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WP Briefing: Episode 52: Workflows and Phase Three Visioning with Special Guest Héctor Prieto

Santana InnissMarch 28, 2023WordPress New

On Episode fifty-two of the WordPress Briefing podcast, join WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy and special guest Héctor Prieto as they discuss phase three and why it’s more than just collaborative editing!

Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording.

Credits

Editor: Dustin Hartzler
Logo: Javier Arce
Production: Santana Inniss
Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod

Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording.

Show Notes

Transcript

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:00]

Hello everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project, some insight into the community that supports it, and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:40]

I have with me today Hécto Prieto. You all may know him from the WordPress Slack. He recently was, I believe, a release coordinator, maybe for the last release. Was that for 6.1?

[Héctor Prieto 00:00:51]

Yes. It was for 6.1 and also 6.0, in fact.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:54]

All right. Well, welcome to the WordPress Briefing today. How are you doing?

[Héctor Prieto 00:00:59]

Well, I’m excited to be here. I’m a longtime listener of the podcast since the first episode. So I’m super excited to be here with you today.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:06]

Yes. Longtime listener. First-time caller. All right, well, we’re gonna have a topic that just dumps you right in the soup, as they say in the United States. So we are actually here to talk about phase three of Gutenberg. It’s been a long time coming, and there are a lot of questions that folks have about what’s going into it and what’s not going into it.

And as someone who works really closely with our Gutenberg technical architect, Matías Ventura, I figured you would be exactly the right person to come and talk about your favorite things. From your perspective, what is going to be the biggest enhancement that we start to approach in phase three?

Like which thing, which API is gonna take the most work, do you think?

[Héctor Prieto 00:01:53]

Well, the most work, that’s a very hard question to answer because we are still we are going to start an exploration phase to determine how far we want to go with each of these APIs. So, in general, all these APIs and these products are standalone projects. And some of them are shorter, and some of them are longer.

I would say, in general, the real-time collaboration sounds the most technically challenging because of what it represents and all the changes needed to how we interact with WordPress from async to sync, basically. That would be the hardest part. I think there are also already a few prototypes working, but we need to see how that scales, for example.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:32]

Yeah. So speaking of a few prototypes, I know that there are two or three different prototypes specifically for collaborative editing, but do we have people or groups, working groups in the community that have built any other prototypes? Or is it just kind of first passes at collaborative editing that we’ve seen?

[Héctor Prieto 00:02:52]

Well, apart from Riad Benguella’s exploration, there’s a public repository with that exploration, there are a few plugins trying the same, trying real-time collaboration.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:03]

Yeah, I can think of co-blocks and as blocks, and then I feel like there was a third one.

[Héctor Prieto 00:03:09]

Yeah.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:09]

We’ll find the links to all these

[Héctor Prieto 00:03:12]

Yeah. Let’s add them to the show notes.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:14]

Excellent. So that’s going to be the biggest one. Is there, of the list of APIs, and this is based on the post that Matías sent out last week. If you all haven’t seen that, we’ll put that in the show notes as well. But from the APIs that Matías sort of helped us to identify last week, is there any one that you are particularly excited about for fixing things in WordPress or just generally like an interesting topic of development for you?

[Héctor Prieto 00:03:42]

Well, I would say all of them and how they all play together. But, if I need to pick one of them…

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:48]

Everything’s the best!

[Héctor Prieto 00:03:50]

I’ll cheat anyway, and I will going to pick two out of them because they solve issues at different levels. I’m very excited about visual revisions. I think it helps a lot of users, and it affects even non-technical users.

So it’s one of the projects that lower how hard or complex WordPress can be to use sometimes. It’s going to be a huge improvement. It’s going to, I mean, bringing blocks to the revision system. I mean, it’s just a dream come true for me. I’m also going to highlight the search everywhere or quick search feature Matías already opened an issue in the GitHub repository right now.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:28]

Mm-hmm.

[Héctor Prieto 00:04:28]

So the idea for this product is to have a power user shortcut that opens searching, an Alfred-like or Spotlight-like interface for those familiar with MacOS operating systems.

When you can type anything, any place you want to go, or you want to search for any specific text in a document. And it’s supposed to be your power user command tool. So that you can do most things there.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:53]

Oh, and I mean not only power user command tool, but also there are some applications there for folks who have mobility issues, people who are using primarily keyboard as opposed to keyboard and mouse, all that kind of stuff, right?

[Héctor Prieto 00:05:07]

Exactly. And just thinking long term with the rise of AI, it could be possible even to add some natural language processing to this interface so that users could just write in, in plain text, in natural language, what they want to do, and WordPress would provide the action for them.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:23]

Very nice. My two favorites, since you gave two favorites and I can’t just give one at that point, my two favorite projects, which are also probably really, really hard projects, are those explorations around fixing notifications. That is a really big project. And one that I think that, in general, the WordPress project is going to be really excited to have some input on.

And so that’s one that I really will have an eye on. And the other one that I’m going to definitely have my eye on is the media gallery redesign. I realize that this shows, between you and I, that shows our two specific focuses. Because, of course, you work directly with guiding all of our developers. And I am very much like our user advocate. And WordPress “everyman.”

I don’t know if that’s a term that makes sense outside the US. But I do a lot of advocacy for folks who are using WordPress from the user side as opposed to from the developer side because, of course, we have a lot of excellent developers. So y’all don’t need my help with your advocacy.

But yeah, that really shows that you and I have different focuses, which I think is good too.

[Héctor Prieto 00:06:32]

Yes. Also, it’s worth noting that at the end of the day, any improvement we make for developers is so that developers can build better things for users. So, at the end of the day, everything is in the best interest of the users.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:45]

That’s right. That’s definitely a good point. Yeah. So, a final question about this particular thing because we’re trying to keep it a little brief and also because we’ll have a few other podcasts that are specifically about phase three as our explorations get going. Final question here: If you felt like there was one API or one project in particular that could benefit from a lot of community involvement which would you guess that was?

[Héctor Prieto 00:07:20]

I don’t think I can single out any of them. I think getting user feedback is going to be a vital part of this phase, as always. So I would encourage our listeners to just participate in discussions and provide feedback as we start releasing the first prototypes in the Gutenberg plugin. I don’t think I can pick one of them for you, completely honest.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:07:43]

Yeah. My guess for that is going to be the rework of the dashboard, the admin, WP admin. I think that a lot of people are gonna have a lot to say about what they use it for, what they would like to be able to use it for, how to make it look more modern, how to make it feel more modern. I think that that probably is going to benefit from a lot of early testing and possibly some specific user testing around the concepts of design in there.

And so that’s one that that I think probably is going to take a lot of feedback from the community. And community, in this case, I think, is not only our developers and designers and copy folks who are working to build the CMS, but probably also all of our folks who are extending WordPress, everybody who is working in agencies, things like that.

[Héctor Prieto 00:08:35]

Hmm, well, if I need to pick one, I would say the publishing flows could use also lots of feedback and testing because we are going to implement editorial requirements and customized user flows. And, of course, there are many, many different workflows out there that we might not be able to think of ourselves.

So just imagine the sheer amount of different use cases. There’s going to be, or there currently is with customizations of third-party plugins. So, yeah. I would like to listen to how people would like the publishing flows to be. What are the specific use cases?

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:09:09]

So really, just everything, we need a lot of user feedback on everything.

[Héctor Prieto 00:09:13]

Yes. That’s the summary.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:09:15]

I don’t think that’s a bad summary. I know that we talk a bit about how WordPress is made better by the activity of our co-creators, the people who are using the software and testing the software, and telling us how it could be better. Those are the groups of people that make sure that we are the best version or headed in the best direction on any of our things with the software.

And so I guess it’s probably not super unusual for everyone to hear like we need your feedback on everything because that’s probably what we do half the time.

[Héctor Prieto 00:09:44]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:09:47]

So the publishing workflows, that reminds me that there has been a little bit of a conversation lately around the naming of this phase, basically.

And I know that the phases don’t necessarily need names. Like that’s why they’re numbered, and that’s a great idea. Like numbers are wonderful ways to reference things, but it also is just easier to reference it in kind of general conversation.

So the first phase was easier editing, and it really focused on the editing experience itself. The second one was customization, and now the third phase has been called collaboration for quite a bit of time.

But as we got closer and closer to this phase and we had more and more conversations that were coming out of phases one and two, it became really clear that really what we’re looking at here is more around workflows. And I love that that is an option for how to refer to this. Probably that’s how I will refer to it for most of the time that I talk about it as we are looking at phase three.

Because I remember that when we were first building the prototypes of Gutenberg, one of the big flags that I had was that breaking changes are not just about what we can see or any sort of visual regressions or what causes the white screen of death. Also, some of the things that are breaking changes should be considered in those workflows when we change where things are or how you accomplish a task.

And our users weren’t ready for it. That is something that is breaking for them, right?

