There’s a community summit next week after WordCamp…

There’s a community summit next week after 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. SF for those who don’t know. During this day we break into small meetings to discuss big picture items. These topics touch the entire community. In this case I’m specifically looking at adding more coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. development topics to the list, because it’s pretty barren right now.

Here’s some thoughts we covered two years ago at the last official summit. The timing of this, for reference, was about three months after 3.4 came out, and two months before 3.5 came out. I pulled this off the schedule:

• Core UI discussion
• Engaging and retaining new contributors
• Better ways to solve i18ni18n Internationalization, or the act of writing and preparing code to be fully translatable into other languages. Also see localization. Often written with a lowercase i so it is not confused with a lowercase L or the numeral 1. Often an acquired skill. issues, WP multi-language
• Multisite Roadmap (which of course became this published roadmap)
• Improving Deployments on WordPress (embedded in a summary post)
• The Future of the Customizer (was never published until I found the draft today)
• JavaScript: How do we increase JS proficiency in the WordPress community? (also prev. unpublished)
• Elimination of Pain During Theme Switch (same)
• Helping WP-based companies contribute to core (sadly, same)
• Updates: Faster, Smoother, Sexier? (can’t find text on this, but WordPress 3.7 did it, so woo)

I think most of these could benefit from a revisit in some way. A lot of specific and big improvements have been made in a number of areas (e.g. bugbug A bug is an error or unexpected result. Performance improvements, code optimization, and are considered enhancements, not defects. After feature freeze, only bugs are dealt with, with regressions (adverse changes from the previous version) being the highest priority. tracker, updates, i18n, 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/., multisitemultisite Used to describe a WordPress installation with a network of multiple blogs, grouped by sites. This installation type has shared users tables, and creates separate database tables for each blog (wp_posts becomes wp_0_posts). See also network, blog, site), but even then there’s a lot to cover and a lot has changed in two years.

Here’s some potential topics that have been proposed:

• Development philosophy
• The Future of the Customizer (2.0)
• Core tooling
• Future of the JSON API

Some other ones that I’m now proposing:

• After PHPPHP The web scripting language in which WordPress is primarily architected. WordPress requires PHP 5.6.20 or higher 5.2
• i18n/multilingual roadmap
• multisite roadmap, 2.0
• next steps for updates (or: how can we auto update everything)

And now I toss it to you: what else should be on this list? Quick, you have a few hours before the initial schedule is built.

I’m reading through all of the relevant documents from the summit in 2012, and attendees for this year’s summit, you should too. I linked all of them above in the first set of bullets.

#summit, #wcsf