March 10th Support Team Meeting Summary

WordPress 4.5 BetaBeta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process. 3

WordPress 4.5 Beta 3 is out, and so far we haven’t noticed anything consistent or otherwise worth highlighting in our testing.

Please do test the beta when you can. If we can find bugs before 4.5 goes final, we’ll have less threads to deal with after.

Badge Status Update

I am very happy to report that, in line with the other teams, we now have a Support Contributor Badge, and that everyone with a Support Team badge now has a Support Contributor badge.

Meanwhile, congratulations to everyone else with a new Support Contributor badge today: @abletec, @daviduzelac, @catacaustic, @adeline, @stephencottontail, @bcworkz, @rossmitchell, @songdogtech, @digitmaetel, @gblsm, @nobita, @ikaring, @extendwings, @kuck1u, @hnle, @npssl, @mura0403, @ounziw, @taku-k, @inc2734, @mocomoco, @hayato-y, @kjmtsh, @kuroda, @megane9988, @adminstrelok, @denisco, @alvarogois

Badges are defined on the Handbook’s Volunteering in the Forums page.

We aren’t done awarding badges, we have more to go in a second round soon, and we’ll be looking into ways to automate the process so that we can get this done much quicker (and accidentally miss less people, sorry).

If any not-English support leaders are reading this and either @kenshino or @macmanx have not gotten to you, and you are on a rosetta forum (we can’t connect to external forums), please feel free to DM us, and we’ll get your locale’s Support Team badge thingy sorted out.

Moving to bbPressbbPress Free, open source software built on top of WordPress for easily creating forums on sites. https://bbpress.org. 2

The move to bbPress 2 is still ongoing, and the slow pace is deliberate and necessary. Lots could break if we aren’t careful, and the move to bbPress 2 depends a lot on how well moving the Plugins and Themes Directories to native WordPress goes.

You can help speed the process along a bit by adopting a feature of our current forums and turning it into a 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. Anything that is high to medium priority absolutely must be done before we even attempt upgrading the forums, anything low priority is also necessary but not a blocker for launch, and anything that is listed as “none” for priority would be nice to have but please give priority to the rest first.

Read the meeting transcript in the Slack archives. (A Slack account is required)

#weekly-chat