The WooCommerce Roundtable Dives Into WordPress 6.0

• Updated on: 2022-05-18
• Read original article here

The WooCommerce Roundtable Dives Into WordPress 6.0
Do the Woo - A WooCommerce Podcast
The WooCommerce Roundtable Dives Into WordPress 6.0
Play Episode
Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Overcast | PocketCasts
Thanks to Our Pod Friends
Avoid critical disruptions and added stress and do what you do best. Mindsize will give you and your clients peace of mind with their maintenance and optimization plans. 
IconicWP
" itemprop="image" srcset="https://dothewoo.io/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/IconicWP.png 543w, https://dothewoo.io/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/IconicWP-300x300.png 300w, https://dothewoo.io/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/IconicWP-100x100.png 100w, https://dothewoo.io/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/IconicWP-150x150.png 150w" sizes="(max-width: 543px) 100vw, 543px" />
If your restaurant clients are looking to get online with their Woo site, check out the Orderable from IconicWP.
With WordPress 6.0 on the near horizon, the Woo Roundtable took a dive into a conversation around the release.
This isn't your normal chat, as the Roundtable brings in some diverse insights, thoughts and even opinions. Sit back and enjoy the perspectives this episode brings to you including, yes, touches of Woo.
Your Host & Panelists
The weeks before a release
Testing and taking it seriously
A flavor of some of the new features in 6.0
What happens at hosting when building up to a release
Excited about block locking
Blocks, full site editor and educating your client
Multiple theme jsons
Starting to see more control
WordPress responds to the voice it hears
Businesses changing their approach to blocks and rising marketplaces
Too many shiny things, WordPress and WooCommerce
WordPress responds to the voices that it hears and if it doesn't hear all the voices, it can only respond to those that are speaking at it
Ronald: Welcome to another episode after the WooCommerce Roundtable. And I am joined here by Tammie Lister, Robbie Adair, and Robert Jacobi. And this week we are going to talk about the new version of WordPress, which is 6.0. And at a time of recording, I'll be releasing a couple of three weeks time. So maybe less so by the time you hear this. We are excited about that. And why are we excited? Because it's a big number. It's a 6.0. Now, I don't think it's a huge release. I don't think it's something we have to be really scared about from what I hear in between. But Tammie, I would like to ask you, because I know you've been involved in the release squads, is that how you call our teams?
Tammie: Yeah.
The few weeks before a release
Ronald: So you must know what these last few weeks feel like or maybe the tension, the challenges, and how important also the feedback is to get. So would you like to give us a little bit of a flavor for what that feels like?
Tammie: Yeah. I think it's a little bit like you've got to the top of the hill and you're coming down the hill in a good way because you can't really make many changes to everything in a good way because you shouldn't. Once you got into RC, you shouldn't make many changes because testing and that's the thing, you need testing, you need feedback. So this really would be a time, if people aren't testing, to do that and this will be what everyone on the release squad is trying to do as much as possible, trying to shake out all those bugs, trying to find out and triage, what is a critical bug and what is a nice to have bug. And I think that's important because if something was mission critical bug, then that is kind of a show stopper because things can be paused and things can be patched because it's still code if something was going to cause that much of a problem.
Things are being prepared, like marketing things are being prepared like the about page, things are being prepared like how does the announcement happen? All those kind of translations, the polyglots team is fully activated and in their kind of space, they've just done a lot of their work because translations had to be locked in before we move and just phase but trying to catch those last strings and all that kind of stuff. And a lot of the community people starting to get into that kind of engagement, how do they support plugins and theme people? So it's like, best way to describe it I think is, when you skim a stone or forge a stone into something and the ripple effect, that release squad kind of ripples are going out from that release squad now into the whole of the community and all of the make teams.
So it's a really exciting team, but it's a time when that team feels incredibly supported and that team also feels very visible because you've worked really hard and you've done your little thing behind closed doors. And it's a public channel, partially letting know what everyone's watching and it feels like you present during this lovely release. And then everyone is like, oh, and starts paying attention. And normally some people have tested, but this is the time that people are like, "Oh, there's a release happening. I better do my testing."