[Héctor Prieto 00:11:25]

Yes. As you mentioned, this phase was referenced as collaboration, real-time collaboration, for a long time, but if we think of how this collaboration looks, it’s much more than just editing at the same time. A very big part of collaboration is also asynchronous collaboration by adding in-line comments and improving these notifications when you have a comment in your draft. I think the power of this phase is how everything comes together. These individual pieces come together.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 0:11:51]

Yes, and I don’t know where that first flag that sparked the discussion around, like, okay, but collaborative editing is not quite big enough and also means a bunch of different things for a bunch of different people. It depends on the size of your organization or the type of content you’re writing.

Like, I don’t know where that conversation started. My guess is, you know, some WordCamp somewhere, and an attendee was like, did you, did anybody ever think about these problems? And then they kind of worked their way around the Make Core site or otherwise made their way around to Matias’s ears.

But yeah, I think that was a really smart choice. And you’re exactly right, collaborative editing; that can refer to the synchronous kind or the asynchronous kind, and both of those types of collaboration are equally valuable and probably equally used.

[Héctor Prieto 00:12:40]

Yes. And one important point to note here is that this editorial flows, and this collaboration is crucial to implement multilingualism going into phase four. We need to think that as soon as we have posts and pages in different languages, there are going to be requirements in terms of how to translate these pieces of content.

So this will need collaboration, all forms of collaboration.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:13:02]

Yeah, absolutely. This maybe was before your time with the project, but I was team multilingual-first for a long time. Or at least thinking that we could do the multilingual part of this work alongside the collaborative editing part of the work. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand what we think is going in phase three versus what probably we need to be able to do as far as having native multilingual support in the project.

And I have softened my very hard position on that. You know, we’re big fans of strong positions loosely held, strong opinions loosely held. And this was one of those moments where I had that really strong opinion that we could just do them concurrently. We can do them at the same time.

And I think it was a conversation that you and I were having when you were pointing out the complexities of translating WordPress at all, let alone being able to translate all your content as well. And it makes a lot of sense, and you’re right. I think that there are a lot of interactions, a lot of workflows that we’re gonna have to kind of refresh or redesign or rebuild before it really makes sense for us to help make that a nice streamlined option for multilingual offerings.

[Héctor Prieto 00:14:17]

Yes, absolutely. As a Spanish-speaking person, I’m super excited about having multilingual in Core, but I also understand that we need some tooling ready before implementing multilingual in Core.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:14:29]

There are no, there really are no easy problems left in WordPress, right? Like, we all agree on this now?

[Héctor Prieto 00:14:36]

That’s correct. And we’re creating something incrementally. If we look at the phases, they are ordered sequentially. But that doesn’t mean that when we start phase three, we are, finishing phase two completely in the same way. We have not finished phase one.

That will be like saying, when is WordPress finished, when is the development finished? So it’s an incremental project, and it’s always going to be to need refining. So it’s of course, multilingual needs to come after collaboration because we need those tools.

But that doesn’t mean we need to finish the collaboration phase or have it very advanced phase three before we can start phase four. That will be determined in the next month as we start explorations.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:15:17]

So if you all, which I know you are, are interested in better workflows, more streamlined ways of working inside WordPress, and or interested in how we are gonna get multilingual settled in the future, this is a great time to get involved in this project and in the community. Like I said, we’ve got that post up that Matías shipped last week, which, again, if you have not read it, go read it because it’s got excellent, excellent information in there for you.

Héctor, before we head out, is there anything that you wanna make sure that you let the listeners know, either about phase three or just about WordPress in general?

[Héctor Prieto 00:15:57]

Well, tomorrow is WordPress 6.2 release day. So happy 6.2, everybody!

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:16:04]

Happy 6.2. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Which means today is the dry run; probably in three hours, we’re doing the dry run.

[Héctor Prieto 00:16:14]

Depends on when we’re listening to this, but yes.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:16:18]

Oh, that’s a good point. Right? Not everybody listens to this the second it becomes available. Time zones. That’s right. Oh, man. Look at us being a global project and just pretending like everybody listens to this particular thing the moment that it’s available.

I apologize to everybody who’s listening to it after the release or in the middle of the release party or whatever you’re doing. Regardless, tomorrow, if you’re listening to it today, is the WordPress 6.2 release, and it’s gonna be great.

Well, Héctor, thank you so much for joining me today. I really enjoyed having you on, and thanks for letting me interview you.

[Héctor Prieto 00:16:59]

Thank you for having me. It was my pleasure to be here.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:17:10]

So that brings us now to our small list of big things, and as is frequently the case, it’s actually kind of a big list of big things. So we’re gonna hop right in here. As Héctor and I mentioned in the episode, the release WordPress 6.2 is coming out tomorrow, depending on when you’re listening to this. If you listen to it on the 27th, it comes out on the 28th of March.

If you have a chance to drop by the release party. I would encourage you to; they’re pretty interesting just to get an idea of everything that it takes to build WordPress. It is, of course, the last few hours before a release, and so you don’t get a full scope.

But it’s always nice to see the way that everybody in the community works together, especially there in that last moment when we’re trying to package something and test it in a bunch of environments all across the world.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:18:00]

I love attending those. And so I encourage it. The next episode of the WordPress Briefing is going to have the release rundown.

I’ll go through the key features and highlights that finally made it into 6.2. The reason we don’t do those beforehand is just in case we have to remove anything at the last minute from a release. It doesn’t happen too often, but it does happen sometimes. And so, next episode of WP Briefing, that’s what we’ll be talking about.

The next thing on my list is a new developer blog. So there is a brand new developer blog. It was launched last Wednesday. It’s a great resource for WordPress developers to stay up to date and hear the latest in the WordPress development world. And also, we had been hearing some feedback from our developers in recent years that if you are like exploring how to extend WordPress, if you’re in that group of extenders, people who are building themes or building plugins, you’ve kind of feel like you’ve lost a place where you can have those exploratory conversations.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:19:00]

This is gonna be one of those places. We’ll put a link in the show notes. So far, the content that’s planned, I think, is really interesting.

Next thing on our small list, big list, of big things is WordCamp Europe’s Contributor Day.

So registration for Contributor Day is now open, and it does require a separate registration than regular attendance at WordCamp Europe. So if you are registered for WordCamp Europe, you already have your ticket for that, but you are not registered for Contributor Day, click the link in the show notes and come on down to spend a little time giving back to the WordPress Project.

And the last thing on our list today is that we have a WP20 Wapuu coloring giveaway. So put on your little party hats, and grab your crayons. The 20th anniversary Wapuu coloring giveaway is here. There is an opportunity to color in your own community-driven Wapuu and tweet it to us using #WapuuWP20 for your chance to win a sweet haul of WP20 swag items.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:20:00]

You can check out the full rules at the link in our show notes.

And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Thanks for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks.

WP Briefing: Episode 51: Is Routine a Rut?

Santana InnissMarch 14, 2023WordPress New

On Episode fifty-one of the WordPress Briefing podcast, join WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy as she makes a case for why routine is a good thing– in life and in the WordPress project.

Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording.

Credits

Editor: Dustin Hartzler
Logo: Javier Arce
Production: Santana Inniss
Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod

Show Notes

Transcript

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:00]

I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:29]

All right, my WordPress wonders; it’s time to join me for one of my gentle rants on basic leadership principles. Today we’re talking about the importance of routine and predictability in everyday life. But don’t worry, I’m gonna tie it all together with WordPress, too. So by now you’re probably aware that I don’t really consider myself one of those “born leaders.”

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:00]

Over the years, I’ve put a lot of effort into researching characteristics of good leaders and general leadership methods overall. But one of the things I encountered early on in my leadership learning journey was the concept of routine.

As with most leadership practices I hold, routine has more than one purpose. From a very pragmatic standpoint, routines provide predictability and the more predictable something is, the lower the cognitive load becomes, which in turn lets you use your thinking power for something better. For instance, if you know that in every check-in with your team lead, she’s gonna ask you what you were proud to have shipped last week, what you want to ship next week, and what things stand in the way of your plans, then you know that that is what you have to prepare for.

The knowledge work, the thinking part. The thinking part stops being, what is my team lead going to ask me and starts being what is the problem that she can help me solve?

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:00]

But from a more human standpoint, that kind of predictability helps us to understand when something that happened is out of the ordinary. Whether it’s a notification of a comment left on your blog or syntactical highlighting that lets you know that you’ve written something that’s out of voice or against grammar standards, it just lets you know that something is unusual there and deserves your attention.

Now for me, this has a lot of applications across the WordPress project. There are the obvious things like the cadence of our major release cycles or our notification system, which honestly could use a bit of TLC, a little bit of elbow grease.

But there are also less obvious things that this idea still applies to simply because of the way our brains work, the information architecture on our sites, for instance. It should make sense visually and semantically because that makes it easy for us to skim and predict where the highest value content is for us. Or the user interface across the back end of our software.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:00]

Having familiar tasks or actions across any type of content or area of content makes it easier for a site maintainer to flow from one area of a site to the next, fixing things as they find them without necessarily having to stop and put down their hammer and pick up a screwdriver or whatever metaphor works for you. Or if you’re doing more nuanced work, like put down your timpani mallets and pick up your xylophone mallets.

