Digestible WordPress.org Project List

Hello! My name is Sam and I work for Audrey organizing and scoping projects. I’ve spent the last three weeks talking to a lot of people and trying to get a better sense of all sorts of projects that exist throughout the WordPress community, especially on 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 all of its associated websites.

There’s a lot of pieces to wordpress.org and everything can be better. I’ve identified a number of areas that have been mentioned over and over and that need a lot of focus. Based on my conversations, I’ve taken a first stab at prioritizing everything below.

I want to emphasize that none of the ideas I put after the projects have been decided; I just wanted to give some general thoughts I had about what each project means. Everything below is at varying degrees of progress. Some things are nearing completion! Others are just ideas, with no scope at all. And there are only so many things that can be worked on a time, so a lot of these projects might get put on the back burner as we focus. As we decide to move forward on a project, we’ll want to decide what the goal is and then scope out exactly what needs to be done.

Because I’m pretty new to the WordPress community, I’m sure I’m missing some things. Feel free to comment and let me know. Nothing is too big or too small.

To start, these are a few ongoing projects, by which I mean these are things we should take into consideration as we work on any part of wordpress.org.

  • 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.: Many parts of wordpress.org are closed to participation. We should open source websites as we work on them. (In progress.)
  • Stats: Integrate stat collection throughout each part of the site so we know what features are most used.
  • General Design Improvements: Every part of wordpress.org should have a consistent design. We should also investigate implementing a responsive design across all sites, though this is likely targeted for the medium term or later.

And here’s the entire list of projects, in order by the priority I determined:

Immediate Priority

  • Increase WordPress and WordPress.org Participation: Let’s make it dirt simple to contribute to the WordPress community. For starters, we can do a better job answering the “Where do I go?” question. But we can also do a better job at recognizing contributors from all over the project and keep attrition low.
  • Improve make.wordpress.org: Redesign the front page of make.wordpress.org to be useful. It should be the home page of WordPress contributors. Ideally, make.wordpress.org will show an overall view of what’s going on throughout the project and incorporate information about each team.

Short Term

  • Support & Documentation Hubs: Two separate hubs, but closely related in many ways. Our story for end-user support isn’t great and should be improved. Likewise, the documentation in the Codex can be overwhelming for new developers. (Below are some sub-projects.)
    • Handbooks: Well-written online resources that give a good overview of how to get involved (contributor handbooks), how to develop for WordPress (developer handbooks), or how to use WordPress (support handbooks).
    • Developer Resources Hub: We need to point developers to the part of the project they are most interested in and link to relevant handbooks and resources. A code reference is an easy win for documentation and would replace a lot of Codex pages with solid, up-to-date information.
    • Support Hub: As WordPress gets into the hands of more users, we need a better end-user story. Many relevant documents exist on wordpress.comWordPress.com An online implementation of WordPress code that lets you immediately access a new WordPress environment to publish your content. WordPress.com is a private company owned by Automattic that hosts the largest multisite in the world. This is arguably the best place to start blogging if you have never touched WordPress before. https://wordpress.com/, but would need to be tailored to the wordpress.org audience (i.e., someone running their own installation of WP but maybe not understanding what that means).
  • Profile Improvements: At present, it’s hard to know what individual community members are working on. We should vastly improve profiles, showing activity from across wordpress.org (including, but not limited to: tracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/., SVNSVN Apache Subversion (often abbreviated SVN, after its command name svn) is a software versioning and revision control system. Software developers use Subversion to maintain current and historical versions of files such as source code, web pages, and documentation. Its goal is to be a mostly compatible successor to the widely used Concurrent Versions System (CVS). WordPress core and the wordpress.org released code are all centrally managed through SVN. https://subversion.apache.org/., forums, theme and pluginPlugin 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 https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party directories, localization work, event participation, etc). Using this data, we can better recognize contributions. Profiles should be the place to go to see what someone has been working on. Likely, these improvements will take place over time, as we work on individual areas of the site. (Partly in progress via Google Summer of Code project.)

Medium Term

  • Themes Directory Redesign (feature themes better)
  • Improvements for the i18n Community
    • Create “global.wordpress.org” (i18n community portal)
    • Improve locale sites (Rosetta)
    • Improve translator tools and resources (Translate)
    • Improve international forums
  • Improve WordPress.org Home Page
  • Support ForumSupport Forum WordPress Support Forums is a place to go for help and conversations around using WordPress. Also the place to go to report issues that are caused by errors with the WordPress code and implementations. Improvements

Long Term (or Low Priority)

  • Plugin/Themes Directory
    • Improve Tools and Collaboration (better support forum tools, better code collaboration, better bug tracking tools)
    • Improved Plugin Rankings
  • Workshops (i.e. learn.wordpress.org)
  • jobs.wordpress.net (Some work being done now; more work in the future)
  • “Ideas” Improvements
  • Mailing List Page Redesign

Let me know what you think!

#projects