fidzu : blog

Watch the winning trailer from the Future Vision XPRIZE, The Gifted.

28 Sep 2026 7:00pm GMT

Explore art and culture with visual-first conversation search, a redesigned home feed, AI experiments and 27 new city guides in the Google Arts & Culture app.

28 Sep 2026 4:30pm GMT

See what developers have built with Gemini 3.8 Flash, our most intelligent workhorse model, launched in early September.

28 Sep 2026 4:00pm GMT

Quel stérilisateur choisir pour vos biberons et pièces de tire-lait en 2026 ? Comparez les critères essentiels pour faire le bon choix !

L'article Guide ultime des meilleurs stérilisateurs de biberons et de pièces de tire-lait en 2026 est apparu en premier sur 20SIX.fr.

28 Sep 2026 2:20pm GMT

tl;dr:

15 years stuck in the same wp-admin, why don't you try in playground the new wp-admin experience?

WordPress has spent the last fifteen years becoming capable of doing almost everything, yet somehow we have continued interacting with wp-admin in fundamentally the same way: click somewhere, load another screen, go back, open another tab because you do not want to lose the previous one, and after a while end up with ten different WordPress tabs scattered across your browser.

I find it quite funny that we all accepted this as completely normal.

Today WordPress is used to run stores, publications, membership sites, communities, LMS platforms, agencies and entire businesses. We have plugins that are effectively full applications, incredibly complex editing experiences, analytics, forms, CRM systems, media tools, commerce, automation and thousands of other things living inside the same installation. Yet the interface connecting all of them still assumes that, most of the time, you want to look at one thing at once.

And when you don't, the browser has to solve the problem for us.

Browser tabs have essentially become the window manager of WordPress.

That is one of the ideas that eventually led us to OpenStation.

Why don't we have windows?

It sounds ridiculously obvious when you phrase it like that, but that is exactly why I find the question interesting.

On a normal computer I can have my editor open next to a browser, keep a terminal in the background, drag files around, minimize something I want to return to later, or simply arrange my workspace around whatever I am doing at that moment. Nobody thinks about this as a feature anymore because it is just how computers work.

Then we open WordPress and suddenly that whole model disappears.

If I am editing a post and need something from the Media Library, I navigate away or open another tab. If I am checking an order while editing a product, another tab. If I want to compare two posts, another tab. If I am configuring something and need to check how another part of the site is set up, another tab.

There is nothing technically wrong with that, of course, and it has worked for years, but after building and using OpenStation every day I started noticing how much context we constantly throw away simply because wp-admin was designed around pages rather than workspaces.

That distinction matters much more today than it probably did fifteen years ago.

WordPress quietly became something much bigger

I keep describing WordPress as the operating system of the web, and obviously I do not mean that literally. What I mean is that WordPress has gradually accumulated many of the characteristics you would expect from a platform where applications live.

Plugins install capabilities into it. Users have identities and permissions. Applications share data. We have APIs, scheduled processes, notifications, media, editors, databases and an enormous ecosystem of software that knows how to work with the same underlying environment.

The strange part is that the interface never fully made the same transition.

We kept adding more applications to WordPress, but we continued presenting them largely as destinations in a menu.

OpenStation started from a very simple thought: what happens if, instead of redesigning every individual wp-admin page again, we change the environment in which those pages live?

That immediately opens a much larger set of possibilities.

A post editor does not need to replace your media library on screen. A WooCommerce order does not need to replace the product you were editing. A plugin screen does not necessarily need to occupy the entire browser just because you clicked its menu item.

They can simply be windows.

You can move them, resize them, minimize them, keep several of them open, organise them across different desktops and return to exactly what you were doing without recreating the context again.

The funny thing is that none of this feels particularly futuristic. Quite the opposite. We have been using computers this way for decades.

We just somehow never brought that interaction model into wp-admin.

The interesting part is not actually the windows

The windows are what people notice first because they are visual, but I think the more important idea is what happens once WordPress stops assuming that navigation must destroy context.

Suddenly the admin becomes a workspace.

You can have the Media Library next to the editor instead of travelling between them. You can keep an order visible while checking something else. You can open notes or widgets without abandoning your current task. Applications can coexist on the same desktop and eventually interact with each other in ways that become much harder when everything is isolated in separate browser tabs.

