Yeah. Okay. Welcome. Thank you for joining us. Whether you're here live or you're watching this as a recording, this is the WordPress 6.3 kind of release announcement where Anne McCarthy and Rich Tabor are going to lay out all of the new bits and pieces that we can manage to get in something around an hour, probably 40 minutes and then a little bit of time for Q&A at the end. Speaking of that, if you've got any questions, please put them in to Zoom. There are several people here who are going to try and make sure that those questions make it in my direction and then hopefully if there's time at the end we can collate those and then get them out and hopefully get them answered. So yeah, without further ado, I've already introduced them by name but hello Anne, how are you doing. Great. How are you? Yeah, great. Thank you. And also, hello Rich. How are you doing? Yeah, Nathan. Yeah, I'm doing really awesome. Great. So it's my job just to step out the way. So that's exactly what I'm going to do and I will hand over to Rich so that he can take it from here. Yeah, you know Nathan, I'm thrilled to showcase WordPress 6.3. It really is a monumental release that marks the tail end of the customization phase of the Gutenberg project and sets the stage for Phase 3 which is focusing on collaboration and workflow. So some of what you'll see today is starting to lean in that direction. But before I really dive into it I wanted to share that what Anne and I are sharing throughout all this demo is a collective effort across hundreds of contributors from all over the world. And for those folks like you know who you are and thank you for caring about the future of WordPress and really the future of the web. So I want to start there but let's dive in. Alright, can everybody see my screen here? Yes. Awesome. So one of the more exciting parts of this release is the addition of what is called the WordPress command palette. So this is accessible within the post and the site editor and allows you to quickly navigate and command WordPress. So you can pull it up using command K or control K depending on your OS. So as soon as you hit it you'll see this new dialogue right here where you can start searching for commands. Let's push the O command so you can see that there's quite a few commands that lets you open up different panels on the left. So if we go to pages we can open up the style variations and we'll dive into each of these in a bit templates. But if you go into the editor here you actually have quite a few more commands because this is very contextual. So we can go into here and then let me refresh here. You can go into the editor and then run commands like opening the CSS panel over here. Let me see if I can get it open. There it is. We can also, I think Zoom is messing with my keyboard shortcuts here. You can also run the command palette from the superior so you can open it here, navigate specific pages. So if I go to my about page I can actually pull it up within the editor here. And then also commanding the editor to do other toggling options like setting the spotlight mode for example to where only the block that you're selected on is highlighted. And you can also turn it back off.  Really the command palette is, you know, the first iteration of what is going into WordPress 6.3. I'm really excited about the WordPress command palette API and how folks can start leveraging that and plugins can add additional commands not only to, you know, open up different settings views, but actually toggle controls or fetch data to render all custom post types or different settings within more advanced plugins. And I even can imagine an idea where the command palette not only launches experiences but maybe even holds experiences so if you're selecting an image and you run the command or you run the command palette. And you'll see maybe a transform command and that lets you transform that block into something else so there's many experiences within the command palette so I'm really excited to see how this evolves. Alright, so let's jump on the topic to that all. I'm going to try and share but I can't see a way to message everyone right now but I'll drop it in a second for anyone who's interested with the nerdy details. Yeah, and the API the WordPress command palette API is ready to for folks to start working with. So that's, that's ready for 6.3 and all these plugins I'm really, really interested so if you do add commands to your plugins like please share them with folks so that we can get more feedback and continuously improve where this is headed. Alright, so this is the site editor view there's a couple of enhancements here, you know, a quick one but this is a nice touch is to be able to resize here and it's a much better resize action than previous versions of WordPress. And it lets you see the, the really all the responsive views from tablet all the way down, just to see exactly what you need to adjust if you need to a mobile. We have a couple of menu items over here that are different and new. So we have navigation styles templates was existing but it's been evolved quite a bit pages and patterns. I'm going to jump into pages because this is probably the bigger hitter here. When you open up pages here this is a relatively new concept in the site editor but it's not new to WordPress where you can publish pages so within the pages view here we have all the pages listed and now you can browse and then also edit pages within the site editor. So if I opened up the about page here, I see my about page in full with header and footer all the template parts anything that you would see on the front end of the site over here within the frame. And on the left I have my details view where I have the slug so if I wanted to quickly open this up into a new tab and view it on the front end. There's also the excerpt some details this is showing us a status you know the word count time to read. Also, when was this last modified down here at the bottom, but I can go into this by clicking the frame, and now I can edit this actual post title and the post content. These items are split out here on the right so you can identify what is editable from this view, and this title bar here at the top is letting you know that you're editing a page, and it's the about page. So if I go in here, change this to about WordPress you'll see it changing wherever it's relevant. And then I can go in here and actually start manipulating the post content up so I can add any of my blocks I can add any patterns. All of this is exactly like you would see in the post editor, but now it's accessible here in the site editor. Now if you wanted to go in and actually edit the template itself as soon as you click on any of the template areas so like the header where the footer. You'll see this little notice here at the bottom. We also have this button right here that indicates that you're going to that if you want to edit the page template you would click this will click edit template. And now we have place a placeholder content for the actual page, you can see here we're now editing the page. So this is the template icon and anything that's purple is being reused across the site so this is the page template that's being reused across all of your pages. So if I take this title, let's say move it to the center. Let's go ahead and add the featured image block as well. And then think I want to add some space here, just to make sure this looks nice. And then down here we'll rearrange this make that a little bit bigger as well. And what I'm doing is actually editing this one template that'll be applied on every page. So I hit save. We'll go back now I'm on my about page itself, I have the featured image title and content. And now you can see also have the featured image that's editable so I can click this. Let's say add this image here. Now we have this featured image that I can actually edit on my page within the site editor and I can see all the elements of this template in context with the rest of my site. So it really kind of brings together, or the start of bringing together the two editor experiences into one cohesive experience while also putting some guardrails around editing templates that are applied everywhere versus editing content on this one particular post. So it's a huge feature to have now to be able to publish posts directly in here and part of what I think Richard talked about earlier of the complete experience where you're able to do everything within the site or without leaving and this was a big piece of feedback. We got from the outreach program from the community, but that was the main reason people would be leading the site editor and having to switch back and forth between the two. So this is definitely a neat thing and paves the way for the future, possibly with some of the editor experiences whenever you're in post editor and you can add the template there. There's a lot we can we can learn. Exactly and it's really like browsing and editing is is really nice but then we're going to go a step further here and drafting. So I can draft a new title. I'm going to page here I'm going to do my page. Create draft. And now I've drafted a page is using that same exact template that uses a feature image here. I can start adding my content to this page and save it is still a draft here but if I want to set this as publishing, I can do so like this. And now this page is published on my website, and I can hook it up to my navigation I can put it wherever I need to elsewhere so this really reduces the amount of times you have to go in and out of all the complex areas of WordPress and kind of keeps you in this one contained environment for creating pages, drafts and posts that are published but also editing them further. It really is a really is a very capable engine for publishing and I think it's a great improvement for 6.3. And you want to talk about the navigation front. Yes, navigation is definitely a hugely critical part of your site and so that comes up a lot. When we look at the site editor and so now there's a dedicated navigation section so before in 6.2, you had to go into a template or a type of part and actually find your navigation for your site to make changes. It wasn't exactly clear how to access all of them. There are a number of pain points and now it is a top level item that gives you direct access and actually is contextual so that's another thing that you'll probably hear that word a lot is contextual and that's part of like the requirement that's coming to this release. So depending upon how many menus you actually have, you'll see a different sidebar to grant so if you just have one menu, you'll see this the menu listed in this sidebar in this case we have to see you see them all listed there. And if you have many, you'll see them all listed. And depending upon the complexity you can also have different views in terms of going in and actually making direct changes. But with each of