So, yeah, consistency. Consistency is the topic of today’s gentle rant. I get really worked up about it because I feel like consistency ends up being this euphemism for being boring. But I honestly believe that it’s the consistency and the dependability that make it clear what is supposed to be exciting, the things that are different enough that they merit our attention.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:38]

Which, fortunately, now brings us to our small list of big things. It’s actually a pretty big list today and also a bunch of pretty big things. So first thing to know, there was an additional beta added to this release cycle.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:00]

It was beta five; it came out last week, I think. There was a bit of a regression that we worked our way through. And so RC1, release candidate one, is going to be postponed a little bit because of that. But don’t wait until RC to start testing, obviously RC is tomorrow, so that means you get to test, like, today!

The second thing on our small list of big things is that we have the WordPress 20th anniversary coming up. That’s May 27th. And you can join in the celebrations. So at WordPress’s 10th anniversary and 15th anniversary, we had like a big, ongoing global set of parties, like Meetup events got together and made cakes, or did a concert, or did a hackathon for various reasons.

Like they all got together on May 27th or thereabouts and did some really fun, like celebration of how far WordPress has gotten them and how far they hope to be able to go with WordPress.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:00]

So if you are from the before times WordCamp kind of organizing timeframe, you know that we always consider WordCamps to be like an annual celebration of the excellence of your community and how much you all come together and how different you are as part of this overall big WordPress-y thingy.

All right. Third item that we have is that, I know that I mentioned this in the last WP Briefing as well, but we have another session of the diverse and inclusive WordPress events coming up that’s happening on March 16th. So coming up really fast, we’ll put a link to that in the show notes as well.

And the final thing, I don’t remember what list number we’re at, but the final thing is that there is a proposal out there right now to modify the events and news widget that we use inside the WordPress dashboard. If you’re not familiar with it, it is a place where all of the local-to-you Meetup events get listed.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:00]

It’s where all of the news items from various WordPress media outlets get published. We just have a link to it there. And so, we would like to make some changes to that so that we’re able to include not only specific location types of events but also events that are location agnostic because they’re online but might have a specific, identifying niche that you particularly find interesting.

So it might be for Spanish speakers or for women in particular, or whatever it might be. There’s a proposal out for that. We’ll put a link to that in the show notes as well.

And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Thanks for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks.

WP Briefing: Episode 50: 3 Interesting Trends from WordCamp Asia

Santana InnissFebruary 28, 2023WordPress New

On Episode fifty of the WordPress Briefing podcast, join WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy as she explores the three big trends from the inaugural WordCamp Asia.

Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording.

Credits

Editor: Dustin Hartzler
Logo: Javier Arce
Production: Santana Inniss
Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod

Show Notes

Create Block Theme Plugin
WordPressing Your Way to Digital Literacy
PostStatus Networking Opportunities
WordPress 6.2 Live Demo will be held 2 March, 2023 at 17:00h UTC
Future Plans for the HelpHub
How to Own Your Expertise & Start Speaking at WordPress Events WP Diversity Training 1 March 2023

Transcript

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:00]

Here we go.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:40]

The inaugural WordCamp Asia happened a couple of weeks ago in Bangkok. There were almost 1300 people in attendance, and I was lucky to be able to talk with a lot of them about their thoughts around the WordPress project and community. So today, let’s talk about three of the most interesting trends that I heard from people: the future of themes, the future of work, and the future of contributions.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:00]

So first up, the future of themes. This one was not a surprise to me. Not only has it been on my mind lately, but every WordCamp I’ve ever attended in Asia or Australia has had themes as a central element. There are a lot of theme creators making a living in WordPress in this part of the world. So it’s natural that they want to know what to prepare for.

Now, it’s hard to predict the future, but there are a couple of things you can do to kind of get a leg up on it. Firstly, the theme review team, if you know how to make block themes but are still struggling to understand what might make them high value to your users, donating a little bit of time to review them can help.

While I was at the contributor day, the team rep who happened to also be there to represent the table told me that reviewing block themes is way faster than reviewing classic themes. So if it’s been a bit since you stopped by, I would encourage you to give it a shot. It’s a lot easier than it used to be for a lot of reasons, and they can always use a little bit of help.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:00]

The second thing is this plugin called the Create Block Theme plugin. If you don’t know how to make block themes, you know how to make classic themes. You don’t know how to make block themes. This is a wordpress.org maintained plugin that will make theme creation simpler. It’s a relatively new plugin, though, so if you’re the type of contributor who likes to create good tools for good people, you can also feel free to grab a ticket or two from their repo and help get that moving.

The second thing that came up was the future of work. This was also not a surprise to me. There have been a lot of reports of layoffs in the tech industry and worries about the possibility of a recession.

Since WordPress is not only a tool that folks use in their jobs but also a tool that empowers people to create jobs for themselves, it’s entirely expected for questions about career prospects to come up during a WordCamp. Here are a couple of thoughts on that. So I mentioned this briefly during the Q&A session on that Sunday, but I’m gonna repeat it here because I believe it with every fiber of my being.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:06]

You can learn every 21st century skill that you need while contributing to an open source project.

I talked about it in episode 17 of this podcast. I’ve talked about it at WordCamps and major event series outside of WordPress for years. Like I really, really believe this, and it’s not just like a WordPress only thing. Although obviously, that is my primary perspective, that’s true for contributing to almost any open source project.

On top of that, if you are contributing to WordPress and you’re doing that in the way that we encourage folks to do, you’ve got public examples of proactive, asynchronous collaboration across cultures and time zones. And I don’t know about y’all, but sometimes it’s hard to explain what my job is. And so having examples of how the whatever it is that you were doing, however, you were collaborating or contributing or working on a project together, having concrete examples to be able to share with someone can never hurt.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:04]

I’m gonna give us a necessary side note here. I know that volunteering time is a privilege, and if you find yourself between jobs, the last thing you want to do is give up any more of your time for no money.

But if you have contributed to any team in the past, that benefit still exists for you. Your contributions are not taken away just because you’re no longer with your employer.

The second thought on that is actually one that Matt mentioned during the Q&A on Sunday. He said in his experience that open source shines in recessionary times.

I’ll have to take his word for that one since I discovered WordPress in 2009 or so and so after the last recession that I would have experienced in the US. However, I have heard from a lot of people in the WordPress ecosystem and in tech in general who have shared their stories from the last time that we all experienced a recession.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:00]

And certainly, when they suddenly found that they did not have a company to call the place that they were working, a company that they were working for, they were able to, at the very least, freelance until they found the next thing.

I know that that’s cold comfort if you’re in the middle of things right now, but it certainly is something that people always have looked back to as like one of those turning points for them in the 2007-2008 era here in the US.

Now I know that is sometimes not what anybody wants to hear. And also like, who am I to be speaking about observed experiences from other people? I did want to let you know that the folks over at PostStatus have opened up some networking opportunities for anyone that’s been caught up in the current downsizing around the ecosystem.

I’ll link to that in the show notes here on wordpress.org/news, but also, if you’re a part of the PostStatus network, they’ve got it posted over there on their sites and things as well. So easy to find and definitely worthwhile if that’s a situation that you find yourself in right now.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:02]

And the third thing that I heard from a lot of folks about is the future of contributions. So 635 people attended the contributor day that happened ahead of WordCamp Asia, And at WordCamp Europe in Porto last June, it was 800 people or something, which was the biggest one on record. And so this is really close to that.

There’s a lot of people. And a lot of them were attending for the first time. Over the course of the day, I checked in with quite a few of the table leads and heard some pretty consistent feedback, both about what we’re doing to help onboard contributors now but also about how we can help to onboard contributors in the future.

Firstly, we all generally agree that documentation, which is our current problem to solve toward easier contributor onboarding, we all generally agree that that’s going pretty well. We now have a ton of our preferences and processes documented in various team handbooks, but with a ton of documentation comes the potential for overwhelm.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:07:00]

So across the board table leads shared the need for sort of a quick start guide for each of their teams. Secondly, we also generally seem to agree that mentorship plays a big role in the success of many long-term contributors. I’ve talked about it before. I had some mentors as I was getting started, and I would never have made it past organizing meetup events if it hadn’t been for their help.

And so a bonus item I heard about is actually Meetup events. Meetup groups are one of our most resilient ways to contribute to WordPress, and they also happen to be one of the hardest working. If you’ve never been to one of these events, you may not know that you can learn a skill that’s new to you or teach a skill that you’ve had for a long time.

You can also network to find the jobs that you want or network to hire the people you need. It’s where people learn how to use the CMS or learn how to become an entrepreneur.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:08:00]

But it’s also where they discover our community and eventually learn why we think that open source is an idea that will change our generation.

