Hi everybody, good morning. I hope the keynote was good. I was busy hiding so that I could give this talk So I didn't get to hear it, but it's really awesome to see all of you here today All right, I'm gonna let people kind of trickle in in the back, but anyway So hi Already a big introduction of me, so I don't have to talk too much about myself I am a designer and a front-end developer I Partnered on a lot of enterprise projects and I've also do a lot of design builds for smaller clients So I've been working for myself since 2009 and I've kind of gone through a lot of the growth pains and excitement With WordPress, but I don't really want to talk about myself all that much I actually want to learn more about all of you So how many of you build themes for you know selling them or for clients, whatever How many of you like either work for yourself or like work for or run a small agency like kind of a smaller Alright, so my people are here and how many of you maybe you don't do those things But you're thinking of doing those things like that's something that you want to do. All right a couple of you Well, welcome to the talk. Thank you. I want to learn about you because what we're doing here is we're kind of talking about How we navigate this new modern WordPress that's kind of happened to us in the last few years, right? And when I was thinking about that when I was thinking about how to write this talk a concept that I was reminded of was the hero's journey How many of you are familiar with it? It's like a literary concept, right? If you're not familiar with it. It's also known as the mono myth. It's basically kind of the most pervasive concept in storytelling We're a hero. They have a disruption to their life. They face a bunch of challenges and then they come out having been transformed So in the hero's journey There's several different versions of it But the modern version is going through 12 stages of transformation in three acts The protagonist has to leave their ordinary world and go into the special world Which is the world of challenges and growth and then when they return to the ordinary world They have been changed and so what I'm gonna do today is take you on the hero's journey of Transforming from you know, maybe a classic editor person or like a new person to doing WordPress themes Maybe somebody who's been doing themes a long time Transforming into a full site editor developer I'm gonna cover a whole lot in a short amount of time So I'm not gonna be teaching you how to do all of these things But I do want to give you a framework of how to tackle it from the beginning So if that sounds good, I'd love to get started We begin in the ordinary world stage one where we meet our hero This is where we learn more about the protagonist who in this case is us the independent theme developer We are the hero of this story. And who is the independent theme developer? Tell me if any of this sounds familiar Probably came from kind of a diverse assortment of backgrounds. You might not have been a programmer originally You maybe came into WordPress and decided theme building was kind of fun Not necessarily a developer prior to WordPress. You probably also wear many hats, right? You know because you're doing this on your own or maybe you're running a very small team You're not just a developer. You might also be doing design. You might also be doing content strategy providing support Consulting often you need to worry about everything and how to get it all done And you're probably you know not just doing a job But you know you probably have maybe like a family or some hobbies or other things that you want to be able To do there's a lot going on on your plate and Also the independent theme developer at this point has probably Figured out a lot of how to make their their business run, right? They have a lot of fine-tuned workflows We've gone through a lot of stuff. We've built our suites of tools. We we know the things we like to use We know the the themes or plugins we like to use maybe we use different custom field managers or we use different page builders We turn to some specific plugins and themes pretty frequently. We know where to look for things We've read the documentation We kind of know all the languages are writing in right, you know, we're using html css php some basic javascript We're pretty comfortable in our world, you know everything everything makes sense things are working But as you know, the hero's journey isn't just sitting and watching the heroes sit in their house for 12 acts We have the call to adventure and the call to adventure is when the hero's life is disrupted And they are called to take a journey and in our case This would be the merge of Gutenberg project into wordpress core and then again with the release of full-site editing These are kind of our big calls to adventure like things are changing Let's do it And there are things that are exciting about this right, um, you know as a service provider For the client. It's pretty cool. You know, they get a wizzy wig interface They get to have these really great content tools that let them be able to write long form content Have more power to be able to do things without the developer having to build custom stuff And they're the client's probably very excited because like it's a lot easier for them to understand what they're looking at As a developer, it's also pretty cool. You know, I mean there are um Faster page builds so like I don't have to write custom code in order to add columns to a page, right? It's it's all in there in the editor Global styles are easier to take care of because they've introduced new tools that automatically generate them And the theming framework of using a json file to just you know, do all these things It's a little more similar to how other languages do it. So as a developer. There's some pretty exciting stuff Um, so then we get this, you know, are we ready to begin this journey? Um, it seems like it's inevitable. It seems like it's the way going forward But still it's a pretty difficult choice for those of us that are used to our ordinary world So the next stage is usually the refusal of the call And that's where the hero is hesitant to begin the journey because they don't feel ready Or they don't feel qualified or they don't want to leave their current life There's a lot they like about it And for us, there's a lot of reasons to be resistant to all of these changes, especially if we've been doing this for a while I mean as a service provider who has to deal with clients some of the things that are kind of scary The interface is not perfect yet. Um, it can be glitchy and buggy There are features that are missing. I I have my own feelings about some of the blocks like the navigation block and how great they are great Some features like responsiveness or interaction isn't quite baked in the way we want It kind of still feels like beta software a little bit things might break things are going to move around and that means, you know More support requests, which we don't really love As a developer a little scary. Also documentation hasn't quite caught up to the level that previous wordpress has had um There's a whole bunch of new development tools and languages that we're looking at trying to learn functionality that we're used to having access to has been really obscured And it feels like it's constantly changing and it just doesn't feel as mature as what we're used to working with But really the biggest fear, especially as a person who's independent or maybe running a small agency is like Well, okay. I see that we have to learn all this stuff, but like Who's gonna help me do that? Right? Like i'm not getting paid to like Learn a whole new programming language do all these new build tools like keep up with everything I'm just trying to like build websites for clients who need websites um So in the next stage we meet the mentor. This is usually, you know The wizard or the great helper the trainer, right? This is the the person who enables the hero to get the knowledge and support they need to start their journey And for you, maybe this talk is your catalyst or maybe you've already seen some really good tutorials and resources out there I know for me Being a member of different social or slack communities has been very very helpful for having people to talk to also attending talks like this or you know watching various tutorials I wanted to link to several resources here developer dot wordpress.org learn dot wordpress.org full site editing dot com and wordpress tv All have really great resources and I show several specific ones as we go on But another thing that we can do to kind of be our own support Especially when it comes to clients is like try to manage expectations of what this looks like so Maybe can you sell update or maintenance packages to help cover the time and costs for all of these changes that are coming up Can you outsource some of that to someone else? Um, how can you take on projects that maybe help you stretch your skills by being you know Maybe 20 percent more than what you know, and then they can help kind of pay for that Um and also remembering that you don't have to do all of this all at once I'll re I'll reinforce that multiple times during this talk, but like at any of the steps on this journey You can provide value So again, we're posed with this same question. Do you want to start the journey? And now with the support we feel ready to get started. So here we go In this stage crossing the threshold This is where the hero decides to take the journey and with the support of their mentor guide and appropriate supplies They embark So for the theme developer This is kind of your first foray into the block editor to see what the new paradigm is So if you've been doing classic stuff or building with a page builder This is the time to get your hands dirty in in what this all is And you want to approach this interface With the curiosity and kind of the desire to learn as a power user So we're not doing any development yet. We're just kind of learning like okay. What is this thing that you're expecting me to build So generally you want to get you know a fresh install with the latest core theme You can use your favorite local development tool to do this or you can use the the wordpress playground Which will let you kind of spin up an instance of wordpress and go into it and look at all of the admin And the first thing that we want to do is look at the post editor or the page editor itself And get really familiar with where everything is especially again If you've been used to working more in classic wordpress or using a page builder You kind of want to know where everything is in the interface And you'll notice that many of the classic editor pieces are still there like the content editor and the page settings They just look a little bit different. There's also a whole bunch of new elements that have been added so We have the block in pattern inserter which you'll see as we go on You've got kind of these different tools switching between editing and selecting mode and the undo and redo buttons You have the the document overview which i'll talk about a little bit more You have where your view and preview buttons are so how you can see everything on the