first insights: Hallway Hangout: Let’s chat about WordPress 6.5
Tags: webdev, beginners, tutorial, wordpress
Published: 2024-01-17 17:47:52

first insights:  Hallway Hangout: Let’s chat about WordPress 6.5
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9q1Moih0u1Y


On January 16th, 2024 a few community members from various contributor teams joined a hallway hangout to check out some demos of 6.5 features and chat about what's in progress for the release. 

0:00 - 2:00 Intro
2:00 - 33:00 Demos
33:00 - 59:00 Open discussion

**more infos - and background**

**Hallway Hangout Let’s explore WordPress 6.5 Recap:  **https://make.wordpress.org/core/2024/01/17/hallway-hangout-lets-explore-wordpress-6-5-recap/

This is a summary of a Hallway Hangout dedicated to exploring WordPress 6.5 and first announced in late November 2023. Thank you to @saxonafletcher and @isabel_brison for helping with the demos! This hallway hangout doesn’t cover everything in the Roadmap to 6.5 post but goes through many of the features that are ready for and needing feedback. Please help test!

**Demos: **The following items were demoed in various ways, sometimes on live sites, sometimes as prototypes in figma, and sometimes in a draft PR state. 

Style revision improvements.
Pattern overrides.
Data Views for templates, patterns, and pages. 
Font Library.
Block connections.
Ensuring local content is not added to global scope and vice versa for both template editing and pattern overrides. 
Section styling, Colorways, and Typesets.
List View displacement when dragging and dropping.
Allow drag & drop to create rows and galleries.
Discussion:
Desire for a separate meta capability for pattern overrides 

**Question from Jorbin:** “Do pattern overrides include capability checks so that it is possible for someone to be able to use the pattern and the overrides without editing the pattern as a whole? What I am thinking is having a meta capability for managing the pattern and then a separate meta cap for doing overrides.”

This was underscored by folks on the call and a follow up GitHub issue will be opened to pursue this further. 

**When is something ready to ship for a release?**

A discussion broke out both in the chat and on the call itself around when we deem something ready to ship, particularly as it related to pattern overrides. Right now, pattern overrides currently only work with paragraph blocks and need the ability added on a block by block basis due to a limitation with the block bindings API. There are plans to expand to buttons, heading, and images. This is a great chance to give feedback, share use cases, and dig in to find limitations. Generally, it’s common to ship an initial state of something and iterate in future releases but we need to ensure that initial state is still properly valuable for users. 

**Where can I learn more about block connections?**

This is the best issue for 6.5 related items with a recent update. 
This is the overview issue for the broader set of work.
On the potential of block connections

Towards the end of the call, we had a discussion about the UX of block connections (what will and won’t matter to a user), how useful the feature will be, what to show when there’s no value, and whether a connection can be defined by a theme. For example, you could have a theme that supports a plugin’s post meta and then the theme already makes these connections to provide a seamless experience for the user to then edit as they’d like. This is definitely in line with where this work is headed. 

“Thinking about a price for example. We want to store it in meta so that we can display it both in a query loop and on the single post in different locations. But to a user it shouldn’t matter at all. For them editing it inline on the page template should feel as if it all just is in content.” – Fabian in the chat.