Josepha 9:10 pm on March 4, 2020  

WordCamp Travel and COVID-19

Over the past few months, the Global Community team and I have gotten many messages asking about COVID-19 and what it means for WordCamps. We’ve all been doing our best to be knowledgeable about the virus while responding in a level-headed way. Now seems like the right time to share some guidance on what to do next.

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. Travel and Contingency Planning

We should do our part, as members of a highly connected global community, to limit the spread of the virus while there are still so many unknowns.

TLDR: Current guidance advises that if you are planning an event scheduled between now and June 1, and there is any evidence of community transmission of COVID-19 in your area, we strongly recommend that you postpone the event until later in the year or 2021 and/or adapt to an online event.

  • As always, WordCamps are encouraged to embrace their local nature, showcasing the WordPress enthusiasts in your own area.
  • I’ve asked some experienced global community team deputies to research ways to support community-organized livestream events. Not to replace all WordCamps, but to offer an alternative for any that decide to cancel.

For the remaining 2020 WordCamps designed to gather international attendees (WordCamp Europe, WordCamp Centroamerica, WordCamp US), I’ll assist the global community team as they continue monitoring the situation while gathering information from organizing teams and providing the same support provided to WordCamp Asia.

Epidemics like COVID-19 are unpredictable and I’d rather err on the side of caution. I recognize “caution” is a subjective term, but here it means making decisions that align with the efforts of the world to contain the impact of this virus.

Resources and Kudos

Huge thank you to the members of the Global Community team who have been monitoring this evolving situation. Here are a few of the resources and metrics they’ve been using: 

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 10:51 pm on May 25, 2020
Tags:   

Plugin Review Team: 25 May 2020

PluginPlugin 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 Status Change Stats

  • Plugins requested : 213
  • Plugins rejected : 15
  • Plugins closed : 26
  • Plugins approved : 120

Plugin Queue Stats (current)

  • Plugins in the queue (new and pending)* : 795
  • → (older than 7 days ago)** : 705
  • → (2020-05-18 – 2020-05-25) : 68
  • → (new; not processed or replied to yet)* : 15
  • → (pending; replied to)* : 780

HelpScout Stats

  • Total Conversations: 325
  • New Conversations: 231
  • Customers: 276
  • Conversations per Day: 39
  • Busiest Day: Wednesday
  • Email Conversations: 231
  • Messages Received: 406
  • Replies Sent: 489
  • Emails Created: 158
  • Resolved: 192
  • Resolved on First Reply: 26%
  • Customers Helped: 267
  • Replies per Day: 33
  • Closed: 265

#plugins

webcommsat AbhaNonStopNewsUK 11:44 am on May 24, 2020
Tags: , onboarding, , WCEU, WPTranslationDay   

Marketing Team update, May 2020

Supporting new and existing contributors

Thanks to the work of our contributor event communications working group, we have continued to produce materials to encourage participation and provide support in setting up and using the team’s tools.

With the assistance of @macgraphic, @webcommsat and @rahuldsarker we are working on screen videos to show how to set up 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/ and Make WordPress 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/. accounts ahead of 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 (WCEU) Online 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 4 June 2020.

The English version of the video, with captions.

Some contributors have asked for further help with voiceovers or captions in their native languages. We will try to add these where possible. If you would like to help with this, contact @webcommsat or @macgraphic

Marketing Team onboarding (introduction) sessions will run again this week on. Please join the team if you would like assistance setting up the tools or being involved at WordCamp Europe’s Contributor Day on 4 June 2020.

  • Monday 25 May 2020, 19:30 UTC (a Zoom link to the group event will be available either on request through email or shared on the #marketing channel on Slack)
  • Tuesday 26 May 2020, 15:00 UTC
  • Wednesday 3 June 2020, 14:00 UTC – usual Marketing Team meeting which will be held on Slack and Zoom
    • this will focus on any remaining support needed to help WCEU Contributor Day attendees and final preparations with volunteers
    • event attendees are welcome to join, especially if they need assistance preparing for the event

Small group training

For the previous four weeks we have been running small group training and task support to help new contributors to the WordPress project or those starting out in marketing.

Thank you to everyone who has come along and those who have generously provided video conferencing hosting and training. During this last week, we have run daily sessions on onboarding, the tasks we will have available at WordCamp Europe’s Contributor Day, and introductions to marketing techniques used in some of the existing tasks.

Promoting Online WordPress Meetups

We continue to help with marketing and information on WordPress Meetups which are running online during the pandemic.