Testing and taking it seriously
Ronald: Yeah. And the testing phase, do you think people take that and people, developers, agencies maybe they're managing hundreds of size. Do they take that serious enough to really work with that because it's an open source software. We all make use of it freely. So it's part of that core contributing.
Tammie: I don't think we do enough. I think we do take it seriously, but I think we could take it even more seriously because, yeah. I think if we take it more seriously, it's more supportive. I think often there's that, oh, somebody else will test it for me or, oh, it's a minor release or, oh, there's not something that I know that impacts my theme that will have an effect. Something could. And I think just by doing that, just by giving it a run and I always say, if you do an hour testing every release, you can just sit there, you can just run through, you get to know what new features there are. And there are so many good new things, this release. I know we kind of feel, six feels a huge number as you say it.
The whole numbers there's something about them, right? There's a vibe about these whole numbers, even though we don't try and behold to them, there is a vibe about whole number, right. But every release pretty much has had quite a lot in for a long time if we press, if you look hard enough and just knowing that, it enables you to maybe be able to sell something that you couldn't sell before, if you're an agency, it enables you to maybe be like, "Oh, that actually impacts something. Oh, that could be something that could be super useful in our project. So there's all these little things that just being able to do that and all roles, not just engineer, not just designers, making sure that POs, PMs, everybody sells.
Ronald: Who actually presses the button to say, let's go? Is that the one person?
Tammie: Yeah. Release coordinators are doing that. So we have the release coordinators and there is a process that does that. I have never pressed the button, which is there isn't a button.
Ronald: Yeah. 43% of the web.
Tammie: Yeah. You thought there should actually be a physical button, right? A big red button. This is do not press it, but you just want to press it. Yeah, a big button, but it should say do not press because then you want to press. It's the thing.
A flavor of some of the new features in 6.0
Ronald: Robbie, I know you've done a little bit of research. I don't know how much you've done the testing yourself, but I think you can give me a little bit of a flavor of what the new features will be for WordPress 6.
Robbie: Yeah. Some and I think we're going to see the most impact or the most testing that we need to do is going to be in the theme area just because of when we have full site editing, right, but we also have the styles, pattern, block locking. We've got a lot happening in that world. Now, not all themes are going to work for that. We know that, but will they be affected? We don't know. I don't know that we know all of that. And so I do feel like there's going to need to be a little extra careful testing done this time around particularly, this is Woo, do the Woo. So I will say particularly if you have e-commerce for your client sites, you definitely want to make sure that you're setting those up in a staging environment.
You're going to want to test them. Particularly if you've done some custom layout with products, make sure that nothing is affected. And to Tammie's point, this also though is an opportunity because maybe it is time for you to contact your clients about doing an upgrade on the look and feel. Now might be the perfect time because you might want to really investigate going down the row of a full site, editing theme with your client. And so now it gives you that opportunity to open the door with a discussion with your client to say, "Hey, WordPress 6 is just released. These are some of the fantastic new features. And we would like to get your site over in there. It's time for a refresh, let's build with full site editing. Or maybe, maybe not. Maybe they just want to show them that there are some new features inside of Gutenberg that will make things better, like block locking, things like that. So it might not be a full new theme, but it may be that there's some new features that they want to introduce to their client.
What happens at hosting when building up to a release
Ronald: Yeah, Robert, I know you are sort of a hosting man, director of WordPress, at Cloudways. So a big release. Are you scared for that to come out? Is that a moment when you see that support is being a lot more, gets quite busy because things aren't working or is the hosting in general, quite relaxed about any release?
Robert: Every release we're testing our end to make sure that, and I'll speak for every hosting company because any release it's already being beta tested internally to make sure there's nothing super weird that your infrastructure platform may not be happy with.
Ronald: Can you talk a little bit more about that process of internal testing, how as the person who hosts a site on a host, what guarantees can you almost give them to say, hey, we've done this, we've done that. We've done all sorts of unit tests on that.
Robert: So most hosts have at this point some kind of one click and slot WordPress. So that's going to go through a full QA process like we would deploy any application. So to make sure, at least our baseline installs, it's working across whatever PHP versions we support or whatever any hosting company supports. We have obviously very platform specific things as do other hosts. If you're a host that's using cPanel or Plesk, you're going to make sure that there's no conflicts or anything. So there's just a full QA process that we go through and we'll start that with the betas to see if there's anything super crazy, but argue the merits of the supreme backwards compatibility of WordPress. Typically, we don't see anything that really is a stumbling block in the slightest.
For those folks who already have WordPress now, they're going to have to go through the regular do I want to update, hit that magic button or auto update? And they've gone through that process and know, well enough at this point, like many hosts, we have automatic backups of everything. Talking about staging, heck yeah. There are best practices that as a host you'd like to enforce and you hope people are doing to make sure that things are getting tested.
I did want to jump on a little tangent that Robbie had mentioned about, oh, this is a great opportunity for agencies to talk about, should we have a makeover? Are we going to add in full sight editing? How's that going to impact WooCommerce and all that? I also think it's a great time, especially with the major numbers, because that kind of sticks in someone's head like, oh, excuse me, we just went from five to six. Well, how about just even a simple site audit, are there plugins that are kind of being crufty and not as good as they could be and just even pointing that kind of stuff out. I think the major release numbers are great opportunities to have those conversations with your customers or with yourself if you're running your own site.
Ronald: Yeah. It's a bit more impactful then to say, oh, we have 5.9 0.2. Would you like to do a big site audit?
Robert: Yeah, exactly. The irony is 5.8 to 5.9 to 6.0 to 6.1, they're not freak out major versions like you see in some other packages. There are new features there. There's cleaning up of features and that's great, but you're not seeing something like when Drupal goes from seven to eight or Joomla goes from three to four. There's not a total collapse of the universe, which again has its pros and cons, but at least from a stability standpoint, from a hosting perspective, going from one release to another is generally pretty straightforward.
Excited about block locking
Ronald: Yeah. Looking at the list of new features, a lot of them include blocks. Tammie, I know you are very much involved in project Gutenberg. I think the type of Gutenberg is not so much used anymore. I think it's people accept as blocks now. Do you still follow that? Are you still involved in that?
Tammie: I am really excited about block locking and that was mentioned by Robbie and that's one of the things that has been mentioned as a want, and I think it had to be done correctly. I think with patterns and that being kind of pivotal and that being core to a lot of functionality, I am really, really excited about that from an agency perspective patterns is just essential. It can't be more essential to the work that is going on there. So yeah, block locking is really essential. There's also so many under the hood fixes within editor that are just making quality of life better, which I think is really good and edit just like the editor flow, that there's something about the flow and how you write. It's like the vibe of writing, I guess, is just getting easier and feeling better each time so yeah, it's really. Each release doing that, I think being able to not only push ahead features, but also refine features, it's a real balance to be able to do both of those at the same time.
Robert: I'm thrilled about any improvements in full sight editing slash Gutenberg. I know they're two different beasts entirely, but let's just conflate them like everyone else does.
Ronald: I feel it's really getting momentum now.
6.0 is not Frankenstein
Tammie: Yeah. I think that's important to say that that's still indeed it though. Because it's very easy to kind of say it and wrap it all into a big bundle and then people are just like, "Oh that's part of this." No, that's not part of this release. This release is not where suddenly you're going to have full site editing and it's going to be alive like Frankenstein monster. It's a happy monster and it's also all awesome, but that's not what's going to happen now. That's one, it's only if you have a theme that activates that. So you are making that choice. You really are so, and that is so important in the world of Woo and any complex parking you have to actively make a choice to turn on full site editing. And I suspect you're always going to have to actively make a choice to turn that on.
