Héctor Prieto has shared the decisions (with a transcript) from the meeting that determined what’s a “go” for WordPress 5.9 with Matt Mullenweg present as Project Lead. Yesterday the team released a video review of the proposed features going into 5.9.
Things agreed upon include: Block themes, the default Twenty Twenty-Two block theme, the Styles interface, various designs tools, the Navigation Block, and more.
Not everything is done yet, but the team is confident it will be — and this might be generally what we should expect to see for the release in December.
— David
Ari Stathopoulos has published a proposal for a WordPress Performance Team with input from Joost de Valk, Francesca Marano, and Adam Silverstein.
According to the proposal, “compared to other platforms […] WordPress is falling behind” in its speed and performance. While it is well-positioned “to meet the increasing needs and expectations of site owners and end-users, WordPress needs to be actively investing in performance in WordPress Core and beyond.”
The proposal acknowledges performance plugins (and functionality that should remain in plugins, like CDNs) as well as performance-focused themes. Why is a team needed to tackle performance optimization? The proposal authors’ answer:
“A team gives more visibility to the effort… it also opens up contributing to new types of contributors, like performance or data analysts… [and] could also attract contributions from different groups; browsers, hosting, SEO companies, etc.”
While the proposal has received mostly good responses in some public social circles like Post Status Slack, the birth of a new team is a rare event. WordPress performance for the common user hasn’t been embarrassing if you pick the right plugins, themes, and host. (This is a bigger if than most of us may like.)
Managed WordPress hosts have generally built their infrastructure, server environments, marketing, onboarding experiences, and put limits on WordPress to ensure performance. Increasingly, Headless WordPress is a bankable service. But vanilla WordPress could and should be much faster out of the box — and solutions such as headless and static have proved that the experience of speed has a high level of demand.
Joost noted in Post Status Slack he has a vested interest in WordPress’s performance now as an employee of one of the biggest WordPress hosts:
“Performance is a core feature of a CMS now in my opinion… we have ideas for both frontend performance improvements as well as some pretty big ideas for an overhaul and speed up of WordPress bootstrap. I’m superbly excited about sharing those with everyone over the coming weeks and months.”
— David and Dan
Nigel Bahadur, the owner of WPCloudDeploy, has some thoughts about “WordPress as a service” (WAAS).
Earlier this week, WPCloudDeploy opened a public GitHub repository for their plugin, which offers functionality inside WordPress that’s more commonly seen on SaaS platforms for spinning up sites and deploying code to them. WPCloudDeploy issued a short explainer and FAQ about the implications of this move and the advantages of using a public repo. Apparently, it was a conversation in Post Status Slack with Jonathan Wold that “crystalized the timing for releasing to GitHub.”
Nigel says that the biggest challenge with “WaaS” sites is “the completely disjointed experience” that comes from having “to stitch together” a unified interface across “various plugins and themes.” After talking with Jonathan, Nigel decided it was time to go ahead and put the WPCloudDeploy codebase in a public repo at GitHub in part to help open source developers collaborate across projects to create a better WaaS experience.
While WPCloudDeploy was always an open-source project, originally the plugin was an internal company tool that Nigel says “ended up becoming a commercial project.” And “as a commercial project, it was clear that public GitHub was where … [it] would ultimately end up. It was only a matter of timing.” After establishing a stable release with a good feature set and doing some cleanup, WPCloudDeploy was ready for a public release.
We have heard the UI/UX problem come up more and more in recent years, especially in the context of hosting companies trying to create a unified experience on their platforms. As others have observed recently, that motive contributes to the trend toward acquisitions of WordPress plugins and companies.
Nigel cites and agrees with Jonathan’s Sustainable Assembly approach, so if you haven’t read that yet, it’s worth adding to your reading list.
— Dan and David
— Stay updated and engaged with the fast-paced and ever-evolving WordPress project. Product and project managers take note! Get the feed here.
— Stay updated and engaged with the fast-paced and ever-evolving WordPress project. Product and project managers take note! Get the feed here.
Zoom / 📆 Oct 28 12:00 PM CST
October 5, 2021 - Brainstorm Force Acquires ProjectHuddle
👉 We’ve created a page for WordPress acquisitions going back to 2007. We’d also like to gather major investment data. Help us make this table more complete by adding additional deals, data, and links.
Fri 10/15 - Post Status Excerpt (No. 28) — A WordPress Core Performance Team?
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