Ian Dunn 3:32 pm on July 9, 2015
Tags: Improving WordCamp.org ( 17 ), official websites, wordcamp.org ( 34 )

Site Cloner v1 is now available

The first tangible outcome of the Improving WordCamp.org project is now available. The Site Cloner lets you browse through screenshots of other 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, and then easily copy the custom CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. from them, so that you don’t have to start a new site from scratch.

Props to @ryelle for building the prototype 🙂

If you’d like to check if out, just open up the CustomizerCustomizer Tool built into WordPress core that hooks into most modern themes. You can use it to preview and modify many of your site’s appearance settings. on your site and click on the Clone Another WordCamp panel. Just be sure to not click the Save button, though, unless you actually want to switch your theme and reset your CSS 🙂

It’s the first version, so there are some known bugs and missing features. If you’d like to help out with those, check out these issues on MetaMeta 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. TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/.:

It’s also important to keep in mind that there will always be some CSS that is specific to each site; maybe it references a page ID, or uses a background image with the original Camp’s logo, etc. So, you’ll still need to do some work to make the CSS fit your site, but this should get you 90% of the way there.

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

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

Ian Dunn 3:45 pm on July 8, 2015
Tags: documentation ( 9 ), Improving WordCamp.org ( 17 ), official websites, wordcamp.org ( 34 )

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

Ian Dunn 11:07 pm on July 2, 2015
Tags: Improving WordCamp.org ( 17 ), official websites, wordcamp.org ( 34 )

Results from the WordCamp.org Tools Follow-Up Survey

The results of the previous survey were unclear about the theme/template question, so I created a new survey to clarify that. The results from that follow-up survey are now in.

The most popular choice was to let organizers build a new theme to meet the specific needs of WordCamps. We’ll also be able to add new page templates to the theme in the future, provided that they meet the criteria discussed earlier.

Once the theme is done, it’ll be reviewed by the MetaMeta 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. team for any security issues, and by the DeputiesProgram Supporter Community Program Supporters (formerly Deputies) are a team of people worldwide who review WordCamp and Meetup applications, interview lead organizers, and keep things moving at WordCamp Central. Find more about program supporters in our Program Supporter Handbook. for general appropriateness, and then made available to everyone on WordCamp.org.

Building a Team

The first step will be to put together a team of organizers who want to build the new theme. Obviously it should have designers and developers, but it could also benefit from UXUX 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. and 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) specialists, and of course lots of people to test it.

If you’re interested in being on the team just leave a comment below, and if you know someone who may be interested, please send them a link to this post.

We’ll need someone from the team to take the lead role, and make sure everything is organized and moving forward. Once we see who’s on the team and what everyone’s skills are, I’ll look for someone who’d be a good fit for that.

Guidelines

The team will have the freedom to build whatever they think is best, but I think we should also agree on some guidelines to ensure the project reflects our community’s values and standards.

The team should be welcoming and open.
- It should be a collaboration from across the community, rather than a small group from one city or company.
- In practical terms, that means development should occur on an open platform like GitHubGitHub 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 by the repository owner. https://github.com/, and communication should take place on this p2 and in the #events 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/.
The theme should serve the many, not the few.
- The goal should be to make something that meets the needs of most organizers, rather than just the needs of the individuals on the team.
- The focus should be more on making it a flexible starter theme for organizers to customize, rather than just something that looks beautiful when it’s first activated. It can (and should) have a great initial design, but the primary goal is to let organizers take it and easily create something that looks totally different.
- The team should solicit feedback from lots of camps to make sure that their needs are addressed.
The project should not be a design-by-committee.
- Input from organizers and contributors should be weighed heavily, but ultimately the team lead should be the one making the final decision on what choices will have the best outcomes for the entire community.
The theme should meet the relevant standards:
- WordPress.org Theme Repository
- Accessibility
- Coding
- There may be a few cases where parts of the above aren’t applicable or there’s a compelling reason to make an exception, though.
It should be a theme only.
- It shouldn’t bundle custom post types, shortcodes or other functionality.
- Having said that, the team should feel free to contribute as much as they’d like to the existing plugins, provided those contributions will also work with the other themes on WordCamp.org.
It should be thoroughly tested.
- Because it will be customized by lots of organizing teams, we’ll need to maintain backwards compatibility, which will limit the kinds of changes that can be made in the future. That makes it very important to test well up front.
- “Testing” in this case doesn’t just mean testing the theme’s internal correctness, but also testing how easy it will be for other organizers to create new designs on top of the theme.
- It should be betaBeta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process.-tested with a handful of camps before launching to everyone. If fixing any problems are found during the beta period that would require breaking backwards compatibility, then we’ll be able to do that and manually update the beta sites.

