Documentation review: WordPress Events in Dashboard

A long time ago, I promised to gather page to MeetupMeetup Meetup groups are locally-organized groups that get together for face-to-face events on a regular basis (commonly once a month). Learn more about Meetups in our Meetup Organizer Handbook. handbook about WordPress Events visible on Dashboard. I finally got it done and before adding it to Handbook, I’d like to ask you to review it on Google Drive 🙂

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JPaAQHY5EOLjzyB94E-mKeKY998j_bnL3u4u3PTsgXg/edit?usp=sharing

This documentation basically gathers together information that has been in multiple locations (comments, SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. discussions etc) previously. It tries to answer questions about what is the WordPress Events listing, how it works, why it exists, how to debug it and where to report problems.

@andreamiddleton has written excellent WordPress Events and News widget FAQ which is merged into this documentation. I propose that we deprecate that page and just link it to the new Handbook page, if it will be added. I’d also propose this documentation to be added into WordPress Meetup organizers handbook as a new page.

Leave your comments/suggestions on this post so that we can discuss changes or improvements. Deadline for comments and discussion is 2018-08-16.

#nearby-wordpress-events, #wp-admin, #documentation

Proposal: existing documentation to be merged into the handbooks

We some seriously amazing content in the blog that could be merged or at least linked into the handbooks.

Here is the list with the actions that I propose we take:

Proposed WordCamp Editorial Calendar

Create a new page in the WordCampWordCamp 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. Organiser Handbook > Publicity > Website Content ✅

Promoting Your Local WordPress Meetup

Create a new page in the MeetupMeetup Meetup groups are locally-organized groups that get together for face-to-face events on a regular basis (commonly once a month). Learn more about Meetups in our Meetup Organizer Handbook. Organiser Handbook > Promoting your Meetup ✅

What makes a WordPress Meetup Great?

Create a new page in the Meetup Organiser Handbook > Building and growing a meetup > A collection of videos to inspire you ✅

do_action Zurich 2018

Link in the Meetup Organiser Handbook > do_action: Charity Hackaton ✅

WordCamp Design Kit Producing assets and finding a…

Merge in the WordCamp Organiser Handbook > Publicity ✅

Collecting ideas & methods for Meetups promotion / growth

Merge in Meetup Organiser Handbook > Summarise together with the “Promoting your local WordPress Meetup” post above ✅

Handbook Page: WordCamp Marketing/Ticket Sales Tips

Merge in the WordCamp Organiser Handbook > Publicity ✅

Contributor Day Room Signage

Merge in the Contributor DayContributor 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/. Organiser Handbook ✅

Contributor Night – An experiment in Torino, Italy

Add a page in the Contributor Day Organiser Handbook > Other Contributor Events ✅

Also: change the name of the handbook from Contributor Day to Contributor Events ✅

Deadline: July 22nd. If no one objects or points out different possible places to have this content, I will go on and do it 🙂

Thanks!

#documentation, #handbook

Camptix Notify functionality – documentation review

The task that was assigned to be at WCEUWCEU WordCamp Europe. The European flagship WordCamp event. was to draft documentation for the Camptix Notify functionality of WordCampWordCamp 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. sites, including some notes on the date format for the Purchased Date field in the filterFilter Filters are one of the two types of Hooks https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Hooks. They provide a way for functions to modify data of other functions. They are the counterpart to Actions. Unlike Actions, filters are meant to work in an isolated manner, and should never have side effects such as affecting global variables and output. conditions.

I’ve tried to keep the documentation as non technical as possible, but as a developer I would appreciate feedback from the rest of the community.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/12LP506qXGPOcwBNpsiThTavPwLptfJe4BILjMp7V5U0/edit?usp=sharing

I therefore ask anyone interested to review the document via Google Drive and leave your comments/suggestions on this post so that we can discuss changes or improvements.

I’d like to give this a two week deadline for comments until Friday the 13th (dun dun dun!) of July, in order to move the process of having this included into the WordCamp docs along promptly.

Thanks

#camptix, #documentation

Updating the Community Team Glossary

If you’ve never had a look at the Community Team Glossary, you can have a look at it here. It’s not what one would call…complete. By way of example, here is the Glossary of the Core team.

In our team meeting today, we spoke about improving our glossary and making it more relevant, practical and useful. I’m sure everyone would agree that this would be a valuable thing to do. The questions are then when we do this and what we include in the glossary – both of which I’m happy to answer here 🙂

What words/terms should we include in the glossary?

