Hosting Team meeting agenda 2023-08-02

The next meeting is scheduled with the following details:

When

Where

At #hosting channel on 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/..

Agenda

WordPress Community

  • WordPress 6.3
  • WordPress 6.4
  • My ticket, my responsibility
  • Contributor Orientation Tool

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. Team Time

  • WordPress Hosting Survey
  • Dropping support for 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. 5
  • Updating the Hosting Handbook (for WP 6.3)
  • Upcoming Events / Contributor Days

Open Floor

  • Anything not in the agenda

Ideas or suggestions

Anything else? Please leave a comment to add to the meeting.

#agenda, #meetings, #weekly-hosting-chat

Hosting Team meeting agenda 2023-07-26

The next meeting is scheduled with the following details:

When

Where

At #hosting channel on 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/..

Agenda

WordPress Community

  • WordPress 6.3
  • WordPress 6.4
  • Plugins Team, new Team Reps

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. Team Time

  • WordPress Hosting Survey
  • Dropping support for 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. 5
  • I18N Performance Analysis
  • Advanced Administration Handbook
  • Upcoming Events / Contributor Days

Open Floor

  • Anything not in the agenda

Ideas or suggestions

Anything else? Please leave a comment to add to the meeting.

#agenda, #meetings, #weekly-hosting-chat

WordPress Hosting Survey

Last week in the Make WordPress #hosting 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 (direct link to post here), Matt shared that he would “like to have recommended hosts on the main .org page and all the language subdomains that most align with our values and contribute the most back.” 

As a first step, he requested feedback on a WordPress hosting survey he shared here

Some years ago, the 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. team was involved in a similar effort and prepared a report at that time, which can be found here.

Those who regularly attend the weekly Hosting team meetings are already familiar with the Hosting team’s recent “Project Bedrock,” which was an updated version of the original report and proposed to create a democratized directory of all hosts that meet a series of predefined requirements.

After reviewing the newer document, Matt challenged us to distill the most salient questions given how many differences there are between the survey he shared and the questions in Bedrock.

Courtney Robertson from the Training team, building off the application, drafted a rubric for scoring potential hosts for inclusion. 

A number of other ideas and notes have been posted by individuals as well, and those of us on the team are thrilled to see a renewed interest in the project and page as a whole. 

It has been proposed that this be a topic for discussion at the Community Summit next month, as well as at the Hosting table during 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/..

However, we encourage anyone interested in offering feedback or desiring to participate in the discussion to please do so by leaving a comment on this post.

Whether you’re able to attend in person or not, we want to make sure your thoughts and positions are represented as this discussion continues. 

Hosting Team meeting agenda 2023-07-12

The next meeting is scheduled with the following details:

When

Where

At #hosting channel on 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/..

Agenda

WordPress Community

  • WordPress 6.3 status
  • 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/ phase 3

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. Team Time

  • Dropping support for 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. 5
  • Meeting Update proposal
  • Upcoming Hosting 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/.

Hosting Team Projects

  • Advanced Administration Handbook
  • Host Test Runners
  • WordPress Hosting Directory

Open Floor

  • Anything not in the agenda

Ideas or suggestions

Anything else? Please leave a comment to add to the meeting.

#agenda, #meetings, #weekly-hosting-chat

Hosting Team meeting agenda 2023-06-28

The next meeting is scheduled with the following details:

When

Where

At #hosting channel on 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/..

Agenda

WordPress Community

  • WordPress 6.3 BetaBeta Beta is the software development phase following alpha. A Beta phase generally begins when the software is feature complete but likely to contain a number of known or unknown bugs. Software in the beta phase will generally have many more bugs in it than completed software, speed or performance issues, and may still cause crashes or data loss. The focus of beta testing is reducing impacts to users, often incorporating usability testing. 1
  • Be a WordPress Mentor
  • Next Generation WordPress Events

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. Team Time

  • Channel Updates
  • Odd MySQLMySQL MySQL is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). MySQL is free and open-source software under the terms of the GNU General Public License./MariaDBMariaDB MariaDB is a fork of the MySQL relational database management system (RDBMS), intended to remain free and open-source software under the GNU General Public License. MariaDB intended to maintain high compatibility with MySQL, ensuring a drop-in replacement capability with library binary parity and exact matching with MySQL APIs and commands. Data on stats page
  • MariaDB 10.3 EOL
  • Criteria for Removing “Beta Support” from 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. 8.x
  • New WP_DEVELOPMENT_MODE constant
  • Upcoming Hosting 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/.

Hosting Team Projects

  • Advanced Administration Handbook
  • Host Test Runners

Open Floor

  • Anything not in the agenda

Ideas or suggestions

Anything else? Please leave a comment to add to the meeting.

