So ciao in Italian is also hello it is not just goodbye.
I'm not going away, I just got started.
My name is, Francesca Marano,
I'm the WordPress community and partnerships manager at SiteGround,
The independently owned web hosting company with over 16 years of
experience giving back to the WordPress community in form of talks as part of my job,
and I get to do one of the things that I love the most share knowledge.
Sometimes it's from my own experience and
sometimes from the collective knowledge of the SiteGround team.
In addition, my role in the workers community includes
an active participation in the community team and in the core team.
Between 2019 and 2020,
I had the immense honor [LAUGHTER] to co-lead
the two major WordPress releases WordPress 5.3
and WordPress 5.4 with the role of the release coordinator,
and I've been contributing to WordPress since 2015,
but this experience really allowed me to observe the process a lot more.
I think it's impossible to keep track of all the moving parts,
there are a lot of them,
but it was interesting to see how things actually happen,
how changes getting introduced,
championed and hopefully they move forward then lend into a release.
First of all, let's see who and what are
the driving forces behind the changes happening in WordPress,
which as of July 2020 is used by over 37 percent of all the websites,
so those are huge numbers,
and every change that is made,
keeps that in mind, of course.
We have the companies in the business ecosystem worth
more than $10 billion as reported by [inaudible]
the co-founder of the project at the end of 2019,
hosting companies like SiteGround fall into this category plug in and theme developers,
agencies this is a proper business ecosystem.
Then we have the community which I like to define as anyone that uses
WordPress and cares deeply about different sides of the software or all of it,
so much that they decided to give back to the project with some form of contribution.
Now, bear in mind contribution for me is anything that can help us move forward,
it doesn't need to be a patch that will lend into a release.
It's giving talks to educate the rest of the community, it's writing articles,
it's leaving feedback in comments,
in blog posts and tickets,
so sometimes this overlaps with the companies,
but not necessarily there are a lot of independent professionals involved and end-user's,
WordPress lovers that care about it and so help out somehow,
and finally, the wish to modernize.
WordPress is 17 years old and the worldwide web is 31,
that's a lot of history,
and the web industry is changing at an incredible pace,
with a lot of new technologies becoming available and
affordable very quickly compared to what it was at the beginning.
To keep up with those changes,
the project must change and evolve.
These, together with the competition from site builders like Squarespace and Wix,
for example, and the opportunities in what you could imagine as the next blue ocean.
All the small websites,
all the small businesses that don't have a website yet,
we're among the reasons why Gutenberg, for example,
was launched, and this was actually explained by Matt in one of
the early blog posts he wrote about it on why and how this project came to be,
and actually these post is from three years ago,
it actually says we have to work on WordPress's next big thing,
the thing that will help us deal with the challenges and the opportunities,
and the thing that changes the world,
that's a very ambitious [LAUGHTER] goal, obviously.
These changes are then translated into releases.
For the next year and a half,
there are six releases planned already.
The next one WordPress 5.5 is happening in less than two weeks on August 11th,
and so it's really right around the corner,
and this is something that I have to say I'm really proud of because I introduced it,
in 5.3, after consulting with Matt.
For years, WordPress had
a somehow predictable schedule with an average of three releases per year,
it took a little bit over a year to push 5.0 Through,
and there was a lot of uncertainty around the timeline.
I felt that having one was very important,
it allows everyone to plan ahead and not only companies but also contributors that are
working on the project and they can see in
advance how this will fit in their life and work schedule,
and for larger organizations like universities,
of course, and media outlets,
every major release brings new things to test and it's important to
know what time frame do you have to do so?
I don't want to turn this talk into a shopping list.
If something catches your attention,
you can deep dive into it in the many of the resources that I added to my slides online,
or we can chat about it during QA,
actually, I would really love to do that.
I would rather highlight some challenges,
some changes and challenges [LAUGHTER] that are already
merged or planned for the next release that have an interesting story behind it,
how they came to be or what is their impact in the ecosystem?
Changes might be championed by different stakeholders,
but the ultimate goal is always to improve some of
the most important things in the web landscape today.
For example, auto updates,
they are important for security.
Outdated versions of plugins,
themes or core are potentially vulnerable and can be used to hack your website.