If anyone thinks there should be any changes to those guidelines, please leave a comment so we can all discuss it.

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

Ian Dunn 7:32 pm on June 16, 2015
Tags: Git ( 2 ), Improving WordCamp.org ( 17 ), Jetpack CSS Editor ( 4 ), official websites, wordcamp.org ( 34 )

Editing WordCamp CSS Locally with Git

One of the Improving WordCamp.org projects is to let organizers develop their CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. locally, and then commit it to a version control system like GitGit Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency. Git is easy to learn and has a tiny footprint with lightning fast performance. Most modern plugin and theme development is being done with this version control system. https://git-scm.com/, and have it automatically updated on their WordCamp.org site. This is the project that I think will make the most impact for organizing teams with experienced developers.

The benefits are that:

You avoid all of the pain points of editing CSS in a browser.
You can use whatever IDE and other tools that you normally use.
You get all the benefits of a version control system, like easier/safer collaboration, history, and a structured approach.

So, I’d like to discuss the best way to implement a system like that.

Implementing a solution

After thinking about it for awhile, this is the best approach I’ve come up with:

(Note: This process has been updated since it was originally published, to incorporate feedback from the comments.)

Add a new wp-admin screen under the Appearance menu, called something like “Remote CSS”. It will have a field where you can enter the URLURL A specific web address of a website or web page on the Internet, such as a website’s URL www.wordpress.org for a CSS file, and a button to pull CSS from that repository and enqueue it locally. The CSS file can be in a source control repository like Git, but it doesn’t have to be.
The CSS file can be named anything, and it can be built from supporting SASS/LESS/etc files, but only the CSS file will be used by WordCamp.org; everything else will be ignored.
The contents of CSS file will be passed through Jetpack’s CSS sanitization functions, and if there’s anything left, the safe CSS will be cached. If there are any errors while fetching the file, the process will abort to avoid overriding the known-good version that’s already stored on WordCamp.org.
When front-end pages are loaded, the cached CSS will be enqueued as a extra stylesheet, similar to how Jetpack’s Custom CSS is enqueued.
To automate updates, there will also be an endpoint listening for webhook notifications of pushes to source control repositories. If the files changed in the pushed commits include the CSS file, the 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. will automatically fetch the latest version, sanitize it, and cache it. Updates will be limited to once every 3 minutes, to prevent abuse. Rate-limited notifications should be queued and acted on once the limit has expired.
If the fieldon the Remote CSS screen for the CSS file is empty, we’ll display step-by-step instructions for setting up the CSS file, webhook, and a local WordCamp.org sandbox. If the file is hosted on GitHubGitHub 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 by the repository owner. https://github.com/, we’ll also recommend enabling two factor authentication, to mitigate the risk of a compromised account leading to CSS defacement or other malicious changes.
A new metaMeta 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. box could be added to the Appearance > Custom CSS page to advertise the option of using a remote repository.

Does anybody see any problems with that approach, have a different idea, or have any other feedback?

#git, #improving-wordcamp-org, #jetpack-css-editor, #official-websites, #wordcamp-org

Jen 3:58 pm on June 15, 2015
Tags: official websites, themes ( 8 ), wordcamp.org ( 34 )

1-Question WordCamp.org Themes Survey

Ian posted this follow up survey in a comment below, but since I’m thinking most people won’t see it there, wanted to post again. It’s a 1-question survey about WordCamp.org themes, as a follow up to the last survey. It will take less that a minute, I promise! Just put the three choices in the order you think they should be and click submit.

Go do it: http://wordcampcentral.polldaddy.com/s/improving-wordcamp-org-tools-clarification

#official-websites, #themes, #wordcamp-org

Ian Dunn 11:36 am on June 10, 2015
Tags: Improving WordCamp.org ( 17 ), maintenance, official websites, security ( 2 ), wordcamp.org ( 34 )

Allowing Custom PHP and JavaScript on WordCamp.org

By far the most common request in the WordCamp.org tools survey results was for the ability to write custom PHPPHP PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. https://www.php.net/manual/en/index.php and 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. This is definitely understandable, because being limited to only modifying CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. does significantly restrict what you can do with your site.