#agenda, #meetings, #weekly-hosting-chat

X-post: WordPress Contributor Mentorship Program: Pilot Program Proposal

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Hosting Team meeting agenda 2023-05-17

The next meeting is scheduled with the following details:

When

Where

At #hosting-community channel on 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/..

Agenda

WordPress Community

  • WordPress 6.2.1
  • 20 Days to Celebrate 20 Years of WordPress, From Blogs to Blocks

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. Team Time

  • Contributor Days

Hosting Team Projects

  • Advanced Administration Handbook
  • Host Test Runners

Open Floor

  • Anything not in the agenda

Ideas or suggestions

Anything else? Please leave a comment to add to the meeting.

#agenda, #meetings, #weekly-hosting-chat

X-post: Proposal: Retiring Older Default Themes

X-comment from +make.wordpress.org/core: Comment on Proposal: Retiring Older Default Themes

Is WordPress compatible with PHP 8?

Looking for updated information?
Visit the Hosting Handbook Server Environment page.

TL;DR. If you are using WordPress 6.2, you should at least use 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.PHP PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a general-purpose scripting language especially suited to web development. PHP code is usually processed on a web 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. 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 HTTPHTTP The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, where hypertext documents include hyperlinks to other resources that the user can easily access, for example by a mouse click or by tapping the screen in a web browser. response. 8.1. If you keep your WordPress, plugins and themes up to date, everything should work fine.
If you are not yet using WordPress 6.2, we strongly recommend that you use this version of WordPress for maximum PHP compatibility.

PHP 8.x has been with us for a while now, so much so that even PHP 8.0 has only security support, and we should mainly use PHP 8.1 and PHP 8.2.

It mainly depends on which versions of WordPress and PHP we are talking about. There are many places to get information about WordPress and PHP compatibility:

A lot of information, plenty of versions.

The official version

WordPressPHP compatiblePHP beta compatible
WordPress 6.25.6 – 7.48.0* / 8.1* / 8.2*
WordPress 6.15.6 – 7.48.0* / 8.1* / 8.2*
WordPress 6.05.6 – 7.48.0* / 8.1*
WordPress 5.95.6 – 7.48.0* / 8.1*
WordPress 5.85.6 – 7.48.0*
WordPress 5.75.6 – 7.48.0*
WordPress 5.65.6 – 7.48.0*

What does beta mean?

Nothing. Yes, really, nothing. Forget about that!

When PHP 8.0 was released, WordPress gave some warning messages (not error messages). Most of those messages are fixed in all versions of WordPress and for all versions of PHP. Yes, there are outstanding tickets and messages, but they are few and should not affect WordPress performance.

Why put the beta label, then?

Not because of WordPress, but because of the ecosystem, i.e., plugins and themes. When PHP 8.0 appeared, block themes were not yet widespread and the Site Editor was not yet finished, which it is now. And since WordPress did not make its compatibility clear, many plugins were not adapted to PHP 8.x… because what’s the point if WordPress is non-compatible? (yes, this last question is pure sarcasm).

And, the fish that bites its tail: WordPress says it’s beta-compatible, and plugins and themes don’t adapt because WordPress isn’t… but, it’s not true. You have to read the fine print.

It’s all a matter of timing

In some cases, the release of WordPress coincides with a new major version of PHP, and that complicates everything. On the one hand, there is no time to adapt, on the other hand, everything works. And between one and the other, things are left the same.

The fact of marking WordPress as beta-compatible had a reason to be: WordPress works, but in general nobody uses WordPress without plugins. And the plugins, most of them, were not adapted to PHP 8.x.

It has been 6 months since the release of PHP 8.2 and many plugins are still not supported… although there has been time for PHP 8.0 and 8.1 to be supported.

Again, it’s a timing issue. PHP started a few years ago a cycle of annual releases of major versions that are not fully compatible with each other or generate many warnings, and reviewing all the WordPress code is complex, let alone the more than 60,000 plugins and 10,000 themes.

The Hosting vision

Security is a critical factor for hosting companies, and keeping PHP versions up to date is part of that.

That is why, every year, as the old PHP versions are no longer officially supported, the providers are activating the new ones and deactivating the old ones.

While it’s true that there are no PHP 7.4.1+ vulnerabilities reported yet (it’s a matter of time), it’s about time to use at least PHP 8.0. And, almost already, for the remaining half year of support, you should consider using at least PHP 8.1.

WordPress vs. PHP vs. Hosting companies

Undoubtedly, the decision to use one or another version of PHP for each project should be up to the users, although the hosting companies should clearly inform about the risks or not of using one or another version.

