Weekly design meeting notes of Wednesday December 12, 2018

AKA recovering from 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 2018. Today we chatted about a number of things, but first let’s jump to Housekeeping. 

Housekeeping 

  • In past design meetings we discussed having some focuses for the coming year and outlining them as a team. We would like to start that next week with a post here announcing the start of it. 
  • It’s important as a team that we actually support and recognize all the work that designers are interested in doing. So this will provide an opportunity to weigh in on where we take things in 2019. 
  • Also, if you’re interested in resources for what the design team is doing on a given week, checkout Trello

Open Agenda

For the rest of the meeting we had an open agenda, and were able to discuss a number of topics. 

  • WordCamp US followup – Several folks from the design team were able to attend WordCamp US. On Sunday we had the Contributor DayContributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/., where we spent time workshopping on where we can take GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ from here. Really appreciate all the folks who joined and lent their thoughts and design ideas. 
  • Building in Gutenberg – Over the past few days I’ve been working to build out a more complex page using Gutenberg. During that process I’ve been hitting the limits of what can easily be made, and have been turning to Theme and 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 options to try and fill the gaps. We discussed this briefly during our chat today. If you have been digging into Gutenberg we’d love to hear your successes, and where things could be improved! This will help give guidance as we move forward into future phases. As designers we should share our experiences!
  • Designers in future work – We discussed the contributions of designers in Phase 1 of Gutenberg; with the note that more designers were able to contribute to this phase than projects in the past. That’s a huge win, and one we want to repeat in future phases!
  • AccessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) support – We discussed ways that folks from Accessibility and Design can work together. As a resource there’s a great page sharing the standards that we strive to meet with the WordPress project as a whole. 
  • How do you help as a designer? There’s a lot of ways designers can help in CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress., whether it’s Trac, Trello, or Github. We chatted about some of the challenges with using TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/., and ways we can make the onboarding process easier in the future (stay tuned for that post next week!)

#meeting-notes