This is also where things like drag and drop become much more interesting.

If two applications are part of the same environment, moving an image, a product, a post or another WordPress entity between them can become an actual interaction instead of a sequence of copy, navigate, search, paste and navigate back.

And once you start thinking about WordPress this way, a lot of things that initially looked like unrelated OpenStation features start making sense together: windows, the dock, multiple desktops, widgets, the command palette and applications are all different pieces of the same idea.

The goal is not to decorate wp-admin until it looks like a desktop operating system. The goal is to make working in WordPress feel less like navigating a website and more like working inside an environment.

We don't need to replace wp-admin to do this

This is probably the part I like the most about the approach.

WordPress already has an enormous ecosystem and rebuilding everything would be both unrealistic and, in my opinion, the wrong problem to solve. There are thousands of admin interfaces that already work, plugins developers have spent years building, and workflows users already understand.

OpenStation can sit on top of that rather than asking the ecosystem to start again.

The existing WordPress admin can continue being WordPress. Existing plugins can continue exposing their interfaces. What changes is how those interfaces are presented and how you move between them.

In some ways, I think that is much more interesting than simply designing another admin UI.

We are not trying to decide what every WordPress application should look like. We are trying to give those applications a better place to live.

And once you have that place, building actual OpenStation-native applications becomes possible as well. We have already been experimenting with things like a photo editor, project management tools and forms, but what excites me is not any individual application. It is the idea that WordPress can host an entire collection of tools that feel like they belong to the same workspace instead of a collection of isolated screens connected by a sidebar.

So why did it take fifteen years?

Probably because there was never a single moment where the old model stopped working.

WordPress evolved gradually. A new menu here, another plugin there, a more sophisticated editor, WooCommerce, custom post types, page builders, analytics, SEO tools and so on. Each addition fitted reasonably well into what already existed, so there was never an obvious reason to stop and question the basic interaction model.

But those small changes accumulated.

The WordPress of today asks considerably more from wp-admin than the WordPress of fifteen years ago did, and I think that eventually creates an opportunity to revisit assumptions that once seemed completely reasonable.

The assumption we are questioning with OpenStation is a very simple one:

Why should opening something in WordPress mean leaving everything else behind?

After spending months working this way, I now notice it every time I go back to the traditional flow. I open something, realise I need another part of WordPress, create another browser tab and immediately think: why am I doing this outside WordPress when WordPress itself could manage the workspace?

That is probably the best way I can explain what we are building.

WordPress has had applications for a very long time.

Perhaps what it has been missing all these years is somewhere for those applications to actually live together.

By the way, don't forget you can always try OpenStation without even installing it in your site, using WordPress playgrounds

28 Sep 2026 12:57pm GMT

The Open Source Champions initiative invites individuals and brands to support the network through a unique advocacy opportunity, offering exposure, promotional features, and participation in special episodes.

28 Sep 2026 12:17pm GMT

Howdy,

Before anything else: if you maintain WordPress sites, go update them. WordPress 7.1.2 shipped on September 22 to patch a single critical vulnerability in page template resolution, one that lets an unauthenticated attacker load a chosen PHP file from outside your active theme's directories.

Now let's move on to better things. Anne McCarthy is auctioning off her framed WordPress release albums, the ones given to release squad members. All the proceeds go to Stimpunks, a nonprofit started by Ryan Boren, who joined the project in 2003 and wrote the plugin system that nearly every site runs on. She calls the albums "a form of a gold medal to me," and she built the auction site herself in a week. The starting bid is $500.

We also learned this fortnight that the next default theme will be called Ipsum, which means 16 years of naming themes after the calendar is over. Admittedly, I'll miss the old Twenty* names a little. But it's time for something new for a new era.

Two more quick things: WordPress has taken its turn leading the Open Website Alliance, alongside Drupal, Joomla!, and TYPO3, with Mary Hubbard holding the rotating presidency for the WordPress Foundation. And starting with 7.2 in December, release parties move from in-person events to livestreamed webinars, so the whole squad can actually be there.

Enjoy your weekend!