So if you took nothing else away from this, I guess the takeaway is that you too can organize a Meetup event that will strengthen your local community and the world!

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:08:27]

Which brings us now to our small list of big things. So first up, we have a live product demo for WordPress 6.2 on March 2nd, that’s going to be at 17:00 UTC.

There is a post that has gone up about it, which I’ll include in the show notes. This is an opportunity for folks to watch a live walkthrough of the current release with a collection of people from the release squad as well as avid contributors and testers. It’ll give you an idea of upcoming changes, but also we’ll probably expose a bug or two along the way.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:09:00]

Come with your questions, and we will see you there.

Item number two is documentation. So apparently, that’s just half of what I wanna talk about today. Documentation, so wordpress.org, has docs that are specifically written for users and pulls in not only the documentation that we have but also information from the codex, the documentation space of yesteryear.

There’s a bit more to do here, and I realize this project has been going on since 2015. It’s because there’s a lot of stuff we have to do. There’s a lot of documentation, and we have to kind of get it in order. But that is the area that we’re in now. We have launched the new documentation page, the new look and feel is out there.

And so the next question is making sure that we have it organized in a way that’s easy to find and easy to learn from as you go. There is a whole working group that meets about it, and I will share a link to that in case you find that to be of interest to you as well.

And last but not least, there is another speaker workshop coming up on March 1st.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:10:00]

If you have not heard of these yet, it’s a workshop that helps speakers learn the process of presentation brainstorming and creation. It is a great workshop. It was created over the course of many years within the WordPress project by Jill Binder and crew. It is a wonderful opportunity.

It’s not a WordPress link that we’re on, but there is an event link that I will make sure that we all have access to here, in case that is something that you have always wanted to try, learning how to speak at WordPress events.

And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Thank you for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks!

WP Briefing: Episode 49: Everything You Need to Know About the Community Summit!

Santana InnissFebruary 14, 2023WordPress New

Episode forty-nine of the WordPress Briefing explores the What, Why, and Who behind the upcoming Community Summit in National Harbor, DC, USA, August 22-23, 2023. Join Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy to learn the importance of the gathering to the WordPress project.

Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording.

Credits

Editor: Dustin Hartzler
Logo: Javier Arce
Production: Santana Inniss
Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod

Show Notes

Observations on WordPress Contributor Team Structure

Apply to attend the 2023 Community Summit

Topic Submissions for the 2023 Community Summit

Tuckman’s Theory: Stages of Group Development

Chatham House Rules

Proposal for a project-wide mentorship program

Openverse.org

6.2 Beta 1 is open for testing

Transcript

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:00]

I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:40]

A couple of episodes ago, I mentioned the Community Summit in the small list of big things. That’s coming up on August 22nd and 23rd, right before WordCamp US. And for some of you, that made complete sense, and the only thought in your mind was, wow, our last one was in 2017, how could so many years have passed since then? And since so many years have passed, today we’re gonna talk a bit about the Community Summit, what it is, where it came from, and why it’s so important for the WordPress project.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:09]

First things first, let’s talk about what exactly the Community Summit is. The Community Summit is a small event where folks from around the WordPress project and community come together to work through some of the most difficult topics the project currently faces, many of which are easier or at least less fraught when we can be face-to-face.

The Community Summit is usually done in an “unconference” style, and when we were smaller, we left topic gathering and voting to the day of. That’s evolved a bit as our group of fearless contributors has grown over the years, and this year, we have been asking for topics ahead of time so that we can make sure we have the right folks in the room and are making the best use of everyone’s limited time.

It’s easy to take a look at this event and think it’s like some fun exclusive thing with a who’s who of WordPress.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:00]

But I assure you it’s a working event. Decisions are not finalized during the event, but since we try very hard to account for many, many viewpoints, it ends up being two days of hard discussions, contentious viewpoints, and problem definition at a level of complexity you don’t really see every day.

Hearing how hard this event is, you may be wondering why we put in that effort. There are a lot of reasons, but there are three that come to my mind immediately. So for starters, working across cultures is hard. Apart from the cultural differences, we tend to be aware of things like where we’re located or our lived experiences, things like that– working remotely or distributedly is a whole different set of skills than working in person. This helps remind everyone that we’re humans, that there are humans behind those comments and behind those messages in Slack. The second thing is that I’m a big supporter of Tuckman’s theory of group development.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:00]

If you don’t know what that is, you can look for it, we’ll put a link in the show notes, but it’s that forming, storming, norming, performing kind of concept of how groups come together. Because there are so many of us and our community has such a large footprint, there are little storms a-brewin all the time.

Some get really big, some stay small. But at some point, most of them have to be addressed. And this is a space that is specifically designed to help us do that. Which brings us to the third reason that we do it. This event uses something called the Chatham House Rule, which creates a kind of temporal psychological safety.

Right. Psychological safety, if you’re a leader, you know that that’s something that is built over time and requires a lot of trust and a lot of conversations with people that you’re working with, and we can’t quite do that.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:00]

And so Chatham House Rule builds an environment that helps create that suddenly in the moment and requires, you know, some, some faith in one another.

But basically, no one can be quoted about what they said in those conversations. No one’s examples can be attributed to them. But the conversations can be summarized and published, which we do on the Community Summit website. And then, we publish those for our collective knowledge over time. This lets folks who are attending advocate for themselves and others fully without worrying over whether they’re gonna be taken out of context later.

And finally, one of the biggest questions we get ahead of any Community Summit is why it is by invitation only. The most commonly cited reasons for keeping this small and invite only have everything to do with logistics and leadership. You want it to be large enough to have good representation but small enough to have high-quality interactions. It’s just a really narrow Goldilocks moment, if you will.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:00]

But that reason doesn’t necessarily address the need for invitations rather than letting it be first come, first served. The reason for that is more of a philosophical one and requires you to go on a mini historical journey with me.

This also has changed a bit over the years. The first ever Community Summit, way back in 2012, was before my time, but if I recall my history correctly, it was truly by invitation only. The summit after that included a closed nomination process. The next included a team nomination process, and then the last two, 2017 and 2023, have included open nominations.

Now, even in the nomination era of Community Summit organizing, there is still a selection process. The organizers review the list of suggested attendees and check for the same types of things we expect major WordCamp organizers to look for in their speaker selection.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:00]

Things like which teams they contribute to, what communities they advocate for, and how long they’ve been a member of the community.

And then they adjust for balance. In addition to those things, there are also four types of voices that we always want represented at our Community Summit. So first is leading voices, people who are already in the community and kind of are helping us to make decisions. I am considered one of those leading voices; I have put in my application to be included in the Community Summit. Really hope we select me.

The second one is future leading voices. Specifically, those are people who are active in the community already and are showing a lot of promise, either because they really understand the values that the WordPress open source project is putting forward or understand the basic processes of communicating and guiding people in such a complex ecosystem as the WordPress project represents. Or because they have said quite plainly they are interested in helping us to make sure that the WordPress project is able to move and continue to create and continue to support democratizing publishing.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:07:00]

So it’s a little bit potentially folks who are self-selecting for that. People who already are showing that they are doing that either in WordPress or in their local communities. That’s one of the types of voices we want to include. A third one that we want to include all the time is voices we need, so voices that we need to hear. People that specifically we are building WordPress for, people that have indicated to us that the CMS is not necessarily perfect for some of the use cases that they run into regularly.

So the people and users and community organizers that can and are able to advocate for the types of user interactions, the types of community interactions that we absolutely want to be able to see.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:08:00]

And so that’s a third group of voices that we want to make sure we have represented.

And then the fourth and final group that we always want to have represented is a group that I call voices we miss. And so those are the people that we want to be able to hear more from in our project that we don’t necessarily either have a good group of representative voices for, so it’s hard to hear them, or that we know are probably users of the CMS or they are attending events, they are somehow involved in the WordPress project.

But we don’t necessarily have any way to have accounted for them while we were building solutions way back in 2012 or 2006 when things were being built for us. And so those are the four groups of people, the four types of voices that I absolutely want to have represented at our Community Summit.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:09:00]

And I ask organizers to go through this incredibly complicated selection process because we want not simply a microcosm of the WordPress community as we see it today and hope to see it in the future but also an equitably voiced forum during that critical problem definition phase.

So TLDL. For, listen?! T L D Real Listen. Although if you didn’t make it through that, you definitely are not getting to this point. So a TLDR for folks who skimmed the transcript and got here, I guess we keep this invitation structure because we want to account for voices we don’t hear every day in the WordPress project. Not because we don’t value them but because we already hear them.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:09:44]

And now that brings us to our small list of big things. This week it’s actually kind of a big list of big things, but you know, there it is.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:10:00]

First things first. The applications for the Community Summit are now open. Those are the applications to attend. It’s pretty short. I filled mine out this morning and it’s three questions about who you are and your username on wordpress.org, and then three questions about the topics you are most interested in and the experience that you have in those conversations so far.

