Core Team Meetup Recap – Part II

Picking up where we left off….

Friday

We kicked off Friday with a discussion about the high-level roadmap for 2012. Using our earlier talk about process and scope, we identified areas/userflows that we could use to focus a release. Areas of interest included changing themes/customizing your site, uploading a bunch of photos, interacting with audience/feedback loopLoop The Loop is PHP code used by WordPress to display posts. Using The Loop, WordPress processes each post to be displayed on the current page, and formats it according to how it matches specified criteria within The Loop tags. Any HTML or PHP code in the Loop will be processed on each post. https://codex.wordpress.org/The_Loop.. (There were more, but let’s face it, there are too many things we’d like to improve to do them all at once.)

We all donned WordPress gear so that people would recognize us at the happy hour later.

Lunch: Went to The Sentient Bean in Savannah.

The Sentient Bean

Back patio at the Sentient Bean

Koop and Mark, Dion and Ozz in the background

Next we went to ThincSavannah, my coworking space in downtown Savannah. We did the livestreamed Town Hall/Q&A (recording coming soon), answering questions from that forum thread I put up last week and a few that came in live from IRCIRC Internet Relay Chat, a network where users can have conversations online. IRC channels are used widely by open source projects, and by WordPress. The primary WordPress channels are #wordpress and #wordpress-dev, on irc.freenode.net..

CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. team town hall

After that was happy hour at Jazz’d. Only two people came to hang out with us (and to think we dressed up especially!), but they were two great people, so we were fine. Some drinks and appetizers later, we departed for WordPress on Ice, in which we went ice skating at the Civic Center.

Nacin and Koop on skates

WordPress on Ice! Nacin, Mark, Jane, Matt, Jon, Daryl

Then a stop at Huc-a-Poo’s, then home.

Saturday

We spent the morning talking about mobile apps and their place in the WordPress ecosystem, as well as making the dashboard a better experience when viewed in a mobile browser.

Lunch: Went to AJ’s and ate on the deck. Continued talking about mobile.? This eventually morphed a bit into a discussion about the lines between .org/.com.

Core team at lunch at AJ’s Dockside

After lunch we talked about the default theme for 2012, including what it should do/be that our current themes don’t already accomplish, and the process for its creation. Breakouts followed. One was focused on multisitemultisite Used to describe a WordPress installation with a network of multiple blogs, grouped by sites. This installation type has shared users tables, and creates separate database tables for each blog (wp_posts becomes wp_0_posts). See also network, blog, site, while the other was focused on hosting/diagnostics/health check. We tested doing a Google Hangout with screensharing as a way to collaborate more effectively throughout the year, and agreed we would try to do them once a month. For dinner we got takeout BBQ from Gerald’s Pig & Shrimp. We pretended @ryan was with us by playing a video of him from last year’s meetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area.. Afterward, Koop gave a primer on JavaScriptJavaScript JavaScript or JS is an object-oriented computer programming language commonly used to create interactive effects within web browsers. WordPress makes extensive use of JS for a better user experience. While PHP is executed on the server, JS executes within a user’s browser. https://www.javascript.com/..

Sunday

When we started this morning, we tried to at least quickly hit the things we hadn’t gotten to yet, since today was the last day. These included: Google stuff, core plugins, how leadership in core does/does not translate to leadership of the whole project, wordpress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ site, pairs (creating process to make collaborative/non-solo development the norm), and CMS stuff.

Since a lot of us were pretty interested in making the theme customization process a focus of the next release, we starting identifying what the chunks of that might look like under the new process and with people working in pairs/teams. We continued talking about this over brunch at the Tybee Island Social Club, where @nacin and @dkoopersmith drank bacon bloody marys.

Bacon Bloody Mary

Should Nacin eat the bacon or drink the bloody mary? He can’t decide.

After brunch, @markjaquith and @dd32 left for the airport, and @joncave and @azaozz left two hours later. Bye bye, core team!

Now we begin a 2nd mini meetup. Matt, Nacin, Koop, and I are staying, and have been joined by @otto42 and @chexee. The next couple of days we’ll be doing some planning and starting projects to make visiting wordpress.org a better, more useful experience. ? Tonight, though, everyone is catching up on some individual work after a week of long days.

We’ll post summaries of the specific core meetup discussions over the coming week.

#wptybee, #core-team-meetup