PHP Meeting Recap – August 20th

This recap is a summary of our previous 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.

You can find this meeting’s chat log here.

Chat Summary

  • We continued reviewing the content of the Update PHP page, which is available in this Google document.
  • We specifically looked at the closing section that acts as a summary, wondering whether it could be highlighted more or whether it is even needed. In the end it was decided to keep it as it is, as web readers typically expect a conclusion to occur at the end of a resource. Furthermore it leaves them with a positive attitude about their (future) achievement.
  • There were two comments about redundancy of paragraphs describing what would be the topic of the respective next section, since they are followed by a heading telling the same thing. However, as linking paragraphs they improve the reading flow and therefore should remain present.
  • A couple of minor wording improvements were discussed and applied.
  • It was agreed that the only outstanding change is the removal of all the hosting-specific tutorial links. They should be replaced with a single link to an external resource containing those links, similar how it is in the current live version of the page. A long list of links would distract readers, furthermore a single external resource allows for more flexibility on how this is managed. For now, the single link should point to the hosting-specific tutorials list in the Servehappy resources repository. Once this change is present, the content of the Google document can go live, replacing the current Update PHP page content.
  • Before the meeting, at 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. Brighton, a new idea of coming up with a documentation pattern and distributing it to hosts in order to get them provide guides on how to update PHP on their environment was discussed. The idea was appreciated by everyone. While an involved task, it will iterate on the already present crowd-sourced resources repository.
  • It would make sense to use GitHubGitHub 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/ Pages for such a repository. Pointing to a repository directly would easily confuse non-technical users, and a simple website fetching the content from GitHub Markdown files would improve that greatly.
  • A consideration is the URLURL A specific web address of a website or web page on the Internet, such as a website’s URL www.wordpress.org to use for that. GitHub Pages URLs for organization repositories contain both the organization name and the repository name, so for the servehappy resources directory, it would be WordPress.github.io/servehappy-resources, which is not very obvious for what it contains. A repository named update-php or update-php-resources would be a better alternative. Alternatively, a custom domain could be used. This needs to be carefully evaluated.

Next week’s meeting

  • Next meeting will take place on Monday, August 27th, 2018 at 15:00 UTC in #core-php.
  • Agenda: Further discuss the approach for streamlining hosts’ PHP update tutorials and using GitHub Pages (or possible alternatives) for those resources.
  • 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.

#core-php, #php, #servehappy, #summary