front end in different views You have your settings which tend to which live in the little this is the thing that pops out the sidebar that you can see right here And then you have your screen options where a whole bunch of other menu items live In addition to the page settings in the sidebar the block editor adds a whole bunch of block settings which show up in context When you have a block selected Each block has a tool bar that either lives right above the block or docked in the top menu That depends on your global settings by default. They show up right above the block And many blocks also have a lot more complex options in the block settings sidebar So this is an example for the cover block and what happens which settings you have So you can see there's a few inline things that kind of show you what's the width of it How can you move it? What are some of the cropping options? And then there's the the sidebar settings are usually a lot more complicated It's important to kind of study which settings tend to live in which spot Especially later if you decide to go down the route of building custom blocks yourself Then you'll kind of know where people are expecting to find things Then we have the block pattern and media inserter and all of these things have undergone a lot of changes So this is as recent of a screenshot I got maybe last week because I wanted to make sure everything was like 6.3 compatible Um, but this is where uh all of your Blocks and patterns and media live and you can access this either through that little Inserter in the upper corner or you can access it by kind of hovering where you want the block to go Or you can type the forward slash and start typing what block you want so several ways of inserting blocks But this is where uh people are going to go to kind of insert all the blocks or patterns or media that they want to add Then we also have the list and outline views and I have found list view to be probably One of the best tools in navigating the editor if you haven't started using it It gives you an entire nested view of every single block that's on your page And now this is a really simple layout. There isn't a whole lot going on But just imagine like groups with columns inside them with a bunch of things inside that the list view lets you not only see Those things but also move them around from directly within the list view copy them delete them It's a really great the outline view Let's you kind of see things from a content writers perspective So it tells you you know, what are the headings you have? What are the different things? How many words do you have? What's the reading time? Etc. So those are all really useful tools And then I also wanted to call out because this is really useful as you're starting to learn How blocks and themes are written Inside the settings there is a place to toggle between your visual editor and your code editor Which we used to have in tiny mce also But this way you can look at the markup of all of the blocks that are on your page Which is going to be really useful later when you start wanting to write themes or patterns or any of the other things I also wanted to call out the concept of locking blocks You can access that through kind of the right clicking menus But this is a concept that prevents moving the block or removing them And again, that will probably be useful later when setting up themes or blocks for clients But I wanted to call out where that lives So next we move into the editor itself and this is for full site editing specifically And this is kind of the latest version of it that's come out and there's lots of things you can do here So this is where you can view edit and create templates view and edit styles View edit and create patterns and then also now we have navigation and pages also show up here That's brand new as of 6.3 The template editor lets you see every template that exists and also where it came from so templates can come from the theme They can come from a plugin. They can be custom built within the editor itself And you can also as you can see add new templates that don't exist Including custom templates that you can assign to an individual page or post which is kind of neat Also want to bring up the concept of a synced and unsynced patterns This is a brand new concept that just happened with 6.3 also If you've watched block editor development over the years, you might have heard of the concept of reusable blocks That was a set of blocks that where you if you updated the content it would update across the entire site Um Now those are called synced patterns and your template parts are called unsynced patterns And they all kind of live in this pattern section. So that's brand new, but that's where that lives Then we also have the the styles and variations. So these are all your global styles, right? So typography color layout padding and spacing and also if the theme provides style variations where people can pick entire different sets Of colors and entire different sets of typography. That's where that lives And also that's where you can edit it and override what came in the theme All right, so at at the end of this stage I kind of want to bring up these stats screens to talk about like benefits and obstacles where we're at here So right now we're kind of at mostly benefits and not that many obstacles The main obstacle is time, you know, it takes a little while to go through all this stuff and get familiar with it But the benefits are great, you know, now you understand the interface You'll be able to provide better training be able to answer questions You'll kind of be able to know what does core already have? What is it lacking? And like What's available to you as a developer moving forward? So now we move into the next phase of our journey, which is the tests allies and enemies stage, which is where The hero goes through a bunch of challenges and forges partnerships in order to continue on their journey And for us, this is where we start adapting our classic theme to support the block editor So the most basic way you can do that is with traditional add theme support So this is changing almost nothing about your theme. We're just adding theme support And we're opting into several block editor features. So you don't have to do very much here except maybe change some css This is something you can do I wouldn't recommend it being the thing that you do Because the next thing that you can do is adding a theme.json file to your classic theme Which replaces most of what add theme support does it also adds a bunch of other things I do want to call out that the templates and template parts Aren't really applicable to a not full site editing theme So if you're just adding this to a standard php theme, you don't really need to use those But we are going to look a whole lot at the settings and styles because this is the way where you're going to get a nice change So in your theme.json settings again, this is replacing add theme support And this is kind of enabling or disabling different block editor features It enables you to set your presets like color spacing fonts and sizing that's going to show up For the people that are making the content It also gives you different black level controls of what things are going to look like And it's also where you get your preset and custom variables. So I'll go through a little bit of that Theme.json generates css variables. I'll show you a few examples of each of those things But what's really cool about what it's doing is it automatically loads these in both the editor and the front end So if you're taking advantage of both of those things What you see in the editor is what you're going to see in the front end for the most part You do have to add your custom scripts and style sheets within qblock assets so that they show up, but It's really important if you're going to do this to Convert your css file to use as many of these variables as possible And I know especially if you're kind of used to writing css a traditional way like putting stuff into a json file feels kind of Hard and maybe a little gross But it's actually really worth it, right? No, I know I'm like, oh my gosh I'm writing for robots. This is But it does help in the long run and actually again, like I said, it's it's more similar to how other non-wordpress theming frameworks declare styles Um So some of these variables are built into the settings and these are going to generate some css that starts with wp preset These are things like the palette And stuff like that. It's mostly like the palette and typography and stuff that governs those things But you can also write as many custom variables as you want in the custom section And they're going to output with the format of wp custom Um And I think making a whole bunch of these is great because uh, it means that later It's easier to globally change your styles within the theme dot json instead of having to go into your css and rewrite a bunch of things And then uh, we in the styles we can set our default global styles and our default block styles And what's neat about this is we can write absolute values or we can reference variables that we already made So again, we're trying to keep everything inside this json file And what is nice about that is again, it is automatically outputting these to the front end as well as the editor So we have access to them on both sides There's a few tutorials here on converting classic themes to block themes I suggest that you take a look and again, I i'm going to have a link to all these slides afterwards So you can just you know grab that there, but I wanted to make sure you had this So now here we are benefits versus obstacles. Where are we at? Well, it's a little bit more changed because again, we are modifying a bunch of our css We're using theme dot json instead of add theme support But the benefits is that now like well now the clients can use the block editor to write pages and posts And we can start providing some control to them through selecting pre branded colors and typography and other different styling and controls So we can limit their options while still letting them have access to the block editor But again, it does take some time to convert everything to using theme dot json. So a little bit of change in time Okay, so we're here and now we get to the ultimate test approaching the innermost cave the trials are starting to get harder And here's where we're going to start doing a block editor development, but not with javascript yet The first thing that I want to bring up here is block patterns, which I think are really great for being able to give your clients more More options. So core already comes with several block patterns. You can take a look at what those are But basically what we're doing here is we're just kind of registering some block patterns We're exporting the markup, which means we could build the pattern in the editor go to that code view and copy it right into this And we have patterns This is a pattern that adds three columns that have a heading a subheading and a link that seems really common So now my clients have that available and I didn't have to do that much work Another thing that we can start doing is adding custom block styles So it's pretty simple to