For example, someone with WordPress 5.8 cannot be recommended to activate PHP 8.1 because it probably won’t work. Nor can you push to make the change as soon as a new version of PHP is released.

What should I do?

First: the decision must always be yours. It is your project, and you have to decide what is best for it with all the information.

Second: have all the information. And this is where we can help you, a little.

Third: everything has to work. The goal is to make your site work, so you have to check, with a staging version, that everything is working properly. Ask your hosting provider for help with this.

I have WordPress 6.2

Presently, in May 2023, our recommendation is that you have at least PHP 8.1. It is a stable version, it is a secure version, and most themes and plugins work with this version.

WordPress 6.2 is compatible with 5.6.20+, PHP 7.0.x, PHP 7.1.x, PHP 7.2.x, PHP 7.3.x, PHP 7.4.x, PHP 8.0.x, PHP 8.1.x and PHP 8.2.x. BUT, older than PHP 8.0 are nor maintained, PHP 8.0 has only security maintenance and PHP 8.1 and PHP 8.2 are maintained versions. This is why PHP 8.1 is a good choice because, in general, everything should work.

What do I do if something doesn’t work? Upgrade everything to the latest versions. The latest version of WordPress 6.2 (right now WordPress 6.2.0), the latest versions of all your plugins and all your themes. If you have premium plugins, make sure you have the latest versions. Ask your hosting to help you figure out what’s wrong.

I have WordPress 6.1

When we published Server Environment for WordPress 6.1, we knew that WordPress 6.1 worked correctly with PHP 8.0 and PHP 8.1. PHP 8.2 did not, for one simple reason: it had not yet been released.

We also knew one thing: most plugins, even though PHP 8.1 had been on the market for a year, were not fully compatible. It was after PHP 7.4 stopped receiving updates that many developers started to support all available PHP 8.x versions, which are PHP 8.0, PHP 8.1 and PHP 8.2.

It has been long enough for WordPress 6.1, its plugins and themes to work properly with PHP 8.0 and PHP 8.1.

And, just as with WordPress 6.2, if you still have WordPress 6.1 everything should work correctly with PHP 8.1.

I have WordPress 5.9–6.0

You can read the same as in the two previous cases. In short, you should now be able to upgrade everything to PHP 8.1.

I have WordPress 5.6–5.9

You can read the same as in the two previous cases. In short, you should now be able to upgrade everything to PHP 8.0.

I have a version before WordPress 5.6

Surely, the best thing to do is to check out our article Upgrading (very old) WordPress.

Summary

The Core, Test, and Hosting teams actively care about the full compatibility of WordPress with all its technologies. This includes Apache HTTPD, nginx, PHP, MySQL, MariaDB, memcached or Redis.

While it is true that PHP is a critical technology, we have a project in which many hosting companies test their systems with future versions of WordPress so that, once released, its compatibility is as high as possible.

You can see the results of Host Test Results and learn how well it works and what the bugs are. Errors are good because it means that a possible incompatibility has been detected and will be corrected in the future so that WordPress remains compatible with the widest number of systems.

And if you are a hosting company, you can help WordPress stay up-to-date by testing alpha versions on your systems.

#core, #php

Hosting Team meeting agenda 2023-05-10

The next meeting is scheduled with the following details:

When

Where

At #hosting-community channel on 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/..

Agenda

WordPress Community

  • 2021-2022 WordPress 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. Survey
  • 2022 Annual Survey Results & Next Steps
  • WordPress 6.2.1 Planning
  • 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/ 15.7
  • Stacks: The first community themeTheme A theme dictates the style and function of your WordPress website. Child Themes derive from the main parent theme.
  • 20 Days to Celebrate 20 Years of WordPress, From Blogs to Blocks
  • Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship for 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 2023

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. Team Time

  • SQLite DatabaseDatabase A database is an organized collection of data. Access to this data is usually provided by a "database management system" (DBMS) consisting of an integrated set of computer software that allows users to interact with one or more databases and provides access to all of the data contained in the database. Because of the close relationship between them, the term "database" is often used casually to refer to both a database and the DBMS used to manipulate it. Update
  • WP CLICLI A command-line interface (CLI) processes commands to a computer program in the form of lines of text. Today, many users rely upon graphical user interfaces and menu-driven interactions (WordPress WP-Admin). However, some programming and maintenance tasks may not have a graphical user interface and may still use a command line (WP-CLI). Update
  • Contributor Days

Hosting Team Projects

  • Advanced Administration Handbook
  • Host Test Runners

Open Floor

  • Anything not in the agenda

Ideas or suggestions

Anything else? Please leave a comment to add to the meeting.

#agenda, #meetings, #weekly-hosting-chat