WordPress.org

Earlier this year, Knock Knock Whois There LLC, an Automattic subsidiary in partnership with Primer Nivel, won an auction for around $19 million dollars to offer top-level .blog domains. On August 18th, an email was sent to users who signed up to Dotblog.WordPress.com notifying them that they could apply and secure a .blog domain name before November 21st.

Applying For a Domain Name

Chris Schidle took advantage of the opportunity and secured chris.blog for $30 per year with a $220 application fee. People who apply for a domain only receive it if no one else applies for it. If there are multiple applications, the domain goes through an auction process between November 14-17.

As the auction dates drew nearer and Schidle didn’t receive any information concerning the auction, he contacted support. Support confirmed that his application was not successful and he received a refund on November 15th. After asking support about the auction process, Schidle was informed that chris.blog ended up on a list of reserved domains that were not available for registration.

In a blog post entitled “The .blog Bait and Switch”, Schidle expressed disappointment in Automattic’s lack of communication. “Perhaps it’s not fair to call this bait and switch,” Schidle said.

“Really it was bait and refund, and certainly the situation would be far worse had they chosen to not make the application fee refundable. But still, I thought I had a chance at securing the domain. That was the logical conclusion given the terms they outlined via a successful application or winning an auction.”

Other applicants shared similar experiences on Twitter.

@cschidle i feel your pain. they also took my $250 for my app for https://t.co/8H0dBZfKny – surprisingly poor handling for a comm's company

— Chris Yim (@cyim) November 17, 2016

@cschidle I've got stood up in the same manner for https://t.co/wqDOQWyF2X Full-refund and no invitation to auction

— Octavian Cioaca (@octasimo) November 17, 2016

@cschidle Same thing happened to me with https://t.co/1bRlWkdtmy. Not cool.

— Mark Barrera (@mark_barrera) November 17, 2016

In response to Schidel’s post, Paolo Belcastro published an explanation of the process behind activating some domains in the Founder’s Program while reserving others. Belcastro says that as a registrar, they’re able to activate up to 100 domain names. Some of the domains were given to third-parties and 25 generic domains were given to WordPress.com to be shared for free with millions of users.

The registrar reserved all one, two, and three-character domains from being registered. They also allowed Automattic employees to reserve a single domain each, some of which were first names.

On behalf of .blog, Belcastro apologized to those who filed applications in August and later discovered the domains were not available.

Many registrars started taking pre-registrations for the Landrush period as early as last August. We do realize that some users were disappointed when they discovered that the domain names they had applied for were in fact attributed as part of the Founder’s program, or reserved, and wouldn’t be possible to register or auction at the end of Landrush.

We would like to apologize to these users, but as the lists of Founder domains and Reserved ones weren’t final until just before Landrush, we couldn’t communicate them to registrars in advance (there is nothing registrars hate more than ever-changing lists of reserved domains).

In addition, domains were removed as well as added to the lists, and we didn’t want to take the risk for registrars to refuse applications in September for domains that would be released in October.

To mitigate the uncertainty surrounding domain availability, fees were set up in a way so that only successful registrations would be charged. This provided a way to give full refunds to those with failed applications.

Schidle appreciates the company’s apology, “It’s unfortunate that their reserved domain list wasn’t finalized prior to accepting applications, and that affected applicants like myself weren’t notified sooner (auctions were scheduled to begin on November 14th),” he said. “But I think they realize their mistake in handling that communication and their apology is appreciated.”

photo credit: Luis Llerena

WordPress now powers 27.1% of all websites on the internet, up from 25% last year. While it may seem that WordPress is neatly adding 2% of the internet every year, its percentage increase fluctuates from year to year and the climb is getting more arduous with more weight to haul.

credit: w3techs.com

In January 2015, Mullenweg said the next goal for WordPress was to achieve 50% market share (the majority of websites) and he identified Jetpack as a key factor in preventing WordPress’ decline, a controversial statement delivered at Pressnomics. At that time Automattic was secretly working on Calypso, WordPress.com’s JavaScript-powered interface, but did not unveil the project until November 2015.

It’s difficult to say what effect Calypso has had on WordPress’ market share, as the w3tech’s 27% stat covers mostly self-hosted sites. Following up with him a year later, Mullenweg estimates that less than 10% of those sites are hosted on WordPress.com.

“It does look like about a quarter of it is using Jetpack, though, and that has grown since Calypso was released,” he said. “Remember – Calypso is for Jetpack sites as well as WP.com.”

In a recent interview on WPWeekly, Mullenweg said he is also optimistic that the WooCommerce acquisition and Automattic’s sale and management of the .blog domain extension will contribute “another 5-10% each to that market share.” In fact, there is a team inside Automattic called Team 51 that works on strategies for getting the market share to 51%.

“For getting to 51% and beyond – it’s more than just blogs and more than just websites,” Mullenweg said. “We need to do stores well, we need to do wikis well, we need to do real estate sites well, we need to do restaurants well – all these things that may be outside what you normally think of as a core WP experience.”

In order to provide the best content-creation experience on the market, in any niche, WordPress has some major work to do. The software is in imminent danger of being eclipsed by newer competitors if its core features don’t improve, especially when it comes to customizing a new site. Jetpack cannot single-handedly solve WordPress’ onboarding problem.

WordPress’ Weakest Link Is Also Its Greatest Opportunity

In the past Mullenweg has identified customization as the weakest link in WordPress but also one of its most important areas for improvement, saying, “The Customizer is everything.” During the 2015 State of the Word address he said, “Customization is the single biggest opportunity for improving the WordPress experience.” I asked him if he thinks the necessary improvements to make the software more competitive need to come from core itself or if commercial products could introduce game changers for the Customizer, the editor, and other problem areas of WordPress.

“I think to have an impact on WordPress’ growth improvements to customization have to happen in core or Calypso/Jetpack, otherwise there isn’t enough reach,” Mullenweg said. “It doesn’t matter how great a commercial product is – being behind a paywall will mean it won’t reach enough people to make a dent in WP’s growth curve.” He outlined how he sees the Customizer as a critical component of WordPress’ future:

I think the needed improvements will only come from a customizer and theme system which is flexible, intuitive, and instantaneous, which might also need to break backwards compatibility, and a post editor which leverages the same language, patterns, interface, and concepts. We need to use and adopt a React / Redux approach to the javascript, like Calypso, and rename or make irrelevant concepts like Menus which are just plain confusing to people.

Customizer improvements have been a focus throughout 2016 and the feature’s small team of contributors have made major strides towards improving the underlying architecture to build upon.

“It’s customization that is the key need here, not necessarily the existing ‘Customizer’ interface that we have today,” Customize component maintainer Weston Ruter said. “The key need WordPress has is to be able to live preview more functionality in WordPress, as Helen tweeted here:”

What if instead of opposing "shoving more stuff into the customizer" we supported "adding live previews to WordPress functionality"?

— Helen 侯-Sandí (@helenhousandi) September 20, 2016

Selective refresh was added earlier this year in 4.5, giving WordPress the ability to preview elements without full page reloads. This is one way the Customize API addresses that “instantaneous” aspect Mullenweg outlined above.

“The Customize Posts plugin is an effort to rebuild the post editor from the ground up with live preview for all changes to post data and postmeta at the foundation,” Ruter said. “It’s a JavaScript-first approach to the post editing experience. No more waiting for a full page reload to save a draft. No more clicking a preview button to load the post in a new window. All of the changes are saved as drafts and previewed live. It’s reusing the TinyMCE editor component.”

WordPress may be looking at front-end editing powered by the Customizer in the not-too-distant future. Ruter and contributors are also working towards using the Customize API to power the next generation of widgets in core, which would use JS for UI and open the door for widgets to be managed via the REST API.

“Changesets, coming in 4.7, is the most far-reaching architectural improvement to the customizer since its inception,” Ruter said. “Changesets allow for live preview functionality to be de-coupled from the current Customizer interface. This architecture allows for live preview to be developed in other contexts, namely on the frontend and in REST API-driven apps and headless sites.” Ruter anticipates the REST API endpoints for managing changesets to come in 4.8.

The WP JS Widgets project shifts widgets away from their heavy reliance on PHP and creates a JavaScript foundation in the Customizer that allows for any library to be used to build widget controls.

“A control can actually be implemented using any JS technology stack,” Ruter said. “In the JS Widgets plugin I have a demonstration of widget controls in the customizer being built using the customizer Element, Backbone.js, and also React.” The plugin currently implements three core widgets and contributors are working on more.

“It’s somewhat of a ‘Widgets 3.0’ in core, focused on what they would look like in the Customizer first,” Ruter said, “where the widget instance data is stored in a setting, and the control listens to changes to that setting and updates its UI to reflect the changes in the underlying instance data.”

Although this particular project is being built to be JavaScript-library agnostic, Ruter said he thinks there would be value in exploring the use of React/Redux in a “Customizer 2.0” interface:

It would be great to experiment with re-implementing the Customizer UI (pane, panels, sections, controls) in React. #wcus

— Weston Ruter ⚡ (@westonruter) December 4, 2015

Taking the Customizer Beyond First Impressions

Ruter said he would have a difficult time proposing to build a client site that depended on the WordPress admin for site management and content authorship.