just register them and then you're basically writing css So a block style is basically a visual modification of a block that already exists So this is an example of a group block that has a horizontal scroll on mobile So instead of collapsing you can scroll past the screen. This is just a variation on a group block But it's still just a group block You can also start building Block templates and start incorporating block locking. So this is again something that's been really useful for clients If I create a custom post type I can pre populate that custom post type with a whole bunch of blocks that are already on the screen So they don't have to try to figure out which things to put on there They just already have blocks and I can also say you can't remove these blocks They stay here so that you don't mess it up because the whole point is to make it easy for clients to update things And again, we're already creating a whole lot of value for our clients And we haven't had to touch any of the new stuff yet really so this is great I also want to call out if you're already using one of these tools There is a couple companies that make Custom block creators where you don't have to use javascript You can you know use their tool to to write php and create custom blocks So I just want to call out that these things exist And they've been really useful for a lot of people that are trying to make this transition I personally have used acf custom blocks before They can be somewhat slower than native blocks But it's still really awesome to be able to add this value to your clients Even when you're still at this part of your journey So let's let's look at the benefits and obstacles right so so far We haven't changed much to the theme yet, right? You know, we've changed our css But our theme is probably built pretty similar. We're just adding some stuff to it to make it better And what's really great about this is it can be as much or as little as you want Depending on what your client needs. So I spent a lot of time in this phase I've I built a lot of themes that we're doing exactly this stuff and making the the block editor more useful for my clients But you know, we're getting here. This is the ordeal. This is kind of the climax of the movie, right? You know fight the dragon it's the hero's biggest challenge so far And our biggest challenge is going to be writing a full site editing compatible theme So here we go And the first thing we have to do here is like really learn block grammar And block grammar is one of those things that exists and it's true and however you feel about it. It is what it is One thing to note is, you know, again, you'll learn a lot about this by exploring the code view of existing themes and existing content We have some that are self-closing which means that they don't have content inside them like wp search We have some that do contain content like wp paragraph where you can see the paragraph is inside it And you can also see that you can pass different attributes to them So they are written basically like json And those are the same kinds of settings that you would see if you were editing those settings in the sidebar in the editor And this is this is what it looks like to write blocks I'm not so one of the bummers I'm not really sure that any like ide's or coding environments have support for this syntax yet So unfortunately when you're writing it, it's going to look gray like a comment because it thinks that it's a comment But maybe that's something someone's going to solve soon if they do please let me know that would be great But this is this is what you're going to be doing is you're going to be doing a lot of block grammar And you also have to learn a little bit of a different template structure So it does still follow the same template hierarchy.  I believe I think that that changed So you just need your your index dot html your style dot css If you have any template parts your theme dot json, which we already have and Any functions or anything else There's several resources on this. I I can't teach you this year. I wish I could But I I love these resources for specifically talking about how to convert from a classic theme to a full site editing theme I think that it would be really great to take a look at these I do also want to mention For people that are kind of moving into doing a full site editing theme. I converted mine It is still possible to use php templates within full site editing This is a an awesome article about how that works But if you need to do something more complex and you're not quite ready to try to figure out how to write Custom blocks to do all of it. There are ways to write php templates That are used within full site editing. You can't edit them in the editor But you can still use them and this is really great if you have to do a bunch of dynamic content or or stuff like that And there are there are some workarounds necessary to how you write it They're all listed in the article and I'll let them do a better job of explaining it than me But here we are we're looking at our benefits and our obstacles now You can see the the box are really going up on on what we have to do here because this is a You know complete rewrite from the ground up right now now we are kind of taking away our old theme and rebuilding it in this new paradigm It's a high level of time and investment to to rebuild it or build a new theme It is a pretty big change from our previous development workflow because now we're writing this block grammar instead of php for the most part Um And there is some trial and error when the markup is wrong You know the fun thing of like opening up your editor and your editor is just a white screen instead of a useful error message Is great. Um, but and also again like I called out in the code editors Like there isn't really any good syntax highlighting for block grammar yet Although again if someone wants to solve that, please let me know that sounds great Um, but the benefit is like you can actually fully take advantage of full site editing and make those tools available To your clients who would need them So all right now we've gotten to the reward like we are now full site editing developers It's the light at the end of the tunnel. We are officially building things the new word press way. Yes. I saw a golf clap over there Yes, good job everyone. We've made it this far. Um But you might be thinking like all right, you know, we fought the dragon. We've got our gold But there's still limits to what we can build and customize using the tools we've learned so far Um And that's when we realize that we have to take the long road back to the ordinary world And there's more for the hero to face and in our case we need to face javascript Here we are So a simple way to start that is you know earlier we talked about registering block styles with php You can also register block styles with javascript. It Does the same thing But instead you're using javascript but a good way to kind of start getting used to writing it Uh a very powerful tool that i've started using recently. So this is about the spot where i'm at in this journey by the way I'm here um And i've started to write custom block variations and block variations are a little bit different than block styles Block styles are a visual change to an existing block and block variations are a little bit of a functional change to an existing block Which is neat. I've started using block variations to modify the query loop block So that uh, I can insert query loop block with uh different Pre-populated fields inside it or maybe ordered in a different way or maybe like using different parameters like I found a great article on how to Order it by a metafield value rather than the the built-in values Which is something we would expect to do in a normal wp query, but it's not in the query loop interface So I love block variations as a way to start using javascript a little bit more, but still not going too much But I do have to bring up and this is this is one of the hurdles Especially if you haven't worked in javascript very much is if you're going to start moving forward beyond this you're going to have to Get some build tools and and start transpiling You can write everything in standard javascript, but most things are written in es6 and jsx and these are syntax extensions to javascript that browsers can't currently read So that means that these need to be transpiled into regular javascript before they run And that means you need build tools now Learning to set up and configure build tools is a whole talk in and of itself It might even be multiple talks and there are many tutorials for this But I do just want to mention that wordpress has a wp script package That contains all the tools that you need to like build watch and lint forward press specifically. So that's really nice Still again a little bit of a pain to get it all set up Especially if you're not used to working with build tools, but it is there But once you start working in this transpiled javascript, um, you've got a lot of options, right? It's really cool I just saw this article that was about creating a custom ui for like inserting different things into the editor And I think it's a really great start series. It's like a three-part series for Getting started with the build process how to set it up and then converting that to new ui elements So again, here we are benefits and obstacles, right? What are the benefits? Well now we can kind of create any ui control that we want, right?  We're having custom stuff We have variations which are very powerful Um, but of course, there's some big obstacles, right? You have to start getting familiar with the command line Uh, you have to be able to set up and install and troubleshoot build tools with all their secret rules that are only documented at the bottom of a stack overflow article somewhere You have to learn about package and dependency Management and of course if you haven't been writing javascript you have to learn javascript syntax and you have to learn jsx syntax and a whole bunch of other things Um Once all this is set up though You can keep using it again and again like you don't have to do it over and over So, uh, I think it is worth it, but acknowledging this is a big change and a lot of time So then we get to you know the final battle, right? Like you think you think the thing's over But there's one last thing that the hero has to face and they have to take everything They've learned to face the biggest challenge and that one is building custom blocks. Here we go Now I do want to mention that it is possible to do everything else in this journey and never build a custom block There are plenty of people that are building custom blocks. I bet a lot of things have been solved Um, however, I know much like learning how to build custom themes or plugins in the first place We we probably found ourselves here because the things other people had already created didn't quite match our use case, right? Like they got 90 of the way there, but not quite So I just want to talk a little bit about what the custom blocks are Again, I'm not teaching you how to do this, but I want to make you aware There's a couple different kinds So one is called static blocks and these are most