It's not just something that's just going to appear randomly like a wild Pokemon, because that would just be weird from this whole perspective because block locking is probably something that's going to have to be explored with content locking and section locking. And how does that work? How do lock templates? How do you lock editable areas? It's just the start. If I think in the agency space, it's just where I work now, saying every single template someone can edit, that's not going to work. Some, absolutely. Some areas absolutely. All, no, that's not going to work for all cases at all. And we can think about use permissions, but that's not micro enough. We really have to think on the level of usability and think about who is going to use this and scalability as well. And if you're talking about these big networks of 12, 13 network sites, you really need to have that finite control over things as well.
Ronald: Yeah. No, I can imagine that's music to your ear, especially with your design background. And I remember a few sessions you joined us and were design and fun, just so important.
Thanks to our Pod Friends Mindsize  & Iconic's Orderable
Blocks, full site editor and educating your client
Ronald: So Robbie, I know you were going to say something, so, but I also want to add to that before you go into that, a question with regard to blocks and educating the customer.
Robbie: Well, I was going to say that to me, a couple of other little changes that they made in there such as the navigator, I love the navigator and I try to get my team members as well as if we have clients that are going to actually be doing editing themselves inside of the block editor to use the navigator. To me, as you think it's essential to really truly understand what is going on. Seeing that navigator really helps them. And they're making it where it auto collapses when you open it this time, so it's not quite so scary. It doesn't look quite as intimidating when they go in there, right? You're just like, what is going on here? So they've locked that down. I think that that's going to help or it starts compressed.
And then I can explain that to the client as to, okay, this is what this is, this is your outline, this is how you're going to see where all your sections are because it can get confusing, especially when you start getting some of the more complex pattern layouts in there, it gets kind of confusing and you're like, "Wait, how do I select this one thing?" And so I think learning more about the block editor is very important for adoption of all the new features. I also I'm happy about the styles that are coming in because then that means you can actually set up the styles and hopefully train your clients that do their own editing in there to follow along with styles so that we don't all of a sudden have this crazy red, fuchsia, whatever blinky thing on a page, because they just went crazy. We say, these are your colors. This is your palette. Stay within that.
And so I think that is actually going to be something that will help make education easier because now they're the tools there to help guide people if it's set up properly by the agency. So the agencies obviously need to first set it up proper so that when their clients put their little hands on it and start going to town on making new pages of blogs or whatever they're going to be doing in there, that they're following some sort of guidelines so that their site stays cohesive to that design that you established for them. And yes, education is very important Ronald, obviously I think that. So we are with OS training, we're planning a new WordPress class for WordPress six. We are, we will wait for it to release though before we finish it, just because there's always changes that happen there towards the end and stuff. But we have already started outlining it so that we can make sure that our new class pulls in all of these new features, otherwise you could take our old class, but we want the new WordPress class to have all of the new features in it.
And we will actually cover full site editing in our new class as well, even though we know, and we will make it apparent in the class that you don't have to use full site editing, but we want people to know how to use it. So if they one, maybe their site was built by an agency with full site editing, they'll know how to handle it, but also just for the agencies. I think agencies, we get in a rut if we do things in a certain way, right? And then we're hesitant to try other things, but I do hope that some of the agencies do start working with full site editing to try it out because you need the adoption, right, for it to grow. And it does need to grow. It's in its infancy right now. It needs to grow and become more robust, but the only way to do that is for adoption. So I am hoping that we will see more people adopting it and trying it out.
Robert: And I guess to Tammie's point earlier with full sight editing, it's still in beta.
Multiple theme jsons
Tammie: One of the things you mentioned about styles, a super useful thing you can do is multiple theme jsons, which then that becomes, when do you need a child theme and parent theme? And I think that is such a curious space to be in particular when you're talking about network sites and you're talking about that. The thing I really want from that though, is the ability to not display them all at the same time. That's like the next stage, I think.
Ronald: Can you explain a little bit more what theme json is?
Tammie: Yeah, so you can have more than one theme json, so more than one style. Let me take you back to the nineties, you remember those style switches that used have, that's kind of where we're going here. Right? And I had one, it was autumn or winter or cosmic or sunset. Back in CSME boot days when you used to kind of do those things and it was fun to change and things were like that. That's where we're going. I made it sound super frivolous because I think if you make it sound fun, then you're curious about it.
