Looking Ahead to WordPress 6.6

WordPress 6.5 launch was nice, fairly uneventful.

I didn’t notice anything break on my sites, and I’m happy that I can finally select Google fonts for the block-based themes I’m running, like Twenty Twenty-Four.

The community is already looking ahead to 6.6 (and versions beyond) with Anne McCarthy leading the charge for another Hallway Hangout scheduled for April 24th at 7PM EST. I’ll be arriving back from a fun-filled vacation at Disney — hopefully I have enough energy to join.

Some of the topics on the agenda are:

• ~Data views efforts~ and its relationship to the Admin Redesign.
• ~Overrides in synced patterns~, including the UX and the broader reasoning around naming to unlock an override.
• ~Zoomed out view~ and the experience coming together to focus on patterns rather than granular block editing, including ~Advancing contentOnly editing~.
• Layout improvements, including ~Grid layout support~.
• ~Pattern styles~, which would offer multiple ways of styling content based on a single palette, and ~Colors and typeset presets from theme style variations~.
• ~Style inheritance~ to help clarify where and why different items are styled as they are. 

Here’s to hoping Overrides in Synced Patterns makes it to 6.6, as we really wanted in 6.5!

If only Overrides makes it to 6.6, we’ll have another nice but seemingly uneventful release in mid-July. See the roadmap here.

Slow. Iterative. Uneventful. Open Source.

There’s been a lot of fanfare around wanting WordPress to be more, to go faster, to ship more things for builders — and I get it — I was that person once, too. I’d wager to say that WordPress was a lot further off from today’s capabilities, but that’s software for you.

Unification. Stability. Community.

This what I want from my WordPress, these days. It’s not a product made by a product company, or at least, a traditional method a commercial product company would take. I know we can go on the fringes and break that apart, but there’s no marketing/sales team funneling customer feedback into the product team, which disseminates it down to the engineering team, and so on.

There’s not even just one team.

Think about it: a 20-year old software product, used by millions. The amount of customer avatars this software touches would put a traditional product marketing team into a tailspin. We know how challenging marketing WordPress is, and most of the good work is done by those of us in the trenches.

The recent wave of criticism where WordPress might be falling short isn’t wrong — it’s just not a product is solely focused on solving a WordPress builder problem. The old me would have taken issue with that, too. We’re part of the people in the trenches, after all.

What I’ve learned is that when WordPress continues to thrive, 3rd party tools win. People in the service industry continue to win. I’m either getting older, or I’m seeing the part where open source WordPress begins to make sense longterm.

So while 20 years is lightyears in tech, it’s still very young in how we all operate together as a community. Here’s to WordPress thriving.

Important Links

Slow news week again, except for the launch of 6.5!

• WordPress 6.5 “Regina” was released. I’m sure you’ve updated by now.
• Apparently Woo.com is moving back to WooCommerce.com citing a major drop in traffic impacting their organic search + their marketplace partners. A blurb was mentioned in the WooCommerce 8.8 delay announcement.
• Syed Balkhi announces that WP Beginner will be offering professional services.
• Steve Burge shows off an interesting custom publishing workflow UI for his suite of tools.
• Beaver Builder (the Jonas Brothers of page builders, I’m still waiting for someone to laugh at that.) celebrates 10 years!
• WordCamp Canada announced its first round of speakers.
• Cami MacNamara tweeted that WordPress community member Jocelyn Muzak passed awaypeacefully on March 31st.
• Eric Karkovack asks if we’re Going Too Far with WordPress Critiques?
• Video: Watch this before you upgrade to WordPress 6.5