We need your input for this. Please comment on here with any words that you feel would be valuable in a glossary for the Community Team. You don’t need to provide definitions, so list any words or terms that you think we should define or that you are confused about.

When will we define these terms?

We will be making this a project for the WordCampWordCamp 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. Europe Contributor DayContributor 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/., which is taking place on 15 June. So if you could submit as many words and terms as you can before that date, then the Community Team at the Contributor Day can get to work on defining those terms and adding them to the glossary.

As always, a document like this will always be evolving, so work won’t stop on it after the Contributor Day, but it will be a huge head start in getting it together and complete.

#documentation #docs

Full-day Events

There are some specialized events that we have talked about standardizing/supporting/organizing through this team that we haven’t really had a structure for because we were stuck in the habit of thinking of two extremes: a two-hour MeetupMeetup Meetup groups are locally-organized groups that get together for face-to-face events on a regular basis (commonly once a month). Learn more about Meetups in our Meetup Organizer Handbook. event, or a full weekend WordCampWordCamp 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.. Many of us have been involved with events that fall somewhere in the middle – full day workshops, hackathons, contributor days, etc. – but without resources in place for how to handle these things, there has been confusion about what support is available, what to call things, and in some cases, even what’s allowed.

I’d like to start formalizing some of these event types and creating documentation (event guides) to make it easy for people want to organize them to get started. A lot of these have happened in multiple locations already, with each location putting their own spin on things and a variable level of documentation. For the sake of getting something together that we can put into a Meetup organizers handbook with instructions on what’s involved with each event type, I’d like to get a few people willing to put on an event and document the process so that we can start building our library of event guides. To that end…

Charity Hackathon
@hlashbrooke has run several charity hackathons in South Africa, where volunteers build sites for nonprofit organizations. This is something that also has happened at a number of WordCamps, as well as through Meetup groups or as standalone independent events. This event type is much simpler than a WordCamp, but requires more support than a 1 to 2 hour meetup (for example, a full-day venue rental is harder to get donated). He will be partnering with Erica Kuschel from Austin to put on one of these events in Austin this April, and he will create a draft event guide to help other people organize the same kind of event.

Note: We will want to come up with a standard name for describing this kind of event. there are some connotations with the word charity that make it less appealing for some people, and similarly the word hackathon has been known to alienate people who are not hard-coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. developers. For this event, Hugh will be using the name do_actiondo_action do_action hackathons are community-organised events that are focussed on using WordPress to give deserving charitable organisations their own online presence. Learn more on doaction.org., which he has used at past events, but we might need a clearer, more general label for the event guide that. Community build-a-thon? Suggestions welcome in the comments.

Contributor DayContributor 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/./Weekend
Doing a standalone contributor day (or weekend) is something quite a few communities have done successfully, and in some cases on a regular basis. I know that @miss_jwo created documentation for this event type on independent site, and there are several members of this team who have organized contributor days in the past. It would be great to see who is interested in taking point on/contributing to an official event guide, and go from there. I’m also doing half day contributor thing as part of the support team contributor weekend this Saturday, so if anyone else is organizing something for that weekend, maybe we could pool our thoughts and experiences.

Full-Day Workshops
There have been so many of these, and yet we don’t have any documentation on what’s involved in running one. New user workshops, theme-building workshops, speaker skills workshops… Within the full day workshop categoryCategory The 'category' taxonomy lets you group posts / content together that share a common bond. Categories are pre-defined and broad ranging., there are quite a few variations so it would be great to develop an event planning guide for each type. This particular event type would be supported by the training scripts being developed on the training team for standardized curriculums, for the sake of an event guide we are mostly concerned with the logistics of planning and running the event. Is there anyone who would like to take point on the event guides for this event type? I have done several full-day workshops as have many others, so I think there’s plenty of information available, it’s just a matter of getting it all together in one place. This event type would also include workshops for specialized audiences such as kids, senior citizens, veterans, etc. If no one volunteers to take point on this, we’ll create it after we do our pilot workshops (Feb-March) to prepare for a one-day workshop with Hack the Hood this spring.

Are there other full-day events that you’ve done (or seen others do) that would benefit from an event guide? Tell us in the comments!

#community-management, #documentation, #event-types

Better WordCamp.org Docs

One of the projects we identified to improve WordCamp.org was to have better documentation.

Sometimes organizers aren’t aware of the intended approach to building a WordCampWordCamp 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. site, or of the tools that are available, so they end up doing things the hard way, or in a way creates a worse experience for participants.

