About this episode.

On the podcast today we have something new. Until now I’ve interviewed one person at a time, but today there’s three people on the call, Birgit Pauli-Haack, Marcus Kazmierczak and Zack Krida.

Birgit is a Developer Advocate for WordPress and is an ardent supporter of the Gutenberg project. She publishes the Gutenberg Times and co-hosts the Gutenberg Changelog podcast.

Marcus is a team leader at Automattic. His team is involved in Gutenberg, and has been working on it from the start. Marcus is also the documentation lead for the 5.9 release of WordPress.

Zack is the team lead of the Openverse project, which will be the focus of the later part of the podcast.

So WordPress 5.9 is just around the corner. Initially scheduled for release in December 2021, it has now been pushed back until January 2022.

It’s an important release for a multitude of reasons, but perhaps the headline item is Full Site Editing. Full Site Editing, or FSE, will change the way that WordPress websites are built. Areas which were once the domain of template files and of developers will now be editable from inside the Block Editor.

The intention is to make everything much easier to work with, but it’s a big departure from how things have been done until now.

We’re moving into an era of Block Themes, Template Parts, Theme.json files and much more. But what does all this mean? Well, Birgit and Marcus are here to explain what’s coming in WordPress 5.9, why the changes have been made, and how you can make use of them.

Later in the podcast we pivot and have a discussion with Zack about Openverse. If you’ve not heard of Openverse, it is a search engine for openly-licensed media. It makes it possible to find media from a growing catalogue of freely contributed assets.

The project has been going for a while (it was previously called CC Search), but was recently brought under the stewardship of the WordPress Project. We talk about how you can make use of Openverse and what kind of media is available there. We get into how media is licensed and why this project is a good fit for WordPress, and we round off with some thoughts on how it will integrate with the Block Editor in the future.