Your friendly neighborhood dev advocate,
Justin Tadlock

Developing Gutenberg and WordPress

Two security releases in six days. WordPress 7.1.2 is the urgent one, and it's security-only: an unauthenticated attacker can, under the right conditions, make page template resolution include a readable local PHP file from outside the active theme directories. John Blackbourn led the release, Robert Ressl disclosed it, and the fix was backported to every eligible branch going back to 4.7.

Five days earlier, WordPress 7.1.1 arrived as the regular maintenance release with 11 security fixes, 17 bug fixes on Core, and 19 for the Block Editor. Aaron Jorbin led it, and Anthropic is credited twice in the security list.

Aki Hamano announced what's new in Gutenberg 24.0. The big feature: post title changes now show up in revisions with a proper diff, so you can stop guessing when a rename happened. The Gallery block gains a Grid variation with column count and "crop images to fit" configurable per breakpoint, and Site Title picks up fit-text, scaling to the width available instead of a fixed point size. And nearly 100 icons were redrawn on a stroke-based grid.

Stalled out somewhere between "clone the repo" and "why won't this build"? Contributor Toolkit 1.2 from JuanMa Garrido now covers Gutenberg as well as Core, and it runs a stock WordPress in Playground with your checkout mounted as the plugin, already activated. No local server, no Docker.

The road to 7.2

Anne McCarthy published the roadmap to 7.2, and it looks to be a security-heavy cycle by WordPress standards. Sudo mode gates sensitive admin actions behind re-authentication, a new Secrets API gives credentials "a first-class way to store credentials safely," and Application Passwords get hardened. Notes should gain a suggestion mode and emoji reactions. Designers get form element customization in Global Styles and custom block states. The final release lands in early December.

Real-time collaboration came out of WordPress 7.0, and Chris Zarate has now explained why in a post on moving to a server-aware approach for collaboration, written with Alec Geatches, Dennis Snell, ingeniumed, and Paul Kevan. The old design had browsers hold the post in a CRDT document and sync peer-to-peer, which broke three ways: the server couldn't tell who made which edit, opening the door to content laundering; REST API and WP-CLI updates couldn't participate, so saves became all-or-nothing overwrites; and a dropped connection could take your work with it. Three candidate sync engines are on the table, with a gutenberg-sync-engines repo to test against. If you build editorial tooling, have an opinion about this now.

The next default theme has a name, and for the first time in well over a decade, it isn't a year. Henrique Iamarino introduced Ipsum, built with Carolina Nymark, Maggie Cabrera, and Juanfra Aldasoro. The reasoning behind the naming change: "default themes will have their own names and change when the design calls for it, not when the calendar does." The theme is intentionally spare. It's blog-first, has minimal typesets, and structural elements that stay invisible until you need them. The request is simple: "try it and tell us what breaks and what's missing."

Nik Tsekouras opened a call for testing the DataForm editor inspector, which rebuilds the Post and Page tab of the Settings sidebar so it stops drifting from Quick Edit in the Site Editor. Install Gutenberg 24.0 or later and enable Editor Inspector: Use DataForm under Settings → Gutenberg. Test it as an editor, author, and contributor, not just as an admin.

Behind the release

A minor release can touch more than twenty branches, and much of that work was done by hand. Lance Willett opened a public repo of Core release tools, which includes tagging, release docs, SVN merge verification, and contributor lists.

Huzaifa Al Mesbah counted 84 people who tested WordPress 7.1 across 337 Trac tickets. Fifty were first-timers, which is 60% of everyone who showed up. The most important line: "you don't need to be a developer." 7.2 testing is open now.

Plugins, Themes, and Tools for #nocode site builders and owners

WooCommerce 11.2 lands the week of October 6, so read Shani Banerjee's pre-release notes before it arrives rather than after. Order withdrawal emails become configurable, the CSV importer can match products by Global Unique ID when neither ID nor SKU is available, and checkout fields gain date support with min/max validation. Two of the seventeen developer advisories will bite if you ignore them: date filters in wc_get_orders() and wc_get_products() now read a bare date as a day in your store's timezone rather than UTC, and the Cart and Checkout order summary becomes a fixed 360px column with the two-column breakpoint moving from 700px to 920px.

