Hosting Meeting Notes: January 18, 2017

Here’s the summary of our very first meeting in #hosting-community on Wednesday, January 18, 2017 at 1600 UTC (Slack archive).

Purpose

Kicking things off by restating the purpose of the group.
- Original post on Make Hosting.
- Is the scope of what we’re looking to tackle off?
  - Looks fine for now.
  - Let’s just fix things as we go.

Ideas

Hosts should band together and work through things that the coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Team builds WordPress. group can never do.
- Come up with solutions for things like:
  - Upgrading PHPPHP PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a general-purpose scripting language especially suited to web development. PHP code is usually processed on a web server by a PHP interpreter. On a web server, the result of the interpreted and executed PHP code would form the whole or part of an HTTP response. for non-managed users.
  - How we can all generally make WordPress feel and work better for everyone.
  - If core needs PHP module X, can we get enough of us on the same page for core to rely on that?

Best practices documentation (see: WordPress HostingHosting A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their website accessible via the World Wide Web. Handbook).
- ServerServer A server is a piece of computer hardware or software that provides functionality for other programs or devices. Typical servers are database servers, file servers, mail servers, print servers, web servers, game servers, and application servers. setups are going to vary, but there are definitely best practices that we can document.
  - Who puts default settings in wp-config.php?
  - System plugins.
  - Standard “default” php.ini values.
    - Hosts should offer feedback on things like upping default memory limits in core. (#29341)
  - Scaling and performance optimizations.
    - The REST APIREST API The REST API is an acronym for the RESTful Application Program Interface (API) that uses HTTP requests to GET, PUT, POST and DELETE data. It is how the front end of an application (think “phone app” or “website”) can communicate with the data store (think “database” or “file system”) https://developer.wordpress.org/rest-api/. and plugins like WooCommerce are changing how people use WordPress.

Promoting and encouraging 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. attendance.
- Hosts are uniquely positioned to promote regional WordCamps to customers.
  - WordPress has great brand awareness amongst customers.
  - WordCamp? Not so much.
  - Knowledge sharing “in your own backyard” is a big draw for some people.
- Can leverage geographical customer data to promote upcoming local camps.
  - “As a WordPress user, here’s an event near you that you might find educational and informative that you didn’t even know was a thing!”
- May require support from the #community-events team to help automate it.
  - An APIAPI An Application Programming Interface (API) is a computing interface that defines interactions between multiple software intermediaries. It defines the kinds of calls or requests that can be made, how to make them, the data formats that should be used, the conventions to follow, etc. would make it easy to tie into.

Making sure new features are scalable on implementations of all sizes.
- Testing things at the host level rather than just depending on the automated TravisCI tests that are currently run.
- See: @jorbin’s PUBSUBHUB unit testing idea.

Assignments

Best Practices Documentation: @voldemortensen, @lukecavanagh, and @aaroncampbell agreed to pitch in where they can.
Promoting WordCamps: @smaffulli will reach out to events team.
Distributed Unit Tests: @mikeschroder is reaching out to @jorbin for next steps.

Feedback

Miss the meeting? Interested in helping on one of the initiatives above? Please feel free to drop into the comments and weigh in.

Next Meeting

Our next meeting will be in #hosting-community on Wednesday, January 25, 2017 at 1600 UTC. If that works with your schedule, we’d love it if you could attend. Hope to see more of you next week!

#meetings, #summary, #weekly-hosting-chat

smaffulli 23:29 on 2017-01-18

thanks for the write-up folks. I have reached out to the events team, it looks like WordCamp.org has an APIAPI An Application Programming Interface (API) is a computing interface that defines interactions between multiple software intermediaries. It defines the kinds of calls or requests that can be made, how to make them, the data formats that should be used, the conventions to follow, etc. that can be used to pull a machine-readable list of approved WCs. Also, meetup.com has API that allow pulling the list of WP meetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. events. Combining the two should give a decent coverage of all WordPress community events in the world.
I would move forward with a very simple proof of concept that pulls events from both, WC and meetup.com, builds a unified machine-readable list of *all* future events. This list can then be filtered downstream by hostingHosting A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their website accessible via the World Wide Web. companies to pull events they want to advertise. Thoughts?
- Pascal Casier 07:59 on 2017-01-19
  
  Also check out the work done last year (but manual). But it can give you ideas of what others wanted to get as info: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JbLqECUoy_c3713gzOL2yba5qO2xG7kVHgSDzaZ_kh4/edit#gid=0
- Ian Dunn 16:24 on 2017-01-19
  
  We’ve got some code that already does that, if you’d like to borrow anything from it. It was powering a page on make/Community, but that’s no longer working, so there may have been some APIAPI An Application Programming Interface (API) is a computing interface that defines interactions between multiple software intermediaries. It defines the kinds of calls or requests that can be made, how to make them, the data formats that should be used, the conventions to follow, etc.-side changes that broke it, or something.
  
  The REST APIREST API The REST API is an acronym for the RESTful Application Program Interface (API) that uses HTTP requests to GET, PUT, POST and DELETE data. It is how the front end of an application (think “phone app” or “website”) can communicate with the data store (think “database” or “file system”) https://developer.wordpress.org/rest-api/. on WordCamp.org hasn’t been worked on in awhile, and is still running v1 for that endpoint. Eventually I’d like to redo it in v2, but there are a lot of higher priorities right now.
  
  Let me know if you have any questions or anything.
Daniel Bachhuber 00:07 on 2017-01-19

For reference, here’s the set of scripts I put together for Pantheon to run the WordPress test suite against Pantheon on a nightly basis.

It was actually easier than I expected. On hosts where the same environment has to be reused, you’ll likely want some locking mechanism to prevent two jobs from executing at the same time.
- John James Jacoby 17:52 on 2017-01-19
  
  This is really cool. Nice work.
Pascal Casier 06:47 on 2017-01-19

Hi @smaffulli,

As said in the channel, if you need any input for the APIAPI An Application Programming Interface (API) is a computing interface that defines interactions between multiple software intermediaries. It defines the kinds of calls or requests that can be made, how to make them, the data formats that should be used, the conventions to follow, etc. usage, I’m already doing some stuff there. Like getting 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. events only for an area like Europe or getting all meetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. events in some countries : http://wp-info.org/events-fr/

I can share any technical details you want!
squidboylan 00:13 on 2017-01-24

Here is the tool I worked on https://github.com/squidboylan/wordpress-meetup-scraper , it pulls from http://central.wordcamp.org/ and https://www.meetup.com/ to generate a comprehensive list of upcoming events. I built it quickly while learning the two APIs, and it can be easily modified to fit our needs. Let’s discuss what the scope of the tool should be and we can also talk about some implementation details.
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Purpose

Ideas

Assignments

Feedback

Next Meeting

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