“A lot of the work we’ve done at XWP for the past few years has been building on the Customizer to provide the editorial experiences that I think are lacking in the WP admin,” Ruter said. “We invest heavily in the customizer because we see it as the best foundation that WordPress has to offer to provide the experiences we want to deliver to our clients.”

If the Customizer is so critical to WordPress’ success, it’s curious that the contributor team remains relatively small and few companies are investing in the feature specifically. XWP invests heavily in Customizer development and a great deal of that is prototype work in the form of feature plugins such as Customize Snapshots, Customize Posts, and several other plugin projects.

“I don’t know for sure why more developers across the WordPress community aren’t doing more with the customizer,” said Ruter, who is CTO at XWP. “It may be in part a perception problem, where it has seemingly been stuck with a negative reputation. Or it could be a technology problem, where the Customizer is vastly different from other areas of WordPress being a JavaScript single-page application.”

When the Customizer was first introduced it included support for ‘option’ and ‘theme_mod,’ followed by widgets and navigation menus a bit down the road. The WordPress community didn’t have a full understanding of the scope and capabilities of the Customizer for addressing some of the project’s chief concerns, including content authorship with live previews. Users simply saw a constrained UI they didn’t like using to customize themes. Most users had no concept of the Customizer providing the architectural underpinnings of other aspects of WordPress.

“Part of the problem is a lack of contributors,” Ruter said. “But even more than that, the biggest problem is one of having a shared vision. When the WP community throws hate on customizer improvements with each new release, it’s somewhat demotivating.

“If the community realized the vision behind and appreciated a full admin experience that had live preview and staging of changes, then that would make a huge difference,” Ruter said. He and contributors find it challenging to articulate the scope and they are considerably short-handed.

“It could be a problem with getting ramped up,” he said. “But that’s been the mandate for the WP community as a whole – to learn JavaScript deeply. I say, why not learn JavaScript deeply by building on the customizer?”

GoDaddy Plans to Invest in Core Customizer Improvements

GoDaddy is a surprising company to emerge over the past couple of years as another key player on WordPress’ road to 50% market share. WordPress product and service companies, along with hosts, are keenly interested in seeing the software continue its market dominance.

“It’s very important to GoDaddy that WP market share increases,” Gabe Mays, head of WordPress products at GoDaddy, said. “We’re deeply invested in the success of the WordPress community, not only because many of our customers use it, but also because of what it represents.”

Mays reports that approximately 1/3 of all GoDaddy sites and half of all new sites are running on WordPress. With millions of customers using the software, the company took the initiative to create a new onboarding experience specifically for WordPress customers. I asked Mays if GoDaddy is concerned about competitors like Wix and Weebly cutting into the WordPress market share.

“I don’t know if ‘worry’ is the right word, because 1) we know the problem and 2) we’re capable of addressing it,” Mays said. “As a community we either care enough to fix it or we don’t. There are negative consequences associated with the latter that pose an existential threat to the community.”

Mays has been involved with the WordPress community for the past 10 years and is working with GoDaddy to improve the new user experience.

“Part of the issue we’re experiencing now is that WordPress benefitted from such strong product market fit and, subsequently, such high growth that there weren’t the typical feedback mechanisms forcing us to make things like the UX better,” Mays said. “On the other hand, our competitors fought hard and iterated for every basis point of market share they have. We’re like that natural athlete that got to the top with natural talent, but now need to master the basics, get our form right, etc. to stay on top as the game changes.”

GoDaddy’s new onboarding experience is a stab at improving this UX and Mays said the company has significant WordPress core improvements in the works to provide a better first-use experience.

“I’m happy to say we’ll also be contributing these improvements back to core,” he said. “We’re happy to have had Aaron Campbell join us as our first core contributor earlier this year and we’re working on more ways to accelerate our core contribution efforts.”

Mays said GoDaddy is planning to submit core contributions to the Customizer and related core components in the near future but would not disclose any specifics at this time.

“Hosts benefit immensely from WordPress and as hosts we can collectively do a lot more to move WordPress forward,” Mays said. “We want to lead by example here and have big plans for this in 2017.”

WordPress product and service companies are also deeply invested in the software’s success and eager to see its market share grow. Cory Miller, CEO of iThemes, one of WordPress’ earliest theme companies, said growth is one potential sign of WordPress’ health.

“As WordPress has grown, so have we with it,” Miller said. “The opposite of growth is scary — it’s stagnation or decline. Many have predicted that in WordPress for a long time, but it continues to grow and push new limits, like the defiant teenager it is.”

Miller said one of his concerns with competitors in the space is that they have started to cut into the lower or lowest end of the market, “the do-it-yourselfers that many of us count as a key part of our customer base.”

“WordPress is fantastic, and so are all the innovative tools and services around it, from themes, plugins to hosting,” Miller said. “But I’m increasingly seeing the reason why many, on perhaps the bottom end of the market, say, ‘I don’t want to mess with updates, or worrying about security, or pulling 15 separate tools together to do what I need. I just want a simple website, I want everything in one bundle, mostly done for me, and so I’ll just go with SquareSpace or Weebly.'”

Although WordPress provides so much more in terms of community and extensibility when compared to Wix, Weebly, and Squarespace, getting started is the hardest part for new users. This is where tools like Jetpack and GoDaddy’s onboarding experience are useful for giving users what they need to succeed with WordPress.

Even with a strong background in HTML and CSS, customizing a WordPress site can be challenging. Your site will never feel like your home on the web if you struggle to customize it to suit your preferences. The good news is that the WordPress project lead, contributors, hosts, and product companies are working together to improve customization in different, complementary ways in order to ensure the future of the project in an increasingly competitive market.

The second Global WordPress Translation Day was held November 12 and the stats released this week show the event was an even greater success than the first one. In April, WP Translation Day connected 448 participants through both online and in-person translation events. The second event brought 780 translators together, a 74% increase in participation. Attendance at the local events increased from 39 in April to 67 in November.

Looking at #WPTranslationDay stats I can’t be more grateful to @humanmadeltd for supporting my time for the #WordPress Polyglots. So lucky❤️ pic.twitter.com/NwSjYOyUBX

— Petya Raykovska (@petyeah) November 16, 2016

“We really wanted to build on top of what was already there, reach more people, and bring more important topics front and center,” said Petya Raykovska, one of the members of the Polyglots Leadership Team. Participants had the opportunity to discuss the upcoming internationalization features in WordPress with core developers, including a session by Pascal Birchler and a panel led by John Blackbourn. Translators also discussed gender neutral languages in the WordPress UI, prompted by a discussion around gender neutral German.

Raykovska said one of the goals of the second event was to “bring more people on screen so everyone can feel like they’re a part of a truly global event.” Local participation for the live streaming meetups increased from April.

“The activities in India have kept their strong growth rate – we had eight events last time, this time they were 14, with Mumbai even having two events,” Raykovska said. “For the first time we had events in Russia and in South Africa.”

Raykovska said she’s hoping the Polyglots Leadership Team will soon begin developing events in African regions, following patterns of success in Asia and Europe.

Thank you @ResellerClub for hosting us today for #WPTranslationday pic.twitter.com/vfr9l0D50V

— WordCamp Mumbai (@WCMumbai) November 12, 2016

Global WordPress Translation Day Expands Into South Africa

Cape Town WP Translation Day – credit: Jon Bossenger

South Africa has 11 languages and Raykovska said the event gave a big boost to the translation community there, with Xhosa being translated for WordPress for the first time. Xhosa is spoken by 7.6 million people, which is approximately 18% of the South African population.

“Africa has a huge potential and a lot of wonderful, enthusiastic people,” she said. “There will be more WordCamps there in 2017 and hopefully more activity on the translation side.”

Jon Bossenger and Hugh Lashbrooke, who co-organized the Cape Town event, had attendees translating WordPress into Xhosa, Sotho, and Setswana.

“By the end of the day we had two translation files for these languages that we’ll be looking to submit requests to be added as locales for WordPress,” Bossenger said in his recap post. “We’re almost halfway towards adding all 11 official languages, just in one day.”

Trisha Cornelius, co-organizer the WP Johannesburg Meetup, organized the in-person translation event in Johannesburg where the team made major progress and assisted the Cape Town team in getting their languages started.

“We managed to get Xhosa approved in time for us to translate some strings for our translation day event,” Cornelius said. “We translated into Afrikaans (which is at over 95% so we are pushing to get to 100%) and South African English as well. People who were at the Cape Town event have volunteered to become translators for Tswana and an attendee at our event has volunteered to become GTE for Zulu.”

Cornelius said the excitement of live streaming and connecting with Cape Town and others around the world could have easily made for an event that spanned longer than three hours.

“The biggest success was in showing people how easy translation is,” Cornelius said. She hopes the translations will make WordPress easier for more people in South Africa and help more people get onto the web.

“South Africa has an interesting case in that we have a clear racial split between being multi-lingual and not,” Cornelius said. “The majority of our population speaks English/Afrikaans as a second language and I would love to see WordPress available in all 11 of our official languages so that WP users can choose to use WP in their mother tongue.”

Cornelius said language accessibility in South Africa is less of a challenge than actual access to computers with the Internet, but they are making progress in Johannesburg to make the internet more widely available.

“Especially with the prevalence of smart phones, I think having WordPress in more indigenous languages will mean that we are able to hear more of each others voices which we desperately need,” Cornelius said.