If your Chapter MeetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. is planning an event which would welcome or be of interest to a wider, global audience, help us find your details by adding #OnlineWPMeetup to your relevant social media posts. Thanks for all the feedback and help requests that have come in, ideas for contributor stories, and for our survey.

We hope to publish the survey next week to better understand how the team can assist organizing teams.

WordPress Translation Day mini-events

Abha Thakor and Rahul D Sarker have been working to promote interim locale events for the French and Bengali languages in the last two months.

Thanks to @webcommsat and all those involved in producing marketing materials. If you could assist the #WPTranslationDay, Polyglots and Marketing teams in jointly updating a communications pack, please message the @TranslateWP Twitter account or contact @webcommsat on the Make Slack.

After WCEU, the Translation Day team will be exploring when the next international day could potentially take place.

#contributor-day, #onboarding, #wceu

Estela Rueda 1:53 pm on May 22, 2020  

Design Team Updates 22 May 2020

Since the last update, the team met on Wednesdays as per usual time at 19:00 UTC as well as 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./CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. and GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ triage. You can read meeting notes below

Next meetings coming up:

Core/meta: Monday 16:30 UTC
Gutenberg: Tuesday 16:00 UTC

The following design meetings will be on Wednesdays at 18.00 UTC.

Discussion

#design-team

Timi Wahalahti 6:43 pm on May 21, 2020
Tags: , , ,   

WCEU 2020 Online Contributor Day: All that team facilitators and experienced Contributors need to know

Hello WordPress Make teams. It’s only two weeks until 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 2020 Online 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/. and we can’t wait for the event to start.

First of all, thank you so much for providing us with all the details we asked for, especially within such a tight timeframe and with limited information. The whole WCEU team was thrilled to receive the excellent video introductions from the 15 different Make teams that will be joining us on the day.

We are finally ready to share a detailed update about how the day will work and have a few final requests. This is a long post, but please read it carefully as it contains important information for all members of the Make teams helping at Contributor Day.

Continue reading →

#contributor-day, #online-contributor-day, #wordcamp-europe, #wordcamp-europe-online

Stefanos Togoulidis 1:35 pm on May 19, 2020
Tags:   

Mobile Team Update – May 18th

WordPress iOSiOS The operating system used on iPhones and iPads. and Android version 14.9 is available for testing. Sign up here to join the 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. program on iOS or follow this link on your Android device, tap on Become a beta tester.

Highlights for the last two weeks:

  • BlockBlock 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: We’ve been working on bypassing a tooling problem, and have made major progress on providing a fallback for unsupported blocks.
  • Full Site Editing: Color settings for Button and Cover blocks have shipped. We’ve updated existing layouts to use new blocks.
  • Other Projects: On iOS we’ve streamlined the coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. navigation in the app, moving the controls to update your settings and create new posts and pages. We’ve also been working on a range of stability improvements.
  • Infrastructure: We continued to iterate and improve some of our core processes, and helped investigate crashes and improve our testing setup.

#mobile

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 8:13 pm on May 18, 2020
Tags:   

Plugin Team Status: 18 May 2020

PluginPlugin 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 Status Change Stats

  • Plugins requested : 212
  • Plugins rejected : 13
  • Plugins closed : 16
  • Plugins approved : 81

Plugin Queue Stats (current)

  • Plugins in the queue (new and pending)* : 813
  • → (older than 7 days ago)** : 688
  • → (2020-05-11 – 2020-05-18) : 99
  • → (new; not processed or replied to yet)* : 50
  • → (pending; replied to)* : 763

HelpScout Stats

  • Total Conversations: 308
  • New Conversations: 222
  • Customers: 267
  • Conversations per Day: 38
  • Busiest Day: Monday
  • Email Conversations: 222
  • Messages Received: 418
  • Replies Sent: 503
  • Emails Created: 145
  • Resolved: 195
  • Resolved on First Reply: 24%
  • Customers Helped: 256
  • Replies per Day: 32
  • Closed: 264

#plugins

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 11:08 pm on May 11, 2020
Tags:   

Plugin Review Team Update: 11 May 2020

PluginPlugin 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 Status Change Stats

  • Plugins requested : 191
  • Plugins rejected : 15
  • Plugins closed : 40
  • Plugins approved : 97

Plugin Queue Stats (current)

  • Plugins in the queue (new and pending)* : 735
  • → (older than 7 days ago)** : 651
  • → (2020-05-04 – 2020-05-11) : 72
  • → (new; not processed or replied to yet)* : 0
  • → (pending; replied to)* : 735

HelpScout Stats

  • Total Conversations: 312
  • New Conversations: 236
  • Customers: 274
  • Conversations per Day: 39
  • Busiest Day: Thursday
  • Email Conversations: 236
  • Messages Received: 386
  • Replies Sent: 484
  • Emails Created: 149
  • Resolved: 191
  • Resolved on First Reply: 30%
  • Customers Helped: 266
  • Replies per Day: 34
  • Closed: 252

#plugins

Timi Wahalahti 12:26 pm on May 11, 2020  

WCEU Online 2020 Contributor Day: Submit your introduction videos, office hours times and introductory session needs this week

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 Online 2020 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/., taking place on 4 June, is getting closer. Only three and a half weeks to go. How exciting!

WCEU team has asked every Make team to prepare for the Contributor Day in different ways. Some things we have asked are tightly related to WCEU, with the intention to help attendees get most out of the day and ease the workload of Make team facilitators during the day as well.

Because the team is organizing first-ever virtual Contributor Day at this scale (500 anticipated contributors) and the day is just around the corner, we need the information from each Make team to finalize our plans.

Deadlines for providing the information for us:

  • Thursday 14 May 24:00 UTC (midnight UTC) Make team video introduction submissions
  • Monday 18 May 24:00 UTC (midnight UTC) other information that was asked:
    • Scheduled European timezones friendly office hours taking place in 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/. between 25 May and 3 June, targeted for new contributors
    • Need for an introductory session to help onboard new contributors after opening remarks
    • Rough estimate of how many working groups your team needs during the day

These things are needed by the deadlines because we are sending the first email for Contributor Day attendees during next week (week 21), featuring all Make teams attending to Contributor Day and providing the information about how to get ready for contributing.

Teams that have not provided us with these details by the deadlines, are considered to not take part in the WCEU 2020 Online Contributor Day.

A longer update on how the day is going to work will be shared with you in a few week’s time. In short, the tools are going to be:

  • Youtube Live for opening and closing remarks. Pre-recorded introduction videos will be used during opening remarks. For closing remark updates, a facilitator from each Make team will be invited to the Zoom call that is relayed to Youtube Live.
  • Making WordPress Slack will be used for communications
  • Introductory sessions are held in Zoom, where we also provide a possibility to have meetings on a request.

If you have anything to ask, don’t hesitate to contact the WCEU Online 2020 Contributor Day team in comments, via email to contributing@wp-europe.org or reaching out to @sippis in Slack.

Thank you for working with us on creating first large-scale virtual Contributor Day and smoothing experience for new contributors!

+make.wordpress.org/polyglots/
+make.wordpress.org/support/
+make.wordpress.org/themes/
+make.wordpress.org/training/
+make.wordpress.org/test/
+make.wordpress.org/tv/
+make.wordpress.org/tide/
+make.wordpress.org/accessibility/
+make.wordpress.org/cli/
+make.wordpress.org/community/
+make.wordpress.org/core/
+make.wordpress.org/design/
+make.wordpress.org/docs/
+make.wordpress.org/hosting/
+make.wordpress.org/marketing/
+make.wordpress.org/meta/
+make.wordpress.org/mobile/

Estela Rueda 5:48 pm on May 8, 2020  

Design Team Updates 8 May 2020

Since the last update, the team met on Wednesdays as per usual time at 19:00 UTC. We had another Show & Tell as well as 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./CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. and GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ triage. You can read meeting notes below

Next meetings coming up:

Core/meta: Monday 16:30 UTC
Gutenberg: Tuesday 16:00 UTC

The following design meetings will be on Wednesdays at 18.00 UTC.

Discussion

Calls for Involvement

#design-team

elibud 5:05 pm on May 5, 2020
Tags:   

Mobile Team Update – May 5th

WordPress iOSiOS The operating system used on iPhones and iPads. and Android version 14.8 is available for testing. Sign up here to join the 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. program on iOS or follow this link on your Android device, tap on Become a beta tester.

Highlights for the last two weeks:

  • BlockBlock 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: Images being inserted into a post can now be cropped, zoomed in/out and rotated on Android. Image captions are pre-populated from the media library. Several bugs were fixed.
  • Full Site Editing: The Button block has shipped! Color Settings needs a little more work. We made some improvements to the Covers block, and released the floating toolbar.
  • Other Projects: On iOS we’ve made improvements to the Login flow 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.. Media editing on Android and pre-publishing nudges on iOS are now complete.
  • Infrastructure: We continued to iterate and improve some of our coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. processes.

#mobile