First Name and Last Name, Last Name and First Name

A historic problem in WordPress is back: the users list can always be sorted by first name, but not by last name. Remember that you can listen this program from:     ## Program transcript Hello, I’m Alicia Ireland, and you’re listening to WPpodcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community. In this episode, you’ll find the **information from September 27 to october 4, 2026**. **Gutenberg** 24.1 is, above all, a consistency release for design tools: about 140 of its contributions are devoted to making nearly all core blocks have the same background, color, shadow, and typography options. Background image, size, and gradient, shadows, borders, and link, heading, and button colors now reach blocks such as Accordion, Tabs, Comments, or the Post blocks, and the Group, Author Biography, and Terms List blocks also gain support for text columns. The text shadow that debuted a few versions ago now has its own panel in Global Styles and is available in Paragraph and Heading, and the Cover and Media & Text blocks debut a media selection section in the inspector, just like Image and Site Logo already had. The *Presence API* plugin, the piece that shows who is working and where within the WordPress dashboard and which was announced in April, reaches version 0.14.0 with several significant new features. The most relevant is multisite support: the network administrator can now see who is connected across all sites at once, enabled by default on networks that are not large. It also changes how post editing locks are handled, which go from being stored as post metadata to living in the presence table itself; this way, renewing a lock no longer invalidates the post query cache on sites with persistent object caching, a real performance problem. Presence also works with any content type that has an editor, including what someone has open in the Site Editor, and with roles that only edit pages or custom types. Two aspects stand out above the rest. On privacy, logging is enabled by default, but it can be disabled per site or for the entire network, and there is a section in the privacy policy along with data export and erasure tools; in addition, knowing where each person is remains reserved by default for those who can list users, while everyone else only sees who is connected. And on the AI side, agents that edit through the REST API or through MCP do not send the usual activity heartbeat, so since 0.13 each save records a temporary presence that appears with an “Agent” label in the admin bar and in the editors column. The plugin does not decide who is an agent: it asks the Agent Users plugin or any other that responds through the provided filter. Among the refinements, better performance with a single tab that queries and shares results with the others, Site Health warning if Heartbeat is not keeping presence up to date, and a debugger in the admin bar for development only. An old WordPress problem has been reopened: on the profile screen, the first name always comes before the last name and no language can change it. In Japanese, Hungarian, Chinese, Korean, or Vietnamese the family name is written first, and WordPress already supports this when displaying the name publicly, but not when entering it. The oldest Trac ticket dates from 2008, and since then the issue has gone from postponement to postponement, waiting for a global solution with a single full-name field that has never arrived, while users in Japan or Malaysia resort to tricks such as putting the family name in the first name field or inverting the fields with CSS. The proposal is to split the problem in two. First, a small change: that each locale can reorder the profile fields through a translatable string and a filter, without altering the meaning of the data, so there are no compatibility problems. Later on, a site-level setting with three options: first name first, last name first, or a single full-name field. Fumiki acknowledges the bias of the sample: those who participate on Slack or Trac have already gotten used to the English order and respond that it doesn’t bother them, but the person most affected, such as the owner of a small café who builds their website in their own language, almost never shows up there. They ask each locale’s team to share how names are written in official documents, what they do today in WordPress, and whether the change would work for them. The first comments already add nuance: in Russian the formal order is family name first, but WordPress’s current order doesn’t seem strange because first name, patronymic, and family name is also natural, and the usual approach is to omit the patronymic if there is no field, rather than mixing it with the first or last name. Tor-Björn Fjellner, a Polyglots mentor, argues that the most reasonable option is a single field, because it is impossible to guess where each part goes, and suggests a second field with the sort value. Fumiki sees this as consistent with the W3C’s internationalization recommendations, and adds that what interests them most is knowing how people actually write their names in each region, not the theory. A contradiction has been detected in the **Community** handbook about who can organize a meetup event. One handbook page, titled “Any Member Can Organize an Event,” says that any member can do so without filters, while the Five Good-Faith Rules speak of “reliable and trusted” members. The author of the proposal found herself in the middle when someone who had never been to a meetup asked her to organize one and she suggested attending an existing one first; a member then asked her whether anyone can organize or not, and she couldn’t give a clear answer. Her hypothesis is that, when the content was split into separate pages in 2023, the text was copied but the context was lost: in the 2016 version the sentence referred to a specific checkbox in the group’s tools, and the current page’s title turns it into a general principle. The team’s answer, which reached her by private message and is not written down anywhere, is that any member can organize an event without being a co-organizer, but must coordinate with the co-organizers, who confirm that they are trustworthy and that they follow the rules. That is why it is proposed to confirm this interpretation, remove the “Any Member Can Organize an Event” page, and distribute its content among the group management documentation, the rules, and the record of the case in the handbook audit. On the **Photos** team, they have found that the rule against AI-generated images exists, but only verbally. The Slack channel threads since 2023 have been reviewed, and it has been stated on several occasions that a generated image is not a photograph and is not accepted, and the moderators ask that only real photos be submitted. However, neither the guidelines, nor the pre-upload checklist, nor the rejection email, nor the FAQ mention AI, so whoever submits an image doesn’t find out until it is rejected. Nor is it documented how to appeal a rejection, which has left contributors who said they had uploaded real photos without an answer, with the added difficulty that the image is deleted upon rejection. The proposal is four simple changes: add “AI-generated images” to the sentence in the guidelines that already excludes screenshots and digital art, do the same in the checklist checkbox, expand the rejection reason “Not a photo” or create a dedicated one for AI, and add to the FAQ that anyone who believes it was a mistake can reply to the rejection email attaching the photo. It is limited to fully generated images, and leaves AI editing, such as upscaling or generative fill, for another discussion. bbPress 2.6.19 is a new security release that applies legacy forum passwords to REST API responses and BuddyPress activity, and reinforces access checks for restricted content in feeds, group forums, and other indirect views. It also hardens moderation and forum role permissions, protects the importer’s credentials and account management, and improves escaping in profiles and administration. Among the maintenance fixes are corrections in BuddyPress group forum associations and notifications, in converter cleanup, in imported database passwords, in subscription emails, and in reply position. And finally, this podcast is distributed under a Creative Commons license as a derivative version of the podcast in Spanish; you can find all the links for more information, and the podcast in other languages, at WPpodcast .org. Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!