreted by AI?

The first thing we noticed is that the AI liked descriptive, fully formed text it could easily read and interpret. Long-form paragraphs and other clear, declarative sentences allowed it to provide the most accurate and confident results.

Obviously, we don’t want to simply write giant walls of text, but content creators should take every opportunity to use clear and complete text phrases to answer specific questions. 

For example, instead of writing, “We offer a variety of paid media and digital marketing services”, go a bit further and give the AI something to really chew on: “Our agency provides pay-per-click ad campaign management, content strategy and copywriting, landing page creation, technical SEO and link building services.”

If you’re using lists, grids, or other visual elements to break up text content, that doesn’t pose a problem, but it’s critical that your site uses the best semantic HTML markup for the job. 

A lot of sites fall back on

Hopefully you've now see what makes wp engine hosting different. If WP Engine is of interest and you'd like more information, please do make contact or take a look in more detail here.

 

Credit: Original article published here.

Our view at Stack - we've been using WP Engine in our business for 12 years so that should say it all! WP Engine offers optimized performance, enterprise-grade security, award-winning support, unique WordPress features, scalability, and developer trust. So what makes wp engine hosting different? If you want the best hosting then WP Engine is the answer 🚀🌟

Welcome to Press This, a podcast that delivers valuable insights and actionable tips for navigating the ever-evolving world of WordPress. 

In this episode, host Brian Gardner and Automattic Developer Advocate and Core Contributor Nick Diego explore the nuances and benefits of using child themes with block-based WordPress.

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Brian Gardner: Hey everybody, welcome back to the Press This podcast. I am your host, Brian Gardner. I am a WordPress advocate at WP Engine, and it is my job to spend my day talking and thinking about conversing with WordPress. 

In the last episode, we discussed some of the points of the WP Engine acquisition of NitroPack and what it means for a faster web. That was exciting. But I’m excited about today’s show, one from a content perspective and two from a guest perspective. And so, let me first introduce you to Nick Diego from Automattic. I’ll let you introduce yourself, Nick; go for it.

Nick Diego: Thanks for having me, Brian. I am a full-time contributor to WordPress, sponsored by Automattic. I focus on developer relations and helping to bridge the gap between the community of developers and users and the engineers building WordPress itself.

Brian Gardner: Before we go any further, I want to hone in on something you just said because it makes me happy. Even though you’re in developer relations, you just said you focused on developers and users—and this will be a good segue into our conversation today—because WordPress powers 43% of the internet. 

There’s so much depth of users within WordPress. And so what we’ll talk about today is that we’ll cover both sides of the spectrum because there’s some stuff in between because there’s a lot of considerations. And so before we go further, thank you for listening, everybody.

Today, we will discuss child themes, which are near and dear to my heart. It’s been a pain point in my life dating back to the beginning days of Genesis, of which I think Nick, you go back, or at least mostly back, because I know you did stuff built on top of Genesis as well. 

And so, in a new modern WordPress era, in light of how block themes are and how WordPress sites and block editors are, let’s talk about child themes. And I will open this up just like the wide-open question. From there, we can pick. And I know where you’ll start. Nick, what do you think about child themes? What are your initial reactions when you hear a child theme in light of the current status of WordPress?

Nick Diego: As you mentioned, I started building with WordPress on top of Genesis. So, the concept of child theming was ingrained in how I first approached WordPress. You install the Genesis theme, and you build a child theme on top of that. You know, that’s just how we built it. 

As we’ve been transitioning into a block theme world, you can still easily make child themes. However, I found that there is less of a need for child themes in my theme development. I typically will take a block theme and either build one from scratch or take one and modify it directly. And then that’s my new theme. 

But it’s important to stress that we’re discussing block themes because we’re working in a block. It doesn’t mean that you should use a child theme or you shouldn’t use a child theme. I can speak more to that as we progress in the conversation, especially around WordPress.org, transitioning to a block theme structure with a parent-and-child setup.

Brian Gardner: Yeah, that is one of the things. I also like what you said about your workflow. Sam, our friend, often says there are many ways to use WordPress. That’s very accurate. And that’s important, especially for those who have followers or—I hate using the word influencers because it’s not like… I don’t love that word.

But people who influence the WordPress space, when they say definitive things, in their perspective, will say things like, “this is the new way to do a thing, or this is how it should be done.” And I object to that, and I try myself not to do that. And I always, like you, try to caveat my opinions, like “this is what works for me. This method is how I do things. It’s the right way for me, but there might be better ways for you.”

And so, I encourage people as they talk through things and have these conversations, whether it be opinions on Twitter slash X, or just on podcasts or whatever, always to make that sort of note that there are many ways to use WordPress, and here is a way that works well in my workflow for the needs that I have. As we’ll discuss, users or developers have very different needs. I just wanted to acknowledge that. So, thank you for bringing that perspective.

This is when Matt talked about Gutenberg 5.0 and all that. One of the reasons I became unsure about the future of it all was back in the days of Genesis, we had built the framework, and the child themes were opinionated designs, the CSS, that kind of thing. 

As Matt cast the vision of Gutenberg, what I started to realize was much of what he was casting. And I use the word cannibalized because it cannibalized the value proposition that Genesis itself could, you know, hooks and filters and sort of move things around and do things in a bit more accessible way and in a no-code way.

My opinions on child themes started to shift once Gutenberg landed, and Core incorporated a lot of that functionality. If WordPress core becomes the framework, is there a need for a child theme? If so, what does that look like? I want your perspective regarding the shift from classic WordPress to block-based WordPress and things of that nature.

Nick Diego: Yeah, that’s an excellent way to frame it. Core is taking on a lot of responsibility, like Genesis did. If I look at it again, this is my opinion. If you want to build a block theme differently, by all means, but if I’m creating a theme for my site, I will develop that theme as a standalone theme.

Now, if I need to build another similar site, I may take the theme, copy it, and then make the modifications I need for my new site. So, you have two separate themes. I like that approach, and because we have so much standardization around how the theme.json file works and how you will register block styles and variations, the two themes are relatively similar. You don’t need that layer of abstraction of a parent-child. It just becomes more accessible to have a separate theme. 

I will caveat that it depends on your setup. I alluded to WordPress.org earlier, and WordPress.org is transitioning to a block theme architecture. The way it works is that WordPress.org comprises multiple individual sites.

And so there is a parent theme, a parent block theme with a lot of functionality built into it. And that lays the foundation for every site. And then each unique site, you know, has the plugins repository and the themes repository and news and all these different pieces of WordPress.org, they are child themes that sit on top of their unique, as you were mentioning, similar to Genesis, their unique styles and, you know, unique functionality for those individual sites.

Both are very acceptable and reasonable approaches, but it depends on your workflow and how you want to manage the architecture of your site builds.

Brian Gardner: So many conversations have come through the product lens. You’ve built and sold similar products because you and I are innately product-minded people. And so I generally have always, I mean, StudioPress was a 2006 starting point. So, for the better part of 18 years, my brain has always gravitated towards building something consumed en masse. 

That is a different perspective than building a custom site for your parents, or the idea of creating a child theme for your parents on top of parenting seems silly. But from a child-themed perspective, let’s bring this into the modern WordPress era because it’s almost three-dimensional. In contrast, the classic world is two-dimensional.

So, as an example, I would build a theme, and in my head, I’m like, OK, well, there’s a lot of, you know, the core template files, the core theme.json styles and settings. It’d be nice to do so because I gravitate just out of the box, thinking, OK, I build something plugged into. Then, you create many designs outside the original base or parent theme.

What I need help with the most is that one theme can do anything you want it to. If it starts simple, you could bend it through the site editor, global styles, and everything else. That’s the intent of WordPress, where you can add more templates and create new color palettes.

But the struggle is that I can do that because I spend 24 hours a day doing this stuff. However, the end user, even a developer who knows WordPress, has yet to arrive. Then, you have to deliver a child theme. So, what they see on the demo gets delivered to them on activation. Let’s talk about that briefly because part of me wants to show tough love and say, let me show you how to fish. And then the other part of me is like, people say, well, I want what the demo is. Why is my header not like that?

You have to create a child theme more like what they see when they activate it. This fact might lead to a conversation like WordPress’s onboarding piece. We won’t go there today, but talk about that a bit; it’s a struggle.

Nick Diego: It should be as easy as possible for users so that struggle resonates. Let’s make it easier for users to get started. Watching people who have never used WordPress dive in can be more complex than competitors.

I’m always inclined toward making the user experience the best. Taking it a step further, though, I think that child themes—just personally—add a layer of complexity for users because you have. Then, they need to start understanding what a parent theme is, and then you install a child theme. That’s a level of abstraction that is also confusing.

If this were a personal product, even in my workflows, let’s say you take two themes, and they’re very visually different, but the underlying architecture is very similar. So, it could be a situation where you have a parent and two child themes.

I would create two themes to make it easy for users. You shift the challenge and burden of building the two themes to the developer, so they must maintain two instead of a parent and child theme. The user sees the theme they like, likes it, installs it, has one theme on their site, and is off and running. That’s how I would structure things.

It’s more challenging from a maintenance perspective as a developer because if you want to make, let’s say, a simple change that you would naturally make to a parent theme, now you’ve got to make it to the bowl of two complete themes. So, there are some trade-offs there, but I would hedge towards the user.

Brian Gardner: So Nick has had either the pleasure of getting inside my head whenever I want to talk through this. I talk about this often because what you said is like where I’ve been. However, I wanted to make it easier for people to consume. You make a child theme, but then suddenly, you start discussing creating a block theme and saving changes. And this is where we get into the third dimension of WordPress.

The whole idea of making changes via the site editor puts those changes in a different place. And so I had someone email me the other day, and they’re like, so if I use this base theme and then activate this child theme and then make a bunch of changes in the site editor, it was kind of like, who’s on first, right? And then I was like, do I make a grandchild theme? And I was like, wait a second, all of a sudden this, now we’re in inception.

Finally, to the point you made earlier, the challenge of why Genesis was its thing back in the day was that I didn’t want to have to maintain 30 different theme.json files that are essentially all the same. But this is where I’m currently at. I joked with my friend Jeremy; that was how I felt today, which could change in an hour.

Now I’m like, maybe it’s just having a basic base theme and forking it until it’s standalone opinionated themes. Yes, the burden’s on me to maintain that. But at least this way, it’s like one person, one theme; if they make changes, they’re within one theme and don’t go across two themes. I don’t have to worry about a base theme update from .org; seeing all that becomes easier.

If there’s anything specifically to discuss, we can go into the next layer: the Create Block Theme plugin and what that does. I’ll let you introduce that a bit because I’ve been fascinated by its current state. We’ve talked about this at Build Mode. All of a sudden, it’s changed the way I want to help educate people.

Nick Diego: Before we move to that, I want to mention child themes. There’s a very interesting use case for child themes in enterprise-level implementations. I say enterprise, but I use that term loosely. It could be a big university with tons of sites or WordPress.org or something like that, where you are not, you’re using a block theme or perhaps a hybrid theme, and you have an implementation where your users aren’t changing that much in the site editor. You’re, you know, you want to keep everything in version control, and you’re deploying these things. You know, developers are deploying these things. It’s not a user going in there and starting to change things.

That is where a parent-and-child theme setup makes much sense regarding controlling the infrastructure across all your sites. And that is a very valid approach. One that I’ve seen deployed quite a bit. But as we’ve discussed, when you’re talking about child themes from a product perspective, the idea is that we’re moving away from child themes. Speaking to, sorry, go ahead.

Brian Gardner: This is a brilliant segue into the Create Block Theme plugin. And what you just said, your example of WordPress.org having its own thing and sort of like the enterprise level, I’m starting to encourage people who I think are capable enough. And when we talk about that, it’s different than taking somebody else’s base theme and building many child themes on it. We’re talking about a system that should be used and created, not from scratch. You could take a base theme and fork it or make it your own. Like 10up or WebDevStudios, they should have their base theme so that they can control it. They control how it works and the updates. And they’re not at the mercy of the decisions of people like me who want to change things occasionally. And so, in that context, yes.Create Block Theme is a great introduction. How does one take someone else’s theme and make a theme of one’s own? I’ll let you start with that.

Nick Diego: I don’t know the genesis of the Create Block Theme plugin, but you can install it from the WordPress plugins directory. Once the plugin is activated, you’ll see a suite of tools available in the admin panel and the site editor. It allows you to back up. When you make changes in the site editor and click the Save button, those changes are saved into the database.

One of the biggest benefits of the Create Block theme is it allows you to take all those changes and write them back to the actual theme files. It will enable you to modify the theme you’re using without touching a line of code. It also allows you to create a copy of the theme, create a child theme, and do all sorts of things to create a block theme, as the kind of the name of the plugin suggests. But what it does is it takes something that was, if you took a new user and you said, build a theme from scratch. It’s a daunting prospect.

But instead, if you said, take the new base 2024 theme or take, you know, a theme block theme out there that you like, install it and install the Create Block Theme plugin, start making modifications to that theme in the site editor, doing everything without any code.

Then, click a few buttons to place those changes in the theme file. You can also download the theme that you’ve just created. That’s a powerful thing. And as we look ahead, there’s a lot of improvements that are, you know, kind of being under discussion around the Create Block Theme plugin, around, you know, pattern management and different functionality there that supercharges the ability to build a block theme really, without touching a lot of code. It’s an excellent tool for getting people to create themes quickly.

Brian Gardner: As you know, we host Build Mode every Friday. It’s for anybody interested in talking about the business of WordPress and all of the evolutions and changes we see with WordPress. In the last several weeks, we have been screen-sharing and investigating what the site editor is. How does it work? How can you make changes, and so on? And so, last week, I installed the Create Block theme on a local install of mine.

