Openverse, Block Styling and WordPress 6.2

Monet Davenport:
Welcome to Press the Issue, a podcast for MasterWP, your source for industry insights for WordPress professionals. Get show notes, transcripts, and more information about the show at masterwp.com/presstheissue. Press the issue by MasterWP is sponsored by LearnDash. Your expertise makes you money doing what you do. Now let it make you money teaching what you do. To create a course with LearnDash visit learndash.com. Our mission at MasterWP is to bring new voices into WordPress and tech every day. The new MasterWP workshop series does just that. Our new live and recorded workshops on everything from code to design to business turn WordPress fans into WordPress experts. Find the workshop for you at workshops.masterwp.com. Use the code podcast10 for a 10% discount.

Allie Nimmons:
In this episode, Rob and Brian review the biggest new features of WordPress 6.2, the integration of the OpenVerse image library into WordPress core, discuss whether full site editing is really ready to move out of beta, and whether the OpenVerse is proof that web privacy regulations have become a hindrance rather than a help for the typical web user.

Rob Howard:
Hey Brian, how’s it going?

Brian Coords:
Good. How are you doing today?

Rob Howard:
Very good. Happy to be back on the podcast with you. Today we are going to talk about the forthcoming release of WordPress 6.2, which is coming out on March 28th of this month. So there’s a lot of new stuff. Obviously it’s a big point release and I’ve got a bunch of questions for you. Have you had a chance to dig into it and play with the beta and stuff like that yet?

Brian Coords:
I have been using the beta on one of the sites I’m developing right now, but I keep having to switch back and forth to find out if the issues I’m having are because I’m using the beta or just because I’m using a lot more block editor than I usually do. So I have been turning it on and off a lot recently.

Rob Howard:
And I know on kind of a separate thread of discussion, you and Aurooba have been doing a lot of block editor exploration and work, so that has been really cool to hear that. And we’ll be sure to link out to some of your deeper stuff on that, on your viewSource podcast too. We kind of have almost like an array of podcasts that are now spinning off from MasterWP and the company. And I love it because I get to kind of spy on all of your thoughts in a variety of different platforms. So I always find that to be fun, being part of a team that has so many kind of creative outlets has been really cool.

Brian Coords:
Yeah, it’s nice working with people who are just want to share, want to teach, want to learn a lot of new things. That just kind of keeps it fun and keeps it fresh.

Rob Howard:
Totally. We’ve kind of stumbled into the fact that we all like being teachers, but it’s been a very cool transition to that from being just a developer to a developer and a teacher.
So in the world of 6.2, there’s a lot of block stuff that you’ve been working with that also is kind of simultaneously new. But one of the big things is lots of changes to CSS and styling. Can you talk about that? What you’ve played with and what we’re looking for as big changes for developers in the next release?

Brian Coords:
Yeah, so as always with anything block editor, you always have to parse through everything to find out is this feature for anybody using the block editor or is it only for people using full site editing block themes? So some of these I’ll try to remember, but sometimes you think, “Oh, that’s a cool feature,” and then you find out, well you have to use a full site editing theme. But the big kind of piece that I think a lot of people will be really excited about is the ability to add custom CSS is going to show up in WordPress 6.2 because that used to be in the Customizer. And as WordPress is moving away from using that front end Customizer tool, it’s been pretty hard to deal with full side editing without being able to just say, “Let me just write my own CSS for this two line thing.”
So this idea that you can write your own additional CSS in the backend and you can even do it on a per block basis, it’s one of those features that’s kind of in every other page builder. So I think people are really going to appreciate that it’s finally coming back into WordPress core.

Rob Howard:
Yeah, and as much as it’s not the best practice, I use that a lot because there’s often, in my role at our agency, I’m rarely building as full site from start to finish, but I’m often hot fixing stuff or helping a client experiment with something or just fooling around at the margins with a client project.
So having the ability to quickly override something is essential to me in my role because I’m not sitting there on local with a build process and all this stuff. I’m like saying, “Oh, we just got this for a request. This thing is looking weird. Can we fix this in 30 seconds or does it need to be a ticket that goes back to the developer?”

Brian Coords:
Yeah.

