WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy published a summary of the project’s “big picture” goals for 2023. The goals fall into three major categories: CMS, Community, and Ecosystem.
WordPress development will focus on completing the remaining tasks for Phase 2 (Customization), and will move on to begin exploring Collaboration in Phase 3.
“As we prepare for the third phase of the Gutenberg project, we are putting on our backend developer hats and working on the APIs that power our workflows,” Haden Chomphosy said in her recent Letter to WordPress.
“Releases during Phase 3 will focus on the main elements of collaborative user workflows. If that doesn’t make sense, think of built-in real-time collaboration, commenting options in drafts, easier browsing of post revisions, and programmatic editorial and pre-launch checklists.”
The vision for the first two phases was “blocks everywhere” and Haden Chomposy said this will be updated for Phase 3 to be centered on the idea of “works with the way you work.”
In addition to the Phase 3 APIs, Haden Chomphosy identified the following items as part of the CMS goals for 2023:
- Openverse search in Core
- Navigation block
- Media management
- Simplify the release process
- PHP 8.2 compatibility (Core and Gutenberg)
- Block theme development tools
Under the Community category, WordPress will be focusing on planning the Community Summit, which will be held at WordCamp US in 2023, contributor onboarding, improving Polyglot tools, establishing mentor programs, revamping WordPress.org designs, and keeping pace with learning content. The project is also aiming to develop a canonical plugin program, which should be helpful as some Performance team contributors recently expressed that they don’t fully understand what the process is for canonical plugins.
The Ecosystem category will focus on the WordPress Playground, an experimental project that uses WebAssembly (WASM) to run WordPress in the browser without a PHP server with many useful applications for contributors.
WordPress contributors also prevailed upon Matt Mullenweg to consider having the project devote some time to working through old tickets and fixing bugs. Mullenweg said he is amenable to tackling one long-standing ticket (the kind that are stuck because of missing decisions or multiple possible solutions) each month in 2023.
Something that has periodically arisen for me when building editorial workflows for clients is ‘I want to approve a draft published post written but author/editor’ as in not a draft, but a published post that can have a new revision without being live (I once even helped build such a workflow, it was really not easy, we had the concept of ‘draft published’ as a new post status where published was the ‘live version’ and 1 or more post revisions after that, where an approved person could ‘publish’ any version, past or future).
I wonder if this is being considered by the team, as collaboration over a published post / page would be really beneficial if every post published save / revision wasn’t live. Or the first version of a revision could be passed to someone else to edit / approve.