Quick shout out to our Local development tool. And so, and this is something that I struggled through a little bit with everybody on there because I didn’t realize it was a thing, and I didn’t know, as it’s very much suggested, one of the options as well is to create a blank, start with a blank canvas literally. So yes, you could take your existing active theme, clone it, and create a child theme.

But you can also create one from scratch, and what that looks like is it generates the theme folder, the blank style sheet with like the header information at the top, and the index template is the only one it starts with because that can control everything. It’s all unformatted. You need to go in and say I got to establish my color palette, so I’m going to add these colors rather than replace the ones that come with the theme that you’re using. It was an exciting and eye-opening experience. Those who want to start with a blank canvas and create their theme could do that and then export it. Many things are coming with the Create Block Theme, which has slightly changed my perspective on this.

With the people on Build Mode, there’s some pretty good seniority there. Many people have tenure in WordPress development, so they understand how it works. But two weeks ago, I asked the question because a lot of people are, you know, we’ve got Peter, who uses Kadence a lot, and many people are using other similar tools.

Let me ask a question because I have a hypothesis that was proven wrong when I asked the question. And then I went on Twitter and pulled this too. We call them either theme implementers or developers. Are you more interested in developing client sites with a code or no code sort of process? During Build Mode, many people said they were good with using the tools inside the dashboard and the site editor. I don’t want to learn theme.json, and I don’t get it. And I’m afraid of it and things of that nature, which a quick shout out to anybody who’s going behind the scenes. Once you understand how it works, it’s pretty simple to sort of master.

Most people on Build Mode said starting with a base theme and building a client site using the site editor would be OK. And so that’s why we’ve, you know, uncovered some things and why we’ve explored. And I was shocked by that response. The intent of WordPress is more from a user perspective. Still, I think there are a lot of people from back in the Genesis days, a lot of people will call them implementers, whether it be Genesis implementers, we call them Genesis developers, they’re basically taking the theme and making a few tweaks and, similarly with Elementor and some of these page builders, most people are just, they’re not touching code. They’re just downloading Elementor, putting it on a client site, bending it to the way the client wants, and calling it a day.

Why should WordPress be any different? But I was surprised by that. And so it altered my plan. Cause I was like, I was building for and teaching people how to do it and code, and only a few people want to learn in code.

Nick Diego: Yeah, and I don’t know, I’m the same. I can build the theme from scratch, but if you don’t have to, why should you? Anecdotally, I’m building a small site for a friend. I’m touching the least amount of code possible. You know, I have a base theme already. I’m going into the site editor and building the whole thing out, modifying all the templates, doing everything visually, and then using the CreateBlock theme or simple copy and paste to write that back to the theme files. So, I’m not touching any code. I understand how it works. It is essential to know how things work under the hood. But you don’t have to touch any of that.

I participate in a series called Developer Hours. And we will have one on August 27th with community members such as Peter and Tammy Lister. That will be all about the Create Block Theme plugin, where it’s heading, and what you can do with it. So, it is one of these tools that is more than just some plugin sitting out there. It’s becoming a fundamental tool for building block themes, making it much more manageable. It abstracts away some of the complexity that things like theme.json can be pretty complicated. But one of the things I love about it is instead of having to learn all that the folder structure and theme.json, instead of having to learn all that upfront, you can dive into Create Block Theme, mess around with it, build your theme, and then slowly, over time, get an understanding of how things work.

Brian Gardner: Yeah, that’s a good point because, and this is where, you know, as we head into 6.7, well, we’re already headed into 6.7, but 6.7 and beyond. One of the things I appreciate most about the efforts of those who are working on marrying it up because of the Create Block Theme plugin. Much of the promise with Create Block Theme and the number of people who want to use that sort of build tool depends on whether or not, and this is what I want to sit on for a minute, whether or not the user interface within Site Editor matches the capabilities of theme.json.

Because if there’s a one-to-one, that’s a brilliant system. But if theme.json can do some things, we’ll say that the Site Editor doesn’t have a UI, then there’s a reason to make people go into theme .json, like if they want to tweak a border. And so one of the things I know will be coming in 6.7 makes me the happiest. But when I see them come through GitHub, I’m like, wow, this is what the people need—a UI added to the site editor for modifying font sizes.

Theme.json can establish the font size system. You can determine if you want that size to be fluid, what it’s called, and everything else. If you think about it, 80 % of the people who are tweaking a thing want to change the size of the fonts. And if they can’t do it inside of the dashboard, then you’re forcing them to cross over into the code, and then it becomes murky. And so I appreciate the efforts around harmonizing what’s making a corresponding UI inside the site editor for anything in theme.json. Once you have that parity, suggest that people use the Create Block Theme plugin. Without revealing trade secrets, will Create Block Theme’s functionality eventually become part of WordPress Core?

Nick Diego: That’s a good question. I want to back up quickly before I answer about the one-to-one between theme.json and the site editor. Anything that revolves around the visual aesthetic of a theme, such as the available fonts and font sizes, as you just mentioned, should be editable within the site. There is functionality inside theme.json that is much more advanced; that would not necessarily be necessary. It needs to make sense to be in the site editor. Namely, in the site editor and theme.json, you can restrict functionality on different blocks in the settings section. So, I don’t want heading blocks to have color controls. You can do that in theme.json.

That is a pretty advanced need that the average user just building their site wouldn’t need. And so, there are things in theme.json that will never be in the UI simply because they’re like the advanced things that only a developer or a person building something for a client would need. The Create Block Theme functionality can likely be implemented into Core. It’s also a perfect place to try out new things. We mentioned pattern management, which is being able to add new patterns, save new patterns, delete patterns, and manage patterns.

There’s been some discussion around implementing that in the Create Block Theme plugin as an initial first step. There’s a natural pathway between the plugin and Core. It’s just a matter of time. We’ve seen tremendous improvement with the site editor over the last few years. However, there’s still a long way to go, especially as we have more harmonization between the post editor and the site editor and some of the admin redesign work that’s also going on.

Brian Gardner: It’s important to note that some of that functionality is now part of WordPress Core. My understanding is that there’s an option to export the theme in WordPress Core as it stands. There needs to be an interface like Create Block Theme. If you hit the export theme, your work will be bundled. It doesn’t allow you to clone it; it doesn’t allow you to create a child theme, and so on. But at a minimum, if you install a theme and do some work, you want to export it for use on an existing client site. For people who are listening and interested in all of this, spin up a local install and make some changes to a theme, export that, and put it on another local or a client site and see how that works. Cause that’s already there and should work for many use cases.

Nick Diego: The Create Block Theme plugin is a fully open-source community plugin run by core contributors. So, if you want to test it out, contribute to it, work on it, open an issue, or do whatever, it is a tool to make block theming easier. For those listening, it’s a great way to test it out. If you want functionality, open a feature request.

Brian Gardner: That’s a good call out for contributing. There is a misconception: I can’t, I don’t write code. I can’t contribute to WordPress. Right. And there is so much to like what we discuss on Build Mode. Those who write code are only writing code based on things that they think or teams internally have discussed, but also things that the community has asked for. As you said, just creating an issue and saying, Hey, it would be great if this functionality was part of either this plugin or part of Gutenberg or WordPress Core, and then conversation happens. And then somebody says, I can write that code, and I like this idea. And so for those looking for ways to contribute, there are all kinds of ways, but sometimes, if you have an idea or clients that continually ask you for the same sort of thing or functionality. It’s only better for you if that gets put into WordPress Core. Then, you don’t have to build a hack or do something special for every client you’re creating.

Nick Diego: And I want to stress that not opening an issue is second nature to Brian and me, but if you’ve never opened an issue on GitHub before, please feel free to reach out to either of us, and we’ll help you get started. Because GitHub is a foreign land for many. So, we understand that. So we’re here to

Brian Gardner: And also a quick note that it’s not always a guarantee or slam dunk that just because you put something in there, a feature request that it gets accepted. There might be several factors or reasons for it being a better idea. So go into it with a, take it all to the grain of salt that it’s there to improve the software, but this is not your personal wishlist item for everything you want because it does power 43% of the internet, and there are considerations elsewhere.

We could continue to talk about this for days and days and days, but this is a good foundation for at least discovering some of the current capabilities. Again, you know, what you do for an end user is different than, you know, a sophisticated agency or enterprise-level implementation of all of this. The take-home point is that WordPress is in a good spot; we all want it to be great. But more importantly, there are many ways to interpret all of this. Mike McAllister at Ollie is building his thing his way. And that’s not right or wrong. It’s right in his mind, and because I might have a different opinion, there needs to be that understanding within our space that there are several ways to accomplish the same thing, which is good and bad sometimes.

Because a lot of times people are like, well, show me the way. There are six different ways to get to the top. You know, and that’s frustrating for some people because they want one way. Do you have any closing remarks or comments about specific themes and what we discussed here? Or if you have any under-the-hood insights into 2025, which I think is supposed to ship with WordPress 6.7 and all of

Nick Diego: I think if you’re listening to this and you’ve never built a theme before, or you’re starting this for the first time, my recommendation, and you’ve heard a lot about child themes and maybe there are articles from the past around how you really should start with a child theme, I would recommend finding a solid base theme, whether you want to start with the base 2024 or the upcoming 2025 theme, I would recommend just starting with that theme, making the modifications to it, using the Crate Block theme plugin and don’t worry about child themes right now, especially if you’re starting. Take the theme, make your modifications in the site editor, and use the available tools like Create Block Theme to save those changes to the theme files and go with it.

Once you master that workflow and find that maybe I need a child theme, start exploring that. Still, it would help if you waited to dive into it first because many tools today allow you to build block themes quickly, save those changes, and build everything in the editor. The child theme is not the first place you need to go, especially if you’re starting. What do you think, Prime?

Brian Gardner: I agree with that 100%. I wasn’t going to plug this, but I’m going to now that we’re here. I recently released a Powder Zero theme onto the WordPress.org theme directory, a stripped-down version of my powder theme. I started getting scope creep inside of Powder, and we still need to get into the idea of color palettes, presets, variations, and all that stuff, which brings us to a fourth dimension of WordPress.

Using that as a base theme became hard because you needed help undoing many shipping things with that central theme. So I’m like, you know, in light of all the conversation that we had at Build Mode, let me provide a, what I think is a very, very stripped down and unopinionated theme to do the very thing you just said, which is cut your teeth, put it on a local, understand how it works, take it. There are no patterns. There are a couple of colors just because there should be.

Then, play with it, build something out, export it, and see what happens as you get more comfortable with that process. Whether through theme files or the Create Block Theme plugin, you can fork it and make it your own. The intent is for someone to take that and make that their base theme. Just play around. The problem is billable hours and all that kind of stuff. And so, like, it gets in the way of the mindset that you are investing into your future means understanding how this works because once you start to understand it Then, you start to see the ROI where you can begin to do things faster and more efficiently, and so on.

Nick, thank you again for taking some time out of your day. I know you love to help and educate, so this is another extension of what you get paid to do. Of course, I know you love talking about themes and all of that. I promise to avoid bothering you for another few days about what we should do and how to communicate all this.

Nick Diego: Yeah, well, thanks for having me again. My job is literally to speak to the community and talk to developers who are struggling with things. My colleagues and I are here to hear your frustrations and concerns. If you need help building block themes or with these things, we are in the community to help serve you. So please feel free to reach out; it’s not a bother to reach out to us.

Brian Gardner: Yep. A hundred percent, a hundred percent. Thanks again, Nick, for being here. I will see you next week at WordCamp Minneapolis, which I’m looking forward to. We’ll continue this conversation through various avenues, online and on social media, through events, etc. So, if you have any questions, hit us up. In the meantime, as a reminder, you’re listening to the Press This podcast, where I, Brian Gardner, WordPress Advocate on behalf of WP Engine, dive deep into the ever-changing world of WordPress and what it means for product people, business owners, and end users. Until next time, have a great day.

Hopefully you've now see what makes wp engine hosting different. If WP Engine is of interest and you'd like more information, please do make contact or take a look in more detail here.

 

Credit: Original article published here.

Our view at Stack - we've been using WP Engine in our business for 12 years so that should say it all! WP Engine offers optimized performance, enterprise-grade security, award-winning support, unique WordPress features, scalability, and developer trust. So what makes wp engine hosting different? If you want the best hosting then WP Engine is the answer 🚀🌟

Welcome to the WordPress Roundup, your monthly digest of the latest news and updates from the WordPress community.

We bring you essential WordPress developments for all experience levels each month, keeping you informed about the latest core updates and upcoming releases.

Whether you’re a seasoned developer, a dedicated site owner, or launching your first WordPress site, these updates promise to enhance your site-building experience by making it more seamless and powerful. You’re a vital part of our community, and we’re here to support you every step of the way.

We’ll also spotlight plugins and themes that elevate your site, highlight important community events and notable contributions from WordPress developers, and share tips to keep you ahead in this ever-evolving ecosystem.

This month’s edition examines Ollie Pro, the Create Block Theme plugin, the upcoming WordPress 6.7 release, and more. Let’s dive in!

Ollie Pro

Ollie is the theme that will elevate your site-building experience, and Ollie Pro gives you access to even more. Imagine combining the power of the block editor with the finesse of professionally designed patterns—Ollie Pro does just that and then some. Ollie isn’t just another theme; it’s your new secret weapon for creating stunning, customizable websites with unparalleled ease.

What makes Ollie Pro stand out? It’s all in the details. The enhanced Pattern Browser is a prime example, offering instant access to a wealth of meticulously crafted design patterns. Whether you want a sleek, minimalist look or something more intricate, the Pattern Browser lets you build it faster than you can say “block editor.”

But it’s not just about speed; it’s about giving you the freedom to express your vision without the usual headaches. Ollie Pro’s customization options are robust yet intuitive, offering you the tools to tweak every detail until it’s perfect. This theme will help you simplify the complex, putting professional-grade design within reach of anyone, regardless of their technical expertise.

