WordCamp EU Contributor Day!

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. Europe 2019 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/. was on June 20th. A very big thank you to all participants at the Tide table and the amazing cross team communication!

The day was originally going to be focused on-boarding new contributors to Tide, reviewing the backlog for issues, and submitting pull requests. As well, I had planned to meet with the Hosting team after lunch and connect with the Meta team to discuss how we can start consuming data from the Tide APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways..

The actual event went something a bit different…

As usual the WiFi network was overtaxed and getting people setup with Tide was a bit of an arduous task. Unfortunately, we were not able to get anyone setup with a local working version of Tide.

Instead effort was put into fixing issues that could be done without installing the Tide requirements and building the Docker images. For example, the documentation and API results. There were a couple pull requests created by @ottok as a first time contributor, which deserves a big thank you!

@grapplerulrich and I also began focusing on installing the wordpress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ metaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. environment to trying and create a patch that would consume the Tide API and display those results. Again the WiFi played a hand in slowing down that effort. The biggest win though was all the cross team communications.

Luckily we were able to get the right person at the table, thank you @dd32! Dion updated the meta environment so the Tide PHPPHP 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. Compatibility results for plugins are now being stored with the post meta. We are officially using the Tide API and it feels good!

What does that mean though? We are not yet consuming data for themes, we are in the exploratory phase where we test that the sync is working correctly. Once we are satisfied that the connection is stable we will add data from themes. Then we can explore the logic and UIUI UI is an acronym for User Interface - the layout of the page the user interacts with. Think ‘how are they doing that’ and less about what they are doing. needed to expose that data to everyone and respect the authors supplied value.

We are much closer now to using the TIDE API to automate static analysis on plugins and themes. It’s a small piece of code but a huge win for the project. There was also discussion of ways to use Tide in a broader sense and we are now looking towards the future. This is especially important for automating review team activities and for helping WordPress adopt PHP 7+ — it’s exciting to say the least.

On Saturday I also had the pleasure of meeting with several folks to discuss the requirements for the Plugin & Theme Review teams plus what actions need to be taken to move the coding standards into a good place for our community. There is a recap of that conversation here.

The biggest takeaway of the event is that Tide is now being used. However, we have a lot of data to analyze currently in our API, which could be used to solve whether or not WordPress is ready to adopt a more modern codebase. I have a few more meetings to attend and ideas to formulate on the future of Tide, so look for those updates in the coming weeks.

For now let’s all just celebrate this win!