Yeah. It took me, like, I think, 90 seconds. Like, a full minute and a half. So head on over there. We have a link in the show notes, but also, you’ll be able to find it in newsletters across the entire WordPress media ecosystem. I am pretty sure about that.

The second thing is that there is a proposal out for a project-wide mentorship program.

This is a huge potential win for us. It is aiming to fix some of our broken ladders. If you’re not familiar with my Broken Ladder Theory of the WordPress project, I’ll try to remember to find a link to that post and put that in the show notes.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:11:00]

Number three is that Openverse moved. I shared this last week that happened last week. They didn’t move very far, though. They have a new URL, you can find them at openverse.org. It’s the same team. It’s the same product. It’s the same group of excellent openly-licensed images and media that you have come to expect. It just has its own standalone URL now. Huge kudos to the contributors who got that done.

Another thing that happened last week is that WordPress 6.2 has moved into its beta phase, and so now is the time to get out there and test.

There also was an excellent, excellent write-up about how to test any given release. And I think it also includes how to file a good bug. And so we’ll send all of those things into the show notes. They’ll be easy to find. Get out there and do your testing.

And number five, longest, small list of big things in recent history.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:12:00]

I got some interest on [a] women, and non-binary led release for 2023, and so since there was some interest shown for that, it is hereby verbally confirmed. Keep an eye out on make.wordpress.org for more information about what that process is gonna look like and how to volunteer your time for that if that is something that calls to you.

Woo. And that, my friends, is your small list of big things, your big list of big things. Thanks for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks.

WP Briefing: Episode 48: What Does Concluding a Gutenberg Phase Really Mean?

Santana InnissJanuary 31, 2023WordPress New

On episode forty-eight of the WordPress Briefing podcast, Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy reflects on the closing of Gutenberg phase two, and what that means in the larger context of the project.

Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording.

Credits

Editor: Dustin Hartzler
Logo: Javier Arce
Production: Santana Inniss
Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod

Show Notes

Removing Block Editor Beta Label GitHub Issue
Reporting Bugs
make.wordpress.org/design
Contribution Conversations: Improving the Contributor Journey
Contribution Conversations: Ending the Eternal September
Contribution Conversations: WordCamp Mentorship
WordCamp Asia Livestream Info

Transcript

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:00]

I’m your host, Jospeha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:40]

We’ve barely gotten moving here in 2023, but even so, WordPress is already working toward its next major release– coming to us at the end of March. You’ve probably heard by now that with this release comes the “end of Phase 2.” But for a lot of folks, that’s raising some questions about what to expect.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:00]

So I’m gonna spend a little time today sharing what I currently know. Let’s start with what that phrase does mean. Firstly, all of the projects, with the exception of two, I believe, in the Phase 2 scoping ticket, will be shipped in the Gutenberg plugin before WordPress 6.2 release comes out. Barring any major breaking issues, those will then land in that major release in WordPress 6.2.

So, like, 99% of the features we considered in scope for Phase 2 will be in core by April. It also means the block editor may finally shed its beta label. We’ve been discussing that possibility with the input of the community over the course of the last few major releases, and we’ll do the same as we get ready for the 6.2 release as well. That discussion is tracked over in GitHub, and I can share a link to that in the show notes. For anyone who is a little super nerd, like me, the ticket number is 39293.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:00]

So not only if you’re going to memorize it and be one of those cool WordPressers who can call tickets to mind based on the numbers. This is a good one because not only is it an important topic, to be able to recall, but also it’s a palindrome, so you get to be fancy and know that forever.

But anyway, I’ll put a link to it in the show notes for all the rest of us. Fingers crossed that we get to remove that label this time around, but also, the acceptance criteria on it are pretty clear. So it’s really a matter of yes or no on all of the columns all the way down.

So what does that phase not mean? Firstly, it does not mean that we will stop accepting user feedback or bug reports on any features up to this point. It is always encouraged to file a ticket on track or GitHub detailing any bugs that you’ve encountered. If you’ve never reported a bug before, don’t worry. We have all been there. I’ll gather a link or two with some information for first-timers.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:00]

If you ever run into me at a WordCamp, feel free to ask me about my first bug-reporting experience. And after you’ve heard that, you will immediately go and file that bug that has been sitting screenshotted on your desk for six months because it honestly cannot get any worse than my first one.

Secondly, it definitely does not mean that we will stop shipping refinements to the user experience. As much as I’d like to say this isn’t true, I think all open source contributors know that no matter how much you test a solution, you can’t actually account for all possible use cases when you work on a project this size.

So as we find things that we didn’t realize were a little rough to use, we will, of course, make the effort to smooth those workflows as quickly as possible. So that’s my little reassuring tl;dr for what that phrase means. If you are listening to this and haven’t spent much time in the block editor as it exists today, I encourage you to do so.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:00]

It has really changed substantially since it was first merged in 2018, and it represents thousands of hours of research and problem-solving and creation, and outreach. If you know someone who has contributed to the project or whose content helped you make sense of some inscrutable part of it, also maybe, drop them a line and let them know you appreciate their hard work.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:26]

That brings us now to our small list of big things. Firstly, we are thinking a lot right now about the paths to contribution. Both at the start of your contribution journey and as you grow into a long-term, seasoned contributor. There are a couple of different discussions related to that right now. So there are actually two project-wide discussions that are on make.wordpress.org/project.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:00]

And then there’s one that is specific to WordCamp membership, and that is on make.wordpress.org/community. You can head over to any of those and share your experiences, thoughts, and any wild ideas that you have.

The second thing on my small list is that there are a lot of pages across wordpress.org that are getting shiny new designs.

If you want to get involved in those discussions, or you just wanna catch early previews of what’s coming to the site, you can hop over to make.wordpress.org/design or join the design team meetings in Slack.

And the last thing is that WordCamp Asia is coming quickly, my friends. This event is near and dear to my heart. I hope to see a lot of you in person, but if you won’t be able to make it in person, we still have you covered. There will be a live stream, and the schedule for that is already on the site. It shows the times for each session in your local time zone so you can easily decide which presentations you absolutely must see right in the moment.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:00]

And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Thanks for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks.

WP Briefing: Episode 47: Letter from the Executive Director

Santana InnissJanuary 17, 2023WordPress New

On episode forty-seven of the WordPress Briefing podcast, Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy shares her vision and current thinking for the WordPress open source project in 2023. Rather read it? The full letter is also available.

Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording.

Credits

Editor: Dustin Hartzler
Logo: Javier Arce
Production: Santana Inniss
Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod

Show Notes

make.WordPress.org/core
Join the 6.2 Release!
Submit Topics for the Community Summit!

Transcript

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:00]

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:40]

Last month at State of the Word, I shared some opening thoughts about why WordPress. For me, this is an easy question, and the hardest part is always knowing which lens to answer through. Though I always focus on the philosophical parts of the answer, I know that I often speak as an advocate for many types of WordPressers.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:00]

So as we prepare ourselves for the start of a new year, I have a few additional thoughts that I’d like to share with you, my WordPress community, to take into the year with you.

Firstly, the Four Freedoms. If you have already listened to State of the Word, you have heard my take on the philosophical side of open source and the freedoms it provides.

But if you didn’t, then the TL;DR on that is that open source provides protections and freedoms to creators on the web that I really think should just be a given. But there are a couple of other things about the Four Freedoms, and especially the way that WordPress does this kind of open source-y thing that I think are worth noting as well.

One of those things is that WordPress entrepreneurs, those who are providing services or designing sites, building applications, they have proven that open source provides an ethical framework for conducting business. No one ever said that you aren’t allowed to build a business using free and open source software, and I am regularly heartened by the way that successful companies and freelancers make the effort to pay forward what they can.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:02]

Not always for the sole benefit of WordPress, of course, but often for the general benefit of folks who are also learning how to be entrepreneurs or how to kind of navigate our ecosystem. And the other thing that I love about the Four Freedoms and the way that WordPress does it is that leaders in the WordPress community, no matter where they are leading from, have shown that open source ideals can be applied to the way we work with one another and show up for one another.

As a community, we tend to approach solution gathering as an us-versus-the-problem exercise, which not only makes our solutions better, it also makes our community stronger.

As I have witnessed all of these things work together over the years, one thing that is clear to me is this: not only is open source an idea that can change our generation by being an antidote to proprietary systems and the data economy, but open source methodologies represent a process that can change the way we approach our work and our businesses.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:01]

The second big thing that I want to make sure you all take into the year with you is that we are preparing for the third phase of the Gutenberg project. We are putting our backend developer hats on and working on the APIs that power our workflows. That workflows phase will be complex. A little bit because APIs are dark magic that binds us together, but also because we’re going to get deep into the core of WordPress with that phase.