Two dot releases arrived in between, both flagged as security updates. WooCommerce 11.1.2 fixes the infinite recursion that was breaking product variation galleries, and 11.1.1 hardened API permissions and session handling.

The latest WordPress.com changelog moves the AI website builder from picking a theme to generating one: on Premium and Business plans, it "now generates a fully custom theme built around your goals and brand." A new Annotate feature lets you queue several targeted edits and send them at once.

GatherPress started on a fourteen-hour drive to WordCamp US in 2018, when two Montclair meetup organizers came up with a name and then didn't write any code for nine months. Rae Morey tells the story of how it grew into WordPress' Meetup.com replacement, through July of this year, when Automattic's Karen Arnold confirmed WordPress is going ahead with it. The gatherpress.org domain is transferring to the Foundation, and the plugin has been testable at events.wordpress.org since August 28. No launch date yet, and co-maintainer Mervin Hernandez Sitnikovski would rather you help than wait.

Theme Development for Full Site Editing and Blocks

WooCommerce has a new block theme. Brian Coords announced that Purple is back and ready for beta testing. The project was paused during a strategy update last year, and it's Woo's first official block theme.

Ten color palettes, ten font pairings, custom styles for both WooCommerce and core blocks, and templates covering everything from Shop to Checkout to My Account. The inserter category is being renamed from "WooCommerce" to "Shop." If you're wondering where Storefront's featured extensions went, block editing absorbed most of them. Peter Schimke also notes that Purple is now the default for new WordPress.com Commerce stores.

Mark your calendar for Wednesday, September 30 at 10 a.m. PDT / 1 p.m. EDT / 7 p.m. CEST: Woo is hosting a live session on building with WooCommerce block themes. Mike McAlister of Ollie joins Woo engineers Karol Manijak and Lucio Giannotta. There's a Q&A at the end and a recording afterward, but questions only work if you show up.

"We need more workflow in Core," said K. Adam White, principal engineer at Human Made, talking with Nathan Wrigley on WP Tavern about migrating to blocks with artisanal care and enterprise efficiency. At the center of it is Human Made's open-source Rehydrator, which uses pattern HTML as a template and injects migrated content into it, so structure and styling survive a move off something like Sitecore. He describes building SQLite databases from client exports just to find the edge cases. He's candid about the gaps, too: granular permissions, editorial approval workflows, and internationalization.

Building Blocks and Tools for the Block editor

Your Query Loop returns nothing, and the heading and pagination you wrapped around it render anyway. Ryan Welcher spent a live stream adding a "hide if empty" control to Advanced Query Loop, his free plugin that extends the core Query Loop with taxonomy relationships, meta queries, and relative date filters.

Gutenberg's JavaScript tests have moved off Jest. Marco Ciampini explains that unit and integration tests now use Vitest, driven by ESM: as more dependencies shipped ECMAScript modules, the CommonJS-based Jest setup needed more and more compatibility glue. The part that affects you: @wordpress/scripts 36.0.0 makes Vitest the default for test-unit-js, with @wordpress/eslint-plugin 27.0.0 following. Not ready to migrate? Switch to wp-scripts test-unit-jest and install the Jest dependencies yourself.

AI in WordPress

Your agent builds you a landing page, and then what? It sits in a chat log, or a folder, or a local dev server nobody else can reach. That's the gap Spacefast is built for, and Automattic soft-launched it this week: Matt Mullenweg announced it on X. The pitch is the last mile for agent output: publish from a conversation with Claude or ChatGPT, from npx spacefast publish, or from a GitHub push, and get a permanent URL with immutable versions, one-click rollback, and access controls. It hosts full-stack projects, not just static files.

The WordPress hook is a Spacefast plugin with two modes. Static mode hooks into Simply Static, exports your site, and publishes the snapshot. Headless mode treats WordPress as the content source for a repository project, triggering a production rebuild when you publish or update public content.

MCP turns up everywhere

WordPress Trac now speaks MCP. Lance Willett announced a Trac MCP server that's "public and free to use: no account or API key needed." Ask what's left on a ticket and which pull requests are still open, or what someone committed in January 2005-yes, it goes back that far. It covers every WordPress.org Trac, from Core and Meta to bbPress and GlotPress. James LePage wrote the first version, with props to Jon Surrell, David Newman, and Konstantin Obenland.

