Playground for Meetups

Meetups are those events for anyone, whether they know WordPress or not, to get into the social side of it, and do so with the help of a simple demo site with WordPress Playground.

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Program transcript

Hello, I’m Alicia Ireland, and you’re listening to WordPress Podcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.

In this program, you’ll find the information from July 29th to August 4th, 2024.

Surely WordPress Playground is the ideal tool for any live demonstration, quickly and without preparation, allowing you to show where to start. Anyone attending a Meetup will be able to access and have their own WordPress to play around with.

This browser-based environment allows users to experiment with WordPress without needing complicated setups or hosting, making it ideal for those with no prior experience on the platform. By removing these initial barriers, Playground focuses on quickly demonstrating WordPress’s capabilities, enhancing the learning experience.

The tool ensures that participants can start creating and exploring WordPress immediately, without the typical setup and registration hassles. In initial Meetups, this will maximize the event’s efficiency, allowing organizers to focus on showcasing WordPress’s features and functionalities, especially as September approaches, a time when new courses typically start and initial “what is WordPress” Meetups are planned.

To support this presentation method, the community plans to develop some resources, including a facilitation guide for organizers and user-friendly documentation on how to save work. Feedback will be crucial to refine the process and ensure the most effective use of Playground, with the ultimate goal of making WordPress more accessible and attractive to a wider and local audience.

And with the release of the experimental plugin Gutenberg 18.9, we have more flexibility in Data Views, with the ability to sort tables and adjust grid density in a personalized way.

The Page List View receives a small detail for authors and will display their avatar next to their name, along with several customization options for the list elements.

And, in the ongoing effort to provide consistency in design tools for all blocks, border control support has been improved for the Gallery and Button blocks, which also get color and padding support. The Heading, Paragraph, and Quote blocks, with spacing support, also receive improvements. Likewise, the Image and Search blocks get margin support.

The Performance team has published a detailed post about WordPress 6.6, which introduces several significant performance improvements.

One of the main improvements is the optimization of template loading, achieving a 35% improvement in block editor load time. The number of queries to the database on expiration has also been reduced from two to one, improving efficiency on sites without persistent cache.

Additionally, outdated polyfill dependencies have been removed, reducing the load of unnecessary scripts in modern browsers. Deferred iframe loading has also been implemented to improve the loading speed of pages embedding entries from other Wo