The Month in WordPress – November 2022

WordPress enthusiasts tuned in last week for the State of the Word address to celebrate the project’s yearly accomplishments and explore what 2023 holds. But that’s not the only exciting update from the past month. New proposals and ideas are already emerging with an eye on the year ahead—let’s dive into them!

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Highlights from State of the Word 2022

WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg delivered the annual State of the Word address on December 15, 2022, before a live audience in New York City. Most attendees joined the event via livestream or one of the 33 watch parties held across 11 countries.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy, Executive Director of WordPress, kicked off this year’s event with an introduction to the Four Freedoms of open source and the importance of WordPress in ensuring “a free, open and interconnected web for the future.”

Similar to past State of the Word events, Matt reflected on the project’s achievements over the past year, including Gutenberg’s adoption beyond WordPress, the steady progress in advancing the site editing experience, and the return to in-person events. In addition, he took the opportunity to remind everyone of the 2023 Community Summit and the 20th anniversary of WordPress coming up next year.

Ahead of 2023, Matt announced new taxonomies in the www.remarpro.com theme and plugin directories to help users identify the extensions that best fit their needs and plans for Phase 3 of Gutenberg—Collaboration—among other notable updates.

People who watched the State of the Word enjoyed a demo of WordPress Playground, an experimental project to explore, experiment, and build apps with a WordPress instance that runs entirely in the browser.

Missed the event? Read the recap or watch the State of the Word recording and Q&A session on WordPress.tv.

The 2022 WordPress Survey is open

The annual WordPress survey helps project leadership and those who build WordPress understand more about the contributor experience, how the software is used, and by whom.

This year’s survey will remain open through the end of 2022 and is available in English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish.

Take the 2022 WordPress Survey to help make an impact on the project.

What’s new in Gutenberg

Two new versions of Gutenberg have shipped in the last month:

• Gutenberg 14.6, released on November 23, 2022, came with many refinements to core blocks. Notable highlights include a variation picker that allows users to choose a desired layout when a Group block is inserted on a page, a new list view for editing the Navigation block, and a keyboard shortcut to transform paragraph blocks into headings.
• Gutenberg 14.7, released on December 7, 2022, introduced an experimental tabbed sidebar, colors to help identify some block types in list view, and improvements to the Page List block to make it easier to manage page links in the content.

Follow the “What’s new in Gutenberg” posts to stay on top of the latest enhancements.

Team updates: Introducing the block editor in the support forums, a revamped Showcase page, and more

• The Support and Meta Teams are bringing the block editor experience into the www.remarpro.com support forums.
• www.remarpro.com’s redesign continues with a refreshed Showcase page.
• A proposal for the 2023 Global Community Sponsorship Program has been published.
• WordPress is accessible to more people thanks to 19,357 contributors who translated more than eight million strings this year. Learn more about the Polyglots Team’s achievements in 2022.
• Speaking of accomplishments, supporters of the Global Meetup Reactivation project helped reactivated 126 meetup groups in 2022! There are also some discussions on how these efforts can support the Polyglots Outreach Effort project, and vice versa.
• The Community Team met with members of the Meetup.com team to help report some feedback and issues with an accessibility overlay that they ultimately agreed to remove.
• The Training Team highlighted the latest updates that have been made to Learn WordPress. In addition, part 1 and part 2 of the Developers Guide to Block Themes are now available on the platform.
• The Themes and Polyglots Teams announced their team representatives for 2023.
• The final releases for WordPress 3.7-4.0 were made available on November 30, 2022, with a notice that they are no longer receiving security updates. WordPress 4.1 and later will continue to receive such updates.
• Fresh off the press, the December 2022 edition of the Polyglots monthly newsletter is available for reading.
• The latest edition of People of WordPress features Huanyi Chuang, a front end developer from Taiwan.

Curious about why WordPress has so many releases? Tune in to Episode 44 of WP Briefing to learn about the role of major and minor releases in the project.

Feedback & testing requests

• Help efforts to wrap up Gutenberg Phase 2 by testing the Site Editor’s latest updates. Leave your feedback by January 6, 2023.
• The Performance Team shared a new proposal for enhancing the Scripts API with a loading strategy.
• The Full Site Editing (FSE) Outreach Program is looking for volunteers to use Replay.io for capturing bugs. Express your interest by December 28, 2022.
• Version 21.4 of the WordPress mobile app for Android and iOS is available for testing.

The Community Team is calling on WordPress contributor teams to suggest topics for the 2023 Community Summit by January 16, 2023.

WordPress events updates

• The #WPDiversity working group organized several workshops during the past few months. Among other highlights, attendees of the Speaker Workshop for Women Voices in Latin America reported a 52% increase in self-confidence to speak in public. Stay tuned for the next events.
• The WordCamp Europe 2023 organizing team shared their content vision for next year’s flagship event in Athens, Greece.
• WordCamp Asia 2023 is just a few months away, scheduled for February 17-19, 2023, in Bangkok, Thailand. Organizers have announced the first recipient of the WordCamp Asia Diversity Scholarship, Awais Arfan.
• Three more WordCamps are happening in the next few months:
  • ???? WordCamp Zaragoza, Spain on January 20-21, 2023
  • ???? WordCamp Birmingham, Alabama, USA on February 4-5, 2023
  • ???? WordCamp Cebu, Philippines on February 11, 2023

WordCamp Europe 2023 is calling for sponsors and speakers.

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The following folks contributed to this edition of The Month in WordPress: @cbringmann, @webcommsat, @sereedmedia, and @rmartinezduque.