Ollie co-founder Mike McAlister recently announced Ollie Pro’s impressive milestone of $10,000 in subscriptions within the first month. Community engagement, transparent communication, and prioritizing user feedback were critical to this success. These elements have driven its early success and will shape its growth.

Ollie Pro is a complete design solution. It seamlessly blends aesthetics and usability and is perfect for those who value form and function. With Ollie Pro, you’re crafting an experience, not just building a website.

Create Block Theme

If you’re not ready for a premium block theme like Ollie Pro, consider an alternative: downloading a free theme and using the Create Block Theme plugin to build your custom site. Start with a solid foundation and let the plugin guide you through designing, customizing, and refining every detail.

The Create Block Theme plugin simplifies development, allowing you to create, edit, and manage themes from your WordPress dashboard. You can generate new themes, clone existing ones, and export customizations as standalone themes. It streamlines the process, making it accessible to beginners and experienced developers.

This approach gives you complete control over layouts, color schemes, and typography, making it easy to tailor your site to your vision. Even for beginners, the plugin is user-friendly and accessible, turning the design process into an enjoyable experience.

Opting for this route saves money and enhances your understanding of WordPress themes, giving you the power to maintain and update your site independently. A free starter theme such as Powder Zero paired with the Create Block Theme plugin offers a perfect blend of creativity and practicality, making it a smart and empowering choice.

WordPress 6.7

With WordPress 6.6 released on July 16, users are now looking forward to the next major update. The upcoming WordPress 6.7 release, slated for November 12, 2024, promises many exciting features and improvements. This version enhances user experience and performance with significant updates to the block editor and site health tools.

Expect a streamlined interface, improved navigation, and new block patterns that simplify the design process. Additionally, performance optimizations will ensure faster load times and smoother interactions, which are crucial for maintaining user engagement and satisfaction.

A highlight is the expanded customization options, providing greater design flexibility. WordPress 6.7 will empower users with more control and efficiency, making creating and managing stunning websites more effortless than ever.

Another exciting addition is Twenty Twenty-Five, the new default theme. Built as a block theme, it aims to minimize CSS, configure styles through theme.json, and make it editable via Global Styles. The theme development team is working closely with Gutenberg contributors to enhance design tools in the block editor to achieve this goal.

Other bits

WP Engine’s acquisition of NitroPack, a leading site performance optimization solution, marks a significant step toward a faster web. This strategic move integrates NitroPack’s advanced speed-boosting technologies with our robust platform. 

The partnership aims to deliver unparalleled site performance, enhance user experiences, and drive better business outcomes. We aim to revolutionize website speed and efficiency, paving the way for a more dynamic and responsive web.

Several exciting WordCamps are set to take place around the globe in August. WordCamp Cape Town kicks off the month on August 1-2. Mid-month, WordCamp Rio de Janeiro and WordCamp Minneapolis/St. Paul will take place on August 16-17 and August 16, respectively. Toward the end of the month, WordCamp Cebu and WordCamp Lira are set for August 24, followed by WordCamp Bogotá on August 30-31.

The WordPress Developer Blog has published three new insightful articles. Building a Card Layout with a Hover Reveal Effect offers a step-by-step guide to creating engaging card designs with interactive hover effects. 

15 Ways to Curate the WordPress Editing Experience provides practical tips to enhance and streamline the WordPress editing workflow. Mixing and Matching Styles, Colors, and Typography in WordPress 6.6 explores creative techniques for combining design elements to achieve stunning visual results in your WordPress projects.​

That’s it for this month. Stay tuned as we watch the development of WordPress 6.7 unfold and inch closer toward WordCamp US.

Hopefully you've now see what makes wp engine hosting different. If WP Engine is of interest and you'd like more information, please do make contact or take a look in more detail here.

 

Credit: Original article published here.

Our view at Stack - we've been using WP Engine in our business for 12 years so that should say it all! WP Engine offers optimized performance, enterprise-grade security, award-winning support, unique WordPress features, scalability, and developer trust. So what makes wp engine hosting different? If you want the best hosting then WP Engine is the answer 🚀🌟

Welcome to the WordPress Roundup, a monthly digest of the latest news and updates from the WordPress community.

Each month, we’ll bring you a curated selection of the most important developments affecting all WordPress users, regardless of your experience level. Whether you’re a seasoned developer, a dedicated site owner, or just starting your first WordPress site, you’re an integral part of our community.

We aim to keep you informed of the most recent WordPress core developments and upcoming releases that promise to make your site-building experience even more seamless and powerful.

We’ll also highlight plugins and themes that can help elevate your site, important community events and notable contributions from WordPress developers, and tips to help you stay ahead of the curve in this ever-evolving ecosystem.

This month’s edition looks closely at the WordPress 6.6 Release, Section Styles, WordCamp Europe and US, and everything you need to know about WordCamps. Let’s dive in!

WordPress 6.6 Release

Last month’s roundup provided an overview of WordPress 6.6, which should arrive on July 16th, 2024. Among its main features are advanced design tools, unified publish flow, and the ability for users to mix and match typography and colors.

We did not highlight Section Styles in the roundup, but they have quickly emerged as a standout feature. Section Styles streamline the design process, making it more efficient and user-friendly, enhancing the web development experience. Enabling users to apply curated styles with a single click removes the necessity for tedious manual adjustments.

This feature has plenty of use cases, ranging from users experimenting with design via the block and site editors to sophisticated agencies leveraging it for client websites.

Rich Tabor, Product Designer at Automattic, wrote an article titled I made 720 WordPress theme styles, which showcases the power of Section Styles through his work on the Assembler theme.

What’s next for Section Styles?

The Global Styles UI for block style variations will undergo significant enhancements, making it easier to customize styles for all inner elements and block types. These improvements streamline the design process and provide a more intuitive and efficient way to apply and modify styles across your site.

This update may also include improvements to the Style Book, which would allow it to support block style variations more effectively.

Additionally, a potential future enhancement would enable setting customization for each block style variation, further expanding users’ flexibility and control.

The GitHub tracking issue provides a comprehensive overview of the discussions and developments regarding Section Styles.

Earlier this week, WordPress 6.6 RC2 became available for download and testing. You can test this exciting release in four convenient ways: via Plugin, Direct Download, Command Line, and WordPress Playground. Get involved and help shape the future of WordPress!

WordCamp Europe

From June 13-15, 2024, enthusiasts from across the globe gathered in Torino, Italy, to explore and celebrate WordPress at WordCamp Europe. The 12th annual WordPress event in Europe, held at the prestigious Lingotto Conference and Exhibition Centre, drew 2,584 attendees. Organized by a dedicated team of 250 volunteers, led by WordCamp veterans Wendie Huis in ’t Veld, Juan Hernando, and Takis Bouyouris, the event ran smoothly and efficiently.

The conference featured diverse sessions covering the latest trends, best practices, and innovative solutions within the WordPress ecosystem. Attendees enjoyed insightful talks, workshops, and networking opportunities, fostering a spirit of collaboration and community.

With its vibrant atmosphere and engaging content, the event offered a unique platform for participants to connect, collaborate, and enhance their skills. Everyone left the conference with fresh ideas and new connections, ready to advance their WordPress projects.

Contributor Day brought together 726 dedicated individuals across 25 teams to advance the WordPress project. They achieved impressive milestones, including translating 79,059 interface strings into 29 languages, updating documentation for the upcoming 6.6 release, onboarding new members to the support and testing teams, and identifying improvements for plugin security.

WordCamp US

Excitement is building for WordCamp US, which will occur in Portland at the Oregon Convention Center from September 17-20, 2024. This event will bring WordPress enthusiasts, developers, and industry leaders together for another inspiring and collaborative gathering.

WordCamp US offers a four-day immersion in the ecosystem, featuring sessions on the latest trends in web development and blogging. Contributor Day invites all skill levels to help improve WordPress, while Showcase Day presents innovative uses of the platform.

The new Showcase Day will debut on Wednesday, September 18th, the second day of WordCamp US. This addition allows attendees to explore WordPress’s most innovative and exciting uses, highlight its cutting-edge potential, and inspire future projects.

The event also provides excellent networking opportunities with influential community members, exquisite lunches, and a social event. Attending WordCamp US enhances your skills and contributes to shaping the future of WordPress. Get your tickets now!

WordCamp Central

Explore other upcoming WordCamp events and join WordPress enthusiasts and experts for unforgettable experiences worldwide. Click here to access the full WordCamp schedule.

Ready for your first WordCamp adventure? Tune in to “It’s your first WordCamp? Welcome!” on the WordPress Briefing podcast with Josepha Haden Chomphosy and discover everything you need to know, from exciting sessions to expert networking tips!

That’s it for this month. Stay tuned as we approach the official release of WordPress 6.6 and more exciting developments!

Hopefully you've now see what makes wp engine hosting different. If WP Engine is of interest and you'd like more information, please do make contact or take a look in more detail here.

 

Credit: Original article published here.

Our view at Stack - we've been using WP Engine in our business for 12 years so that should say it all! WP Engine offers optimized performance, enterprise-grade security, award-winning support, unique WordPress features, scalability, and developer trust. So what makes wp engine hosting different? If you want the best hosting then WP Engine is the answer 🚀🌟

Today, a well-designed and accessible website is a necessity. 

As your digital front door, you want your site to be welcoming and easy for everyone to navigate, creating a seamless and inclusive experience for all users.

That’s why, in the latest Crafted Future event presented by The Webby Awards and WP Engine, experts were asked to weigh in on the importance of accessible design in the modern age and what it means to design accessible digital experiences. 

Panelists included WP Engine Web UX Design Manager Nicholas Tilley, Bellweather Agency Co-founder and Chief Creative Officer Louis Lee, and Marriott International Senior Interactive Designer for Content Marketing, Kia Delgado. The discussion was moderated by, The Webby Awards General Manager Nick Borenstein.

Read on to delve deeper into what the experts had to say about effective website design and the key elements of accessibility. 

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Finding balance between accessibility and design

Accessibility is necessary in modern web design, but what’s easy to forget is that the foundational principles of accessibility overlap with the principles of great design. 

Lee called attention to this fact during the panel discussion.

“There’s a misconception that accessibility somehow compromises design, but if we really look at some of the baseline core principles of accessible design—strong contrast in colors, strong contrast in type sizes, clear hierarchy—those principles of accessibility are also principles of good design in general,” he said.

Other panelists agreed and took time to highlight the importance of finding the right balance between accessibility and design innovation.

Delgado used the Marriott Bonvoy Travel By Design site as an example of striking that balance. The intent of the Travel By Design site is to increase the end user’s awareness of Marriott’s portfolio of hotels. Marriott Bonvoy owns 30+ brands, so travelers might not even know they’re staying at a Marriott-owned property. 

“We were figuring out a way to balance the design because we have so many different properties that we’re featuring that have all these different looks, but how do we bring that into a space that feels cohesive while letting these images shine?” said Delgado.

“What we landed on was having a more minimal black and white design, so that the photos can really shine, the visuals come through, and the page is easy to navigate.”

The page design helps connect the dots between the Marriott brand and the concept of beautifully designed hotels. For their efforts, the editorial site was nominated for a Webby Award in the Best Homepage category for Websites and Mobile Sites, and it’s being featured in this year’s Crafted With Code showcase as an example of beautiful, accessible design.

Identifying the tools for success

One obstacle designers, especially those on small teams, tend to face when building accessible sites is finding the right tools to build and test their environments. Panelists shared both current tools for success as well as hopes for what the future could bring to further improve accessibility testing.

Some of the resources mentioned include Figma accessibility tools and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), as well as free content created by accessibility advocates on YouTube. At the end of the day, no matter what tools you use, the most important thing a designer can bring to the table is a willingness to understand the entirety of their audience.

“I think the greatest tool a designer has in their toolbox is empathy,” said Tilley. 

“So I would recommend reaching out to someone who is experiencing or has experienced a disability and educate yourself on what they struggle with so you can understand that perspective.”

When ideating on the potential for future tools, panelists shared the hope that Artificial Intelligence (AI) may hold the key to providing smaller teams with the resources they need to properly test for accessibility. 

“If you give small designers, small shops that don’t have access to user research, a tool that allows them to get that input from users with disabilities—if an AI tool like that could bring that power, could mimic the experiences of people with disabilities—it could bring about more education,” Tilley said.

AI: Accessibility assistant or adversary?

Speaking of artificial intelligence, panelists approached the subject with healthy doses of both skepticism and optimism. 

While AI technology has presented challenges with bias, panelists agreed that, if configured well, it could also be leveraged to aid in accessibility efforts.

“I think AI is one of those unavoidable topics, and it feels really relevant to accessibility. I have a lot of optimism about how AI-powered tools can really aid us as makers in terms of accessibility and web design.” said Lee.

Panelists also grappled with the conflict between the benefits that personalized experiences offer to users and the need to protect the data that makes personalization possible. They agreed that accessibility and personalization can exist at the same time as quality data privacy, and it all comes down to ethical site construction.

“Personalization is sometimes seen as the enemy, but I think it’s great,” said Tilley. 

“It just takes a certain amount of personal responsibility. You have to understand what you want to share and how to protect what you don’t want to share.”

Creating buy-in around accessible design

According to the World Health Organization, about 16% of the world’s population lives with some form of disability. In the United States alone, nearly one in four adults has a disability, as reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). 

These numbers reflect a substantial portion of potential website users who might face challenges navigating a poorly designed site.

So, when panelists were asked how they ensured stakeholders’ buy-in for accessible design before building or reimagining a site, they were very clear: accessibility is not optional.

“Accessibility is the law for businesses in their physical realm as well as their digital spaces. Quite literally, by law, you should be accessible. So if CEOs or managers at your company are unsure of it, frame the conversation around proofing yourself for now and in the future against potential litigation,” said Lee. 