of the blocks that you're kind of interacting with in the editor All the content and markup are created and saved to the post within the editor So stuff like paragraphs headings groups columns images media, etc. Those are all static blocks They often have a lot of style and setting options and some can contain other blocks within them The difference between static blocks and now dynamic blocks is that dynamic blocks content They kind of display content from other parts of the site usually So the query loop is a great example of a very complex dynamic block Another example that they show here is the site title block where it displays the site title Well, the site title is set somewhere else So these blocks render their content differently. They often have server side functions associated with them But they can still have like styles or other block settings within the editor that influence what they look like or how their content is displayed So again, there's a difference between static and dynamic blocks And there are plenty of people that are talking about this if you want to go into more depth when you're ready for it But just be aware that that difference exists And again your benefits and obstacles for for building custom blocks I mean we've filled up all the bars in terms of change in time like this is the biggest difference This is the most time commitment The document you know we're doing things that are new So the documentation hasn't fully caught up yet Especially if you want to do something kind of your special snowflake exact thing that only does this bespoke thing your client needs You know harder to find documentation for that again Making sure all your build tools are working package and dependency management and then writing more reacts syntax So now you have to start getting into like I actually have to know this other language a little bit But the benefits are huge because now you can do fully custom functionality. You can do a fully custom UI I know we all saw the Presentation with the nasa stuff like all of that is just possible because we can do all of this stuff with with custom blocks and custom building So the last phase of the journey is the return with the elixir right you've brought the prize home And what that means for us isn't that now we have to build everything with full site editing and with custom blocks What it means is that we have a larger suite of tools at our disposal And at this point it's still okay if you build a classic editor theme These are good for managing things with like a lot of structured data or metadata Where people don't really need to change how it looks very much right? It's totally okay if you do that It's totally okay to build a hybrid theme like where you're building a php theme But letting people interact with the the the classic editor Like we want to be able to take advantage of as much of that stuff as possible But maybe it makes more sense to not have them be editing the header and footer right And it's also totally okay to build whatever custom unique solution with all of these tools that best fits your client's use case It doesn't mean that you have to do it a specific way or not So really the point I want to make is like No matter where you're at on this journey. You're the hero You are providing value to your clients during each one of these steps And also these steps were presented in a specific order But you might have to jump around and go back and visit steps and keep updating things I'm personally still on this journey. Like I said, I'm kind of in step like nine and ten right now So I've only just started getting into building custom blocks. And maybe maybe I don't go down that road Maybe I love that road. Who knows but I'm still being able to provide value to my clients and solve their problems Based on the things that I know So anyway, um, this is my contact information I know we'll have a little bit of time for questions But I want to just specifically point out that link at the bottom the bit.ly 2023 dash wp-themes That is where these slides are located if you want to go back into them and check out all those tutorials Yes, take the pictures And I think that's it and I'm ready for questions So I think the way questions work is you can go up to the microphones or whatever, right? If you want to be brave Don't be shy. She won't bite you No, or maybe it was perfect and you have zero questions and I've literally taught you everything. That's great Yeah, hi, um, I'm from Minneapolis. So good to see you. Uh, my agency. We use acf blocks. We're building custom blocks What would be a good is there a good transition into full site editor that you would recommend Okay, so the question if you didn't hear it was like they're currently using acf blocks and you're asking like What's a good transition to the full site editor? Well, um I mean, I think you don't necessarily have to stop using acf blocks to transition to the full site editor because they're Blocks, so you can always like rework the theme around it and keep using acf blocks if you want to I I'm probably not the right person to ask about like if you want to migrate from acf blocks to building your own custom blocks That is Probably a person above my pay grade which there are many here So that's very convenient that you have that question But I do think that like if you're using stuff like acf blocks and you want to convert your theme to using the site editor There won't be a problem So out of curiosity, which editor do you prefer to work in for me to build the syntax highlighting in? Okay, can you say that again? Sorry, which editor do you want the syntax highlighting for? VS code Yes, I I'm a vs code person So if you're if you're planning on solving that for me right now and everyone else, uh, that would be neat Hello Hi, thank you. Great presentation Uh, I have a question. Do you know, uh, good solution if you have Two different roles Inside a company one person should be able to fully get a website like use the blocks and everything and the other person is just content manager and they need only like to change the content like titles and text and How to limit their access what they can change Without like missing the blocks like order all the colors and everything. Is it possible? Is it possible? So I believe it is possible I haven't had to work on a project like that But I think that some of the bigger projects like nasa have definitely had to do things like that where they've had to limit How people can interact with blocks on a role basis So there are probably people here that have a good answer to that question. But again, I know that it's all pretty new So I think Okay, so there there are apparently some plugins that let you get really granular with access privileges I haven't used them, but it would be interesting to see how those integrate on like a block by block basis I wonder if there's things that that integrate with like block locking from that perspective So that might be fun to look into but thanks for your question. Thank you Hi, hi, can you describe your Let's move the site around from different environments workflow because Personally that has been by far the hardest part for me just because of the nature of the interaction between the database and the theme That wasn't there before sure So I'll expand on this for people that maybe don't know or haven't worked with full site editing The super fun part about it is that When you're making theme changes in the editor those all live in the database and if you're used to Being able to move things around via version control or maybe being able to deploy things between different environments that can get kind of fun So Right interesting. Yes So I guess Some of the things I've been doing in order to do that is like Exporting any of the stuff that I'm manually doing inside the editor out back to the theme and only deploying Like the changed theme to production Which is also not that ideal because then if people are making changes To production like how do we get those back on to it? I haven't solved it. I haven't solved it I mean, I'm sure there's plugins for that too Yeah Which one? Oh, yes. Well, I did. Yes. So create block theme, which I do think I mentioned in the presentation as a link is a really useful way for Exporting things that you've been doing either as a child theme or as its own new theme or Rewriting the original theme. So yes create block theme. I know I didn't call it out specifically although I had it on the screen Is useful for kind of packaging up all of those changes But again, it doesn't really solve the part about like stuff going production and back But it does do it like one way. So hooray. Cool. Thanks I just wanted extra confirmation that it wasn't just me fair enough All right, we probably have time for like one one more question. Yes. Hey, michelle. Hi So Content layout has been a need for developers for decades in WordPress And I'd say a lot of developers are on a parallel track with different page builders like beaver builder elements or divi So I wanted to ask Have you and your agency used any of those? And if so, what made you decide to move into full site editing and block editing? Sure. So the the page builder question always good Um, so I personally didn't use page builders I didn't think I was quite the right market for them the way I feel about page builders I think they're very useful first of all, so I'm not anti page builder I think page builders are extremely useful for people who have Very strong Detailed opinions about what they want their theme to look like and they want a user interface to do that Rather than putting that into code and I think that's awesome And that just wasn't me I think that page builders still have a use in this case because there are still some more granular detailed opinions That probably won't ever be in the full site editing interface and for those people Page builders are probably going to still make a lot of sense and all of them are very smart And they know what's happening with full site editing and they're going to try to make that as seamless as possible I think full site editing is kind of in that really sweet spot in the middle Where you don't want to you know, you don't want to just have a bunch of fields But you don't need to give people like granular control over every single detail of every single element And I think full site editing is kind of that sweet spot in the middle of that especially Maybe less so for the full site editing part of it. We are updating the header and footer But definitely for the part of it. We are editing the content Cool. Thanks. Are we are we good done? Okay. Thank you everybody


