Announcement: Sunsetting Tagregator plugin on WordCamp.org websites

WordCamp.org websites have had 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 available and enabled for ten years. The plugin allowed organisers to pull content from various social media networks onto their pages.

Recently, many social media networks have introduced breaking changes in their APIs. Some have even made APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways. access nearly impossible at our scale. At the same time, the WordCamp.org 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 has not received many questions or feedback about how to use the tool, while it most probably hasn’t worked as expected for quite some time.

That is why the WordCamp.org Meta team has decided to sunset the Tagregator plugin after the discussion on GitHub.

Old sites with content that Tagregator has pulled from social media networks are unaffected since all the posts are cached in our database, and the plugin remains active on those sites.

Currently, there are no alternative solutions for displaying social media posts that the WordCamp.org Meta team would support. Given how restricted social media platforms are nowadays, it is also unlikely that such would come later. If you have good viable suggestions, you can suggest one in the comments.

Props @iandunn, @ryelle and @rmarks for helping with this effort.

#meta-wordcamp, #official-websites, #tagregator, #wordcamp-sites, #wordcamp-org, #wordcamps

Announcement: Review of WordCamp sites without a tracker item – removal of some old WordCamp sites

Already some time ago, @iandunn handed me the list 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 missing their counterpart in the WordCamp tracker.

Some of these sites are for WordCamps that did never take place at the end. Some sites are for WordCamps that have taken place well before the WordCamp tracker was introduced or do lack their counterpart for some other reason

I’ve gone thru the list of 60 sites and checked their status. Based on that, my proposal is that we:

  1. Create the counterpart post in the WordCamp tracker to backfill the history, with simple details like location, lead organiser (if available) and dates

OR

  1. Remove the WordCamp site, as the event never happened or the page links to a domain that does not work/isn’t controlled by WPCSWPCS The collection of PHP_CodeSniffer rules (sniffs) used to format and validate PHP code developed for WordPress according to the WordPress Coding Standards. May also be an acronym referring to the Accessibility, PHP, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, etc. coding standards as published in the WordPress Coding Standards Handbook. or WPFWordPress Foundation The WordPress Foundation is a charitable organization founded by Matt Mullenweg to further the mission of the WordPress open source project: to democratize publishing through Open Source, GPL software. Find more on wordpressfoundation.org..

Some of these sites go back to the early years of WordCamps, to 2008. More eyes on this list and determining the right action for the site would be highly appreciated, in case there is some historical information that isn’t available from the site.

The list of sites and proposed actions is here.

Please leave a comment on this post if you think that the proposed action in some of the sites is wrong. The discussion will be open until 2021-04-23 after which we’ll start to remove the sites and creating counterparts in the tracker. If you’d like to help with creating these counterparts, let me know in the comments!

#wordcamp-sites, #wordcamp-org, #wordcamps

WordCamp PWA : An update

This is an update about plans to enhance 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 website as a Progressive Web App for the 2019 Camp. Plans were first announced in this post in February 2019:
https://make.wordpress.org/community/2019/02/13/wordcamp-pwa-plugin-proposal-and-designs/


The organising teams from WordCamp Europe 2019 have been working on plans to enhance WordCamp websites by adopting Progressive Web App (PWA) features.

The plan is to provide contextual information for attendees that is served from and integrated with the main WordCamp website, and which can be stored locally on the user’s devices for offline access. This would allow attendees to access key event information in a more immediate and flexible way.

Initially, we had conceptualised this as an additional “layer” of content, which would load “over the top” of the existing Camp website for the duration of the event.

After sharing these original plans, we received a lot of feedback and suggestions from the community. Thank you!

There was much support for adding these progressive enhancements and contextual information for attendees. However, community members felt that progressive enhancements should be made to the existing site website and web pages themselves, rather than creating a separate and additional layer of content.

Based on your feedback, we now intend to take a more integrated approach to this project.