“A light but professional threat might be a great way to start having that conversation,” he joked.

An accessible website isn’t just good practice—it’s good business. Studies have shown that businesses lose out on billions of dollars in potential revenue each year due to inaccessible websites. 

And because search engines prioritize accessibility by boosting the rankings of accessible sites, inaccessibility can cause your content to get lost in the shuffle. By taking accessibility into consideration from the jump, you’re more likely to succeed in whatever your digital goals may be.

“It’s a common misconception that accessibility is an add-on at the end—it’s that extra work that you do,” said Tilley. 

“But it’s our job as designers to educate people that it doesn’t have to be that. If we are taking into consideration accessibility in the very beginning—in the design phases, in the execution phases—it’s not that extra time. It’s built into the process. And the ROI is huge because you’re broadening your audience with a minimal amount of investment if you do it correctly.”

What is Crafted Future?

Crafted Future is a series of panel discussions featuring experts recognized in Crafted with Code, a collaborative showcase presented by The Webby Awards and WP Engine that highlights Webby-recognized website work and shares the stories behind the builds.  

Since 2019, the virtual event series has been exploring topics impacting the work of digital professionals as told by top-level experts in their fields. You can find all the previous Crafted Future discussions on The Webby Awards’ YouTube channel.

Craft your future with WP Engine

WP Engine is committed to creating the best, most innovative technologies to help developers build beautiful, accessible sites on WordPress. Craft the future of the web on WP Engine. Check out our plans or talk to an expert about what WP Engine can do for your site!

Hopefully you've now see what makes wp engine hosting different. If WP Engine is of interest and you'd like more information, please do make contact or take a look in more detail here.

 

Credit: Original article published here.

Our view at Stack - we've been using WP Engine in our business for 12 years so that should say it all! WP Engine offers optimized performance, enterprise-grade security, award-winning support, unique WordPress features, scalability, and developer trust. So what makes wp engine hosting different? If you want the best hosting then WP Engine is the answer 🚀🌟

Welcome to Press This, a podcast that delivers valuable insights and actionable tips for navigating the ever-evolving world of WordPress. 

In this episode, host Brian Gardner and NitroPack Co-founders Mihail Stoychev and Georgi Petrov discuss WP Engine’s acquisition of NitroPack—what it means to customers and what’s next for them.

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Brian Gardner: Hey everybody, welcome back to Press This. I am your host, Brian Gardner, and today we have an extraordinary episode. We have historically brought in guests from the community, and today is unique because we have an agenda to share. Many of you who have followed WP Engine may know that we announced last week that WP Engine acquired NitroPack.

Today, we have very special guests, co-founders Georgi and Mihail, joining us to talk a little bit about the acquisition but, more importantly, about NitroPack itself, what it is, why it exists, and who it’s for. We want to share that with the audience because the founders behind the product have a great story, and the co-founders will share that.

Before we start, Georgi and Mihail, I will have you introduce yourselves separately; give us some context regarding your WordPress origin. But before we go there, congratulations. Congratulations to you both on a well-deserved acquisition. I know from personal experience, specifically with WP Engine acquiring StudioPress and our Genesis framework, that I have sat in the same seat you guys are in.

So I understand it’s a busy time and a lot is happening. So, thank you, first and foremost, for taking the time to be on the show. Mihail, let’s just start with you. A little bit of your WordPress origin story and then Georgi, and then we’ll get into how that led to NitroPack and go from there.

Mihail Stoychev: Hey Brian, thanks for having us. Pure pleasure. It’s been hectic last week, let me tell you. Talking about being very busy, we have been trying to be on the busy side for the past 14 years with Georgi. How NitroPak came to fruition: we had a big customer with a busy eCommerce website operating in the Middle East. That was back in 2011, 2012. So, we were working on a platform called OpenCard. And that was a platform of choice for this customer in particular. And the store was great. We made it. It was okay. But the speed around the website was never where the customer wanted. They would always complain about different types of fallbacks and other experiences, causing churn. So, what we did is we said we knew how to solve this. We created NitroPack. We called it NitroPack because it combined more than one optimization metric. So, we would smash and optimize the images.

So, we will minify the resources and take care of the CSS and HTML, and since it has more than one feature, we call it NitroPack. We created this concept in 2019 for WordPress since this is where the market is. We love open source and serving a much more extensive array of customers, which is how we came to exist in the WordPress store. Let Georgi continue the story from there.

Georgi Petrov: Yeah, just building upon what Mihail said when we launched NitroPack IO in 2019, what we wanted to achieve was to offer an all-in-one solution because it was too challenging to have CDN on one side, image optimization on another side, caching on a third side, and fonts optimization on the fourth side. So, we decided to combine everything in one product and go with NitroPack IO. So this is how the current and the big version of NitroPack was born, NitroPack IO.

Brian Gardner: I have been building WordPress websites since 2006, and one side of the web that I’ve never really gotten into is sort of this whole caching and speed and CDNs and stuff like that, mainly because I have never needed to use any of that. So because of that, I’m always a little bit behind the curve on understanding how caching works and how page speeds, things are compressed, and all of that stuff. So, it’s been fascinating for me to dive deeper into this once we announced the acquisition. And so, I’m curious about the creation of NitroPack. If you guys don’t mind, Georgi, we’ll start with you and then Mihail. Before NitroPack, what was your experience with WordPress, and how did you come to WordPress ahead of even the idea of creating NitroPack?

Georgi Petrov: Thanks for the question. We all witnessed fantastic progress in the WordPress ecosystem. My first touch with WordPress was in 2007 or 2008 when I built a WordPress website. Things have changed a lot since then. I also co-organized the first WordCamp in Bulgaria, where we invited Matt in 2009 or 2010; I am trying to remember the date.

And yeah, since then, things changed a lot, and since then, like me and Mihail, we started doing open source freemium, then we moved to SaaS in the software world and back to 2000. In 2018, we crossed paths again with WordPress, where we identified that NitroPack IO could greatly benefit WordPress as a platform by creating synergies by combining all the products available at that time in the market. Yeah, success was pretty close to launching. Since we launched, the community and the users have appreciated our solution, and it has started growing on a self-serve basis, completely like an online solution, an online marketing solution out of Bulgaria.

Mihail Stoychev: My first touch with WordPress was the website we built for my mom. I love you, Mom. We built that in 2012 or 2013. I can’t recall the exact year, but the website remains the same after many years. We’re just updating it. So it comes to speak to WordPress’s impact on the whole ecosystem, the whole internet.

Many things we take today for granted wouldn’t be here if they weren’t the stepping stones, and I believe WordPress is a huge stepping stone for everyone to appreciate today.

Brian Gardner: It’s funny how WordPress back in the day was so simple, and then it became complex and then offered just with it being open source, so many options and availability to sort of build into it and build out of it, which is undoubtedly what NitroPack is. I will admit this, I said. Being a novice when it comes to this sort of thing, what I love most about it is likely the foundation of the success you guys have had.

I’m going to read your website’s article about NitroPack. Because I think we should spend a few minutes just talking about it. And so, your website says NitroPack is an all-in-one cloud-based site speed solution that optimizes WordPress, WooCommerce, and custom-based websites. And this is the catch. It requires no coding or tech skills, so every website owner can set it up and see improvements in less than three minutes.

Now, that is a bold claim—one that I certainly think again helps with anybody because, like me, you don’t need the skills to do it. And as we’re sort of in this no-code WordPress evolution, let’s talk a little about the behind-the-scenes part of NitroPack. Like what exactly it does and then go into how it works and how a user can set it up and

I mean, it’s practically for anybody who owns a WordPress website and beyond; I realize that you guys, from my understanding, NitroPack and sort of the technology work outside of WordPress itself. Let’s talk a little bit, maybe Georgi; I’ll ask you specifically about the meat and potatoes, so to speak, of NitroPack and how it impacts websites.

Georgi Petrov: Great. Well, we are very different from everything else out there. We are different in how our technology is designed, which makes us very different.

So, when designing NitroPack, we boldly decided to remove all the heavy lifting and optimization operations from the hosting provider and put them on our servers in the cloud.

That was an excellent strategic and architectural decision because it allowed us to scale and apply much more significant optimizations than any other solution could provide. So, for example, heavy image optimizations, video optimizations, HTML optimization, and anything that is super heavy and cannot run on shared hosting providers are with us.

For the world, we are simply an API, and we have a simple WordPress connector that connects to this API. We do all the heavy lifting. We have our crawler, which crawls your website the way Google crawls your website. We index the website through different devices, create device-specific versions, and, in the end, the result is device-specific lightweight HTML files directly served to your visitors from us produced for you. That’s more or less how we operate and what our value is.

Brian Gardner: Now, at WP Engine, we found the value in partnering with you ahead of the acquisition. I don’t remember exactly how far back this goes, but we launched Page Speed Boost to our customers, which is a part of the technology behind NitroPack. We implemented that in a way that our customers could take advantage of, which gave us a value add and put us ahead of the competition.

Mihail, let me ask you this: Do you know the origin of that first part of the partnership? Can you speak to that with the current iteration of Page Speed Boost via NitroPack and what that means for our customers, specifically right now? Then, we can move into what’s next and what’s to come.

Mihail Stoychev: Yeah, that’s a great question, Brian. Thanks. We started based on our shared DNA that WP Engine’s fast hosting. Then NitroPack is a product that helps speed up many things to put some data behind this. So, there is this portal called Google Data Studio. Here, you can compare how the different platforms and caching solutions rank regarding passing Core Web Vitals. What are Core Web Vitals? This is Google’s way of showing how users experience a website once they land on it. So, this is slightly different from PageSpeed, which is a score. It’s an integer between one and 100.

Based on this score, you see how fast your website loads in a shared test. So it’s not like the real users, but it’s like a server that simulates how fast your website loads. This is the most important way for Google to see how users perform once they land on your website. So this is very, very important for us.

As we realized when we initially started talking with the WP Engine folks, it’s also quintessential for the WP Engine. When designing NitroPack, I could only step on what Georgi said. We realized that most users want to focus on creating a successful business, a successful blog, a successful news outlet, a gallery, a self-representation website, and a name, and they want to be as simple as possible. So, we designed NitroPack initially with a straightforward setup. You register on our website or download NitroPack from the WordPress extension directory, and then you create an account, click one button, and select the mode in which you would like everything cached. So please take it as the drive selector on the car.

Where you have comfort, you have fast, we have nitro, ludicrous modes, different modes, depending on how aggressive you would like to go, and then you’re all set. So this is where our promise for three minutes comes from. When we initially started thinking in the same direction with WP Engine, our cornerstone decision was, can we make a solution that is as simple as possible for the end user, where they can get immediately visible benefits on the way that their website loads and this should happen with a single click of a button? So this is how we came up with NitroPack OneClick: You need only one click to set it up. WP Engine loves our proposed solution, and this is how PageSpeed Boost was born by NitroPack.

The WP Engine audience took it very warm-heartedly. We saw significant adoption and benefits but only a little support, which is always good. So this is when we knew that, all right, this thing works. And we’re super happy to pilot it with one of the best hosting providers.

Brian Gardner: Well, we certainly appreciate that. One of the things I love most about WordPress and the open-source community is that there are so many different ways to be a part of it. And because it’s such a complex ecosystem for me, I love design. So it is my goal to beautify the web and to make it more beautiful, obviously functional,

You know, with you guys, it seems like, you know, you’ve set out to establish a faster web that loads more efficiently, which is more delightful for users to experience a website, obviously for things like Core Web Vitals and PageSpeed and all of that. It also accomplishes that. Do either of you have some origin story for what made you care about making the web faster?

Mihail Stoychev: I think we both do so. Georgi, why don’t you go first?

Georgi Petrov: Yeah, so we do have an origin story, and this story changed over time because the web changed over time. So, the problems we were facing on the web in 2013 were, I would say, about 50% different from the problems we’re facing right now in terms of performance. But the bottom line for us was that we wanted a more desktop-like experience on the web because the internet connections were slower then. So, it was an obvious problem to solve.

Also, browsers and computers were less capable, so it was straightforward to understand that it needed to be solved but could have been more easily solvable. Techniques like putting all the images into one image, loading only one resource, and showing only part of the resource on the front end were huge differentiators that improved the user experience.

In 2024, this performance site of web loading converted more to a user-centric performance, which means that now we are analyzing things like how the user is actually experiencing the web page, whether we are serving the visible part first and then delaying everything non-visible, and whether the user is interacting in the right place.

Is he getting responsive interactions and things like this? So, this is where the current performance focus is. In all cases, our focus is on helping the users experience faster loading, which has been our biggest motivator since the beginning.

Mihail Stoychev: I rate this 10 out of 10 in terms of a response. If I have to go back to when we started, throughout the evolution of humanity, people always wanted it bigger, faster, and better. So this is how we build this as a stepping stone towards what we try to achieve. We know how important it is to make the web faster.

After all, this was one of Google’s credos as well. They made it not only accessible, but we believe that they tried to make it faster as well with platforms in the face of WordPress as partners. We wanted to give our input into making this mission a reality. We chose speed in terms of a domain, and we just gave our best to be the best at it.

Brian Gardner: I appreciate what you guys have said, and Georgi, I really kind of love the call out of starting with desktop and transitioning to mobile because every aspect of WordPress, whether it be, you know, page loading or even design, you know, again, as a designer, the whole idea of responsive design mobile first and all of that sort of hits that that that crux of when things some switched over from like 50 % desktop to 50 % mobile and

It’s amazing. Especially going as granular as e-commerce and WooCommerce and ensuring things load fast from a search and user perspective. I appreciate the emphasis on following the trend of viewership on what devices. Again, mobile-first responsive design, intrinsic design, and all that, like, is the language I look at this all from. And so I remember even during the Genesis Framework days when we switched to a mobile-first style system. And, of course, the evolution of Gutenberg, the new block editor, and WordPress also has room for improvement, as we all can agree. However, the intrinsic nature of that block editor serves up the ability for people to design and build their websites.