Rob Howard:
So that use case for me, really is essential to providing good client service quickly. Certainly you wouldn’t want to let that be the only way that you add CSS to the site, but I am a person who opens Customizer and adds custom CSS when I have to fix something quickly. And I would hate to see that go away permanently. So I’m glad it’s back.

Brian Coords:
Yeah. And if you are using a full site editing theme where theoretically you’re not really doing any local development, you’re pulling this theme off the shelf and you’re.. And there’s so many times, I do a lot of experimenting with full [inaudible 00:06:00] editing, and there’s so many times where I just think if I could just write two lines of CSS, I could save myself 10 minutes.
So for those themes where you’re literally, there is no local development environment and everything, it’s kind of a nice feature. And along that line, there’s a lot of things around like when you style a block, you can click one button and send that style to every block. So you could change the font size of paragraph and apply that everywhere. Or you can do copy and pasting styles from one block to another bringing… You might design a block one way and you just want to copy those colors, bring them somewhere else, that sort of stuff. So there’s a lot of really refinements around just styling things, getting things styled correctly, new tools to actually see all the blocks on your site and style them, see what they’re going to look like without actually sticking them inside of a page, things like that. So styles is really just a big push for 6.2.

Rob Howard:
Yeah, and the globalization of those changes makes a big difference in my workflow too. So I did a, not full site editing, but block editing site build for our agency site. And one of the things that I really appreciated, and this is a couple versions back, was the ability to copy a large container from one page to another. So we had our staff or our portfolio or something and I was like, “This would be cool if it was also on another page,” and there actually is a copy and paste option now.
So this fact that you can make those bulk edits or bulk copies in bigger ways, I think is going to make it easier and easier for content creators. Obviously I’m a developer too, but I wasn’t really in my… did not have my developer hat on when I was building this site. It was more like what you described where it’s like, “I’m going to do 95% of this in blocks, I’m going to write 30 lines of CSS to kind of fine tune it and then it’s done.” So that was a nice experience even a couple versions ago for me. And yeah, I’m happy to hear it’s getting better and better.

Brian Coords:
Yeah, and I do that with just my personal website. I do it full site editing. I try to live as somebody who doesn’t know how to write code would live, just to see what that’s like or something. So yeah, seeing a lot of those come in. Another place where they’re putting a lot of work into is… There’s a couple modes, one’s called distraction free mode, one’s called browse mode. But these are just, I think a lot of people feel like sometimes the block editor is a little overwhelming visually and it’s a little hard to navigate. So they have a distraction free mode that kind of turns off almost everything except for your content. That’s really nice. And then they have this browse mode that lets you kind of jump through all the different templates and parts and pieces and stuff. And it’s like you’re inside of an app, there’s no page reloads, there’s no refreshes. It’s very fluid ability to browse to your website. And if you ever used a tool like Squarespace or something, you’ll see that it’s pretty familiar to that experience.

Rob Howard:
I know I wouldn’t be able to do much with the block editor without that list sidebar that’s kind of like a table of contents-

Brian Coords:
Yeah.

Rob Howard:
…nested with all my blocks and everything. And I think that it sounds like the browse is almost a expansion upon that idea of I need to be able to iterate through these things without just hopefully hovering over the right thing and clicking on it at the precise moment when it’s highlighted, because that’s a very tedious process for a lot of blocks and pieces of blocks. So that’s good to hear that there’s kind of a better flow coming. Because I know before I even I guess realized that the list view was a thing, which I think also speaks to the sort of cacophony of icons that many people have brought up-

Brian Coords:
Yeah.

Rob Howard:
Before that I was like, oh my gosh, I can’t even click on this thing. And somebody who’s been building websites since before WordPress existed is getting frustrated with this process. So obviously I’m not the only person to voice that complaint, but I’m glad to hear that it sounds like we’re really moving ahead with some of those UI and user experience changes for the content creators.

Brian Coords:
Yeah, and there’s some updates kind of in the list view of color coding things, trying to make things a little easier to tell what’s what, and really all the panels are getting cleaned up. But if you’ve ever used… like I recently spent some time using Figma and Descript and some of these other modern apps. And once I saw that I was kind of like, “Oh, now I see what they’re going for with Gutenberg and-“.

Rob Howard:
Yep.

