This recap is a summary of this week’s PHP 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: @brainfork @jdgrimes @mte90 @nerrad @schlessera @screamingdev @sergey @spacedmonkey
Announcements
Before we get to the chat summary, I want to make an announcement first, for the people that don’t attend the Slack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. channel.
GitHub 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 be the repository owner. https://github.com/ repositories have moved
The servehappy and servehappy-resources repositories have been moved from the temporary wp-core-php GitHub organization to the official WordPress GitHub organization.
Here are the links to the new locations (the old locations should redirect to these):
Chat Summary
We started with discussing the sections and the section content of the landing page again. We iterated over a couple of different versions of the first section, which we had been calling the Why you want to read this section.
What we came up with was to consider three different approaches to phrasing this first section, with the understanding that:
- the #marketing team will help us find the best way to write the actual copy for each approach;
- the different approaches can be A/B tested to optimize them and find the most effective one.
Here’s a preliminary summary of the three approaches we went with:
- The “technology” approach:
One of the important software components that enables WordPress to run on all sites is PHP. On this page you will learn what PHP is, why being on the latest version of PHP is so important for your site, and some steps you can take to make sure your site has the latest PHP version in use.
- The “detected issue” approach:
Your website might not be operating at its full potential. This page will tell you about an important issue we have detected and how to go about to resolve it (no jargon!). Let’s talk about what PHP is, and why you might need to update it.
- The “probability” approach:
You want your site operating at its full potential. Is it? As many as 4.5% of sites running WordPress are not. This page will help you determine if your site is one of them and how you can fix that.
Then we went on to discuss the distribution of the remaining content we need across the different sections. We identified the individual goals that the content needs to achieve and built a preliminary overview:
- A. What is PHP?
- explain what PHP is
- B. Why PHP version matters to you as a site owner
- explain what the problem with old PHP is
- explain the benefits of new PHP
- explain what an update is
- explain why WordPress can’t deal with this problem itself
- C. How to upgrade PHP for your website
- list the potential problems an update might cause
- provide steps to prepare an update to PHP
- give instructions on updating PHP
- help troubleshoot issues
Again, the exact ordering and the copy to use should be discussed with the #marketing team. For the C. section, we are considering a UI User interface component similar to an accordion, to avoid people being overwhelmed with the amount of content on the page. This might need to be discussed with the #accessibility team first, though.
Concerns were raised about how useful the project board on GitHub is for discussing something like the overall structure here. This problem is the reason why we have a “Meta 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.” section on the project board that can contain issues to discuss overarching topics like the main sections.
Finally, it was confirmed once again that the project is meant to be translated in as many languages as possible. However, we only want to start working on the translations once the content is somewhat finalized, to avoid wasted effort.
Next week’s meeting
The next meeting will take place on Monday, 29 August 2017, 20:00 CEST, as always in #core-php, and its agenda will be to finalize the section work we’ve been doing so far and to get it into a shape we feel good about presenting to the #marketing team. 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