Why not allow custom PHP and JavaScript?

The reason that this restriction exists is because there would be very serious security and maintenance implications if we were to open things up.

Security is very hard, even for experienced developers. Everybody makes a mistake at least occasionally, and many developers don’t realize how often they do.

There’s no doubt that allowing unreviewed PHP or JavaScript would introduce critical vulnerabilities, not just to WordCamp.org, but to the rest of the 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/ infrastructure as well, and even to regular WordPress sites interacting with the infrastructure.

WordCamp.org is connected to the rest of WordPress.org in several key ways, and the right kind of vulnerability (or combination of vulnerabilities) could allow an attacker to do some pretty scary things, like silently stealing password hashes or authorization cookies. If they targeted someone with commit access to CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress., WordPress.org, or a popular 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., then the results would be severe.

Of course, we have access controls, monitoring, and other systems in place to minimize the chance of an attack and mitigate its effectiveness, but the essential threat is there and can’t be downplayed.

Why not just review custom code before it’s committed?

We just don’t have the resources to review that much code. There are only two developers who handle the vast majority of the work on WordCamp.org, and both of us also have responsibilities on other projects. So, we have roughly the equivalent of one full time developer. There were 80 WordCamps in 2014, and that number grows every year.

Conducting a thorough security audit and code review takes a significant amount of time, and simply isn’t possible with the resources we have.

Imagine giving hundreds of developers access to one of your high profile sites, or committing to review hundreds of themes and plugins every year while still trying to build new features and iterate on existing ones.

What makes the most impact?

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 are tools that help organizers communicate with attendees. It’s great to have a design the community can take pride in, and working on the site can definitely be a community-building experience, but volunteer hours are limited. It’s best to focus on things that will inspire and connect attendees at the event, rather than making the website perfect.

At the end of the day, attendees will be helped the most by the sessions, workshops, networking, and contributing that goes on at the event.

The goal of WordCamp.org is to give organizing teams something that works out of the box and facilitates all of the basic conference services that most WordCamps need, so that you can spend your limited time on the event, rather than the website for the event.

Solutions that benefit everyone

Allowing organizers to write custom PHP/JavaScript isn’t the real goal, it’s just a means to an end; and I think there are better ways to get there.

For the most part, all of our camps have very similar needs, so rather than each one re-inventing the wheel on their own, it’s much more efficient if we collaborate on solutions that work for everybody.

The survey results helped us identify the worst pain points with the current tools, and we’re planning solutions to improve the CSS editing experience, to give more theme/template options to choose from, and to be able to easily clone another camp’s site instead of having to start from scratch. The feedback on all of those was that they’d have a huge impact on everyone’s ability to create the sites they want.

I think that focusing our time and energy there is going to be much better for everyone in the long term. If you’d like to help move those projects forward, please check out the survey recap for next steps.

And if there’s a project that would benefit everybody, but it’s not on that list, you can always work with the Community Team to build a consensus for it, and organize a group of developers from local communities to contribute it. You don’t have to be a developer yourself; many projects need people to organize everything, create designs, write documentation, perform user testing, etc.

#improving-wordcamp-org, #maintenance, #official-websites, #security, #wordcamp-org

Ian Dunn 11:36 am on June 10, 2015
Tags: Improving WordCamp.org ( 17 ), official websites, wordcamp.org ( 34 )

WordCamp.org Tools Survey Results

The results from the WordCamp.org tools survey are in. Each PDF below has a chart with the totals, along with the anonymous feedback that was given.

Allowing Custom PHPPHP PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. https://www.php.net/manual/en/index.php and 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

By far the most common feedback was about the desire to write custom PHP and JavaScript. That deserves to be discussed, but it’s a big enough topic that it should have its own conversation, so I started another post with a detailed explanation of the reasons behind the limitation.

How well does Jetpack’s CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. editor meet your needs?

A surprising number of organizers were happy with the editor (62%), but that still leaves almost 40% who aren’t.
The most common frustrations were losing your place when the page reloads to save changes, and having changes overwritten when multiple people are editing at the same time. Both of those were problems we identified as things to fix if we choose to focus on improving Jetpack rather than building an alternative solution.

