During the pandemic, we noticed that people were focusing on their side hustle and building a trusted brand online. We’re focused on making it easier and quicker to launch your website, so that you can focus on building your community. 

Here are five ways to get started: 

1. Create your website on WordPress.com
2. Get your own domain name to make it easier for people to find you
3. Setup Professional Email to connect with customers using your own domain
4. Create a logo to make your brand memorable
5. Start collecting payments with Earn tools 

Whether you’re a blogger, an entrepreneur, a small business owner, an artist, an educator, or you have a new idea you want to turn into a side hustle, we want you to have the opportunity to amplify your message through the web and find your own community and customers here. We’re ready to help you get started on your journey. Are you ready?

Stylish Heading Font Weights

Headings not only draw your audience in, they help get your message across. Now you can enhance the font weight of headings with the click of a dropdown menu. Between the options for font size and font weight, you’ll be able to create the perfect look you’ve been aiming for.

To start experimenting, select the Heading block you want to edit, then head to the right-side block menu. Under Typography, change the Font weight. When you select a new option in the menu, you’ll see your heading font change on the left.

Persistent List View Toggles

As we mentioned last month, the List View button acts as a table of contents and outlines all the blocks in use on your page or post. And most importantly, this outline is persistent — meaning it won’t disappear as you edit your content so you can quickly find and edit any block on the list.

The List View just leveled up: you can now expand and collapse nested blocks in the list.

Deeply nested layouts will benefit from this feature. But even for straightforward layouts, certain elements such as content in columns can make the List View a little daunting. Less searching + more focus = improved editing.

WordPress 5.8

WordPress.com updated to WordPress 5.8 on July 20. This release starts the wave of functionality centered around Full Site Editing.

Full Site Editing aims to bring blocks to every aspect of the WordPress experience, including navigation menus, site logos, templated content, global styles affecting your site’s overall look, and much more. Between adding functionality to your site or editing what’s already there, Full Site Editing will allow you to do it with a visual editing experience — without the need to learn code.

Learn more about Full Site Editing here.

Keep Building, Keep Exploring

Your feedback is crucial to expanding the block editor’s capabilities, so keep it coming. Watch here for more updates, and in the meantime, have fun experimenting!

Join us online for the second Official WordPress.com Growth Summit on August 17th in the Americas + EMEA and August 18th in APAC. 

Calling all creators, small businesses, and publishers! 

Are you a blogger looking for ways to drive traffic and attract more visitors? Are you a small business owner that wants to start selling products and services on your site? Are you an artist or creator who wants to learn how to share your work and generate leads? The WordPress.com Growth Summit will cover these topics (and many more). We’ll provide indispensable advice to help you succeed!

Speakers include:

• David Nitzsche, Owner and Editor at Workprint.
• Jessica Petrie, Owner and Lead Teacher of Yoga Next Door.
• Wali Pitt, Web Developer at HBCU Gameday. 

You’ll have direct access to our Happiness Engineers —  ask your most pressing support questions and check out on-demand product demos. 

Social network with fellow attendees to grow your community connections.

To stay accessible to a global audience, we’ll hold the event twice:

• Americas + EMEA — August 17th, 2021.
• Asia Pacific — August 18th, 2021.

Register today to take advantage of the special rate of $25 USD at checkout. Special pricing ends July 31!

Video Overview

Here’s a short video overview of using the photo carousel on a mobile device and the upgrades we’ve introduced:

What’s New

Smooth, Hands-on, High Resolution Photo Viewing

• Full-width photos expand to the display of your device
• Swift, smooth pinch-to-zoom, and double-tap-to-zoom through your photos
• New, higher resolution images that stay crisp and clear however far you zoom
• A simpler, faster tap-to-close button to move back into the thumbnail gallery view

Faster, Clearer Navigation Between Photos

• Responsive, fast swiping between your photos
• Clear photo numbering navigation to show where you are in your gallery
• With 5 or less photos, a dot navigation system you can tap to jump to any photo in the sequence

Easy Access Metadata and Comments for Every Photo

• One-tap metadata for every photo
• Per-photo comment notifications, with a single tap to view comments

Getting Started

If you’ve previously used our image carousel feature, your site has been upgraded automatically so your visitors will get the new experience starting right now.

If you haven’t added a carousel to your site so far, now’s a great time to give it a try. Simply insert a gallery block using our editor and your photos will show using the carousel whenever your visitors click or tap an image.

What Does the WordPress.com Managed Hosting Webinar Cover?

In this webinar, you’ll learn from WordPress.com Happiness Engineers and product experts how to build a fast, secure, and scalable website using WordPress – the publishing platform that now powers over 41% of the web. 

Managed hosting is a convenient service offered by WordPress.com, which is 100% dedicated to hosting the open-source WordPress software. Managed hosting is an excellent option for people who don’t want to deal with running a website’s back-end technical operations. You get all of the freedom of WordPress, with none of the hassles. 

Here’s what you get with WordPress.com managed hosting: 

• A faster website. 
• Powerful, built-in SEO. 
• Security and systems experts. 
• Scalability and uptime you can depend on. 
• Automatic WordPress Updates. 
• Real-time backups.

Watched the Webinar but Still Have Questions?

Attendees at the live event asked great questions throughout the presentation. We’ve created an FAQ that answers many of them, along with other questions you might have. If you want to know more about WordPress.com’s managed hosting, the FAQ is a great place to start.

Pocket Casts should be the podcast app you listen to and through which you distribute your content. Here’s why:

1. Discover hidden gems with powerful search tools and human-curated recommendations. Pocket Casts helps you discover premium content with next-level search and discovery tools. You can use the episode search feature to look for a topic or special guest you want to learn more about or rely on the advice of human curators to help you find new podcasts that you’ll enjoy.