Jamie Marsland makes the case for why WebMCP is going to be big for WordPress and, more usefully, shows you how to try it this afternoon: open the ChatGPT desktop app in Work mode, load WordPress Playground in its built-in browser, and ask it to build you a homepage. His framing is the clearest I've read. WebMCP gives an assistant "an instruction manual with working buttons" instead of making it squint at screenshots.

For the enterprise view of the same shift, Shane Schick compares WebMCP and traditional MCP and lands on a line I'd pull out of the whole piece: "MCP is not going away, and WebMCP shouldn't be seen as a rival protocol." His table sets them side by side on deployment, access scope, scalability, and auditability. That auditability row is the one that matters if you answer to a compliance team.

Schick also introduces Parse.ly MCP, which connects Parse.ly data to whichever assistant your team already uses. You authorize once with your existing login, and the assistant sees exactly the sites your account already sees. "Analysis that used to take a request and a day now takes a conversation."

One more, for the security-conscious: WPShout walks through connecting Cursor to WordPress with MCP using ThemeIsle's Easy MCP AI plugin. Every tool call still passes a WordPress capability check, with a 60-requests-per-minute default. Their advice is the part to take seriously: "read-only first, watch the audit log for a week, then grant write scopes deliberately."

Putting agents to work

Anthropic open-sourced its commerce agents on September 2, and WooCommerce has already adapted them. Shani Banerjee walks through running the Claude Commerce Agent on WooCommerce, which spins up a demo store with eight products and nine orders in about fifteen minutes. The neat piece is a bridge plugin: the assistant's cart lives under a Store API token your browser session can't see, so at checkout the plugin re-adds each item to your real cart with normal stock checks. Merchant-side changes stage behind an approval gate, and "ask it to approve itself and it declines."

There's a second kind of visitor to design for now. Carlo Daniele argues for building WordPress for AI agents instead of just human visitors, and the distinction he draws is the useful one: "Crawlers primarily retrieve or index information. Agents can go a step further and take action on a user's behalf." That turns architecture questions into permission questions: who is asking, on whose behalf, what can they change, which actions need approval. The Abilities API and MCP Adapter are where WordPress answers them.

A week later, Daniele turned to operations. What happens when AI agents become your new website operators? works through a five-stage autonomy ladder and argues most teams should sit partway up it for a while. I feel like he's right about that. As he puts it: "An agent that makes a bad production change creates another."

Learning and practice

Want a structured introduction rather than a pile of blog posts? Destiny Kanno announced that the AI-Powered WordPress course is now live on Learn WordPress: four modules, 23 lessons, roughly nine hours. The first three are for anyone who publishes; the fourth introduces the developer APIs and assumes no prior PHP experience.

The AI team's contributor summary for September 16 is a good snapshot of what's actually moving. neillmcshea reports work on markdown feeds for the AI plugin, so AI clients can request a markdown version of a post. PHP AI Client 1.5.0 is close. There are still open gaps in web search support. For example, message parts can't represent source annotations, and citation URLs are hard to retrieve.

Finally, a piece for the conversations you have with clients rather than with a terminal. Will Davis writes about how WordPress agencies use AI, and what clients should ask about it, arguing that the honest uses are the boring ones-code generation, QA, content migration, documentation-while architecture and governance stay human. His five questions for clients would work just as well on a sales call, starting with "What does a person review before it reaches me?" As he puts it, AI "genuinely reduces repetitive work, but it doesn't replace judgment."

	Need a plugin .zip from Gutenberg's master branch? Gutenberg Times provides daily build for testing and review. Now also available via WordPress Playground. There is no need for a test site locally or on a server. Have you been using it? Email me with your experience.

Questions? Suggestions? Ideas?
Don't hesitate to send them via email or
send me a message on WordPress Slack or Twitter @bph.

For questions to be answered on the Gutenberg Changelog,
send them to changelog@gutenbergtimes.com

26 Sep 2026 4:45pm GMT

Du choix du logiciel au rendu réaliste, découvrez comment concevoir votre intérieur en 3D, tester couleurs et mobilier, puis présenter aux artisans un projet précis avant les travaux.

