Over the past few weeks I’ve been getting in touch with people who I’d like to see involved with the handbooks. I’m going to continue to do this over the next few weeks as we get started on working. I just wanted to give you an update on teams and templates.
Teams
Here’s who we’ve got so far:
[update: am adding more people to teams as they contact me]
Core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.
Daniel Bachuber
Japh Thomson
Support
Andrea Rennick
Scott Basgaard
Christine Rondeau
Dean Robinson
Phil Erb
Mika Epstein
Plugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party Dev
Pippin Williamson
Dougal Campbell
Tom McFarlin
Thomas Griffin
Maor Chasen
Justin Sainton
Theme Dev
Chris Reynolds
Tammie Lister
Rachel Baker
Jay Hoffman
Theme Review
(no one so far 🙁 )
Events
Brandon Dove
Ryan Imel
Aaron Jorbin
Sara Rosso
Mobile
(no one so far 🙁 ) Except Isaac?
Abhishek Ghosh
Polyglots
Zé Fontainhas
Docs
Andrea Rennick
Christine Rondeau
Dean Robinson
Me!
These things span all of the handbooks:
General help
Kari Leigh Marucchi
Abbie Sanderson
UX UX is an acronym for User Experience - the way the user uses the UI. Think ‘what they are doing’ and less about how they do it./UI UI is an acronym for User Interface - the layout of the page the user interacts with. Think ‘how are they doing that’ and less about what they are doing.
Shane Pearlman
@helenyhou or other person from UI
Mel Choyce
Accessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility)
Esmi
We definitely need more people so if you know of anyone please send them this post. Or drop me an email: siobhan at wordsforwp dot com and I’ll get in touch with them personally.
Template
After having chats with different people in different contributor groups and reviewing the material that we have already, I’ve come up with a very loose schema that I think will work across the handbooks.
Introduction
Requirements
All of the things you need to start contributing to this area
Tools
Useful tools to get started
Pathways
The different ways that you can get involved in this area
Tutorials & Guides
Practical guides to doing what you need to do
Reference
Glossaries etc (maybe useful email addresses etc?)
Best Practice
Coding Standards, Best Practices, UI Guidelines, UX Guidelines, Accessibility
Credits
Lists the contributors to that manual.
This is a starting point, so please do make suggestions based on your own experience. There’s always a danger when you’re creating something generic that you lose the specific, which is why I’ve tried to keep the schema as loose as possible.
Some other things
I have a chat with Brad and Pippin about the plugin development handbook. They had some great ideas to keep in mind:
- We should use practical examples of code that will help people to learn
- We need a syntax highlighter of some description. We did discuss using Gists but then our docs are reliant on Github GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ and that not something we want
I think there may have been other things so Brad and Pippin if I’ve forgotten something please chime in. Soon we’ll get into discussions about the particularities of specific handbooks I’m sure, but I wanted to note these here for the record
Next Steps?
Next steps are as follows:
- Come up with schedule and workflow – I’ve got some stuff written down on this but will save for another post! Let’s aim for long term – we don’t want to burn ourselves out.
- Schedule some google hangouts with contributor groups and volunteers to discuss best practices
- Develop table of contents
Okay, phew! That was a long post again. Let me know if I’ve missed anything, please do add any suggestions or tell me where things can be improved.
Most importantly, spread the word. This is an exciting project in its beginning stages and over the next year we’ll be able to create something we’re genuinely proud of and that gets more people contributing to WordPress.
