We had our first weekly slack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. chat on Wednesday (5:30pm UTC+1) to discuss the WordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Talks 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. The archive starts here.
On our agenda:
- One CPT or two? balancing the existing with the incoming.
- User profiles & login
- Automation: workload? And should we aim for v1, or can it wait? (dependant on above discussion)
- Questions, getting everyone up to speed
- Reporting: how should discussion during these chats be archived?
Present: Mathieu Viet, Andrea Middleton, Josh Levinson, Veselin Nikolov, Kelly Dwan & myself, with input from Tom Nowell, Dominik Shilling & John James Jacoby.
1. The Custom Post Type WordPress can hold and display many different types of content. A single item of such a content is generally called a post, although post is also a specific post type. Custom Post Types gives your site the ability to have templated posts, to simplify the concept. debate
The WordCamp Talks plugin introduces a new CPT, on top of the existing Sessions, currently called “Talks”. The debate centered around the pros and the cons of having two separate CPTs, versus combining them into one (ie, rewriting the Talks plugin to utilize the existing Sessions CPT).
Consensus was reached that leaving them as two separate CPTs was more advantageous.
- The two CPTs have different purposes: Talks is for receiving, upvoting/commenting and selecting talks privately; whereas Sessions is for displaying talks and full schedules publicly.
- Each has taxonomy A taxonomy is a way to group things together. In WordPress, some common taxonomies are category, link, tag, or post format. https://codex.wordpress.org/Taxonomies#Default_Taxonomies. and/or meta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. data not used by the other. (although it could be interesting to integrate categorization into Sessions, a separate debate :)).
- Large WordCamps can receive over 200 applications, whereas the final selection is usually no more than 60. From a 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. standpoint, it would be much easier for organizers to manage this reduced final selection than having to scroll through a list of both selected and rejected talks.
- The workload to automate the process of selecting from Talks to publish to Sessions is minimal. So whereas it does create some redundancy, it does not significantly increase the workload for organizers (check boxes, push a button).
- This also means that Talks remains optional, it doesn’t have to be a requirement for organizers to work this way (didn’t come up in discussion, me adding it now :)).
Barring veto from @iandunn 😀 or additional arguments against this approach, we’ll continue development in this direction. Tom Nowell said he would have an alternative proposal – so we’ll discuss it at the next meeting if he’s ready.
2. User profiles & login
The ultimate goal of this plugin is streamlining the entire Call for Papers process for WordCamps. One of its key features is allowing applicants to log on to the site, creating a user profile account, from which they submit multiple talks, edit their talks (time frame defined by organizers), edit their profile at any time and view the ensemble of their submissions.
After much discussion about the best way to integrate and conform to the existing WordCamp sites and Speaker CPT, we are looking to create a single login based on wp.org user profiles. This will have the additional advantage of not only allowing users to submit more than one talk from a single profile, but effectively submit multiple talks to any WordCamp from their single wp.org profile. Brilliant!
What if an applicant doesn’t want to sign up to wp.org? Will this be excluding some people outside of our community from participating?
This question was raised during our work session at Contributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/. during WCUS WordCamp US. The US flagship WordCamp event.. After further discussion we concluded the following:
- In either case, the applicant will have to sign up somewhere, creating an account on one or the other website. They are required to provide us with a certain amount of personal information.
- In the same way that speakers are required to sign waivers, allowing organizers to film them and publish their talks to WordPress.tv, this will become a requirement of participating in an official WordCamp.
Unless strong arguments can be made against a universal login, we will proceed with development in this direction.
How to go about it? We were pointed to the following (thanks, Dom!):
- https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/721
- https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/browser/sites/trunk/common/includes/wporg-sso
- https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/browser/sites/trunk/wordpress.org/public_html/wp-content/themes/pub/wporg-login
3. Automation and feature roadmap
We solved this pretty quickly: no need to wait, automation can be achieved for the v1. This was mainly regarding publishing from Talks to Sessions, but also regarding the Speaker CPT, which we’ll be digging into as we move forward on the login.
4. Reporting
We agreed that this was the best spot to post full reports of our meetings 🙂
If you have comments, ideas, opinions on any of this, please weigh in!
Or if I left anything out or reported sideways, let me know! 🙂
Our next slack chat is schedule Wednesday, December 21 at 5:30pm UTC+1 (Paris time) on the #meta-wordcamp channel. I’ll post a proposed agenda a few minutes before we get started.
The plugin is on github if you want to contribute https://github.com/imath/wordcamp-talks