them you can actually select and edit an isolation and like a focus mode. Within the experience itself, which is what Rich is showing right now. Make changes to whatever you'd like it there. You can go back, you can also drag and drop and move these around and just make really simple high level changes. Kind of like the most common actions you might take within the sidebar. And I love this is another area that is a great spot to give feedback on to continue iterating on, but it's a huge, huge step forward in terms of the experience of trying to find and manage navigation. This is definitely something that came up a lot of me to go and search through all the templates and figure out where your, your menu was and hopefully this is something that helps make that a lot easier. And I love personally that it changes based on the number of menus that you have and the complexity. I won't go into the micro detail of all that but expect for documentation to be up to date and for this to be streamlined. Do you want to jump into styles next that's. Yeah, let's do that. This is another section that's new with the site editor and 6.3 at a high level it shows the style variations that come with a theme, as well as an option to access the style book, which you can turn on right here, which shows all your styles and the impact of those different style changes. There's also an easy access to get directly into styles as well as star revision so what you see at the very bottom where it says last modified few seconds ago it's just basically quick links to get you where you want to go. And this jumps into star visions here which I think we go in the future I think I jumped ahead. I get too excited about this stuff. But in the future that whole style section one of the things that's being discussed right now and GitHub is around having font management there. So you can imagine this style section being a home for more things in the future potentially. It's still TBD on how they'll evolve. And basically it could be a home for more more options in the future and I'd love to hear feedback on this as well as another feedback on all of it really but this section in particular I think for themes without star variations what do you want to see what would be most helpful. How can we elevate the experience in a way that is intuitive and make sense and gives you access to the things that you want to see. Yeah. Do you want to jump into templates. So the fourth item here is templates and templates really have evolved and some of the updated mechanisms for adding templates have been quite enhanced here so I'm going to go into here. Adding a new template we have this new model view here where you can select the type of template you want to apply. You can also create custom templates which can be applied manually to any page or post when you're editing those. We're going to create a custom template here. We're going to name it my custom template. It create. And this is where we see something pretty new here previously in other versions of WordPress you would have to copy and paste and kind of get smart with when you're creating new templates across different templates. Now we WordPress is finding the most associated templates so right now I created a custom template and I have an existing page template. And it's using this this as a suggestion for what I could start with now you can also register and create your own patterns so you could have different template patterns that would be considered starter templates. So I can pick this here and now instead of trying to bounce between two pages and make sure my templates are one to one I have exactly what my existing template was that we edited earlier now I can go in and make changes. So say I wanted this template to be much more minimal removing the the title and the featured image I can even modify the header here so let's replace this. Save something a little bit bigger. Maybe do this bigger as little changes as you want for each template and now this template when I save it will be available for editing within this templates view here and I can also apply it to other pages now. We also have details views for templates so if you go to index here. I have a post per page that is pulled out of the other general settings within WordPress and to the relative template, I can set this to six. Can just allow comments on new posts if you want. And let's save this year. And now I have six posts on my index view here. This is also neat where some of the areas that are used within WordPress templates are pulled out for reference so if you want to identify the footer, you can just zoom right in on the footer and make contextual changes right here. Navigation is the same thing this navigation block is pulled out into context within the sidebar. This is the first iteration in the direction but ideally we could start pulling out other top level key features like the site logo maybe even site title when you're focusing in on a navigation or a header as well. That way you don't have to dive all the way into a block to change its settings we can pull out the most important and significant settings. Yeah and as part of this the details to cure some of the stuff that's come up and that there's an ongoing discussion about is continuing to surface the reading settings and making that as intuitive as possible. And another thing that I'm really excited about is in the future I think there's going to be some work around turning off templates so let's say your theme comes with the front page template but you don't want to use that being able to turn that off and then also just duplicating templates with ease and having that as part of the process of creation for sites. So I think there are there's some use cases where folks are running into already. I don't want to use these templates from this thing I want to use my own template. And that leads into the future of the future of blocking searching. I want to put some this site or this theme and I want to use them on my site and I want to use these operations in this thing. So there's some interesting groundwork already for that future. Right yeah templates don't have to be associated to a specific team where patterns or styles it's really kind of got made these all components of a site. And I think kind of just put some together in a nice fashion. And speaking of components and compositions we have the newest item here and the last one will go over in the site editor and this is the patterns item. So WordPress 6.3 leans quite heavily on patterns and patterns are compositions of blocks that can be added to a page all at once. This includes both new patterns that are added to the patterns directory and also the ability to create and manage patterns directly in the site editor. So here we have all your patterns set out visually those patterns included by from your theme and plugins that would be listed right here. For now they're not editable but I imagine in the future we would be able to replicate and edit maybe something similar to how template parts can be editable. And you can go through here and create patterns to add to your pattern section up here so let's run through that here. We're going to hit this plus it create pattern we're going to name it I'll name this pattern. And then we can toggle these patterns to keep them all synchronized across every instance that this pattern is in use. One thing to note with synced patterns is that when you do edit one of them they're going to be edited at the same edits are going to be applied throughout all the synced patterns. Let's create this pattern here and let's run through that. Let's start with a blank slate here. I'm going to pick an existing pattern to roll with a really like this one here to a cool double cover type design. And I saw where one of them is set to fixed and the other one's not. Let's go in and make some changes. Perhaps actually I want to use this new do a tone control this is pulled into the inspector here to kind of surface some of the design controls a little bit better. I'm going to apply the do a tone effects there. We're going to hit save and go back out to patterns. Now we have our new pattern that I created that my pattern right here. It's purple again purple is synced and used everywhere. We're going to go to the homepage and I'll show you how to add it. So you can if it's a synced pattern you can actually search for it with the this insert here. So you save my pattern and also through this existing tab here. And you may know that these reusable blocks and synced patterns are very similar and you want to touch on the feedback that we received on that front. Yeah, let's dive into that so with the concepts of simple parts reusable blocks and patterns a lot of confusion came up to the point that I created a user doc on it, comparing the different options and distinguishing each and this release brings us into kind of a gathering of the concepts consolidate how much people need to know. So reusable blocks as a concept is now known as synced patterns and patterns in general now become the way in which you create content that you can use across your site. So synced and un-synced. Un-synced is how patterns have worked before or each instance is unique and can be customized. Synced patterns work exactly as reusable blocks you sort. So any reusable block you've had in the past will continue to work exactly the same. It'll just be named differently in the interface. There's some nudges built throughout like Richard showing here. When you first create a new pattern you also see the option to create reusable block or pattern listed in the interface and if you dismiss that nudge, that will just change to create a pattern. So I know this is an adjustment. There is going to be a Wordpress.org news post on the topic to make sure we get the word out. So I know that's very important to folks. Again, there's an effort underway for documentation from the docs folks and the training team is aware. So there's a lot to update, but this is also a big step forward to consolidate the number of concepts. This is something that I got feedback on. I think for the entire three years of the outreach program of there's another thing we have to learn is not going to have to learn and this should help reduce that confusion and also house them in the same place and kind of get folks familiar with the different options and honestly I hope it causes people to use these synced options more. I ran into so many folks who did not know about reusable blocks and I think this is a really good way to surface a powerful feature in the WordPress experience so I'm quite excited about it and I hope it helps reduce the cognitive load of how much that you need to know. I also wanted to quickly note with the patterns to one of the things that I am looking forward to in the future is also being able to create a pattern and assign it to a template or a post or a page. So that functionality