L'article Concevoir son intérieur en 3D : du croquis au rendu réaliste est apparu en premier sur 20SIX.fr.

24 Sep 2026 11:00am GMT

Se sentir apprécié, écouté ou valorisé est humain. Mais quand ce besoin de reconnaissance est trop fort, cela peut devenir douloureux.

L'article Comment combler son besoin de reconnaissance sans dépendre du regard des autres ? est apparu en premier sur 20SIX.fr.

23 Sep 2026 9:00am GMT

Much as I love pasta, I'm not sure it loves me. Last year my carb-heavy comfort food diet led to some weight gain so I looked into low carb pasta as an alternative. There's a lot out there and I'm still trying different brands and styles, but I thought now would be a good time to share what I've learned so far.

Pasta with Butternut Squash and Brussels Sprouts

My introduction to legume and bean-based pasta was thanks to Barilla. I was lucky because I got to attend a webinar with Barilla's incredible chef, Lorenzo Boni. I tried his recipe for pasta with butternut squash and Brussels sprouts which I definitely recommend and have now made several times. If you've seen his wildly popular (150k+ followers!) Instagram feed you know he's a master at making all kinds of pasta dishes and that he often eats plant-based meals. I followed up with him to get some tips on cooking with pasta made from beans and legumes.

Pasta made with beans and legumes is higher in protein and so the recommended 2-ounce portion is surprisingly filling. But the texture isn't always the same as traditional semolina or durum wheat pasta. Chef Boni told me, "The nature of legume pasta makes it soak up more moisture than traditional semolina pasta, so you always want to reserve a bit of cooking water to adjust if needed." But when it comes to cooking, he says that with Barilla legume pasta you cook it the same way as semolina pasta. "Boil in salted water for the duration noted on the box and you'll have perfectly al dente pasta." They are all gluten-free.

Chickpea pasta

When I asked Chef Boni about pairing chickpea pastas with sauce he said, "Generally speaking, I prefer olive oil based sauces rich with vegetables, aromatic herbs and spices. Seafood also pairs well with chickpea options. If used with creamy or tomato-based sauces, keep in mind to always have some pasta water handy to adjust the dish in case it gets too dry." He added, "One of my favorite ways to prepare a legume pasta dish would be a simple chickpea rotini with shrimp, diced zucchini and fresh basil. The sauce is light enough to highlight the flavor of the pasta itself, while the natural sweetness helps keep the overall flavor profile more appealing to everyone." I like the Barilla brand because the only ingredient is chickpeas. Banza makes a popular line of chickpea pasta as well although they include pea starch, tapioca and xanthan gum.

Edamame pasta

I tried two different brands of edamame pasta, Seapoint Farms and Explore Cuisine. The Seapoint pasta has a rougher texture than the Explore. With the Seapoint I found the best pairings were earthy chunky toppings like toasted walnuts and sautéed mushrooms. The Explore Cuisine edamame & spirulina pasta is smoother and more delicate, and worked well with an Asian style peanut sauce. I was happy with the Seapoint brand, but would definitely choose the Explore brand instead if it's available.

Red lentil pasta

Red lentil pasta is most similar to semolina pasta. Barilla makes red lentil pasta in a variety of shapes. But for spaghetti, Chef Boni says, "Barilla red lentil spaghetti is pretty flexible and works well with pretty much everything. I love red lentil spaghetti with light olive oil based sauces with aromatic herbs and some small diced vegetables. It also works well with a lean meat protein." I have to admit, I have yet to try red lentil pasta, but I'm excited to try it after hearing how similar it is to semolina pasta. It is made only with red lentil flour, that's it. It's available in spaghetti, penne and rotini.

Penne for Your Thoughts

Do you remember seeing photos from Italian supermarkets where the shelves with pasta were barren except for penne? I too seem to end up with boxes of penne or rotini and not a clue what to do with them so I asked Chef Boni his thoughts on the subject. He told me, "Shortcuts such as rotini and penne pair very well with all kind of ragouts as well as tomato based and chunky vegetarian sauces. One of my favorite ways to prepare a legume pasta dish would be a simple chickpea rotini with shrimp, diced zucchini and fresh basil. The sauce is light enough to highlight the flavor of the pasta itself, while the natural sweetness helps keep the overall flavor profile more appealing to everyone." Thanks chef! When zucchini is in season I know what I will try!