Good afternoon pastor David. How you doing John? Welcome everybody to unfiltered a random moment with pastor David today pastor I'd like to share a little bit about what your message is going to be about on Sunday Just a brief context is there's a couple of questions. I'd like to ask you Regarding our love for Jesus, but yet how that can spill over to a selfish ambition even expecting special favor from the Lord In your previous study last Sunday, you were just You taught us about the rich young fool and It came down to Jesus telling his disciples that you cannot serve two masters or even that young man as they're asking what They're asking about that and Jesus was clear on that and then Right after this as we see in our coming up study is that James and John now are Asking the Lord for special favor because they're asking that we want you to do for us. Whatever we ask Can you share a little bit pastor about the danger of first of all speak? Seeking special favor from the Lord, but how that can lead to selfish ambition. Well, I think that selfish ambition can prompt a request like that because When you look at the account as it's given to us by Matthew Matthew points out that the one who is actually Making the request is the mother on so at Salome who is making a request on behalf of her two sons James And John and then when you begin to look at the different portions of scripture that speak related to Who this Salome is it turns out that she is the sister of Mary the mother of Jesus Which would make James and John his cousins and so what they're asking for is favor But it's it's a special request related to the fact that they're related to him And so you see that kind of thing taking place and that's why not that's not the only reason why but that's a reason why the other apostles including Judas got upset that they were asking for a special position in the kingdom of God and so in this The study this Sunday, we're going to be looking at you know the context of that How could Jesus have just told them the third time as recorded in Mark that he's going to suffer die he's going to Go through all of this pain and betrayal and yet the thing that's still remaining on their mind is How can we find special favor in your kingdom now and part of it one commentator pointed out Would have been their love for Jesus. We want to remain close to you as close as we can closer than anybody else We'd like to be seated on a right-handed on the left hand, you know places of honor and and all And so commentator was saying you know this this is a desire that believers ought to have is to be close to Jesus And yet they're using an unfair advantage to try and secure for themselves a position That really was being fueled more by an ambition than for a real love Because if they were really sensing and loving Christ sensing his words and loving him They would not have been thinking at that time of their positions.  I'm going to be betrayed. I'm going to be tortured and So the other apostles who who are aware of this request get indignant And that's when Jesus tells them what true greatness is and I think that in our day true greatness is measured by the wrong Things especially in the church, you know people in the church think that that that many think that positions in the church or even the senior pastor will call him considers himself the most special member of the church in all which is an upside-down way of seeing what Jesus spoke of He said the the people of this world the Gentiles lord it over people they they They have a system that that pushes down the humble and elevates those who are proud and to use that as your metric for what is Good or what is appropriate or right in the kingdom of God is to misunderstand what a what a servant is a Greatest in the kingdom is the one who sacrifices and And I think that this is a timely message not necessarily only for the members of our church It's a timely message for those who are in leadership those who lead churches who who seem to think that the more bodies They get into their their church service the greater they are and they always have people who will prop them up Saying oh you are so good you walk on water. You're so important and it's just destroying the church Because we have made pastors into celebrity and when you make a pastor a celebrity and help him to to Consider himself some great person. That's very dangerous in the body of Christ. It's very dangerous in the kingdom of God So that's the lesson Jesus is teaching his men So as Christians we're to seek not the favor of God in terms of what we can get from it But to seek his favor in a way that will bring glory and honor to him Well, you know Paul called himself a slave of of the Lord who is a policy was Paul were servants You know when you have the right estimate of yourself when you realize that you've been saved to serve when you You come to maturity to understand that the favor of man doesn't match the favor of God Then it helps to to change the direction of your life the path that you're taking Again, you know, I've I've seen the tragedy of I've too many men who've been elevated to a position almost of Perfection and their their churches Are the worst for it? Because they've created an idol and they don't even know and they sustain it by their Agulation and their constant praise and they're boasting about and John You know, I was blessed to have a pastor named Chuck Smith who had an amazing ministry Many churches were birthed from his Great works were done, but Chuck never Never gave the impression that he thought he was something important I remember when in the early days when I was speaking to him and I would say pastor Chuck He said, you know, I'm Chuck, you know He didn't even like it when I referred to him in that way He wanted to be a brother and he told me they said I'm your brother and he was but he was also a man who gave to me Lessons in humility because he truly was a shining light in the kingdom of God But he never used that to his advantage He was asked to be an advisor to presidents But he said my my role is to care for my my sheep to love my sheep to minister to my church And he those kinds of ambitions that many seem to have today to be some mover and shaker in this world Maybe we need to remember the lesson that we'll be looking at this Sunday Amen, and we do want to invite you guys to come out and join us 10 8 30 and 10 45 this Sunday and you again as you mentioned will be going through mark chapter 10 I like your title kingdom greatness So invite your friends and family to come out and join us We look forward to having you and this evening pastor We have our church is hosting a national day of prayer at 7 p.m. In the chapel and we'll be praying for various things So I want to invite you guys to come out and join us as we even have a time of worship And so pastor, thank you so much for sharing guys. Thank you for tuning in God bless you. We look forward to seeing tonight and on Sunday in our morning services. God bless you guys


Hi folks, we'll begin in just a moment. All right, we're going to go ahead and get started. Welcome to today's LF networking webinar. Our topic for today is NFE deployments and the path ahead and operators perspective. Before I introduce our panelists just a couple of housekeeping items. All of our attendees will be muted during the presentation. However, if you'd like to ask a question or if you have a comment for the group. There is a chat and Q&A function towards the bottom right of your screen. So feel free to type in any questions or comments you may have throughout the duration of the event. We will have some time towards the end to do some live Q&A. And if you do have questions, I will be pulling questions from the Q&A window at that time. Recording of the of today's session will be available beginning tomorrow and anyone who's registered for the event will receive that link via email and will also be sharing it on social media and LF networking website. All right, I'm going to go ahead and introduce our panelists now if we could kick it off to our first slide. Yes, thank you. All right, so today we have joining us Lee Wang from China Mobile. We have Beth Cohen with Verizon and Randy Levensoller with cable labs. So without further ado, I'm going to go ahead and kick things off to Beth to get us started today. So thank you, Jill. I'm very excited to be joining us with along with Randy and Lee and we're going to be talking about a white paper or actually it turns out to be two white papers that we wrote specifically around the topic of testing and automation and the support for virtual network functions or NFVs. So with that, I would like to like to start a little bit of an introduction. So I'm Beth Cohen, I excuse me, I work for Verizon as a product manager and heavily involved in deploying software defined networking solutions for customers. So with that, Randy, just a quick introduction. Randy Levensoller, I'm a principal architect at cable labs. We're working on creating standards and specifications for deploying network virtualization in the cable space. And Lee. I'm Lee Wang from China Mobile and I'm a researcher in China Mobile Research Institute, and I'm focusing in the NFV testing and some other field and also include the industry field. And I'm now the chair of EO AG. Thank you. So with that actually leave us an excellent segue into you mentioned the EU AG. And I'd like to, you know, have you talked a little bit about what's the role of the EU AG within the LFN Linux Foundation networking portfolio. Yeah, it's a very good question. As you know that the EU AG is the end user advisory group in LFN and it is composed of various end users. Many of them are operators. We analyze and discuss the latest industry trends, collect operator requirements and put forward operator industry recommendations. So as to promote the development of various open source communities and standard organizations in the industry. So the EU AG, the requirements of operators can help promote the development of the industry and the technology of the industry can also be discussed and used by operators in turn. Thank you. So Randy you're not an operator or your, your company's not an operator how do you see as benefit of of EU AG. Yeah, so you know we really work on behalf of the cable operator since we're nonprofit only owned by them. And for this is really a way where we can kind of get together with people in other related industries. And really we can represent the views and collect feedback for all of our members so we find that the end user advisory group is a great place to get together. And a lot of great readouts and then with papers like this, we can really help identify, you know what are some of the opportunities and also, you know dig into some of the gaps of where we think we can improve what LFN is doing. So it's really a great place to go and, you know, a free exchange of ideas so it's just, you know, a lot of great stuff going on. And for me, you know, I'm talking from as Verizon Verizon is, is, you know, we, we participate in the development of own app and etiquette and some of the other projects. And I, you know, from my perspective I see the EU AG is sort of pulling together all those requirements and feeding them back out to the projects so you know that's that's that feedback loop that's so important. And I know the EU AG started as the advisory group to own app but of course it's expanded its role, which segues into the next topic, which is, how do you see the, the VNF testing that we discussed in the white paper fit in with the with the role. Yeah, I think that you know this is really kind of one these ways where we can help provide feedback to multiple projects. And we've had projects over the years even, you know, pre LFN through that through own app with that end user advisory group about, you know what