Overall, the WordPress Translation Day participants translated a total of 60,426 strings, up from 40,350 in April. This includes popular plugins and themes in addition to WordPress core. A video replay of the event can be found on Crowdcast.io.

A few days ago we added Bloglines to our list of RPC ping receivers, worked out a few issues with them, and now they've announced their pinging service.

I'll be adding them to the web form soon. :) 

In this short episode of WordPress Weekly, Marcus Couch and I discuss a handful of news stories making headlines. We discuss a recent security update to the WP eCommerce plugin, Upvato disappearing only to reappear in the near future, and Nashville, TN hosting WordCamp US in 2017 and 2018. Last but not least is Marcus’ plugin picks of the week.

Stories Discussed:

WP eCommerce 3.11.4 Patches SQL Injection Vulnerability
Upvato Backup Service Confirms Files Are Lost, Plans to Relaunch on New Provider
Nashville to Host WordCamp US 2017-2018

Plugins Picked By Marcus:

Show Featured Image Size in Admin TopBar displays the image size for the featured image in the admin top bar. This makes it convenient to know how large features images need to be without looking it up.

WP-MQTT connects WordPress to the Internet of Things. This plugin can automatically send MQTT messages to compatible devices when something happens on your site. MQTT is a machine-to-machine (M2M) / Internet of Things connectivity protocol. It was designed as an extremely lightweight publish/subscribe messaging transport.

Hello Trumpy is a plugin aimed at making WordPress great again!

WPWeekly Meta:

Next Episode: Wednesday, November 23rd 9:30 P.M. Eastern

Subscribe To WPWeekly Via Itunes: Click here to subscribe

Subscribe To WPWeekly Via RSS: Click here to subscribe

Subscribe To WPWeekly Via Stitcher Radio: Click here to subscribe

Listen To Episode #254:

Earlier this year, Automattic added visual icons to the WordPress.com customizer after user testing showed users tried clicking on the parts of the page they wanted to edit, rather than searching through the menus in the customizer. In an effort to see if the same could be done for the self-hosted version of WordPress, Payton Swick open sourced Automattic’s work into a plugin and placed it on GitHub.

The plugin added persistent icons to show users which parts of a site can be customized when the customizer preview pane is open. After months of collaboration between Automatticians and the Customize component maintainers, the icons were merged into WordPress 4.7 and are officially called visible edit shortcuts. The icons visually inform users which elements can be edited in a theme.

The icons appear when the customizer is open and directs users to settings that control an element. For example, clicking the icon next to the site tagline in the image below opens the Site Identity section of the customizer and makes the Tagline field active. Visible shortcuts are an extension of the Shift-click to edit keyboard shortcut that was added in WordPress 3.9.

Visible Edit Shortcut Buttons

The icon approach was largely inspired by WordPress.com which has a similar feature in its customizer. Nick Halsey, Customize component maintainer, describes in detail the history of the feature and what theme authors need to do to support it.

Unlike many of the theme specific updates in the past where developers can add support by using add_theme_support, supporting visible edit shortcuts is more comprehensive. Theme authors will need to add support for selective refresh, selective refresh for widgets, and selective refresh for menus.

“Edit shortcuts will be enabled by default for all themes, but are contingent on themes supporting selective refresh,” Halsey said. Additionally, a small amount of CSS may be required to properly position the icons.

Adding visual elements that connect parts of a theme to the customizer should take some of the guesswork out of editing themes. Instead of spending time browsing through various customizer panels to edit a part of a site, users can click a button and the right customizer panel will open automatically with the settings you need. This can be especially useful for themes that have a lot of customizer sections.

I tested visible edit shortcuts using the Twenty Seventeen theme in WordPress 4.7 beta 4 and didn’t encounter any issues. The team is strongly encouraging users to test with as many themes as possible. If you use a theme where the shortcut icons are not displayed, please contact the theme author, request that they add support, and refer them to the make core blog post which explains how to do so.

photo credit: Viv Lynch Westward – (license)

WordCamp US attendees are counting down the days until the event kicks off in Philadelphia in two weeks but preparations for 2017 and 2018 are already underway. Yesterday Matt Mullenweg announced that Nashville has won the bid to host WordCamp US for the next two years. According to Randy Hicks, one of the organizers, the new Music City Center venue, which was finished in 2013, has been reserved from Thursday, November 30, 2017, to Sunday, December 3 but the camp will take place Friday – Sunday. The venue has confirmed the ability to host 3,000 – 5,000 attendees.

“We have a brand new venue that is pretty amazing but Nashville is very centrally located to handful of other cities that all have their own WordCamps,” Hicks said. “I think there are about seven camps within 4-5 hours. The WP community around Nashville is rather strong.”

Over the past few years the local WordPress community has grown and WordCamp Nashville sold 325 tickets at its 2016 event.

“I’ve been coming to the meetups since the very first one and have been an organizer since about the same time as well as John Housholder,” Hicks said. “We’ve seen the community explode every year after WordCamp, but 2014 and 2015 have been huge growth years for Nashville as a whole and the meetup has reflected those numbers.”

The application process included nailing down a venue, creating a budget, and gathering specific details about wifi capabilities, room capabilities, hotel availability, and date availability. Organizers from both the Nashville team and the Denver team (another finalist) agreed that the application time frame was somewhat constrained.

“I thought the time frame between start and submission was pretty short, but I think that depends on who is submitting and how informed they are on their local venue,” Hicks said. “Ours was really hard to get information from.”

The Denver team had a similar struggle with locking down a venue without certainty of being able to fully book the reservation.

“There was what I would consider to be a semi-fanatical obsession with the first weekend in December, which was flatly unavailable at the convention center here,” said Drew Jaynes, one of the organizers who applied on behalf of Denver.

“To give you some perspective, at the time that we applied, March 2016, there were two available weekends left for the Colorado Convention Center – two in all of 2017. The end of August and the middle of December. To organize an event of this size on what would be considered relatively short notice for a city as popular as Denver was essentially a fool’s errand.”

The Nashville organizing team was able to secure its venue for early December dates, but a wider range of acceptable dates might be one way for WordCamp Central to improve the process for next year. This would give more cities the opportunity to submit competitive applications, as venues that can accommodate the expected size of WCUS are in high demand in popular cities.

“We had a great set of communities apply so it was tough to pick just one,” WordCamp Central representative Cami Kaos said. “In the end we went with Nashville for WordCamp US 2017-2018 because it seems like a great location for attendees, they had a beautiful venue that could accommodate an event of this size as we grow, and the dynamics between both teams were a natural fit.”

If you’re interested in learning more about Nashville, the organizing team has created a page that includes some favorite local attractions and rankings:

• Ranked within the top 10 on Cvent ’s list of Top 50 Meeting Destinations in the United States. (August 2015)
• Named #3 Best Convention City in the 10 Best USA Today Readers’ Choice Awards
• Ranked #1 Friendliest City in America by Travel and Leisure (April 2015)
• Listed in Collaborate Magazine’s list of the Top 12 Foodie Cities for Meetings

Nashville is centrally located for a relatively short drive or flight from anywhere in the US and should have ample options for accommodation. The city won the bid to host the WordCamp out of six applicants and Matt Mullenweg’s announcement post indicates that there were multiple local communities capable of hosting the event in the future.

“Based on the other great applications we got I’m also excited about the pipeline of communities that could host it in future years as WordCamp US travels across the United States and gives us an opportunity to learn and love a new city, as we have with Philadelphia,” Mullenweg said.

My story starts in high school as a girl with a technical bent, in a small country town just as computers were becoming mainstream but well before they were in everyone’s home. (I was in high school when Apple came to school and showed off this new fangled thing they called a mouse…). We were taught BASIC and Pascal and I actually really enjoyed tinkering with programming, but no one thought to say, “Dee, you look like you’re good at this, you should pursue it…” I mean, I was a girl (and girls didn’t ‘DO’ computers), and no one in the circles I moved in really had any idea where this technology revolution would take us.

The truth is I wasn’t particularly ambitious, I didn’t have any kind of clue what I wanted to be ‘when I grew up’ so I allowed myself to be gently steered by my parents into leaving school before the end of my final year when I was encouraged to apply for a job in a bank.

I got the job and started in the MICR processing department, encoding cheques with magnetic text, and I finished as a teller 3 years later (and boy was I terrible at balancing the books at the end of the day – I was much better at chatting to the customers!).

Financial independence was the only name of that game; for me there was very little else to recommend the job, so I saved all the money I could and took off from both the bank, and my homeland (New Zealand) in very short order as a young, naive 20 year old primed to spend the next 3 years exploring the world. And by the world, I mean the US and Europe…

That first mouse had come out in 1983, WordPress was founded in 2003 and in those 20 years the world changed. While it was doing that I was at various times being a nanny, working in child care centres, working in customer support, temping, and generally ‘working to live’ in whatever way felt right at the time. However, in 1999 I packed up my bags once again, moved from New Zealand to Australia and took a place at a performing arts school where I honed my singing and performance skills and volunteered my time to our music director who was starting to experiment with sending out HTML newsletters and updates via email.

And so my personal revolution began.

On what I think was the day after I graduated from that course I walked into a full time role as that music director’s assistant and began my journey back to code. It was part of my job to edit those HTML newsletters and send them out every week. I went from there to buying books about coding for the web, experimenting on my home built PC making web pages. I’m sure like a lot of us, I remember the thrill of creating that first HTML file and seeing a ‘Hello World’ or similar heading rendered in the browser… from there I was completely hooked.

