As another 14 days turned around, the design team has continued to meet weekly and also have twice a week triages.
Specific update posts:
Here are a few more things that were accomplished:
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 if they are using 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.
There has lately been an uptick in incorrect use of the report topic feature by plugin 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 5.2.3 is scheduled for release on September 4th.
WordPress 5.3 is tentatively scheduled for release on November 12th.
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!
Some questions are going unanswered, notably relating to the new block 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:
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)
The Health Check Plugin has received an update which went live over the weekend between the meeting and this summary going out.
Useful new features are primarily related to the PHP Compatibility Checker, found under the Tools tab.
The suggested PHP version in core is scheduled to go live on August 20th (this is for showing the dashboard widget encouraging users to update their PHP version if they are using version 5.6 or lower).
The docs team is looking for input on what documentation is often needed, but is either missing or incomplete.
So far we’ve informed them that documentation on the new Site Health features (both checker, and fatal error protection) are desired, and that the block documentation needs to be surfaced better as many did not know we had any.
5.3 is tentatively scheduled to release mid-November, and a 5.2.3 release has been tentatively scheduled for early next month in the interrim.
Members from Sweden, Brazil, Portugal, Netherlands and India provided updates on how things are going in their regions.
The plugins team gave a heads up that there’s a lot of trademark strikes being handled as companies are becoming more aggressive in what they do and don’t allow, which may cause some noise.
The Community Team meets twice a month, first and third Thursday, at two different times to cover different timezones.
Agenda and Slack logs from July 18: 11:00 UTC and 20:00 UTC.
How to handle conflict of interest situations
Team has some assumed norms about conflict of interest situations, but not any suggestions or documentation how to handle those. There is ongoing discussion to identify possible conflict of interest situations and how we should work with those. After discussion there will be an proposal or post for further discussion.
Thanks to everyone who made suggestions on the previous post about updating the WordPress User & Developer Survey! Commenters shared lots of ideas as well as some wise words about survey design and data collection. There are plenty of questions we could ask, and it became clear to me immediately that the best way to move forward would be to clarify the goals of the survey. Once we’re settled on what we’d like to learn, we can use those goals to direct and inform the questions we ask.
The goal of this survey is to learn more about who uses WordPress, and how they use it — data that we can’t gather anywhere else — so we can build better software. Here is an outline detailing sections of questions, with some thoughts on what contributor teams would find each section useful:
Once people answer questions in the above categories, we can offer an additional set of questions designed for WordPress contributors, past and present. Presumably a contributor will be willing to give a little extra time to the survey, since they have a closer relationship with WordPress than non-contributors. We could probably use the list of questions asked in the 2015 Contributor Experience Survey as a starting point; it seems like a pretty comprehensive start.
Mentioning this now so that marketers can plan ahead: this year I’d like to promote the survey more widely than we have in the past.
We’ve always promoted the survey through a banner on WordPress.org, plus an article on WordPress News and through word of mouth. This has been successful in the past, but less so in recent years. In 2015*, 45,997 people filled out the survey, but in 2016 and 2017, less than 10,000 responses came in. We won’t have time to add a notice to everyone’s dashboard (even if everyone agreed that would be wise), so this year I’d like to ask everyone to help promote the survey through as many channels as they have available to them.
Here are some ways you can help:
Based on feedback on the broad goals of the survey, I’ll work up a survey draft, incorporating questions we asked in past surveys as well as new questions, which I’ll then publish on this site for additional feedback.
* There were 27,662,162 active WordPress installations as of Dec 24, 2015.
WordPress iOS and Android version 13.0 will be available for testing later today. Sign up here to join the beta program on iOS or follow this link on your Android device, tap on Become a beta tester.
Highlights for the last two weeks:
Another fortnight has travelled through time, the design team has continued to meet weekly and also have twice a week triages.
Specific update posts:
Here are a few more things that were accomplished:
I’ve updated this site’s sidebar to include a list of projects that affect multiple contributor teams and are being discussed mainly on this blog. My hope is that this will make it easier for people to follow communication centered around certain initiatives, as we continue to use this site for both weekly team updates and topics/project that affect many teams.
The links just take people to a list of all the posts associated with a project-specific tag, so it’s not terribly complicated. To keep this list relevant and useful, those leading cross-project initiatives should tag their posts consistently, and add the name of the initiative to that sidebar widget. This can be done retroactively as well, of course.
I considered making another sidebar widget for easy links to all the weekly updates from each team, but I don’t know if that would be useful or not. If you have a strong opinion on the matter, please share your thoughts in a comment on this post! If there’s a project that I’ve missed (as yet I’ve only added a few, that I’m personally working on), please also comment below. 🙂
