November 3rd Support Team Meeting Summary

Announcement

WordPress 4.7 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. 1

The first WordPress 4.7 Beta is here, so please start testing.

If you don’t have any room on your own server or hosting account, there are some great guides for setting up a local server environment.

More bug reports during the beta means less forum threads after the final release.

New Forum Theme

Please continue to test the forum redesign!

To start the fun, simply visit https://wordpress.org/support/?new-theme=1

It works off of a cookie, so if you need to switch back, simply visit https://wordpress.org/support/?new-theme=0

If you find anything broken, please open a ticket in Meta Trac (after searching first, of course) under the Support Forums component, and prepend the ticket’s title with “Support Theme:”. You can also use this pre-made query for viewing reported issues.

In addition to reporting bugs, we now have two master posts to aid in planning a new Forum Welcome and new forum descriptions.

This is how it’s launching for now (with a query string cookie toggle), and once everyone is confident that the bugs have been worked out, it will be launched for real! 🙂

Publicly Requesting/Posting Private Information

We have received some concerns of folks asking for and/or even providing other people’s private information, such as location, primarily in settings like IRC and 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/..

While we understand that this is typically being done in a friendly manner, please be aware that some folks would rather not share such things (even as broad as state or country) in a public setting, even despite being eventually conceded into doing so.

If it is not necessary to resolving their support issue (it rarely is), please just don’t ask, and if you catch anyone else asking, please convey this to them.

And never, under any circumstances, provide someone else’s private information. If you catch anyone doing that, please immediately report it to a moderator.

While many of us are friends, remember that not everyone wants the world to know their job, gender, living situation, location, etc. Be respectful. If it’s not your personal information, don’t talk about it in public.

WordPress Ideas Section

WordPress Ideas has been around for a long time. To the best of our knowledge, it’s not actively monitored, it only has two moderators, and it’s still on an old version of bbPressbbPress Free, open source software built on top of WordPress for easily creating forums on sites. https://bbpress.org..

It sounds like there has been some discussion on replacing it, but nothing recent, so we had a discussion and a vote on what we’d like to do with it (understanding that the decision may be out of our hands).

If the decision does come down to us, by unanimous vote, we would like to retire the WordPress Ideas section in favor of the Requests and Feedback forum.

Update: Meta Ticket 2203 has been filed for this.

Twenty Seventeen Issues

There was some confusion around how to handle reported issues with the new Twenty Seventeen default theme now shipping in the 4.7 Beta, since the theme is not officially “live” yet.

Please report bugs in Trac using the Bundled Theme component.

If you’re already helping a user on the forums with the Twenty Seventeen theme, and want to crowdsource opinions before sending them off to TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. with a bug report, try #core-themes on Slack.

Post-DST Meeting Time Change

Starting next week, by 13 to 2 vote, our meetings will be at 17:00 UTC, which means the next meeting will be Thursday, November 10, 2016, 17:00 UTC.

Checkin with International Support Liaisons

Attendance

@macmanx @bcworkz @jmdodd @cais @lukecavanagh @bdbrown @geoffreyshilling @sterndata @kidsguide @cristianozanca @zoonini @danhgilmore @jdembowski @songdogtech @alchymyth @bethannon1 @stephencottontail @ipstenu @kenshino @jcastaneda @erricgunawan @t-p @tnash @numeeja @clorith @valeriosza @sergeybiryukov @zodiac1978 attended.

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

#weekly-chat