With the time we have left. I want to shift over a bit into a Page Speed Boost for the acquisition. I will quote from our announcement about the partnership with WP Engine.

And so, having sold companies before, we’re highly selective about who we do business with, and our journey with WP Engine has reaffirmed that they’re the right fit for our team, our technology, and our customers, all of which are critical factors, by the way, at least when. I’ll jump into that quickly. So, for those listening, there are many considerations when you sell a company. Is the thing I’m selling getting valued? The money part of it matters.

But also the fit, the sort of transitional piece. In other words, will the company do what I hoped I could do with my product but decided I didn’t want to do it by myself or needed someone else to take the baton and run with it? In other words, are they going to see out the vision? And then also, and for me, this was crucial, and it was a delineating factor as to why the people mattered when we sold StudioPress to WP Engine.

I’ve always been a people person. I know you guys are people, people, people also. It sounds funny. But when I sold WP Engine with StudioPress, we had a relatively small team; maybe there were 15 or 20. The five of us partners decided not to come over with that transition. But the people who made up StudioPress, those who made it a success, the ones whose families depended on it, I insisted it was a deal breaker.

And so let’s talk a little bit less about the specifics regarding the money because that’s not important, and indeed, business is only between you and the company. But let’s talk about the decision to sell, kind of how you guys as founders came to that. Maybe some of the process. I wrestled with it because it was my baby when we sold, and handing that over is not always easy. Let’s talk a little bit about the process of the acquisition and then head into what’s next for both Nitro Pak and the people. I mean, you have a lot of folks on your About page, people who are part of the NitroPack company in various fashions.

We are infusing a few of your folks into our marketing team, and I’m looking forward to meeting them. And then a little bit about what’s next because I know what’s next for you guys is a little different than what’s next for NitroPack. So, let’s start with that. Mihail, maybe talk about how the actual Conversations took place and what considerations you guys had regarding selling to WP Engine?

Mihail Stoychev: In the beginning, it happened much faster than we had anticipated. So we just came from another exit and are on year one plus our journey. We got approached first to see if we could do something together.

We always believe this is the right way to be like a vet on culture. The same thing that you mentioned, Brian, is how you think the other side will be, you know, in a relationship because an acquisition is a relationship. Partnerships also involve a specific type of relationship. Things work well with Page Speed Boost and NitroPack OneClick. We started giving this a thought. And our logic was, well, we have Nord of 200,000 websites right now, and WP Engine has 1.5 million. We have 1 million websites as a North Star on our mind. What is the fastest way to go to 1 million websites?

Because, at the end of the day, when we boast about helping make the internet faster and improving WordPress in the capacity of what businesses need the most, we are also constrained by time. So, if we can speed up the process and partner with the best-in-breed provider, would this be a win for everyone?

Someone in a smaller company wanted to grow into a position we don’t have, and then we would tell them we don’t have it, so they would have to look elsewhere. Are we doing this person a favor, or are we just not taking care of them? We also considered the same considerations you mentioned about people on the map, and we thought, all right, what would be best for WordPress businesses?

How can we reach this one million website in the fastest manner? Who can carry on the legacy so NitroPack can continue existing as a tested and true brand? And what can we do to help our folks excel in their careers while we remain focused on something we love doing?

How can we maintain this thing that we are around and that we help avoid mistakes that might turn south and accelerate the mission to reach those goals? Those were the proper consideration parameters.

Is the player respected in the industry? Check mark. Is this a company that has already made acquisitions? So, are they going to take care of the folks properly? Yes. Can we expand the office? We are from Bulgaria, a small country in Southeast Europe. Can we bring a global player to the local market where they can grow and expand?

Last but not least, will this legacy stay, and will we be incredibly proud of where the company that acquired us in this case? We’re happy to say that WP Engine will take NitroPack in a few years, and we can say, my gosh, they’ve made it and even exceeded our expectations.

Brian Gardner: Well, Georgi, before you jump in, I will assure both of you, based on my experience, that the company culture at WP Engine is fantastic. The care for those coming in from an acquisition, in other words, the employees or contractors that come with the acquisition, everybody came over intact. Most of them have been here since the acquisition and have found their way through various parts of the company, just identifying opportunities and being recognized for their leadership skills. And so I love that six years after our acquisition, there are people in the company at very high levels who came through the studio press acquisition and are like proud parents. It’s like I knew my kids, who worked for us, were exceptional, skilled, and unique.

And it took the acquisition and the integration of those people and the identification of their, you know, skill sets and all that stuff. Every day we’re on calls, I love seeing the integration of the cultures, regardless of location, right? Some of ours were on the other side of the globe, which didn’t matter. And we made it work. And I know we have a considerable presence in Europe anyway, and we have a hub office, at least one. I assure you that those coming over with the acquisition will be well cared for.

Georgi Petrov: Thank you for sharing this, Brian. I can feel it. Honestly, I can feel it. It’s already been a few days, but I can feel it and am pleased about our move.

Brian Gardner: Good. One more call out before, Georgi, I’ll ask you. I love Mihail when you said acquisition is a relationship because it is. Often, it’s not; users, community folks, and everybody involved can detect when it’s not. And so I think WP Engine has always, through the acquisition of StudioPress, Atomic Block, ACF, and Flywheel, been like it is and always has been that way for us. So I feel very proud about that part of it. So Georgi, let me ask you, now that WP Engine is the owner of NitroPack and without necessarily going into trade secrets and all of that kind of stuff, where should, and I was asked this yesterday actually on one of our community agency partners’ calls. What does the future look like? What should folks expect from the togetherness that WP Engine and NitroPack will have now? From your understanding, because I assume there’s been some conversation around that, what should users expect moving forward? And then, after that, I want to know what you guys are going to personally do because I know you guys have already committed to working on the next thing, which is fantastic. What’s next for you guys?

Georgi Petrov: That’s a fantastic question because this is the same one for me. First, what do we expect from NitroPack, and where will our focus go? We want a better and more powerful NitroPack within WordPress and put jet engines on the existing NitroPack website. Our solution will stay open for any WordPress vendor out there. Yeah, that’s going to be the focus of NitroPack. And what’s next is actually what’s next complementing NitroPack, so we’re planning to launch a solution called Navigation AI. It was showcased on Google IO this year, and this solution will optimize navigation. It will predict the user’s following navigation, prepare and optimize it, and play well with NitroPack. So this will be a complementing solution, and we’ll continue building and innovating solutions related to actual user experience and improving it.

Brian Gardner: Excellent. Mihail, how about you? What about you guys? Are you guys working together on this project?

Mihail Stoychev: We are, so I think Georgi took the stage to introduce it on behalf of both of us. So that will be our, I don’t know, consecutive company we do together. We kind of already know our good sides. We know our responsibilities. So this is one of the advantages of creating things with Georgi. We have known each other since university.

If anyone out there is listening, they’re contemplating starting a business. That’s a great, great thing. Always look for a buddy you have trust in. And if you’re looking for a hosting provider, look no further than WP Engine.

Brian Gardner: That is the best mic drop we can do here. So, on that note, we’ll call this one a session. Georgi and Mihail, again, congratulations to you both on not your first exit but this exit in particular, as it affects me and the WP Engine and WordPress communities. I wish you guys both the very best in Navigation AI. Thank you for sharing that a little bit.

I will follow that journey to see what you guys are up to and how that works. As a reminder, the Press This podcast delivers valuable insights and actionable tips for navigating the ever-evolving world of WordPress. I am your host, Brian Gardner. I am a WordPress advocate here at WP Engine. I love exploring topics within the community and bringing in folks from the community. I also greatly champion WordPress’s direction with the block editor. We will talk to you again soon. Thanks again for listening. Have a great day.

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Welcome to Press This, a podcast that delivers valuable insights and actionable tips for navigating the ever-evolving world of WordPress. 

In this episode, host Brian Gardner and WP Engine Senior Product Manager Iain Poulson discuss the ACF annual survey, last year’s results, and what’s to come with WordPress 6.6.

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Brian Gardner: Hey everybody, welcome back to the Press This podcast. In the last episode, Sam and I talked about the beauty of community, why it’s essential, and why your WordPress product and service needs a community wrapped around it. And so we’re taking a pivot this week. However, we’re still going to talk about products, and we’re talking about community. 

And so this week, we will be talking about Advanced Custom Fields. I am joined today by Senior Product Manager Iain Poulson who came over as part of the Delicious Brains acquisition just over two years ago. 

And so, Iain, first of all, welcome to the show. Second, give a little background about who you are and how you play a role in ACF. From there, we’ll overview ACF for those new to the show or the Advanced Custom Fields plugin. It’s been around for several years, and hundreds of thousands of sites use it. So, let’s start with that.

Iain Poulson: Yeah, great. Yeah, thanks, Brian. Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here to chat with you. As you said, I came across it from Delicious Brains two years ago in June. I’ve been working for Delicious Brains since 2014 across the various plugins as a developer, you know, on WP Migrate and WP Offload Media. Then, I transitioned into a more product manager role. Around 2021, we acquired the Advanced Custom Fields plugin from Elliot and took that on.

And then, obviously, a year later, Delicious Brains and all the plugins, including ACF, came across to WP Engine, and I came across and continued to be the product manager for ACF. So yeah, it’s been a wild few years because, as an ACF user myself, most of the sites I’ve built in the past, ever since discovering it, have been using ACF. So it’s great and scary at the same time to be working on such a big plugin with an extensive user base, really well loved, really powerful, but something that I am personally, you know, I love it, I use it. So yeah, it’s great.

And in WP Engine, a perfect home has been found to continue to invest in, grow it, and make it even more awesome. I say that a lot, but it is already excellent. We’re happy to build, work on, and make it even more awesome. So yeah, and this is something we might touch on and could probably do a whole episode on, but just ACF in a WordPress world that has, over the last couple of years, been ever-changing: the block editor, the site editor, the way we build WordPress sites, the way content editors use WordPress to edit their site content, and how the landscape has shifted quite a lot, but ACF is changing and growing with that landscape. So yeah, it’s an exciting time, and ACF is doing well.

Brian Gardner: That is good to hear. So I also came over for full context. Well, I didn’t come over to WP Engine through the acquisition of StudioPress at the time, although I did come a few years later after the transition took place; I also was part of, you know, the acquisition of a product acquisition by WP Engine, and in part, a lot of it had to do with the whole idea of Gutenberg which—so the acquisition took place six years ago, and so our team at Copyblogger wasn’t sure the direction of WordPress and a little bit hesitant on investing as much as we should have given all of the things that we needed to do to compete in the space. And so we decided to sell it at that point. And I will set the table even more so because of the stuff I have historically done through WordPress.

I am not an ACF power user or power developer. I know enough about it because it’s been around forever, and I’ve been around WordPress forever. And so I ask this question mainly for the folks who might be new to the podcast or the plugin, but also for my own sake: What is ACF, how is it powerful, and why was it widely adopted? Then, we’ll use that to introduce where we’ll stop and start over that sentiment. And then, we’ll dovetail into why we’re here on the show, which is what most people will get excited about.

Iain Poulson: Yeah, sure. Yeah, ACF is one of those plugins that I think most people who have come across it and use it now would think, can think back to the time that they were either shown it by a colleague or they were explained about it by someone else, and they had a kind of a light bulb moment of, that’s what it does. That’s why I want to use it. And it’s one of these things that, being a big plugin, you would have heard about it but not necessarily used it. So, having that moment, and for me, that was when I worked many years ago for an agency building WordPress sites.

I think, obviously, back then, block edits were slightly different, but back then, when it was just the classic editing interface, you know, you were editing a page or a post or a custom post type, and all you had was the post title and the post content field. And that is the TinyMCE editor, the WYSIWYG field. But not all data, like the things people have on websites, fit nicely into that title, text field, and text area, tinyMCE editor. 

So, people have been doing this with custom fields for ages in WordPress. I’ve created a custom post type for a movie, and now I need to add some other data that just doesn’t fit into that. I need the year it was created and the director; I want to add some structured data.

As a developer, I always looked at what I could build with WordPress. You could add meta boxes to the editing area, save that data when it gets added by an editor, and code all that out because WordPress has those hooks and filters. And, as a developer, you think, great, I can do that myself. But then, as soon as you realize that there’s a plugin that allows you to create this editing experience by saying, right, well, my movie post type, for example, I’m going to carry on with the movie analogy, the movie post type needs 10 bits of other data.

So, ACF allows me to create: Here’s a text field for the year. Here is a dropdown showing all other custom post types of directors I’ve already made. I’ve filled out many director people, and I can drop down and select the director from there. You’ve got lots of different editing experiences for those data types. So, it selects checkboxes, radio buttons, true-false switches, simple text fields, text areas, and WYSIWYG fields.

Then it becomes more powerful, and, well, here, I want to select some images for this movie. You can put in simple image fields or a gallery field type in ACF Pro that allows you to select multiple photos. You can put a video link, a YouTube link for the trailer, and all this stuff you wouldn’t have in WordPress when editing a post type. So you have this: ACF is like a three-part tool where the first part is the developer or the site builder defining all these fields and saying: right, well, I want these fields in this field type, and I want it to show up when you’re editing the movie type, post type. 

And then you’ve got the second part, the editing experience. Now, you can be a content editor; it might still be the same person who’s built the fields. Still, it might also be a different person who will go and add a movie or edit a film. They get this utterly different editing experience where it’s not just post title and the field; it’s everything else. The ten fields have been defined for you, and you can populate that data. And then you’ve got to show that data on the frontend. So, in classic templates, you’d be bringing in that data that’s been saved, and you would be showing it in your single hyphen-movie.php template.