In practical terms, we will build on the great work of Weston Ruter and his Progressive Web App feature pluginFeature Plugin A plugin that was created with the intention of eventually being proposed for inclusion in WordPress Core. See Features as Plugins., which brings PWA capabilities – including service workers and the web app manifest – to WordPress. Rather than create a new and separate “layer” of context based information over the WordCamp website, we will instead enhance key pages of the existing WordCamp site – for instance, the Schedule and Speakers pages – to be stored locally on a user’s device for offline access.

In addition, we intend to create a new website homepage for the duration of the WordCamp event to display context based content on the Sessions that are “on now” and “up next”, alongside the latest Posts from the Camp website, to put this key information at the fingertips of attendees.

WordCamp Alerts & Announcements

There was initially some discussion of creating an alerts feed for important announcements at the Camp itself. During the feedback phase, a number of people felt this was unnecessary, overly complicated and could prove a barrier to wider adoption of the PWA functionality by other WordCamps.

As a result, a decision has been made to use the existing Posts functionality from the WordPress installation for the news and alerts feed during the Camp.

Visuals

Below are some visuals of how the home page of the website might appear during the Camp itself. Whilst these designs here are specific to WCEUWCEU WordCamp Europe. The European flagship WordCamp event. 2019, the content would of course take on basic styles – fonts and colours – from its WordCamp site.

Plans for the WordCamp Europe 2019 website homepage (mobile version)
Plans for the WordCamp Europe 2019 website homepage (mobile version)

Plans for the WordCamp Europe 2019 website homepage (desktop version, screen 1)

Plans for the WordCamp Europe 2019 website homepage (desktop version, screen 2)

We intend to complete this work in time for WCEU 2019. Beyond that, we hope that this enhancement to WordCamp websites would be available to WordCamps around the globe.

#apps, #improving-wordcamp-org, #progressive-web-app, #pwa, #regional-wordcamps, #wordcamp, #wordcamp-sites, #wordcamps

WordCamp PWA: Plugin proposal and designs

Planning is well underway to create a new look Progressive Web App (PWA) for 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. events. The PWA will make accessing and providing content on mobile devices much easier for attendees and organisers.

This builds on the work to create a PWA for previous WordCamp Europe (WCEUWCEU WordCamp Europe. The European flagship WordCamp event.) events.

However, rather than developing a standalone PWA at a separate URLURL A specific web address of a website or web page on the Internet, such as a website’s URL www.wordpress.org to the WordCamp site, as has been the case in the previous years, the plan is to create a layer of contextual information for Camp attendees that is served from and integrated with the WordCamp website, and which can be stored locally on the user’s devices for offline access.

WCEU Blog post on the PWA development

The PWA will present a better mobile experience, taking advantage of touch screen gestures, and will put the most relevant information “at the fingertips” of Camp attendees. The PWA will enhance a WordCamp website, and will allow users to bookmark the website to their device’s home screen for offline access.

This PWA functionality will initially be created as 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, displaying an additional visual ‘layer’ of content aimed specifically at attendees, in an ‘App like’ way over the main WordCamp website content. However, both online and offline users will have access to this same layer of content.

WordCamp PWA plugin design proposal v1 - PWA landing page displaying PWA controls over the main WordCamp website
WordCamp PWA plugin design proposal v1 – PWA landing page displaying PWA controls over the main WordCamp website

The plugin should be simple to set up and configure, so that – in the longer term – any WordCamp event can take advantage of its features.

This initiative is being led by the WordCamp Europe 2019 Organiser teams, with design prototyping by the WCEU Design team and development by the Attendee Services team. The Communications team is also actively guiding the design and development of the PWA.