By 2004 I was working full time as a webmaster, by 2005 I was running a small business creating sites on the side of my ‘real job’ and by 2009 that small business became my full time job as I left employment to pursue my Masters Degree in Digital Communication. It was in that year I met WordPress when I moved my old Movable Type blog onto it and within a very short time I was using  WP as the CMS of choice for all my client work…

Then in 2011 I stumbled across WordCamps and by extension the WordPress community. THAT was the thing that changed my world.

I flew on a whim from Sydney to Melbourne to attend this crazy inexpensive conference I had found after a google search for ‘WordPress Conferences’. In doing so I met welcoming people, made friends, connected, and came back to Sydney excited and hopeful about continuing this connection with the wider WP community.

Building a community around WP got off to a slow start in Sydney, but from an inauspicious early WPSyd meetup in the function room of a pub (one we actually held in the dark due to a blackout) my connection and involvement took off. Before long I was helping organise that Sydney meetup and by the time I moved away from that great city it had branched into 2 meetups, and soon after, into 3. Furthermore at the end of that first year, at my second ever WordCamp, I put my hand up to help organise a WordCamp Sydney in 2012 and then as I moved interstate, WordCamp Melbourne in 2013.

Here’s the point.

WordPress, software, technology, the Internet will come and go, morph, and change, evolve. Maybe WordPress will last forever, maybe it will morph into something else, maybe one day it will look completely different than it did when I first started (actually, that’s true now…) the thing that doesn’t change is the humanity around it.

WordPress and any other software package exists to serve people.

The thing that I have learned, not only through WordPress but in life, is that if we too serve the people around what we’re doing, we ourselves will grow, develop and change alongside the people we serve, and the tools we use to serve them.

In organising meetups, WordCamps, and community events around WordPress,  I have found that at the end of the day it isn’t actually WordPress that matters… it’s those connections, it’s the friendships. It’s the network of work, referrals, support, help, encouragement that has kept me wired into this community and committed to helping other people find that connection and growth for themselves. Even as my career in WP has moved through coding, into team support, into project management, there too it has been the people and my connections to them in the community that have helped fuel that transition.

I believe that the place I’ve found and the opportunities I have had owe as much to my own desire and ambition as they do to the help, support and belief of the community around me; sometimes even more than I’ve felt in myself. In all of this I feel as though I’m living proof that by helping, connecting, and resourcing other people, I myself have been helped, resourced and connected into places I’d have never dreamed of all those years ago as a teenager playing with that first mouse… experimenting with that BASIC code.

Arnold Schwarzenegger said “Help others and give something back. I guarantee you will discover that while public service improves the lives and the world around you, its greatest reward is the enrichment and new meaning it will bring your own life.” and I completely agree.

Ricky Martin said “A hero is someone who is willing to help others in his or her best capacity.” Here are two very different people giving voice to exactly what I’ve found in working and serving in this great community of diverse people. This is the kind of heroism I see around WordPress, at meetups and WordCamps; it’s the kind of hero whom I want to raise up, and at the end of the day, this is the kind of hero I hope that I am.

Best of all, it’s the kind of hero that absolutely ANY of us can be.

The post Actually, WordPress didn’t change my life. appeared first on HeroPress.

WordPress 4.7 Beta 4 is now available!

This software is still in development, so we don’t recommend you run it on a production site. Consider setting up a test site just to play with the new version. To test WordPress 4.7, try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (you’ll want “bleeding edge nightlies”). Or you can download the beta here (zip).

For more information on what’s new in 4.7, check out the Beta 1, Beta 2, and Beta 3 blog posts, along with in-depth developer guides on make/core. We’ve made about 60 changes in the last few days for beta 4, including tweaks to Twenty Seventeen, custom CSS, and the REST API content endpoints.

Do you speak a language other than English? Help us translate WordPress into more than 100 languages!

If you think you’ve found a bug, you can post to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. We’d love to hear from you! If you’re comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, file one on WordPress Trac, where you can also find a list of known bugs.

We are almost there
Please test your plugins and themes
RC coming soon

The title says it all. We had some great applications for cities to host WordCamp US after we finish up in Philadelphia this year, and the city chosen for 2017-2018 is Nashville, Tennessee.

Based on the other great applications we got I’m also excited about the pipeline of communities that could host it in future years as WordCamp US travels across the United States and gives us an opportunity to learn and love a new city, as we have with Philadelphia.

By the way, if you haven’t yet, now is a great time to take the Annual WordPress Survey and ask your friends to as well.

Photo Credit.

Upvato creator Freddy Lundekvam has confirmed that all user files entrusted to the service have been permanently lost, as his previous storage provider is unable to recover them. After receiving a series of emails from the provider reminding him that payment was due, the provider terminated his account seven days after the invoice was overdue.

Lundekvam said ordinarily he would expect his sites and servers to go offline in response to an unpaid invoice but this particular provider, which he would not identify, simply terminated his account.

“I contacted the provider in good faith, knowing that any decent provider has complete backups of everything they terminate for X time after they terminate it,” Lundekvam said. “Apparently, with this ‘crappy’ company, terminated means literally terminated. All decent backup providers have backups of their backups, and any provider with such a setup knows very well that terminating the backups at the same time as you terminate the original files is a HUGE mistake, after all, you have those backups in place just in case something is terminated wrongly or the system corrupts something. We can simply conclude with the fact that this provider didn’t do backups of their users’ data and therefore would never be able to recover anything they have lost.”

Although Lundekvam mentioned Amazon Glacier in a previous interview as an example of how cheap storage space is, he confirmed that Amazon was not the provider in question here. “Amazon was quickly ironed out in the launch phase due to the heavy adjustments it needed to make it work exactly the way we wanted it to,” he said.

Lundekvam said he sincerely believed this backup provider was reliable and was disappointed to find out otherwise after trusting users’ data with the company. Despite the misfortune and embarrassment of the current situation, he is determined to relaunch Upvato with a new provider that offers redundant backups.

Upvato to Relaunch with Improved Version that Allows Users to Define Backup Destination

Lundekvam said the new version will be launched “as soon as possible.” His team is considering firing up the current (old) version and then migrating as originally planned instead of relaunching with the new version. The improvements include a better backup algorithm and new functionality.

“The very new version will allow the user to define their own destination / choice of backup location, whether that be on Upvato’s servers, their own FTP / SFTP server, Dropbox, Amazon, and other providers we’re looking into implementing,” Lundekvam said. “This would make Upvato function as a mere gateway that detects and keeps your backups in sync at your favorite destination, while at the same time presenting the same awesome visual experience on the website to display the sales ad associated with the item.”

Lundekvam remains committed to keeping the core service free indefinitely and may add commercial upgrades if costs exceed what he is able to contribute on his own.

“As long as I am able to sustain Upvato on my own, then it will remain ad-free and completely free to use,” he said. “But of course there are plans to monetize the website if we at some point need help keeping the lights on. That might be ad-generated revenue, or a premium service for premium functionality. But regardless of what we do then, the core functionality of Upvato – backing up your Envato files – will always remain free to use.”

In response to commenters who suspected the service of fraud and users who may be wary of continuing with the service, Lundekvam said, “Upvato is not a fraud in any way. It’s really entirely up to the user if they want to give us a second chance or not. We are a completely free service that intends to do the very best we can do make sure that we stay a reliable, good way to store and backup your Envato files.”

When images are uploaded in WordPress 4.6.1 that have an empty alt text value, WordPress tries to generate one based on the caption text or the image title. If the image title is non descriptive as is common with photos uploaded from digital cameras, the alt text can be meaningless.

In WordPress 4.7, the caption text and the image title fallbacks have been removed. The fallbacks were originally introduced to ensure every image included alternative text. Over time however, this practice has proven to be a poor user experience for people who use screen readers.

Since the fallbacks are removed, users will need to explicitly set a value for the alt text field. According to Joe McGill, the change will not affect content already published but will be the expected behavior in WordPress 4.7 and beyond.

If you’re not sure what text to use to describe an image, check out this article on Webaim. It explains when alt text should be displayed and provides useful tips on how to describe an image.

Wedding Bride is a new theme from Alex Itsios, co-founder of Ketchup Themes. The Cyprus-based theme company has 16 themes on WordPress.org. Wedding themes are a relatively small niche in the directory with fewer than 20 listings. This new arrival stands out from the pack with its bold colors and customizability.

Many WordPress wedding themes in the official directory seem like a wedding site forced into a blog-oriented design, with lingering post meta in areas where it serves no purpose. This particular niche is where a focused, one-page design really shines. Wedding Bride features event-specific front page sections for the couple to share their story but also allows for (optional) extra pages and a blog.

All of the theme’s options can be found in the Customizer where users can upload a header image, personalize the header overlay, and add various content sections – all of which are optional. It also includes an option to make the navigation menu sticky or have it scroll with the page (default).

Wedding Bride users can customize the background color and/or image. Unfortunately, the theme does not include a color picker to customize the pink accent color, but this can be changed with a little CSS. Blog pages include a sidebar and it supports four widget areas in the footer. The contact form section was created for use with Contact Form 7.

Check out the live demo to see the theme in action. Wedding Bride is Alex Itsios’ 16th theme on WordPress.org and his first foray into the wedding niche. If you’re looking for a theme that allows you to quickly create a wedding website with all the essential details on one page, you can download it for free from WordPress.org via your admin themes browser.