is the importance of testing, what certifications do we need and how can we really help ease this adoption right because that's one of the big challenges with open source and these newer technologies is. It's a very reputable confident way to have these products from perhaps a very wide variety of vendors that can then be quickly brought into an operator network and run at scale. And in order to do that we really need a lot of automated testing and checks to make sure that everything works, and also the virtualization at one of our big benefits with virtualization cloud native is this agile process will actually be having lots of releases so it's going to go and qualify a piece of hardware for six months and then go drop it in the field and it'll run with just a few minor updates for five or 10 years. You're going to be rolling out new updates you know multiple times a year, maybe even multiple times a month, and there's no way to really do that without automation and around the test, the testing cycle, and the more kind of open source engagement there is the better foundation that everyone can can go from. Yeah, and and lay your, your. Yeah, I totally agree with this opinion. And from my perspective, I will say that, as you know that in the early period, you have organized a survey for an automated testing and the survey has been supported by many of our EOA GCS piece members. And from the survey we have analyzed and investigate many requirements. In fact, we have tried to put forward some recommendations in terms of NFB automated testing and try to summarize and collect most of the recommendations from our CPS piece members and from the survey paper, you can try to read and find out these requirements and recommendations for reference. So that actually brings up a good point which is that, you know, things are changing very rapidly and I know we talk about that in paper and, and I think we'll talk about it more in a minute, which is that, you know, traditionally you know, operators, you know, as Randy said, put hardware out in the field and expected to perform untouched, you know, for 10 or 15 years. And that's just not reality anymore. I mean, you know, we know that the gaming operators literally change. They, they, they do code updates literally hourly or minutes, you know, within minutes. Now, yeah, it's only three lines of code that they change. But still, that that's a whole different mindset. So what with, with that I'd like to, you know, have Lee if you could talk a little bit about, you know, what what your findings about what the current state of testing is in the operator and the open source and, you know, here's a diagram of the testing framework and if you could talk a little bit about that. Indeed, from this framework is one of one of the parts of our white paper. We have tried to analyze and investigate the popular testing framework in different SDOs. It's the testing framework is one of them. As you can see from this graph, they have put forward DevOps process. And we have been a provider, then package repository. And we can use the DevOps server to collect the testing requirements from the provider. And after that, it do the data handle and also send the testing process to the test framework. And, and this is just the standard framework. And based on the standard framework, we tried to do some realization and implementation in different industry open source communities. And as you knew that we have such as VTP, etc, etc. They, they are the most of them are based on this framework. So, so that's, that's interesting that you say that. So you found that Etsy the Etsy framework was was probably the common denominator, you know what other, what other organizations were involved, and I throw this out to either Randy to to talk about in terms of, you know, testing testing frameworks, I know that Anakit has a func test, for example, which is focused on the infrastructure. But I know that there are others as well. Yeah, thank you know on app has some testing as well within it for looking at some of the network services and how they're composed. And the tech is another thing because we find that edge and NFV are very closely related. So a lot of the tools that we build for one tend to apply to the other advice versus since it's, you know, all things that are related to the position on the network and you need very consistent performance and a lot of those things. So we're really kind of seeing a lot of overlap between those. And then you even just looking at a lot of the standards for the applications we're deploying, you know, things like three GP P and O ran, and we're starting to see more test tools come out in those spaces. So more to what we're doing in the cable space as well. So if you say and I'm and I'm looking at a question that somebody posed with, would, would either of you say that the state of the current testing tool sets is not well integrated. And that's, I think that's one of the recommendations that we made in the white paper. Yeah, so I think so I think there's, you know, there's certain functions that you can only test with the proprietary test tool today, due to licensing and IP arrangements. I know a lot of work is going on in that space to allow those licenses to be modified or have a one off license to do additional testing tools and open source. And the other is, you know, there's tends to be tests that focus on the infrastructure like we do with opiate fee, and then on that tends to focus on the application which is why having and a cut come together to really try to bridge those really shows kind of where we're moving. But yeah right now it's typically most operators end up writing their own test suites because a lot of it's very dependent on their network as well so we're really hoping to kind of get a flexible framework. To do this, you know a lot of the piece parts are there. There's a few gaps here and there that are either filled in by someone wrote an Ansible script or you went with a private vendor. But this is where, you know, some of these things we tried to call out in the white paper to really try to bring this together and make it a much more seamless process and more consistency across the different levels of the network. So Lee, could you comment about, you know what were the key takeaways that you feel that are that we should highlight this in this talk from the paper, you know what what did you learn it as you went through the process of writing it. Indeed, as you know that the NFV testing white paper will be divided into two papers, which cover the analysis of operators automated testing status gaps technical requirements. And from the operators perspective, we put forward some recommendations for automated testing process, frameworks, open source and STOs, etc, which are very worthy for the whole industry. And at the same time, we have also sorted out and summarize the current research status of automated testing technology in open source and also STOs, and we also give our evaluation model for automated testing. So by refer to the evaluation model and automated testing technology, you can try to find some potential automated testing methods suitable for your company. As you know that CSPs has done many attempt in automated testing. We hope that through the white paper, we can express operators requirements, put forward industry development suggestions, shared advanced technologies, then walkways for industry to promote the development of NFV testing in a more automated and intelligent way. And, and I want to say that there's a question that came in that I think gets to the heart of it which is how much of the testing framework is in fact automated today. And, and of course, you know manual testing of course, you know, translates into significant resource strains and slows down the development process so you know what were the findings. About how much testing is in fact automated today and, and how much, how much can open source really help with, with making that a reality. So, Randy. Yeah, I think I found a lot of the piece parts were there and there were some test orchestration tools there. But there are definitely gaps I think most a lot of the gaps are really at the application layer. We've done a decent job at covering the infrastructure, though of course there's always, you know, more that can be done with you know how do you standardize the test how do you test across multiple configurations and things like that. So, you know I think we're still, you know we're not, you know we have a foundation we have a starting point but we're by no means, you know, almost done right there's still a lot of work to do in the space. And, and how does containers really come into play I mean traditionally the telcos have been doing a lot of their testing. I mean, you know that's not a it's not a secret that open stack is is pretty close to the default infrastructure for for telcos and and as, as containers come in you know, how's that, how's that, you know how are we, are we ready. And containers actually provide a lot of great opportunities for this space. We're seeing in the cable market actually a lot of Kubernetes on bare metal for our virtual CMTS is our cable modem termination systems. With Kubernetes you can actually, you know deploy tests within the network very easily you can do rolling upgrades with, you know, contain orchestration you actually have a little more control over, you know what version you're running how you can load balance and manage So with that part it makes it a little easier the part that can make it a little more challenging is you do have the same kernel and often the same scheduler, and we've run into situations where, you know, if you're running something like a V ran and virtual CMTS on the same physical server, they both have different scheduling requirements at the kernel level. You can test that and validate that and you know look at those trade off for performance there. And that's something that you know again, we're as we get through these and we run more and more of these scenarios we then developed these automated tests to capture that in the next time. And a lot of this is going to come down to you know more real world deployments we have, you know one of the other questions asking how real is NFV. You're right there's a lot deployed today and looking at 5G and for cable and future upgrades to the cable plant. They're all heavily reliant on virtualization. And most of the new applications are container based. So, you know, yeah, but think that that, you know, probably is very critical going forward and a lot more so probably in the next, you know, two to five years then VMs will be well I want to actually I want to touch on that because what I have found is I think you're you're absolutely right there's a mix right now. I'd say containers are further along in the 5G space. And because that's Greenfield. What I have found, you know, is that Brownfield areas, you know, routing networking, you know, the sort of basic networking functions are still VM based and in some cases still physical based. And I think that the industry is struggling to, to, you know, get to be containerized. I mean that's the North Star for everybody, but we need to get there and I, and I'm hoping I am