2. Easily navigate with a beautifully designed interface. Pocket Casts is a thoughtfully designed app built by podcast listeners for podcast listeners. Easily follow and find your favorite podcasts and build a playback queue for a seamless listening experience.

3. Personalize how you listen. With built-in features like variable speed playback, trim silence option, volume boost, a sleep timer, personal media storage, and standalone playback for Apple Watch, Pocket Casts delivers a streamlined and customized listening experience that users love.

4. Listen on the go across all of your devices. Once you are ready to hit play on your next podcast, Pocket Casts allows you to listen anywhere across platforms, including iOS, Android, Web, Windows, macOS, CarPlay, Android Auto, watchOS, Alexa, and Sonos.

5. Have your own podcast on WordPress.com? Make it easy for people to subscribe to your podcast on Pocket Casts by adding the Podcast subscription block pattern to your site.

As part of Automattic, Pocket Casts will continue to provide you with the features needed to enjoy your favorite podcasts (or find something new). We will explore building deep integrations with WordPress.com and Pocket Casts, making it easier to distribute and listen to podcasts. We’re thrilled that we can continue to give our users a multitude of ways to tell and engage with stories that matter.

Co-founders Russell Ivanovic and Philip Simpson will continue to lead Pocket Casts as part of Automattic. 

Overheard on our Blogging for Beginners Course Community: “Taking this course has pushed me to think beyond my comfort zone and take a step back in my journey to become a better blogger and focus on what I truly want to write about.”

Join the WordPress.com Course Communities here.

But to keep up a good habit, sometimes you need a nudge. So, we’ve added Blogging Reminders to the WordPress mobile apps to help keep you on track.

Choose the days you prefer to blog, and a push notification will remind you to write your post.

You’ll see a promotion for this new feature in your app, available from version 17.7. You can set it up as follows: 

• Go to the My Site tab.
• Scroll down and tap on Site Settings.
• You’ll see Blogging Reminders under General.
• Select the days you want to write, and you’ll be reminded with push notifications.

We hope this encourages a regular blogging habit! We’d love to hear your feedback. Reach out to us from within the app by going to My Site, tapping your photo on the top right, tapping Help & Support, and then selecting Contact Support.

P2 is the tool we use at Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com), and today we’d love to share some ways you can do the same.

What sets P2 apart from other project tracking tools?

There is no shortage of project management tools out there, but the killer feature of P2 is its total flexibility.

Instead of having to adapt to a particular, fixed way of working, P2 adapts to the way you and your team work.

That’s made possible by the baked-in integration of the WordPress block editor, giving you a really flexible tool that can adapt to whatever you need to throw at it. 

P2 is your project tracking canvas

From a blank page upwards, P2 makes it easy to track and feature what’s most important to you, using any of the nearly 80 (and growing) blocks at your disposal.

In practice that means that any page can include images, Google Calendars, PDF embeds, Figma designs, checklists, and a wide spectrum of video players and social media integrations (just for starters). And of course, you can arrange them on the page any way that meets your needs.

Three project tracking blocks you can add to your P2 today

Among the options available to you on P2, three blocks in particular can be really useful for project tracking. Let’s take a look at those.

1. Task block

Tasks are the atomic unit of getting things done. 

With the Task block, you can add your team to-dos and assign whoever’s responsible for them right from the editor. Clicking the “cog” button in the top right of the editor will open up further options to set start and end dates. 

Here’s an example of a Task block in action:

2. Project Status block

Tasks often add up to a bigger project. The Project Status block does what it says on the tin by tracking a group of tasks together.

Just add it to your post, optionally set a due date and assign tasks, and then update it as tasks are in progress and are completed:

Find advanced tips on the Task and Project Status blocks here. 

3. Changelog block

A changelog is a log or record of all notable changes made to a project. If you’d like to call out those changes visually, the Changelog block lets you assign colorful preset or custom labels, with a description for each:

At Automattic, we use the Changelog block to summarize the work status for a team or product. But P2’s Changelog block can really be used for any projects that you want to keep a record of.

Find advanced tips on the Changelog block here.

How to add project tracking blocks to your P2

Once you have a P2 up and running, you can add the Task, Project Status, or Changelog blocks to your post or page by either:

• Using the “+” button on the top left of your editor and typing the first few letters of the block name
• Typing “/” anywhere in the editor itself, and searching for the block that way by starting to type the name of the block

How do you P2?

Signing up for P2 is free. Take a look around our demo P2 to see some ways we use it at Automattic.

We’d love to hear how you use P2 and its project tracking blocks in your work. Let us know in the comments.

Built-in duotone image filter

Duotone is a much anticipated feature that allows you to choose between any two colors for an image’s shadows and highlights. Think black and white photos, but in any color combo of your choosing. What was once the power of standalone image-editing software is now at your fingertips in the block editor.

Establish a consistent tone across your site’s images or draw your audience’s eye with a catchy color combo for a big post.

Try it out by adding an Image or Cover block, select “Apply duotone filter” from the floating block menu, and experiment by choosing colors.

Editor navigation via persistent List View

Level-up your editing game by selecting the List View in the top menu bar—this displays the entire block structure of your page or post. It’s essentially a Table of Contents of all the blocks currently in use. List View is now persistent, meaning it will remain expanded in the sidebar as you edit. 

This update will vastly improve the navigation of complex content and the editing of nested blocks.

And there’s a bonus! Anchors added to blocks are also shown in this List View for easy identification.

Customize your Table colors

Background and text colors are easily edited within the Table block for a more consistent feel across your site.

Keep building, keep exploring

Your feedback is crucial to expanding the block editor’s capabilities, so keep it coming. Watch here for more updates, and in the meantime, go forth and create!