Josepha 4:07 pm on December 11, 2019  

Journal Entry: Sockpuppet Emails

Posting here with a journal entry for reference: I was pinged in a few tweet storms in the past week, so I took the liberty of reviewing the email template that seemed to kick off both conversations (sockpuppetSockpuppet A false online identity, typically created by a person or group in order to promote their own opinions or views. Generally used to promote or down-vote plugins en masse. activity). I edited it for clarity, flow, and WordPress Voice. The issues that prompted the complaints on Twitter have also been resolved through direct communication.

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 4:11 pm on May 17, 2019  

Do You Make Widgets?

Please take some time to read and comment on the proposal to move Widgets to the Blocks UXUX UX is an acronym for User Experience - the way the user uses the UI. Think ‘what they are doing’ and less about how they do it.!

Widgets to Blocks UX Flow Proposal

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 5:20 pm on April 1, 2019
Tags:   

WordPress To Move to PHP 5.6+

WordPress 5.2 is due out at the end of April, and wit that release the minimum recommended version of PHPPHP PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. http://php.net/manual/en/intro-whatis.php. will be PHP 5.6.

Minimum PHP Version update

For most plugins this is a non-issue. While we recommend you update your “Requires PHP:” version in your readme.txt, this won’t change the functionality of your code. That field is a minimum version, so if your code works with 7.0 and up, you can set it to `Requires PHP: 7.0` and that will cover 7.1 and 7.2

Also keep in mind, this doesn’t change our policy on PHP versioning, which is to say we still do not have an official version requirement for PHP in your plugins. If you want to support 5.6 forever, feel free. If you want to require 7.1 and up, again, go for it.

You can use a compare to do the basic check: 

version_compare( PHP_VERSION, '5.6', '<' )

And remember the goal for your 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 is “Don’t break things for users.” Stop them from getting fatal errors, and don’t run your plugin if you know it can’t work.

#php

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 3:24 am on December 13, 2018  

https://make.wordpress.org/core/2018/12/13/backwards-compatibility-breaks-in-5-0-1/

Backwards Compatibility Breaks in 5.0.1

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 4:07 pm on September 3, 2018
Tags: ccoc, crosspost   

Notice: Community Code of Conduct Meeting 4 Sept

The Code of Conduct will apply to all 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 developers and their support crew, so we encourage you to be aware of these developments.

Community code of conduct next meeting: 4th September 15:30 UTC

#ccoc, #crosspost

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 9:55 pm on May 1, 2018  

https://make.wordpress.org/core/2018/05/01/javascript-internationalization-the-missing-pieces/

JavaScript Internationalization: The Missing Pieces

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 4:37 pm on December 3, 2017
Tags: ,   

Reviewing the Guidelines – 2017

I do this regularly, but recently I received a comment that the guidelines were still too vague.

I need to stress that this is by intent. If we make guidelines like “You can only have 3 external links” then people will find ways to exploit that. However I do not think that guidelines are perfect. Which is why I’m proposing a minor update to them to address the following concerns:

  • Overall tense of guidelines made consistent
  • Update introduction for readability and unpack what we mean by keeping email updated
  • Explain the converse of 3
  • Put the important part of 5 on top
  • Add link to forum guidelines to 9
  • Add prohibition against harassment to anyone in WP
  • Clarify self-dismissible alerts are acceptable in 11
  • Changed tense of 12 and 13 to emphasize their importance
  • Grammar fix for title of 15
  • Fix reference to zips in 16 (upload now vs link to)
  • Reword title of 17 to explain that PLUGINS must honor…
  • Guideline 18 has received a full rewrite to clarify what rights we reserve and reiterate our promise to do this as fairly as possible.

You can see all the changes proposed here on GitHub

Please read the guidelines and leave comments or pull requests on 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/. The plan is to make these live in January 2018 so please jump in and help! Thanks.

#announcement, #guidelines

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 5:05 pm on September 7, 2017
Tags:   

SWFUpload To Be Removed From Core

Removing SWFUpload

If your 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 is using SWFUpload, please remove it and switch to Plupload. If you’re a security plugin scanning for it, you’re fine. If your plugin is using it, or including your own, it’s time to upgrade.

#announcement

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 9:27 pm on June 27, 2017  

Test With Gutenberg Please!

Call for testing: Gutenberg

This is especially important if your 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 adds 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. boxes or otherwise makes changes to the editor. PLEASE test early and often.

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 6:24 am on April 5, 2017  

Reminder: How SVN on WordPress.org Works

Now that the new directory is out, it’s time for a couple quick reminders on how the SVNSVN Short for "SubVersioN", it's the code management system used to maintain the plugins hosted on WordPress.org. It's similar to git. repositories work on WordPress. We have documentation on how SVN works here, but the information can be overwhelming.

Use readme.txt (not .MD)

A readme.md file is not the same as our readme.txt format. If you try to use one and expect everything to work right, you’ll have a bad day.

Your Stable TagTag Tag is one of the pre-defined taxonomies in WordPress. Users can add tags to their WordPress posts along with categories. However, while a category may cover a broad range of topics, tags are smaller in scope and focused to specific topics. Think of them as keywords used for topics discussed in a particular post. matters

This has always been the case, but it’s now more important than ever. If you say that your 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’s stable tag is 1.2.3 but you do not have a /tags/1.2.3/ folder, your plugin will absolutely not behave as expected. If you’re not using tags folders, your stable tag should be trunk and that’s it. (But we would rather you use tags.)

Don’t use a folder for your MAIN files

Do not put your main plugin file in a subfolder of trunk, like /trunk/my-plugin/my-plugin.php as that will break downloads. You may use subfolders for included files.

The Assets folder is special

We have a dedicated folder for your plugin screenshots and banners. Want a faster, smaller, plugin? Put your assets in /assets/ and not /trunk/assets/ please. Your users will thank you. Screenshots and banner images go in that folder. It’s special. Use it wisely.

SVN is a release repository

One of the guidelines is that frequent commits to your plugin should be avoided.

Unlike 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/., our SVN repository is a release repository, not a development one.  Every single commit triggers a regeneration of the zip files associated with the plugin. All the zips. That can be pretty brutal on the system. No one likes it when a plugin download breaks because the server’s down. Please be nice to our servers.

It’s okay to update your readme within reason

That said, if you need to update your readme to fix a critical public typo, do it. And if you want to update the readme to bump the version of WordPress you’ve tested up to, that’s fine too. Just keep it to the major releases. A plugin that is tested on 4.7 will show as tested up to 4.7.2 as well, after all.