of having like a starter option when you're creating a new thing like rich showed with the templates. I think it'd be really cool to be able to create that interface it's not currently an option but I think in the future that definitely will be. Yeah, I agree. It's really neat to you could you could see these now visually, you can even delete duplicate stuff we wanted to duplicate one of these. Now we have two copies and we can go into one of them and make our changes. Say we want to change the styles of this one to sneak yellowish orange one and save it now we have two copies of it. And I mentioned earlier about the idea of detaching patterns so for going to our homepage here right now this pattern is synced again we have this purple outline indicating that it is a synced pattern. You can detach it now so detaching a pattern will now remove it from all the other instances that are synced together and I can make changes to just this one so let's go with this purple yellow one. Here. And maybe change that to make it something a little bit cool. There we go. So now we can have these changes only applied to this one pattern so I'll save this page. And this existing pattern is still the same as well. So really patterns are are a much really like an advantage advantage UI, especially for folks building sites. So you can build and manage the different components of a site with this visual visual library of patterns here and you can also zoom into each individual one make your changes have them applied everywhere and not based if they're synced. And really just kind of abstracts the complexities of sometimes of an entire page of blocks into one component of blocks. So I'm really excited about this patterns work that's been going on and there's even future ideas and implementations around potentially having partial syncing where some parts of a pattern could be synced together. Maybe maybe the text could be changed or maybe the styles are all the same, or maybe the opposite. There's a lot of ways that we can work with on the idea of syncing and partially syncing. But for now they're they're one to one copies or not at all. And I'm really intrigued on the direction of what that's going to roll. Right, so that's it for diving into the site editor. I wanted to do a little segment on design and blocks, though, and do you want to kick off cover some revision stuff. Yeah, let's actually dive into the revisions because I am beyond stoked about the revisions and we've gotten really good feedback around this timeline view so briefly revealed earlier, you can actually go back in time and look at how your site appeared before. And it shows you made the changes when you'll see this site if you scroll for a really long time we've edited this site over and over and over again. I've actually used it for some calls for testing. I've used it for the last demo which is pretty cool. But there is some work being done around template and template part revisions to that did not make it into this release but I expect in the future. And these things combined to have a really robust revision system just makes the site editor more powerful more trustworthy for a better word you want to be able to roll back you want to be able to have access to changes that have been made. So the way that we're showing these star revisions, I think is a really interesting look at what could possibly be explored for the future with phase three, there's a whole post dedicated to revision so that'll drop in a second when we're done. Yammering about revisions, and I think the more feedback we can get on that and the more we can kind of see what works about this visual system. So I'm very excited about star visions in the future template and to put part revisions. Rich, are you cool with showing them the deep linking in the style so if you go to blocks here. Yeah, so one of the things I love if you're trying to have this is like a quality of life. You can open up styles and then turn on the style book or go to the block section and just click on each individual blocks this works whether the style book is on or off and you just click on a block on your page. But it opens up the specific settings for that block. So you can just edit quickly and directly, which I find to be just, I don't know, a really nice quality of life improvement, and allows you to make changes quickly to exactly what you want in the context of the page which is also really cool. And of course these changes are applied globally, but it does allow you to get a very quick and fast look. And I think this is one of those features that folks might miss so I was wanting to specifically called out. I'd also love to dig into some of the top toolbar enhancements if you don't mind changing that on. So the top toolbar got some improvements in the top to where if you haven't used it it's basically an option that when enabled allows you to access all the block document tools in one place at the top of the editor. So it's a way to just have it up there at all times for you to use. And this option was enhanced and kind of brought into the new site editor features so that it works nicely with the title bar. And it also allows you to select a selector which is I think what rich was about to show. And it basically allows for specific options when selecting different multiple blocks. It totally got overhauled in a really exciting way. It also allows you to have easy access to the undo and redo. There's just a lot of improvements to make it a bit more elegant and yeah user friendly for folks who want to use that option if you haven't tried it out I definitely recommend it. It's really expensive on if you've been using it more, which is pretty exciting. Yeah, I agree. And I forgot to mention the show and hide which I think is what you were showing. Yes. Yeah. So yeah there's a way to show and hide it in line with the title bar. So whenever you're in the center and trying to use it. There's a lot of neat, neat features. The top floor was really, really interesting, especially when you're trying to edit and sometimes you know some stuff gets in the way and not so much here because I have things spaced out very well. But there are times when it's nice to just have everything condensed at the top. Another thing that I think is pretty nice is the idea of the distraction free mode coming to the site editor now. So this was only available in the post editor where it hides all the UI and makes things distraction free. But now you can add it, apply it to the site editor here. You can still make any changes. So if you wanted to change this make any copy changes you can even replace an image. Let me drop this other image into here. You can replace images and make you know slight changes and add blocks as well, like when the inserter comes up you can add blocks. But it's meant to be more of a trailer tailored trim down experience that takes a lot of the UI away so that you can see exactly what what is here and what you're doing and make some side adjustments. I think it's a nice way to really just kind of finesse and fine tune your site and then to turn it off is come back up here. And there's a there's a shortcut as well but you can just log on that. And there we go. Alright, so let's move into a few design tools. I went to add a pattern before here and they created earlier. This is the my patterns that I've created. I'm going to add this in here. This is a neat like matted photo type pattern. I thought it'd be cool to kind of have the the blue come into this area as well. That's just using a gradient with the hard stop. But that's just an aside. The cool part here is this new aspect ratio control. So the aspect ratio control allows you to set an aspect ratio. We have a couple of defaults here so we can do square standard three by two, two by three. And here and whatnot. And it's pretty nice. It's very simple right for now and I think it'll continue evolving. But really the big enhancement on this front is the ability to retain the aspect ratio of an image when you replace it with something else. So let me change this to this nice image here. The aspect ratio is still standing the height and width are set as well and I could replace that image without breaking the layout so this would be super helpful for folks that are creating patterns, especially patterns on the pattern directory where you might have imagery that kind of like this here where it sets like the cool mood for this here but if you replace this with without aspect ratio, it could jump in size or it could be super small it kind of loses its integrity and this aspect ratio control maintains that as well. You can also set it to contain or cover so that would contain makes the image not distort so they so it wouldn't fill all the way up cover is is the traditional zoom in so that your image actually shows at the aspect ratio that you selected. There's been a couple other enhancements to the image sizing over here just cleaning it up and making it flow a little bit better as well. I'm really thrilled about about how the aspect ratio improved and I expect this exact control to move to other areas and other media blocks within the editor. Alright, let's go into a couple new blocks. So we're going to go to our about WordPress page here.  After you select something you'll have the footnote appended up here and dropped in down here where I can start adding some footnotes about this. Now this is linked together and if I add a second one they would be linked as well, and this is technically a block so it can be moved. You probably wouldn't put it up here but if you had a social or if you had some separators or an author bio block underneath your pattern you might you might adjust where you want this to go but now this block was added automatically and this was linked together so it's a really nice way to to make what used to take, you know, 10 or so actions into one where you just hit, you just select it and add the footnote. And then we also have a new block called the details block. Now the details block is great for showing and hiding content. So let's take this paragraph for example, I want to add a details block so I'm going to add one before type in details. And then I'll put a summary up here so grab this text. Move it here, and then we'll take this paragraph text. And I want to put it inside this block. So technically it's inside the details block and anything inside of it is going to be toggled via the details element. So if we come off of it, there's closed. Now it's open so I can see it. If I go to the block controls you can also open it by default. This might be helpful if you're setting up an FAQ or you have a lot of different details and you want your first one to be open perhaps can also do some some clever styling. So if you wanted to add a background, and then maybe add some padding to this as well. These padding controls have also been improved where you can select individual apply