Security is important for every website and doesn't matter it's size or visibility,
and also updating plugins and themes will help a website owners to keep everything
to the latest version and reduce the surface of the hacking attack.
But of course, anything that has to do with auto updates is very tricky territory.
Lots of people quote Facebook and
online services where you don't know which version you're using,
but I actually don't think that's [LAUGHTER] a fair comparison
at all because those are software as a service applications.
Here we're talking about updating
a self hosted application that might have been heavily customized over the years.
Right now this is the first iteration of the future.
I think it doesn't have the easiest discoverability, and in fact,
I actually opened my first core ticket about it because I feel it still needs
some design feedback to help users find it and decided if they want to use it or not.
This option actually exists,
it has been existing since WordPress 3.7,
which came out in October 2013.
At the time minor releases,
auto updates were turned on by default.
So the change coming in 5.5 basically
adds a UI to the plugins and themes auto update existing filters.
In this case, it's opt in,
so it's disabled by default.
I totally understand the fear,
but at the same time as an employee of a manage hosting
company with hundreds of thousands of WordPress installations on our servers,
I'm here to tell you that it can be done.
Plugins are pretty straightforward,
manage hosting company have been doing that for years.
Themes are trickier because despite the existence of childhood themes a lot of
people don't use them properly and I'm a big supporter of this feature.
The less time we spend in tasks that can be safely automated,
the more time we have to do different work.
My concern about this feature is the lack of tests that hosting companies,
like us, have been doing for years.
We always backup the website before you opt to update,
while it should decide how long after the release you want to update
and of course we'll roll you back automatically if something doesn't go as planned.
But none of this is part of core yet, maybe.
For now, I would definitely encourage everyone to give it a try and of course,
test it on staging or development before you turn on the switch on a production site,
but I'm sure you are already doing this for
anything you change on your WordPress website.
In a future release,
5.6, more security improvements will be introduced.
For example, major core releases will be updated as well.
Work on this feature hasn't started yet,
but it's basically the last step of a process started seven years ago.
Support for PHP 5.7 will be dropped,
so it was dropped by PHP at the end of 2018,
so the time has come for work results to drop it.
At the same time, support for PHP 8 is later to be
released in the fall of 2020 will be added.
I would definitely recommend that you start auditing and testing your code and
follow PHP 8 to development news to see what are the changes coming.
This is both a security and a speed issue,
since each new version of
the programming language brings improvements in this area as well.
Finally, there is a three stages plan for upgrading
version of jQuery as shipped with the WordPress.
A test to plugin was released to make it easy to test the different versions of jQuery,
jQuery migrate, and jQuery UI.
To get ready for this update,
it's very important that you update your code and
the migrate plugin will assist you in identifying these potential issues.
Another welcome feature is
the native lazy-loading of images in the browsers which support it.
The feature became a web standard at the beginning of 2020.
This will save bandwidth on servers, obviously,
but also on user agents across sites
where images further down the page is to be loaded right away,
even in the case that the user might never scroll towards that,
but the images are loaded anyway.
After security, this might be one of
the most important factors to take care of when you work on your website.
Speed matters a lot to every stakeholder.
According to Sync with Google,
53 percent of mobile visitors will leave
it if a web page doesn't load within three seconds, which is nothing.
At Cyber, we implemented this at the beginning of the year,
but in our own optimizer plugin,
but obviously having this in core it's great because it makes it
available to everyone no matter which hosting company you're using.
A faster, more secure web is a shared interest of search engines,
hosting companies, agency so it's definitely a feature well rooted for.
Every time I talk about anything related to speed,
I like to show some scary numbers.
In this case, does our bounce rate increases as long as the page load increases?
Obviously, universities are not eCommerce websites,
but their existence still depends on students signing up for them.
Speed optimization is important,
getting lazy-loading out of the box is
a step towards it and there's something less that you need to take care of.
An OPUS 5.5 comes with a lot of accessibility improvements.
These changes are driven in partly by businesses and in large part by the community.
Just to mention a few that will be available in a couple of weeks.
Lease tables will come with extensive alternate view modes.
Disable buttons will actually look like disable buttons.
This is probably one of my favorites because I really don't like this animation,
the shake animation indicating a login failure
will respect the users choices in the query,
prefers reduced motion, you get query.
