Author: Jen Mylo

Upcoming WordCamps

Jen Mylo

WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences that celebrate everything related to WordPress, and are a great opportunity to meet other WordPress users and professionals in your community. This has been a great year for WordCamps — there have been 56 so far in more than 20 countries, and there another 15 on the calendar before the year’s over. If there’s one near you, check it out! In addition to getting to know your local WordPress community, most WordCamps attract some traveling visitors a well, giving you the chance to meet contributors to the WordPress open source project and get involved yourself.

Here are the WordCamps on the schedule for the rest of this year.

October 25-27: WordCamp Boston, Boston, MA, USA
October 25-26: WordCamp Malaga, Spain
October 26: WordCamp Nepal, Kathmandu, Nepal
October 26: WordCamp Sofia, Bulgaria
November 7: WordCamp Cape Town, South Africa
November 9: WordCamp Porto, Portugal
November 9-10: WordCamp Kenya, Nairobi, Kenya
November 15: WordCamp Edmonton, AB, Canada
November 16-17: WordCamp Orlando, FL, USA
November 16: WordCamp Denver, CO, USA
November 23-24: WordCamp London, UK
November 23-24: WordCamp Raleigh, NC, USA
November 23: WordCamp São Paulo, Brazil
December 14: WordCamp Las Vegas, NV, USA
December 14-15: WordCamp Sevilla, Spain

No WordCamps on this list in your area? Not to worry! There are thriving WordPress meetups all over the world where you can meet like-minded people, and we maintain a library of WordCamp videos at WordPress.tv.

Get Involved

  • If you’re interested in organizing a WordCamp in your area, check out our WordCamp planning site.
  • If you’re interested in starting a WordPress meetup in your area, let us know and we can set up a group on meetup.com for you.
  • And speaking of WordCamp videos, we’ve recently enabled volunteer-generated subtitles/closed captioning of the videos on WordPress.tv to make them more accessible. Interested in helping? Check out the WordPress.tv subtitling instructions.

The Next 10 Starts Now

Jen Mylo

All around the globe today, people are celebrating the 10th anniversary of the first WordPress release, affectionately known as #wp10. Watching the feed of photos, tweets, and posts from Auckland to Zambia is incredible; from first-time bloggers to successful WordPress-based business owners, people are coming out in droves to raise a glass and share the “holiday” with their local communities. With hundreds of parties going on today, it’s more visible than ever just how popular WordPress has become.

Thank you to everyone who has ever contributed to this project: your labors of love made this day possible.

But today isn’t just about reflecting on how we got this far (though I thought Matt’s reflection on the first ten years was lovely). We are constantly moving forward. As each release cycle begins and ends (3.6 will be here soon, promise!), we always see an ebb and flow in the contributor pool. Part of ensuring the longevity of WordPress means mentoring new contributors, continually bringing new talent and fresh points of view to our family table.

I am beyond pleased to announce that this summer we will be mentoring 8 interns, most of them new contributors, through Google Summer of Code and the Gnome Outreach Program for Women. Current contributors, who already volunteer their time working on WordPress, will provide the guidance and oversight for a variety of exciting projects  this summer. Here are the people/projects involved in the summer internships:

  • Ryan McCue, from Australia, working on a JSON-based REST API. Mentors will be Bryan Petty and Eric Mann, with a reviewer assist from Andrew Norcross.
  • Kat Hagan, from the United States, working on a Post by Email plugin to replace the core function. Mentors will be Justin Shreve and George Stephanis, with an assist from Peter Westwood.
  • Siobhan Bamber, from Wales, working on a support (forums, training, documentation) internship. Mentors will be Mika Epstein and Hanni Ross.
  • Frederick Ding, from the United States, working on improving portability. Mentors will be Andrew Nacin and Mike Schroder.
  • Sayak Sakar, from India, working on porting WordPress for WebOS to Firefox OS. Mentor will be Eric Johnson.
  • Alex Höreth, from Germany, working on  adding WordPress native revisions to the theme and plugin code editors. Mentors will be Dominik Schilling and Aaron Campbell, with a reviewer assist from Daniel Bachhuber.
  • Mert Yazicioglu, from Turkey, working on ways to improve our community profiles at profiles.wordpress.org. Mentors will be Scott Reilly and Boone Gorges.
  • Daniele Maio, from Italy, working on a native WordPress app for Blackberry 10. Mentor will be Danilo Ercoli.