individual paddings at a time or custom to apply all of them, but where block can determine if a few if it wants to connect the vertical and horizontal paddings as well. And there we go. We have the details block. You can add more blocks inside of here it's just an inner blocks component to where you can have different paragraphs you can even put images if you need it to. And there's well. So those are the new blocks added to repress 6.3 the footnotes and the details block. And you want to talk us through the addition for previewing and themes. Yes, I am also strict about this. So along the standing point of feedback that we've had as well as around the ability to preview block. So block thinkers were pretty upset that this wasn't an option because obviously you want folks to try out your stuff. And then also end users in general who might want to taste the site editor and explore how it might impact their site. We're able to do so must setting up a test site because it wasn't a way to preview and a group of lovely folks came together and help create the option to live preview and it's powered by the site editor. So you both are able to preview the actual block theme and then also get a taste of the site editor before switching over. And this is just really a huge gateway open for a lot of folks I imagine will help adoption a lot. It also helps clue you in that you are going to switch to a block theme, which is something that we've also gotten feedback on. How do we tell people they're about to dive into the world of block themes that they just hit activate. It just gives you a really good sense of how it might impact your site and honestly you can customize it same way with the customizer you can go through and make a bunch of changes and activate it and I just I love that it gives you a taste of the site editor experience at the same time. And it just solves a huge pain point for block themes and helps folks decide whether to switch without needing to do any extra testing. So I think this will be a huge feature coming to 6.3 that I can't wait to see the impact of and again definitely want to iterate on this. This is previewing, but if there's any suggestions folks have for 6.4 beyond to make it clear but yeah you can really do everything start building out your entire site here and hit activate and go. It's really nice to be able to see all the entities like seeing all the patterns that that are provided, you still have your patterns that you created but then you go into here you see all the patterns created by frost. And this particular theme demo, but it's really nice and then you activate save and it's there. So it's a quite a nice improvement. I'd also love to dive in I know we're coming up on 40 minutes if like Richard I could spend 40 hours talking about 6.3. But I wanted to go through some of the wider core improvements as well. That's okay. So, to start, I'm very excited next week around this time I think there's going to be a hallway hang out around some of the performance benefits myself, and Emily Clark are going to host it I will drop a link to that. Here and I do want to call Courtney Robinson also mentioned that you'd like to practice and go through any of these features together. There will be an online workshop at the top of the hour with a link to the meetup group. So I'm going to solve that question real quick. But that is a very great way to get your hands dirty and actually get involved in this and, you know, we're still are in the RC period so it's a great time to also find any bugs which is my favorite thing to do. But yeah, we're press comes with a load of performance improvements, specifically around low time for content with images. There's a link to a dev note around that that I'll drop in a second but the performance leads have shown for 6.3 reduction for RC one that's the latest. They've been so great they've been literally every single beta, and now RC doing performance tests and really testing to see how each version is is holding up and hot off the press. And basically right now for RC one it shows a reduction of 24% for block things LCP and 19% for classic themes, which is really exciting and it's always good to see this focus on performance and improvement across both the block theme and classic thing world. And I hope you join the hallway hangout next week. I will jump into that. Now let me pull that up. So the performance improvements and then let me drop in the image. Yeah. So the two posts that you can dig in to find out more. There are also some neat improvements around rollback for manual update for themes and plugins. So basically if you are mainly updating a plug in your theme and the process fails, the rollback feature will automatically restore the previously installed version to your website up and to ensure that so works for everyone. This is a wonderful built in future to have in WordPress and some that I am really excited about seeing in place that was one of the first things I ever did to break a WordPress site was ran an update without checking anything back when I was a student on the multi site, which was not fun. So, this is something I'm very excited about dropping support for PHP five is another thing I would like to call out. So the new minimum version supported will be PHP 7.0. The recommended version, of course remains at some point for an above. So I will drop that in real quick. As you can tell I love to drop links so people have all the information. There are also a number of accessibility improvements, and that team is small but mighty and I deeply encourage you to get involved. However you can with that with that group of folks. There, as you can see we just have a ton of stuff. So a lot of improvements coming to the site editors a lot of new features. And so as part of that accessibility needs to also be focused on and a lot of improvements shipped around the site editor, especially on navigating between things. I also want to specifically call out some work done around the list view that list view is a super powerful tool for navigating complex content. And it's important that everyone can use it. And so a number of accessibility related efforts were completed there. And then there are some general block editor experience lots of things there to go through. And then as well as some other wider core and administration upgrade install, and the bundled themes, I will drop a link to that as well. One moment, and just huge props to the folks working on that stuff there is always need to see how much gets done in each release and to pause and actually celebrate some of the improvements and also consider what we need to do going forward. There are also some internationalization improvements specifically around just the time translation loading. So it's basically firing too often if no translations were found. So there's also some neat performance improvements. And then a new preload text domain filter was also introduced, which is useful for plugins to develop and test alternative loading caching strategies for translations. So I will drop that in as well.  And it'll also probably be a part of the roundup. But that is a very fast look at a lot of the behind the scenes kind of infrastructure updates that you can imagine and there's a ton more, but I'm not even getting into around like different API is being updated. And there's a ton of dead notes as well. So this is just scratching the surface of the high level items. Yeah, and really when you think about it, every part of the site editor has been enhanced every single part of it like navigation styles pages templates patterns. And then all sorts of editing capabilities are improved drag and drop this view, replacing media, some link control work like there's, there's hundreds of other smaller things and things that you might not. I've seen but we didn't talk about because we're just in it and we're working we're demoing stuff. But there's so much work that's gone on to 6.3 really is really is a massive step forward for for editing and publishing WordPress and I'm just thrilled to to have been a part of this release and I can probably say the same about everyone here and it's really really something that I'm proud of and I'm excited for where it's going but also where the next iterations and the continuous work later on this year with 6.4 and then really taken off phase three. Thank you very very much indeed that was a full on expose of everything which is coming in 6.3 I know that you guys have put a lot of hard work into that presentation so Bravo. And thank you you managed to cover a lot of ground. Okay, just a couple of bits of housekeeping if the if the chat inside of zoom is is something that you are finding unable to copy from fear not it's all going to end up in the slack channel which is associated with this so hashtag walks through. So there we will make every effort to put all of the links that you currently seem unable to get.  It'll be recorded and it will, it will be put. I'm not entirely sure where it's going to be put in all honesty I don't know if you can help me out with that but they'll they'll definitely be a recording made and when that recording is made probably the link will go into the walk slack channel as well. We've got quite a few questions coming in so well let's dedicate the remaining 15 minutes to those. If you if you feel that some of these have been answered already we can just skip over them but I'll just go through them in order. I don't have any names associated with them so they just come as they come so number one is is there a way to get the left and right margins of the content space either for a block or for a whole page I think you did tackle a little bit of that. But yeah, over to either one of you. Yeah I'll share real quick and just pull it up here in the styles, you can select layout, then you can modify vertical and also horizontal padding and this is site wide on every page. And within individual blocks, you can select the block and go over to styles. And down here there's padding dimensions where you can manipulate the padding on either side so if you wanted to increase the amount of space. And you can do that, pretty much on on most container blocks and most other blocks that have that fulfill the like a big chunk of space. So the answer to that is a definitive yes, there we go great. Another question, will we finally get a sidebar template part in 6.3 Probably not an official one but you could create a template part, just like I showed how you can create patterns it's template parts works the exact same way. And you can house that or even use it as a you can create a synced pattern and use that as your sidebar and put that on any template that you would like that might even be easier. Thank you very much. So the next one. If you create a pattern. Will it still be available should you change or update the theme interesting. Yeah, if you remember when I switched to the preview of the