The Future of WordPress

Francesca: 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 in the WordPress community and partnership manager at SiteGround with over 16 years of experience. Giving back to the WordPress community in the form of talks is part of my job. I do what I love the most, to share knowledge. Sometimes from my experience and sometimes from the SiteGround team.

My role in WordPress is an active participation in community and Core teams. Between 2019 and 2020, I had the immense honor to release WordPress 5.3 and 5.3 as a Release Coordinator. I have contributed to WordPress since 2018. This experience allowed me to observe the process a lot more.

It's impossible to keep track of all the moving parts. There are a lot of them. It was interesting to see how things actual happen and how changes are introduced, championed and hopefully they move forward and lend to a release.

First of all. Who and what are the driving forces behind the changes in WordPress? In July of 2020, it's used by over 37% of all the websites. Those are huge numbers. Every change that is made keeps that in mind, of course.

We have the companies and business ecosystem, worth more than 10 billion as reported by the cofounder. Hosting companies fall into the categories, scene developers, and other businesses in the ecosystem.

Then we have the community, anyone who uses WordPress and cares deeply about different sides of the software or all of it. So much that they decide to give back to the project with a form of contribution. Contribution for me is anything that can help us move forward. It doesn't need to be a patch to lend to a release. It is giving talks to educate the rest of the community, writing articles, leaving feedback and comments in posts and tickets.

Sometimes this overlaps with the company, but not necessarily. There are independent professionals and users, WordPress lovers that care about it and help out somewhere.

Finally, the wish to modernize. WordPress is 17-years old. The world wide web is 31. That's a lot of history. The web industry is changing at an incredible pace with new tech becoming available and affordable, compared to what it was at the beginning.

To leap off those changes, the project must change and evolve. Together with site builder like SquareSpace and the next promotion, all the small websites and businesses without a site, we're the reason why Gutenberg, for example, was launched. This was explained by Matt in an early blog post and he wrote about it on why and how this project came to be.

Actually, this post was from 3 years ago and says that we have to work on WordPress's next big thing, that helps us deal with challenges and opportunities and the thing that changes. It's an ambitious goal.

This changes into releases. For the next year and a half, there are six releases. The next one, WordPress 5.5 is happening in less than two weeks, on August 11th, right around the corner.

I am proud of this; I release it in 5.3 after consulting with Matt. There was an average schedule, with 3 releases per year, and then we pushed through 5.3. There was uncertainty on the timeline. I think it is important to have a timeline, so people can plan ahead, companies and contributors, etc. They can see how it fits in their life. In universities and media outlets, major releases bring new things to test and it's important to know the timeframe you have to do so.

I don't want to turn the talk to a shopping list. If something catches your attention, deep dive in the resources that I added to my slides online. Or, we can chat about it during the chat. I want to highlight changes and challenges that are merged and planned for the next release, with an interesting story, how they came to be and the impact in the co-system.

Changes are championed by different stakeholders. The ultimate goals are looking at the important things in the web landscape. For example, ultra updates. Updates for Core can be vulnerable and can be used to hack your site. Updates and plugins can help site owners to delay the version and reduce the surface of the hacking attack. Auto updates are tricky territory.

People quote FaithBook and you don't know the service. I don't think it’s' a fair comparison, these are software applications. Here, we're talking about updating a heavily customized application.

I think it doesn't have the easiest discoverability. I opened my first Core ticket about it. I feel it still needs design feedback to help users find it and decide if they want to use it or not.

This option actually has existed since WordPress 3.7, which came out in October of 2013. At the time of release, ultra updates were on by default. The change coming in 5.5 adds a UI to the plugin and themes auto updates. In this case, it's disabled by default and you have to opt in.

I totally understand the fear. At the same time, as an employee of a hosting company with hundreds of thousands of WordPress on the server, I am here to tell you that it can be. I'm part of the managing hosting company. Despite the existence of themes, people don't use them properly. I'm a big supporter of the feature.

The less time we spend in automated tasks, the more time for other works. My concern is the lack of tests that companies have done over years. Always check the site before you update, decide how long you want to update after the release, and we roll you back if something doesn't go as planned. It's not part of Core yet.

For now, I would definitely encourage people to give it a try and test it on staging or development before you turn on the switch on the production site. I'm sure you're doing this for anything you change on the WordPress site.

