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WordPress version 6.5 release is set to be publicly available on Monday and a panel discussion at WP Engine’s De{Code} delved into what developers can look forward to in the upcoming release.
The session featured Damon Cook, developer advocate at WP Engine; Nick Diego, a WordPress Core contributor and developer relations at Automattic; and Fabian Kägy, another core contributor and the associate director of Editorial Engineering at 10up.
Diego started the discussion by noting that a personal favorite improvement for him is the extensibility for the navigation block. While the navigation block has been around for a long time, he said, it wasn’t previously possible to add your own custom blocks to it. Now that’s possible, he said.
“It seems very minor, but it unlocks a bunch of stuff,” Diego said. “You could do custom blocks that introduce mega menus, as I’ve experimented with myself, or shopping cart buttons, that sort of thing. So very minor thing, but I think it will really unlock a lot of things for developers.”
The underlying unification that happened between the site and post editors topped Kägy’s list. It will allow developers to preview the full template in any page or custom post type that you’re editing, he explained. That’s particularly helpful when working on complex sites that have a “hugely complicated template,” because it makes it nicer and more visual to edit the content in line in the post editor, he said.
Both also said they’re excited about the interactivity API and the block bindings API.
The interactivity API is the upgraded version of the lightbox for images feature, according to WP Experts.io. It allows developers to create interactive experiences within blocks.
“Developers can include other exciting features, such as showing new comments or fetching search results,” the article noted.
The block bindings API allows developers to connect custom fields to blocks, according to WP Experts.io. It also means developers can connect core blocks to any dynamic content when needed, it added.
The session also included a demo by Anne McCarthy, product wrangler at Automattic and a member of the WordPress 6.5 release squad. McCarthy showed the new data views feature that’s designed to streamline website editing. Data can be viewed in a grid or table; and when making bulk changes, developers can use a new UI to toggle fields. Data views are a foundational step in the WordPress redesign, the panel noted.
“I’m actually much more excited about the groundwork for this laying the future of what we can do, because at this point, today, this is not super extensible,” Kägy said. “One of the coolest features in that whole system is there is a list view, for example, where you can save your own custom lists [and] your own custom filtered views. You could, for example, filter by author on published dates and in this specific category, and save that filter so that you can always jump to that specific list. And that is something that I think will make a big difference for anybody using WordPress in the future.”
Google is introducing aspects of Angular into its internal Wiz framework, and may add elements of Wiz to Angular. Google’s technical lead and manager for Angular developer relations, Minko Gechev, discussed the implications with Jeremy Elbourn, engineering tech lead for Angular, during this week’s NG Conference.
YouTube’s Christopher Rocco presents at NG Conference
Wiz is an internal framework for Google that’s used to make UIs for consumer-focused apps, as opposed to Angular applications, which tended to be more interactive and for enterprise or business UIs, Elbourn said. Wiz is widely used at Google for apps such as Photos, Search and Google Play, Gechev added, and it’s not open sourced.
But over time, developers noticed that the lines were blurring between the two types of UIs, and increasingly, Google developers working with Angular wanted more features than Angular offered.
“It became clear that these two different frameworks were actually converging on very similar ideas, and people at Google were asking, why are we duplicating so much work?” Gechev said.
“Last year, the stars aligned and we struck upon some serendipity, just as we were looking to build our signal primitives for Angular, Wiz was looking at doing the exact same thing,” added Elbourn. “We were able to say, what if we shared, and even better there was a product team that was super enthusiastic to collaborate with both Angular and Wiz on these shared signal primitives, to get an initial version running in production on a pretty aggressive timeline.”
YouTube collaborated with Angular and Wiz on the development and adoption of Signals for the better part of a year, according to YouTube developer Christopher Rocco.
“We wanted to know if Signals would be a viable unification target, and could help us achieve our performance goals,” he said. “First, Signals meet the prerequisites of each of our platforms, they have universal browser support. If your browser supports arrays and closures, it’ll support Angular Signals.”
Using Angular, they rewrote large parts of the UI, starting with things they thought would be challenging and representative.
“The results exceeded our expectations,” Rocco said. “On our low-end devices, we saw 35% improvement in interaction latency in the living room as you’re navigating through video tiles. On our video player controls, we’re able to bring all of our key interactions up to a smooth 60 frames per second, with very little effort, often up from a jittery 25. On our shorts carousel, just swiping through videos, we also achieve 60 frames per second, lower interaction latency. And this meaningfully increased our top line metrics like views and watch time.”
YouTube ultimately decided it preferred the Signals-based rendering model, in part because it was easier to achieve high performance, he said.
“We’re already running hundreds of these components in production,” he said. “Today, we’re hoping to power all of YouTube’s web apps with signals over the course of the next two years.”
The Wiz and Angular team will continue the collaboration, Gechev added, adding the best from Wiz to Angular, and vice versa. Over time, it may converge into one framework or they may continue to co-exist.
The two then segued into a discussion about how can others integrate Signals into their applications today. To help with that, Angular is shipping four types of new Signal-based APIs:
“These new APIs give you a signal of your query results, whether you’re using the singular or the plural version, and you can then use that Signal result inside of a computed expression or an effect,” Elbroun said. “Overall, these are more concise, more consistent, and they have better type inference.”
Microsoft introduced .NET Smart Components on Wednesday. .NET Smart Components are AI-powered UI components that can be easily added to .NET apps without redesigning the UX or weeks of research into machine learning and prompt engineering, wrote Daniel Roth, principal product manager of ASP.NET.
“.NET Smart Components are prebuilt end-to-end AI features that you can drop into your existing app UIs to make your users more productive,” Roth wrote.
Currently, they are an experiment and initially only available for Blazor, MVC, and Razor Pages with .NET 6 and later, although the plan is to provide components for other .NET UI frameworks, including .NET Maui and Windows Forms.
The smart features currently available in Smart Components are:
The .NET Smart Components can be tried out with Blazor or MVC/RazorPages using the .NET Smart Components sample apps on GitHub, he added.