Accessibility is often an afterthought and it was the same for WordPress,
but for the past few years the project has been working to get it right.
Accessibility compliance is not only required by law,
which should be motive enough for anyone to invest in it,
but if I was to be cynical,
I would say it's also good for business.
The more people can access your website,
the more you can interest them in signing up for your course of services or whatever.
I was talking about the fact that the community is
a big driving force behind accessibility improvements.
The WP Campus organization is a major force behind it.
In fact, you, the community,
the WP Campus community,
was the initiator of the Gutenberg Accessibility Audit,
which was released in mid 2019.
The report from Tenan,
the company that won the proposal bid,
highlighted a number of issues and basically found that,
and I'm going to read out loud,
"Gutenberg has significant and pervasive accessibility problems, severe in nature.
Organizations which have high risk profiles should consult
legal counsel before using it and may want to choose to use the legacy editor instead."
There's no way to sugar coat this.
We were talking with Rachel (phonetic) before the presentation,
but I still want to see something positive in all of this.
84 issues were opened in the Gutenberg GitHub repo and 68,
the majority of them have been closed,
but there's still work to be done, of course.
As you folks know better than I do,
higher education institutions are particularly sensitive to the legal obligations,
they have to provide accessible technologies.
At the time of the report,
Gutenberg failed to comply with DOLE 30 of the WCAG 2.1 success criteria.
I will be honest,
I don't know what the results of a new report would be a year later.
Luckily, Joe Dolson will talk in less than two hours exactly about this,
so I would suggest you don't miss it.
I will not miss it.
But before hearing a session and no matter what he has to say,
I know something, for sure, 100 percent,
the WordPress Accessibility Team is working tirelessly to
improve the overall accessibility of WordPress and is
lending improvement after improvement in each release.
Finally, the last feature I wanted to highlight from
the upcoming releases is the native XML Sitemaps.
Submitting an XML Sitemap to search engines is important for indexing an SEO.
The project was started by a number of companies including Google, but again,
it benefits significantly the user no matter which search engine you use.
Better SEO means your institution will show up in search results before competitors
and of course SEO is not only achieved by submitting an XML sitemap,
if only it was this easy.
The biggest job is still done by creating
compelling content that respond to people search intent,
but it's definitely a part of what is called technical SEO
that uses code to make your website stand out.
Out of the box it creates a sitemap that you can see from,
for example, domain.com/sitemap.xml, like this from my personal website.
The sitemap is extensible and you can customize it to your needs.
Again, my personal opinion,
this feature could have included
UI controls to customize the content type that will show up.
Also image, video, and news at sitemaps are not created.
Both features were declared not in scope of the project when it started.
I said this is a good first iteration and hope that in time it will actually take into
account the level of usefulness and complexity and necessary today in the SEO world.
It is extensible up to a certain point because image, videos,
and news, and filters, and hooks are not available at this time.
But if you are happy with the basic options and
you were relying on a plugin just to produce the sitemap,
you don't need it anymore and it's one less update to worry about.
Whatever you end up deciding to do,
I also say this is a great first step into integrating
some out of the box SEO options into core itself,
so it's a good start.
These are all the features that more or less were based on
input from the business ecosystems and the community.
What will happen after August 11 and beyond the security staff that I
already mentioned that are already almost ready for 5.6?
Well, active development of WordPress actually never stops.
Everyday people work on tickets and keep thinking about how to make it better.
If you go to WordPress.org/roadmap,
you will see a very high level roadmap,
with the direction where the software is headed to.
I don't think it will come as a surprise to see that blocks are the main focus for
the next couple of years and it has been so since 2017.
The roll out plan is made of four stages.
The goal of phase one was to introduce the Block Editor which
was merged than WordPress 5.0 and keeps moving forward as a plugin.
Multiple versions of the plugin gets merged into a WordPress major release.
For example, 5.5 will have 10 versions of the plugins,
so that's a lot of new things.
The goal of phase two,
right now I'm more interested to talk about phase two,
full site editing. [NOISE]
The goal of this phase is to utilize the power of
Gutenberg's block model in an editing experience beyond post and page content.