Over the weekend, the WP eCommerce team released version 3.11.4 of its e-commerce plugin. The update patches an SQL injection vulnerability that was responsibly disclosed by Mika Epstein, a member of the WordPress.org plugin review team.

According to Justin Sainton, lead developer of WP eCommerce, the team was notified of the vulnerability on November 11th and patched within an hour. The update was available on WordPress.org the following day.

“This vulnerability only affects users who use eWay as their payment gateway, have Gold Cart activated, and are using the as-of-yet-unreleased Theme Engine 2.0,” Sainton said.

“We believe the number of users affected is likely close to zero, due to these conditions.”

Users are highly encouraged to update as soon as possible. Created in 2006, WP eCommerce is one of the oldest plugins in the directory and is actively installed on more than 40K sites.

Upvato, the service that specializes in backing up Envato Market files, has shut down without warning. Freddy Lundekvam, a full time programmer and frequent user of Envato products, created the service after losing 10 files to Envato’s policy of reserving the right to take down and remove any file at its or the author’s sole discretion. Losing files is a common frustration among Envato users, as the company cannot guarantee the ongoing availability of products due to situations like copyright complaints and technical issues.

Upvato made it easy for users to automatically backup their purchases, cataloguing them with screenshots, descriptions, titles, and author information. The service offered unlimited backups and Lundekvam encouraged users to connect their Envato accounts to keep their files safe. A few weeks ago, Upvato users started to suspect that the service was shutting down.

Anyone using #Upvato for their themes etc from @envato – I think you have just been duped!

— Andrew Wilkinson (@parysnet) October 31, 2016

What happened to #upvato? Looks like it died silently and nobody noticed. Zero commentary from the usual webdev pundits.

— sunil (@sunilwilliams) October 27, 2016

“I’m beginning to think this was not all above board,” one WP Tavern commenter said after discovering that the site disappeared. “[Upvato] seamlessly copied all my themes to their server and then shut down with no warning!”

Lundekvam, whose website can no longer be reached, replied to my first inquiry. After experiencing problems with Upvato’s provider, he is not hopeful that he can recover the files.

“Our provider’s automated systems terminated everything related to Upvato,” Lundekvam said. “I am so frustrated and upset that you won’t believe it, but I am doing what I can do recover the files and or get a backup up and running. But it seems like the provider isn’t and wasn’t really a reliable backup provider at all, and as it is right now, it looks really dark for a possible chance to recover the files.”

Lundekvam would not specify who his provider was, but had referenced Amazon Glacier in a previous interview as an example of cheap storage space at a mere $7/month.

“Such things shouldn’t happen with a backup provider like Upvato, and I am extremely surprised that it happened with our backup provider, causing it to affect Upvato,” he said. He also confirmed that he does not plan to shut the service down permanently.

“If I am unable to recover the backup and files, then no, I am not shutting down,” Lundekvam said.” I would, and have to, install Upvato with a new provider and start over. Please rest assured that Upvato is coming back up. Regarding the concerned users, I am deeply sorry for the downtime and, possibly, loss of Envato files. It hurts that it happened, as this is in no way how I want Upvato to be seen or represented.”

Lundekvam would not respond to subsequent inquiries. Upvato has had ample time to share this news via other outlets but the service did not have a Twitter account and its website has vanished, leaving users without any information. Lundekvam had said in previous interviews that he did not have plans to monetize Upvato in the immediate future. His motivation was to “make something cool and useful that people might want and need.”

Unfortunately, since he treated Upvato as a side project and did not have further backups in place, an unexpected problem with his provider has wiped out the files users trusted with the service. In an ironic twist, the service has inadvertantly replicated the exact situation that users hoped to avoid with Envato. Lundekvam has not responded to further inquiries on the status of the recovery process, but we will update when any new information is available.

Music videos are themselves an art form, and it’s always interesting to me how an artist chooses to transform the interpretation of their song with the video. I’ve listened to this song since it came out but haven’t seen the video until now, and it will definitely make me listen to it differently. Featuring Kendrick Lamar.

WordPress emoji are served from s.w.org, but they are not compressed. This impacts the SVG loading time, depending on how many emoji you are using, and can even throw warnings on Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. Turkey-based WordPress developer Mustafa Uysal has just released Compressed Emoji, a plugin that makes use of the emoji_svg_url filter introduced in 4.6. This filter allows developers to change the URL for where emoji SVG images are hosted.

When the plugin is activated, the compression offers savings in the range of 3kb ~ 1.3kb (roughly %60) per emoji.

Uysal said he hopes WordPress.org will consider compressing emoji in the future, especially since approximately 10% of the web is using WordPress 4.6. Compressing emoji is a small way to speed up a sizeable chunk of the web. A ticket was created on Trac four months ago, requesting cache headers for emoji files and compression. According to Gary Pendergast, the change is something that can be made outside of the WordPress core development cycle, so he closed the ticket and passed the suggestion on to the Systems team. Cache headers were added by the team, but compression was not implemented in that update.

“The current plan is to move everything to a new CDN,” Gary Pendergast reported after chatting with the Systems team. “The current CDN is a bit outdated – they don’t support HTTP/2, for example. They need to do some more testing, but it’s high on the todo list.”

In the meantime, users who want compressed emoji can use Uysal’s plugin. It compressed the files using SVGO, an open source Node.js-based tool for optimizing SVG vector graphics files. The tool removes unnecessary things like metadata, comments, hidden elements, and default or non-optimal values from the SVG files without affecting their rendering. Another advantage is it doesn’t require an internet connection for those who are developing locally.

Compressed Emoji is available in the WordPress plugin directory and is also open for contributions on GitHub.

WordPress 4.7 Beta 3 is now available!

This software is still in development, so we don’t recommend you run it on a production site. Consider setting up a test site just to play with the new version. To test WordPress 4.7, try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (you’ll want “bleeding edge nightlies”). Or you can download the beta here (zip).

For more information on what’s new in 4.7, check out the Beta 1 and Beta 2 blog posts, along with in-depth field guides on make/core. Some of the changes in Beta 3 include:

• REST API: The unfiltered_html capability is now respected and rest_base has been added to response objects of wp/v2/taxonomies and wp/v2/types, while get_allowed_query_vars() and the rest_get_post filter have been removed.
• Roles/Capabilities: Added meta-caps for comment, term, and user meta, which are currently only used in the REST API.
• I18N: Added the ability to change user’s locale back to site’s locale. (#38632)
• Custom CSS: Renamed the unfiltered_css meta capability to edit_css and added revisions support to the custom_css post type.
• Edit shortcuts: Theme authors should take a look at the developer guide to the customizer preview’s visible edit shortcuts and update their themes to take advantage of them if not already implementing selective refresh.
• Various bug fixes: We’ve made over 50 changes in the last week.

Do you speak a language other than English? Help us translate WordPress into more than 100 languages!

If you think you’ve found a bug, you can post to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. We’d love to hear from you! If you’re comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, file one on WordPress Trac, where you can also find a list of known bugs.

Building the future
A global community
Stronger together

After 14 years of blogging with MovableType, Andy Baio has relaunched Waxy.org on WordPress. Baio’s media and technology blog has been a continual source of original content about life on the internet and how it affects our culture. The migration includes 472 posts and 15,891 entries from his sideblog Waxy Links.

Waxy.org played a small part in WordPress.org’s early history. In 2005 Baio broke the story about WordPress quietly hosting search engine spam articles in order to help cover some of the site’s expenses. The exposure and subsequent removal of the articles temporarily decimated WordPress.org’s pagerank but Matt Mullenweg’s response to the situation brought more transparency to how the open source project was being funded. Baio interviewed Mullenweg for the piece and considered it his first foray into serious journalism.

In his post about the site’s redesign Baio concedes that blogs are “not really part of the cultural conversation anymore” but said he thinks there’s still potential in the medium.

“There a few reasons why I’m sad about the decline of independent blogging, and why I think they’re still worth fighting for,” Baio said. “Ultimately, it comes down to two things: ownership and control.”

Baio explained why it’s important for him to control his own space on the web, as opposed to putting content at the mercy of third-party platforms whose futures are not guaranteed:

Last week, Twitter announced they’re shutting down Vine. Twitter, itself, may be acquired and changed in some terrible way. It’s not hard to imagine a post-Verizon Yahoo selling off Tumblr. Medium keeps pivoting, trying to find a successful revenue model. There’s no guarantee any of these platforms will be around in their current state in a year, let alone ten years from now.

Here, I control my words. Nobody can shut this site down, run annoying ads on it, or sell it to a phone company. Nobody can tell me what I can or can’t say, and I have complete control over the way it’s displayed. Nobody except me can change the URL structure, breaking 14 years of links to content on the web.

Waxy.org is now responsive and uses a custom theme built using Automattic’s Components starter-theme generator. Baio will continue exploring odd corners of the internet on his blog and plans to share his thoughts about the challenges of navigating the ecosystem of independent publishers.

The bbPress development team has released 2.5.11 to add support for a technical change in WordPress 4.7. Users are highly encouraged to update to bbPress 2.5.11 before updating to WordPress 4.7. In 4.7, the loading order for the current user in the function stack was changed to accommodate user locale switching.