The plan

  • The WordCamp PWA plugin will present an additional ‘layer’ of mobile friendly content over the main WordCamp website – inheriting the basic colours and fonts of the website. However, individual WordCamps should be able to customise the look of the PWA further using CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. overrides.
  • This PWA layer can be switched on/off from plugin settings within WordPress admin, so that it is only available for the duration of the Camp. When viewing the site on touch screen devices during the Camp, users will see the PWA layer appearing over the top of the WordCamp site.
  • The PWA controls will look very like a native smartphone App, and will be optimised for touch screen devices, employing swipe gestures.
  • On loading the website on touch screen devices, the user would be presented with a range of PWA control, docked to the foot of the screen, offering PWA menu options as icons around a large, central, ‘always visible’ circular button that will be used to open/close the PWA layer.
  • Using the power of PWA, the content of the App will be downloaded and stored offline on the user’s local device, and can be bookmarked on the user’s home screen to be accessed at any time, with or without an internet connection.
WordCamp PWA plugin design proposal v1 - Screen layouts
WordCamp PWA plugin design proposal v1 – Screen layouts

Content

The PWA plugin will display a range of key content sections relevant to conference attenders. Each content section will animate open as a panel from the icon at the bottom of the screen. This will initially include the following screens (which relate from left to right to the icons in the image above):

  • Attendees: a full list of attenders with Gravatars, sorted alphabetically, with search field to look up attendees by name. For GDPR reasons, attendees should not be downloaded and stored offline on the local device – although this may be reviewed in the future in line with GDPR and privacy regulations and with any permissions requested during attendee sign-up.
  • Speakers: a full list of speakers with GravatarGravatar Is an acronym for Globally Recognized Avatar. It is the avatar system managed by WordPress.com, and used within the WordPress software. https://gravatar.com/., biog and links to relevant sessions, sorted alphabetically, with options to 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. by schedule date/topic group and search field to look up speakers by name.
  • Schedule: a full schedule for the WordCamp, with a single column per schedule date, and option to filter by Track. Users will have the ability to ‘favourite’ sessions, and these preferences will be stored on the local device. Columns can be swiped left/right to view previous/next day, and the sessions should be filterable to show just the sessions which the user has marked as their ‘favourite’. Depending on when the schedule is viewed, the schedule list should visibly scroll/animate down to the current time/session, so users can see ‘at a glance’ what is ‘on now’.
  • Venue Map: one or more graphical floor plans of the venue, with the ability to swipe/pinch to resize and re-position the maps within the viewable area of the screen.
  • Announcements: a chronological listing of announcements for attendees during the WordCamp, filterable by type (that is, catering, sessions, social, and so on) and can be determined by the WordCamp organisers.

These five sections will be arranged as icons around a large central ‘Start’ button, docked to the bottom of the screen, to allow users to turn the PWA layer on/off. This circular arrangement would allow us to add additional buttons/sections at a later date, and have these icons ‘revolve’ around the main circular ‘Start’ button with swipe gestures.

The content for all the above sections is already present with the WordPress database for WordCamp sites, apart from ‘Announcements’, which will need a new 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. to be added, potentially with its own custom taxonomyTaxonomy 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. (to allow users to filter different types of announcements). Venue Map images may also require the use of one or more custom fields for storage and display.

Tablet view proposals

Timeframe

The ambition is to pilot a version of the WordCamp PWA plugin at WordCamp London in April 2019, followed by a full launch at WordCamp Europe 2019 in Berlin in June 2019.


Questions

  • Would you use this PWA plugin for your WordCamp event?
  • Is the content detailed above the most useful for WordCamp attendees – is anything missing or unnecessary?
  • Is the design/UIUI 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. proposed intuitive and accessible?
  • Any other feedback or observations?

UPDATE: 17 April 2019

After posting these original plans to enhance WordCamp websites with Progressive elements, we received a lot of feedback and suggestions to enhance this development work. Thank you!

Based on this feedback, we now intend to take a more integrated approach to the project.

In practical terms, this will build on the great work of Weston Ruter and his Progressive Web App feature pluginFeature Plugin A plugin that was created with the intention of eventually being proposed for inclusion in WordPress Core. See Features as Plugins., which brings PWA capabilities – including service workers and the web app manifest – to WordPress. This will mean that, rather than create a new and separate “layer” of context based information “over” the WordCamp website, we will instead allow key pages of an existing WordCamp site to be stored locally on a user’s device for offline access.