planning on testing helping to get there faster. Lee, would you like to comment on that. I think I don't have no more comments. Randy, I just say one other thing kind of along that continuum as you mentioned Beth, you know open stack is kind of has a lot of adoption in the telco space today and then we're seeing things like Kubernetes deployed on open stack where then open stack manages that Kubernetes environment. Yes, and then we're also seeing the evolution of the other side where with technologies like kubvert or once you get to a tipping point, you can have Kubernetes manager bare metal infrastructure and actually have VMs that are managed through Kubernetes, which is again another interesting thing as we progress towards hopefully all container based and cloud native just, you know, just one of those things the less infrastructure technologies you have to bring into bring to play the easier it is to manage and test less permutations there. So, so I want to talk a little bit about what are the next steps and I know Randy. The, you know, what do we need to move the test suites for you know what what what is required and, and, you know, there's a slide here about some of the, the work that's being done around an app. And I know Randy I think you were going to talk more about it. This is great again this shows how we are progressing as the industry, especially in some of the LFN projects. You know, as you look at right you know one of the key things to do for testing is you actually have to design your tests and plan them out, and configure your network so with you know own app SD SDC. You can build a Tosca based apology that can then be used repeatedly to run the tests. And then using an orchestrator like oh no you can actually deploy it you can deploy many different variations of that same container so you can test, or same CNF or VNF, and actually be able to test that repeatedly and then of course once you have that that deployed, then you know these virtual test plans, where you can actually run scripts against it and collect results you know what is the performance is there fail over how does it handle fail over. You know, there's quite a few kind of test cases there and that's where you know a lot of that just comes from real world experience you know oh we ran into this problem let's make sure we test against it next time in our regression suite. And finally, you know, as we're talking about you know, iterating through a wide variety of BNF's and CNF's across a variety of infrastructure options with kind of multiple deployment scenarios with you know different connections networking types and overlay networks, you really need to have a good way to validate that. So things like as these test suites mature, we're able to give a certification, and those certifications really show that you've been through this, not only that your application is mature enough, but that space is mature enough that there actually is a certification. You kind of need both, both prongs there to get that certification, and then the analysis because you're going to have volumes of data, and you're going to run these. You know, some of these sessions may run every five minutes, you know, every time there's a code check in, you're going to kick off a pipeline that's going to run unit tests, and do some deployment tests within a staging environment. You just really need analytics to help interpret the test results I mean there's always going to be that human factor but you know more and more we want to have something that will say, you know, big red X stop, and you can find that problem as soon as it was introduced, which really makes it easy to debug if there's only one change you're looking at as opposed to a few thousand changes. And I have found, you know, testing in real life environments is very important because the network behavior of a real network and a network behavior of a lab network, I have found have kind of had nothing to do with each other. And so I think it's really important to have a lab that that that reflects the real behavior on the network. And that's great Beth and how can we do that me, let me take your spot for a second. And what do you think we could do to help have, you know, open source communities out there, have a better representation of what's actually running on the service provider network. That's a really interesting, interesting thing of course you know within within our environment we tap into our real network which is how we do it. So, you know, our, our lab is, you know, some of our labs actually tie into the actual network. So we do the testing on the actual network but I think that's something that the open source community should, should, and should explore with the with the providers to you know, at least access to the internet part of, of our real networks to really get a sense of, of how things actually perform. And of course it's very important that you know this is integration testing and end to end testing and performance testing and all of those tests need to need to take place. And I know, and it gets working on a badging system and you know, a lot of the telco operators want performance testing. Yet, you know, many of the vendors are reluctant to, to provide that for, you know, it's not that we can. It's not that we don't do those performance tests we have to. But we tend to do them internally and silos. So, you know, I think that's that's something that the open source community does need to confront. And, and, and Lee I know. Oh, that's a good question so apparently we have a question about lean NFV, which Lee or Randy I'm throwing it out to you. I'm going to talk about lean NFV. I can read it out. Let's see what approach would you recommend for addressing the data plane performance limitations, especially the networking between containers. Yeah, so I only I'm happy to talk about that question you know with the, you know addressing data plane performance limitations this is where hard work acceleration comes into play. I think you'd be, you know, you know, I don't think you'll find any solid functions out there that don't take advantage of something like dbdk to offload some of the networking functions on to smart nicks. You know offload either on a smart Nick or through a separate FPGA in the V ran we're actually seeing quite a bit of FPGA utilization for the upper l one, so to do things like forward error correction. You know fast Fourier transforms and all the all those fun, fun functions there. So I think that really, that's something that, you know, hard work acceleration is needed for some of that and the other is looking at make sure you understand the topology of your network, both within the computer and where it sits on other computers, you know, especially with Kubernetes you can do pipelining so you actually can have, you know, CNF talk to each other without going on to the network so you can actually pipeline multiple containers together on the same processor on a system, and you also need to make sure that your processors are tied to the Nick that they're using otherwise you'll have a performance hit there so I said there's quite a few things out there today to do that and we're really looking a lot at how can we use some of this general purpose hardware acceleration to improve that you know to do a lot of these fairly common functions, not just put everything on the CPU. I'd like to, you know, get back to you I know we wanted to talk a little bit about some of the testing tools that are available today if you. As you know that the current open source communities have conducted conducted research and exploration of automated testing tools and frameworks. In the in the NFE testing white paper, we have listed current advanced automated testing tools for several mainstream open source communities and standard organizations, and we have conducted technical analysis and research. You can write the white paper to learn about the automated testing technologies that operators are concerned about, and which includes some advanced testing tools, automated testing frameworks and interface standard requirements, etc. As you can see on this page, we take the current testing tool of elephant as an example, and we give technical analysis, including vtp and x texting amount which you can see the the different description in these testing tools. As you can see that vtp is a vertical common test from front platform for various vnf tests, and which can be used in different test stages, including CICD. And elephant OVP certification testing uploading design and active and passive testing. This platform provide execution verification function of test cases. And as you can see from this page, we have another testing tools as an example, which called x testing. The X testing was originally proposed by fun test to achieve smoke and integration testing, and nowadays mostly used to build CICD to a chance. And I have also see one question from the chat window asking about the the OVP certification, which is relevant to the vtp testing tools, which the project is OVP. And the question is, are there any OVP certifications for vnfs recently. Indeed, as far as I know that the OVP projects is now still under planning, and they have. Yes, they do vnfs certification right now, and they have also considered trying to extend their desk gate to the AI and intelligent network certification in next step in OVP 3.0, as far as I know. And that is my answer to this question. Thank you. So let's see. So one of the, so as we sort of wrap it up, I know we'll be answering some questions following up, you know, I just want to take a moment to say please read the white papers there's two. One is the just the recommendations and sort of high level highlights that's the one to share with your CIO. And the second one really goes into the design methodologies and the requirements details and also a survey of the test tools that are out there today. Both some proprietary ones as well as the open source ones that are available. And I'd like to, you know, one final question to the panel. You know, now that we've completed this this test testing and automation white paper, you know, what are our next steps for for taking, taking what we learned here into our next next project which is focused on AI ML and how that will affect the, the networks and, you know, telco networks I know there's a lot of interest right now in using AI ML artificial intelligence machine learning technologies and bringing them into our networks to really allow the networks to work more efficiently. That's the promise anyhow, and you know just a little teaser about some of you know where we're going with that over the next couple months. Lee, you want to talk a little bit about our initial, you know, where we're going with this. Yeah, thank you best that this question. Indeed, as you know that the artificial intelligence and network intelligence intelligence are the development direction of the industry, so that we would like to bring up a more automated and intelligent testing process so that we would like to introduce the intelligent networking and artificial intelligence certification in this landscape. And besides, we will in next step, we will continue to focus on operators automated testing