Tag Archives: intro

Jen 3:35 pm on November 25, 2012
Tags: , intro   

Community Team Intro

Community (outreach, building, etc) is another new contributor group. I and Andrea Rennick are the team reps. The goal of this group is to create programs that will help bring in new contributors, and to keep contributors engaged so that casual contributions can be a stepping stone to longer-term involvement. Under that umbrella we’ll be looking at starting a number of programs, including:

  • A “welcome wagon” to let first-time contributors know they are appreciated and make sure they have the information and support they need to grow their contributions
  • Cross-group mentorship programs
  • Contributor retention and recognition programs
  • Diversity program to try and make our contributor pool less homogenous
  • College and school initiatives
  • Partnerships with other groups/orgs/etc to take advantage of existing programs (Open Hatch, Summer of Code, etc)
  • Improvements to 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/ to support these initiatives and goals
  • Stats so we can track our progress in these areas

I want to start with a small focus and expand over time, rather than trying to start a lot of things at once, to make sure we don’t bite off more than we can chew. Right now we’re doing introductions over on the group blog for potential members, and general brainstorming, so that we don’t start something now and then get distracted by the 3.5 launch and then and then lose momentum the holidays. So far Amy Hendrix and Cátia Kitahara are signed on to help.

Contributors to this group should have experience contributing to WordPress and a solid understanding of the ecosystem. While we will also reach out to new contributors and non-contributors at times, in terms of having people who’ll take responsibility for creating programs, for this group a certain level of experience and trust is necessary. Alternately, people who are not experienced contributors to WordPress, but have experience with similar programs elsewhere, would be useful additions to the group.

We will most likely have a lot of collaboration/crossover with the events, training, 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., and documentation groups. Our weekly updates will be posted by me on Fridays. My first goal for this group is to have a prioritized list of projects by the end of the year, with people assigned to the top 3, and to have worked with the other team reps and Otto/Meta on getting some stats around our contributor pool as a baseline. Let the games begin!

#community, #intro

Jen 7:27 pm on November 23, 2012
Tags: , intro   

Events Team Intro

Since @andreamiddleton is on vacation this week, I’m acting as her backup and posting the Events group intro.

This is a new official contributor group, though people have been contributing to WordPress by organizing WordPress events for more than 6 years. The group is newly formed, but there are already quite a few contributors, made up of pre-existing 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. and 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. organizers. Andrea and I posted a laundry list of projects that should fall under the group’s aegis, and people volunteered to work on the ones that inspired them the most. Andrea is currently in the process of posting “assignments” to these projects based on a combination of expressions of interest and required skills and/or backgrounds.

The projects are numerous, which is a risk; keeping track of so many actions at once can be difficult, especially in a mostly-volunteer environment where deadlines may have to be set aside on occasion as the day job requires it, so keeping things moving but manageable is the top priority right now.

Here are the areas where “subcommittees” of contributors will be working on putting together recommendations, or will be getting trained in how to maintain things:

  • WordPress.tv event video management
  • Multi-event Sponsorship Program
  • Event planning training materials
  • Meetups program
  • WordCamp guidelines review
  • Translation of event guidelines and/or materials
  • New organizer mentorship
  • WordCamp base theme templates
  • Speaker mentorship
  • Event type inventory

There will be natural areas of overlap with the Training and Community Outreach groups. Regular updates from this group will be posted on Thursdays by Andrea moving forward.

#events, #intro

Isaac Keyet 11:03 pm on November 21, 2012
Tags: intro,   

Mobile Team Intro

I’m Isaac, acting rep for make/mobile.

Mobile WordPress is: 6 open source native apps under the WordPress umbrella that interact with WordPress installs through the XML-RPC APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways.. We also help contribute to coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. to extend and enhance the API. Over time, we hope we can lend a hand for any mobile/responsive pushes in core for the web admin.

Current team (apps):

  • Isaac Keyet (@isaackeyet)
  • Eric Johnson (@aerych)
  • Robert/Beau Collins (@beaucollins)
  • Danilo Ercoli (@daniloercoli)
  • Brad Angelcyk (@irbrad)
  • Jorge Bernal (@koke)
  • Dan Roundhill (@mrroundhill)

Guest stars:

  • Marko Heijnen (@markoheijnen)
  • Max Cutler (@maxcutler)

Goal
Or goal is to create the best mobile WP experience, no matter what mobile device, WordPress host, or user environment. The apps are focused on short-form blogging and other tasks that you’re more likely to do while on the go.

IRC & Dev Chats
We have weekly dev chats in #wordpress-mobile on Freenode at 16:00 UTC Wednesdays. Join the channel at any time to talk directly to the contributors. Weekly dev chat summaries here.