But they have a real practical because a lot of the times you make a child theme not necessarily for big things and you could make a child theme because you're just maybe changing some theme Jason stuff. And because theme json is a lot of stuff now. You can do block stars, you can do block variation, not so block but you are doing so many things. You are starting the block specifically, you're doing a lot of very specific stuff that you would've been doing in CSS before in theme json. So because of that, it opens up the possibility of you not needing to have child themes to be able to change these styles.
Ronald: So if you would, for example, do, sorry to interrupt, but just to give a bit more concrete example and maybe for agencies to utilize that more, if you do a massive sale, maybe Black Friday sale, you could just switch the button and make everything red.
Tammie: Christmas. So you could have a Christmas theme json or a Halloween theme Jason, and everything went pumpkin colored. There you go. That's where I'm going in this.
Ronald: And you can set it. You can export that and you can do the same pumpkin color or design.
Tammie: So it would be available just as you have the styles that you can select, it would be available to be able to pick those different styles. That is it's very early days with a lot of this stuff and how it works. My hope is you'll be able to visibly turn them on and off because when you can do that, it means that you can per network site be able to do that. There's a bit more flexibility then, because you might not always want to expose that to every user. We go back to all these things are so useful from an agency perspective, from a multi shop perspective, from all these kind of perspectives when you scaling up. Right? But they're not, if you can't control what is seen at the end. If everything is always on that end, they're not so useful. If you have the macro control, then they're really useful.
Starting to see more control
Tammie: And I think we're seeing with block locking, I always want to play the Chemical Brother song every time I say that because it's in my mind every time, I think it's not just me. Thank you. But with that, we're starting to see that control. And I think it's because we're starting and I would encourage anyone who is in that space to start giving feedback because we're starting to get people who give feedback in that space because it takes a while for people in that space to have time to be able to use these things, because you are talking a year ahead before you can implement these things. You are not going to be thinking about full site editing probably for at least another six months until it's firm. As you were saying, whether you are just going to start exploring it now, you are going to be a very long time before you are fully prepared. Your learning space, yes, but it's going to be a very long time before you're implementing that on a larger scale at the point.
Ronald: Yeah. And as part of being active in a community and contribute to WordPress, it's a responsibility, isn't it that we can't forget about. It allows us all to make a living and build up huge businesses as well.
WordPress responds to the voice it hears
Tammie: WordPress responds to the voices that it hears and if it doesn't hear all the voices, it can only respond to those that are speaking at it. I just personified WordPress in a weird way, but it's true, right? If the people who are asking for features are only of a particular user type, that's all you're going to get. So it is really, really important for anyone to give, and of course your idea might not be useful for everybody. Absolutely. But it might be useful for a large proportion of people or a proportion of WordPress market share. If we're talking about some of these, that's a significant WordPress market share some of these sites because they're dealing with so many numbers and so many people. So the balance is there that they need these tools as well.
Robert: I'm just excited by the breaking news that there will be no more child themes.
Tammie: I did not say that, but I'm excited about it maybe.
Robbie: I think I heard it too, Robert.
Robert: Yeah. For sure. We broke it here. Thank you Tammie.
Tammie: Oh dear.
Ronald: Oh Robert, you have to remodel the whole business, isn't it? And a new market place on the theme json.
Robert: That's right.
Businesses changing their approach to blocks and rising marketplaces
I do like the idea that we're abstracting some of these things that were all jumbled and sort of, for lack of a better term, hard coded altogether. So being able to pull out styles, pull out the blocks, and really be able to focus on each one of those pieces, as separate components and building WordPress or WooCommerce site is great. But it should also be a signal to developers that, okay, a lot of this stuff is a lot easier to get done now. So what are you going to bring to the table? The ability to be more creative about what those patterns look like, what those styles look like, all that is going to lean into the creative portions of agencies much more than developers, because it's just getting easier to do.
