General announcements
We’ve put some effort into the proposed `info.php` lately, we’ve now merged this into the Health Check plugin, and may revisit the coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. inclusion at a later date. Keeping it in the 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 for now means we can more easily iterate and find needs in a more efficient manner. As such, we recommend using the plugin for troubleshooting where getting information about a setup is required, if we all stick to using one tool we’ll get a much clearer picture of its usefulness. The plugin is already starting to get translations from the various languages around our lovely support community, which is amazing!
In other news, WordPress 4.9-beta1 is now available. If you can, please give it a try, our primary concern is still the file editing in core getting revamped,let’s make sure it’s as hard as possible to break things (there are enhancements to this that didn’t make it into beta1 as well, so beta2 should be a really good experience we hope).
Our second workshop was had this week, it went off without a hitch, and we seem to be finding our footing around conducting them, a huge thanks to @tacoverdo for doing this one! The recording from the session is available in the post as well for those interested who weren’t able to make it live. Input on topics of interest are welcome, if there’s a particular topic or presenter that would be of interest, let us know.
Checking in with international liaisons
The Portuguese, Swedish, Italian, Russian, Hindi, Brazilian, Spanish and Greek communities are looking fine and dropped by for the conversations.
Other items
At-mentions in the forums
We’ve noticed a starting trend of directly pinging people in support topics to bring attention to issues faster, in an attempt to “cut the line” so to speak.
Pings should be used to bring a topic to someones attention, for example if you are stuck, but know another volunteer knows a fair bit about a topic, this is a good use. It can also be used to guarantee a notification is sent out, in the case of moderators we might use this to ensure someone gets a notice about doing something that is frowned upon, before we archive our own message. We archive our own messages to avoid friction in these situations, as they often require jumping into some other users topic.
To help give people a place to reference, we’ve updated the international forum guidelines, we don’t want our volunteers to feel forced to answering anything, and if they have an official place to reference about this being frowned upon, it’s easier for them to say no.
Contributor badges
We had some questions about how badges work, so here’s a quick coverage of how the support ones work.
The badges are manually assigned for now, each international community has one or more liaisons that provide the profiles of members who should be given either a contributor or a team badge. If you are the administrator of an international forum and don’t have this ability please reach out and we’ll get you sorted out with this ability.
The criteria for the badges are fairly simple:
- Support team: You are a moderator or an administrator on your support forums
- Support contributor: You have 400 or more posts on the forums
The badges will eventually be automated, and we may also revise our criteria, but those are the current ones.
Read the meeting transcript in the Slack archives. (A Slack account is required)