Previously, BuddyPress and bbPress displayed a custom notice when a user was initialized without using WP->init(). In addition to patching the issue in BuddyPress and bbPress, a new wp_roles_init filter was added to WordPress that allows plugins to add custom roles when they’re initialized.

The changes mentioned above are technical in nature so I asked John James Jacoby, lead developer of bbPress, what the update really means. “bbPress loads its roles on-the-fly, in a similar way to how post-types and taxonomies are registered,” Jacoby told the Tavern.

“With locales and roles now having a reversed load order, bbPress needed some code changes to work for both WordPress 4.6 and 4.7 without causing any problems for third-party bbPress plugins and non-English installations.”

This particular improvement has personal historical meaning to Jacoby, “This change to WordPress core in 4.7 is a long time coming,” he said.

“It was the very first bug I ever reported in WordPress’ IRC channel back in 2008, when I was working on a large multi-lingual multisite installation. It’s how I met Peter Westwood and Jen Mylo, and it was their kindness that made it clear that WordPress was the platform for me.”

Jacoby also notes that per-forum moderators, favorites, and subscriptions have been rewritten in bbPress 2.6. During testing, performance enhancements were discovered and submitted to WordPress core and have been implemented across the forums on WordPress.org. Work continues on bbPress 2.6 which is expected to ship in 2017.

In this episode of WordPress Weekly, Marcus Couch and I discuss the news of the week. WordCamp US live stream tickets will be free this year and development of BuddyPress 2.8 kicks off. We talk about the revamped guidelines for the WordPress plugin directory and how they should help streamline the review process.

Last but not least, we discuss an important update to bbPress. Because of some recent life changes, the recording time for WordPress weekly will now be on Wednesdays at 3PM Eastern, 12PM Pacific.

Stories Discussed:

BuddyPress 2.8 Development Kicks Off, 2016 Survey Now Open for Developers
WordCamp US Live Stream Tickets Now Available
Take the 2016 WordPress User Survey
WordPress Plugin Team Publishes Revamped Guidelines for Plugin Directory
PressNomics 5 Scheduled for April 6-8, 2017 in Phoenix, AZ
bbPress 2.5.11 – Maintenance Release

Plugins Picked By Marcus:

Grid Canvas – Pinterest Image Creator automatically detects all the images in a post and adds them to a grid layout. It comes with plenty of predefined grid layouts to choose from and there are more coming soon. You can also select the image size that is most optimal for different social networks.

Disable Password Changed Notifications by Pippin Williamson disables the notification email sent to site administrators when users change their passwords.

WP Private Comment Notes allows WordPress admins and or moderators to add and manage private notes for comments. Additionally, each note can be shared with the user who left the original comment.

WPWeekly Meta:

Next Episode: Wednesday, November 16th 3:00 P.M. Eastern

Subscribe To WPWeekly Via Itunes: Click here to subscribe

Subscribe To WPWeekly Via RSS: Click here to subscribe

Subscribe To WPWeekly Via Stitcher Radio: Click here to subscribe

Listen To Episode #253:

WordCamp Europe 2017 is set to host the next community summit in Paris. This will be the first time the event has been held outside of the United States, a change that makes it more accessible for contributors who are unable to obtain a visa to enter the U.S.

Attaching the summit to WordCamp Europe was the next logical step, as the event brings together project contributors from around the world. Europe is one of the fastest growing regions for the WordPress community in terms of events, with a 70% increase in WordCamps in 2015. There were 20 WordCamps held in October and 50% of those were hosted in European cities.

The past three community summits have been invitation-only in order to ensure those present were active contributors to WordPress and to enable a format that facilitates face-to-face discussions on key issues facing the project and the community. This inevitably leaves many valuable contributors on the outside. In an effort to mitigate the sense of exclusivity around the event, the WordPress Community Team is proposing a new selection process for 2017:

If we have to limit our attendance to have productive, collaborative discussions at the Summit, then choosing the participants becomes a challenge if we don’t know what the teams are going to discuss ahead of time. Therefore, this year I suggest we try something new:

Let’s ask teams to decide on the challenging, controversial, or sensitive issues they want to discuss at the summit before the summit is held. Then, once the teams know what they want to talk over in person, they can nominate and select the people needed to represent all points of view in each of those discussions. This way, the event stays small, hard topics get discussed, but the selection process is more transparent and functional.

Rocio Valdivia, who posted the proposal on behalf of the team, roughly outlined how the selection process would work. She suggested each make.wordpress.org project team would create and publish a list of topics/issues for discussion at the summit and submit them by December 20th. Teams would then select representatives to attend the summit. Two members of those selected would be assigned to help with the organization and logistics of the summit, including tasks such as finding sponsors, travel assistance, and communication.

“The intention of this approach is to propose a more open and team-focus Community Summit with transparent participation from all active contributors and reps of each team,” Valdivia said. “This way we can hopefully anticipate barriers and cross-team difficulties that might come up, and avoid them.”

This approach is different from past events where attendees were not part of the organizational aspects but it gives contributors more ownership of the event and their teams’ specific goals. Details and logistics would be worked out later in the year with the help of the WCEU organizers.

The Community Team is asking for feedback on the proposal before implementing a plan of action for the new selection process. As the open source project has grown, WordPress has hundreds of contributors spread across its three dozen core components. So far contributors have weighed in on the initial proposed number of team representatives and the deadline for preparing topics.

There was also some concern in the Community Team’s meeting on Slack as to whether the new selection process will perpetuate the pattern of the same people being invited to the summit every time simply because they are most active in the project. Allowing teams to nominate their representatives based on the anticipated topics will make the selection process more focused on which contributors are best suited to work on pressing issues. Moving the location to Europe will also give regional contributors the opportunity to bring fresh ideas and perspectives, especially regarding the challenges of multilingual publishing with WordPress.

Astute testers may have noticed a new feature in WordPress 4.7 beta 1 that enabled users to search, preview, and install themes from within the customizer. This feature was part of five feature projects related to the customizer that were approved for merge last month. Its goal is to unify the theme browsing and customizing experience.

Customizer Theme Browser Flow

It was removed in WordPress 4.7 beta 2. Helen Hou-Sandí, WordPress 4.7 release lead, reverted the change after collecting feedback. Some of the reasons for reverting the feature include:

• Displaying on mobile devices is broken.
• Inability to close the feature/filter accordion.
• Checkmarks are overlayed on top of the search form.
• The full-screen plus reload experience isn’t polished.

According to Hou-Sandí, there is not enough time left in the development cycle to polish the design and make it sufficient for WordPress 4.7. Nick Halsey, who helps maintain the Customizer component, expressed displeasure with the decision.

“Abruptly deciding to pull something without allowing any opportunity to improve things or even bring it up in a weekly dev chat is ridiculous,” Halsey said.

“Had I been asked to provide patches for outstanding bugs (one of which never even received a ticket), I would have gladly done so sooner – this was my highest priority for core for the past 4 months.”

Halsey goes on to say that the revert is disrespectful and insulting to him and that he is unlikely to further contribute to the project until it is back in trunk. Samuel Sidler, Apollo Team Lead at Automattic, responded to Halsey supporting Hou-Sandí’s decision.

“Making a decision to pull a highly visible feature is hard, but, as you know, it’s ultimately one that the release lead should make as it’s their release and they have the best overall view,” Sidler said.

Weston Ruter, who also helps maintain the Customizer component, asked if the revert could be reversed if patches to outstanding issues were created.

“No – if this were a matter of problems that have defined solutions already then the course of action would not have been a revert,” Hou-Sandí responded. “I know that it would feel better to have something more than ‘my gut and the guts of others say no’, but if there was more definition to the problems then we may not have been in a position where reverting from this release was the only sane thing to do.”

The feature has been punted and the milestone was changed from WordPress 4.7 to a Future Release.

A Window Into How WordPress Development Works

The quotes I published above are only part of the story. I highly encourage you to start with this post and read every response in full. It’s a great opportunity to see a WordPress release lead in action and how and why certain decisions in WordPress development are made. Those interested in the feature’s progress can follow along by monitoring this ticket.

I am not a developer. Confession? It feels like it sometimes. In my mind’s eye I see a roomful of skittish WordPress marketers with dark-ringed eyes, disclosing the number of times they pretended to understand something technical when it made about as much sense to them as the moon landing. Frustrated they can’t code it themselves. Maybe it’s just me in that room.

I am a words person – a creative, a copywriter, and a marketer. My heart beats faster over ancient English literature, clever mailers, alliteration, storytelling and subject lines, and the shapeshifting challenge of building an authentic brand in a world of smoke, mirrors, and shmoozing.

Topher asked me to write my WordPress story and when I thought about what I’ve learnt over the past two years what came to mind was: uncomfortable doesn’t mean walk away.

Far from being something to categorically flee or avoid, discomfort is a signpost to watch out for – something to embrace and step bravely towards. Obviously there are exceptions – but in my experience discomfort often means lean in, listen closely, change something.

I’ve chosen to share a few of the ways I’ve encountered uncomfortable in my WordPress journey so far, and why I’m grateful.

A bit of background

Perhaps we are all creatures of habit on some level, but I really am. For example, when backpacking with my best friend in 2008 from Istanbul down to Cairo – through Syria and Jordan, including places that are now literally non-existent – she and I noticed that if we found a good restaurant I’d suggest returning the following night while she always wanted to try new spots.

