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  • Jen Mylo 12:48 pm on December 23, 2011 Permalink
    Tags: core team meetup,   

    Core Team Meetup Recap: Multisite 

    These are the notes from a breakout discussion on multisite at the core meetup with me, @markjaquith, and @nacin. As with all of these discussion summaries, please remember that they’re just discussions. I’m posting the notes for transparency purposes, not to say that these are the only things discussed or decided. I’m working from notes, and sometimes you don’t get everything down when you’re taking notes (next year I’ll record these things instead).

    Multisite!

    Who can lead this joint? Since the merge and Donncha moving on to other things, we had Ron for a cycle, Pete for a cycle, then no one. It would be good to have someone act as component owner.

    Multisite needs parity with the single site experience. Includes UI, UX, copy/strings, install flexibility (subdomain etc), installation ease (add a site).

    First we need to improve the manage/use experience, then fix install stuff and get it into the dashboard to turn on multisite.

    We need a useful global dashboard.

    We need to have flexibility in where sites and networks live — should be able to live wherever you want on one network. Subdomains/subdirectories/mapping/whatever you want, mixed subdomain/subdirectory, custom domains, global permalink consumer/router.

    Need to fix different workflows: adding users to network, adding users to site, invitations. User signup, creation, assignment, invitation all need new flow

    We need parity between plugins and themes. Enable vs activation is confusing, need to improve language, indicators. Need ability to network enable but disable for individual sites. Need to standardize network enable/activate etc for plugins/themes. Network activated plugins don’t show in individual site’s plugin list, which is confusing.

    UX Action Items:

    UX ACTION ITEM — Include network activated plugins in the plugins menu and give message that it is automatically on for the whole network (if admin/have rights to see plugins screen).

    UX ACTION ITEM — Autocomplete usernames or site names for network admin and for superadmin everywhere.

    UX ACTION ITEM — Get multisite tag/indicator on plugins in directory, add multisite specific/required indicator.

    Under the Hood Action Items:

    ACTION ITEM — Get rid of MS-FILES.

    ACTION ITEM — Enable install in subdirectory so you can use externals.

     

    • Frank 1:39 pm on December 23, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Great; i love solutions with mutlisite and i wait now for an global dashboard; current i use the root blog (1) for this job. Great news
      I wish the team mery christmas and really nice new year. Best regards

    • Lauro Faria 1:45 pm on December 23, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Good.
      These are items that interest me.
      An updated website (multisite), to version 3.3, and found some difficulty in managing permissions and what is accessible by users. It may not have found the right plugin. It aims to improve this item?

    • mitcho (Michael 芳貴 Erlewine) 12:25 am on December 28, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      +1 Happy to help as time allows. I’ve been involved with and rolling out more and more Multisite installs… there’s definitely a lot of space for improvement.

  • Jen Mylo 10:53 pm on December 18, 2011 Permalink
    Tags: , core team meetup   

    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 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.

    Dion

    Dion (dd32) modeling the latest swag

    Dion and Andrew

    Dion and Andrew Ozz before lunch

    Lunch: Went to The Sentient Bean in Savannah.

    The Sentient Bean

    The Sentient Bean

    Back patio at the Sentient Bean

    Back patio at the Sentient Bean

    Koop and Mark, Dion and Ozz in the background

    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 IRC.

    Core team town hall video screen cap

    Core 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

    Nacin and Koop on skates

    Nacin, Mark, Jane, Matt, Jon, Daryl

    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

    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 multisite, 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 meetup. Afterward, Koop gave a primer on JavaScript.

    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.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

    Bacon Bloody Mary

    Nacin attempting to consume a 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. Â 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.

     

    • Michael Beckwith (@tw2113) 11:26 pm on December 18, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Very curious to see how the focus on theme customization process turns out, and maybe I can jump in and help a bit with that as it’s one areas I love focusing on.

    • Andrew Nacin 12:12 am on December 19, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Worth nothing a few things:

      First and foremost, that bacon bloody mary was good. Really good. Who cares how you consume it.

      Second, please don’t interpret the lack of a mention of any peculiar topic to mean it wasn’t discussed — only that only so much can fit in one of these posts. For the developers, we had some discussions on security practices and procedures, unit testing, and core architecture (and planning for the future). The word “multisite” escapes with a single mention, but in that meeting we came away with a number of immediate action items, as well as a potential roadmap for the next year. And if you didn’t catch the livestream, you may have also missed that we’ve committed to a JSON API in core to go alongside RSS.

      This was just the day-to-day play-by-play. There’s a lot more we need to write up. Woo.

    • David Johnson 2:46 am on December 19, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Thanks for the recap write-up!

      Any word about backup/restore/migration issues within the WordPress core? It seems like basic security and backup should be in the core installation..but maybe I’m missing something.

      Thank you WordPress core team for allowing the community to be involved and aware of the goings on within WordPress.

      • Jane Wells 2:24 am on December 20, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Security is definitely something that was talked about, but a backup utility is more suited to a plugin than core (though we did discuss the possibility of a core/canonical plugin for backups).

    • Adam W. Warner 2:34 pm on December 19, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      It’s great to get an “insider” view of your meetup, so thanks, the community appreciates it and all the work you all do to make the World a more open and accessible place for many to have their voices heard.

      Also, @Nacin, thanks for the additional mention of Multisite. I’m an avid user and am pleased there will be some additional focus.

    • Lance Willett 3:00 pm on December 19, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Great job with all these newsy updates, Jane. Kudos.

    • mitcho (Michael 芳貴 Erlewine) 3:07 am on December 22, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Wait, is the “Nacin and Koop on skates” photo the answer to my request!?

      Here was the original ticket:
      https://twitter.com/#!/themitcho/status/147901791776935937
      :D :D :D

    • havahula 3:51 am on December 23, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      ok. i’ll bite. where does one get those fancy, baby blue track jackets Dion, Ozz and Matt are wearing? and did Nacin have one too before he drank the bacon bloody mary, which turned his brown?

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