This group is part a cross-team collaboration. The editorial group meets monthly on the first Thursday of each month at 13:00 UTC in the #core-dev-blog channel of the Make WordPress 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/..
Slack link to start of the meeting on March 2, 2023.
Summary from the February 2023 meeting
The 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/ card numbers on this page relate to the Developer Blog (versus network, site) GitHub repository.
Attendees
Editorial group attendees: @bph, @webcommsat, @marybaum, @milana_cap, @greenshady, @mburridge, @ndiego, @bcworkz
Observer attendees: @carl-alberto
Due to different time zones, some of the editorial group to add to the meeting asynchronously.
Update and actions since last meeting
Developer Blog – Editorial meeting: February 2, 2023 – thanks to @greenshady and @webcommsat for collaborating on the summary.
Ongoing action: Comments / additions needed on the draft template for suggested topics: GitHub #69 Developer Blog.
New published blogs
@bph shared a ‘huge thank you’ to all and to those who helped with direction, editing and reviews.
@greenshady echoed the thanks to reviewers, and that it was ‘a huge help to have the support system to help clean things up and make the content even better.’
Growth in comments on the blog, especially the Intrinsic Design post which has received as of the meeting 20 comments.
@webcommsat update: The call for more ideas and writers was repromoted at Dev Chat yesterday and at WordCamp 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. Asia. Ideas for more promotions are being collated for a future date when the blog is out of beta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process.. The Marketing Team is assisting with gathering ideas and is aware that the communication and messaging is limited until post-beta and the formal launch.
Project Board status review
Posts in progress
Topics in the pipeline
A few topics in the pipeline for consideration / approval. They are not all ready to proceed, but writers have started initial thinking on the topics.
General note: in the majority of times, the title on the ticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. is for the initial discussion for review rather than the title of the post to be written. The writer and review team will collaborate on the post title during the publishing process.
What’s new for Developer (March 2023) – agreement in principle. What’s new for Developers is a monthly column. and it would now not require monthly pre-approval as a topic via the editorial meeting. This way focus can be on the content, and information for it could be collated throughout the month. It would still go through the editorial process of review, but this agreement will streamline its planning. Starting with the April 2023 edition, it will appear each month on the Project Board.
Homepage with with alternate blocks and query on inner paginated views (#81) – agreement in principle
How Webpack and WordPress packages interact (#79) – agreement in principle
New HTML Tag Processor – an in-depth tutorial (#75) – agreement in principle
useEntityRecords tutorial (#60) – agreement in principle
What the heck is wp-env? (#33) – agreement in principle, further discussions on scope, coverage and audience
- working title only – suggestions can be added to the ticket, eg how to use wp-env
- further discussion on the main audience to follow (please add on the ticket): potentially developers who may be using MAMP/WAMP, Local, Valet, etc, and who may have heard of wp-env but are unsure what it is and how it differs from what they’re used to
- suggestion of focusing on a survey of local hosting environments, but with an emphasis on wp-env.
- discussion that developers would appreciate more in-depth explanation of wp-env than roundup of all the environments. Not too much detail on other environments as developer audience for this post are likely to know about them. Some others have suggested value of highlighting roundup of environments. The audience level set for this post will be crucial to the content focus decided
- the audience to be subtly described early on in the piece to help people know of it is for them. This can be summarized with the excerpt An excerpt is the description of the blog post or page that will by default show on the blog archive page, in search results (SERPs), and on social media. With an SEO plugin, the excerpt may also be in that plugin’s metabox. too.
- to focus on encouraging more people to start using wp-env which is officially recommended by WordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/
- discussion on other pieces on wp-env, including a more in-depth one, and an article aimed at promoting its take-up and with some case studies on its use, and potentially inviting other case studies
- comments can be added to the Issue #89 on GitHub
Tutorial on spacing for block themes (#68) – agreement in principle
Working with theme.json filters (#82) – agreement in principle. Discussion about how this will be super valuable and a good example to promote use of this dev blog. This would also be important to cross-link with any existing or future plans for related Learn WP resources.
