General announcements
The Site Health Team did the suggested upgrade version bump for PHP in core this week, and over the next week users will start seeing a dashboard widget 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. if they are using PHP PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. http://php.net/manual/en/intro-whatis.php. 5.6 or lower, guiding them towards upgrading.
A reminder that when flagging users, a moderation action limiting public display of posts until approved by a moderator, always educate the users on why this was done and what this means, there will also be more direct guidelines on when to flag users coming in the future, as the use of flags is becoming a bit too liberal, at least on the international forums.
And when writing notes on users, make sure to be descriptive enough, as they are available across all rosetta sites, and not everyone can read an archived post for example.
In other news, there’s a lively conversation going on at https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/4696 relating to WordPress profiles here on dotorg.
Increased use of the topic report feature by authors for invalid reasons
There has lately been an uptick in incorrect use of the report topic feature by plugin 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 and theme authors, primarily because they don’t like getting negative feedback from users.
This has started to become a nuisance to the volunteers, and we would like to reiterate that the report feature is for forum guideline violations only. Continued misuse of the feature will lead to us reporting things to the theme or plugin teams respectively.
WordPress Core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. Timeline Update
WordPress 5.2.3 is scheduled for release on September 4th.
WordPress 5.3 is tentatively scheduled for release on November 12th.
Checking in with international liaisons
Members from our Russian, Swedish, Brazilian and Dutch communities took place in this weeks discussions.
If you are a part of a non-English speaking part of our community, we invite you to join our weekly meetings (if you can), as we would love to get ot know you!
Open floor
Some questions are going unanswered, notably relating to the new block Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. editor. Although it’s a shame when someone doesn’t get helped, we’re all volunteers on a community forum, and it’s perfectly fine for some questions to not be answered, we’re all human, and we do what we can when we can, but nobody should feel obligated here.
The Health Check plugin was updated last week, and some of the more notable changes include:
- Changes to the grading indicator in the header The header of your site is typically the first thing people will experience. The masthead or header art located across the top of your page is part of the look and feel of your website. It can influence a visitor’s opinion about your content and you/ your organization’s brand. It may also look different on different screen sizes. (no longer uses a numeric value, instead it’s an indicator with a string for clarity)
- A new dashboard widget when you login to give you the site health at a glance
- A new PHP compatibility checker for plugins in the Tools section
For more changes, the full list is available at https://wordpress.org/plugins/health-check/#developers, and yes, some of the changes in the plugin relating to the grading indicator and Site Health Checks are being tested out and intended for a core release.
Read the meeting transcript in the Slack archives. (A Slack account is required)
#weekly-chat
