PHP Meeting Recap – August 7th

This recap is a summary of this week’s PHPPHP The web scripting language in which WordPress is primarily architected. WordPress requires PHP 5.6.20 or higher meeting. It highlights the ideas and decisions which came up during that meeting, both as a means of documenting and to provide a quick overview for those who were unable to attend.

The meeting’s chat log.

Attendees: @chetansatasiya @clorith @desrosj @flixos90 @tfrommen @jdgrimes @kelseyfecho @mikelking @mte90 @nerrad @schlessera @screamingdev @sergey @sudar @xkon

Chat Summary

@flixos90 started by letting everyone know that he will be alternating with @schlessera in running the weekly meeting.

As we had split up the discussion into two main topics during the last PHP meeting, we wanted to concentrate on one topic only this time: making progress on providing the informational page that should educate people about PHP updates.

As we noticed that some benefits we had identified in prior meetings only applied to specific subsets of our target audience, we discussed the need to more explicitly subdivide the audience into individual segments, and adapt the language we’re using for each of these. We distilled the following list of main segments to begin with: site-owners, developers, hosters.

We agreed that it does not make much sense to have separate landing pages for each and that we’d rather have one single default landing page for the site-owners, with links to other sections/subpages for the other segments. The reason for that is that the page should start with adapted language for the least tech-savvy group, with additional details as needed, so as not to overwhelm the page’s visitors.

For site-owners, we also want to provide a convenient email template that they can send to their hosting provider to get an update. We could potentially discuss this with hosting companies to know what their preferred ways of contacting them about updates are, to make the process as frictionless (and cost-effective) as possible. This would mean that the provided template could change depending on what hosting provider was detected for the current site.

The list of benefits should be done as real copywriting, as we are basically building a sales page, trying to sell “updating PHP” to the site-owners that have to pay the price for that. The page should use proper marketing language, convincing stats and diagrams, and story-telling techniques to finally end in a call to action.

The page we’re building should also include a section on the more tricky technical aspects of updating PHP, like checking 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 compatibility and troubleshooting issues.

Given all of the above, we decided it is time to contact both the #marketing as well as the #hosting-community teams/channels to ask for help.

And although we decided we need to deal with different audiences and adapt the page to each of them, we also realized that this multiplies the amount of work to be done. In order to get first results as quickly as possible, we agreed to concentrate on initially building the section for site-owners first, and adding the other segments afterward.

As for the structure of the page, we discussed a first general layout like the following:

  1. What we want from you
  2. Call to action
  3. What is PHP?
  4. Why do you need an update?
  5. What should you need to know before doing an update?
  6. How do you do an update?
  7. Call to action

The main location to persist decisions, for now, is 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 An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress. ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. 2996. However, we’ll prepare some shared document space to gather all intermediate materials.

Next week’s meeting

The next meeting will take place on Monday, 14 August 2017, 20:00 CEST, as always in #core-php, and its agenda will be to discuss the more organizational aspects of making progress. We want to agree on one tool where we can collaborate on archiving our current results and on producing first deliverables. If you have suggestions about this but cannot make the meeting, please leave a comment on this post so that we can take them into account. See you next week!

#core-php, #php, #summary