PHP Meeting Recap – November 20th

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: @flixos90 @jdgrimes @nerrad @overclokk @ptasker @schlessera @uofaberdeendarren @vizkr

Chat Summary

The agenda for this week was to finish the rest of the “Before Upgrading PHP” document that will be handed over to the marketing team afterwards to get their help with writing the copy.

Here is the discussion summary:

• It was decided that the sections dealing with asking 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/theme support, the hosting provider and possibly a developer for help should be combined into one help section at the end of the document. The reason for this decision is that all of those resources may or may not be available for a site owner, and the results of a consultation may vary. It should be emphasized that the upgrade steps are intended to be easy enough for the site owner to perform them on their own, but those resources should still be pointed out for those who feel more comfortable that way.
• Merging those help sections into one has made the document more straightforward to read. It essentially now consists of the following steps:
  • Backup & Rollback Plan
  • Updates
  • Compatibility Check
  • Find replacements for incompatible plugins
• The third step will hopefully become a lot simpler once the new WP Tide project is available.
• The fourth step is at this point the least straightforward one. Finding plugin alternatives requires either good knowledge of the WordPress economy or an exhausting search. In addition, migrating from one plugin to the other will likely involve non-trivial tasks that only a developer could take care of. At least in regards to finding alternatives, a dedicated feature for that in the plugin repository could help. @schlessera pointed out that this is apparently already being worked on by the plugin repository team.
• By the end of the meeting, it was agreed that the draft is now ready to be passed on to the marketing team so that they can build something awesome out of it. @flixos90 has since asked for their help in the #marketing channel.

Next week’s meeting

The next meeting will take place on November 27th, 2017, 16:00 UTC as always in #core-php. There is no scheduled agenda yet this time, as there hasn’t been a response by the marketing team yet. 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. US will however provide a good opportunity to talk about the document in person. 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