If you want to have impactful work for future users of WordPress, though, this is the phase to get invested in. This phase will focus on the main elements of collaborative user workflows. If that doesn’t really make sense to you, I totally get it. Think of it this way, this phase will work on built-in real-time collaboration, commenting options in drafts, easier browsing of post revisions, and things like programmable editorial, pre-launch checklists.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:00]

So phases one and two of the Gutenberg project had a very ‘blocks everywhere’ sort of vision. And phase three and, arguably, phase four will have more of a ‘works with the way you work’ vision.

And my final thought for you all as we head into the year is this, there are a couple of different moments that folks point to as the beginning of the Gutenberg project. Some say it was State of the Word 2013, where Matt dreamed on stage of a true WYSIWYG editor for WordPress. Some say it was State of the Word 2016, where we were all encouraged to learn JavaScript deeply. For a lot of us though, it was at WordCamp Europe in 2018 when the Gutenberg feature plugin first made its way to the repo.

No matter when you first became aware of Gutenberg, I can confirm that it feels like it’s been a long time because it has been a long time. But I can also confirm that it takes many pushes to knock over a refrigerator.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:00]

For early adopters, both to the creation of Gutenberg as well as its use, hyperfocus on daily tasks makes it really hard to get a concept of scale.

And so I encourage everyone this year to look out toward the horizon a bit more and up toward our guiding stars a bit more as well. Because we are now, as we ever were, securing opportunity for those who come after us because of the opportunity that was secured for us by those who came before us.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:33]

That brings us now to our small list of big things. It’s a very small list, but two pretty big things. The first thing on the list is that the WordPress 6.2 release is on its way. If you would like to get started contributing there, you can wander over to make.WordPress.org/core. You can volunteer to be part of the release squad. You can volunteer your time just as a regular contributor, someone who can test things — any of that.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:00]

We’ll put a link in the show notes. And the second thing that I wanted to remind you of is that today is the deadline to submit topics for the Community Summit that’s coming up in August. That comes up in the middle of August, like the 22nd and 23rd or something like that.

We’ll put a link to that in the show notes as well. If you already have chatted with a team rep about some things that you really want to make sure get discussed at the community summit, I think that we can all assume that your team rep has put that in. But if not, it never hurts to give it a second vote by putting a new submission into the form.

WP Briefing: Episode 46: The WP Bloopers Podcast

Santana InnissJanuary 1, 2023WordPress New

This episode of the WP Briefing features all the Josepha bloopers our little elves have stored away over the year.

Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording.

Credits

Editor: Dustin Hartzler
Logo: Javier Arce
Production: Santana Inniss
Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod

Transcript

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:00]

Hello everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can normally catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project with the hope that deeper understanding creates deeper appreciation.

But on today’s bonus episode, instead of catching quick explanations, you’ll catch some quick bloopers.

The end of the year is a time when many people and many cultures gather together, and whether you observe traditions of light or faith, compassion, or celebration from everyone here at the WordPress Briefing Podcast, we’re wishing you a happy, festive season and a very happy New Year.

Sit back, relax, and enjoy some of the laughs and outtakes from recording the WP Briefing over the year.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:00]

Hello everyone, and welcome to the WordPress. This is the thing I’ve done 25 times, and I know how to do it for reals.

Welcome to WordPress Briefing, episode 20. Oh no, 7? 27? 26? Episode 27. I know how many things I’ve done.

Ooh, neat. This is Josepha recording episode 46 of the WP Bonus Briefings. Not because we’ve had 46 bonus Briefings, but because this is the 46th one and it is a bonus, it will also have a fancy name. But right now, I’m just calling it the bonus. It’s gonna be quick. Here I go.

Group them into two big buckets, themes, uh, themes and tools. Mmm, I’m gonna have to redo the whole thing! No! I thought I could save it, and I didn’t save it. I had a typo in my script, and then I messed it up. I, it said into you big buckets instead of into two big buckets.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:00]

I’m gonna start over from the target release date because I kind of smeared it all together, um, despite what I intended to do.

And gives everyone, no. What is this ringing of phones? Oh, I was doing so well. Where was I? Let’s see if I can just pick it up.

All righty, live from my closet. It’s episode 20, the WordPress Briefing, WP Briefing. So I have a title for this, and when I started writing it, I really had every intention of writing it to the title. And then what I wrote doesn’t fit the title at all, but does really hang together well. And so we’re gonna have to come up with a new title, but at the moment, it’s called So Many Ways to WordPress.

Here in a minute, you will see why it doesn’t fit. Also, at the end, I feel like I get very, like, angry nerd leader.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:00]

And so I may, I may at the end, give that a second go and see if there’s a way that I can soften it a little bit, but, I, I don’t know that I can soften it. I feel very strongly about it. So, maybe I am just an angry nerd leader.

Oh, okay. I’ll get us started now that I apparently have filled the room with apologies, not the room, the closet.

We’ll figure out something very catchy as a title or as an alternative. Very descriptive, and people will click on it because they must know, but we’ll figure out the title later.

@wordpress.org. However, I don’t know why I decided to do an invitation to email me in the middle of that. I’m gonna start from the top of that paragraph. I just got too excited by the opportunity to get mail.

I gotta slow it down. I’m like the fastest talker, had too much coffee. Okay, slowing it down now.

Huh? What am I saying? No, no, that’s what I’m saying. It’s fine. I, I can do this.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:00]

Hold on. Oww. Sorry. I was adjusting my microphone, and then it fell down. I happened to be holding it at the time, so it didn’t, like, slam down, I think, and hurt your ears and so I apologize. Good thing I stopped so it didn’t just, like, slam down in the middle of a recording.

That’s all right. I’m gonna give myself that win, even though it’s a hollow one. All right. Trying again. Starting right there, at now since.

This year, it starts on October 18th, 2001. That’s the year? No, 2021. That’s the year. Oh man. I’m doing such a great job of this.

Um, I’m recording this slightly before, um, you’re hearing it? What, how am I gonna start this? Hold on. I don’t know how to start this. All right. I’m, I can do it.

Oh, I’m so glad I remembered. We had guests that could have been so embarrassing.

Now for me, the trade-offs work well. How many times can I say now?

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:00]

Do I just start every sentence with now now? Is this just how I do things? Uh, now, now, now, now. I’m gonna start all over again because I’m in my head about the words in my mouth now. So.

In some near timeframe, some near timeframe. This is not a thing that people say, Dustin, I’m sorry. That’s not a thing people say. I’m just gonna retry that one sentence to sound like I speak with other human beings sometimes.

Today is the start of… I can do these things.

This was a terrible ending. I need to just finish that last part. I’m gonna redo the part where I started with my name and not the name of the podcast. Um, and we’ll do that.

And if you’re supporting or building anything to hand off to clients, you know that timely, easy to ship changes on a site are considered a vital part of any overarching brand and marketing strategy. Wow. It’s like, I don’t know what words are right there.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:00]

I tripped over my own tongue a lot. I’m gonna sit, I’m gonna do that paragraph again because I didn’t do a very good job of it.

I’ll do a better job.

I literally digress, and now I don’t know. I am in my thing. What was I saying? Oh, there we go.

Topher DeRosia, who founded Word not WordPress. Holy moly. That was a, I knew I was gonna say that, and I was like, don’t say that when you actually get around to saying this, but here I am, and I did it. Even though I knew I was gonna do it and I told myself not to. Doing it again. Right from there.

Not which audiench segment. Oh man. Audiench is not a word, folks. I was on a roll. I’m gonna start right from the primary thing.

I don’t even remember how I started this podcast. What is the last thing I said? I said, here we go. All right.

Kind of covered some interesting ground, and so, oh no, this is not where I’m gonna start it. I know exactly where I’m gonna start it. Okay. I’m really ready now. Here we go.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:07:00]

I suddenly, I’m gonna pause right here because I suddenly got really worried that I didn’t actually hit record. Oh my gosh. I did. Woo. I’m all over the place. Okay. We’ll now continue. Wait, did I? Oh my goodness. I did, super sorry.

Of the WordPress Briefing. I’m gonna do some singing in the middle of some talking, but I keep trying to talk myself out of the singing, so I’m gonna go ahead and do the singing, and then I’ll do the talking before I talk myself out of the singing. Here I go, probably.

I added a word. That was so good. I’m gonna start again. I’m gonna get some water, and then I’m gonna start again. Not again. Again. Just from the ‘and finally.’

I don’t know how I finish my show. Y’all, I do this literally every week. I never know how to finish my show. Here we go.

I don’t know why I shouted at you from the other side of the tiny closet. I apologize. I’m gonna start again from ‘and finally.’

Tada we did it.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:08:00]

Ha. I hate it. I hate the whole podcast. It’s gonna be fine.

Done. Nailed it.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:00]

With that, I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Merry Christmas from me. Happy holidays to you, and we’ll see you again in the new year.

Done.

WP Briefing: Episode 45: State of the Word Reflections

Santana InnissDecember 23, 2022WordPress New

In the forty-fifth episode of the WordPress Briefing, WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy discusses highlights from this year’s State of the Word address.

Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording.

Credits

Editor: Dustin Hartzler
Logo: Javier Arce
Production: Santana Inniss
Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod

References

LearnWP
WordPress Playground
ICYMI: State of the Word Recap
Take the 2020 WordPress Survey!
Exploring WordPress Certifications
Community Summit WordCamp Site
Submit Topics for the 2023 Community Summit
20th Anniversary– Stay Tuned for Updates
Check Out Style Variations and the 2023 Theme

Transcript

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:00]

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project, some insight into the community that supports it, and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:39]

Last week, WordPress hosted its annual State of the Word. As usual, this was delivered by our project co-founder Matt Mullenweg and represented a year-long labor of love from the WordPress community as a whole. There are many things I love about State of the Word, but consistently the thing I love the most is being able to shine spotlights on the great work of our global network of contributors.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:02]

Since that presentation goes by at the speed of light, I wanted to highlight a few things as well. First things first, I wanted to highlight that we had nearly 1,400 contributors, and by nearly, I mean just one too few. We had 1,399 contributors. So that is a big deal in general, but it’s an especially big deal to me because that’s before we start looking at any contributions that aren’t specifically tied to a release.

You may be wondering what those non-release contributions are. An incomplete list of those contributions would include organizing WordPress events, training others how to use WordPress, the myriad podcasts, articles, and newsletters that make up the WordPress media community, and any participant in a call for testing. Not to mention the unglamorous ways to contribute, like reviewing themes or reviewing plugins.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:58]

Things like patching security vulnerabilities and the bazillion things that Meta does to make sure that our community has all the tools that it needs to function. So I want to echo, once again, the huge, huge thanks that Matt already shared in State of the Word, and thank all of you for showing up for our project and for each other this way.

The next thing I wanted to be sure to highlight was LearnWP. It was briefly noted that 12,000 learners had found their way to courses on learn.wordpress.org, and then during the Q&A, there was a related question about certifications in WordPress.

The need for certifications has been a regular topic in our project, and I mentioned that there are two different ongoing discussions at the moment. One of those discussions is happening directly on the make.wordpress.org/training site, so I’ll share a link in the show notes for that.

But I’ve also been personally chatting on and off with Training team reps and other members of the community about what makes that so hard. In case you have not heard my whole spiel about what makes it difficult, it’s the logistics and our speed of iteration, and public perception.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:05]

So not exactly a small set of hurdles. I’ll be doing a more complete post on this in the New Year so that we can get some solid documentation of the state of things and not let it be lost forever in this podcast. But I do know that it is something that we are very interested in as a community and something that, historically, I have really been resistant to.

Not because I think it’s a bad idea, but because as someone who’s looking out for our operations side of things and our logistics side of things, it is not clear how we’re gonna get that done. Like I said, in the New Year, keep an eye out for a big, big post that takes a look at the benefits versus the costs and everything that we can do to help make those match each other a bit better.

And then the last thing I wanted to highlight was the WordPress Playground. Okay, so this was the last thing that Matt mentioned, and I want to be sure that it’s clear what’s going on with this project because when I first heard about it, I very nearly lept from my chair!

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:03]

It was such a remarkably big deal. Okay, so the WordPress Playground uses technological magic called ‘web assembly.’ I don’t know what it is, but it’s magic. And when I say magic, I mean that this tool makes it possible to run WordPress, an instance of WordPress, including a theme and a handful of plug-ins entirely inside your browser as a logged-in admin.

You don’t need a server. You don’t need to select a host. You don’t need to download anything at all. You don’t need to know what your domain’s going to be. You simply select the theme you want to test. Add some dummy content and see how all of the posts and pages function as though we’re a real live WordPress site running on your favorite top-tier host.

Then when you close the tab, it’s gone forever. Poof. Just like that. Now, this is a brand new project. It’s brand new to us and has a long way to go. So if working on that sounds cool, stop by the Meta Playground channel in the Making WordPress Slack.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:09]

But this, in my mind, changes the way that we stage sites.

It could change the way we determine whether a theme or plugin is right for us. And arguably, it can become a stress-free way to introduce new or undecided users to WordPress’s admin area so that they can tell what they’re getting into. So when I say that this is a mind-blowing thing, and when I say that it is powered by magic, like it is astounding, it is astounding.

And the applications for our users as a whole, I think, are untapped yet, and potentially even the applications for our learners and future learners of WordPress– equally untapped. I’m very excited to see what we can do with this project in the future. So stop by the Meta channel. Stop by Meta Playground.

See what’s going on over there. We would love to have you.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:00]

So those are my highlights of the day for State of the Word. Like I said, there are a few things I want to do more of a deep dive on in the text, so keep an eye out on make.wordpress.org/projects for most of those. But right now, let’s make some time for the small list of big things.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:17]

Today I actually have kind of like a big list of big things. But I pretended it was small, so you didn’t turn off the podcast. So the first thing that I have is that in case you missed State of the Word, if you didn’t have a Watch Party to go to, or you didn’t know it was happening and so you didn’t really tune in at the time, I’m going to drop in a link of the recording.

It’s gonna probably start right when everything gets going. And so you shouldn’t have to scrub through anything. If you end up on one of the recordings that includes like the whole live stream, there is jazz for the first 30 minutes, and just, you know, skip through that.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:07:00]

The second thing on my big list of big things is our annual community survey. So Matt mentioned this in State of the Word, and he pointed out that one of the things that makes WordPress and open source in general so effective is that we have a way to communicate with people who are using our software and we make every effort to be responsive to it.

So the annual survey that we send out, it used to be quite big, and we’ve cut it down to 20 questions. If you want, you can think of it as like a census, so have your type of work and how long you’ve been working in WordPress, and what you wish to do with WordPress– have all those things be counted so we have a good idea of the type of person who’s currently using WordPress, and we can account for your needs and wants.

But also, if you want to think of it more as an opportunity to share the things that were especially useful for you in the project this year or especially valuable for you as a contributor, this is also an excellent place to do that.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:08:01]

There’s a QR code running around on the internet somewhere, but I’ll also put a link in the show notes. If you do not know where the show notes are, by the way, they are at wordpress.org/news/podcast, and you’ll be able to get to the survey.

The third thing on my big list of big things is that next year we’re hosting a community summit. So if you’ve never been to a community summit, Matt mentioned that it is an opportunity for the best and most prolific contributors that we have to show up and discuss the things that are the biggest problems for the WordPress project right now.

But we also want to make sure that we are making space for the voices that we know that we are missing from the community as well as contributors who look like they are probably excellent future stewards of this open source project that we are taking care of together. And so there is a whole website for that.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:08:55]

I believe it’s communitysummit.wordcamp.org. Right now, there is a form up asking for topics that you want to be able to discuss while we are there, but it’s taking place, if I recall correctly, on August 22nd and 23rd of 2023.

Number four on my big list of big things is that next year is WordPress’s 20th anniversary. So on May 27th of next year, WordPress will officially be 20 years old. So on our 10th birthday, anniversary rather, and our 15th anniversary, we pulled together some parties all across the world.

We had some images, some logos, and things that were specific to the celebration that we printed into stickers and that folks put on, like, mugs and backpacks and cakes and stuff. So if you want to learn more about that, keep an eye out in the community channel in making WordPress Slack. They will keep you posted on how to one, find any of those logos and designs so that your local community can join in the celebrations.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:10:03]

But they will also help you learn how to have any sort of WordPress celebration party that we’re doing there in May of 2023.

And then the final thing on my big list of big things, it was mentioned that on the 2023 theme that was shipped with a bunch of style variations and there was this really, I think, excellent illustrative video that Rich Tabor put together for us that shows that you can switch through style variations on a single theme and have a site that looks totally different.

Now, that feels like that’s just a thing that should always have been in WordPress, but it is new this year. And so, if you have not yet had a chance to look at the 2023 theme, it is the default theme that shipped with 6.1. And so, if you have it on your website and just haven’t had a look at it yet, I encourage you to do that.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:11:00]

It’s a really interesting implementation that makes a single theme potentially look like an infinite number of other themes, and those style variations can be specific to the theme or can just kind of be around and about in the patterns that are also available in Core.

Give that a look. I think it’s super worthwhile.

And that, my friends, is your big list of big things. Thank you for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, and I’ll see you again in the New Year.

WP Briefing: Episode 44: Minors, Majors, and Why We Have So Many Releases

Santana InnissNovember 29, 2022WordPress New

In the forty-fourth episode of the WordPress Briefing, our host Josepha Haden Chomphosy highlights the role of major and minor releases in the WordPress open source project.

Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording.

Credits

Editor: Dustin Hartzler
Logo: Javier Arce
Production: Santana Inniss
Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod

References

Twelfth Man
State of the Word

Transcript

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:00]

Hello everyone! And welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project, some insight into the community that supports it, and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks.

