Depending on who you talk to and when, you might hear the refrain that the WordPress is moving too fast or too slow. The sentiments are often held so strongly with each side expressing dismay. An easy example I’ve heard since I ran the now evolved FSE Outreach Program is around the desire for responsive controls. It still regularly comes up as an area folks want to see movement on and lament how slow it’s been. At the same time, I hear how fast the project is moving, particularly from block themers and contributors. Whispers of a desire for a maintenance only release float around. Folks want to see “more in Core” with rising user expectations for software and others want to see Core as lean as possible. You hear all sides expressed loudly and regularly.
How do you make sense of this when you’re trying to be a good steward of the project? To me, a few things come to mind: clarify why something is moving at the speed it is, set expectations for the speed (ex: “this feature is fast changing and in the early days” or “this feature relies on XYZ feature’s speed”), break things down into smaller iterations when stuck, and pay attention to the tension to see what’s not moving at the right pace. On that last note, I think the conflicting “too fast” and “too slow” feedback reflects a sense that we have room to grow to move the right things forward at the right time to solve the right problems. It’s in that space that I’m mostly interested in living and getting specific about, alongside communicating as much as possible when something isn’t changing anytime soon (“here are ways to work around this”) or is changing rapidly (“proceed with caution”).
Some problems also don’t have easy answers and a faster answer isn’t necessarily the best answer for the long term of the project. At the same time, not landing something isn’t always neutral and can be damaging to creating a more open web. It’s a delicate balance!
For WordPress 6.6, I was really hoping to see a longstanding problem of surfacing inherited styles iterated upon. Knowing where a block’s style comes from is key to knowing where a change might need to be made to style it to your liking. For 6.6, work was started to show locally the value that a block inherits globally, when applicable. This means that, for example, if you set a paragraph to always have blue text in Styles, every paragraph you added will show blue text and the block settings will show the blue color as the chosen text color. This is in contrast to today’s experience, where it shows a circle with a line through it, to indicate that no local color has been set despite the block inheriting it globally. This change will not land for 6.6 but when it does in a future release it will resolve long standing feedback on the experience of styling in the Site Editor and lay the groundwork for future improvements to show the hierarchy of styling. This is a great example of something that was broken down into a smaller, more iterative step that could move forward but that still didn’t make the cut. I feel these deeply, even as the project also lands big, exciting features like overrides in synced patterns.
To offer a counter example, I’m excited to see an iteration on the Inserter experience to show all blocks rather than just the blocks that can be added within another block or in a certain context. This was moved on much quicker partially thanks to it being a more contained problem not requiring a new design approach and thanks to work to break it down into an initial iteration. The video below shows a comparison between 6.5 and the upcoming 6.6 release:
Ultimately, this tension is one that will likely always be there and I’m learning to love it more deeply and specifically. What causes swells of “this is changing too fast” vs “this is changing too slowly”? Who is voicing concerns about speed? What side of things will upcoming features fall into? What does it mean to move at the right pace? What role does communication play in how the speed of things feel?
Shout out to Microsoft’s Image Creator for this featured image.
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