When I find something I like, it makes perfect sense to me to stick with it, sometimes to a fault. Until fairly recently I would have described myself as someone who didn’t thrive on change. This partly explains why by the age of twenty nine my entire life had played out in one city.

My beautiful mum, brother and I. My mum is a superhuman and I miss her daily.

Birth, preschool to postgraduate studies, the first nine years of my career, family, friends, life – all in one patch.

I have been privileged to do some excellent travelling to amazing places – European beach holidays and ski trips (obviously I broke my arm), teaching English for four weeks in South Korea, a cruise in Alaska, a church trip to Singapore and Malaysia, Vancouver to visit family – but my sense of home and place was unwaveringly Cape Town.

At the beginning of 2014 I decided to emigrate. The delay between the idea occurring to me and resigning was less than two weeks. With a British passport through my English mum and a mild obsession with all things British, London was it. It seemed wise to secure a job first but my gut said I should have faith and move regardless so I resigned from Yuppiechef.com where I’d been for nearly five years, sold my car, and booked a one way ticket.

At this point, it would be fair to say WordPress was not even really on my radar. It powered Yuppiechef’s blog so I’d used it in that capacity and my own blog was on WordPress.com – but it was pretty much just a thing to do with the internet that helped people publish stuff.

A week before I set off I was having sushi with friends and got chatting to a mouthy American who worked for WooThemes. Hearing of my pending departure and getting a sense of my strengths and what I loved to do, he suggested I consider applying. Less than a week later I accepted an offer to join Woo’s then-tiny marketing team. I’m still amazed at the speed with which it all happened – and will be forever amused by Mark and Warren’s confidence in me as a total WordPress n0ob (maybe they didn’t realise!).

I love MailChimp. Freddy lives on my desk beside some Woo stickers

And so my WordPress journey began in London on 1 July 2014, fresh off the boat and working remotely for the first time. I logged online from a coffee shop – specifically Timberyard, which has become a familiar friend – and dived headfirst into a world I hadn’t realised would be so technical. And digital. Marketing a digital product is a very different kettle of fish to kitchen products. And working remotely as an extrovert?

In my first week I was sent to WordCamp Brighton where I innocently asked someone the difference between .org and WordPress.com. This was the first prickle of my first uncomfortable hurdle: being okay with not knowing everything.

It really is okay not to know everything.

It sounds stupid to even write that one needs to be okay with not knowing everything – of course one can’t, but at Yuppiechef.com I sure knew a lot more about a lot more. There, my lack of technical understanding wasn’t a thing, marketing was lauded, and our brand was at the forefront of what set us apart. People wrote about how the following for Yuppiechef was cult-like, and I’d helped create that.

Joining Woo I was a tiny fish all over again, and I was swimming in a world with languages I didn’t understand.

Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid. – unknown (but attributed to Einstein)

It was a little bit terrifying to be a marketer in this tech-celebratory world. And it took me a long time to accept I have something significant to offer at WooCommerce (and now Automattic) and feel confident enough to add my voice to conversations. Why? I guess I am proud. In the early days I was constantly tempted to pretend to know more than I do (for the record this is a bad idea) and developed a hefty dose of imposter syndrome, which worsened when Automattic acquired WooCommerce. I found myself wondering if they would have hired me.

For a few months, the fear I felt kept me from bringing to the table the valuable things I did know.

With my team in Cape Town earlier this year. Nicole, Aviva, me, Gareth and Kevin <3.

It’s scary admitting a lack of understanding, it takes strong relationships with colleagues (which take time to build, especially remotely) to raise your hand and be vulnerable. But the problem is that not doing so ends up blocking and robbing the contribution you could make. It silences your voice. It is not possible to be a master of all trades: yes I need a working understanding of our products, but I don’t need to become a Javascript developer. One body, many parts, all valuable.

This learning curve was uncomfortable for me. At various points I have wanted to bail, or take a year to learn how to code fulltime. But I am really glad I haven’t because marketing is vital and that is what I can do. And do very well (when I’m not looking over my shoulder).

It’s okay to be an expert in what you love, not what other people love. It’s why we have teams. It’s what makes the world interesting.

The first WordPress London meetup I attended. It was pretty awesome.

Remote relationships take longer to build but they sure run deep.

My degree was in Psychology and it remains an active interest. ENFJ is proudly in my Twitter bio, I love taking personality tests and calling out and connecting with the underbellies and depths of fellow human beings.

“My friends are my estate. Forgive me then the avarice to hoard them.” – Emily Dickinson

If you’re familiar with Gallups Strengthfinder, I’m a Relator to the bone. People often ask how I have the discipline to work from home but that’s pocket change compared to the relational challenge. Showing up to work and being productive hasn’t been the thing I’ve found difficult – it’s trying to build relationship digitally with people far away and in different timezones.

Plus I find there is a certain type of rapport, creativity, and energy that is really hard to create remotely when it comes to brainstorming and collaborating. The buzz of having an idea and someone else adding to it IRL, growing it into something greater. This was not a comfortable thing, but again choosing to stay has proven invaluable.

Remote relationships take longer to build, but they sure run deep. The bonding that happens when you come together for meetups and WordCamps is extraordinary. I have grown to properly know and love my colleagues (not all 500+ Automatticians yet but certainly my immediate team) and a bunch of awesome WordPress people I’ve met.

Well hello Woo people. Here’s us hanging out on Air.

It’s tiring flying to meetups, and you miss home, but it’s now becoming hard to leave them. My heart sometimes feels like it is scattered in little bits: a fragment with Scotty and the Dekode crew in Norway, another few with Louise in Kwazulu Natal, Cobus and Dom in Cape Town and chunks with Nicole and Aviva stateside. It’s fragmenting, but what a privilege.

To keep me grounded day to day, I’ve helped start and now am involved in running a non-profit coworking space, which has opened up a whole new web of relationships in London. If you’re ever in town, pop into ARK Coworking for a pour over coffee.

Working remotely is different. But it’s a pretty niche kind of special to have a web of people around the world that you would otherwise be totally unconnected to.

The Woo biker gang on a marketing meetup near Lake Michigan, 2015

Which brings me to another uncomfortable hurdle brought squarely to me by WordPress: the challenge of responding well to diversity and difference.

Thinking something for a long time doesn’t mean it’s true.

Part of Automattic’s creed is to never stop learning. Being part of WordPress has brought me into close proximity with a more varied, vocal, challenging, and diverse group than I could have made up.

The thing about being a human is you only ever get to be one of them. One in over seven billion. How much about other people and parts of the world you don’t live in do you know, really? How much do I? Being part of WordPress has opened my eyes to diversity in a way that is hard to describe. Emigrating helped too, but it is very possible to live in a bubble wherever you go.

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right. – Thomas Paine

Just because something has always been a certain way, doesn’t make it right. Being part of WordPress, and Automattic, has helped me greatly in learning how to hold what I believe to be right and true gently, and have equal respect for other people’s right and true.

I ran the WooCommerce London meetup for two years which brought me into contact with a very mixed group; I was part of Automattic’s diversity workshop at the GM which was educational to say the least; when my friend Rosie started a blog to highlight out how mouthy women get told they’re too masculine, I got behind her heart and soul.

Stewart Ritchie sharing at the WooCommerce London meetup. Photo: Gabor Javorsky.

The most poignant example of this for me was much closer to home. I wrote some copy a while ago as the backstory of Woo’s ninja mascot, Hiro and included in it a bunch of references to Japanese culture that, though well intentioned, turned out to be not okay. It had been up for ages before someone with a different enough perspective flagged it. Ouch.

I went home after a long day of tears and much Slack messaging and confided in my Malaysian flatmate about it, half expecting him to comfort me and say the whole thing really wasn’t such a big deal and that it didn’t bother him. Instead his only comment was: “That’s good. It will make your company better.”

We live, we learn. We wound, we grow.

John Maeda, who recently joined Automattic as Head of Design and Inclusion, calls such oversights in our thinking ‘lacunae’. Being part of the worldwide community of WordPress has brought a number of my own lacunae into sharp focus. It’s also made me more able to exist peacefully alongside people whose views I don’t share. I’m a human, they’re a human. Two in seven billion.

Now, the idea of stepping away and retreating to a more homogenous, same-y group of people who tend to agree with me is not just unattractive, it’s scary.

WordPress helps me be open-minded and it’s vehicle for doing this is individuals who are willing to speak up. Let’s help each other, as kindly and graciously as we can.

Marketing a WordPress product is difficult.

I’ve found marketing WooCommerce challenging for two reasons.

First there is the classic digital marketer’s problem of how to build relationship with customers you never get to meet. All we have are words online and if we’re lucky some rituals and routines we can inject life into (I wrote about this strategy here).

Over the past two years there have been a number of times I have thrown my hands up in the air and wanted to market something that is just easier to sell (coffee, an awesome gadget, luxury jewelry).

On top of that eCommerce is a competitive space and selling WordPress can be a little complex messaging-wise, especially for non-coders and those not familiar with WordPress:

Friend: Do I even have WooCommerce yet?
Me: Yes it’s there in your downloads folder.
Friend: <silence>.

Every time I see another seductive Squarespace ad or the daily Shopify case study lands in my inbox (How person x built y and changed the destiny of the human race) – part of me can only see how far we have to go.

