When I was using Drupal years ago, one thing that stood out was how deeply rooted Drupal was in the higher education ecosystem. Is that still the case? I would imagine that WordPress has made in-roads and many colleges and universities have switched over. It looks like HumanMade is interested in this market.

Eric Karkovack is finding that clients grew up using the web, have heard the ads that anyone can create a website, and so want more design freedom. He suggests that people build sites for client with that flexibility in mind.

A Hallway Hangout is planned for agencies and freelancers to discuss using the Sited Editor for client sites. It looks like they plan to discuss the difference in workflows between using a Classic theme and the Site Editor.

Facebook is owned by Meta. Meta has a newish Twitter clone called Threads. They have announced that Thread’s users will be able to share their posts on the fediverse using the ActivityPub protocol. WordPress has a plugin for sharing via ActivityPub. It is interesting as this may put some pressure on X to be more open.

Google is going to require disclosure for AI-generated content on YouTube. Overall, this seems like a good move. I hope they are able to enforce it.

Beginning in May 2020, Automattic sponsored Anne McCarthy to run the FSE Outreach program. The idea was to encourage WordPress users to try new features and also to be a conduit to get non-core user feedback to the core team. The program has been a success, both in terms of providing better communication, but also as a tool for bettering community relations.

Now Anne is moving on to other tasks and the outreach program, which was originally seen as temporary, is being given a more permanent status as part of the testing team. Birgit Pauli-Haack will be the new lead.

Performant Translations – Yet another set of features slated to be included in WordPress 6.5 are a number of big performance improvements with internationalization. Up to now these improvements have been being tested via a feature plugin.

Also included in this article on the Make blog is information on a new translation file format which you may begin seeing.

Native support for AVIF is coming in WordPress 6.5. AVIF images can be up to 50% smaller than a JPG image with the same or better image quality. Can I use says there is about 89% browser support.

The Crocoblock team shares the list of the best WordPress communites to join to stay up to date and follow new trends.