Design meeting notes May 13th

These are the weekly notes for the design meeting that happens on Wednesdays. You can read the full transcript on our Slack channel and find the meeting’s agenda here. You can join the SlackSlack 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 by following the instructions in our handbook.

First, housekeeping. We can still use more volunteers for note-taking and triage leading. Leave a comment if you’re interested.

Next, @michael-arestad brings 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/ updates.

  • Gutenberg 8.1 RCRelease Candidate A beta version of software with the potential to be a final product, which is ready to release unless significant bugs emerge. was released last Monday.
  • Here’s an overview of what we’re working on in May.
  • There is some interesting work being done on the Query block.
  • The blockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. navigator is getting some new useful tools.
  • The welcome guide is getting a pretty great design update.
  • The navigation block is seeing some forward progress (over a series of issues) with @karmatosed leading the design of several.
  • Work is being done on an idea for template areas to function a bit more like adding a section (prototype) based on a discussion from last Friday.

Some exciting news: we are participating in Google’s Season of Docs! https://developers.google.com/season-of-docs This will help with the exploration of the new categories for documentation that will be included in the redesign of documentation.

Then, @ibdz updates us on the work being done on the Design Team Handbook to improve the flow and usefulness. Current content is being re-ordered, and soon the pages that need it will be (re-)written. Hopefully this will also help the onboarding process for 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/..

Speaking of contributor day, Office Hours for onboarding new contributors should be planned. Volunteers to keep an eye on the design team slack channel and help anyone with questions would be greatly appreciated. Leave a comment below if you’re interested.

For Contributor Day itself, there are some suggestions for tasks:

  • Updating Gutenberg components
  • Picking up CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. needs-design(-feedback) issues on TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/.
  • Picking up Gutenberg needs-design(-feedback) issues on 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/
  • Reclassifying articles with the Docs team
  • Seeing where the Notification Center proposal is at, but that may be quite big

We agreed to start reviewing tickets with needs-screenshots for new contributors and having Monday 1 June/Tuesday 2 June triage as part of the on-boarding process.

#meeting-notes