frost theme at the very end you could still see the patterns that I created and the site editor so those do persist when you switch the theme they're owned by you you've created them they're not tied to a specific thing. Okay, moving on I seem, there seems to be some confusion and it seems like you were deluged with email or whatever he may have been around the the nomenclature of synced and non synced patterns. And the question is about that will synced versus non sync patterns be identified visually in somewhere and I know that they're separated in menus if you like but is there. The icon. Yeah the icon is different. So filled in or not, and then also just like they're separated in the patterns interface, you can have a view to see all you can see sync you can see unsynced it's also named when you create a new and sync pattern it says like unsynced pattern created versus sync pattern created. It's all over the face. And then you can also pull them in different places so in the insert or you'll see unsynced patterns where you would see patterns in general under my patterns. And there's a section and then for synced patterns. It's reusing the reasonable block section so they're back where you're used to seeing them, and you can pull them up there. So yeah there is like a lot of visual distinction and there's still confusion there again. And open an issue. Please give me back. Yeah I noticed and that you were were pains several times to say well I wrote it down you want suggestions. So if these if you've got any thoughts that you think and ought to know about her door is wide open I think it's fair to say, and any suggestions that you've got will be warmly welcomed and looked at very very carefully. So there we go next one. If I want to know who changes one block of the style book. This might be a revision where all blocks are in. Okay, would be better to see would be better to see it for every block itself I think probably will just tackle the first part of that question. Is there some way who did what. So this is a discussion I think because I answered a different question about star vision so I was trying to answer questions while we're going excited feeling the ground out of time. And so this one was about like, we see star revisions for the style book and the style book is basically just a layer in a way of presenting the changes. It's not necessarily something that separate out in the same way. So it is not. You cannot see star revisions based on that specific block but you can roll back through the overall star revisions and that might be an interesting thing to discuss on on GitHub is having more granular control on that but that is not currently possible in terms of like zooming into that specific block and seeing that specific specific change to the styles, but you can see them in the timeline. So that is an interesting idea. Yeah. Just, just to say we've got about 10 minutes more that's where we're topping out so if you do have any questions burning questions. I think it's highly unlikely that you're going to get and and rich on a call both at the same time, available for questions soon at least anyway so if you've got any thoughts any more questions we do still have 10 minutes there's a few more to go but just drop them in and we'll hopefully get through them that'd be nice. Okay so the next one simply says from my testing I found that you don't need to highlight anything to add a footnote number just place the cursor behind the word where the footnote number should go. Is that a hidden feature, or is that a bog. I would say feature though, though it's much more intuitive to select what you want to apply footnote to, I would say. I would agree. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's how it works. Just in general I think that's in by design. Okay, thank you so moving on love the new oh nice I love when when a question begins with just something pleasant love the new ability to preview block themes it's also on the radar. Sorry, is it also on the radar to let people save site editor customizations to a new theme they are trying out before activating it and ideally share it with others like you do with the customizer drafts via a unique link that's something that users really want and then a little smiley face. Yeah, there's an issue that I pulled up that I will drop a link to and slack that talks about this so there is like an overarching site editor and customizer MVP for basically compatibility and that was one of the things that's come up as around scheduling and saving So another more I couldn't find it while doing all this think the nerves got to me but there is an issue around that of saving and scheduling changes as part of both the site editor and I would see that porting directly into So, not yet. So not to 6.3 but that definitely is something that's on on the mind for future releases. And speaking of I did want to know someone asked a question I answered already where it was like, is this it is this always 6.3. That's what we're going to get with the site editor and know there's a link to an issue around an ongoing customization which will also drop now where work is going to continue going so just because phase two has been marked as done does not mean the work is done and kind of like with 5.0 and the block area coming out in phase one work continues on there and all of these things are blocks. And it's all about how they fit together and so having this like unified approach allows us to make improvements across the board so both of those issues are dropped below. I feel like a YouTuber right now. Yeah, I feel this one may not be pertinent to this but we'll ask it anyway there may be something that you wish to say. Is there any news regarding native multilingual support in core. I can answer that quickly but no I don't have any updates around that I think that is still planned for phase four but I do think there was some stuff with working up Europe, my jet lag brain can remember it around possibly some concurrent work where it's like as phase three starts we kind of have to figure that problem out first, but there could be a future where, you know, towards the end of phase three, we could start doing some of the phase four stuff kind of like the command palette was actually planned for fully phase three and we've released it was 6.3. So I could see work like that happening. Okay, the next one is why is it necessary to put template parts inside patterns because template so question because template so because patterns are not template parts. I don't think it's necessary I think it's possible. So template parts is very close right now to sink to patterns. It's the main difference is you can assign a template part to a header or footer or as to be a general, a general template part and I would say general template parts and sink to patterns are basically the same thing. I expect that in the future will have the ability to set categories for the patterns you create so seeing patterns can be created and added to the header category. So perhaps that is maybe that's the same thing as a header template part where you can have all the same advantages UI that you get with template parts like replacing a template part with another template part but it will just exist for the sink to patterns. So I would say they're pretty close to the same thing right now, but not quite there. Okay. A couple more questions. Oh, I don't know if this question is about to be removed it on the Google Doc that I'm reading from it suddenly been highlighted so I'll go to the one below it and then come back to that one. So the next question then would be regarding the rollback of failed manual plugins and theme updates this will happen even if the update break and make the website fail with a fatal error like some kind of recovery mode. I don't know if you can pause that question. I'm not entirely sure what's meant by that. Yeah, I was trying to parse that as well I am going to lean on the Dev Note for this so I'm going to drop that in again. Just because that would be if you have a way to phrase that to the person here at the Dev Note that might be the easiest way to get up if my understanding is if it's going to cause an error, it will be rolled back for updates. I do know there is some work around at the bottom. So we'll read this. The above and comes as part one and two the robot feature part three hopefully for WordPress 6.4 is the same process but for automatic updates. So specifically rollback part three which is not part of 6.3 checks to see if that the update plugin does not cause a PHP fit or when activated if it does this error is captured and the previous installed version is restored. So all the rollback feature parts one through three are included for testing it will back update failure feature plugin. So that's something that's of interest to you. There is a plugin that you can actually use and install that I have a lot of my test sites to help further this feature as well. Thank you. Okay. A couple left I suppose really. Hey, is there any option to apply global styles and then in brackets themes theme.json variations to different templates separately. And then in a just a nice comment there. This person says by the way, new aspect ratio input is cool. Nice. Yes, it is cool. So there's not there's not the ability to apply a theme adjacent specifically to a template. But there is explorations on the idea of theme.json partials and that is applying a theme.json array of objects of styles to an entity so it could be a template or it could be a pattern. So that way you could style one pattern, perhaps in the pattern directory. And then when your theme inherits that pattern as soon as you install that your, your styles can be reflected in that same partial. So there's some explorations for sure, but not just not quite at that point yet. Okay, thank you possibly the final question then unless there's a deluge suddenly very quickly with 6.3 CSS grids become comes to query builder. So what is the plan for CSS grid in the group block rose stacks and grids. And will that be a full implementation or a limited one as the currently limited flex box implementation in rose features. Thanks. I would say that hopefully in 6.4 we could have some new layout tools introduced I know there's been quite a few explorations on that front. And we're at the point where rose stack grid columns can can kind of become one unit in a sense I don't know that they really would holistically but you maybe you can morph between them and it doesn't doesn't change your content unexpectedly and also have allows for more controls like setting the grid options as well I would expect it probably wouldn't be the most full featured grid to start with, but it would probably have more control than the query loops implementation now which is pretty straight streamlined and turned down. But there's there's definitely an issue on GitHub and we can find that. And if you have feedback and ideas on how to improve layout across the board. That would be something that would be really cool to get into the next release of WordPress. That's all the questions and actually as look what have it that's literally about the perfect amount of timing is now 59 minutes past the hour according to my clock. So let's say that's a wrap thank you very much if you joined us as we said all of the all of the bits and pieces that have been dropping into the chat if you've been unable to access this fear not you can go to the you can go to Slack and you can go to the hashtag walkthrough Slack channel everything will go in there there is being there is a recording being made and I suspect a transcript as well and that will appear somewhere very soon and no doubt be posted about in a blog. I guess the only thing that it remains for me to do is to say certainly thank you to Anne and rich for putting in a lot of time. Honestly, a lot of time I saw the notes. Thank you for all appreciation for that. Thank you. It was a really, really great demonstration of that, but also in the background, Jonathan Meyer and Chloe for setting all of this up as well, much appreciation to you guys as well. Thank you, Nathan. Thank you very much indeed. Well, we'll see you next time hopefully for 6.4. But you never know. Thanks very much for joining us. Have a good day. Thank you. Thank you.


