Revitalizing the Showcase 

Submission guidelines on highlighting the best of what you can do with WordPress

Highlighting the potential of what can be built with WordPress is both a testament to the incredible power of creating on WordPress and a testimonial that even the most noteworthy of brands are powering their content with WordPress. As the Make Marketing team updates the content of what’s in the Showcase, the team should aim to elevate and maintain the integrity of the platform. Read more on the efforts to reinvigorate the Showcase.

This is an excellent opportunity to get involved in a way that helps shape how others, especially those who aren’t intimately familiar with WordPress might come to view the excellent work that brands with their teams or designers, developers, and marketers are doing while utilizing WordPress.

In order to fix the aforementioned issues, allow Showcase to reach its fullest potential, and make moderation sustainable, I’m proposing the following steps be taken:

  1. Limit the WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ Showcase to 100 entries. Unlike the Photos Directory, websites aren’t static, they change frequently. Staying on top of which sites are still running and still using WordPress has been an ongoing and growing issue. Limiting the Showcase to the 100 most sites resolves this issue and also guarantees that the showcased sites are also fresh, demonstrating the latest and greatest WordPress possibilities. Bonus: Develop a script to automatically unpublish any sites still running on an old version within 30 days of a new release.
  2. Get details and data. The showcase should be more than just ‘shiny and new’ or a collection of Fortune 500 companies. Digging in and getting details like how the website was created will help answer the question of “Why is this in the Showcase?” MetaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. data that helps to answer this question will be prioritized throughout the curation process.
  3. Reduce categoryCategory The 'category' taxonomy lets you group posts / content together that share a common bond. Categories are pre-defined and broad ranging. noise. Have fun with tags. The Showcase previously used an arbitrary collection of tags for navigation. Rather than carry that forward, there is an opportunity to simplify navigation through the use of select categories. Tags can then be used to arbitrarily group sites by technology, theme, host, etc. This will help keep the collection of sites and add some quirk and joy as well.
  4. Update the submission form to include additional metadata. While the Showcase has previously used single-sentence site descriptions, the hope is to expand entries to tell more of the story behind the sites. Adding form fields for the site creator, country of origin, and story (background) gives visitors insight into how these sites are built. These fields can also make the content creation process easier.
  5. Maintain and manage the list. While each site on the Showcase will embody the spirit of what it means to be powered by WordPress, some brands’ notoriety will underscore the breadth of what’s possible with WordPress. Keeping such sites as evergreen — or pinned — will be in the best interest of visitors. Innovation is also a key way of keeping the showcase fresh and some entries will help balance the showcase with evergreen content and user-generated submissions to help show off the beauty of WordPress.
  6. Create credibility and trust. Adopting a policy that refreshes a portion of the showcase, rotating through new various sites, allows the WordPress Project to stay true to values like fostering creativity and innovation on the platform. When the Showcase exemplifies what’s possible, the Project will live its values. Brands that might make sense from a name recognition point of view might be best represented on /enterprise rather than the showcase.

What’s next?

Sharing some of these thoughts with you and listening to your observations and ideas is a critical step in making the Showcase a valuable and successful brand asset. The project will only benefit from its collective community voice as it works to show off some of the excellent work that’s being done out in the wild world wide web!

So what do you think? Do these guidelines capture a strong way of revitalizing the Showcase? Please share your thoughts and ideas. Or join in the discussion on GitHub.

#showcase