Day 10: #WP20 From Blogs to Blocks

Prompt 10/20 Blog: Check out the WordPress Roadmap (or this Roadmap to 6.3). What upcoming WordPress projects are you most excited to see happen?

https://make.wordpress.org/marketing/2023/05/17/day-10-wp20-from-blogs-to-blocks/

The full roadmap has a lot of interesting things on it, but I want to pick just a few to focus on:

CMS

Community

  • Ongoing re-engagement of events
  • Holistic contributor onboarding
  • Establish contributor and mentor programs

I’ll focus on Community first, which is no surprise for folks who know me. I’ve not attended an in-person WordPress event since March of 2020. I was meant to speak at a WordCamp this year, and got Covid the week beforehand and had to cancel. The pandemic is still ongoing folks!

I like the idea of reworking the onboarding experience for contributors, including building out a mentorship program for contributing. This has long been a large barrier to entry in WordPress community involvement, and getting the knowledge that has accrued in peoples’ heads into a defined program would go a long way toward ensuring the future of WordPress.


The reason that I’m excited for PHP 8.2 compatibility is for improved speed, performance, and security. Though I would also want the WordPress Coding Standards library to catch up, as that’s been a pain for testing and linting for me lately.

I’m excited for Custom CSS in blocks and theme variations because that just makes it even easier to customize pages to look how you want them. Having these tools in blocks directly would let you make changes without having to know CSS selectors.

Finally in the CMS, I am excited for new APIs, including the Fonts API and the Block API. In my mind, these will make it easier for users to build custom experiences around WordPress.

If you have used RSS readers, you are already familiar with the idea that you can extract content from a blog and read it in different formats and styles, depending on the reader that you are using. Now imagine that you could apply this concept to your browser directly, and on any WordPress website.

In my mind I see a browser extension that lets me not only customize things on a reader level, but at a block and font level to load just the things that are needed from each website (the content), and handle the design of all of the other elements yourself.

This would necessarily take some of the presentation control from site owners and put it in the hand of visitors. That’s not always a bad thing though, and something that I would absolutely make use of. Either way, it’s certainly worth considering when building websites in the future. They have always said that Content is King, and it’s only becoming more true IMO.


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