Hey, Aloha, and welcome to Stand the Energe Band, coming to you live and direct from the windward side of Oahu, Kailua, Hawaii, best known for where President Obama went on vacation every Christmas. That's turned our little sleepy little country town into tourist mecca, mostly for Japanese tourists. So we get more tourists in Kailua than we get in Waikiki sometimes I think. At any rate, I apologize in advance if you hear chickens clucking, roosters crowing, or dogs barking, because that's part of my neighborhood. And we'll try and keep it to a minimum. Today's show is going to be a little bit different. I don't have a guest today. And with everything going on, going on in the world with coronavirus, I actually have some things I want to talk about on the political side, on the virus side, and on the hydrogen side. Because for one thing, I grew up in Hawaii, and we have a lot, we grew up around a lot of cultures, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Hawaiian, Portuguese, you know, different European cultures. And you get to appreciate the best, and sometimes the worst in each of them. But for the most part, we like to accommodate the best and keep the best of all the cultures and ignore the, ignore the hard parts or the parts we don't like. And so I find that, in particular, Chinese culture is kind of interesting, have a long history, have great culture, their martial arts are so refined, just amazing. And it's kind of troubling to me that when we start talking about the coronavirus that we forget that it's not about Chinese people or Chinese culture, but the public people's Republic of China, in other words, the communist government, that's really kind of made this virus what it is today. And there's a lot of opinions out there. And you know, I'm an opinion guy, so I'm going to spend some of my stand energy man time talking about my opinion on socialism slash communism in general, based on my background in the military and the time I've spent living with international relations kind of things going on in the Pacific. And also growing up in the 70s, 60s and 70s, during the Vietnam War, and having a pretty good appreciation for what our country was going through, which almost parallels what it's going through right now, with some fantasy that socialism and communism are actually pretty cool things. And my lifetime experience says not so. Very few people have actually, in the United States, have actually been in a communist country, or particularly been in behind the Iron Curtain when the Soviet Union existed. And I'm one of those people. I've actually been to East Germany and East Berlin in uniform as a US military officer. And I can tell you that from my observation, really the only difference between socialism and communism is that socialism is the utopian ideal that should actually result in the perfect government and the perfect economy. And communism is the end state where it turns out the utopian vision doesn't really come to fruition. And it turns into a totalitarian dictatorship, where the only people that can vote are the people in the Communist Party, and therefore everybody else suffers. And I'm going to go through a couple of things just to talk about those differences, so people understand a little bit better. In fact, in the military, we used to say the biggest difference between socialism and communism was the socialists haven't had their guns taken away from them yet.  And there's no way you can fight back against the government because it controls everything. So that's a starting point. Socialism is really just basically stage one communism. And if you read the Communist Manifesto, which is not a long document that's available online, you can look it up and read it. You can see the parallels of what's going on in society today. And the big push to go to globalism and this progressive idea that we should have one big world with one big hug and one big loving fair government where everybody gets the same wages and everybody does his prosperous and stuff. But unfortunately, it really doesn't turn out that way. And there's reasons for that. So I would suggest that if you haven't read the Communist Manifesto, you should open it up and look at it. It was actually written around the time of our Civil War in the United States and caused a whole lot of havoc in Europe in the early 1900s. In fact, Hitler basically came to power by professing that he wanted to get rid of communism. And lo and behold, he became a totalitarian dictatorship along with Mussolini in World War II and repeated the same kind of basically tactics and techniques in his government that came out of the Communist Manifesto. So something to look at. But ultimately, communism and socialism do a couple of things. Number one, they get rid of personal property. That's where you get this income equality thing. It's not income equality. It's basically dividing the pie and everybody gets an equal slice, except the people in the party get a bigger equal slice than everybody else.  And if we really took the socialist model in today's planet, not just the country, but in today's planet, what you would see is that instead of everybody being prosperous, pretty much everyone would be literally dirt poor. I mean, back in the Stone Age poor, not just sort of poor. We in the United States take it for granted that our poverty level in most countries around the world, literally our poverty level is middle class to almost upper middle class. I mean, we have people that are, you know, in poverty, quote unquote, but they still get their kids educated in a public school. They still have medical care. They have government subsidized food for their kids at school and things like that. And they can move up, but not so in most countries in the world. And ideally, we'd like to see capitalism be the model for one reason. And this is for me, that one of the biggest things, economic reason, is that socialism and communism only see the economy as a pie with a fixed size. And capitalism is a growing pie. That's why when you hear economists talk about GDP, gross domestic product and things like that, and they talk about constant growth, it's because if you keep growing your economy and getting it larger and larger, then people have more of a chance of becoming more prosperous themselves and sharing in that growth. In fact, if you look at most of our retirement funds now, they're in maybe mutual funds or stocks. And as long as the economy is growing and the stocks are doing well and the corporations are doing well, your retirement fund keeps growing. And, you know, your retirement fund, if you're like me and started back in the 60s and 70s, when you were a teenager or just out of college, you know, if you invested a little bit, and I'm talking really just a little bit, a couple, maybe $100 a month in your earning years and early on, maybe it was only $15 or $20 a month, you know, it could be worth several hundred thousand dollars to maybe close to a million dollars now because of the growth of the economy and the growth in capitalism as a system. So communism really just devises that existing pay up. And why is that? Well, number one, in capitalism, people have skin in the game. You work hard, you earn more. You work really hard and you work really smart.  Whereas in communism, there's no incentive. I'll give you, I'll share one story with you when I was behind Iron Curtain in East Germany. We went to their biggest, most talked about mall in Berlin called the Centrum. And it was the showcase, the showcase of their productivity and everything in Germany, in East Germany at the time. And they had these stores there in the Centrum. And it was not unlike a typical mall here in the sense that they had a shirt department and shoe department, and they had, you know, maybe camping goods or things like that. But the interesting thing was they'd have one cashier and maybe one clerk or two clerks. So if you wanted to look at shirts, you'd go in there and you'd wait in line and the clerk would go and help you with your shirts, let you try one or two on.  