In other words, the idea is to make the entire site customizable.
From this point on,
everything you see on a page is a block.
Any user will be able to edit their header footer,
add a new menu, modify widgets,
create page templates, just to name a few.
The initial proof of concept was presented on September,
2019 by Matias Ventura,
one of the lead engineers on the Gutenberg team.
You can find my slides on noticed by looking for Francesca Marano,
and there you'll see I have also all resources that I'm quoting.
I link to this proof of concepts,
so you can see it in action for the first time.
I have become a major Gutenberg fan girl.
When I [LAUGHTER] first tried it before 5.0, I hated it.
Honestly, it felt weird,
it felt buggy, and basically it felt not ready.
I'm very happy to see the improvement.
But as much as I'm thrilled about how it is evolving and how much
we can play around with it and create a great editorial workflows,
for example, I do have some concerns,
especially about full site editing.
The first one is the timeline.
FSE, as it's called in brief,
is being developed very quickly with a lot of resources.
But will it be ready for WordPress 5.6,
which is supposed to go out in mid-December?
Because this is the initial plan.
Will five months be enough to get it to a point where it doesn't feel like Gutenberg,
it feels ready when Gutenberg was launched,
so it feels ready,
it doesn't feel buggy, and basically it's usable in production by websites, big or small.
What will happen if it's not?
Will FSE merging be delayed to a later release,
5.7 for example, or will the WordPress release
be delayed because full site editing is not ready?
I think after talking a little bit with the team involved in making it,
it will be ready for WordPress 5.6,
but it will be merged later on,
potentially 5.7, but at this time is not confirmed yet.
My second concern was not only mine,
but actually a big concern in the business ecosystem is
what will be the future of WordPress theme shops and developers.
For me, it looks like full site editing is both a blessing and a blocker.
It's a blessing because it will allow everyone to
fully leverage the opportunities offered by blocks.
Theme developers will be able to play with modern HTML and JavaScript.
We all like to do that [LAUGHTER].
At the same time,
if they will play their cards right,
also in terms of marketing,
they will be able to attract customers with this shiny new toys.
Part of my job is also looking into Facebook groups
and see what the conversation around SiteGround products and around WordPress are.
A quick look at any of these forums and Facebook groups tells me that
one thing users with no developments skills struggle with
is changing things that for people that know CSS are trivial,
like changing the colors,
changing the font, or changing the elements position.
Theme shops and theme developers that will adapt to this new block
based themes will be able to offer this more
easily to customers and actually make it part of their selling proposition.
I personally don't think that having more customization options
available to end users will put theme developers or web designers out of work,
because dragging and dropping doesn't make you a developer or a designer.
Otherwise, there wouldn't be agencies offering
Shopify and Squarespace customization services,
not everyone wants to do everything on their own,.
But at the same time,
there's a lot to learn,
a lot because full site editing is really changing everything again,
and also in terms of how to actually develop a theme.
Right now there are very few themes that are marked as block ready in the
WordPress.org/ repo and in third party theme shops.
Let's assume that full site editing won't be merged in 5.6,
but it will be merged in 5.7,
which is scheduled to sometimes in the first half of 2021.
It's still less than a year away.
Are developers getting ready?
That is actually a question for you.
Finally, the biggest question for me was,
what will happen to old non-block
supporting themes when full site editing will be introduced?
I've been following Gutenberg Times for a while now,
and they did last year,
a very interesting, they do it all the time.
But I watched the Q & A last year where the point was saying,
the full page editing,
I'm reading because I have terrible memory,
"The full-page editing would make all the previous features obsolete,
but bring it all into a single user-interface,
so the site owner, blocker, the end-user,
don't need to learn about
the various pieces and just update their content where they want to."
Still didn't reply to my concern of
what is going on if I have an older theme that doesn't support blocks.
So I reached out directly to the source,
to Riad Benguella, who is one of the leading engineers of the Gutenberg team.
He wrote to me that full site editing will be enabled
only when a theme supporting it is being used.
If a theme is not ready,
they'll just work like today.
This is obviously a major reliever for me and I hope it is for you too,
but definitely this message needs to be passed around so
people will not go into hysteria for something that actually will break.
I chatted a little bit with theme developers and other people that work in the industry.