That level of control of designing and editing experience is excellent, and then using that data is just mind-blowingly simple. And when I was working for an agency, I just thought: wow, okay, I get this now. And I love the power that WordPress gives me to put in custom things, use hooks and filters, and have that developer ego of, well, I can build this myself. Still, what is the point of doing this when it already exists and I’ve got this easy interface to create the fields? Then, it puts this interface for the editing experience, which would take me a long time to make as a developer. And it’s reusable.

You don’t necessarily have to use the interface to create and define the fields. You can do it in JSON. You can do it in PHP, making it easy to store it in version control and copy and paste it between projects. So yeah, there’s a tremendous amount of power that comes with just being different, and this is the thing I’ve thought of ACF as a developer tool to make developers’ lives more accessible for a long time. Still, it gives developers the power to create an incredible content editing experience for site editors. These people are, you know, the authors, the admins, the people that will be, you know, adding those post pages and custom post types.

ACF is a powerful tool that allows you to make those editing experiences great. And now we’re in a block world, a Gutenberg world, and 5.0 dropped. Was it 2018 or something like that? Elliot created what are called ACF blocks within ACF Pro. It was a way of creating custom blocks for the block editor with just PHP with fields; maybe you want to add some data to these blocks. 

So when your editor makes their content, they drag a block on. They need to fill out an image for the hero, a title, and a text area for this hero sort of block; as it were, you use ACF to define those fields, and then you create a PHP template to render the output that gets shown in the editor and on the frontend when the site’s viewed.

ACF has moved into the block world as of 2018, and that seems like a long time ago, but you know, it’s still relevant today in a block and a full-site editing world. So yeah, it’s all about editing data, and those sorts of editing experiences are even better and more accessible for developers; that’s the thing because it’s super simple to get started, even in creating custom blocks. If you need to get more familiar with ACF, there’s much to dig into.

Brian Gardner: It is no secret that I advocate for the future of WordPress in the sense of the block editor, block themes, and all of that. I also host a call weekly on Fridays called Build Mode, where members of the WordPress community, agencies, freelancers, and product builders show up. It’s an unofficial mastermind where we talk about things, some personal, but also like WordPress, the changes, how it relates to our business, and so on.

Believe it or not, as I advocate for the modern WordPress experience, the block editing experience, and using the site editor to build websites, the number one reason I hear people say, I’m not ready for it yet, which I continuously hear. It’s sometimes exhausting, but it’s also really inspiring because there are many people who, I think, and we’ll get to this point later today. So, the number one reason why people are hesitant to dive into the WordPress block editor is that the whole experience is not because of other page builders.

It’s not because they use Elementor or Bricks, Oxygen, Kadence, or whatever, even though I always hear that. The first reason is that I have my own system and use ACF to build my websites. I can’t do it without ACF, which is excellent from our perspective. Because it means they’re customers, they’re using the product. 

And I’ll admit, even a few years ago, I wondered what a block-based world would be, and I don’t answer this question because we want to dive into the matters at hand first: what does it look like to intersect ACF in a block-based world? Does one cannibalize the other? Do they coexist? Is there a way for them to work harmoniously?

And again, I’ll let you speak to that, and I’ve been encouraged by what I’ve seen from the team within the last few months, up to a year. But before we get there, the reason we’re here, one of the reasons, and this helps us determine the roadmap of where we go, is this thing called the ACF Annual Survey. 

Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe last year was the first year that we put it on, and so I’m going to ask you, what is this ACF survey, why does it matter, who is it for, and how do we use the information?

Iain Poulson: You’re right; last year was the first-ever survey of ACF users. We’ve touched on it and the massive ACF user base already. Over 2 million active installs for the free version on the WordPress.org repository. We’ve got a more significant number of that for Pro installs. We’ve got a huge user base, and the community is excellent. We’ve got forums, we’ve got Slack channels, we’ve got Facebook groups, multiple Facebook groups. We’ve got a flourishing and helpful user base.

But we’ve also touched on the fact that there’s quite a diverse spread of how people use ACF. You mentioned it a minute ago: people use ACF in their way of building. It’s a site editing experience, like a pseudo-page builder. It’s typical with the flexible content field that you get with ACF Pro. That’s one way people use it classically, just populating and putting fields on the edit post screen. You’ve got people that use an Elementor on other page builders. There are a massive number of page builders out there who integrate well with ACF.

So, you’re using Elementor to build your sites, but you need structured data and extra data, and ACF and Elementor work well together. And as I’ve mentioned, we’ve got people building custom blocks with ACF. So they’re in the block editor world. They’re using WordPress in this modern way but using ACF. WP Engine has headless WordPress with Atlas, and ACF is kind of fundamental to that technology stack of modeling out content and putting that data into content models, custom post types, that is, custom fields, and using that data through WP GraphQL to put that into a headless frontend.

We’ve got what we say in our Chat Friday sessions, which are our two weekly open office hours, every two-week session. There are many ways to use WordPress and many ways to use WordPress with ACF. So, from our point of view, we want to support everybody in their ways of doing WordPress site building with ACF, but we don’t have an understanding of how that split; maybe if you say we’ve got five different ways to WordPress with ACF, what does that number look like?

How are people using the product? Are they just using it for custom fields? We added custom post types and custom taxonomy registration last year. There is a form element of ACF. As product people, especially product people within the WordPress space, we don’t understand usage, like telemetry data and WordPress.org for free plugins. It only gives you a little. So it would help if you rolled your own, which we still need to do.

So, the survey was an idea that we had internally. We just thought, do you know what? The user base is so extensive that we could have an excellent data set here to understand not just ACF plugin usage but also the landscape of WordPress development right now. Year on year, if we do this annually, we can see changes. How are people building with WordPress?

We asked questions like: Are you a freelancer? Are you an agency? Do you work with brands? How many sites do you build? What type of sites are you building? Are you building classic WordPress sites? Are you building block-based? Are you a page builder? Builder? to try to get that picture of WordPress usage. 

But then we dive into more specifics around ACF to say: Here are all our field types; let us know how often you use them. Here are the ACF features; let us know how often you use them. Here are third-party ACF extensions; like do you use those? What are the page builders you use? 

I aim to understand how ACF is used and by what kind of developers it is used. So yeah, it went out last year. We had a good response. We tried to shout about it in every place possible within the WordPress ecosystem, and we had over 2,000 people take the survey, for which we were blown away and very grateful. We’ve got the results. We can link these in the show notes, but we’ve got the 2023 results up on the website with complete statistics of what was answered and a lovely infographic showing all the details. And we’re rerunning it this year.

So this is a call to all ACF users listening. Please take the survey and let us know again how you use ACF. We’d love to see how that changes year on year. To answer one of your specific questions there, it’s for anybody who comes across ACF in their day-to-day life. It will predominantly be ACF developers, people who build websites with ACF. People may be using ACF because they’re content editors and know that ACF powers their site. So that’s good to hear, but it will predominantly be people building with ACF. The survey, for us, is primarily from a product point of view. It gives us an excellent idea of where to focus on development for the future to help shape the roadmap.

If, for example, one feature gets much more love than anticipated, we can double down and add more. Or, inversely, we can ignore things a little bit more if they’re not as used as, you know, actual data usage, which I think is helpful to shape the roadmap, of course. The survey is one of the channels of information we use to prioritize features and improvements in the coming months, quarters, and years. 

We get a ton of stuff through email, Twitter, and everything else, but the surveys are excellent and a good place to get that data. It’s exciting to see how things change year after year, especially with the changing landscape of WordPress and how people will probably move to a block and a site editing experience as time goes on.

But yeah, it’s beneficial for us. We would appreciate your help if you’ve got time to take it. It should take less than 10 minutes, depending on how quickly you go. But yeah, that’s the survey. It’s open now. We’ll put the link in the show notes. And we will be running it. We’ll be there until the end of July. And then, we will go away and crunch the numbers and work out a new blog post with the results to share. And that’s likely to come a couple of months later.

Brian Gardner: So if you are an ACF user, power user developer, or anybody building a site and want to help us steer the future of the product, as well as yourself, also help steer the product. We’ll put links into the WP Engine blog post transcript to house this particular show. But if you’re listening and just Google the ACF survey, the number one result comes up. That’s the easiest, quickest way. So, as you’re listening to this event, just Google the ACF survey. Iain is typing it in to confirm that what I’m saying is true.

Iain Poulson: Yeah, I like that. Dominating the search and search results, yeah.

Brian Gardner: Yes, SEO for the win. So go ahead and fill that out. And again, he said, we’ll wrap this up towards the end of the month. Let’s talk about two things regarding the time that we have left. 

Let’s talk briefly about what we found and what our team discovered through the 2023 survey. So maybe some high level, some statistics, perhaps a nugget or two of things that you and the team weren’t expecting, but came back as a, you know, a mass cry to do X. And then after that, we’ll talk a little bit about like, what does this look like as we go forward, right? 2024 and beyond—we’re halfway through 2024.

WordPress is moving as quickly as it doesn’t feel that way, but because I sit in GitHub all day, I see all of the motion going through the WordPress block insight-building experience. So, we’re in hyperdrive right now with the development of the product as a whole. Let’s talk about the 2023 results a bit, and then what does this look like without Getting too much in the weeds? What does ACF look like moving forward?

Iain Poulson: The survey from an ACF point of view was good to hear some overall statistics around people saying that ACF is essential to their development workflow and that 90% of people said it was important to their workflow. 70% of people use ACF on all of their WordPress sites. So it’s not necessarily a tool where you pick and choose for different sites. It’s foundational to the site build. We’ve got this.

It was a good one, so we can talk about it more. We were asking more general questions about WordPress, and 91% of people said they’re likely to continue building with WordPress, which I found a pleasing statistic because, you know, I’ve been in the WordPress world for ages. ACF is part of WordPress. WP Engine is part of WordPress. As WordPress people, we want WordPress to continue to grow and thrive. It helps because we want to build sites with WordPress, but we have products that rely on WordPress.

I’ve had issues with WordPress’ direction in the past, sort of Gutenberg, and how things have moved quite quickly, and I think those are unsettled people in general with WordPress. I feel like the block editor and the site editor have reached a level of maturity now that people are becoming much more comfortable with it. Seeing that 91% of people are going: okay, there is no fundamental flaw here in terms of people going; I’m just going to use some other great CMS because WordPress is still that great CMS. Seeing that positivity moving forward was interesting.

And other things, from a developer point of view, 63% of people use version control for their code base. That’s almost a surprisingly high number because I thought many individual developers still needed to be convinced why version control or using Git was a good idea, but that’s a high number, and that’s good. Going back to ACF, 98% of people are comfortable updating ACF to the latest version, which is a testament to the team in terms of people not being too worried about bugs or issues when they update. There’s that level of security, especially if it is treated as a foundational plugin in their stack. So they depend on it being reliable, but that’s a good, I guess, kind of a customer satisfaction score.

Talking around it, with WP Engine products, 40% of people use Local for their site development. So, the Local application for developing WordPress sites locally, which is part of WP Engine’s sort of family of products, is excellent to hear. And I think, you know, it’s still the best, and it’s still something I use. WP Migrate is high up there under the question of what the most common deployment method is.

Sadly, FTP is still pretty high, with 62% of the respondents saying FTP, but WP Migrate was a plugin that got 25% of the votes. So yeah, there’s some exciting stuff in that 2023 survey. 

And seeing the difference over time, especially this year, will be interesting because, yeah, as WordPress people, I think you live in a bit of an echo chamber on Twitter. And as you say, you’re in GitHub a lot for WordPress development. You get a little bit wrapped up in that area. But if we start seeing massive changes in the satisfaction of WordPress or the satisfaction of ACF, I think the survey is the best place to gauge that. So yeah, I’m looking forward to seeing the results this year.

Brian Gardner: I’ll mention this during our Build Mode calls, as most of the people who are on those calls, we usually have 20 to 25 every single week. Almost all of them use ACF because whenever I talk about something, somebody says, well, when I use ACF with X theme or builder or whatever, it’s fun to hear people’s experiences. 

And again, I think you mentioned this earlier. It is a very loyal group of users. Because in WordPress, right? We saw that with the Genesis framework. We see that with even people using Local. When people find their stack, and it works well, they will fight for it. And so, that being said, let’s, let’s head into 2024 and beyond.

You mentioned that there were ACF blocks. What does it look like? I can only imagine, to some extent, that there might be some people who may feel that there’s a threat to ACF because of the direction of WordPress, and I don’t necessarily think that’s true. Many people may think that because it has to be one way or the other. But as you said earlier, something that Sam, our colleague, always says, there are many ways to WordPress, make everybody feel comfortable by telling us that ACF is not going anywhere, that there’s a great future as it coincides with the development of WordPress, and so on.

Iain Poulson: Yeah, yeah, exactly that. It’s not one way or the other. It’s not ACF or WordPress blocks. ACF Blocks is a feature that, as I said earlier in 2018, Elliot got just before WordPress 5.0 dropped with Gutenberg. It was arguably the bridge that Core could have done at the time, but there was a big push to React, and blocks are built in React.

And there’s a vast upskilling that is required from developers to suddenly go from being a PHP-only CMS, apart from a HTML and JQuery and CSS, to suddenly diving straight into building things with React. So ACF blocks are that bridge for people who want to develop custom blocks for the block editor just with PHP, not having to dive into React and React tooling, and making sure things are compatible as Gutenberg versions roll into Core very quickly.

Core changes every time now, and there are backward compatibility issues if you’ve built on custom blocks. However, the ACF blocks feature is probably as we move halfway through 2024, and the block in the site editor is a big part of WordPress. ACF blocks are probably our most prominent feature of ACF Pro, the premium version of ACF because it is now an indispensable tool for people to move into the block world.

And as we talk about many ways to WordPress, some people are, and I think Brian, you there, are very much a Core native WordPress person; you’re building custom blocks the way you want them, or you create with native blocks. But there’s undoubtedly a vast number of ACF users and agencies that don’t want to spend the time and money building everything custom in React. They’ve got a workflow in ACF that has matured and crossed over into the world with ACF blocks.