For example, if an organizer doesn’t make use of the custom post typeCustom 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. for speakers, then those speakers won’t get a badge on their 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/ profile, and the upcoming Android app won’t be able to display speakers for that camp.

We do have a lot of written documentation on plan.wordcamp.org, along with some videos, but there are many ways that it falls short.

 

Problems

Here are a few of the problems we’ve already discussed, but please leave comments with any others that you see.

  • There’s a lot of documentation, and most people won’t read through everything.
  • Organizers have to visit an external site to reference things while working on their WordCamp site.
  • We’re always adding new features and iterating on old ones, but there isn’t a good way for returning organizers to know what’s changed since they used the site last year.
  • Building a site on WordCamp.org is different than what most organizers expect, so they need to shift their mindset in order to not fight against the grain. For example, organizers can’t upload custom plugins or create child themes; the majority of customization is done with CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. and our custom tools.

Brainstorming Solutions

Here are a few ideas, but please add more in the comments, and leave your feedback on these.

  • Bring documentation into wp-admin, in the form on Contextual Help and Admin Pointers.
    • Should we bring all documentation into wp-admin, or just certain types (like cheat sheets)? If everything is in wp-admin, it will be hard to get an overview. Maybe a hybrid approach?
    • We should probably create a new “WordCamp.org Help” contextual tab rather than integrating into CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.’s generic “Help” tab, because that would be more discoverable and less cluttered.
    • Duplicating documentation in multiple places would be harder to maintain, and they’d likely get out of sync.
    • Hard-coding documentation into a pluginPlugin 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 (rather than the current WordPress pages) would make it impossible for non-developers to update and improve the documentation, which would be a bottleneck. Maybe we should build a way to programmatically import documentation from Plan into wp-admin? It might need to be pages specifically crafted for wp-admin screens, though, rather than the kind of lengthy articles we have now.
  • Add more videos, because sometimes those are easier to digest than long articles.
    • Are there specific types of content that are better for video than others?
    • Would this have a negative impact on non-English speakers?
  • Encourage organizers to ask questions in #events on SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. when they don’t know something, and when they’re not sure if there’s a better way to do something?
  • Create an demo site that is “perfect”, and then make a video walking through it, showing the best way to set things up.
    • We could also give organizers read-only access to it, so they could explore and play around.
  • Make the system more intuitive, so that formal documentation is less necessary.
    • For example, we currently pre-populate new sites with default pages to provide examples of common content and shortcodeShortcode A shortcode is a placeholder used within a WordPress post, page, or widget to insert a form or function generated by a plugin in a specific location on your site. usage.
    • What other things could we do?
  • Create a page that has an index of all the significant changes since their last camp. Organizers could visit the page and enter a date range, then get a short description of all the changes, with links to their full documentation.
    • One downside to this it would require extra time from developers, each time they make a change, and we already have limited time. It might be possible for volunteers to do a lot of it, but it’d still require extra developer time to inform the volunteers about it and give them all of the information they’d need to document it.
    • Another idea would be a mailing list where a message gets sent out each time something new is released. A big downside to that, though, would be that organizers would probably forget most of the info by the time their next camp rolls around.
    • Another idea would be to create a video once a quarter that walks through all the changes in the past three months. This has the same drawback as the original idea, but it might be a better format, and doing it once a quarter might be easier doing it than every time a change happens.

What are you thoughts on all of that? What other problems and solutions do you see?

 

Everyone is encouraged to participate in the discussion, but I’m pinging the people who took part in the previous discussions to make sure they don’t miss the post: @ryelle, @harbormark, @chanthaboune, @nvwd, @kovshenin, @rafaehlers, @davidjlaietta, @dimensionmedia, @iandstewart, @miss_jwo, @topher1kenobe, @jenmylo, @georgestephanis, @valeriosza, @jb510, @jleuze, @robertnienhuis, @cheffheid, @dnelle, @danielgcarvalho@brettshumaker

#documentation, #improving-wordcamp-org, #official-websites, #wordcamp-org

WordCamp Toolkit Updates

All timelines have been created and are now being field tested/tracked for accuracy by the team. We’ve also been in the process of collecting existing email text and tip sheets to be included in the toolkit. We have collected most of the needed text for Volunteer and Speaker Wrangling communications and are focusing this week on Sponsor Wrangling.

Next up for us will be draft post writing assignments for http://plan.wordcamp.org/ as well as identifying which posts belong in automated milestone emails for Lead Organizers.

Leave your thoughts in the comments and, if you want to help get this toolkit on its feet, we have weekly meetings Wednesday at 19:00 UTC in the #community channel on SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/.!

#documentation, #wordcamp, #wordcamps

How to Approve Videos – Now easier to understand!

Howdy Mod Squad!

With @myroseapple‘s help (and awesome video walk through!) we now have a new set on instructions on how to approve videos. Hopefully these will be a lot easier to follow (and refer back to) than the old documentation we used to have.

Take a look:
http://wptvmods.wordpress.com/moderator-handbook/approving-videos/

In addition to that, I would like to propose that we start building out something of a Moderator Handbook (see new widgetWidget A WordPress Widget is a small block that performs a specific function. You can add these widgets in sidebars also known as widget-ready areas on your web page. WordPress widgets were originally created to provide a simple and easy-to-use way of giving design and structure control of the WordPress theme to the user. at the top of our sidebarSidebar A sidebar in WordPress is referred to a widget-ready area used by WordPress themes to display information that is not a part of the main content. It is not always a vertical column on the side. It can be a horizontal rectangle below or above the content area, footer, header, or any where in the theme.) including this new page, and adding sections on the following:

  • Moderating Comments – What to approve, how to respond, clearing out spam, etc.
  • Internationalization/accessibilityAccessibility 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) – What to to with non-english videos, How to moderate and approve subtitles, etc.
  • Video Standards – Policies regarding technical quality, as well as issues around GPLGPL GPL is an acronym for GNU Public License. It is the standard license WordPress uses for Open Source licensing https://wordpress.org/about/license/. The GPL is a ‘copyleft’ license https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.en.html. This means that derivative work can only be distributed under the same license terms. This is in distinction to permissive free software licenses, of which the BSD license and the MIT License are widely used examples. and community compliance.
  • Managing wordpress.tv – The nuts and bolts of how the site workswhat all the tags, categories, menus, and widgets do, how to keep the home page up to date with fresh content, etc.

I am sure there can/should be others, so if you think I’m leaving something out, please let me know. Also, if docs are your thing, you are welcome to join in and help, so give a shout out in the comments.

#documentation, #handbook, #wordpress-tv

Community Expectations

Anyone who’s paid attention to other open sourceOpen Source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. projects over the past year or two has seen the development of codes of conduct for almost every project/conference series that didn’t already have one. We’re behind here, for several reasons.

  • Our project tends to mostly be filled with respectful, kind people, so many people don’t feel we need a code of conductCode of Conduct “A code of conduct is a set of rules outlining the norms, rules, and responsibilities or proper practices of an individual party.” - Wikipedia.
  • Some people feel a code of conduct sets up the notion that we expect people to be inappropriate jerks, and that will make people not want to join us.
  • We have lots of libertarians that don’t like centralized rules and policies. 🙂

For these reasons we have tended toward generalities rather than stating behavioral rules in specific detail.

We’re outgrowing this.

WordCamps, meetupsMeetup Meetup groups are locally-organized groups that get together for face-to-face events on a regular basis (commonly once a month). Learn more about Meetups in our Meetup Organizer Handbook., forums, irc, tracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. tickets, blog comments, and more all have the potential to be home to conduct unbecoming a WordPress community member. But how is anyone supposed to know what we expect without having been around?

And even if they have been around, the people who’ve been around longer have inside jokes and know each other well enough that they might say things tongue-in-cheek that newcomers think are being said seriously and take in a way other than intended. Without any evil intentions, people who’ve never thought about what it’s like to be a member of a minority or anything other than able-bodied/financially-stable/caucasian/American/male/heterosexual/bearded/whatever-the-majority-is might not realize how unwelcoming some language or imagery may be to those who are different.

To that end, I want us to have a page on 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/ that lays out our Community Expectations. A little less harsh-sounding than Code of Conduct, the Community Expectations should lay out what kinds of behavior are welcome/encouraged/expected in the project/at events, and provide a way for people to let us know if we fail to live up to these expectations so that we can continually improve our ability to welcome new contributors.

This is part of the diversity initiative. I’d like to assemble a small team of folks to work together on creating a draft of this document that we can then share with the broader contributor community for comment. To ensure that we are sensitive to language affecting multiple groups of people, I’d like this small team to itself be diverse. If you’re interested in helping draft this document, please leave a comment on this post and I’ll be in touch next week.

If you don’t want to be on the team that works on the document but you’d like to make sure we take something or other into account while we draft it, feel free to leave suggestions in the comments as well.

#diversity, #documentation, #policy