WordPress 7.0 Uncertainty

The site was built five years ago, making heavy use of the Timber plugin – which allows WordPress to use Twig templating – and Advanced Custom Fields blocks.

Things have changed a lot since then, so I have been stripping out Timber, porting all the Twig templates over to native WordPress, and then updating the old deprecated ACF block registration to use the current block.json method. 

It’s time-consuming and fiddly work, but very satisfying. In the digital world, work is often ephemeral, so it’s nice to be able to take an old project and bring it into a later generation of WordPress.

On which note, in WordPress this week, uncertainty about the upcoming WordPress 7.0 release, contrasted with some positive news from the plugins side.

WordPress 7.0 rc1 delayed

The release of WP 7.0 release client 1 has been pushed back by five days.

Significant concerns had been raised about 7.0’s Real-time Collaboration feature, leading to several last-minute changes to the feature to try and mitigate the impact on hosting and site performance, with discussion over how the feature will ultimately function still continuing.

At the same time, the decision has been made to ship 7.0 rc1 with RTC switched off by default, with an opt-in switch for those who wish to use the feature.

Another anticipated 7.0 feature, client-side media processing, has now been moved back to WordPress 7.1. Concerns over performance, browser compatibility and bundle size contributed to the decision to delay the feature until they can be addressed.

Even without client-side media processing, it looks like 7.0 will be far larger than previous versions. The current nightly build comes to approximately 60MB uncompressed, with the libvips library used for client-side media processing accounting for around 13MB of that. By comparison, WordPress 6.9.4 only came to 27MB. So whatever happens, a considerable increase in bundle size seems inevitable.

Featured Plugins update

A few weeks ago I wrote about the new featured plugins section on the WordPress add plugins page, which aimed to make that long-unchanged page a bit more dynamic, and help surface newer and less well known plugins from the WordPress directory.

After two weeks, the experiment seems to be working. Nick Hamze posted on his blog that the eight featured plugins have received more than 26,000 new installs since launch – a 622% increase over the preceding fortnight.

Hamze posted:

“WordPress has always had incredible talent hiding in plain sight inside its plugin directory, I just wanted to make sure some of it finally got seen. The data says it’s working.”

Roots launches WP Composer

After WP Engine’s acquisition of WPackagist earlier this month, the Roots team has announced a competing repository, which they describe as an “independent, community-funded, fully open source alternative”

Their project, initially called WP Composer but subsequently renamed WP Packages, has been in development since last August, but the WPackagist acquisition has prompted them to release sooner than expected, and to keep it in the hands of the community.

“For over a decade, WPackagist was the default way to install WordPress plugins and themes via Composer,” Word said. “Infrastructure this central to the WordPress Composer workflow shouldn’t be controlled by a single corporation. So we built an alternative.”