So they know that they can rely on ACF as a tool to create custom blocks. We take care of the compatibility. So, if you build a custom block with ACF blocks, it won’t break in between WordPress versions because we are handling that sort of compatibility layer. We make sure things don’t break rather than you having to do. However, the speed of block development with ACF blocks is much faster; therefore, it will be cheaper. You do not necessarily have to hire React developers. You can continue to use the same developers you use.

The surveys were another excellent data point for us to understand that actual block usage with ACF blocks is extensive. It’s bigger than perhaps I thought initially. 50% of people using the block editor build blocks with ACF blocks. The survey is for ACF users but could be ACF-free and for pro users. However, a large number of folks are building with ACF blocks. In the last two years, I’ve spoken to multiple large agency buildings of enterprise-level WordPress sites with ACF blocks at the heart of their stack.

So yeah, ACF is going nowhere. If anything, ACF will do what it always has done:

• Enrich WordPress.
• Make it more accessible for developers.
• Make it easier to develop.
• Make it a more rounded CMS with the ability to add structured data and custom field data, and make it much more accessible than WordPress allows you to out of the box.

As that changes, we will continue to grow and build with the block editor.

We had it in ACF, and I can’t remember exactly what it was. It was 6.2, our version was compatible with WordPress 6.5, and we had block binding support. So, if you wanted to use the block bindings functionality that came into WordPress 6.5 to bring custom data to block attributes or block values, you could also extend that to ACF custom data.

So, we’re always following Core as closely as possible and ahead of time. We’ve got a couple of developers or engineers on the team who are very active in Core. Gutenberg, GitHub repos, we understand what’s coming and ensure compatibility with the block bindings API and the interactivity API. We’re testing with WordPress 6.6 and ensuring ACF blocks will always work. We’ve got stuff coming in ACF 6 .4, our next major version that will be coming later this year, to improve ACF blocks even more.

The historical nature of ACF Blocks and the technical debt that I guess you have gotten over many years since 2018 means that the editing experience of editing for a content editor using ACF blocks isn’t as aligned with the Core user experience and sort of the UI interface as we’d like, but we’re making a push to improve that in 6 .4 for ACF. So, editing text fields and text editor fields will be much more of a native experience than you would expect for native blocks.

We can create custom blocks and register them in ACF’s UI. So, rather than registering it in PHP, make your PHP template on the side and maybe create the block definition with the block .json format we support. That allows us to ensure that ACF blocks always inherit all of the settings, attributes, and goodness of native blocks.

Instead of doing that all in code, if you are a kind of a, you prefer to point and click in the UI, like we’ve added support in ACF 6.2 to register options pages only in the UI; you don’t have to use code. Doing that for custom blocks will be game-changing for these people. 

So that’s coming in 6.4. So, we want to continue making ACF the only thing people will always install if they use it for custom data. It doesn’t have to be a decision of like, well, I’m building a block-based site, so therefore I can’t, no, it’s the place you go to develop custom blocks, and it’s quick, it’s simple, and yeah, we’ll continue to make it as compatible as possible as WordPress grows and we grow.

Brian Gardner: If I boil this down to three things, show everything we discussed. These are those three things. 

• One, there are a lot of people using ACF, which is excellent. 
• Two, we have a survey that is out currently, demonstrating our commitment to investing in the future of ACF and where WordPress is going. So those two things are powerful. Having a developer community and a user base of folks willing to take a survey and help dictate the future of the product is fantastic. 
• The third thing that I mentioned is that the future is bright with WordPress and with ACF. 

We’ve got engineers here on our team who are dedicated, as Iain said, to follow along with the project and are on the frontline development of both WordPress and our ACF product. So, in a nutshell, is it safe to say that it’s all good? But bumps will happen for those wondering what ACF’s future looks like in a WordPress block-based world. I think we’re good. 

You’ve convinced me not to need it because I know what’s behind the scenes. However, I hope that people who are using ACF will continue to use ACF and feel confident in their decision. It powers millions of websites. It’s used by thousands or hundreds of thousands of users.

And so it’s kind of a freight train that’s just in motion. It has been for some time and will be as much as we can look into the future.

Iain Poulson: Your three points are correct. I believe the last thing I’d add is that, as you said, a freight train, we’re moving, we are not standing still, and we’re growing with WordPress. But I think it is crucial to people who maybe haven’t adopted WordPress from a block editor point of view and are still using the classic editor, maybe, or they’re using page builders or whatever. I think we try to make precise every time we speak to customers and users that we’re still pretty agnostic to how we expect people to build. We are not saying that just because WordPress is doing this and we are following along closely, that’s the way we want to force people to build.

We are still very aware that ACF is a Swiss Army knife and are trying to continue supporting people. So, if you’re using Elementor to build with WordPress and you’re using ACF, that is something that we will continue to support. If you’re using the flexible content field to make your kind of simple editing experience for your clients, that will still get investment and improvements. We recognize that the block editor is a big part of the WordPress landscape and will continue to be more significant. So, of course, we’re putting investment behind that as well. It’s just, yeah, we are agnostic, but we’re, yeah, we’re a freight train, not a steamroller. I think I’m mixing everything there, but yeah, that was my last point.

Brian Gardner: That is the majestic mic drop by Iain Poulson, senior product manager at WP Engine, overseeing the ACF Advanced Custom Fields product. Iain, thank you for coming on the show. This helps spark some interest in people taking the survey and dictating the future, which will help shape the future of ACF.

As a reminder, the Press This podcast is where I dive into the heart of WordPress and deliver valuable insights and actionable tips for navigating the ever-evolving world of WordPress. One of the things I get to do here at my job as a WordPress advocate at WP Engine is dive into the community and bring them into the show, which will happen. We will talk about everything from the block editor to building a WordPress business. 

Until next time, thanks again for listening, and take that survey.

Hopefully you've now see what makes wp engine hosting different. If WP Engine is of interest and you'd like more information, please do make contact or take a look in more detail here.

 

Credit: Original article published here.

Our view at Stack - we've been using WP Engine in our business for 12 years so that should say it all! WP Engine offers optimized performance, enterprise-grade security, award-winning support, unique WordPress features, scalability, and developer trust. So what makes wp engine hosting different? If you want the best hosting then WP Engine is the answer 🚀🌟

AUSTIN, Texas—JULY 18, 2024—WP Engine, a global web enablement company providing premium WordPress products and solutions, today announced its acquisition of NitroPack, an all-in-one SaaS solution for improving site speed and performance metrics, including Google’s Core Web Vitals.

With an installed base spanning more than 219,000 websites, NitroPack fills a critical need as a comprehensive website performance solution that empowers users with intuitive automation for frontend site speed optimizations with little to no technical expertise required.

“NitroPack exemplifies the technical ingenuity and performance optimizations required to meet today’s online demands,” said WP Engine Chairwoman and CEO Heather Brunner. “This single solution can replace multiple optimization tools, and hundreds of thousands of users have discovered its powerful combination of advanced performance improvements and ease of use. We are excited to add this technology suite to WP Engine’s industry-leading WordPress platform and products.”

Innovative, customer-driven results

NitroPack was previously introduced to WP Engine customers with the launch of Page Speed Boost, which leverages NitroPack’s proprietary WordPress optimization technology. The acquisition will further strengthen WP Engine’s website performance capabilities, providing customers with innovative features and flexibility for site optimization.

Since its launch, Page Speed Boost adoption has consistently grown with customers seeing significant improvements in Google Lighthouse scores, which measure Core Web Vitals. These include a 34% average improvement in desktop scores and a 132% average improvement in mobile scores.

Similar improvements have also been seen across NitroPack’s wider customer base. Software provider, OfficeRnD experienced a 12.5% boost in key page conversions and a 10% increase in overall website conversion rate after implementing NitroPack on its website. Additionally, the site’s mobile performance score improved to over 90, and it passed all Core Web Vitals, significantly enhancing SEO visibility and user experience.

These customer results align with NitroPack’s mission to provide easy access to world-class performance, and support its founders’ vision for a faster, more accessible web.

“Over the past year, our partnership with WP Engine has highlighted our shared vision and values. We are both passionate about making websites faster,” said NitroPack Co-founder and CEO Georgi Petrov.

“Having sold companies before, we’re highly selective about who we do business with, and our journey with WP Engine has reaffirmed that they’re the right fit for our team, our technology, and our customers. This acquisition is more than a business transaction, it’s the culmination of a relationship built on trust, shared goals, and a mutual commitment to innovation.”

Differentiated technology

NitroPack’s advanced technology drives impressive results through robust automation and optimizations for superior page load times and overall site performance.

Key features include proprietary speed algorithms, advanced caching, and a built-in global CDN, which enable users to achieve faster load times without writing code or relying on developer resources.

“NitroPack’s technology makes it easier to ensure faster load times while giving developers time back to focus on more important projects,” said WP Engine SVP and Chief Product Officer Ezinne Udezue. “The acquisition will enable WP Engine’s customers to harness this technology more broadly, as future innovations will allow them to tailor NitroPack’s features to their specific site needs.”

About WP Engine

WP Engine empowers companies and agencies of all sizes to build, power, manage, and optimize their WordPress websites and applications with confidence. Serving 1.5 million customers across 150+ countries, the global technology company provides premium, enterprise-grade solutions, tools, and services, including specialized platforms for Managed WordPress and Headless WordPress, industry-tailored eCommerce and agency solution suites, and developer-centric tools like Local, Advanced Custom Fields, and more. WP Engine’s innovative technology and industry-leading expertise are why 8% of the web visits a WP Engine-powered site daily. Learn more at wpengine.com.

Contact

WP Engine

Victoria Berryhill

[email protected]

832.492.0305

Hopefully you've now see what makes wp engine hosting different. If WP Engine is of interest and you'd like more information, please do make contact or take a look in more detail here.

 

Credit: Original article published here.

Our view at Stack - we've been using WP Engine in our business for 12 years so that should say it all! WP Engine offers optimized performance, enterprise-grade security, award-winning support, unique WordPress features, scalability, and developer trust. So what makes wp engine hosting different? If you want the best hosting then WP Engine is the answer 🚀🌟

From its humble beginnings as a blogging tool to its current status as a sophisticated web design powerhouse, WordPress has continually evolved, shaping the future of web development. This transformation has led to the emergence of a new era driven by groundbreaking features and unparalleled design capabilities.

Launched initially as a simple content creation platform, WordPress has steadily incorporated advanced features, becoming a leading tool in web design. Today, it stands at the forefront of a new era in digital design, poised to redefine what is possible.

To fully appreciate these advancements, it’s essential to explore the history of WordPress design and understand how the four dimensions—Width, Depth, Reach, and Height—correlate to its four distinct eras.

The four dimensions of WordPress design

Width: Versatility and range

Focusing on the expanding range of available themes and plugins, WordPress slowly became a versatile tool for various use cases. 

Early adopters could leverage a wide array of customization options, transforming WordPress into a powerful platform for bloggers and content creators without needing coding skills. This versatility laid the foundation for WordPress’s wide-ranging applicability.

Depth: Sophisticated customization

As WordPress matured, introducing custom themes and plugins allowed for deeper personalization. This era, known as the WordPress Revolution, enabled users to make extensive modifications, tailoring functionalities to meet specific needs. 

The ability to transform their sites extensively made WordPress a robust platform capable of evolving beyond its original blogging roots.

Reach: Expanding capabilities

With the advent of intuitive page builders like WPBakery, Beaver Builder, and Elementor, WordPress expanded its reach significantly. 

These tools empowered users to create complex, visually stunning websites without writing a single line of code. These innovations broadened WordPress’s appeal and usability across various industries and applications, making it an indispensable tool in web development.

Height: Pinnacle of design quality

In the Gutenberg era, the focus shifted towards elevating design quality and user experience. Full Site Editing (FSE) pushed the boundaries of what could be achieved with WordPress, enabling users to create sophisticated layouts effortlessly. 

Even those without coding knowledge could achieve professional-quality results using simple drag-and-drop functionality, marking a significant leap forward in web design.

Examining these dimensions provides a deeper understanding of WordPress’s continual transformation and innovation. Each has played a crucial role in shaping the four distinct eras of WordPress design.

The four eras of WordPress design

The four eras of WordPress design represent key phases in its evolution, each defined by groundbreaking innovations and shifts in user capabilities. 

Each era marks a significant step in WordPress’s journey toward becoming a comprehensive and sophisticated web design tool.

Era #1: The dawn of WordPress (May 27, 2003)

The first era, focused on blogging, exemplifies the “Width” dimension. During this period, WordPress expanded its range of themes and plugins, making it a versatile tool for bloggers with various needs. 

Competing with platforms like Blogger and Typepad, this era broadened WordPress’ base, allowing anyone to start a blog quickly and customize it extensively with numerous themes and plugins.

Era #2: The WordPress Design Revolution (2006—2012)

In the second era, WordPress demonstrated the “Depth” dimension. This period marked the revolutionary introduction of themes and plugins that allowed for extensive customization. Competing with Drupal, Joomla, and Movable Type, users could now delve deeply into the platform’s functionalities, tailoring their sites to specific needs and preferences. 

The depth of customization available during this era was unprecedented, transforming WordPress from a simple blogging tool into a versatile content management system.

Era #3: The rise of page builder design (2012—2018)

The third era of WordPress design highlighted the “Reach” dimension with the rise of page builders. Tools like WPBakery, Beaver Builder, and Elementor extended WordPress’s reach by enabling users to create complex, visually appealing websites without writing code. 

These page builders offered an intuitive interface that made it easier for users to design their sites, broadening the appeal WordPress had across different industries and applications.