In addition, we would intend to create a new homepage for the website for the duration of the WordCamp to display context based content on the Sessions that are “on now” and “up next”, alongside the latest Posts from the Camp website, to put this key information at the fingertips of attendees.

We intend to complete this work in time for WCEU2019. Beyond that, we hope that this enhancement to WordCamp websites would be available to WordCamps around the globe.

#apps, #improving-wordcamp-org, #progressive-web-app, #pwa, #regional-wordcamps, #wordcamp, #wordcamp-sites, #wordcamps

Progress update: New WordCamp theme “CampSite 2017”

As announced in a previous post, this year’s 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 team is working on a new WordCamp base theme for the community. We’re calling it “CampSite 2017”. Since the announcement was made, we were able to gather initial feedback (which was primarily positive), solidify and further develop our ideas. I’d like to share our progress with you today to hear your feedback and thoughts.

Wireframes

After we heard your feedback from our introduction post, we made a list with all common pages, components, shortcodes used, etc. each WordCamp site would need. We then created and started refining wireframes of the main page templates (you can click through the different pages by opening the sitemap button on the top left of the online tool).

Homepage:
For the homepage we put the emphasis on flexibility and being able to tease to different content rather than having a very long blogroll (as often seen on WordCamp sites). This allows us to surface important content, feature relevant calls-to-action (like Call for Speakers, Buy your ticket, Call for Sponsors, etc.). We did want to include latest blog posts, but limited the number on the homepage. The layout is created mainly with widgeted areas where we allow for some additional flexibility (see “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. Area Top 1” + “2”, where you can use one or both depending on your needs).

Attendees page:
We’re working on extending the attendees page 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. to include pagination and a search functionality. Bernhard published a meta post about it.

Speakers page:
On the speakers page we were playing with different grids and types of information to output. Since the event organizers can include different fields / types of information for speakers, they can also decide what to output here. We’ll achieve this by extending the speakers shortcode and will publish 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. post with all the details soon.

Speakers bio page:
We’d like to include a little more information around speakers on this page. We would find it very useful to have prominent links to a speaker’s website and social profile. We furthermore feel that it would be very helpful to see the talk a speaker is giving would be shared on their speaker bio page, instead of having to click one more time to see their full talk info, as well as a link to the slides and talk video (once available). To achieve this will will create a new page template.

Footer:
Here we’d like to provide a simple footer with just the social links or an extended footer with additional widget areas for menus and other links.

General layout templates:
Furthermore we’ll create the following general layout templates that can be used for any regular content page on the WordCamp site:

The Theme Repo – work in progress

We’re using the latest version of Underscores as a base for the theme and setup a repo on Github for the theme. As pointed out in the previous post, most features implemented in the default theme were widgets areas. As shown in the wireframes, we will add some widget areas in the new theme, but with more specific positions. The new page templates will help with some special pages, like the speakers list and bio page or the homepage. A first version with the new templates will be published next week.

A11yAccessibility 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)

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) will be an important aspect of the new CampSite 2017 theme. We’re planning on implementing A11y standards and once the theme is ready for testing would love the community’s help to do a separate A11y testing phase. We’ve received some feedback from the A11y team about the biggest issues of the current theme and the things that Underscores is still lacking. We will take some A11y changes from TwentySeventeen and integrate them into the new theme and ask the A11y for additional feedback, once the prototype is available.

PS: Style Guide

As mentioned in the announcement posts, the CampSite 2017 theme will be shipped with only minimal CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. so you can use it as a starter theme and add all your own CSS styles if you like. But we will also ship an accompanying style guide with full CSS styling 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.. The style guide can be used as is, as a base for customization, or cloned and made fully your own. We will publish a full post about the style guide, how it works, and our vision for the future very soon.

Your feedback please!

We’re still working on quite a few things and would to hear your feedback about the wireframes, our ideas around the page templates and shortcodes, etc. This project is for you, it will benefit the greater WordCamp community and any organizer setting up a WordCamp site in the future. So we want to hear your voice!