I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:27]

At the top of November, a new major release for WordPress shipped. That was WordPress 6.1. I know I talked about it basically nonstop. Then two weeks later, there was a new minor release for WordPress. It was WordPress 6.1.1, which I did not talk about at all. Way back in episode four of this podcast, I dug into the overall release cycle and what someone could expect from a high-level logistics aspect.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:05]

And today we’re gonna take a quick look at minor releases in particular. Just as a general heads up, I always want to lean into sports metaphors when I’m talking about releases, and I think it’s because of the words major and minor. And so, I’ve done my level best to not include that in any of my explanations today.

But I do have one, I do have one that’s a sports thing. So just if you don’t like sports, know that it’s just one little bit and we’ll try to be carefully quick around it together. All right, so minor releases. You may have noticed that I don’t mention minor releases nearly as often as I mention major releases. And yet, most of the time, when we have a major release of WordPress, there’s a minor release that gets started almost immediately after.

So first major versus minor. Major releases in WordPress happen roughly three times a year, give or take a release. Inside a major release, you will find that we include features, so– brand new abilities, enhancements, which you can generally call improvements to existing abilities, and also any bug fix that we can find, big or small, we’ll take ’em all.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:16]

So minor releases in WordPress happen about four or five times a year on average. Minor releases include patches for issues introduced in the major release and any bug fix that doesn’t add or change functionality.

If you’re with me so far, you probably have noted that there’s basically always at least one minor release per major release. And you might have also noted that I said minors include patches for issues we introduced in a major.

Now, if I were hearing this with fresh ears, the first thing I would wonder is, okay, so if you start working on the minor right after you release the major to deal with issues you know you introduced in the major– why just not ship the major while there are bugs in it? Great question. I’m glad you asked. So there are a few things worth knowing here.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:09]

Firstly, there is this concept of “ship and iterate,” which is present in both agile and open source. The idea is that we ship software as soon as we have confidence that what is in the release is non-breaking and represents our best guests at a better experience for our users.

Once that is out there, we use feedback on the initial release to quickly iterate and ship another release. That way, we don’t hold back any good features. And since we already planned the immediate minor, any major issues that show up can be fixed in as little as two weeks. Secondly, there is the concept that with many eyes, all bugs are shallow, which is primarily present in open source.

The idea here is that with enough people looking at a problem, that problem doesn’t stand a chance. So when a release is shipped in a workable state but with interactions that could use some refinement, the fastest way to find those refinements is to take it to the community of WordPress users and developers and invite them to co-create this CMS with us.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:10]

Which touches on my final thought. The concept of the user as co-creator.

If we think about the development and evolution of our software as a team effort, then we can think of the people who use our software as what’s called the “Twelfth Man” That’s in quotes, and I will, I’ll leave a link to that in the show notes as well.

In sports, this refers to the fans. And if you’ve ever been to a live sporting event or played in any, you will know that the cheering and jeering from fans turns into this distinct motivating entity all its own. As a whole team or individual member, you know what you have to do. You know what you need to do in a game, but there’s something about that chaotic, loud roar of feedback that just brings life to what you’re doing, and that’s how I see our community of users.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:02]

So at the end of the day, the answer to the question of ‘why so many releases’ and the follow-up question of ‘why tolerate stable imperfection’ is largely the same. To get features into the hands of our users quickly so that we can always be breathing life into this CMS we care so much about.

I hope that answers your questions about our release cadence, and if you didn’t come into this podcast having any questions about release cadences at all, I hope this new information brings a little extra light to the complexity of working in open source.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:32]

That brings us now to our small list of big things.

Big thing number one is that the State of the Word has been announced and is scheduled for December 15th. It’s a little earlier in the day than in past iterations, so I hope we get a new crew of listeners tuning in at the same time. I’ll leave a link to that in the show notes, or you can pop over to wordpress.org/news to see the announcement for yourself.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:00]

Big thing number two is that team rep nominations are open on most teams right now. So if organization and people wrangling are high on your list of ways you can give back to WordPress, head on over to the team you contribute to and see how you raise your hand for that.

Then big thing number three is that big-picture goals, hopes, and timelines are being gathered, and I will ship those shortly after the start of the new year.

It will give us all an idea of where we want to focus our attention to ensure that WordPress continues to grow toward the future. You can keep an eye out for that on make.wordpress.org/project.

And that, my friends, is your small list of big things. Thanks for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks.

WP Briefing: Episode 43: Openverse & Photo Directory– What Are They, and How Are They Different?

Santana InnissNovember 15, 2022WordPress New

In the forty-third episode of the WordPress Briefing, Josepha Haden Chomphosy explores two resources for openly licensed media in the WordPress project– Openverse and Photo Directory– and how they differ from one another!

Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording.

Credits

Editor: Dustin Hartzler
Logo: Javier Arce
Production: Santana Inniss
Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod

References

Photo Directory Make Page
Submit a Photo to the Photo Directory
Openverse Make Page
Openverse Call for Contributions: Block Editor Integration
Download WordPress 6.1
Docs Team Contributor Day Recap Post
Hallway Hangout Block Themes (Video)

Transcript

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:00]

I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Here we go!

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:00]

About 18 months ago, the Openverse project became part of the WordPress open source project, and at roughly the same time, we also welcomed the Photo Directory.

Since that time, we’ve seen growth in teams supporting both of these initiatives. But if you’re not involved in the day-to-day, it can be hard to know how those two things fit together or if they fit together at all.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:00]

Today, let’s take a brief tour of those two projects and why they came to be.

In my timeline, work on the Photo Directory started before the work on Openverse, so that’s where we’ll start.

For as long as I can remember, the WordPress community has raised the need for WordPress-first ways to have and host GPL-compatible photos for use in themes, site builds, and marketing efforts as a whole. As recently as 2016, that was still coming up as a question at various flagship events and among the career photographers that contribute their time to WordPress.

So in 2017 and 2018, as attention started to turn toward rebuilding the CMS using blocks, it dropped down the list of priority items. But it never really went away as a thing that people were hoping we could do for the project as a whole. So in 2019, it was becoming clear that having open source-first tools of all varieties for people whose businesses were built on our software would help broaden the availability of the open source freedoms we believe in.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:00]

This began the work on the Photo Directory with the intention of providing a GPL-friendly, community-driven repository of images. It has since launched, and we have photos in it now. We have a whole team around it. It’s wonderful. But that is how that all kind of came to be.

Openverse, on the other hand, was launched as CC Search in 2019 with the laudable mandate to increase the discoverability and accessibility of open access media.

Late in 2020, while work on the Photo Directory was underway, Matt shared with me that the team was looking for a new project home. When I first met with them, they shared an overview of the product, which they shorthanded as an open source search engine that searches openly licensed images. We were working on a repo of openly licensed images, so clearly, this was all written in the stars. And so you might be asking yourself at this point, great, how does it work together?

I think for most of us, the timeline there kind of covers the question of what is the difference between these two things.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:00]

But because I never know which of you will want to strike up a conversation about open source on an elevator, I’ve also got the elevator pitch version.

Openverse is an open source search engine that searches, indexes, and aggregates copy left media from across the web using sources such as WordPress’s Photo Directory, Flickr’s CC Tagged Media, and Wikimedia, to name just a few.

Another key difference between the Photo Directory and Openverse is that in order to contribute to the Photo Directory, now that it’s all built, that’s mostly done by submitting photos or reviewing photos. So you don’t really need to be a developer to join in.

Openverse is not only a developer-centric contribution opportunity, but it also uses a different tech stack than WordPress as a whole. So it’s a good place for folks to go if they’re looking to broaden their horizons.

So that’s your elevator pitch of what Openverse is and how it uses the Photo Directory.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:00]

You have a couple of ways that you can get involved with these two projects. For the Photo Directory, as I mentioned at the start, you can always contribute photos, and they could always use more photo contributions.

I’ll include a link to the submission guidelines in the show notes below, and as I mentioned, it is a no-code way to give back to the WordPress project. So no code, development environments, and testing skills are required. The Photo Directory team also could always use more contributors to help with the moderating of photo submissions.

And so I’ll link to their making WordPress page in the show notes as well so that you can get started there.

And as I mentioned before, Openverse is an aggregator, so it doesn’t host any media itself, but it is always accepting suggestions for new GPL-compatible media providers. I’ll link the area where you can leave suggestions in the show notes as well.

And if you are more code inclined, there’s an open issue for adding Openverse browsing to the block editor right now.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:00]

So I’ll link that issue in the show notes in case you thought to yourself, gosh, that sounds like my most favorite thing to do. That is where you can go.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:12]

This leads us now to our small list of big things.

In case you missed it, WordPress 6.1 is now available. It launched on November 1st. Late, late, late in the day, and so it was easy to miss if you’re used to seeing it at a particular time. We were about six hours later than usual. But if you go to wordpress.org/download, you can get your own copy there.

The second thing on our small list of big things is that the Docs team had a contributor day. It was excellent. There’s a recap post up. I will include that in the show notes.

And then the final thing is that there was a recent hallway hangout that talked about the site editor and block themes.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:00]

The video for that is also published. I will also share that in our show notes.

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