And then you get to try on a couple of shoes and then you get to go pay for them. So what you can do in 15 minutes in Target or Walmart or Kahala Mall or Alamona Shopping Center today in our country would literally be an all day trip in the Centrum in Berlin because it was a true department store. And the clerks had no incentive to do speedy work. They had no incentive to do quality work. They made the same money whether they helped one customer or they helped 100 customers. So why should they bust their butt to do anything out of the ordinary or provide service above mediocre because they just got paid the same no matter what. There is no incentive. They have no skin in the game. And you spread that across an entire economy and now you see why it's a problem. So I'm kind of struck and a little bit shocked that the socialist movement is still alive and well in the United States and I'm pretty well convinced that it's just the ignorance of American people who haven't traveled much and really don't have a feel for how those countries actually work inside. The best example is you don't see a whole lot of socialist citizens scrambling to or American socialist scrambling to go move to a socialist country. But you see a whole lot of people from Central America, South America like Venezuela and some of those other countries that are dying to get into United States. And that should tell you something right there. So I'll share the last thing on communism with you and that is part of my military job was to do bilateral defense dialogues with several countries in Asia, including Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, all communist countries. And I can tell you that to a person, the folks that I dealt with and they were all great people, I mean, the people in the world are actually pretty nice no matter whether they're communist or socialist or capitalist. It doesn't matter. People are people. People love their families. People want to want to have a better life and give their kids a better life. But I can tell you that the one thing in common that all those countries I dealt with that were communists and socialists said was there's only two things you can't do in a communist country compared to a capitalist country or democracy or a republic like ours. The first is you can't talk religion. The governments are very intolerant of religious freedom. And you see that in PRC, People's Republic of China with the Uyghurs, which are Muslims that are often talked about being in the millions and in reeducation camps in Korea or excuse me in China, being reeducated because they're so fervent in their religious beliefs. And that kind of bucks the Chinese communist model, which doesn't let you practice religion where it competes with government. And the second part is just that you can't criticize the government. So the folks there in those countries would tell me as long as you don't criticize the government and as long as you don't try and start a religion, you can actually have a pretty decent life in a communist country. As long as you don't mind the government pretty much having complete control over everything. And you know when things get tough in a country like that and the government can't fix it. If you can tolerate millions of people in your country dying, hey, not a problem. You'll be perfectly happy in a socialist country, trust me. But if you care about your individual freedom, if you care about government not having a say in every single thing you do, if you're tired of staying quarantined in your house while this coronavirus is going on, well then you can kind of understand what it's like to actually live in a socialist country where the government tells you what you can't do, what you can't do down to the most minute detail in many cases. Another thing is they don't have any problem whining to their people because they want to keep control. And right now there's information leaking out of China that conflicts with the statistics we're hearing that, you know, they're saying that the United States actually has more cases of coronavirus now than China. I'm not certain that that's actually a fact because there are several things coming out to indicate that there are probably many, many more deaths due to the coronavirus in China than China is letting out. And one indication is the number of cremations and urns that are kind of piling up outside some mortuaries and things like that in China that aren't being reported officially, but individual people who have their own contacts outside are saying, hey, it's not just thousands or tens of thousands, it's more, many more than that. Another thing that I caught a glimpse of on the internet the other day was cell phones. It's interesting that cell phones in China are ubiquitous. Everybody has one just like in the US now. They pay their bus fare with it, they do everything with it. And when you do that, you kind of keep track of how many cell phones are in use and who's got them and where they are. Somehow the government reported and it got shut down really quick that they were 21 million accounts short between November and January of this year, November of last year and January of this year. In other words, those cell phones are used by everybody and all of a sudden they're 21 million accounts short, meaning 21 million people aren't talking on cell phones anymore. What does that tell you?  And it's cracked up to me. So be careful with that. The second post piece I want to talk about, I'll talk about after the break. We're going to go do a quick break here and come back in 60 seconds and I'm going to talk a little bit about national security. Aloha. I'm John David and the host of history lens on think tech Hawaii. History lens deals with contemporary events and looks at them through a historical perspective or what we call a history lens. The show is streamed live on thinktech Hawaii.com. Thanks so much for watching our show. We look forward to seeing you then. Mahalo and Aloha. So not to leave a totally negative taste in everybody's mouth about socialism and communism. Let me tell you one of the great things about socialism and communism that we seem to be suffering from in this country. And that is having government actually be decisive and get things done. When you're a totalitarian dictatorship and you're running the show, you can make stuff happen really, really fast. In this country, you'll get taken into court. You can sue the government. You can you can throw up all kind of roadblocks. You can you have all kind of rules and laws and stuff you got to fool with and you can contest and even your legislators just debate things ad nauseam for months and months and it seems like nothing ever gets done for the better or if it does get done, it just takes years and years instead of weeks. When you're a totalitarian dictatorship, you can make things happen quickly and some of the hydrogen news that's been coming out lately will tell you that China is stepping out way ahead of the United States in hydrogen technology and and employing hydrogen fuel cell technology and buses and trucks. And it's it's really kind of neat to see that happen. And it's a shame to see Russia and China and other communist countries step out ahead of the United States in a technology that really is something we ought to be excelling in. So there are some upsides to socialism and communism, but trust me, they're they're not worth the offsets. So let's talk a little bit about national security. One of the other things coming out of this pandemic virus is the fact that we found ourselves at a deficit for a bunch of stuff at the wrong time. Number one, we're at a deficit for information when we tried to prompt China for information about the coronavirus, we couldn't get it. They wouldn't take any of our expert help coming into their country to help them deal with it. And we're not even sure if the data we're getting out now is factual and accurate. And that impacts national security. But guess what? We're all the masks made, we're a lot of the ventilators made, where are a lot of the things made that that we really count on, especially at a time like this. Have we let too much of our national manufacturing and our expertise go to China and let them take advantage of it, make money on it, which is it's fine to let them grow and help them grow their economy. And, you know, I think our dream is if we can help China become more capitalist than communist, then it would be good for everyone because they have such a huge number of people there and it'd be a great market and they have a great workforce and things like that. And I'm not a, I'm not an isolationist, I'm not someone that's like, we shouldn't have anything imported, BMWs and Mini Coupers are great cars. And I think we ought to be bringing those things in and Volvos and stuff. And, you know, we've got BMW actually stepping out in fuel cells and they're expecting a luxury BMW fuel cell by 2022, which is just around the corner. But what are some of the things you really have to watch out for in terms of national security? What do I mean by that? Well, back in the 70s, I remember being in line to get gas where they went with the last number on your license plate if it was even or odd, you got to go get gas on the even number day if your license plate was even number and an odd number day if the date was an odd number, because the gas was in such rare availability that we had to ration our gasoline and the prices spiked and everything else. And that's when the US discovered that we were actually at the mercy of OPEC for energy. So when it comes to national security issues, there's probably some critical things that we need to consider as something that we just can't let ourselves become dependent on another country for. So I made a quick list of them. Energy certainly is one of them. And that's why I'm such a big hydrogen fanatic, because there's nobody that can monopolize hydrogen as energy storage and storing energy. And we should be able to do clean energy and store it in hydrogen. Economy, we shouldn't have the kind of trillions of dollars in depth that we have and trade imbalances that we have that allow other countries to capitalize on our economy while we stagnate in our economy. So that's another national security piece. Medical security, food security, information technology security, border sovereignty. If you don't control your borders, you're not a sovereign country. And maybe if you put it in political terms, people who don't care about the Southern border, Canadian border, and the folks in the European Union who just opened up other borders and let everybody in, it basically is the folks that are looking for a liberal progressive world order or a world without borders kind of deal where everybody can just go where they want to go and do what they want to do. And as long as you believe in sovereign nations, if you don't protect your borders, then that's a national security issue. Because if you can't control your borders and people can come in and bring whatever they want in viruses, illegal drugs, nuclear weapons, you're just asking for problems and enforcement of your sovereignty. It may sound kind of harsh, but you have to have laws and you have to enforce them. And if you're in a government like ours where your government is up buying for the people and the people have a say in the laws and the laws are applied across the board equally, then you have a say and you have a piece, a stake in the government and a stake in your freedom. Now our country seems to slip a little bit in those areas, some of those areas and we need to come back and get on track with them. Along those lines, when it comes to figuring out and as a recommendation when I'm trying to get across here is that as we come out of this coronavirus, we probably ought to set up some idea of what are the things that we can't afford to have compromise in national security. I mentioned economy, I mentioned energy, food, medical, things like that. We ought to come up with a critical list of things that we just can't compromise, that we have to at least be able to manufacture most of, if not all of, so that we can weather critical economic or medical or food issues. We don't have to depend on some outside country. To that note, one of the strategies PRC has taken up in that's People's Republic of China has taken up is they actually control a great many of the what we call