Monthly Archives: December 2012

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 11:02 pm on December 28, 2012  

Open Issues from 3.5?

So what are the major hanging chads for problems we’ve seen in 3.5?

Here are the noisy ones I’ve been seeing lately:

  • Cron (posts that are scheduled not being kicked off)
  • jQuery/wpdb::prepare() shenanigans
  • Image uploads (has anyone seen problems with GIFs resizing?)

I also have two people claiming WP 3.5 upgrade moved their uploads to blogs.dir. Which sounds a little nuts no matter how I look at it. If anyone has an idea, help is welcome.

FYI I’ve deleted everything that was a complaint, or one-off bug report. I understand that it may seem like semantics here, but I’m looking for bugs more than 5 people have, and I do not mean you and your four friends on your site. Every release will have some one-off bugs. It’s not that I don’t care about those, but that’s not the point of this post 🙂 we’re tying to list, as moderators and volunteers, the issues we have seen come up most often, even if we personally have not experienced them. If you don’t understand the difference, please don’t post here 🙂

Drew Jaynes 5:05 pm on December 28, 2012
Tags: commercial support, ,   

What to do with commercial plugin/theme topics?

On the wp-forums mailing list this morning, there spawned a good conversation about how commercial 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/theme support threads should be handled in the forums.

There were several good questions raised including:

  • Should there be a better way to segregate commercial plugin/theme support topics?
  • How can we better organize said topics into one place? Should we?

The conversation spawned from this thread and how these situations should be handled. Jan summed it up pretty well with:

I was going to reply along the lines of “Please be nice to the plugin
author, they are providing support for free and on their own time” when I
realized wlbryan was their customer.

Given that we routinely tell people that commercial code is not supported
here, why is WOWsliders.com using the forums like this? Is that really
permitted or even a good idea?

As @jane pointed out, make:support might be a more apt venue for the conversation, so here we go.

#commercial-support, #plugins, #themes

Jen 11:59 am on December 28, 2012
Tags: Stats   

Support Stats

When I go to conferences like 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. Bridge and see the other project community managers trotting out their activity stats, a little part of me always dies, because we ain’t got none. Not this year! Yes, I know our systems aren’t set up well for automated stats. Pretend that’s not the case. For the next two minutes, pretend we live in a world where anything is possible, and suggest any and all stats you think it would good or interesting for us to start tracking. Don’t worry, Otto will bring us back to earth soon enough.

P.S. This team more than any other will likely need some infrastructure changes if we want to start measuring progress/success. Feel free to add what you think is needed in your comment, but that’ll be my next round: “Hey, what infrastructure changes would make the forum experience better for users and moderators,” since the forums is the first point of entry for a lot of people, so improvements here can have a big impact on all the projects around contributor growth.

#stats

Jen 5:14 pm on December 24, 2012
Tags:   

Team Rep Voting Results

Hola! Here are the results of the voting for this team.

11 people voted. The breakdown:

Please describe your role with the support team

  • 5 – I am an active forum moderator, and have been active on the forums within the past 3 months
  • 4 – I’m an active participant and would like to level up to moderator status
  • 1 – I don’t plan to get involved
  • 1 – I have not been involved yet, but I plan to start
  • 0 – I’m a moderator who wasn’t active in the last 3 months, but I have been in the past

Describe your forums activity.

  • 8 – I troubleshoot more difficult issues
  • 8 – I troubleshoot basic issues
  • 7 – I check for spam and inappropriate content
  • 6 – I help other people learn how to contribute in the forums
  • 4 – Other Option
  • 4 – I post questions in the forum
  • 2 – I don’t contribute to the forums
  • 0 – I comment on other people’s questions/answers but don’t troubleshoot
  • The four “other” responses were 4 docs and 1 IRC

Mika won the 1st slot in a unanimous vote.

The 2nd slot is not so clear. 9 of the 11 voters entered a name for the 2nd slot.
Both Siobhan and Jan got more than one vote. Since we just broke out docs into a separate group, Siobhan will be the rep for that team. Jan hadn’t said he was interested and voted for someone else. 🙂 Other names put forth only got one vote each (and a couple of those are reps on other teams now, too). I’ve pinged Jan to see if he wants to take the 2nd rep role, but probably won’t know until after the holidays. If Jan chooses not to take the role, I think it makes the most sense to have Mika choose from the other names that were proposed (if they are interested).

Eventually I think we should rethink the “team” vs “project” designation, as we have already spread ourselves into so many teams (and so many people work on multiple teams’ projects) that appointing team reps is hard, which wasn’t the intention of creating teams/team sites. When we get to June and it’s time to vote again, we should consider consolidating some teams. I think the main reason separating them out seemed better now is because P2P2 P2 or O2 is the term people use to refer to the Make WordPress blog. It can be found at https://make.wordpress.org/. makes it that way. If we had a modified theme that made it visually easier to have site sections for various projects (vs the plain text pages/cat list in the sidebarSidebar A sidebar in WordPress is referred to a widget-ready area used by WordPress themes to display information that is not a part of the main content. It is not always a vertical column on the side. It can be a horizontal rectangle below or above the content area, footer, header, or any where in the theme. widgetWidget A WordPress Widget is a small block that performs a specific function. You can add these widgets in sidebars also known as widget-ready areas on your web page. WordPress widgets were originally created to provide a simple and easy-to-use way of giving design and structure control of the WordPress theme to the user.), we could bring more of the groups together.

Anyway, Mika is re-upped! 2nd slot TBD.

#team-reps

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 7:58 pm on December 17, 2012  

How do I get started?

This question comes up a lot, and my usual reply is “What do you want to do?”

Here’s a Getting Started primer. It’s very much a work in progress, and I’m very open to suggestions 🙂

Jen 5:18 pm on December 9, 2012
Tags:   

Team Reps

Howdy, support team! It’s that time again, for your group to elect a couple of team reps to communicate on behalf of of forum folks. You can vote for 2 people. They should not be responsible for any other team repTeam Rep A Team Rep is a person who represents the Make WordPress team to the rest of the project, make sure issues are raised and addressed as needed, and coordinates cross-team efforts. duties, so to that end, of your current reps, Ipstenu is still eligible, but Andrea_r and Esmi are already taken by other teams (assuming they keep those roles). Who else has stepped up lately that wants to join in the fun?

These folks will be responsible for reporting on the progress of the group to the other team reps via weekly updates, as well as occasional chats and such. If you haven’t seen the spiel on one of the other team blogs about how team reps/voting/terms work, the longer explanation is after the jump.

Note: It should be people who want the responsibility. Anyone interested in being a support team rep should leave a comment saying as much so people know who they can/should vote for. Voting is open until December 15, and results will be posted here once voting closes.

Go vote!

Continue reading →

#team-reps

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 4:45 pm on December 7, 2012  

IRC Meetup Recap – Dec 6

Yesterday’s meetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. was going over the support points for 3.5, writing a kick ass doc (thank you @raggedrobins ) for JS debugging, tweaking the wiki, and getting the ZOMG! post ready.

Next week will probably be cleanup from 3.5 and going over anything we’ve learned to make the next time better.

Also! Starting January I want to have ‘rotating’ meeting times, since support is way worldwide. If you can comment with the best time (in UTC hours) for the IRC meetup, that will help a lot 🙂