Here’s a summary of the meeting in #hosting-community on Wednesday, December 12, 2018 at 1800 UTC (Slack archive).
Attendees: @brettface @akpanpromise @dws122 @antpb @mikeschroder @boborchard @stevenkword @mclancy3 @dhsean @pbiron @javiercasares @clorith @andrewtaylor-1
Announcements/Reminders
There’s been great feedback on how both plans and how things are going with 5.0 rollout within the channel! Thanks everyone!
5.0
The meeting started out with folks chiming in on how the WordPress 5.0 release has been going so far.
By and large, there has been much less support than expected after the release. So far, it’s widely seen by hosts as going well.
Users reporting issues seem primarily to be due to plugin 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 or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party. or theme A theme dictates the style and function of your WordPress website. Child Themes derive from the main parent theme. incompatibilities, with one host reporting confusion around Twenty Nineteen, which is being investigated.
@pbiron offered to make public and collaborate on a list of Gutenberg 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/ compatible plugins and themes that his team is working on. If anyone is interested, please comment here, or message in 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/.!
There was discussion on documentation in general, that included @antpb pointing out that the Docs team has made a call for contributors for Gutenberg documentation, and later on @javiercasares offered to share a technical manual as a proposal for further documentation for the handbook.
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. US
Many folks from the hosting 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. community team met during WordCamp US. @brettface synopsized from the public notes made during WordCamp US contributor 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/.. I love how the meetings were documented in real time and suggest taking a look at them to get a better picture of the discussion.
Mission and Direction
In general, a lot of the conversation was around direction of the team, and the best ways we can work together and invite others into conversations around hosting WordPress.
By the end, the group gathered came up with a suggestion for a new mission statement, with the aim of being more inclusive.
Work to improve the WordPress’ end-user experience across a variety of hosting environments through a combination of industry collaboration and user education.
What do folks think about that? Let’s bounce this back and forth a little, and decide on a new one.
There were suggestions to have a regular video meeting as an additional gathering to help with connections. What do you think about this?
Another theme in the conversations I had was around folks that wanted to share information or data, but feel uncomfortable doing so publicly — or at least without anonymity, with one person suggesting a private channel for that use. I’m happy to anonymize any information for meetings if you feel comfortable, but does anyone have additional ideas to help folks feel more comfortable participating in regular chat and meetings?
Site Health This WordPress functionality will perform a number of checks on your installation to detect common configuration errors and known issues, and also allows plugins and themes to add their own checks. Check
The hosting team met up with the Health Check / Servehappy teams to discuss direction and the newly announced initiatives to merge them during the next year and increase the PHP version requirement for WordPress.
The aim is to ship WSOD (PHP 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. Fatal Error) protection and an in-dashboard PHP version warning for PHP < 5.6 in WordPress 5.1, planned for February 21, 2019.
You’ll start seeing the updates related to the above projects cross-posted on this blog so that it’ll be easier for everyone to stay connected.
See more in the notes.
Feedback
Miss this week’s meeting and want to discuss the things chatted about? Please leave a note in the comments or in Slack!
Next Meeting
The next meeting will be in #hosting-community on Wednesday, December 19, 2018, 1800 UTC. Hope to see you then!
#meetings, #summary, #weekly-hosting-chat