rare earths, rare earth metals and rare earth materials that we need magnets, platinum, cobalt, things like that, that we need for batteries. So everybody wanted to go to electric transportation. Great, good luck. China owns many of the mines not just in China, but in South America and Africa. They already have them, they already own them. And so we have to make sure that our national security, make sure that we still have control over some of those assets and that we can get by without depending on other countries for some of those critical things. As a final note, because we're running a little bit low on time here, I'd like to close with one last thing. And I see the president taking some heat for some of the stuff he's dealing with. And I'd like to point out that as a guy who's trained in military support civil authorities and incident command system, that the way that government work, the way that governments, local, state and federal governments work in these kind of situations is the federal government is there to support the states. And that means the president should be talking to governors. And the senators from those states should be the next connection back into government in terms of funding and things like that. But there's no mayor, I don't care how big the city is, it doesn't need business dealing directly with the president or critiquing the president or something. The mayors of cities go to the governors. The way this works is we stand in the military support to civil authorities that all disasters are local. In other words, you handle all disasters at the local level. The funding may come from the federal government, but it's going to be managed by the governor or it's going to be managed by the mayor. And it goes in that descending order. But it's handled locally because in Hawaii, for example, we have a 2,500 mile moat around us. We don't have the same scenario that they do in New York City or that they do in Delaware or Maryland or California. We have a built in way of isolating ourselves. In fact, if you, there's not much reporting on it, but here in Hawaii, we're not even allowed to travel inner island anymore. The folks that live here and we have less than 200 as of yesterday, less than 200 cases and no deaths so far that are directly related to the coronavirus. And yet we're pretty much on lockdown. I was on the big island last week. There were only three cases on the whole big island. And the airplanes that I was traveling back and forth between the islands on, they were not even half full. So, you know, all disasters are local. You got to be handled locally. And the federal government has a role to play. But so does this governor and so does the mayor. And you can't excuse poor planning on the mayor's part or the governor's part and blame it on the federal government when they can't bail you out at the last minute. So, I'm going to leave that as the last word and as part of national security and the states have their responsibility and their own security. And we need to all appreciate that. Everybody in government needs to do their part and every citizen needs to do their part by protecting themselves, self-quarantining.  So, I'm going to wrap it up for now. Not a whole lot of energy stuff on Stand Energy Man today, but hope you found it worthwhile. And I'm compelled to share a little bit of this with you because I'm an old fart. I'm 65 years old, actually 66 now, and had a lot of time working on these kind of issues in the military and state government. And we need to all be working together, helping each other out, spend a lot less time criticizing and a lot more time appreciating what our government is set up to do and how we do it. So, until next week, Stand Energy Man signing off. Aloha.


The will of fire is upheld by every hokage, it is this care and love for each and every member of the village that makes the hokage. They have a responsibility to protect the well-being and the future of each and every member of the leaf, combining that with the ability and the bravery to protect their citizens by any means necessary is what made the fourth hokage Minoto Namikaze a true hero. But it's these very sacrifices that made Minoto view himself as a failure. The yellow flash grew up in Konoha under the tutelage of one of the legendary Sani, Jiraiya. Minoto was rather kind and humble, his personality differed quite a bit from Naruto but his passion came through his actions. The talented Shinobi became the yellow flash for his iconic teleportation Jutsu but he became one of the leaf's greatest shinobi and truly feared during the third ninja war where his legendary speed would come together with his wit and his extensive knowledge of senjutsu and ninjutsu. Minoto had every intention to protect the village and to become hokage, placing a considerable amount of weight and importance into protecting and to preserving lives. Or he instructed Kakashi, Obito, and Rin that rules and regulations weren't everything and these words would resonate with a kind and pure hearted Obito who would later pass that on to Kakashi. Minoto validating the young Uchiha would have a ripple effect as it soon became Kakashi's way of life that those who abandon their friends are worse than scum. Shortly after the war, Minoto became the fourth hokage and married Kushina Uzumaki. Obito would attack the leaf on the day of Naruto's birth and the day the Ninetail seal was weakened. The masked man would eventually extract the Ninetail out of Kushina and place the rampaging beast onto the village. Minoto needed to ensure that his child and wife were okay, that his village was protected, that this man was defeated, and he had to find a way to make sure the Ninetail would still remain in the possession of Konoha. While Kushina offered to seal Kurama into her and die, Minoto rejected this idea. He saw it unfair that he'd be Naruto's sole parent. When she sacrificed everything for him, he found it unfair that she wouldn't be able to watch her son grow. The rest is the series as we know it, Naruto, Jinchiriki of the Leaf. Konoha's yellow flash had an air of greatness surrounding him, with his jutsu, smarts, and his speed being revered. He was the fastest shinobi ever, even faster than A of the cloud. He sometimes seemed perfect, but through his own lens, failure plagued Minoto's legacy, and when the yellow flash was reanimated, he would truly feel this guilt in the presence of his predecessor, Hirosin, who handpicked him, and later in the presence of his son, the Ninetail Jinchiriki, the direct result of his inadequacy. But it would be Obito who shamed his former teacher for not being fast enough. However, and he would tell Naruto how much of a disgrace his father truly was. All of Minoto's students suffered tremendously. Reen with the three-tailed inside of her had died by Kakashi's hand, Kakashi became severely depressed after this event, and Obito died during the war. I'm sure Minoto felt that he could have saved them if he had just been fast enough. But his guilt didn't end there, as Obito had become a mass murderer, being the catalyst in beginning the 4th Ninja War, and the man who was the cause of Minoto and Kushina's death, making Naruto an orphan. Minoto would probably never see himself as anything but a failure. A truly gifted shinobi, again a man who was fast, but just not fast enough. He couldn't save his students, couldn't save his wife, failed his teacher's hopes and prophecy about him, and failed to give his son a life free of hardships. If only he deciphered the masked man's identity fast enough, he might have saved the shinobi world. That's the burden, the guilt that is weighing on Minoto's shoulders when he sees what the world has become, but the Ninetail tells Minoto not to regret a thing. Because had he not done what he'd done, the Ninetail might have been in the hands of the Akatsuki and the world already in ruin. Without having trust in his village and the few people in it, his son wouldn't have become the child of prophecy, the one to lead a new age in the shinobi world. Kurama then tells the fourth hokage that it wasn't his fault, and I think hearing it from the beast himself and seeing his son as a paragon of everything that is good eased his pain a little. Because Kurama was right, these were things that were out of his control. As sad as it is, young shinobi fight in wars and they often die young. It's the troubling reality of the shinobi world. A sad one. And later as hokage, they have a duty unlike any other. I think Minoto would have made an amazing father, the way he treated Kushina and others with a gentle kindness. But when you are hokage, your responsibility is to the whole village, not only your child. And so that was the hardest decision that he had to make, family against duty. Had he sealed the Ninetail back into Kushina, the Ninetail would have reemerged years later, leaving the village open to another tailed beast attack from Obito, and another opportunity to steal it. And if he did decide to get rid of the Ninetail and kill him, they would be leaving the leaf completely defenseless without their most valuable weapon. Minoto had to make a choice and he had to make a choice quickly. Out of so many possible outcomes, he ultimately made the right decision. He did what he had to do to protect his home, and had trust in that very village to raise his son. Minoto in his dying moments seemingly gained the ability of foresight. He knew what he was doing would positively impact the future. Minoto sensed that Obito would be the cause of catastrophe, but he also knew and had trust in Jiraiya, and had so much trust in his son, being so certain that Naruto would one day become the child of prophecy that he couldn't be. It could have been so much worse if Naruto grew up in that world without a village. Sadly enough, without the village ostracizing him, Naruto wouldn't have had that hunger and desire to be noticed and to be seen. But he also would have been without the Third Hokage, without Iruka, Kakashi, Jiraiya, and Tsunade, without friends molding him and guiding him to become what he was destined to become. Minoto is a hero and a great Hokage because he sacrificed himself for the village. Ultimately, that's the will of fire, right? It's the will of fire in its purest form, a self-sacrifice for the village, for everyone's hopes, dreams, and for the future of the leaf. Minoto has earned his status as hero of the hidden leaf. But I just can't help but think about Minoto seeing his son, Agent Shirki in the flesh, and the mixed emotions that came over the yellow flesh.  More than that, Naruto was the spitting image of Minoto and had Kushina's charisma and their combined love for the village. But again, so overcome with shame. He was the man who left his son alone in that world.  Before I end this video off, I just want to give a big thank you to NordVPN for sponsoring this video.  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