#campsite-theme, #meta-wordcamp, #wordcamp-sites #wordcamps

WCEU17 design team is building improved and more flexible WordCamp theme

In the Summer of 2015, a survey on WordCamp.org tools has brought up some great ideas and suggestions for a new default WordCamp.org theme. We, the growing design team of WordCamp Europe 2017, this year 6 people strong, want to help create such a new default theme for WordCamps. The ideas voiced in the survey were pretty much in line with our vision for a new theme.

We currently use 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 Redux” theme for WCEU17 which is based on a very old version of _s, lacking some of the newer features. The Redux theme also has some major A11yAccessibility 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) issues we’d like to tackle.

The suggestions from the survey we felt most strongly about were “serve the many, not the few“, “flexible starter theme“, and “be a theme only“. Using a current version of _s would solve a lot of these wishes voiced by the community.

The status quo

To tackle this, we compared the Base Redux theme with a current version of _s. We wanted to identify feature that were added and might need to be implemented in a new WordCamp base theme. Many added functions in Base Redux are legacy code, including older versions of the custom post types for speakers, session, etc. As those features are now handled by plugins, they are no longer needed in a new theme.

After stripping out all old and unused functions, we identified only some additional 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. areas used:

  • Two additional widget areas after 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.: after-header and after-header-homepage (only on the front_page)
  • Two additional widget before the content: before-content and before-content-homepage (only on the front_page)
  • A second 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.: sidebar-2
  • 5 footer widget areas: footer-widget-1 … footer-widget-5
  • A credit action in the footer (which was never really used)

We do see the need for some additional widget areas and will decide which widget areas make sense to add to the new default theme to add additional flexibility. Having special page templates with no sidebars (full width) or other layout options, could also be very useful additions.

In the comments to the survey, Josh Leuze came up with some ideas for a new default theme. He wanted to introduce a theme with a basic design, so any WordCamp organizing team, with limited design resources, has a good starting point for a nice WordCamp theme. Josh included some of his ideas in the GitHub repo with additional assets for visual design ideas.

A new theme without a bundled design

The Base Redux theme is a starter theme and doesn’t really include any design. When using it you basically have three options, to create a design:

  1. Clone the design of a current WordCamp also using Base Redux
  2. Adding styles to Base Redux using the “Custom CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site.” functionality from Jetpack
  3. Adding styles to Base Redux using the “Remote CSS” functionality bundles in a WordCamp.org 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. 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

For the new WordCamp theme we envision to:

  1. Have a solid technical framework with improved A11y using the latest version of _s
  2. Provide more flexibility and ease in setting up the WordCamp site by providing more layout options, page templates, and additional widget areas
  3. Provide modular CSS and style guide (provided separately / not included in theme – more info below)

Other theme improvements

We’re still working on the full list of theme improvements and features we’d like to include in the new WordCamp theme, but here are some of our ideas so far:

  • More flexible homepage options to share timely announcements, calls for sponsor/speaker/volunteers throughout the life span of an event
  • Page templates for speakers, sponsors, etc
  • Paginated archives for post types
  • Improved A11y

Sneak Peek: Theme CSS and a living style guide

Designing a WordCamp website can be challenging since we can’t modify 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. or JS so it’s important to have a good CSS starting point and documentation to speed things up. Separate from the new WordCamp theme, we’re also creating modular CSS and a living style guide as a convenient starting point for WordCamp organizers to use.

We’ll be releasing it 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. for anyone to use, edit, and fork to create and share new versions. The styles can easily be applied to a WordCamp site using the “Remote CSS” plugin.

We’re hoping this to be a starting point and that the style guide will evolve over time. This will give others the opportunity to release more versions of it for the community to choose from. We understand that not every WordCamp team has design resources, so we want to help with some of the heavy-lifting providing this style guide.

We’ll be publishing more info about this soon. But for now, we’d like to share a few screenshots of what such a style guide would look like:

Style Guide: Color variables and values

Style Guide: Example of components

Big thanks to my team members @kau-boy and @lucijanblagonic who helped me kick this off.

Dear community

We’re very excited about this project and we’d love to hear your feedback! Also read our intro post on WCEU.