Brian Coords:
…you see Figma and the modern design tools and the modern podcast editing tools and you see like, “Oh, okay, they are part of a trend towards something.” And I think they’re maybe getting closer to it. So I think this is supposed to be the official full site editing is officially done and released, and phase two is completed as of this release, as far as we know. So that’s kind of what they’re trying to say at this point.

Rob Howard:
I have to say that while I want to be respectful of all the work that has gone in, it is just baffling to me that phase two has ended within a couple months of there being a huge hullabaloo about how full site editing barely worked. We don’t even know if we’re going to call it full site or site. I think it kind of is a repeat of the pattern of rolling something out too early, rolling something out in a really low-fi version of what it really should be, and it almost feels like a little bit of a punt to me.
That’s just my opinion. I know that there’s plenty of debate around that, but the idea that this is done and we’re moving on to phase three, which is I guess collaboration. Collaboration’s a great idea, but it is a little bit alarming to me that phase two is being labeled done. I know that the sort of response to that is, “Well we’re always going to be fine-tuning it,” but I hope that we don’t stop collaboration at the same percentage of completion that we’re stopping full site editing. If that makes sense. Because I don’t think that it’s really ready for primetime or adopted in any significant way. Even for serious developers, it’s like, “Hey, I kind of use this on my personal site. It kind of works.” But I would like to see maybe some big agencies using it for big projects a lot more consistently before we say it’s a done deal.
Maybe as you said, we’ll come back around to it. And obviously it’s kind of a fluid process, but the big picture of the four phases, to me, if I could wave a magic wand, I would say, “Let’s actually not. Let’s keep going and not shoehorn site editing into phase two and say it’s done just because you want to move on to phase three.” I’m sure there’s plenty of counterpoints and discussion around that, but to me, when I heard that at State of the Word I was like, “Really?” It seemed to me there was a bunch of big issues two days ago, and now we’re announcing that we’re done in March. So we’ll see where that goes. But I don’t know, it feels like we are almost reconning, like how they in a long series they say, “Oh, remember back in season one we said this, well here’s the explanation for it in season four.” And everyone’s like, “What? You just made that up.” I feel like that’s kind of what we’re seeing with phase two being done. Well, not really feeling done to most of the community.
That being said, I’m curious your experience with FSE or I guess SE so far and where you see it going and are we going to use it in our agency in the next year? Or is this going to be a thing that got released and then it languishes?

Brian Coords:
I think the phase one really this past year hit its stride of being where I feel pretty comfortable building an entire landing page across a bunch of sites in the block editor and it feels really good.

Rob Howard:
Yeah, totally.

Brian Coords:
And I feel like this is the year, phase one you could say, “Man, that’s really not as beta as it used to be.” I think full site editing probably is another two years behind from what I would consider I would use this on a site. It’s really great for a blog, it’s really great for a generic kind of newsletter or marketing site. The minute you bring in WooCommerce or an LMS or anything like that, that’s where it really starts to struggle. So I think that’s why a lot of agencies, you’re not going to jump for full site editing for that e-commerce site that you’re building for somebody or something where a pixel perfect design is needed. It’s not really good for that yet. Could you host your blog on it with a full site editing theme and get a pretty good result? Yeah, I think so. So is it beta software for agencies? Yeah. Is it good enough for bloggers? I think that’s fine.

Rob Howard:
And maybe a wordpress.com user is going to be the early adopter of that, whereas the agency is going to be more conservative because we need to adhere to different and higher standards, that sort of thing.

Brian Coords:
Yeah, it’s just a different use case. But I mean, I kind of agree. I would’ve loved to have seen collaboration and even multilingual. The third and fourth phases of Gutenberg come a little before site editing. I can think of a ton of use cases for both of those things and I can’t really think of a great use case for the editing my navigation menu in a block, so.

Rob Howard:
Yeah.

Brian Coords:
But that’s just my personal experience.

Rob Howard:
And I think that just also plays to the, there’s kind of this inherent conflict between two possible financial goals for WordPress. The first being, “Hey, I’m a WordPress agency, I just got paid 50 or a $100,000 to build a great website for a large company or a city or organization or something. And it’s like, okay well in that scenario, full site editing is a moot point because you’re building something that’s so custom and so bespoke that it doesn’t really matter.
So a lot of us make money that way by doing those client projects, whether they’re 5,000 or $500,000. That’s basically the same thing, the same basic sort of set of needs and goals.

