Anne you are quick with the blog summary to accompany the video and everything! Thanks for hosting this and including me. Keen to see how this ship navigates forward!
I’m one of those people who do not care to use Gutenberg. I prefer page builders. The CMS portion of WordPress core is universal. Making that a software package and offering Gutenberg as an option to install during onboarding makes the most sense to me. Basic stuff like making it easy to show custom field data as admin columns on the posts pages are low hanging fruit that WordPress could be doing better.
The WordPress Fields API is potentially on the horizon, and it's been a long time coming. Scott Kingsley Clark has been spearheading this initiative for years, aiming to provide a standardized and consistent way to manage custom fields across the entire WordPress ecosystem-whether it's posts, users, terms, or comments. So, maybe this CMS basic will hit core beyond what already was rolled out in user profiles and settings.
Kevin makes the best remark around min 35 and the response about missing dynamic data functionality in Core is.... Become a programmer, so you can use the API 😭 That should have been a main topic of discussion.
This is exactly why I use other options as a cms that better handle dynamic data and create custom front ends. It’s actually faster and easier than dealing with WordPress and all its plug-ins and now the block editor.
If they still think it’s a blogging platform then why haven’t they integrated basic blogging functionality into it? Social sharing, mailing list management, basic email marketing, managing rss feeds, more robust commenting system, and last of all basic standard smtp functionality so we can add the api keys to popular mailers directly so we get the alerts. You’re saving bloggers from 5 plugin decisions here. It’s frankly crazy they have had no update to philosophy and no wp core meet-up for nearly a decade.
Thank you Anne for holding these discussions, they are necessary. And thank you especially for acknowledging people's issues and not being part of the "all is wonderful, there are no problems bandwagon".
👍 ❤ Do we have any statistics on the percentage of WordPress sites that use any type of plugin builder or theme builder? We need data and analytics for the all ecosystem too on these talks. (if possible) These discussions are great; please keep them coming.
If the "users of Wordpress" are only the clients we sell to, in 5 years time you won't be getting ANY new "users of Wordpress". I'm listening to this and getting the feeling that Aaron isn't listening to absolutely any feedback, he's just thinking about the best reply to PR his way out of an actual conversation.
Can you all share more here? Tell me about your clients that you sell to. In the case of Aaron, I do want to make it clear that I brought him in specifically with his "Core Committer" hat on, so to speak. He is there to share the perspective of someone with core commit access who has been in the WordPress project longer than anyone else on the call. It's less PR and more "here's the context for why things are the way they are". Being a part of the conversation too, there was SO MUCH to get into. I struggled to know when to loop back :) There's a lot of dialogue missing and I had to cut it at just over an hour.
@@AnneMcCarthy most of my clients are small/medium businesses that mainly operate offline, so their needs/asks aren't even that advanced (just what in 2024 should be rudimentary dynamic data possibilities), but still I find myself having to do the most insane workarounds to accomplish this if I stay in Core & Gutenberg. Life has become a lot more enjoyable since I moved to Bricks, all of a sudden those workarounds I needed to integrate with ACF for example.... disappeared, I can just use it.
So basically what I understood from this chat is that there is a significant portion of WordPress users that don't feel heard or accounted for when decisions are made, and when they express their frustrations the answer is a sounding "no", while at the same time claims are made about democratization of publishing. Well, if you're aiming to make publishing more available for more people, why are these users being deflected? Why the only focus is on appeasing only a portion of publishers, those that use WordPress to post articles only? How about the people beginning, who know nothing about WordPress, and are left to guess how to use it because on-boarding is virtually inexistent aside of a few modals that appear in some places? How democratic is that, if, when you install WordPress there is no path to guide you? Why being so reluctant to understand that there is valuable feedback being shared by a significant portion of the users? These people represent them, and all we've got was deflection.
Ah I cut the filming at the end to prevent from sharing the location and time/date we would meet at WCUS for a dinner. I worry about putting public information out like that online and that was a personal choice. I also figured folks wouldn't want to hear me talk about dinner planning :)
He was referring to a more specific kind of meeting rather than them meeting. Each year folks meet at various WordCamps and flagship events, like WCUS, WCEU, and WCAsia. For example, coming up are Core days in Rome: events.wordpress.org/rome/2024/coredays/
If plugins are the "options" for WP for CMS functions that should be part of Core, then WP/Automattic should develop or recommend/monitor more plugins (and take over maintenance if plugin developer stops updating plugin)
Would encourage you to be careful saying "WP/Automattic" when the WordPress project is so much more than Automattic and always should be. There is an example of taking over someone's plugins with Alex Mill's passing: wordpress.com/blog/2019/06/06/taking-care-of-alexs-plugins/ This was a rare exception and the best thing to do is to alert folks to when something is out of date. Otherwise, the maintenance cost of so many plugins and the decisions about which to support could be very immense.
So to put it crudely: WP CMS functionality expansion is dead for a decade because of WP's philosophy. I hope I misunderstood Aaron, because otherwise this is the most scary WP news I ever heard and actually makes me want to look into a fallback CMS😱
You’re 100% right. Notice how every time they say “Wordpress Core” they refer to the Block Editor. Whenever people said they would like some feature they say “Oh, bit Core already has that API”. Their mind is set. Core is The Block Editor. I think until the mass exodus starts to affect even their greatest advocates they will not be waking up and sadly it might be too late for “The Project”
Can you all share more in this thread about what you mean? I want to make sure I understand perfectly because WP continues to expand and grow, especially when looking ahead at what's next for phase 3 and collaboration flows. At the same time, WordPress aims to be a strong, robust, flexible foundation to build upon and will not serve every need for everyone, which is where plugins play a huge role intentionally. Would love to hear more.
WP's default themes for years now have not been blogging themes anymore, so why not update the philosophy? Seems like one part of WP has accepted the evolution (not just a blogging tool), but then WP thinks the CMS part needs to stay as if it's just a blogging tool.
Probably wordpress do not want to upset big plugin developers maybe because they are their biggest contributors. We will never see ACF/Elementor alternatives withing wordpress.
Min 57 Kevin's remark, exactly it's like WP is forgetting about webmasters (not coders, but people who can make, manage websites with 3rd party tools, the core audience for a CMS). It feels like WP is saying become a coder if you want any progress on CMS functionality ....but at that point WP is more of a framework than a CMS
It's very much a testament to how absolutely prolific he was rather than a reflection of the project FWIW: profiles.wordpress.org/ryan/ Stimpunks is the org he runs now and I encourage you to donate to: stimpunks.org/
These kinds of shows are difficult enough to glean from without asking things like favorite color. Ugh. So much wasted time, I can't stick with it. Can someone post a summary of what we got from this? What are your takeaways?
Ah let me add some chapters so you can skip over the intros. As for notes, check this out nomad.blog/2024/08/20/uniting-wordpress-youtubers-part-ii-on-august-20th-2024/ I'll update the description so it's linked.
@@AnneMcCarthy Thank you Anne. So much going on with Wordpress... Interesting times to say the least. I'm a fan and appreciate what is happening. The notes are definitely helpful, thank you. Except the favorite color nonsense. :p Mine is flourescent flat black.