#campsite-theme, #meta-wordcamp, #wordcamp-sites

A/V Release Form

Hello!
The last two WordCamps I had the pleasure to visit asked speakers to sign the A/V release form on a pdf file. This means having a printer and a scanner (or if you are more tech savvy and you have a Mac use Preview, but I don’t assume everyone knows that – I didn’t up until a few days ago!).

For 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. Torino we pasted the text of the A/V release form in a page and added a form with:

  • Name
  • Date
  • Checkbox (redundant, cause if you didn’t send the form for us it meant you didn’t sign the form, but we felt it reinforced the importance of explicitly approve the rules).
  • Send

I feel that this would make the process easier for speakers.

Do you think we could create this page for all WordCamp.org installations?
Thanks!

#wordcamp-sites

Automated ticket invoicing

I consider myself to have pretty high tolerance for monotonous, “mindless” tasks, but after taking on ticket invoicing for 3 consecutive WordCamps (Paris, London, Europe), I must re-evaluate. Some mindless manual tasks are still necessary (folding laundry), but as software engineers, our mission is to make life easier by automating as many such tasks as possible, right?

TL;DR : let’s automate ticket invoicing by adding an option for ticket fields to be included in the email confirmations, along with a couple other default modifications 😀

Current state of affairs

When an attendee purchases a ticket to 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., they do not receive an invoice. For many attendees this is not a problem, but for businesses and/or employees looking to declare their expenses or get reimbursed, they need proper, standardized documentation.

An invoice should include at least:

  • The full name and postal address of the issuer (the Foundation).
  • The full name and postal address of the purchaser.
  • The VAT number of the purchaser where applicable/if needed.
  • The word “invoice” and sequential numbering (invoice #001, …).
  • The date of purchase.
  • The date of issue (if different).
  • The name of the product (type of ticket).
  • The single ticket price.
  • Currency used.
  • The number of tickets purchased.
  • The total price of purchase.
  • The amount of VAT included*

What a purchaser does receive is:

  1. An email confirmation sent by the website.
  2. A PayPal receipt.

The email confirmation contains only limited information, and mostly serves to give access to the online ticket in case it needs to be modified. Here are two examples:

wc-us_confirmation wc-london_confirmation

They contain 4 out of the 12 elements of a basic invoice:

  • The name of the product (type of ticket).
  • The single ticket price.
  • The number of tickets purchased.
  • The total price of purchase.

The PayPal receipt is slightly more complete (sorry, French):

paypal-receipt

It also includes:

  • The transaction date.
  • The name and email address of the recipient.
  • The currency of purchase (and exchange rate).
  • A transaction number.

Key components still needed/missing:

  • The full name and postal address of the issuer (the Foundation).
  • The full name and postal address of the purchaser.
  • The VAT number of the purchaser where applicable/if needed.
  • The word “invoice” and sequential numbering (invoice #001, …).

*VAT (Value added tax) is an issue in and of itself. I’d like to set the VAT question aside for the purpose of this post and the question of automating ticket invoicing. As it is, manual invoices do not include VAT, but rather the VAT line in the total reads, 0. I do believe these to be two important, but separate, problems.

Solution #1: build on the email confirmation

As we already have these two supports available, it would seem logical/relatively easy to build on them.

Could we not modify the existing email confirmation template to include by default:

  • The full name and postal address of the WordPress FoundationWordPress Foundation The WordPress Foundation is a charitable organization founded by Matt Mullenweg to further the mission of the WordPress open source project: to democratize publishing through Open Source, GPL software. Find more on wordpressfoundation.org..
  • The word “invoice” (internationalized), followed by sequential numbering based on the post ID (or something along these lines) of the ticket purchased.
  • Add the VAT line to the total, to read 0 (until that separate and local problem/question can be addressed).