Era #4: The Gutenberg design frontier (2018—present)

In the current era, WordPress embodies all four dimensions: Width, Depth, Reach, and Height. The introduction of Gutenberg, the block editor, and Full Site Editing has pushed the boundaries of what WordPress can achieve. 

Competing with platforms like Squarespace, Wix, Webflow, and Framer, this era focuses on elevating design quality, incorporating advanced features, and delivering a superior user experience. Gutenberg’s block-based approach allows for more flexibility and innovation in web design, making WordPress a sophisticated tool poised for excellence.

The release of WordPress 6.6

WordPress continues to evolve, and the latest release, WordPress 6.6, introduces several new features that underscore its commitment to innovation and user experience. 

This version represents a significant milestone, blending advanced functionality with user-centric design principles to create a more versatile and powerful platform.

Here are the top features driving this new era of WordPress design:

Color palettes and typesets

WordPress 6.6 enhances design flexibility with support for multiple color palettes and typesets. This feature allows theme developers to define palettes and typesets that users can easily switch between, ensuring consistent branding while experimenting with different aesthetics.

Advanced design tools

New tools in WordPress 6.6 include editable shadow presets, negative margin controls, and the ability to set site background images. These features give users more control over design elements, enabling the creation of professional and polished websites. 

Editable shadow presets allow users to effortlessly add depth and dimension to their elements, while negative margins offer more control over spacing, allowing for precise adjustments in layout design.

Expanded Section Styles

The Block Style Variations API enables theme authors to define style options (Section Styles) for multiple blocks, streamlining customization and enhancing design flexibility. With just a few clicks, this feature enables users to apply predefined section styles, such as light or dark versions. 

By streamlining the customization process, users can effortlessly switch between different visual themes, ensuring a consistent and polished design across their websites.

Grid Layout for Group blocks

The new Grid layout variation for the Group block offers both “Auto” and “Manual” options, providing more flexibility in layout design without additional coding. The “Auto” option automatically generates grid rows and columns based on the minimum item width. 

In contrast, the “Manual” option allows users to specify the number of columns, offering more control over the layout.

Refined Font Library

Building on its debut in WordPress 6.5, the Font Library in version 6.6 continues to receive refinements and enhancements, ensuring a more robust and user-friendly experience. 

This update focuses on bug fixes and improvements based on user feedback, providing a smoother and more reliable experience.

Embracing the new era of WordPress design

WordPress has evolved from a simple blogging platform into a sophisticated design tool. Each era—from the early days of themes and plugins to the rise of page builders and the introduction of Gutenberg and the block editor—has added new dimensions to its capabilities. 

The latest WordPress release continues this evolution, offering enhanced capabilities that empower users to create stunning websites easily.

By choosing WordPress and its open-source nature, users gain the freedom to create without limits, enjoy the benefits of data ownership, and select their preferred WordPress hosting provider. 

This new era of WordPress design emphasizes equipping users with the tools and control to bring their visions to life while upholding the core values of autonomy, flexibility, and community-driven innovation.

The advancements in WordPress 6.6 highlight the platform’s commitment to continuous improvement and innovation. With new features enhancing functionality and aesthetics, WordPress remains a leader in web development. 

Whether you are a seasoned developer or a novice designer, WordPress provides the tools and flexibility to bring your vision to life, making it the go-to platform for building modern, dynamic websites.

As someone who has been designing WordPress websites for nearly 20 years, I have witnessed its remarkable evolution. Combining these powerful new tools with the enduring principles of open-source ensures that WordPress design will continue to thrive. It delivers a powerful and flexible ecosystem for creators everywhere, reinforcing its role as the premier choice for web development and beyond.

Hopefully you've now see what makes wp engine hosting different. If WP Engine is of interest and you'd like more information, please do make contact or take a look in more detail here.

 

Credit: Original article published here.

Our view at Stack - we've been using WP Engine in our business for 12 years so that should say it all! WP Engine offers optimized performance, enterprise-grade security, award-winning support, unique WordPress features, scalability, and developer trust. So what makes wp engine hosting different? If you want the best hosting then WP Engine is the answer 🚀🌟

As I stepped into the Infinity Convention Centre in Ottawa for the inaugural WordCamp Canada, I couldn’t help but feel a mix of excitement and nervousness. 

This was my first WordCamp, both as an attendee and a presenter, and I was eager to connect with fellow WordPress enthusiasts and learn from their experiences. Little did I know that the next three days would be a transformative experience.

The event, which took place from July 11 to 13, drew together WordPress professionals and users from across Canada and around the world. As I looked over the schedule, I noticed a significant number of presentations focused on WordPress’ impact on diverse communities, barriers that still exist to access in those communities, and the importance of inclusivity and cultural considerations in WordPress development and usage.

WordPress for all

Keynote speaker Meggan Van Harten reinforced that theme with her presentation, Accessibility in Action: Indigenous Communities, discussing how Indigenous accessibility diverges from general compliance principles and the importance of engaging with Indigenous perspectives to foster inclusive solutions.

Aida Correa-Jackson’s session, Pivot: Making Room at the Table: Empowering Marginalized Communities Using WordPress, explored the transformative potential of WordPress and immersive technologies in empowering marginalized individuals and communities. 

Other sessions on this theme included Growing in Accessibility by Karim Jetha and Sara Ferguson, which covered web accessibility, and the panel discussion on Empowering Indigenous Communities with WordPress, featuring panelists Stacy L. Carlson, Prakash Koirala, Battouly Cisse, Raquel Manriquez, and Nicolette Gomez. Michelle Frechette’s Underrepresented in Tech: the Journey to Amplify Others discussed the creation of a database to amplify underrepresented voices in the WordPress space.

Additionally, Lucas Rodriguez presented WordPress: Empowering the Underserved in Rural Ontario, sharing his experiences using WordPress to help small towns in rural Ontario. The panel discussion on Impact on Underrepresented Communities featured panelists Kiera Howe, Nyasha Green, Michelle Frechette, and Shanta Nathwani. 

Amber Hinds’ session, How to Ensure Your Website Complies with Canadian Accessibility Laws, provided an overview of accessibility laws across Canada, and how to make sure your WordPress sites are accessible to as many people as possible. Finally, Lois Chan-Pedley’s Breaking Language Barriers with Multilingual Sites discussed the process of creating multilingual sites using WordPress plugins.

Technical sessions and business perspectives 

WordCamp Canada had no shortage of business and technical sessions, covering a wide range of topics. Nick Diego’s session, Your WordPress, Your Way: Curating the Editor Experience, focused on customizing WordPress’s editor and site editor to create a more controlled and user-friendly block editing experience. Aurooba Ahmed’s session, Working across timezones as a productive developer, shared tips and tricks for working remotely and collaborating across multiple time zones.

Other sessions included Taming the Whirlwind – Growing Your Business While You’re Busy by Nathan Ingram, which addressed the challenges of finding time to grow a business while managing client work. 

Corinne Boudreau’s session, How to Make Meaningful Privacy Policies for Your Client’s Websites, emphasized the importance of transparent privacy policies for building trust with users. Marc Benzakein’s session, The Problem(s) with WordPress (not a rant session), explored the challenges facing WordPress and sought solutions through collective critiques and suggestions.

Additionally, there were sessions on creating custom blocks with `create-block`, harmonizing creativity and code in design systems, building accessible eLearning experiences, and mitigating security threats to WordPress sites. 

Other topics included leveraging ChatGPT for business insights, mastering web performance, and creating effective About Pages. The sessions aimed to provide practical advice and actionable strategies for developers, designers, and business owners in the WordPress community.

Wrapping up

As I presented my own session, An Editor’s Eye on Code Reviews, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Curly Brackets, I was struck by the sense of camaraderie that permeated the event. 

Even between direct competitors, there was a palpable sense that we’re all one big WordPress family. We may not always agree on everything, but we all want to see WordPress continue to succeed, grow, and expand. 

In general, we want to see more people from underserved and underrepresented communities succeed with WordPress—because we need everyone’s talents, skills, and perspectives to help make WordPress the best it can be. 

Throughout the three-day event, it was made clear that we all have something we can contribute to help move the WordPress project forward. We’re strong individually, but together we can help fulfill the promise of open source: that WordPress is for everyone. 

As I left the Infinity Convention Centre on the final day, I felt a great sense of belonging and a renewed sense of purpose. WordCamp Canada was more than just an event–it was a reminder that we’re all in this together and that together, we can achieve great things.

Hopefully you've now see what makes wp engine hosting different. If WP Engine is of interest and you'd like more information, please do make contact or take a look in more detail here.

 

Credit: Original article published here.

Our view at Stack - we've been using WP Engine in our business for 12 years so that should say it all! WP Engine offers optimized performance, enterprise-grade security, award-winning support, unique WordPress features, scalability, and developer trust. So what makes wp engine hosting different? If you want the best hosting then WP Engine is the answer 🚀🌟

At WP Engine, our Hackathons are two-day innovation sprints in which teams collaborate to craft new product ideas, solve existing problems, or simply flex their creative muscles by trying to build something new. 

This year’s hackathon, which asked participants to channel their inner scrappiness and do more with less, was aptly dubbed Scrap-a-thon. 

Participants were encouraged to choose any project related to their day-to-day work or a new area of interest, including physical builds, code cleanups, accessibility efforts, and more. This provided an excellent opportunity for employees to work with their peers, foster new connections, and learn from those with whom they may not regularly interact.

In alignment with the event’s scrappy theme, each team was given a lean budget of $50 and was encouraged to tap into existing resources to “scrap” their projects together.

Read on for an overview of the projects, awards, and charitable contributions that came out of this year’s WP Engine Scrap-a-thon!

Scrapathon 2024 awards

In the spirit of cordial competition and can-do scrappiness, WP Engine’s hackathon events always include an optional contest, although participants who wish to focus solely on their builds can also do so. 

To be considered for an award, participants must meet two criteria:

1. Participants must present their project idea virtually during a predetermined project presentation event
2. Participating teams must consist of at least two people

Award winners are given $250 to donate to a charity of their choice. 

This year, there were five awards in total, all of which could be voted on by Hackathon participants and WP Engine employees.

1. Finest Craftsmanship: This award goes to the team that spent the most time polishing and perfecting their approach to and presentation of their project.
2. Platinum Blueprint: This award goes to the project with the most potential to become an actual WP Engine product update at some point in the future.
3. Scrappy Scraptacular: This award goes to the team with the best and most unique overall idea.
4. Salvage Spirit: This award goes to the most ambitious project, even if it didn’t fully come to fruition during the short hackathon timeframe. 
5. Blueprint Harmony: This award goes to the project that builds the most synergy between disparate pieces, pulling them together into a unified, harmonious workflow.

The winning projects

While the purpose of our hackathons is to collaborate and find ways to build a project quickly and with limited resources, it’s also about striving for one of our coveted awards! 

This year’s scrappiest projects were innovative, impactful, and sometimes downright silly —and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

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eCom Store Dashboard

For this hackathon project, four team members came together to reimagine an intuitive dashboard that best reflects the informational needs of eCommerce store owners. The goal was to create a place where eCommerce store owners are empowered with important information about their store’s performance upfront, making it easier to manage their store from the WP Engine Portal.

The builders behind this project took home the Finest Craftsmanship award for their well-conceptualized, highly polished proposal. They’ve donated their winnings to the Cliona’s Foundation, which helps families experiencing financial hardship after their child has been diagnosed with a serious illness.

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The ClickHouse Clique

This team was motivated by the sheer volume of HTTP logs created on WP Engine’s platform every day (upwards of 13 billion log requests!). They wanted to find a way to make that important data more accessible to customers as well as the individuals who need it within our organization. To do so, they set up a test environment and combined the capabilities of ClickHouse and Grafana so that ClickHouse compiles the log data and Grafana uses it to create an easy-to-understand visualization of that data.

The project took home the Platinum Blueprint award for its great future potential and the team chose to donate their earnings to the Central Texas Food Bank.

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Animals Playing Music

For this fun and scrappy Hackathon project, the team used physical hardware as well as software to turn pets into pianists! With just a few simple tools, they were able to create an instrument that senses the pressure of a pet’s paw to play a simple tune.

Thanks to their whimsical concept, the team was awarded the Scrappy Scraptacular distinction, and they chose to give back to all future animal superstars by donating their winnings to The Humane Society.

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Improved Log Analytics

This project showed concepts for improved log analysis, visibility, and accessibility to make better use of customer log data. The two team members created a script that looks through customer access logs to create a .csv file so that, when it’s pulled into a spreadsheet, it automatically creates graphs that display critical information like site-level dynamic hits per hour, account-level backend processing time, and more.

These two scrappy team members took home the Salvage Spirit award for this data-intensive project, and they donated their earnings to Dam that Cancer, which provides support to families after a cancer diagnosis.

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Evlv-Viz

These scrappy builders wanted to dig into a pain point that was affecting WP Engine’s customer support team. They created a simple solution that displays different configurations for various WP Engine infrastructure components, making it easier for customer support representatives to compare differences in resource allocation across plan types and point WP Engine customers toward a plan that alleviates any downtime or performance issues they may be experiencing due to resource restraints. 

This project took home the Blueprint Harmony award for the masterful way it was able to make otherwise complex data simple to visualize. The team chose to donate their earnings to Fund Texas Choice, which is an organization that connects pregnant women to reproductive resources.

Join a seriously scrappy team!

At WP Engine, our commitment to excellence extends beyond the service we provide to customers. We also aim for excellence in the environment we build for our employees. 

Every WP Engine employee is empowered to explore new ideas and take risks, because that is the type of environment that fosters innovation on our platform and in our products!

If you’re a scrappy software developer looking for your next career move, visit our careers page to find the perfect role for you!

Hopefully you've now see what makes wp engine hosting different. If WP Engine is of interest and you'd like more information, please do make contact or take a look in more detail here.

 

Credit: Original article published here.