Year-End Meetup
On November 24, we had our second and last meetup of the year. I know it’s not a lot of gatherings, but I think it’s understandable because of the pandemic and general zoom fatigue.
Anyhow, we still had some people attending our 2021 End of the Year meetup, where we had two major topics, presented by Silvan and myself.
- Building schlaufux.ch using WordPress and LearnDash, and then rebuilding it completely using the TALL stack (Silvan)
- All you need to know about WordPress 5.9 and Full Site Editing (Pascal)
schlaufux.ch
Silvan’s presentation about schlaufux.ch was super interesting because it covers building an e-learning plaltform using the popular LearnDash plugin and then completely revamping it using the TALL stack (Tailwind, Alpine, Laravel, Livewire). No more WordPress at all!
In case you missed it, here are the slides:
WordPress 5.9 + Full Site Editing
In the second part of the meetup I talked about the recent developments in WordPress core and Gutenberg this past year. For example, a major milestone there was WordPress 5.8 “Tatum”, which brought block widgets, template editing, block patterns and the query loop block. Oh, and it also removed support for Internet Explorer 11!
All these features are stepping stones towards full site editing (FSE) — which is the ability to edit your complete website using the block editor — slated for WordPress 5.9.
WordPress 5.9 was originally planned to be released in December, but it got delayed to January because the whole full site editing feature was not really ready for prime time yet. While it still has its quirks, WordPress 5.9 Beta 1 is now available already!
I gave a quick demo of how FSE works, and what it means for users and developers. I didn’t prepare any slides for it, but the following official demo video captures the essence of it:
Take the 2021 WordPress Annual Survey
Each year, members of the WordPress community are asked to provide their valuable feedback through an annual survey.
As mentioned on the announcement post, this survey helps those who build WordPress understand more about how the software is used, and by whom. The survey also helps leaders in the WordPress open source project learn more about our contributors’ experiences.
The survey will be open through the end of 2021, and the results will be published on WordPress.org eventually.
State of the Word 2021
On December 14, 2021, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg will deliver his annual keynote.
Check out the announcement post to get the details.
The community team is suggesting to organize watch parties around the globe to watch the livestream together. If you all think that is something you’d like to do, please let us know in the comments or on Slack.