Brian Coords:
Yeah.

Rob Howard:
The other flip side is are we competing with Squarespace? Are we competing with Shopify for the do-it-yourself users? So you definitely see how phase two site editing was almost entirely directed at that do-it-yourself user business model, which I think is part of the reason that it just falls so short for agencies because we don’t really care about do-it-yourself.

Brian Coords:
Yeah.

Rob Howard:
We actually want the client to have a little bit more of a fine-tuned type of control. I don’t want you to have less control, but I also don’t want you to break the header. So how do we figure that out? And in some ways, site editing actually complicates that challenge even more than what we had before.
So I think it’s that kind of weird dual business model where, hey, some of this stuff is clearly targeted at beating Squarespace despite their significant advertising investment and the DIY market, while other stuff is targeted more at, you and me and the other people who are these core developers and designers who are basically building stuff for clients on a regular basis.

Brian Coords:
And I think once they move into collaboration, multilingual, things that I think agencies will really get excited about, I could think of some of our clients that do a lot of writing a ton of content in Google Docs, and then they got to move it over, and then… That could be a game changer for them. Multilingual is nobody’s favorite thing to deal with in WordPress. That could be a game changer. So I’m optimistic that as they move into those, there will be some just refinements on it.
But the nice thing about the site editor is the further they go, it seems like they’re finally letting some of those features come out and you don’t have to use a site editing theme to get some of the good stuff there, which I think is really the best of both worlds living in that hybrid area.

Rob Howard:
Totally. And I’m excited about collaboration for the same reason. If I went back through my email and searched for, “Hey, I think you’re editing this, could you get out of it so I can edit it?” That’s probably happened 5,000 times in the last few years. And we’re not even doing that much nitty-gritty content work with people. But it’s like, oh my gosh, that is probably the most confusing experience for somebody who’s not really used to WordPress. And I mean, I can’t tell you how many clients have been freaked out and emailed me or called me and they’re like, “I can’t get into this, it says you’re editing it.” That’s just not a normal user experience anymore now that everybody’s used to Google Docs and all the equivalents.

Brian Coords:
And it’ll make even training your clients probably pretty cool. You open it up and you’re both looking at it. Yeah, I mean it’s such a great [inaudible 00:18:35]-

Rob Howard:
You see the cursor editing. And even we use Airtable, which is kind of a super spreadsheet tool, and there’s a little icon with your face on it and it’s like, “Oh, Brian’s editing this cell.” And so on and so forth. So it’s a very cool thing. There’s some significant technical challenges to it, but I’m really looking forward to seeing that get released because that’s the kind of thing where very much unlike site editing, it will be an immediate day-to-day improvement for the people who we’re working with and our team.

Brian Coords:
And then I guess the last really big change we should include is the OpenVerse integration, for sure. Have you messed around with the OpenVerse? Have you ever used OpenVerse?

Rob Howard:
I have. So we’re doing another project where we’re doing a plugin that processes images in a special way, that involves basically me testing it with millions of images to make sure it’s working. So I was on OpenVerse the other day for that purpose, but I love that it’s a public domain alternative to Unsplash and all these other sites out there that are sort of like… I mean, they’re nice stock photos. You can certainly go out and pay for stock photos, but I think we’re all really invested in the spirit of open source and public domain. And I think about the other Gutenberg project, which is the free eBooks at gutenberg.org. That is something that I’ve used for years. I love that you can go get every Sherlock Holmes book in two seconds.
And OpenVerse strikes me as the same kind of thing for imagery. Obviously there’s like Wikimedia Commons, which is a similar concept. But it seems like they’ve done a great job of making it really exhaustive, a really big catalog, lots of different stuff. So I love that concept and I’m actually really excited about the idea of plugging it in quickly to WordPress. I think that’s, it’s not one of those features of anyone necessarily was like, “Oh, that was the top thing on my feature list.” But it’s like now that I have this, I definitely could see myself using it. Which is really cool. And I think it of course does a nice job of just reinforcing the public goods and open source spirit of the stuff that we’re doing with WordPress.
Now that being said, you’re telling me that there was some drama around OpenVerse. Could you tell me what was going on with that as we were getting up to this 6.2 release?