15 Feb 2022 6:46pm GMT

Julia is a new film based on Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child by Bob Spitz and inspired by My Life in France by Julia Child with Alex Prud'homme and The French Chef in America: Julia Child's Second Act by Alex Prud'homme. Julia Child died in 2004, and yet our appetite for all things Julia hasn't waned.

I grew up watching Julia Child on TV and learning to cook the French classics from her books, And while I never trained to be a chef, like Child I also transitioned into a career focused on food, a subject I have always found endlessly fascinating. I enjoyed the new film very much and while it didn't break much new ground, it did add a layer of perspective that can only come with time. In particular, how Julia Child became a ubiquitous pop culture figure is addressed in a fresh way.

I reached out to the filmmakers,Julie Cohen and Betsy West to find out more about what inspired them and why Julia Child still holds our attention.

Julia Child died over 15 years ago and has been off TV for decades. Why do you believe we continue to be so fascinated by her?

In some ways Julia is the Godmother of modern American cooking - and eating. Her spirit looms over cooking segments on the morning shows, The Food Network, and all those overhead Instagram shots the current generation loves to take of restaurant meals. Beyond that, though, Julia's bigger than life personality and unstoppable joie de vivre are infectious. People couldn't get enough of her while she was living, and they still can't now.

There have been so many Julia Child films and documentaries, what inspired this one?

Well there'd been some great programs about Julia but this is the first feature length theatrical doc. Like everyone else, we adored Julie & Julia, but a documentary gives you a special opportunity to tell a person's story in their own words and with the authentic images. This is particularly true of Julia, who was truly one of a kind.

The impact of Julia Child how she was a groundbreaker really comes across in the film, are we understanding her in a different light as time passes?

People understand that Julia was a talented television entertainer, but outside the professional food world, there's been an under-recognition of just how much she changed the 20th century food landscape. As Jose Andres points out in the film, almost every serious food professional has a sauce-splashed copy of "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" on their shelves. We also felt Julia's role in opening up new possibilities for women on television deserved more exploration. In the early 1960's the idea of a woman on TV who was neither a housewife nor a sex bomb but a mature, tall, confident expert was downright radical. She paved the way for many women who followed.

The food shots add an extra element to the film and entice viewers in a very visceral way, how did those interstitials come to be part of the film?

We knew from the start that we wanted to make food a major part of this story, not an afterthought. We worked with cook and food stylist Susan Spungen to determine which authentic Julia recipes could be integrated with which story beats to become part of the film's aesthetic and its plot. For instance the sole meunière is a key part of the story because it sparked her obsession with French food, and the pear and almond tart provides an enticing metaphor for the sensual side of Julia and Paul's early married years.

Note: Susan Spungen was also the food stylist for Julie & Julia

Julia is in theaters now.

23 Nov 2021 11:30pm GMT

I met Rick Rodgers early in my career as a recipe developer and food writer when we were both contributors to the Epicurious blog. Not only is he a lot of fun to hang out with, but he has also been incredibly helpful to me and is usually the first person I call when I'm floundering with a project, client, or cooking quandary. His interpersonal skills, business experience, and cooking acumen explain why he's been recognized as one of the top cooking instructors in America. Literally.

You built a career as a cooking instructor and cookbook author. How many cookbooks have you written?

I was asked recently to make an official count, and It looks like an even hundred. Many of those were collaborations with chefs, restaurants, celebrities, bakeries, and business entities, such as Tommy Bahama, Williams-Sonoma, and Nordstrom. I made it known that I was available for collaboration work, and my phone literally rang off the hook for quite a few years with editors and agents looking for help with novice writers or those that wanted a branded book.

Which cookbook(s) are you most proud of?

There are three books that I get fan mail for almost every day: Kaffeehaus (where I explore the desserts of my Austrian heritage), Thanksgiving 101 (a deep dive into America's most food-centric holiday and how to pull it off), and Ready and Waiting (which was one of the first books to take a "gourmet" approach to the slow cooker). These books have been in print for 20 years or more, which is a beautiful testament to their usefulness to home cooks.