WPCSWordPress Community Support A public benefit corporation and a subsidiary of the WordPress Foundation, established in 2016. Action Items (please add if I missed any):

  • Migrate all app’s landing pages, blogs, dev blogs, forums/FAQs to live on 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/. @aerych is helping on our side for this, looking for next steps.
  • Create a page on the make/mobile blog that clearly explains what Mobile does, what gaps the mobile apps fill, and what their target use case is.

#intro, #mobile

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 5:18 pm on November 20, 2012
Tags: intro,   

Support Team Intro

I’m Mika Epstein (aka Ipstenu) and I’m the support lead over at https://make.wordpress.org/support

Support is that wibbly wobbly world where we willfully work with WordPress woes. Our purpose is to serve as a place where the masses of totally cool volunteer forum moderators, 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/theme writers, company reps, and anyone who likes helping out can come and learn how to do that better.

Admins:

Members: The entire WordPress Community

No, really. Have you ever answered a question? Congratulations! You’re a member!

Primarily our goal has been to keep the Support Forums in order, but we’ve been branching out to include StackExchange, IRC, and all those other places people go for help. We’ve got a Handbook of our own, with tips, tricks, and common-answers, and the next step is to come up with ways to help folks deal with the crazy. It happens.

In so far as week-to-week goes, we don’t change much, but we will be codifying the mystical ‘How do I become a moderator?’ question as soon as I can figure out a better way to say “We notice active, helpful, people in the forums and anoint them if they say yes.” Also coming soon will be the draft of that ‘OMGWTFBBQ?’ post I do for every WP release, and I’m very excited to get everyone in on writing that one this time!

#intro, #support

Siobhan 4:13 pm on November 20, 2012
Tags: , intro   

Docs Team Intro

Hi there, I’m Siobhan McKeown, and I’m currently acting rep for the newly formed docs team. Docs was previously included in support but after documentation-related discussions at the summit it was decided that docs could do with its own group. Hopefully this will encourage more people to help to keep the codex updated, and should raise awareness that docs isn’t restricted to the codex, but anywhere that content or documentation is required, we can help out.

It’s a pretty new group at the moment, but this is what I’d love to see the docs group help out with:

  • updating the Codex
  • improvements to 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. help and text
  • contributor handbooks
  • developer docs
  • any other content/doc-related tasks that other teams want to chuck at us.

To get involved with docs, you can jump in with editing the codex, or get involved with one of the projects that we are currently setting up.

These are:

1) Handbooks – a collection of contributor handbooks for guiding people through the process of contributing to WordPress. We currently have 35 volunteers for the handbooks. We’re a little light on contributors to the mobile and theme review manuals – if anyone knows of anyone who can help send them my way!

If you don’t feel that you’re enough of a WordPress expert to write content from scratch you can still get involved. We’re building a team of editors and proofreaders who will responsible for making everything consistent. It’s a great way to learn!

2) User Guide – this is nearly finished. A user guide (with lots of pilfered content from WordPress.comWordPress.com An online implementation of WordPress code that lets you immediately access a new WordPress environment to publish your content. WordPress.com is a private company owned by Automattic that hosts the largest multisite in the world. This is arguably the best place to start blogging if you have never touched WordPress before. https://wordpress.com/) that will help users to use WordPress. This will need to be updated any time that WordPress is updated. It also needs to find its final home.

3) Help tabs – this is currently in inception. Am hoping that it will be a review of content in the Help tabs with a view to making improvements alongside the UI improvements for genuinely helpful help.

Also ongoing is the Codex, which will need to be updated with the release of WordPress 3.5. There is a team of people who always work hard to get this done. This is usually done via the wp-docs mailing list, but with the new P2P2 P2 or O2 is the term people use to refer to the Make WordPress blog. It can be found at https://make.wordpress.org/. we’ll hopefully see more activity there.

Whenever a new release appears I’ll post a list of things that need updated in the codex.

We are conducting some research into the types of documentation that different WordPress users/developers want to see. Once that is finished and the docs team has had time to digest it we can create a long-term roadmap for documentation.

In the meantime, if there are any docs you would like to see let us know here.

#docs, #intro

Chip Bennett 1:31 pm on November 20, 2012
Tags: intro, ,   

Theme Review Team Intro

Hi, I’m Chip Bennett, team repTeam Rep A Team Rep is a person who represents the Make WordPress team to the rest of the project, make sure issues are raised and addressed as needed, and coordinates cross-team efforts. for the Theme Review Team (TRT or WPTRT). The purpose of the TRT is to review and approve Themes to be hosted in the official WordPress Theme Directory, and to define and to maintain the guidelines for Theme review/approval.

The TRT currently has 3 administrators, and around 75 reviewers.

