Michele Mizejewski 9:13 pm on August 6, 2018  

Design team monthly recap July, 2018

Weekly meetings

Weekly meetings occur on 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/. at these times:

  • Ticket triage Monday from 16.30-17.00 UTC
  • Weekly Meeting on Wednesday from 17.00-18.00 UTC

Agenda and meeting notes are published on our team page for more detailed insights into our activity.

All design work for WordPress is done by volunteers, and anyone is welcome to join us.

Meeting Structure

This month we tried a more simplified agenda. This structure should allow us to have more space for everyone’s input. The aim is more discussion and interaction.

  1. TrelloTrello Project management system using the concepts of boards and cards to organize tasks in a sane way. This is what the make.wordpress.com/marketing team uses for example: https://trello.com/b/8UGHVBu8/wp-marketing. inbox
  2. Trello Calls for design: follow up on current projects
  3. Topic of the week (only if chosen ahead of time)
  4. Open floor

Some Key Topics

Onboarding

We’ve been working on ways to improve onboarding of new WordPress community designers who want to contribute.

  • Feedback was requested from active participants to highlight what was confusing to them initially and how we can make things more intuitive for new people
  • Team Trello board shouldn’t be confusing for new people and needs cleanup
  • Team Handbook is a helpful reference but is in need of an overhaul. @boemedia has already started this and there is a need for people to help and review/audit the current content. Handbook will likely be a big focus in August.
  • The buddy system is still something people would like to see happen, since that personal connection can really help people start to feel traction and be more likely to jump in
  • TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. is a huge pain point, and it’s confusing when there are so many different outlets for discussion + work sharing (Slack, Trello, Make blogs, GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/, Trac, etc.)

Calls for Design

  • 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 icons are complete and @cathibosco is doing a review.
  • Another active project with several people involved is Create a style guide for future pages based on create a website and recent pages for example ‘Get WordPress’.
  • Reminder about existing cards in Trello: if you see a project on the Trello board you’d like to work on but status is unclear, check with the person on the card. They may not have updated it, or have been really busy and would love some help.

Outreach

  • We discussed plans for an online design conference. You can check out the previous Trello discussion
  • We also chatted about the potential of doing a small version of the conference this year, and then leading into the well planned out version in the Spring.

Design tools and sharing designs

As designers, we’re used to working with visual tools like Sketch or Figma, and there are some great pattern libraries for WordPress that we’ve been starting to use. The problem we run into is wanting visual version control. No answers yet on the best approach for this…

Ticket triage

On a weekly basis, we go over the oldest tickets that need UXUX UX is an acronym for User Experience - the way the user uses the UI. Think ‘what they are doing’ and less about how they do it./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. feedback to catch up. The goal of these is to look at each one and see if we can progress the issue in some way. The oldest UI feedback tickets in Trac are now all in 2018!

Onboarding for tickets

  • Many people are confused or intimidated by tickets in Trac or GitHub, especially those who are not developers.
  • @karmatosed will be running a ‘non dev’ ticket onboarding session in August for Trac and GitHub – covering 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/ also.

Thanks to everyone who has been involved in some way with WordPress design.