In the future release, 5.6, more security improvements will be introduced. For example, major Core releases, work hasn't started yet, but it's the last step of the process started 7 years ago. Support for 5.6 PHP will be dropped. The time has come for WordPress to drop it. Support for PHP 8.0 will be released in fall of 2020 and will be added. Audit and test your code for the change coming. It's a security and speed issue, since this version brings improvements in the area, too.

Finally, three stages plan for updating jQuery shift with WordPress. A test plugin was released to test the versions of jQuery, Migrate and UI. It's important to update your code. Migrate plugin will assist you in identifying potential issues.

Another welcome future is lazy-leading of images in the browser. The future is the web standard in the beginning of 2020 and saves bandwidth on servers, obviously, and user agents across sites, where images need to be loaded further down the page, even if the user never scrolls towards that. They are loaded anyway.

After security, this is an important factor for the website. Speed matters a lot. 53% of mobile visitors will leave if a webpage doesn't load within 3 seconds. That's nothing. At our site, we implement this at the beginning of the year, in our optimizer plugin. This is great because it makes it available to everyone, no matter which hosting company you use. And a faster and more secured web is a feature that is well-rooted for by various companies, etc.

Anything related to speed, I like to show scary numbers. This is the bounce rate increase as long as the page load increases.

Universities aren't ecommerce websites but depend on students signing up. Lazy loading. Speed optimization is important. Getting out of the box is a step towards it.

WordPress 5.5 comes with accessibility that are driven by businesses and the community. To mention a few available in a few weeks. They come with extensive alternate view modes. Disabled buttons will look like such.

This is one of my favorites, because I really don't like this animation, the shake animation indicating login failure will respect user's choices and motion Query.

Accessibility is an afterthought, which is the same for WordPress. For the last few years, we're working to get it right. Accessibility is required by law, motive enough for anyone to invest in it. To be cynical, it's good for business. The more people that can access you, the more people can sign up for courses, services, etc.

I was talking about the community being a big driving force behind accessibility improvements. The WPCampus organization is a major force behind it. In fact, you, the WPCampus community is the initiator of the Gutenberg accessibility audit released in 2019. The company that won the bid and found out . . . I'll 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. I talked with Rachel before the talk. I want to see something positive in this. 84 issues were opened in Gutenberg GitHub Repo and the majority, 68, were closed. There's still work to be done.

As you know, higher education institutions are sensitive to the legal obligations to provide accessible technology. At the time of the report, Gutenberg wanted to comply with the criteria of section 508. I don't know what the results of the report are a year later. Joe Dolson will talk in two hours about this. I suggest you don't miss it. I won't miss it.

Before hearing his session, no matter what he has to say, I know something for sure, 100%. The WordPress accessibility team is working tirelessly to improve accessibility of WordPress and lending improvement after improvement in each release.

Finally, the last release is the XML sitemap. Submitting the map is important for SEO. The project was started by a number of companies, including Google, and benefits the user, no matter the engine. SEO means that you'll show up before competitors. SEO isn't achieved by submitting atone SML sitemap, but releasing compelling content. SEO uses code to make your website stand out. It creates a sitemap that you see. Like this from my personal website. [Showing.] It's extensible and can be customized.

My personal opinion, it could include UI controls to customize content that shows up. Both features are in scope of the project when started. This is a good first iteration. I hope that in time, it takes into account the level of usefulness and complexity that are necessary today in the SEO world.

It is extensible to a certain point. Image, video, and hooks aren't available at this point. If you're happy with the basics and you're relying on a plugin for the sitemap, you don't need it and it's one less update to worry about.

Whatever you decide, this is a great first step to integrate out of the box SEO options so it's a good start.

These are the features that are based on impact from business ecosystems and community. What happens after August, those almost ready for 5.6? People work on WordPress every day, on tickets, on how to make it better. Go to wordPress.org.roadmap. You'll see a direction of where the software is headed.

I don't think it's a surprised that blocks are the main focus and has been so since 2017. The plan is made of four stages. Phase one, introduce block editor, from 5.0 and moves forward as a plugin. Multiple plugins are merged to a major release. For example, 5.5 has ten versions. It's a lot of new things.

Phase two. I'm more interested to talk about phase two, full site editing. The goal of the phase is to utilize Gutenberg's block model in editing experience past page and post content. In other words, the goal is to make the site customizable.

From this point, everything you see is a block on the page. The user can edit header/footer, menu, modify widgets, templates, etc. This was introduced in Sept 2019, a lead editor on the Gutenberg team. You can look at my slides and look up Francesca Marano and there's all the sources that I will post and you can see it in action for the first time.