But, I am enjoying fighting the good fight to democratise eCommerce with WordPress. I believe in what we’re doing, and in open source, and even though our competitors have bigger marketing teams and 24/7 phone support I feel a fierce loyalty to Woo.

I don’t believe marketing has the emphasis it deserves in the WordPress space, but it’s coming to the fore. Great products don’t market themselves. The weaker thing will win if that is what is in front of people. I’m excited to be in this space.

Saying less is more. Narrow focus is healthy.

As someone who loves to joke around, natter, and come up with ideas, something I have learnt the hard way is that volume of words and number of ideas is not no an indicator of the quality of your contribution.

It feels nice to be busy, but what is the deliverable?

Having another great idea is not always helpful. Sometimes what I need to do is shut up and work. The manager versus maker ratio tends to leave a lot of cooks in the kitchen. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Pushing a few strategic things over the line, with your eyes on a goal everyone has agreed on, now that’s a better way.

Staying focused working remotely can be hard. Fortunately, we have a great system of setting OKRs that my team is particularly diligent at sticking to. There are so. Many. Conversations. Going on all of the time. Focus is a healthy and freeing thing.

My Woo bestie, Louise. Here we are in San Francisco in 2014. I went back to South Africa for her wedding this year :).

Inclusion is a very important thing.

A final thing I am learning through WordPress, and which has made my uncomfortable for sure, is the importance of inclusion. I touched on this a little already, but it’s something that I have now got my teeth into and am not going to let go of. Inclusion is a thing.

Something that is great about WordPress is that intrinsically inclusive, it’s open to all.

It isn’t only about big shiny success stories where people are making thousands of dollars. It’s people all over the world, fighting to make WordPress available in all languages; it’s faithful meetup organisers sharing knowledge with those who are just starting out; it’s the GPL; it’s having childcare at WordCamps; it’s using y’all or folks not guys to greet an audience.

WordPress is not slick, sometimes things get a bit messy and there are heated discussions on forums and in backchannels. But WordPress is also a lot like how the world should be – democratic, going out of it’s way to make room and include, and with more than just the bottom line driving decisions.

Conclusion

That’s it from me. I hope sharing just a few of the ways WordPress has made me uncomfortable– what I learnt, and why I am glad I didn’t just bail – will be encouraging.

Perhaps you are facing some tough things related to work or beyond. Maybe someone has expressed an opinion or belief that has made you uncomfortable. I’d encourage you to pause and take some time to think over whatever it is before acting.

Uncomfortable often means there is something amazing to be learnt.

Let’s be brave, open, and keep on learning together through this wonderful thing called WordPress.

The post Uncomfortable doesn’t mean walk away appeared first on HeroPress.

Development for BuddyPress 2.8 kicked off during last week’s meeting and the target release date was set for January 25. In line with the project’s recent change of course, the upcoming release will be another one focused on developers and site builders.

Long time contributor Slava Abakumov is leading 2.8 with a focus on reducing the 650+ tickets in BuddyPress Trac by 50%. He will coordinate contributors in working on a UI for developer features that were added in the 2.6 and 2.7 releases, which introduced an API for Group Types. Abakumov wants to dive deeper into security and plans to perform a security audit of the plugin.

The BuddyPress core team will shape development for 2017 based on feedback from this year’s survey, which opened November 1. It includes 36 questions aimed at site builders and developers, as opposed to previous years where the survey was open to users and anyone connected with the software.

The project’s change of direction is evident in the questions this year, which are decidedly developer-focused. According to the BuddyPress core team, these questions were prepared for the project’s primary audience of site builders and developers, “an explicit recognition of what BuddyPress has become, and how people use it.”

In addition to the usual demographical questions, respondents are asked about their PHP versions, site setups, and local development environments. A new question asks when developers test their sites and extensions against upcoming releases. The survey also asks which template files developers customize when creating themes (with no option to indicate that you’re not a theme developer). Participants are asked to weigh in on BuddyPress’ problem areas and to give feedback on the most frequent feature requests they receive from community members and clients.

In 2013 the survey received 178 responses, 338 responses in 2014, and 211 in 2015. Given that the target audience is much narrower in 2016, the number of participants may decline again. However, the core team hopes responses will be more concentrated with the kind of information they find useful. The survey will be open through November 20, 2016 and results will be posted before the end of the year.

WordCamp US is less than a month away and attendees are finalizing their travel plans. In August, organizers were estimating 3,000 attendees on the ground but official numbers are not yet available as tickets continue to sell. A maximum capacity has not been published, because organizers have a great deal of flexibility to expand the event to thousands more if necessary.

“The entire side of the PA Convention Center is ours, and we’re not using all of the spaces that they have,” WordCamp US co-organizer Alx Block said. “The sky is the limit.”

Last week a world-class lineup of speakers was confirmed from a record number of applicants. The team received 600 submissions (up from 231 last year) and accepted less than 10% of them, according to Block.

“I think that WCUS last year really excited a lot of people, and they were interested in being a part of it,” Block said. “We also had quite a bit more time on the speaker applications, since in 2015 we planned the entire conference in just about three months.”

One exciting change this year is that live stream tickets will be free for those who are not able to attend the event. There’s no limit on the number of people who can watch live.

“We really felt like there shouldn’t be a barrier to entry in attending WCUS,” Block said. “It’s the community’s conference, and everyone should be able to ‘attend’ no matter where they physically are. We have some incredible sponsors, and making the live stream free felt like the best move.”

Last year’s live stream tickets included swag from the event, and WCUS 2016 will have commemorative t-shirts for sale in the swag store. In addition to the live stream, all of the sessions will be recorded and uploaded to WordPress.tv. If you are joining by live stream, make sure to reserve your ticket in advance. You can also test your computer for compatibility ahead of the event.

With WordCamp US a little less than a month away, it’s time to take the 2016 WordPress user survey. The survey is quick and easy to fill out with only a few questions to answer. Results are anonymized and will be shared at this year’s State of the Word presentation.

Results from last year’s survey were not shared during Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word presentation. During the question and answer portion, Mullenweg was asked about the results.

“Lots of data to go over, but basically more people are using WordPress, app development is growing, lots of people are making their living with WordPress, and other great trends are showing up,” Mullenweg responded. “We’ll try to do a blog post about it.”

A post highlighting the results from the 2015 survey has yet to be published.

In 2014, 33K people took the survey and of those 33K, 7,539 or 25% said they make their living from WordPress. Over 90% of respondents said they built more than one site.

If you use WordPress, please take a few minutes to complete the survey. Also, tickets are still available to attend WordCamp US December 2-4.

I’ve been wanting to get SSL on HeroPress for a long time, but couldn’t for a variety of reasons. Well, it’s finally there! That means the HeroPress Widget will finally work properly on sites running SSL, I could someday do a Give campaign, etc.

One downside is that it broke our connection to WordPress Planet. It’s fixed now, but while it was down there were two essays that didn’t make it to the News widget in WordPress, and that made a big difference.  Here they are, using WordPress’ cool oembed tools. Check’em out and leave a comment if you’re willing.

I fell. WordPress helped me up.

Conquering My Obstacles To Happiness

 

The post Finally SSL! appeared first on HeroPress.

Welcome to the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and via RSS for your favorite podcatcher. Post Status Draft is hosted by Joe Hoyle — the CTO of Human Made — and Brian Krogsgard.

In this episode, Joe and Brian talk about how they learned WordPress development, how employers should look at candidates for skill hiring, and various resources they find valuable for learning WordPress.

https://audio.simplecast.com/52463.mp3

Direct Download

Links

• Just Build Websites
• Lynda.com WordPress tutorials
• WP in One Month
• WordPress Development Stack Exchange
• How to Become a Respected WordPress Developer

Sponsor: Gravity Forms

This episode is sponsored by Gravity Forms. Gravity Forms makes the best web forms on the planet. Over a million WordPress sites are already using Gravity Forms. Is yours? For more information, check out their website and thank you to Gravity Forms for being a Post Status partner.

photo credit: Green Chameleon

Two months ago, revised guidelines for the WordPress Plugin Directory were opened up on GitHub for public feedback. This transparent and open process of updating the guidelines resulted in more than a dozen contributors submitting pull requests with improvements to the language and content. The revamped guidelines have now replaced the previous ones with language and expectations that are clearer and easier to understand.

“In addition to rewriting the guidelines, we took the time to codify the expectations of developers and cost of not abiding by the guidelines, as well as a reminder that we do remove plugins for security issues,” plugin team member Mika Epstein said in the announcement. “We are doing our best to be transparent of what we expect from you and, in return, what you can expect from us.”

After several incidents this year where unclear guidelines contributed to confusion on issues like incentivized reviews and developers submitting frameworks, the plugin team made the jump to update the five-year-old document. Although there are not major changes, some of the guidelines were considerably expanded for clarity. This includes #9: “The plugin and its developers must not do anything illegal, dishonest, or morally offensive.” The list was updated with several more examples of infractions that would land under this category.

“It’s a massive undertaking to re-write guidelines in the public eye in a way that won’t pull the rug out from anyone,” Epstein said. “Our goal was to clarify, not totally change, but also to address the needs of an ever changing technology.”

Because the plugin directory was created to serve the WordPress project and its users, it doesn’t function like many other popular directories and marketplaces. Clear language and expectations are important, especially with WordPress’ growing international user base. The newly updated guidelines should cut down on incidents where the plugin team has to enforce guidelines that were not explicitly documented.