The free and great WordSesh conference has released the schedule and opened signups. Which means—as you probably guessed—that you register with a simple form and then can watch all the sessions live.

Perhaps the first surprise when I started fiddling with WordPress 5.9 and a block theme on an old site was that I didn’t see the Customizer at all. For those who’ve not done that, under “Appearance” you might end up with as few as two menu options: “Themes” and “Editor (beta).” So how do you do some Customizer things, like my old favorite of using it to set the Site Icon?

For those who’ve never heard of it, the State of the Word is the annual talk from WordPress’s BDFL Matt Mullenweg. I’m just finally finding myself with enough time and energy to really appreciate all the polish in the talk, so I want to make sure everyone here has also seen it. Here’s the YouTube embed (for platforms those work on ;p):

I’m a sucker for a pretty chart. And this post over on the Make.WordPress.org for WordPress Core really offers lots of pretty circles. I think there’s a lot of interesting things the charts highlight, most of all the diversity of people and contributions (which were trackable) to WordPress itself. As the charts make clear, they obvious vary in geography, company affiliation, and compenents on which they worked.

As an AMP hater, I was gratified to see this headline from Sarah Gooding over on the Tavern.

One of the more consequential features of WordPress 5.8 I didn’t pay much attention to before it was released was theme.json. Which is “just another file in your WordPress theme” but also a whole lot more. I’ll just quote Jeff Ong from over on WordPress.org:

I really enjoyed watching this little interview with between Mark & Keith from Highrise Digital and Matt Mullenweg and Josepha Haden Chomposy (who are probably the two most influential people shaping WordPress today). Nothing that anyone said was really a surprise or revelation to me, but it was all helpful and “orienting” to hear again what their thought process is, what’s been happening lately, etc.

Next week(!) is WordSesh. For those who aren’t familiar, WordSesh is a free online-first (has been doing it since before it became how all events are ;p) WordPress conference. It is totally free for live (and nearly-live attendance). (If you’re a more-than-24-hours-after-conference-end slow poke on a talk, you’ll just have to become a WPSessions member to see talk recordings.)

If you’re not into the legal complexities of “open source software” you can safely skip this. 🤓

If there’s one post I *always* read about the latest/upcoming WordPress release, it’s these “field guide” posts on make.wordpress.org. They’re a concise summary of the major highlights to keep an eye on.