I'm a major Gutenberg fangirl. When I first tried it, before 5.0, I hated it. It felt weird and buggy and not ready. I am very happy to see the improvement. But as much as I'm thrilled with it evolving and playing around with it to create great editorial workloads, I have concerns about full site editing.

First is timeline. FFE, called in brief, is developed with a lot of resources. Will it be ready for WordPress 5.6, supposed to go out in mid-December? This is the initial plan. Will five months be enough to get it to a point where it doesn't feel like Gutenberg, but feels ready?

When Gutenberg is launched, it feels ready and usable by sites big or small. What happens if not? Will FFC merging be delayed for later release, to 5.7? Will WordPress release be delayed because full site editing isn't ready?

I think, after talking with the team involved in making it, that it will be ready for WordPress 5.6, but it will be merged later on. Potentially, 5.7. At this time, it's not confirmed yet.

My second concern was, not only mine, but a big concern in the business ecosystem. What is the future of WordPress Theme Shops and developers? Full site editing is a blessing and blocker. It's a blessing and allows everyone to leverage the opportunities offered by blocks. You have play with html and JavaScript. At the same time, if they play their cards right with marketing, they can attract customers with shiny new toys.

Part of my job is looking into Facebook groups and seeing the conversation around SiteGround and WordPress. A quick look at the forum and groups looks at the struggle that changes things, for people that know CSS, are trivial, like font and elements position. Theme shops and developers adapt to the block-based themes can offer this more easily to customers and make it part of the selling proposition.

Having more options available to end users don't put web developers out of work. Dragging and dropping doesn't make you a developer. There aren't agencies offering customization services. Not everyone wants to do it on their own. At the same time, there's a lot to learn. Full site editing is changing everything, again. In terms of actually developing a theme . . . Right now, view themes are block ready in third party theme shops.

Full site editing isn’t merged in 5.6, but will be in 5.7, scheduled sometime in the first half of 2021 . . . It's less than half a year away. Are developers getting ready? This is a question for you.

The biggest question for me. What happens to all the non-block supporting things when full site editing is introduced?

I have followed Gutenberg Times. They did an interesting− they do it all the time− I watched the Q & A last year. The point was that the full-page editing makes the previous features obsolete, but brings it to a user interface, the user, end user, etc., don't need to learn about the various pieces and update the content as needed. It still didn't reply to my concern, what is going on with an older theme not supporting blocks.

I reached out to the source, one of the leading engineers of the Gutenberg term and he wrote that full site editing is enabled when a theme supporting it is used. If a theme isn't used, it works like today.

This is obviously, a major relief for me, and hopefully you too. Definitely, this message needs to be passed around so people won't go into hysteria for something that actually will break.

So, I chatted with a theme developer and other people that work in the industry. To quote Justin Tadlock, with experience as theme developers and joined WPTavern as an editor, there are more questions than answers, especially about theme development. The best thing to do− keep up to date.

Compared to how Gutenberg was communicated, I the full site editing is a step forward. Development happens in GitHub, but you can follow how the project evolved in many places. These are my favorite four. Two are community resources and two are official from the project.

First is Gutenberg Times, curated community voices. It's by a developer based in Florida. There's a Q & A session, YouTube channel, etc. There's a site by Carolina, a theme team contributor. If you need to make a block base theme, it's excellent. It's free. If you use it, I encourage you to sponsor it.

There are "Ways to Keep Up with Full Site Editing" and talks about the updates given. If you want to go deeper, follow the blogs of the team that are involved in making Gutenberg and Full Site Editing, Core, Design and accessibility teams, to name a few.

In addition to what we talked about, a number of features aren't worked on, but are exciting and promising.

As one of the writers of the Site Ground blog and a founder of a multi-author blog in Italy, I am looking forward to phase three, collaboration features. As was said in State of The Word, I am quoting, "you take everything you see in Gutenberg and make sure you can coedit in real time with anything editing what you are." This allows multiple people to access content without taking over from someone working at the same time.

If your staff is made up of more than one person, you know the pain of taking over each other and waiting for the person to edit, make your edits again, and it goes on and on until you're satisfied with the content. This will help all of us to streamline the editorial work in a way that will be similar to Google Docs, at least in my dreams.

Finally, phase four is a major way to change in WordPress. Right now, there's nothing concrete. Let's go with the wishful thinking.

My wish for Core is to include multilingual support out of the box. They don't need plugins to translate to multiple languages. As a non-native speaker, who works for an international company, as someone who built sites for Italians working with other countries, the struggle is real.