Did you notice that our summer cohort is as international as the #wp10 parties going on today? I can only think that this is a good sign.

It’s always a difficult process to decide which projects to mentor through these programs. There are always more applicants with interesting ideas with whom we’d like to work than there are opportunities. Luckily, WordPress is a free/libre open source software project, and anyone can begin contributing at any time. Is this the year for you? We’d love for you to join us as we work toward #wp20. ;)

Summer Mentorship Programs: GSoC and Gnome

Jen Mylo

As an open source, free software project, WordPress depends on the contributions of hundreds of people from around the globe — contributions in areas like core code, documentation, answering questions in the support forums, translation, and all the other things it takes to make WordPress the best publishing platform it can be, with the most supportive community. This year, we’re happy to be participating as a mentoring organization with two respected summer internship programs: Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and the Gnome Outreach Program for Women.

Google Summer of Code

GSoC is a summer internship program funded by Google specifically for college/university student developers to work on open source coding projects. We have participated in the Google Summer of Code program in the past, and have enjoyed the opportunity to work with students in this way. Some of our best core developers were GSoC students once upon a time!

Our mentors, almost 30 talented developers with experience developing WordPress, will provide students with guidance and feedback over the course of the summer, culminating in the release of finished projects at the end of the program if all goes well.

Students who successfully complete the program earn $5,000 for their summer efforts. Interested, or know a college student (newly accepted to college counts, too) who should be? All the information you need about our participation in the program, projects, mentors, and the application process is available on the GSoC 2013 page in the Codex.

Gnome Outreach Program for Women

It’s not news that women form a low percentage of contributors in most open source projects, and WordPress is no different. We have great women in the contributor community, including some in fairly visible roles, but we still have a lot of work to do to get a representative gender balance on par with our user base.

The Gnome Outreach Program for Women aims to provide opportunities for women to participate in open source projects, and offers a similar stipend, but there are three key differences between GSoC and Gnome aside from the gender requirement for Gnome.

  1. The Gnome program allows intern projects in many areas of contribution, not just code. In other words, interns can propose projects like documentation, community management, design, translation, or pretty much any area in which we have people contributing (including code).
  2. The Gnome Outreach Program for Women doesn’t require interns to be college students, though students are definitely welcome to participate. This means that women in all stages of life and career can take the opportunity to try working with open source communities for the summer.
  3. We have to help raise the money to pay the interns. Google funds GSoC on its own, and we only have to provide our mentors’ time. Gnome doesn’t have the same funding, so we need to pitch in to raise the money to cover our interns. If your company is interested in helping with this, please check out the program’s sponsorship information and follow the contact instructions to get involved. You can earmark donations to support WordPress interns, or to support the program in general. (Pick us, pick us! :) )

The summer installment of the Gnome Outreach Program for Women follows the same schedule and general application format as GSoC, though there are more potential projects since it covers more areas of contribution. Women college students interested in doing a coding project are encouraged to apply for both programs to increase the odds of acceptance. All the information you need about our participation in the program, projects, mentors, and the application process is available on the Gnome Outreach Program for Women page in the Codex.

The application period just started, and it lasts another week (May 1 for Gnome, May 3 for GSoC), so if you think you qualify and are interested in getting involved, check out the information pages, get in touch, and apply… Good luck!

Google Summer of Code 2013 Information
Gnome Summer Outreach Program for Women 2013 Information

WordPress 10th Anniversary Tees

Jen Mylo

WordPress 10th Anniversary logoIn honor of the upcoming 10th anniversary celebrations, we’ve put a special 10th anniversary tshirt in the swag store at cost — $10 per shirt plus shipping. They’ll be on sale at this price until the anniversary on May 27, and they’ll start shipping out the week of April 29.

Some people who are planning parties or who organize meetups are already talking about doing group orders to save on shipping costs, which is a great idea — just make sure you allow enough shipping time. If you’re not sure if the tees could make it to you in time on your side of the world, use the contact options at the bottom of the store page to ask about shipping times. If they can’t reach you in time and you want to have a local printer do some for your group, we’ll post the vector file on the wp10 site within the next week (and this post will get updated accordingly).