Share examples of using the new filter blockEditor.useSetting.before (#38) (title of the discussion, not working title yet)
- agreement in principle for idea, further discussion to follow
- @bph: there will be a Dev Note Each important change in WordPress Core is documented in a developers note, (usually called dev note). Good dev notes generally include a description of the change, the decision that led to this change, and a description of how developers are supposed to work with that change. Dev notes are published on Make/Core blog during the beta phase of WordPress release cycle. Publishing dev notes is particularly important when plugin/theme authors and WordPress developers need to be aware of those changes.In general, all dev notes are compiled into a Field Guide at the beginning of the release candidate phase. about this new filter Filters are one of the two types of Hooks https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Hooks. They provide a way for functions to modify data of other functions. They are the counterpart to Actions. Unlike Actions, filters are meant to work in an isolated manner, and should never have side effects such as affecting global variables and output. hook and this would be a follow-up post to give people more examples and use cases
- alternative titles to be added to the ticket. @marybaum to work with @ndiego and @greenshady on options
Support Resources for Developers (#54) (working title for discussion) – lots of good ideas and useful information. Discussion on:
- further developing scope, narrowing its focus to save the writer time, identifying the key items for focus.
- potentially rewording the title to reflect its focus and thereby be clearer what readers will find within it
- as a title ‘Support resources for developers’ covers a broad area including what the docs team and documentation does, dev notes Each important change in WordPress Core is documented in a developers note, (usually called dev note). Good dev notes generally include a description of the change, the decision that led to this change, and a description of how developers are supposed to work with that change. Dev notes are published on Make/Core blog during the beta phase of WordPress release cycle. Publishing dev notes is particularly important when plugin/theme authors and WordPress developers need to be aware of those changes.In general, all dev notes are compiled into a Field Guide at the beginning of the release candidate phase., Learn WordPress etc. (more details on a general and regular support resources content below
- not necessarily the right thing for the developer blog at this stage of its content development, but potentially move towards the creation of an evergreen post or page that is routinely updated/ regular column rather than a one-off blog post (@ndiego)
- Furthermore, to be aware that there are plans for a regular “What’s new on the developer blog”, as discussed at earlier in the meeting
- the first edition of What’s New for Developer links to Learn.WordPress.org resources
Open floor
Two items were planned on the agenda for the Open Floor discussion: time was only available for the first one of this meeting.
Recognizing contributors in terms of badges
Discussion on what activity is considered a contributor badge-activity and also which team badge.
Given the nature of the content and the Dev Blog covering multiple contributing teams, there are several potential options discussed:
- Core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. Contributor (currently the Dev Blog comes under the Core Team umbrella. Note Core Contributor includes both code and non-code contributions)
- Documentation Contributor
- Training Contributor
- a hybrid arrangement, with the type of contribution determining the badge. If badges were based on type of activity would this work, eg writing or editing a usage studies receive a Docs badge, tutorial development under Training Team badge etc?
- a new solution/ dedicated badge within one of the teams listed above, eg a Core Dev Blog contributor badge
- a new solution and in the longer term becoming a team in itself. Discussion on potential difficulties with creating a dedicated and additional Make team and its own badge system.
- Workflows are still evolving, so there may need to be an interim solution to allow time for this, as with the model used for Learn WordPress.
- Discussion noted that it would be important to find a solution which did not result in considerable additional administrative work, especially as it is likely that many contributors would come from other teams, and to keep the cross-team collaboration positioning for the Blog
- Balancing administrative items versus the project management and administration associated with the editorial and production cycle for the Blog itself, especially its cross-working with docs, core, training with Learn WordPress, and marketing
Contributions in general are defined by the ‘How to contribute page’.
@bph summarized the main areas of contribution for the Dev Blog
- Participate: Chime in on topic discussions or share your ideas for topics that might help a larger group of developers
- Write: Adopt one of the ideas to write about and volunteer as a writer.
- Review: each drafted post goes through two reviews. You can contribute by reviewing blog posts according to editorial guidelines or from a technical aspect.
- Become a Member of the Editorial Group
Current process for badges:
- each Make Team has one or more badges they can allocate
- Core-Test, and Core-Performance are their own teams and have their own badges
Actions:
- following the discussion and the summary on the Core blog, @bph and @webcommsat will raise the question as in 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. / as a meta ticket and explore options for the interim
- @webcommsat to follow-up in Core about badge documentation in the handbook. Training badge documentation is currently in review. Docs badge documentation will be added to the post.
- the above actions may need to wait until the main requirements for the current WordPress release are completed
The next meeting will be on Thursday, April 6, 2023, at 13:00 UTC. Note for some time zones, daylight saving time will have come in by this date.
Props to @bph for facilitating the meeting, @webcommsat for writing the summary, and @bph for peer review.
#core-dev-blog, #meeting