Admins:

The TRT welcomes and actively solicits contributions from the Theme developer community at-large (here’s how you can join us!). Reviewing Themes has a bit of a learning curve, and full reviews can take a non-trivial amount of time, so most of the Reviewers have only completed a handful of reviews (and we think that’s great; every contribution, no matter how big or how small, is important).

The official TRT home is the Make/Themes website, the official Theme Review guidelines and Theme Unit Tests live in the Codex, and Theme Review tickets live in Themes-Trac.

The TRT has several objectives:

  • Timely review and approval of Themes. This is, of course, our primary objective.
  • Overall improvement of quality of Themes hosted in the official directory
  • Overall improvement of the reputation/perception of the official Theme directory, and more widespread adoption of searching for free Themes first and primarily in the official directory
  • To provide an educational resource for Theme developers
  • To build/foster a sense of community among Theme developers
  • To build/encourage consensus regarding Theme development best practices

WPCSWordPress Community Support A public benefit corporation and a subsidiary of the WordPress Foundation, established in 2016. Action Items:

  • Develop a “checklist” style list of guidelines, to facilitate completion of Theme reviews
  • Consolidate more information directly into the Make/Themes site, to provide an easier means for Theme developers and new reviewers to find that information

#intro, #themes, #trt

Scott Reilly 2:12 am on November 20, 2012
Tags: intro,   

Plugins Directory Team Intro

Hi, I’m Scott Reilly, representative for the Plugins Directory team. Our group of volunteers is tasked with administrating and supporting the WordPress.org Plugins Directory.

The team currently consists of the following members:

In addition, we receive frequent and invaluable contributions from most members of the coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. team in the form of security reviews and weighing in on policy decisions. Frequent such contributors include, but are not limited to: Jon Cave (duck_), Andrew Nacin (nacin), Peter Westwood (westi), Mark Jaquith (markjaquith), and Jane Wells (jane).

As of this writing, longest-time member Mark Riley is the officially designated lead team repTeam Rep A Team Rep is a person who represents the Make WordPress team to the rest of the project, make sure issues are raised and addressed as needed, and coordinates cross-team efforts. and I am the secondary. Mark has recently stepped back from his extremely active involvement with the team. Pippin is our newest member. We’re always on the lookout for additional members to the team, though full membership grants capabilities that require adequate vetting of candidates. Anyone can actually volunteer on their own to review plugins in the directory and report to us any issues discovered (via plugins@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/).

In general, we:

  • Process all incoming 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 requests. All new plugins receive at least a cursory review by one of the team members. We check for guideline violations and coding best-practices. If a plugin is deficient in some manner, and isn’t outright spam or malicious, we work with the plugin authors to address the issues.
  • Handle all incoming support requests sent to the plugins@wordpress.org email address. Through the use of our own SupportPress installation, everyone on the team can view and participate in handling all incoming and outgoing emails. Emails generally fall under one of the following categories: new plugin in-processing/review, discovered/reported security exploit, discovered/reported guideline violation(s), and questions about the plugin repository/SVNSVN Apache Subversion (often abbreviated SVN, after its command name svn) is a software versioning and revision control system. Software developers use Subversion to maintain current and historical versions of files such as source code, web pages, and documentation. Its goal is to be a mostly compatible successor to the widely used Concurrent Versions System (CVS). WordPress core and the wordpress.org released code are all centrally managed through SVN. https://subversion.apache.org/. and/or plugin pages (their usage or problems encountered).
  • Develop and manage tools for scanning commits and the plugin repository. Here we’re looking for guideline violations or security exploits in older plugins (before the review process became as stringent) and in all of the active updates for all current plugins (for changes made since their initial review), as well as newly discovered/defined exploits and violations.
  • Pro-actively monitoring security exploit databases and announcements for any that relate to plugins in the repository and then helping authors rectify those security concerns.
  • Log and discuss Plugin Directory happenings on a private P2P2 P2 or O2 is the term people use to refer to the Make WordPress blog. It can be found at https://make.wordpress.org/.. Due to the sensitive nature of some of our discussions (namely plugin security and active exploits, discussion of email exchanges held with plugin authors, display of user emails, and efforts for combating the spammers that seek to exploit the Directory) we don’t feel as though such discussions should be held in the open.
  • Utilize https://make.wordpress.org/plugins/ as the publicly-accessible P2 to disseminate news, tutorials, advisories, etc for plugin developers. Admittedly, this P2 has not seen much use yet.
  • Work with the WordPress.org make/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. team (huge overlap as Otto, Nacin, and myself are effectively on both) to suggest tools to facilitate doing the various tasks listed above as well as improvements to plugin-related user-facing aspects of WordPress.org such as the Plugins Directory site and APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways., plugin developer tools, and the make/plugins P2.

#intro, #plugins