Ronald: And have you seen businesses actively changing the approach to blocks and maybe seen new and different marketplaces? I know Extendify is doing a lot on blocks. Do you see any others come forward and predict front runners or will everything eventually end up on WordPress.com.
Robert: Ooh, that's a good question. I love that you brought up Extendify because right now they're the only ones that I see are really pushing that space on. Leave everything in core. Don't screw anything up. If you can uninstall Extendify and nothing will break, I think that's brilliant. And I would like to see more folks going in that direction and creating whatever abstraction layers, but that don't actually muck up the site in any way that just, that they find different ways to interact with WordPress, almost like headless. You're hitting the API, being able to do things, but you're not necessarily screwing up foundationally what's going on on your site. None come to mind at the moment that are doing that on the third party site.
Tammie: I think you always have one who does it first, or kind of goes ahead. I think the more tools and the more usefulness, I'm going to go with that that all these things are in core, the seed of a design system, all these kind of things that we have that you can build upon, the more potential there is to do this. And I think that we thought that there were more things that you could do it with, but it's always been working around it. And we've had the promise of this for a long time, but a lot of it has been infrastructure and foundation. That's what a lot of the past few years has been about in a beautiful way, but we are getting to that point where we can have fun with the toys and Extendify is starting to have fun with the toys.
Ronald: Yes. I've got that same feeling.
Tammie: Yeah. And I want to have fun with the toys as well. And I think so many people are going to have fun with the toys. And I think those that like that embrace having fun with the toys. I think that's a business opportunity, right? I would love to see that in the Woo space as well. I think the Woo space isn't doing that quite yet. It's daunting some of these toys, but difficultness level of a lot of these toys has been brought down. I think when they first came out, and it's iterations, right. We iterate the difficultness away. I would need a better word than that, the complexity away.
And I think we're getting there. It's been a few years now since 5.0. It's been an adventure and now we're getting to see, okay, I think we still have a long way to go and team want to design system, not quite there yet and all those kind of things, but we are starting to see the benefits that we could have if we all start working on, not just, what if we had a WordPress admin that did this, or what if we had this, which is super good, but if we actually focused on our infrastructure and our scripting, that level to be able to build it upon it and extend it in a really good way, then we could have these amazing, exciting business opportunities, which is so exciting, because our grows WordPress because otherwise WordPress is just like, eh.
Too many shiny things, WordPress and WooCommerce
Ronald: But you're right though, it's starting to evolve now. And you can see the birds of the flowers appearing. I see that in the [inaudible 00:28:02] blogs. For a few years, I was a bit frustrated. We talk about blogs, but nothing is really coming out. Cards and checkouts, it's all quite limited, but now we are looking at product page and archive pages and that's when the fund starts to begin because you can make changes safely without using a page builder that most likely will break everything if it doesn't get updated.
Tammie: It's the same in agencies, it takes a while before you can use the new shiny's in any space, which is mission critical. And I don't consider the work I do when I experiment with themes mission critical, it's not. That is me playing, right? And anyone who is a core contributor who is just playing with stuff that's in playing, that's not mission critical. Mission critical is like my day job when I am working on client sites where I would not advise half the stuff I want to play with in my off time and all the new shiny's. I am incredibly conservative in what I would offer on a client site because of that.
And as you scale at the complexity, a Woo site is very complex by its very nature, whether that's good, I think the complexity will come down because of a lot of this tooling, because complexity will be less visible. I think that it's part of a lot of this. We can ease some of those complexities, but there's a function. There's deeper functionality. There's more things to do. There's more layers to all these onions of everything. So as a result of it, they can't be like, oh, jumping straight into the new funky. On my own small blog, yeah, I can run the latest and that doesn't matter. But it is completely different to a client's site.
Robert: Both you Tammie and Ron touched on the same thing. There's that risk aversion when you're dealing with something like WooCommerce and the trickle up time for getting that new feature in. It just takes longer and it's not a technical issue necessarily. It's just that business.
Tammie: I'm glad that there is, when I go to buy something or do something, I'm glad it takes a bit longer because I want it to be stable.