Could we imagine the possibility of adding custom fields to the email templates?

include

This would allow us to use custom fields to include optional company and tax information for purchasers. I’ve seen this work in the WooCommerce extension WooCommerce Checkout Field Editor, and although the interface is a bit different, the actions/results are the same.

wc-checkout-field-editor

And ideally, as a next step, and as would be great to see for Sponsors invoices as well (!), the possibility to generate an invoice (email and/or PDF) directly from the Admin would be a huge bonus (because emails invariably get lost/discarded).

Solution #2: PayPal invoices

In talking with @paolo about my fantastic custom fields idea, he mentioned that PayPal should have the capability to send invoices for us. I went poking around a bit, and mostly came up with information about sending invoices for payment, not as receipt of payment.

They do talk about Invoicing APIs that can integrate with accounting systems. Personally reading this makes my face hurt and I feel the above solution #1 would be faster/more direct to implement, but PayPal integration with accounting might be a better long-term solution. Dunno, worth looking into. J

https://developer.paypal.com/docs/invoicing/

Though when I think about the world of e-commerce, I think of it being natural for the site selling to be responsible for accounting, not the financial institution charged with the transaction…

Conclusion

Number of manual invoices created:

  • Paris: 28
  • London: 21
  • Europe (Vienna): 59

These may seem like small numbers considering the total number of attendees for each event, 500, 660 and 2200 respectively. But what these numbers don’t show is the time also spent in communicating with attendees who request these invoices, the time it takes to look up the ticket and make sure it was purchased (yes, not all requests are attached to actual tickets), discrepancies when the asker is not the purchaser, the number of back and forths to explain that the postal address is needed but that the invoice will be sent by email, etc. Sometimes several people can be involved if the request goes first to Central before making its way to appropriate parties, managing email inboxes, etc. London helped the process along by creating an online form for requests and a spreadsheet to manage them. But in the end it was still a couple hours of work to verify, issue and send each requested invoice.

Automating this process would collectively save us volunteers huge amounts of precious time. I’m convinced that updating our email confirmation templates would be a fast and direct solution. I also think there is inspiration (and code) to be found in existing WooCommerce solutions (templates, extensions).

Thanks for reading, look forward to your thoughts and am happy to help in any way I can (conceive templates, test code, etc). 🙂

Best,
-jennyb

cc: @iandunn

#automation, #invoicing, #wordcamp-sites

Hi Everyone I have an idea for the…

Hi Everyone, I have an idea 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. websites relating to the new Session Slide Link functionality.
I posted some questions in Slack starting at https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/outreach/p1465885292000003 and Ian said to post here.

Essentially I would like a 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. that only included the Session Time, Title, Speaker and Link to slide.
So no long session description that currently happens with `[sessions show_meta=”true”]`.

Either added to the `[sessions]` one or if `slide_link=”true”` was added to the `[schedule]` shortcode.

A visual of what I’m wanting to accomplish is on https://2016.kansascity.wordcamp.org/presentation-slides/.

My reasoning is that when the schedule is printed in the name badge, attendees circle/mark which sessions they go to on the badge. When they go to look for the link later, having it somewhat be in the same place will make it easier to find then a long list of Session titles.

Anyone else think this would be a good idea and/or could code it?

#slides, #wordcamp-sites, #wordcamps

Promotions!

Promotions isn’t really the right word, but I wanted something with the same excitement as announcements for Commit Access get on coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.. Brandon Dove (@brandondove) and Kevin Cristiano (@kcristiano) have been powerhouse 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. since the program began, and their dedicated volunteerism deserves thanks from us all.

While we work out how to improve our processes and as we grow the community team with more deputies, we’ll be working within the (sometimes kludgey) systems we have. One of the bottlenecks for deputies has been that sending out organizer agreements and setting up new 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 was limited to Cami and Josepha. Brandon and Kevin now also have these abilities to help speed along the process of approving WordCamps. Hopefully we will be adding more people and/or changing the way this process works so that it can be automated on approval, but for now, yay — instead of only 2 people there are 6 (because also Andrea and I are back).

Thank you again, Brandon and Kevin, and may you send many exciting organizer agreements and set up many default sites as the future unfolds!

#community-core-team, #community-management, #organizer-agreement, #responsibilities, #wordcamp-sites