Samuel Sidler 6:07 pm on July 24, 2013
Tags: projects ( 4 )

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

Jon Brown 6:42 pm on July 24, 2013

Great list!

I know everything can’t be high priority and short term, but personally I feel improvements to the 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 repository for better collaboration needs to be medium term and higher priority. It’s a beast, but it just keeps getting worse and harder to fix as the years go by. There has been a ton of really great discussion on the subject lately, this is a good starting point: http://tommcfarlin.com/problems-with-the-wordpress-plugin-repository/

I also look forward to the Codex splitting more cleanly between users / developers. The codex is such an amazing creature, but it not the most approachable for either group.
- samuelsidler 7:07 pm on July 24, 2013
  
  Thanks for the link! I have another one from the same site that gives some great details on the 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. and ways to improve it.
  
  I should have noted this in the post, but just because something is targeted at “long term” or lower priority, that doesn’t mean it won’t get fixed sooner. My prioritizing was just a first attempt and can be adjusted if we think it’s wrong.
Erlend Sogge Heggen 10:07 pm on July 24, 2013

Great initiative!

“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” really comes down to converting the legacy bbPressbbPress Free, open source software built on top of WordPress for easily creating forums on sites. https://bbpress.org. forums to the new bbPress 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. It’s quite the undertaking, but it’d be a great way to move both projects (WPORG and bbPress) forward.

Likewise, I think “Ideas” should just be a subset of the forum. The way it works now it’s just too separated from where the conversations are taking place. I’d love to see “Ideas” applied to bbPress in the form of a custom post format. These plugins might make for a quick starting point, and their respective developers might be interested in lending a hand:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/ideas/
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-idea-stream/
- samuelsidler 10:17 pm on July 24, 2013
  
  Thanks for the feedback!
  
  If we put a bunch of interested people in a room to talk about the support forums, I bet we can come up with a number of other improvements, beyond simply moving them to the new bbPressbbPress Free, open source software built on top of WordPress for easily creating forums on sites. https://bbpress.org. 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. But I think moving them to the plugin would be a great first step that would allow other improvements to take place at a faster pace.
  
  For “Ideas”, there are a number of… ideas(!) for improving that entire section. When we get to the point where we’re ready to scope out improvements to that part of the site, we’ll figure out what features are ideal to improve participation and generally make people feel like their opinions are getting noticed. Some things I’ve heard for Ideas include better integration with other tools (like tracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. if a submitted idea is already on file), Reddit-like voting, and better categorization of ideas. Like I said, those are just thoughts others have had for that part of the site and might never get implemented! We’ll scope things out as we get a chance to focus on that part of the site.
  
  I appreciate the links to those plugins, of course. 🙂
  - Daedalon 1:01 pm on July 25, 2013
    
    The number one thing missing 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/: a proper forum-specific search. Just go ask the developers at eg. https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/events-manager how many hours they would save every week if users could effectively search for solutions to issues instead of always posting a new thread. Their 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. spans 179 pages, and at 30 threads per page, that’s more than 5300 threads and tens of thousands of messages. The general Google-provided search can’t be limited to a single forum.
    
    Even if it would take days or even weeks to make a proper forum-specific search possible, it would save so much time for every popular 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 developer that the benefit for the WordPress community is huge.
    
    To put it another way, the daily loss for the WP community caused by the lack of the proper search is astounding. Same issues have to be resolved multiple times every day, which eats up the developers’ resources and shows in the number and quality of plugins and support available.
    
    I agree with the priorities listed in the original post otherwise but in my view “Support Forum Improvements” deserves a place as an immediate priority.
    - samuelsidler 8:11 pm on July 25, 2013
      
      Thanks for the feedback on this!
      
      It’s hard to make everything an immediate priority, but I understand why adding an automatic search-for-duplicates would be very helpful to a lot of people. I’ll add the details about that specific feature to my list so we don’t forget it when we work on improving the 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..
      - Ian Dunn 3:42 pm on July 27, 2013
        
        I think it’d be helpful if we could link related posts together, ala stackexchange.com. That way, when someone starts a new thread, it can be connected to all the other threads on the same topic, which would help with cross-referencing.
        
        It might also be good if there were a way to add threads to a list of canonical “resolved issues”, to make it easy for users and developers to find the official/final solution to a common problem.
      - samuelsidler 8:47 pm on July 27, 2013
        
        Ian: Both great ideas. I’ll add them to my list!
    - Jon Brown 6:08 pm on July 26, 2013
      
      Oh! I whole heatedly agree. Forum search is awful and needs fixing. I would add however that 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 authors could be better at adding things to their FAQ page. Maybe we need a way like zendesk has to turn threads into faqs/wiki.
      - samuelsidler 6:24 pm on July 26, 2013
        
        That’s not a bad idea. We could also search the FAQ for an answer to their question prior to a user submitting a new forum post. Something like “Have you read this FAQ answer?” and show the most relevant one(s) based on keyword. There are probably a lot of other things we can do to make FAQ answers and previous forum posts more discoverable.
Erlend Sogge Heggen 10:22 pm on July 24, 2013

Also, I think the WP developers should come together and get behind one single Wiki initiative.