requirements and give our recommendations to industry. And we will continue to use the industry power to promote the development of automated and intelligent agile NFV testing. And in terms of the as best as mentioned the artificial AI and intelligent network. We plan to collect operators network intelligent evaluation and testing requirements, and we plan to input them into relevant open source communities as a reference as well as industry driving force. As you know that the OVP 3.0 they have planned the the AI certification in their project so that we will try to collect the requirements and work with them to bring these AI testing requirements and certification requirements into realization. Thank you. And what just in the cursory review of the survey so far. I think that the sense in the community is we've really just started down this journey and we have a lot, a lot more to go. So I'm pretty excited about that and the, you know, operators are obviously going to play a major role in this we're the ones with the data lakes, we're the data information, and of course the, the vendors in the ecosystem also play a role as well so that's, I think, think it will, we're going to be very interesting work over the next few months. With that, we are going to take questions I know we have a couple questions already in the queue. One of the questions is, has NFP really taken off since the first ETS, ETSI white paper that was done six years back. And what, what do you, what do you think about lean NFV. So, either I can, I can answer from, I think lean NFV is still an interesting concept. I'm not sure that it's 100% there yet, but I think, I think it needs to be a collaboration between the operators and the vendors to get there.  But I see most, most of the other basic network functions have not been cloud nativeized, if you will. So, open it to others or comment. Yeah, I think it's an interesting concept I haven't seen a lot of it in real world deployments yet for lean NFV, but for NFP itself. I think it's kind of becoming the future and the de facto standard, you know we're not necessarily going out and ripping legacy infrastructure that's still meeting the needs and you know a lot of that held up through coven. But as we deploy new services and new functions and add capacity, you know, NFV and CNFs are becoming more and more the default answer. Yeah. Thank you. So Lee, I would like you to answer this one. Can we have a framework for NFV plus VNF plus CNF testing. Is that is that a worthy goal. Yes, it is a potential goal. We have do many attempts in different testing framework. And we wish to have these kind of framework for automated testing. So it's a goal. Let's put it that way. And I think we already answered the question about the testing framework being automated. I didn't say that that was answered. So, Randy, maybe you can talk about there's, there's diverse data models, and they vary quite a bit. And, you know how much does that does that break the, the concept of automated and open source common testing frameworks. Yeah, did that come up, you know, during our analysis and I think it did. Yeah, it did, you know, because the more standardized the API's are for both invoking tests and collecting results and parsing results, the more effective it is. And so if kind of in order to support all those diverse data models you need a translation layer that will go through and normalize all the data, or perhaps something will come out this AI ML working group that will make that a little more automated and less manually intensive. So really, you know, relying on standards either de facto or your standards for reporting information is, is key right you know the easier it is to, you know, for all talking the same structural language for the data and parsing it and for invoking the processes it just makes it much easier to have a pipeline to handle everything. So I think that's a good, good, a good analysis. Leah I'd like, if you could talk about, you know, I think you're familiar with the fact that that a lot of the vendors provide their own testing frameworks and in their proprietary and each one is a little bit different of course. So how do you think that the open source community can address that to provide, you know, a more holistic framework that that can be used across multiple vendors. Yes, that is the role of the EOAG that the CSPs can lead this trend so that we can try to lead this trend to let them build this kind of common, what we call them common testing, automated testing framework. And that is what we attempt to do. Yes, I would agree with you. And there's one additional question I think we have time for one more and then then we have a closing thing. So Randy this, what do you think is the next step in x86 hardware. Particularly as we're, as we're moving towards, you know, dbdk and and some, and then we're moving into the Intel SR IOV and, and other and FPGA, which is, you know, getting back into the proprietary. You know, I think we've swung back and forth a little bit so. Yeah, that's a great question so we're, we a cable apps is one of the places where we're actually spending a lot of time looking at this and how we can use Kubernetes to manage a lot of these different types of compute, you know with x86 and other processor types. We do see fairly substantial improvements. I've seen claims of some of the newer generation CPUs having a 30% increased throughput per core at lower power usage so you know that'll continue to progress, but for certain types of processing, you need something that's more standard. And as Beth mentioned right now, writing to FPGAs is fairly proprietary, not even just to the vendor but to the card type. There's some promise with things like OpenCL and some more intelligent design tools that will let you write more portable design code. P4 is something we're looking at where you can actually program some network functions either on switches or on NICs or on FPGAs, or using the kernel space so you know we try to look at some of these abstracted languages it's, you know doesn't give us the performance as if we wrote it natively for that device, but it does allow us to take the advantage of that hardware offload and can give us either better performance or at least better power consumption and higher density with using a lot of those technologies. So there really is quite a bit available out there and I expect to see that growing and also more standardization in that area to make it more portable to write code and have it run across a variety of acceleration types. So I also want to mention that the OVP group is being renamed, and it will be changed to conform with the Anakit project. So the Anakit project, which of course is focused on the infrastructure to support NFVs, has created a whole set of test cases. We have requirements documents, I mean we have hundreds of pages of requirements documents, we do have the test framework which is came from the OPNFV project. And so interested parties should stay tuned. I have one more question and then I think we will have to wrap. So the last question is, are there any commercial NFV testing labs available for certifying our VNFs. The community labs are more for testing tools development. I'm not sure I would agree with that but that's what the person wrote, instead of commercial VNF testing, please let us know if there any NFV testing labs for certification. Either Leah or Randy. Yeah, I haven't worked with them yet we've been looking at how can we standardize this process and do some of the stuff that cable labs for the cable industry but I don't really have a good answer to that question. Fortunately, I'm a Beth, do you. I think they're actually because you know there are a number of labs, you know the Lincoln's UNH lab, and I think Intel runs a lab and there's a couple others out there that are really focused. I wouldn't say they're on tools development though I would say that, you know the whole purpose of the etiquette and badging is in fact to allow vendors to come in and get a badge that says that it meets the requirements. You know that it that it that it passed the test to say that it that it will fit in a stand you know it will, it meets the requirements of being able to be a reference, you know map to the reference architecture the reference implementations. Lee you want to comment on that. Yes, I fully agree with both of your opinion. I think that there are many of the commercial NFB testing labs here, and you can choose which is mostly fit for you. And it is a little hard for us to, to answer which is good or which is not so good. Maybe you can try to use some evaluation method, indeed in the white paper we have with the evaluation model for reference, and from the testing objects, the, the, the labor division the testing process, etc. You can try to rate this content for reference and find a suitable way for for for your testing testing objects. So with that, I think I'll come to the end of our, our webinar I thank you, Randy and leave for a very interesting and discussion and with some great questions and I encourage everybody, everybody to download and read the two white papers. I think you'll find a lot of thoughtful reading and and and some really interesting insights. Thank you, Beth for helping facilitate this and it's been great and I say we ended up with two papers instead of one just because we had so much that we wanted to talk about in this area and it's something that the end user group was very excited and passionate about. Thank you. Thank you for your effort in these white papers. Thank you to all of our panelists and all of our attendees and we'll see you all on another upcoming health networking webinar.


From VOA Learning English, this is the economics report in special English. Burma's financial industry has suffered from years of mismanagement under military rule. But more recently, the government has pushed through economic reforms. Those measures are changing the nation's banks and re-energizing businesses. There are even hopes that Burma could become one of Asia's fastest growing economies, an Asian tiger. Burma had one of the best performing economies in Southeast Asia before the military seized power in 1962. Many years of state control over the economy followed. Widespread corruption and international sanctions left it one of the poorest countries in the area. Economist Sean Turnell says turning around the economy will require strong measures against corruption. That is why he says political change is important to economic reform. He says restrictive measures make it harder for Burmese to do business internationally.  Here is an example. Nini owns a workshop in Rangoon. He and his family manufactured toys for buyers from all over the world. His toy business is international. But Burma's banks are not. Nini still depends on middlemen called hundies to process foreign money transactions. Foreign visitors to Burma once used black market money changers. And hundies are still the main method for international monetary transfers. But the government hopes this unsupervised cash-based economy is ending. It plans to do this with new ATMs or automated teller machines and foreign exchange licenses for private banks. For VOA Learning English, I'm Carolyn Presuti.