Help contribute to social media materials for 5.9 release

When you can help?

Global marketing meeting from Wednesdays 8 December and 15 December 2021, at 14:00 UTC (time tbc on whether this will be extended to 15:00 UTC), drop-in sessions, and asynchronously during this period.

Update: The meetings on 5 January and 12 January 2022 will also be focused on this area.

Link to the collaboration sessions in January 2022

What will we be collaborating on?

The team will be researching and writing social media draft copy for the WordPress 5.9 release. As in previous releases recently and promotions, we will draft posts for editing into a social media amplification pack. We will cover in the main Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn channels. We hope to continue to align this with the work in #Training and #Documentation and find ways of collaborating more together and avoiding any duplication of effort.

The social posts will be able to be reshared and adapted by others in their own networks, by meetups and users wanting to share the benefits, latest features and showcase the community of contributors.

5.8 social media amplification pack

Information sources

[Updated information relating to RC1]

The main confirmed information source will be the final version of the About Page text, which will be committed for Release CandidateRelease Candidate A beta version of software with the potential to be a final product, which is ready to release unless significant bugs emerge. 1, due on 4 January 2022 (revised schedule).

We will also be able to connect with the technical writer and a central information provider, in addition to the release squad this release to help verify items too.

Thanks to the group who worked on reviewing and identifying potential improvements in the coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. information flow to marketing. It reviewed the 5.6-5.8 experiences and pilot ideas to highlight suggestions for future releases. Thanks to Josepha for responding and considering these suggestions, and her positive feedback.

Can you give a few hours to help in the live collaborations or asynchronously?

Social media collaboration sheet for 5.9 

Please let @webcommsat (@ abhanonstopnews 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/.), @marybaum, or @yvettesonneveld if you can help with this.

You can let us know in the thread of this message or the Marketing channel on the Make WordPress Slack channel.

We welcome people joining to shadow during the meeting too. Just let one of the team reps know so that someone from the team can check-in with you during the meeting and support you.

Thanks to everyone for your involvement in supporting the next WordPress release.

Updates from collaborations are being added below to help new contributors be more easily involved.

Discussion: timeline for availability of resources to promote

There will be some content areas (for example, the changes to wordpress.org/patterns) that will need to be done at launch. With the Training Team, Marketing is exploring how this could be best flagged and whether we can color-code content based on when information or Learn WordPress material will be available to promote.

Discussion: use of video

(22 December 2021 Marketing collaboration)

This discussion built-on the ones held in Core relating to the About Page and wider comms and the research / feedback from Meetups in recent releases.

  • video would need to be able to be standalone and linked from WordPress.org or LearnWP
  • subtitled video would be the aim. This helps from accessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility), usability and translation perspectives
  • possibility that a video may be incorporated or linked from the About Page for the release. This could also be highlighted in the social media pack
  • there are a number of nice videos that could be leveraged showcasing new features debuting in 5.9; e.g. patterns, global styles, blockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. updates, etc. These were incorporated into the State of the WordState of the Word This is the annual report given by Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress at WordCamp US. It looks at what we’ve done, what we’re doing, and the future of WordPress. https://wordpress.tv/tag/state-of-the-word/. last week. We can use those and the 5.9 video (3.5 minutes available on the main WP YT account) for social media promotions. Nicholas is the better POC on those and social media… For LearnWP, there folks are working on training workshops for 5.9 features, but those will likely be ready much closer to January’s release date. Once they are available, we can promote and incorporate into the release docs as well. Dan Soschin to collate a list of videos an links which could be potentially used.

Discussion: photo-editing for channels

  • The aim will be to create image sizes as in 5.8 for the three main channels in the pack: Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Contributor call is running on this. A template is to be looked at by Meg Phillips and Mary Baum has offered to help test.
  • Images will be stored in the Marketing 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/ as in 5.8.
  • Through discussion with the release leads and core, images are now being stored centrally in the main Marketing drive in a release folder. This should help the photo sourcing issues considerably. The originals must not be replaced. Please resize images as a copy and save the new image in the relevant social media folder.
  • Previously Instagram images have not been created as 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/ account was out of use. Instagram stories are not currently being used, but may be in the future. Discussion on whether we should include media that is sized for stories (vertical) in the amplification pack, even if they can not currently be used on the WP.org account.
  • Alt tags: discussion on how these could be added to the spreadsheet and made easier to use by the end user to encourage take-up.

#5-9