If we were to improve the CSS-editing experience, which approach would you prefer?

Supporting a local development workflow was more popular by 10% (actually, a bit more if you include several of the “Other” answers that were similar).
I think it’s likely that the people who voted for improving Jetpack are mostly happy with the editor, but just wish it were better; while people who voted for an alternative approach aren’t really happy at all. So, improving Jetpack would make a moderate impact, but building the alternative approach would make a big one. Based on that, I think we should pursue the local development workflow.
Jetpack won’t be going away, of course, and it will still receive any improvements that ship with future versions. So if you’d like to see the CSS Editor issues resolved, you can still send pull requests to Jetpack, or encourage developers in your local community to do so.
Several people suggested we do both, and of course the two options aren’t mutually exclusive, but we do have very limited resources, so we need to prioritize the things that will make the most impact and do those first.
People overwhelmingly requested GitGit Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency. Git is easy to learn and has a tiny footprint with lightning fast performance. Most modern plugin and theme development is being done with this version control system. https://git-scm.com/(Hub) over SubversionSVN Apache Subversion (often abbreviated SVN, after its command name svn) is a software versioning and revision control system. Software developers use Subversion to maintain current and historical versions of files such as source code, web pages, and documentation. Its goal is to be a mostly compatible successor to the widely used Concurrent Versions System (CVS). WordPress core and the wordpress.org released code are all centrally managed through SVN. https://subversion.apache.org/.. I’d like to see us explore this first, since most teams are much more familiar with Git than SVNSVN Apache Subversion (often abbreviated SVN, after its command name svn) is a software versioning and revision control system. Software developers use Subversion to maintain current and historical versions of files such as source code, web pages, and documentation. Its goal is to be a mostly compatible successor to the widely used Concurrent Versions System (CVS). WordPress core and the wordpress.org released code are all centrally managed through SVN. https://subversion.apache.org/., which makes SVN more of a barrier than a benefit. I can foresee there being some logistical challenges that we wouldn’t face with Subversion, but it’s worth a shot.
See the Next Steps section at the end if you’re interested in helping out with this.

To have more options when customizing your site, which would you prefer?

Page templates were the favorite choice by a wide margin, but I’m worried that I didn’t word this question very clearly, and that may have skewed the results. I assumed that everyone would already be familiar with the previous discussion that contains details on the proposal, but some of the responses make it sound like some people thought that “have the ability to create custom page templates” meant that they could freely upload unreviewed custom templates, which isn’t what had been we originally discussed.

The templates would have to meet certain criteria, and be reviewed for security and other concerns before they could be added to WordCamp.org. We wouldn’t want to end up with dozens of templates that are only relevant to a single camp, or to have to review new templates for every site, so I think we’d have to require that the templates be generic enough to be reused by other camps, and that they only be created when there is a significant need that can’t be accomplished with CSS alone.

To clarify, I started a new survey with just this question, but better descriptions of the answers. I also added a new option, which incorporates one of the suggestions from the survey, which was to allow a group of organizers to build a new custom theme to fit the specific needs of WordCamps, which would then be reviewed and made available to all camps.

Please take that survey to help us move forward with this project; it closes at midnight UTC on June 16th.

Several people suggested that we add more themes and custom page templates, which is an option, but unless there are enough volunteers to work of both in parallel, we’ll need to prioritize the one that makes the most impact first.

Allowing inline SVGs was another thing that was mentioned several times. WordCamp.org doesn’t actually blockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. them, WordPress itself does. SVGs are awesome in a lot of ways, but they’re not the benign images most developers think of them as; they’re really XML applications that can run arbitrary JavaScript and embed external resources.

Once Core finds a way to safely allow them to be uploaded, though, WordCamp.org will automatically inherit the solution. In the mean time, you can still use SVGs as background images via CSS, which has most of the benefits but without the same security concerns.

Of the four projects identified in the make/Community posts, how much would each of them benefit you?

D’oh, comments were disabled for this question, that was a mistake on my part. Please leave them on this post if you’ve got any feedback.

All of them ranked pretty well, so it looks like we picked good projects. Improving the CSS-editing experience and adding more themes/templates were the most popular, followed by cloning a site and then docs.

Is there anything that would benefit you more than those 4 projects?

There were a lot of comments here, but no big themes among them, and many of them would actually be solved by the proposed projects, so I think we should stick with the ones we’ve got. This is still a good list of things to keep in mind for the future, though.

Do you have any other comments or feedback?

This one also has some good feedback, but nothing that would shift our direction.

Existing Tools You Might Not Know About

There were a handful of answers that requested tools we already have:

The Tagregator 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. pulls in social media posts with your hashtag from Twitter, Instagram, Flickr and Google+. Check out the “Social Media Stream” page that automatically gets created on new sites.
You can e-mail attendees based on discount codes and other filters with CampTix. Look for the Tickets > Tools > Notify screen.
You can embed live streams from Livestream.com, Ustream and DaCast using shortcodes.
If you use the Call for Speakers form that is automatically added to new sites, then any submissions will be automatically converted into drafted Speaker and Session posts, which can you publish or delete when you decide which ones to accept.
Session posts have a metaMeta 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. box to add URLs for the slides and WordPress.tv video. If you fill those in they’ll automatically be shown in the sessions 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..

Next Steps / How to Get Involved

For each of the projects, we’ll need people to help brainstorm ideas, give feedback, and write code.

Clone another camp‘s theme/CSS/etc: This project needs a few developers to test the prototype and report/fix any issues.
More Themes/custom templates: The data for this question may have been skewed, so please answer this revised question to make sure we have good data to base decisions on. Once the results from that are in, I’ll post them here and we can discuss how to move forward.
Local CSS development and better documentation: We’ll need to discuss the details for these and come up with a plan. Once the conversation on this post dies down, I’ll start new posts for them so that we can have a focused discussion.

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

Ian Dunn 8:24 pm on May 5, 2015
Tags: Improving WordCamp.org ( 17 ), official websites, survey ( 13 ), wordcamp.org ( 34 )

WordCamp Organizer Survey

We’ve had several good discussions on ways to improve the tools used on WordCamp.org, and now it’s time to collect some hard data so we can know how to move forward.

If you’ve worked with any of the WordCamp.org tools — custom post types, Jetpack CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. editor, widgets, etc — in the past 18 months, please fill out this 6-question survey:

http://wordcampcentral.polldaddy.com/s/improving-wordcamp-org-tools

Anyone on an organizing team who has used the WordCamp.org tools is encouraged to take the survey, but I’m pinging the people who took part in the previous discussions to make sure they don’t miss it: @ryelle, @harbormark, @chanthaboune, @nvwd, @kovshenin, @rafaehlers, @davidjlaietta, @dimensionmedia, @mj12982, @iandstewart, @miss_jwo, @topher1kenobe, @jenmylo, @georgestephanis, @bandonrandon, @cliffseal, @valeriosza, @hlashbrooke, @lcrddz

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

Ian Dunn 1:12 am on April 9, 2015
Tags: community summit ( 10 ), Improving WordCamp.org ( 17 ), official websites, page templates, themes ( 8 ), wordcamp.org ( 34 )

Improving WordCamp.org: Adding More Themes and/or Page Templates

This post continues the previous discussions we’ve had on the project to improve WordCamp.org. If you’d like some background information, you can check out the notes from the 2014 Community Summit and the discussion on the CSS Editor.

* * * *

One of the most common pieces of feedback has been that, when organizers are building their sites, they want more themes and/or page templates to choose from. The goal of this post is to start a conversation on that topic and hash out the details of what we want and how to move forward.

Right now organizers can only choose from the CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. themes (TwentyTwelve, TwentyFourteen, etc) plus 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. Base theme, a custom theme that was written specifically for WordCamps. Organizers can’t edit the PHPPHP PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. https://www.php.net/manual/en/index.php, HTMLHTML HTML is an acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is a markup language that is used in the development of web pages and websites. and 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 of the themes due to security and maintenance concerns, so customizing the CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. is the only way to create a new design. There’s a lot that can be done with just CSS, but sometimes organizers still wish they had more options.

Define the Problem and Goals

I think it’d help to have some specific examples of limitations, and to describe what the goals are in having more choices. These questions should help start the discussion, but feel free to ask/answer others too.

Have you run into limitations customizing your site? If so, can you describe them?
Do you find that it takes too much work to transform the design of the available themes into your custom design?
Do you run into situations where you can’t achieve the design you want without modifying the theme’s HTML?
Are there other major problems that you run into?
What do you think would be good solutions to the problems you found?