So to quote, Justin Tadlock,
that has a lot of experience as a theme developer
and last year joined the WP Tavern as one of the main editors.
There are definitely more questions than there are answers,
and especially about theme development.
The best thing to do is to keep up to date.
Compared to how Gutenberg was communicated,
I think full site editing is the step forward.
Development still happens in GitHub,
but there's a number of places where you can really follow how the project is evolving.
I listed my favorite four here;
two are community resources,
and other are official from the project.
The first one would be the Gutenberg Times,
curated news and community voices about the WordPress lock editor by Birgit Pauli-Hack,
developer based in Florida.
There is a weekly newsletter,
frequent QA session, a podcast,
a YouTube channel, everything you need.
The full site editing course by Carolina Nymark,
who's one of the theme team leading contributors.
If you have to create a block based theme,
or transition an old one,
this is really excellent,
it is free, but if you use it I urge you to sponsor it.
You need to bookmark these blog posts from the core team, which is called,
"Ways to keep up with full site editing," because it lists
all the way and all the times where updates are given.
If you want to go even deeper,
you have to follow the blogs of the team that are
involved in making Gutenberg and especially full site editing support,
design accessibility themes, just to mention a few.
In addition to all that we've talked about so far,
there are a number of features that are not being worked on yet,
but at least for me,
they're incredibly exciting and promising.
As one of the writers of the SiteGround blog and
also the founder of a pretty big multi-author blog in Italy,
I am really looking forward for phase 3 that will bring collaboration features.
As Mark Muller said during 2019 state of the word, I'm quoting,
"Phase 3 is where we take everything that you see in Gutenberg and make it so
that you can real-time co-edit with anyone else who is editing the same things you are."
Collaboration will allow multiple people to access content at
the same time without having to take over someone who is working on it the same time.
If your staff is made of more than one person,
publishing on your website,
you know the pain of having to take over
each other post and then wait for the other person to make the edits.
Then go back in,
maybe make your edits again,
and this goes on and on,
and on until you're satisfied with the content.
This will really help all of us to streamline
the editorial workflow in a way that hopefully will be very similar to Google Documents,
at least in my dreams.
Finally, phase 4 is a major and much awaited change in WordPress,
but basically right now there is nothing concrete,
so let's go with the wishful thinking.
My wish for Core is to include multilingual support out of the box.
So users won't need to plug-ins to translate the websites into multiple languages.
As a non-native English speaker and someone that works for international company,
and as someone that built websites for
Italians that needed to sell also to other countries,
the struggle is real.
I am not entirely sure WordPress will be able to completely
substitute itself to some very mature plug-ins that have been around for years,
but some basic functionality to start with would be great.
For me its about the fact that it's one more less plug-in to worry about.
So more speed, more security, less worry,
and more features that are beneficial for a lot of people directly into WordPress.
Based on all that I've said,
I think the future of WordPress is bright,
we're moving forward, we're innovating.
But, there is a but,
to be able to accomplish this,
the project needs a multitude of people involved at a personal level,
at stake holder business interests level.
I think for example, the WPCampust Gutenberg audit was
a great example of how a community that has a specific needs raise the flag,
was vocal about it,
but also offered dissolution.
The best contributions in my eyes are always selfish and generous at the same time.
I know it sounds contradictory,
but it's basically an invitation to pick one thing in
WordPress that you want to make better, invest in that,
no matter how much,
one hour a month,
ten hours a month,
whatever you can do by doing something or giving
feedback and help take this to the end of the line so everyone can enjoy it.
For example, for me this is outreach and mentorship.
More than the visibility that being the co-leader of two releases gave me,
I'm very happy of the work that I'm doing
towards a release where I will not be directly involved.
The WordPress 5.6, which will be a release completely led by a woman focus leads.
I'm very happy that there will be additional teams
like sub teams to focus on testing support,
and documentation because those areas,
I have a feeling they have not gotten enough TLC in the past,
but they are really important to help
the WordPress project deliver a holistic user experience for as many people as possible;
developers, designers, users, hobbyist, doesn't matter what.
Basically after all, I always go back to the founding principles.
This is the base of open source contribution as
stated by Eric Raymond in The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
A book that has been around a long time and it's still delivers, I think.