Codex is still running on MediaWiki. BuddyPress and bbPressbbPress Free, open source software built on top of WordPress for easily creating forums on sites. https://bbpress.org. however is running on some custom made wiki solution. I don’t know what the WPCOM support/help pages are running on.

The most promising 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 of all is probably Boone Gorges BuddyPress Docs, which I don’t think actually requires BuddyPress.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/buddypress-docs/

There’s also the more MediaWiki-like plugin from WPMU:
http://premium.wpmudev.org/project/wiki-lite/

A unified effort in this area could result in a really solid plugin as well as a more consistent documentation experience (including contributing documentation) across all WP sites.
- samuelsidler 10:56 pm on July 24, 2013
  
  Indeed! And handbooks aren’t wiki-like at all, but is the way we’re heading for a few documents. That’s a technology decision we should make as we start working on specific areas.
- Paul Gibbs 9:33 am on July 25, 2013
  
  The bbPressbbPress Free, open source software built on top of WordPress for easily creating forums on sites. https://bbpress.org. and BuddyPress codexes are just specalised WordPress themes. No magic.
Marko Heijnen 10:47 pm on July 24, 2013

The immediate priority is somehow taken care of. Better profiles would help out with recognizing contributors. But that is really hard to do. Like in my case when I rewrote a complete APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways. in 3.5 and I’m just a name in a list of 200. I don’t mind that at all but recognition does depends on what you did. So one patch is different then having a lots of patches in a release.

Improvements for i18n is already happening right now. I’m working slowly to get GlotPress better. Hopefully in the next few days translate.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/ can be updated to the latest changes.

I think better code collaboration and bug tracking is a low priority and that fine. You can easily use 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/ for now and a lot of people already doing so. I guess moving 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/. to the latest version or even wait till 1.9 is out would make sense. I think SVN 1.9 will move a bit to GITGit Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency. Git is easy to learn and has a tiny footprint with lightning fast performance. Most modern plugin and theme development is being done with this version control system. https://git-scm.com/. but I heared that from others.

Workshop I would put on a higher priority. But more as in training. Read my comment on https://make.wordpress.org/training/ how I feel about it. That also says something how I feel how closed the organisation of .org is. It’s maybe the same that you blog your ideas on this blog when you are new. Maybe you even get commit access to do stuff. It’s nothing against you as a person but it does seems weird to me. You would expect someone need to earn some respect in the community to be able to.

Ideas can be improved but I have no clue if anyone really looks at it. I guess we first need to shrink the open tickets below 1000 will this make sense.
- samuelsidler 11:13 pm on July 24, 2013
  
  Thanks for your comments Marko!
  
  I think better profiles would definitely help with recognizing contributors, but there are always other things we can do, outside of website changes. My focus right now is on the website changes we can make to improve the visibility of contributions. From there, we can hopefully do a better job of recognizing them.
  
  Some of the i18n improvements are also in progress. As you said, your work on GlotPress is definitely one of those. But other changes (like the ones mentioned here) aren’t directly related to GlotPress and the localization process.
  
  As far as Workshops (Training) is concerned, I think that some of the handbooks that are being planned for the support hub will help here as we hone our end-user language. But it does indeed feel like an item that’s been dropped a bit and we need a plan of action. Most of the other items on the list have had a lot of ideas thrown around, making them easier to work on.
  
  See my comments above about “ideas.” I think that getting the open ticket count down is important, but somewhat orthogonal to improving “ideas.”
  - Daedalon 12:41 pm on July 25, 2013
    
    The most important update in my eyes is the search. I have tons of support threads that I’ve opened and which I’ve replied to, and I have use for referring to them quite often.
    
    For example today I opened a support thread, mentioning a previous support thread we had on the same issue, but didn’t provide a link to the original thread as it would have taken too many minutes and too much of the concentration-time available to do.
    
    I already see a paged list of my threads in the activity section of my profile; it’d be great if anyone could also search those threads. This would solve the issue of someone looking for a solution they remember seeing by someone: just go to that person’s profile and search with the appropriate keywords.
    - samuelsidler 8:15 pm on July 25, 2013
      
      And thanks for this feedback too!
      
      Just so I’m clear, this comment is specifically about the ability to search a person’s profile feed and is different than your other comment. Searching profile feeds would be an interesting feature and is something we should investigate. But perhaps there are other, better tools we can work on for people who spend a lot of time in support forums. Do you have other ideas for tracking forum threads?

Welcome to the 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. Team!

Contact

Digestible WordPress.org Project List

Immediate Priority

Short Term

Medium Term

Long Term (or Low Priority)

Welcome to the 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. Team!

Contact

Immediate Priority

Short Term

Medium Term

Long Term (or Low Priority)

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