Potential Solutions

So far two potential solutions have been discussed: making more themes available to choose from, and providing a way for organizers to submit custom page templates for any available theme.

They’re not mutually exclusive, so we could possibly do both, but we have limited resources, so I think it’d be best to pick the one that will make the most impact and focus on that first. After the first round of improvements are made, we can reassess where we are and what to do next.

Other than those two, are there any other solutions that should be considered?

Adding More Themes

The first potential solution would be to simply make more themes available to organizers. This would save time in some cases because you could start with something that is closer to your custom design.

It would also provide a wider variety of layouts and templates, which could solve some of the problems related to needing a specific layout in order to achieve a particular custom design. If a developer did run into that problem, though, they would still be stuck because they wouldn’t be able to edit the HTML.

Just like with plugins, we have to be careful about security, performance, etc when adding more themes, but those concerns could mostly be mitigated by picking themes that are available in both the WordPress.org directory, and on WordPress.com. Those themes have passed an exhaustive review by trusted developers, so we would be able to assume that they’re safe without having to audit them ourselves.

Do you think this is a good solution? If so, which specific themes would you choose?

Are there any problems with it?

Accepting Custom Page Templates

Another potential solution would be to allow organizers to write custom page templates, so that they could create custom layouts for the content area if their design required it. The templates wouldn’t affect the headerHeader The header of your site is typically the first thing people will experience. The masthead or header art located across the top of your page is part of the look and feel of your website. It can influence a visitor’s opinion about your content and you/ your organization’s brand. It may also look different on different screen sizes., 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. or footer, though. In order to use the templates, we’d need to create child themes for the existing themes, and add them there.

The templates would have to meet certain criteria, and be reviewed for security and other concerns before they could be added to WordCamp.org. We wouldn’t want to end up with dozens of templates that are only relevant to a single camp, or to have to review new templates for every site, so I think we’d have to require that the templates be generic enough to be reused by other camps, and that they only be created when there is a significant need that can’t be accomplished with CSS alone.

What do you think about this solution? Are there any specific page templates that you think would be useful?

Are there any problems with it?

Do you have any other thoughts or comments?

Everyone is encouraged to particpate 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, @mj12982, @iandstewart, @miss_jwo, @topher1kenobe, @jenmylo, @georgestephanis

#community-summit, #improving-wordcamp-org, #official-websites, #page-templates, #themes, #wordcamp-org

Ian Dunn 10:04 pm on March 5, 2015
Tags: community summit ( 10 ), Improving WordCamp.org ( 17 ), Jetpack CSS Editor ( 4 ), official websites, user experience, wordcamp.org ( 34 )

Improving WordCamp.org: User Experience of the CSS Editor

One of the discussions we had at the 2014 Community Summit was about customizing WordCamp.org sites, and we identified some of the worst pain-points that organizers currently have.

One of those problems was that customizing a theme’s CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. is difficult and frustrating. Currently, organizers use Jetpack’s CSS Editor, which works well for small tweaks, but isn’t really intended for the types of major overhauls that most WordCamps are doing. Some of the biggest problems are:

There isn’t any post-locking or version control, so it’s easy for two users to accidentally overwrite each other’s changes
Saving edits requires a page refresh, which makes you lose your place. With larger rulesets, finding your place again takes too long and often breaks mental “flow”, which is frustrating.
The browser’s built-in Find functionality doesn’t always work
The rules can’t be modularized into small, manageable files — and then recombined during processing — for easier development and maintenance.
Many consider editing in a browser to be a subpar experience to using an IDE with features like code-completion
Cross-browser/device testing can’t be easily done with the Preview functionality
Syncing between production and a local testing environment has to be done manually
Time-saving tools like LiveReload can’t be used.
There are two scroll bars (one for the page itself, and then another inside the editor), which makes using the scroll wheel on a mouse annoying.

So, how do you think we should move forward and made it easier for organizers to customize their theme’s CSS?

#community-summit, #improving-wordcamp-org, #jetpack-css-editor, #official-websites, #user-experience, #wordcamp-org

Welcome!

Get Involved

Let’s Talk

Learn More

Tag Archives: official websites

Site Cloner v1 is now available