6.5 Announcement Feedback (Suggested enhancements going forward)

[mpeshev]

Comment

I brought this up in Post Status Slack as a consideration first and got referred to this project as a suitable place to provide unbiased feedback - please let me know if the ticket should be restructured differently.

I also want to preface that as an individual review that isn't attacking anyone personally, and appreciates the effort of the marketing team, release lead, core committers/contributors, support and community teams, and anyone else involved in the process.

6.5 is a major release, not a maintenance/support update. And we should be trying to bring more people aboard, introduce new users, invite new blog owners, teenagers, solopreneurs, people who don't rock a site yet. Or are hosted with Wix, Squarespace, Webflow, Medium, post LinkedIn articles instead of a blog.

Here's how I skim through the major release announcement and the headlines in the release post:

• "Add and manage fonts across your site" - great, is there an existing system that's not Medium that doesn't support a font library with sufficient options? Also, changing the theme isn't aligning to a new look and feel over the past 20 years?
• "Get more from your revisions—including revisions for templates and template parts" - so, post backups still work with a slight bump. Not a marketing fault here; just a pretty minor list of features targetted for the release and a perspective of what it looks like on the outside.
• "Discover new Data Views" - that's probably the largest meaningful user feature briefly mention in two sentences (yes, two). It's an actual CMS layer functionality that unlocks new opportunities if anyone expands on a set of problems this solves, and how it presents a competitive edge to flatter site builders that lack this (for publishers, large sites, etc)
• "Smoother drag-and-drop" - yes, we know that Gutenberg is really, really hard to navigate, especially once you start nesting blocks within columns and other sections. Good luck moving some of these away or clicking on the exact dashed line to pick the right component. Yet again, it looks like a "bug fix" as-is (and not even a complete solution)
• "Improved link controls" - As I see it, isn't this a core Word feature and a former TinyMCE one back when the classic editor and WYSIWYG existed again in 2005?

Again, this is a respectful overview aiming to raise awareness of what does a new release introduce to the public if you take a look at the surface.

There have been a number of conversations around marketing amplification, including the Media Corps callout by @josephahaden - https://make.wordpress.org/marketing/2024/03/20/making-a-wordpress-media-corps/

In a different realm, Noel Tock of Human Made brought up the decreasing adoption and market share over the past few years on Twitter: https://twitter.com/noeltock/status/1772157653525094530

Just for comparison - and I'm not stuck on any particular CMS (or an ecommerce CMS in that case), but here's what the latest Shopify quarterly release looks like: https://www.shopify.com/editions/winter2024

That's one of the latest updates on Webflow's website: https://webflow.com/updates/figma-to-webflow-app . It actually provides a formal integration to turn an entire Figma design into a Webflow build. Just a parallel with "improved link" or "smoother drag and drop" above.

Food for thought. We know we can do better, present better, explain better. Are we reaching the bar now?