Brian Coords:
Yeah, so the way it works is when you’re writing your blog post and you want to add an image to it, you can pull one from your media library. But now you can just, in 6.2 you’ll be able to just pull one straight from the OpenVerse project. Which I agree with you, I think that should be one of their killer features that they should use in their promotional stuff. ‘Cause I think a lot of just regular users will really appreciate that. “Oh, I need a featured image for my blog post. Cool. I can grab one and I know that it’s-”

Rob Howard:
Show me a picture of the Colosseum or something and boom, there it is.

Brian Coords:
Yeah.

Rob Howard:
Right? Yeah.

Brian Coords:
Yeah, so I love it. I guess what happened is when they finally merged it in into the beta version of WordPress that we’re all testing right now, I guess it wasn’t importing the image into your website. It was sort of hot linking to the image hosted on the OpenVerse website, which when you first say that out loud you think that’s actually kind of nice; they’re hosting the image for you, it’s just kind of linking to this image offsite somewhere. That’s great. It’s not going to take storage space on your server. Blah, blah, blah. But in the world that we live in with GDPR, it kind of was started for a lot of people, especially in Germany, they were very concerned because they’ve had this issue with Google fonts in the past where you can’t load third party resources from another website, at least not without a lot of privacy popups and banners.
So the idea that it would do that by default, just loading in content that’s hosted on a different server and potentially expose IP addresses, which to me maybe is not the biggest deal,. The legal ramifications of it are the biggest deal. And I know you’ve written a lot about GDPR and fonts, so I’m kind of curious what you think about that.

Rob Howard:
Yeah, so for anybody who’s not up on what GDPR is, it’s basically the European privacy regulations and they’re much stricter than anywhere else in the world. California has kind of caught up with them a little bit, but GDPR really is kind of the gold standard if you want to look at it that way, in terms of strictness about internet privacy. And it’s the reason we have accept cookies popups. It’s funny, my nine-year-old son was on his iPad the other day and he’s like, “Should I accept cookies? What are cookies?” And I’m like, “Oh my God, I hate GDPR so much.” This is just the worst user experience for everyone. Way to make the internet just objectively worse in every way via weird attempts at regulation.
But that being said, I’ve written extensively and somewhat mockingly about GDPR. Because I think that in the larger scheme of things, a challenge about regulating privacy is that it’s easy to focus on minutia. The acceptance of cookies sort of is meaningful in theory. In practice it’s kind of minutia. And then all of a sudden you have 9 million pop-ups on every site or you can’t use Google fonts anymore, which I think is even questionable as the law is written. But at least one judge has sort of arrived at the fact that using Google fonts is against the law if you don’t alert people to it.
So to me it really is well intentioned, but the companies that are the target of it don’t care. Facebook just basically factors in the $25 million fine and goes on with their day.

Brian Coords:
Yeah.

Rob Howard:
That’s just a cost of doing business to them. It would be very difficult to fine them enough money to make them not get a benefit from having more of your data. Because the whole business model of Google and Facebook is selling advertising to you. And it’s kind of like this, all the best minds of my generation are just trying to make people click on more ads. And it’s kind of the sad state of affairs in tech-

Brian Coords:
Yeah.

Rob Howard:
…that most people who are good engineers or good product creators are getting paid to make you get addicted to stuff or click on more ads for weight loss products or whatever it is. Or maybe I’m revealing what my Instagram and feed looks like a little bit too much there, but it’s a big issue and it’s not helping anybody.
It makes people depressed, it makes people stressed out. And it’s like we’re putting all these resources into this and then simultaneously we have this regulation that sort of tries to attack these advertising data… what do you call? Basically these giant tracking scripts, right?

Brian Coords:
Yeah.

Rob Howard:
And they do it in a way that is not big enough to affect the big players, but it affects the tiny players in just really ridiculous and negative ways. So I’m not a big fan of GDPR. I think it’s poorly targeted, and there’s lots of people who will disagree with that obviously. But my ad blocker has done a lot more for me than GDPR ever will do for all the humans in the world combined in terms of privacy. And it doesn’t force sweat developers to worry about getting sued over having a nice font included on your sites.
That being said, the whole hot linking of images thing is very much a 1999 problem. To me, I remember back in the day, “Oh, I’m paying 20 bucks a month and I’m running out of server bandwidth because somebody hot linked my image from another site and now I got to write some code to block them, depending on the referring URL.” And to me, regardless of the GDPR considerations, I think it makes sense to not hot link to the image, right?