So I would be the first to complain if something wasn't stable. So I think we have to understand that when we're just like, "Oh, use a new shiny." There's a balance, right? But it's about those of us who can, enabling that this stuff gets iterated and gets iterated with as many of those voices in the room. I think the moment we don't include those voices who can't use it yet, but who really want to use it really soon, I think we're starting to see how can we get those voices earlier into the room to be included? I think there's something in that to learn from.
Robbie: I think we also see with agencies that, yes, we are very conservative with agencies as to what we offer to clients because we do want it to be stable. Right? You need that client experience to be good so the client, one, keeps you on as an agency and comes back to you and trusts you. Most importantly, you want that trust factor. But I will say as an agency, a lot of times we are pushed by our clients because our clients do see something out there and they're like, "Oh, I want that shiny new toy." And so sometimes the agencies are pushed by their clients to try that.
And then once they have to do it for one and they're comfortable, after they've done it for one client, then they're like, "Oh, let me go and offer this new shiny toy to all my other clients." And so I feel like sometimes agencies, if they don't push themselves within, their clients will start to push them to get the new shiny toys. But I do agree that as an agency, you do have to be careful how many shiny new toys you present out there because you wouldn't want to start building unstable websites for your clients. They do need to be stable. So.
Ronald: That's a really good call out. I have a few experiences exactly that like, "Oh, I want this, I've seen it here." And then you do analysis on the website and it might be on a totally different platform. You think, well, surely somebody has made this, but goodness knows how. But yeah, that's a difficult conversation because by then the marketing and the sales team have already put their mind on that's what we need, that's the flow we would like, that's how we want to have our product pages to be displayed. And yeah, that's quite a tough one.
Robbie: I also see, like we've mentioned here, six is a big full number. Right? And so it does breed that excitement out there, even though we know WordPress is very good about all the minor releases are building up. Right? Even though we're going to punch that update to six, it's not this major, oh my gosh, it's something different. But what I do see that a trend that is starting to happen out there is a lot of the plugin developers are starting to look at and even Woo commerce custom tables. And that's where I see, I think over the next year, two years, new plugins or even current plugins, that's where we're going to see bigger changes or in the plugins themselves using custom tables out there. And which I personally, as you know, I'm in favor of all of this and I just think it will actually make core stronger by getting some of the clutter out of core. So I'm excited about that. And I think that six will be, I hope, the kickoff point of that.
Ronald: Yeah. Great. And Robert in one sentence, what's excitement around 6.0, is it to find out which jazz artist is named after?
Robert: I am. Incremental refinement. That's how I'm going to look at it. It's like when Apple releases... They have those core Mac OS or iOS big release numbers, but sometimes it's just about battening down the hatches and making sure everything works and WordPress 6 looks to me as one of those, okay, we've thrown out some interesting things in the last year and now let's tighten that up.
Ronald: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Tammie, for you and very short, what excites you about 6.0? Or is it a bit of the same, isn't it? O it's what you said earlier.
Tammie: Yeah. I'm going to go with block lock in beats, there you go. Yeah. No, I think, yeah. Block lock in, because honestly that feels like it's starting something.
Ronald: Yeah. And can I guess that's been in your mind for at least maybe two, if not three years, like, "Oh, if only we can do that," and to see that mature and finally being released.
Tammie: So it has a bit, it's just, I think it wasn't the time and no one had the right solution for a while.
Ronald: But you had the vision because you were very early on.
Tammie: I don't think I had the vision. I wanted someone to have the vision of how to do it right because that was definitely something that wasn't me that had a solution to. And I would never take credit for that. And to me, and I think this is important. Moving out from being a full-time contributor to working in agency space has given me a very good perspective on a lot of this stuff. So it has given me a feel for how important that stuff is recently. So, yeah. It's made it urgent for me.
Ronald: Well, thank you all very much for your time again and contributing to the WooCommerce Roundtable. We'll see and hear you again next month. So thank you and bye from us all.
Thanks to our Pod Friends for their support
Post navigation