The Month in WordPress

Update: Efforts on this project have been paused indefinitely.

The Month in WordPress is a monthly roundup published at WordPress.org/News and sent to people subscribed to this blog. It features product releases, community activities, events, contributing opportunities, and more.

Its primary goal is to keep existing contributors engaged and updated while providing an onramp for potential contributors to observe and learn what’s happening in the project.

  • Primary success metric: Unique pageviews
  • Other metrics:  Average time on page, source/medium

Background

The Month in WordPress was officially launched in July 2017 by Hugh Lashbrooke. Various contributors from the Community team took over content creation until it was handed over to the Marketing team at the end of 2021. Since then, marketing contributors have spearheaded these posts in collaboration with other community members.

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Contributing

Contributing to The Month in WordPress is a good opportunity to practice your content creation skills. Because it serves as a platform to share WordPress updates, it’s also a way to contribute to the collective knowledge and progress of the project, keeping the community informed about the latest happenings.

The Month in WordPress is compiled in the last weeks of each month and published in the first week of the subsequent month.

Contributors open a GitHub issue for each edition, including a collaborative document based on this template, and follow this overall process for compilation and publication:

Content curation and creation

  • Following the instructions and resource links in the template, contributors gather relevant news articles for each section and write concise summaries for them in the document.
  • All content needs to follow the WordPress Brand Writing Style Guide.
  • The Month in WordPress posts focus on updates within the Make WordPress teams and 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/ and do not cover external happenings from third-party WordPress companies or products. However, there may be exceptions for certain community initiatives, such as this LGBTQ+Press Empowerment Grant.

Content review and input

  • Once the initial draft is ready, contributors share it on the 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/ issue and the Marketing Slack channel for a collaborative review. This allows for async suggestions, comments, and revisionsRevisions The WordPress revisions system stores a record of each saved draft or published update. The revision system allows you to see what changes were made in each revision by dragging a slider (or using the Next/Previous buttons). The display indicates what has changed in each revision. from other community members during a specific period of time (usually one or two days).

Final adjustments and publication

  • Contributors review and incorporate suggested edits or changes as needed.
  • All collaborators of the draft are credited in the “thank you” paragraph at the bottom of the document.
  • After making final adjustments and preparing necessary visual assets, the document undergoes a last review for spelling, grammar, link errors, etc.
  • Content and assets are moved to WordPress.org/News by contributors with access to the blog and published under the Month in WordPress categoryCategory The 'category' taxonomy lets you group posts / content together that share a common bond. Categories are pre-defined and broad ranging..

Amplification

Examples of past editions:

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Contributors

Open sourceOpen Source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. thrives on connections. The following are regular contributors to this project. Reach out to them in the Marketing Slack channel if you have questions or need help.

@rmartinezduque

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Resources

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Changelog

  • 23 February 2024 – Documentation of The Month in WordPress process
  • 18 April 2024 – Added project status update

Last updated: