Support Team Update – July 20th

General announcements

WordPress 4.8.1-beta1 is out, so please help out by testing it if you have a test setup and are able to do so.

4.8.1-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. includes the the new HTMLHTML HTML is an acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is a markup language that is used in the development of web pages and websites. WidgetWidget 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., and the previous Text Widget (with the TinyMCE editor now) will display a legacy note if you have HTML inside of it, encouraging you as a user to put custom HTML code into the HTML Widget.

The forum master list will have a section dedicated to this to help those users who might be confused by the notice or the distinction between the two widgets.

Support workshops

During WCEU ideas for improving and spreading support best practices throughout the WP community were brainstormed, and one of the ideas that came forth was to do workshops from theme/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 authors and how they approach various aspects of helping users.

We’ll be leaving it to the presenter to decide the medium they are most comfortable with presenting it on, but that it be available to those who might be interested but unable to attend afterwards in some manner.

We’ll be evaluate how it works out and how to continue the approach after the first session, as there’s a plan but it’ll definitely be refined once we see how things pan out.

Checking with international support liaisons

The Italian, Swedish, Dutch, Hindi, Russian, Portuguese, German and Spanish communities are reporting everything to be running smoothly.

The locked Portuguese forums issue from last week have also been resolved.

The new forum welcome has been adopted by more rosetta sites and translated for their communities!

There are still some rosetta sites on the old bbPressbbPress Free, open source software built on top of WordPress for easily creating forums on sites. https://bbpress.org. version, but it’s an ongoing rollout process and they will eventually all be running the new version.

Open floor

@sterndata brought up that we need to be more lenient with some of the premium theme/plugin support requests, as many shops don’t provide support them selves, and we can easily help with things like CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. and generic WordPress related questions that aren’t related to the premium content being used.

This applies to many of our pre-defined replies, make sure to properly understand the question before sending out stock answers.

 

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

#support