Every good work of software starts by stretching a developer's personal itch.
I would change developer in the sentence because I think we
all make this piece of software by scratching our own personal reach for me,
as I've said, is mentorship and outreach and educating
for other people is development for other people as something else it doesn't matter.
But this is definitely the best way for WordPress to continue to thrive and survive.
That would be all for me.
Thank you for listening.
My name is Francesca Marano.
I am the workers community and partnership manager at Siteground.
You can see here my e-mail which is francesca.marano@siteground.com.
Here's the link
2020.wpcampus.org/schedule/the-future-of-WordPress/feedback.
That's where you can give me some feedback about this talk,
which is something that I would definitely love having.
If you want to connect with me online we can tweet,
that's basically the only social media I use.
So let's tweet away.
[LAUGHTER].
But thank you so much for having me.
That was a great session.
Thank you for sharing with us.
There were a few questions that popped up.
Someone asked that you said WordPress core will manage lazy loading,
but then you said we need to implement lazy loading.
What do we need to do to enable lazy loading maybe.
No, we don't need to do anything.
I might have said.
I'm very sorry.
My English is not my first language,
sometimes I just say things that might not be correct.
Lazy loading is already there.
It's been merged.
You don't have to do anything.
That's how images will load from now on, on WordPress.
Don't do anything. It's a great improvement
because if you're familiar with
how lazy loading works and how images are loaded in the browser.
This is very important for speed
optimization because what happens is that if you have, for example,
posts with a lot of images set and the browser loads them all,
even if people don't scroll down to the images and thinking about the very long essays,
for example, that will delay the loading time of the page.
Instead, lazy loading images work that images will start loading when you get there.
This is like an oversimplification. [LAUGHTER].
Rather complex thing in development,
but that's it, it's there.
What I meant is that Siteground for example,
implemented this already in our plugin months ago,
but now is available by default in WordPress.
You don't have to do anything.
Cool. Well, let's see.
Probably time for one or two more.
Someone asked:" Will PHP 7.X continue to be supported in WordPress 5.6?"
Do you know the answer to that. It will be?
Yes.
Easy answer.
I mean it took us forever to drop the 5.4.
I don't really see us dropping everything and just embracing PHP 8 from 5.6 also
because 5.6 is coming out like a month after PHP 8 so it's
not realistic to just, throw it all away.
But we're dropping 5.6 in 5.6.
It's confusing, but it's happening.
Then we have one more pop up; Hi there.
I often wonder how full site editing capabilities will manifest themselves into
areas of the theme in which users typically don't want or need full editing access.
Examples of those areas include the 404 page,
the archive page for various post types.
and then it's a very long question.
Does poolside editing really mean that as a content developer,
I'm now going to be required to build out these experiences?"
You're not required, but you have the option to.
First of all, let me say that a killer
404 page is always a good investment in terms of marketing.
I think that would be a page that if I was still making websites,
I would make it as fun and useful as possible, but I'm digressing.
The truth is, I cannot give you a straightforward answer
because development is happening every single moment.
It's done by a very large team that spans all the time zones.
Basically something that it was made this morning might be changed
in five hours by the people that get up in the Pacific time USA.
As a content creator,
you will be able to change a lot of things that right now you do
need to have some development experience to change.
I'm thinking of one of the most simple things that again,
I see a lot of people wanting to do this.
Having a footer with
different widget areas and your theme comes only with two widget areas,
but for some reason you want one or you want three.
This is something that up until now you can do only should know how to register
new widget area or to change the layout of the footer.PHP.
But with full site editing,
you will be able to do that.
If you choose not to do that, it's fine.
I was very relieved by Riad's answer when I reached out to him because I will be honest,
I was very scared that at the moment that full site editing is merged,
no matter if it's 5.6 or 7.25, everything goes boom.
If your theme doesn't support blocks, that's it.
You have to start over.
But actually themes will be block read.
It just gives you the ability to do something more with it.
But you still will start from a theme.
Did I help a little bit,
or did I make it more confusing.
Think you did, think you got it.
[LAUGHTER].
On that amazing at linked answer,
we have to wrap up for today.
We're out of time.
Thank you, Francesca for that lovely presentation.