The shirts are available in black or silvery gray. Why silvery gray? Because of trivia: the traditional gift for 10th anniversaries is tin or aluminum. :)

Silver and Black tshirts with WordPress 10th anniversary logo on them

Save the Date: May 27

Jen Mylo

What’s on May 27, you ask?

May 27, 2013 is the 10th anniversary of the first WordPress release!

We think this is worth celebrating, and we want WordPress fans all over the world to celebrate with us by throwing their own parties. We’re using Meetup Everywhere to coordinate, and will be putting up a website just for the 10th Anniversary so that we can collect photos, videos, tweets, and posts from all the parties.

The rules are very simple:

  1. Pick a place to go where a bunch of people can be merry — a park, a bar, a backyard, whatever
  2. Spread the word to local meetups, tech groups, press, etc and get people to say they’ll come to your party
  3. If 50 or more people RSVP to your party, we’ll try to send you some WordPress stickers and buttons
  4. Have party attendees post photos, videos, and the like with the #wp10 hashtag

We’ll be using Meetup Everywhere to coordinate parties all over the world, so get your city on the map and register your party now !

We’ll follow up with registered organizers  over the next few weeks with some tips for how to publicize your party and to get addresses for swag packages. To that end, make sure you check the option that lets WordPress 10th Anniversary know your email, or we won’t be able to get in touch with you for these things or to give you access to the WP10 blog.

Whose party will be the biggest? The most fun? The most inventive? Will it be yours?

Note: If you already run a group on meetup.com, making your party an event in your group is great, but you still need to post it and have people RSVP at the special party page, because regular groups and Meetup Everywhere groups aren’t connected yet. 

2012: A Look Back

Jen Mylo

Another year is coming to a close, and it’s time to look back and reflect on what we’ve accomplished in the past twelve months. The WordPress community is stronger than ever, and some of the accomplishments of the past year are definitely worth remembering.

Software Releases

We had two major releases of the WordPress web application with versions 3.4 and 3.5, as well as 5 security releases during 2012. 3.4 included the theme customizer, while 3.5 became the long awaited “media release” featuring a new uploader and gallery management tool. 3.5 contained code contributions from more people than ever, and we hope to continue growing the contributor ranks in the year ahead. We currently have native apps on 6 mobile platforms — iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, Nokia, and WebOS — and saw several updates there as well.

Plugin Directory

A number of improvements were made to the Plugin Directory in 2012. More cosmetic  updates, like the introduction of branded plugin page headers, make it a nicer browsing experience, while functional changes like better-integrated support forums, plugin reviews, and a favorites system made the plugin directory even more useful as a resource.

The “Make” Network and Team Reps

2012 was the year that saw the creation of Make.wordpress.org, a network of sites for the teams of contributors responsible for the different areas of the WordPress project. Now anyone can follow along and get involved with the teams that work on core, theme review, forum support, documentation, and more. In 2013 we’ll work to improve these sites to make it easier to become a contributor. Each team also now has elected Team Reps, a new role that has already led to more cross-team communication. Team reps post each week to the Updates blog so that the other reps can keep up with what’s going on in other teams.

WordPress Community Summit

At the end of October, about 100 of the most influential and respected members of the WordPress community attended an inaugural summit to discuss where we all stand, and to figure out where we go next with WordPress. A “conference of conversations,” this unconference made everyone an active participant, and while not every issue brought to the table was solved by the end of the event, the right questions were being asked.

Meetup.com

The WordPress Foundation now has a central account with Meetup.com. We’ve brought in a couple dozen existing meetup groups as a pilot to test the system, and are in the process of working with more existing meetups (as well as new ones) to join us so that local organizers won’t have to pay organizer dues and can get more support from the WordPress project.

Internet Blackout Day

We participated in the protest against SOPA/PIPA, Internet Blackout Day, on January 18. Though we usually stay out of politics, this campaign was important, and we not only participated in the blackout on WordPress.org, we encouraged our users to do so as well, and recommended plugins to provide blackout functionality. It was deemed the largest online protest in history.

WordCamps

And finally, it wouldn’t be a recap without counting up the WordCamps! There were 67 WordCamps around the world in 2012, bringing together WordPress users, developers, and fans. If you didn’t make it to a WordCamp this year, maybe it can be one of your new year resolutions: check the schedule to find one near you!