Brian Coords:
Yeah.

Rob Howard:
So if it’s on OpenVerse and who automatic or the WordPress foundation or whoever is paying for that server, okay, it’s not really hurting anybody who’s not aware of the problem. But it definitely is poor practice. And as we spoke about earlier, it’s a little bit weird that it got through so many layers of review, especially after so many people had a five alarm fire type situation about the Playfair font being illegal on every website in Germany, which I found to be so over the top as a reaction. Whereas this was like, it’s interesting that this got through. Certainly it shouldn’t be hot linked that way, but perhaps it is a gentle indication to some of the GDPR fanatics out there that there actually are good reasons to include data from another website on your website, and it actually does make life easier.
So I don’t think I’m going to be changing any minds on that anytime soon. But the fact that this was perceived by everybody on the squad as a useful thing, and it violates GDPR tells me that may be extreme adherence to GDPR is more of a negative than a positive for the web.

Brian Coords:
Yeah, and I’ll say one other side of this is I have to imagine they thought it would be nice because of the state of WordPress hosting companies at this point in time. So I think there was, I won’t say which hosting company, but I think we were dealing internally with an error that was because a very prominent WordPress hosting company had a database size limit. Like your database can’t be bigger than a certain number or something-

Rob Howard:
Yeah, that was a first for me. I was like, “What is this?”

Brian Coords:
And a expensive one, not a cheap post either.

Rob Howard:
Yeah, and not like a $3 a month plan, right?

Brian Coords:
Yeah.

Rob Howard:
But the kind of thing where that was a huge surprise. And we took over that site, the client was kind of caught by surprise by it. We took it over from another developer who was struggling. And it was kind of a negative spin out because there were all these hosting problems mixed with the site was also kind of a mess in the first place in the previous developer. And it was very strange. But to your point, that’s one of the arguments of, “Hey, it’s actually nice to use a CDN for my JavaScript, or it’s nice to use another URL for my images or my fonts because I don’t have to deal with the technical details of hosting and bandwidth and edge caching and all that stuff.”
So that’s an argument that flies directly in the face of the German GDPR Google Fonts decision. So it shows that there is a clearly a benefit to these things and that it would be nice if we could strike a balance as opposed to reading this particular law in an extremely strict and narrow way.

Brian Coords:
Yeah, and it just shows that WordPress hosting companies definitely need to think about these sorts of things going forward, because hosting a lot of images is only probably going to increase. But also just in terms of how much performance a website gets around future phases of Gutenberg, the block editor in general. I mean, all these things, they just all start to add up. Safari was giving me some of those, “This webpage is using a lot of resources,” warnings when I was doing some basic block editing. And this is a pretty modern Apple silicon MacBook that Safari is telling me the block editor is using a little too much energy.
So all of these things kind of all go together as part of WordPress. And so that’s one thing we probably won’t have time to get into, but there is that WordPress performance team. And I think keeping an eye on all those sorts of pieces, there’s just a lot that goes into it and there’s a lot that they’re really going to have to start thinking about the further they go into Gutenberg phase three and four.

Rob Howard:
Yeah, I think we have a future podcast episode called Data Centers Aren’t Free: why you need to tighten up your content management processing and JavaScript and all that.
Well, this has been great. We’ll wrap up our 6.2 discussion for now, but of course there’s plenty more for us to come back with as more stuff gets released and we dig into some of these details. So Brian, it’s always a pleasure and looking forward to next time.

Brian Coords:
All right, thank you.

Allie Nimmons:
Hey there. Welcome to a new segment of Press the Issue, Listener Mail. We want to know what you think about this topic. Specifically, how do you think WordPress as a community and project can bring the next generation into the fold? Tweet your response to @_masterwp or email your response to [email protected]. Then tune in to our next episode to see if we read your response at the end of the show.

Monet Davenport:
Thank you for listening to this episode. Press the Issue is a production of MasterWP, produced by Allie Nimmons, hosted, edited, and musically supervised by Monet Davenport, and mixed and mastered by Teron Bullock. Please visit masterwp.com/presstheissue to find more episodes. Subscribe to our newsletter for more WordPress news at masterwp.com.