I don't know if WordPress can substitute itself for mature plugins. But basic functionality would be great. It's one less plugin to worry about. More speed, more security, less worry, and more features that are beneficial for a lot of people that are directed to WordPress.

Based on what I said, I think that the future of WordPress is bright. We're moving forward and innovating.

There's a "but." To accomplish this, the project needs a multitude of people, at a personal level, at a stakeholder/business interest level. I think the Gutenberg Audit is a great example. A community needed a need, raised the flag, worked on it and came out with a solution.

I know it sounds contradictorily, but pick one thing in WordPress to make better and invest. No matter how much, 1-10 hours a month, whatever you can do. Give feedback and help us take it to the end of the line for everyone to enjoy. Outreach and mentorship. More than visibility, being the coleader of two releases, I am happy with the work, even though I'm not directly involved with WordPress 5.6. It's being led by women-focused leads.

There are additional teams, subteams focused on testing, support, and documentation. Those areas, I have a feeling don't have enough TLC, in the past. They are really important to help the WordPress project deliver holistic user experience for as many people as possible, developers, designers, users, hobbyists, no matter what.

After all, I go to the founding principles, part of the contributing as stated by Eric, S. Reymond, who wrote “The Cathedral and the Bazaar." It's a great book. I would change "developer" in this sentence. We all make this piece of software by scratching our personal itch. For me, it's mentorship, outreach, and education. For others, it's development. For others, it's something else. It doesn't matter. It's the best way for WordPress to continue to thrive and survive.

That would be all from me. Thank you for listening. My name is Francesca Marano. I am the WordPress Community and Partnership Manager at SiteGround. Here's the link. Https://2020.wpcampus.org/schedule/the-future-of-WordPress/feedback. You can get in touch with me here. Or you can tweet me. Thank you so much for having me.

I hope we have time for questions. Do we have time for questions? Do we have questions? Rachel, give me a sign.

Rachel: I am muted again. That's what was happening. I will figure this out eventually, everyone. That was a great session. Thank you for sharing with us.

There were a few questions that popped up. Someone asked− "WordPress Core manages lazy loading. What do we do to enable it?"

Francesca: We don't need to do anything. My English . . . English isn't my first language. I say things that may not be correct. Lazy loading is there and merged. You don't have to do anything. It's how images load from now on in WordPress. Don't do anything. It's a great improvement.

If you're familiar with lazy loading and how it works in a browser, it's important for speed optimization. If you have a post with a lot of images and the browser loads them all, if people don't scroll down, like very long essays, it will delay the loading time of the page. Instead, lazy loading images, they start to load when you get there. It's an oversimplification of a complex thing in development. That's it. It's there.

I meant that SiteGround implemented this already in our plugin, months ago, but is available by default in WordPress. You don't have to do anything.

Rachel: Cool. Let's see . . . Time for one or two more. Will PHP 7.X be supported in WordPress 5.6?

Do you know the answer?

Francesca: It will be. It takes forever to drop 5.4. I don't really see us dropping everything and embracing PHPH from 5.6, because 5.6 will come out after PHP 8.0. We are dropping 5.6 in 5.6. It's confusing, but it's happening.

Rachel: We have one more pop up. "Hi, I wonder how full site editing capabilities will manifest in areas of the theme where users don't want/need full editing access. Examples are 404-page, archive page for post types. Does post site editing mean that as a content editor, I have to build out the experience?"

Francesca: You aren't required, but you have the option. A killer 404 page is a good investment for marketing. That's a page, if I made websites, I would make it as fun as useful as possible. I digress.

The truth is, I can't give you a straightforward answer. Development happens every single moment and done by a large team that spans all of the time zones, something that was made this morning may be changed in five hours by the people that get up in Pacific time in the USA.

As a content creator, you will change things that right now, you need development experience to change. I'm thinking of the simplest things. Again, I see people wanting to do this. A footer with widget areas. Your theme comes with two. But you want one or three. Up until now, you could do it only if you could register the widget or footer areas. With full site editing, you can do it. If you choose not to, that's fine.

I was relieved by the answer when I reached out. I will be honest, I was scared 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 start over.

Themes will be block ready. It just gives you the ability to do something more with it. But you will still start from a theme. Did I help a little bit or make it more confusing?

Rachel: I think you did. I think you got it. On that amazing at length answer, we wrap up for today. We're out of time. Thank you, Francesca for the lovely presentation.