July 14th Support Team Meeting Summary

Attendance

@macmanx @jdembowski @abletec @kenshino @clorith @jmdodd @fierevere @otto42 @bcworkz @erricgunawan @kidsguide @vitormadeira @sergeybiryukov @dartiss @numeeja @justingreerbbi @hardeepasrani @cristianozanca @geoffreyshilling @themeislesupport @songdogtech @stevesterndatacom @lukecavanagh @valeriosza @pmfonseca @rafaelfunchal @gugaalves attended.

Announcements

We’re trying a new format by putting announcements first. In this case, “announcements” are any announcements that either don’t need discussion or where discussion happens elsewhere.

  • The next WordPress Community Summit has been moved to WordCamp EU 2017. WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. EU 2017 will be in Paris, France from June 16 to 18. The Community Summit dates have not been set yet, but they will be either before or after WCEU.
  • If you’re looking to help more often in the Accessibility forum, or contribute to WordPress accessibility, or even just learn more about a11yAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) in general, @abletec has released her educational materials for free.
  • Along with the move to bbPressbbPress Free, open source software built on top of WordPress for easily creating forums on sites. https://bbpress.org. 2, a forum redesign is on the horizon. The first research steps have been taken and feedback is requested at the linked post.
  • 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 Directory v3 is now in public beta! For more details, and to leave feedback, please see the linked post.
  • If you have been experiencing SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. crashes lately, it’s probably due to memory consumption from the size of WordPress Slack along with any other Slacks you may be logged into it. If you’re a Mac user, you’re in luck. @boogah has released Making WordPress which is basically a dedicated app for just WordPress Slack. Resource usage should be much lower, and if it still crashes, it won’t take your other Slacks with it.

WordPress 4.5.3

We have not identified any new negative trends introduced by 4.5.3.

WordPress 4.6 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 4.6 Beta 3 is here. Please start testing it, as less bugs in the final release = less threads in the forums.

Varying Vagrant Vagrants is a simple way to run local WordPress sites for testing, though there are others, and of course you could always just install the beta on a subdomain on your own hosting provider/VPS/dedicated/cloud/etc.

4.6 OMGWTFBBQ Draft

The 4.6 OMGWTFBBQ Draft is up and open to feedback in its comments section.

Shiny Updates was suggested as a candidate for the Not a Bug section, but was left out for now as it’s a much more intentional and obvious improvement/change than Font Natively.

WCNYC Contributor DayContributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/.

@jdembowski will be supervising the support contributors at WordCamp NYC 2016’s contributor day and asked for suggestions/requests for the support contributors there, beyond the traditional “answer in no-replies” suggestions.

Suggestions were given to offer feedback on the Support Handbook while using it to do support, to help out with triaging bugs in the Alpha/Beta forums, and to contribute feedback to the redesign research.

Not-English Support Communities in the Meeting

Everyone is welcome to attend and participate in the weekly Support Team Meeting, that especially includes members of the not-English support communities. Given how attendance usually works out, it may appear that we focus exclusively on English support, but if you have something that needs to be addressed in your support community, please do bring it to the meeting.

Responsible Moderation

Please remember that we do have the power to delete individual replies, not just entire threads. If anything in a thread is salvageable or otherwise of value to the community in general, please strongly consider only removing the offending replies, rather than the entire thread.

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

#weekly-chat