How did you get started as a cooking instructor and what are some highlights of your teaching career?

I was a theater major at San Francisco State College (now University), so getting in front of a crowd held no terrors for me. When more brick-and-mortar cooking schools opened in the eighties, I was ready for prime time. During that period, there were at least twelve cooking schools in the Bay Area, so I made quarterly trips here a year from the east coast, where I had moved. My Thanksgiving classes were so popular that I taught every day from November 1 to Thanksgiving, with a couple of days off for laundry and travel. The absolute pinnacle of my teaching career was being named Outstanding Culinary Instructor of The Year by Bon Appétit Magazine's Food and Entertaining Awards, an honor that I share with only a handful of other recipients, including Rick Bayless and Bobby Flay.

Flódni

How have cooking classes changed since you started?

Because there are so many classes available, I can teach at any level of experience. At the cooking schools, we tended to walk a fine line between too difficult and too easy. The exposure to different cuisines and skill levels on TV also has seriously raised the bar. Unfortunately, students want to walk before they can run. They want to learn how to make croissants when I doubt that they can bake a pound cake correctly. It is best to build on your skills instead of going right to the top. That being said, in my online classes, I am concentrating on the more challenging recipes because that is what the market demands of me.

Tell me about your baking school, coffeeandcake.org

As much as I loved my cookbooks and in-person classes, I knew there was a more modern way to reach people who wanted to cook with me, especially since so many cooking schools had closed. I retired the day I got my first Social Security check. But…as I was warned by my friends who knew me better than I did…I was bored, and wanted a new project. I heard about online classes through other teachers who were having success. I found an online course specifically for cooking classes (Cooking Class Business School at HiddenRhythm.com), got the nuts and bolts down, and I finally entered the 21st century!

How do you decide which recipes to teach?

I felt there were plenty of other places to learn how to make chocolate chip cookies and banana bread-just take a look on YouTube alone. I had a specialty of Austro-Hungarian baking thanks to my Kaffeehaus book, so I decided to niche into that category. I have branched out to a few other locations, but my goal is to expose students to something new and out of the ordinary. I also survey my students on what they would like me to teach, and those answers are amazing. People are truly interested in the more difficult desserts. Perhaps it is because so many people discovered baking as a hobby during the pandemic?

For students who have your cookbooks, what are the advantages of taking an online class?

There is no substitute for seeing a cook in action. Plus you get to answer questions during class. In a recent class, I made six-layer Dobos Torte in two hours' real-time to prove that you can do it without giving up a week of your life. And we don't have to travel to each other to be "together." My classes are videotaped so you can watch them at your convenience.

What are some highlights of your upcoming schedule of classes?

Honey cake

In October, I am teaching virtually all Hungarian desserts, things that will be new to most people. I am making one of my absolute favorites, Flódni, which is a Jewish bar cookie (almost a cake) with layers of apple, poppy seeds, and walnuts between thin sheets of wine-flavored cookie dough. San Franciscans in particular will be happy to see a master class that I am teaching with the delightful Michelle Polzine, owner of the late and lamented 20th Century Cafe and author of Baking at the 20th Century Cafe. We will be making her (in)famous 12-layer honey cake on two coasts, with me doing the heavy lifting in New Jersey and Michelle guiding me from the west coast. That is going to be fun! In November and December, I am switching over to holiday baking and a few savory recipes for Thanksgiving, including my fail-proof turkey and gravy, which I have made over 300 times in classes over 30 years' worth of teaching. It ought to be perfect by now

Head to Coffee and Cake to sign up for classes or learn more.

05 Oct 2021 3:56pm GMT

03 Dec 2014 8:12pm GMT

16 Jul 2014 6:08pm GMT

Après presque un mois et demi d'absence, deux bouclages d'albums et plein de projets, je trouve enfin le
temps de poster quelque chose sur ce blog ! Ces jours-ci, je vais avoir pas mal de choses à vous montrer !
On commence tranquille avec un petit dessin aux couleurs estivales.

14 Jul 2014 4:25pm GMT