November 30th Support Team Meeting Summary

WordPress 4.9

WordPress 4.9.1 was released yesterday, and is a combined security and bugfix update. Addressing some of the most noteworthy bugs discovered in 4.9 at this time.

There have been no new recurring 4.9 issues, but we make note of the change to the author bio field now being passed through wpautop which might be reverted.

Health Check debugging

The Health Check plugin got updated last week to introduce a loopback tester, and a troubleshooting mode to virtually disable all plugins for a user. This is to make it easier to have users test with all plugins disabled without impacting their site visitors.

Troubleshooting using the Health Checker

Meeting deputy for next week

@macmanx has volunteered to cover next weeks meeting, as @clorith is away on vacation

Checking in with international liaisons

The Russian, Italian, Hindi, Spanish and Portuguese communities had representatives stop by our meeting this week.

If you do support for WordPress in non-English speaking communities, please do stop by and say hello during our meetings so we can share experiences.

Open Floor

Support chat

A suggestion was put forth for introducing a more topic-oriented chat to topics than what our IRC room currently provides.

Unfortunately a solution like this requires a lot of moderation control, which we do not have the capacity for, and our IRC room does suffice for now. Communities are encouraged to point those seeking a more real-time solution there, as the IRC room allows any language speaking user to join up, they may direct you to forums if the language is under-represented and we do not have any volunteers capable, but it’s a good solution for now.

Contributor onboarding

At 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/. on Sunday, Dec 3, we will be trying an experiment with “Support Volunteer Orientation”. At 10:30 am local time in Nashville (16:30 UTC), we will have a short (10-15 min) Volunteer Orientation in the 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/. channel. We will try to cover the basics, like filtering for no-replies, using the “Also Viewing” script, and when to reach out to moderators for help. We are trying this at Contributor Day because we know we will have some willing new volunteers, but we hope others who might be interested will join us remotely, and most importantly, give us some feedback about whether this might be useful going forward as a regular way to get new volunteers oriented and answer any questions they might have.

Attendance

@anevins, @bcworkz, @bdbrown, @clorith, @contentiskey, @cristianozanca, @fierevere, @geoffreyshilling, @hardeepasrani, @howdy_mcgee, @josearcos, @macmanx, @matteospi, @numeeja, @pmfonseca, @sergeybiryukov, @sterndata, @t-p, @tobifjellner and @zoonini attended.

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

 

Contributor tips
Troubleshooting an issue? Use the Health Check plugin to disable plugins without affecting site visitors!

#weekly-chat