WP Briefing: Episode 33: Some Important Questions from WCEU

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In the thirty-third episode of the WordPress Briefing, hear Josepha Haden Chomphosy recap important questions from WordCamp Europe, and a selection of Contributor Day interviews.

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

Credits

References

Transcript

[Daugirdas Jankus 00:00:04] 

Honestly, it’s not a secret. It’s a big part of our business. And I think it’s like WordPress is a big part of all the hosting company, company’s, businesses, you know? So for us, it is like, we want to make it better. We want to give back. We want to understand, you know, where we can contribute the most. And we see it as a, you know, win, win, win situation for everyone, for clients, for the whole ecosystem.

And for us as a business, of course!

[Milana Cap 00:00:32] 

My favorite WordPress component is WP CLI. That’s my crush, haha, because I love terminal. I love doing it. I’m not a really UI type of person, I get lost in UI. But in terminal, you just type command and it does what you want. And a WP CLI is much more powerful than WordPress dashboard. You can do so many things there and you can have fun.

Uh, so that’s my go-to tool!

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:10] 

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

Here we go!

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:36] 

Many, many people were at WordCamp Europe a couple of weeks ago. And at the end, Matt and I closed out the event sessions with a little question and answer time from the community. I was excited to see everyone and excited to answer their questions. But as with all spur of the moment answers, I experienced this l’esprit de l’escalier and I found that there were a few things that I would have answered a little more completely if I had taken more than two seconds to think about them.

So today I’m going to augment some of the answers from that session with a little more context and clarity. There was a question from Laura Byrne about favorite blocks in recent WordPress releases. And given that I was exclusively holding WordCamp Europe information in my brain at the time, I couldn’t think of which block was my favorite. While I was sitting there on that stage,

I realized that one of my favorite things about WordPress’s 6.0 release, like Matt, wasn’t really a block, but it was a functional workflow sort of thing. So my favorite thing was the ability to lock blocks, but I mean, the question was about favorite blocks. And so I do know that some of the most anticipated blocks are the Flexbox layout blocks. Whew. What a sentence!

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:46]

Try to say that three times fast! Those blocks are the Flexbox layout blocks, they are sort of shortcuts that show up when you’re selecting multiple blocks and allow for easy side-by-side layouts. I’m not explaining it in a way that does it much justice, but I will share a link in the show notes that has more information and you can kind of see how empowering that particular block is in the block editor.

The next question I wanted to give a little more context to came from Courtney Robertson. She asked about how to make translated content more readily available on learn.wordpress.org. My answer was pretty far ranging and talked about why it’s harder to commit to prioritizing that over, for my example, translating WordPress core. 

But I also understand that there are people who want to help and just need someone to point them in the right direction. And so I want to be clear that it is possible to have workshops in any language on learn.wordpress.org right now. We just don’t have a lot of people contributing those translations.

So there are conversations going on right now in the training team about using Glotpress on learn.wordpress.org, and also how to translate subtitles. So, if you are looking for ways to give back through translation and training is an important kind of area of your focus. I will have links to both of those things in the show notes as well.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:11]

I also gave a quick answer, uh, after this question about how hard it is to recognize contributions that are separate from a major event or major release. In this case, when I say recognize, that’s recognized as in thank, not recognize as in, know it exists. In case it’s not clear why that was connected, why that answer was connected to the question, training materials are self-serve and not always specific to individual releases of WordPress.

So that means the maintenance of any content around training happens routinely over the course of time, rather than because of a specific release or a WordCamp. What sometimes can make it a little harder to entice people to join us in that work. 

And now the third question I’d like to tackle is the one that came from Megan Rose. She asked how we can encourage better diversity as we go back to in-person events. My answer was more about the big picture, program-wide work that has been done and specific awarenesses that I, as a leader, have been keeping top of mind. That answer is still true and is still important, but again, it doesn’t really help anyone who’s wondering how they can show up today in their own communities, and do the hard work of fostering an inclusive space there so that we can confidently welcome more diverse voices together. 

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:27]

A great place to start is to have conversations with people who aren’t like you and really listen. Also recognizing that we all come from different backgrounds that give us more or less opportunity and always be asking yourself, who is missing from this conversation and why, how can I find them and invite them into our own WordPress spaces?

If that all kind of feels right up your alley, I would check out the show notes. I’ll have some links in there to the community team’s site, as well as a few posts that will help you to explore that a bit further as well. 

There were also a couple of questions about market share slash usage of WordPress, and Five for the Future that I really do want to answer, but as I was writing up the context and just kind of exploring the questions that people were raising, it turned out to really be quite a big set of answers.

So I will do those in either two separate episodes of their own or one surprisingly long, for me, episode. And so there you have it, a lightning round, deep dive on a few questions from WordCamp Europe.

[Jonathan Desrosiers 00:06:41] 

Yeah, it’s definitely great to be back in person. Um, it’s been a long two years, two or three years for a lot of people and it’s, it’s, it’s great that we’re such an asynchronous community and we can all stay connected online through Slack and different means. Um, but there are some things that you can’t replace, like making friends with people and learning people’s demeanors and having some discussions in person that you can’t replace.

And so, uh, I’m really excited to see people I haven’t seen in a long time. Meet new people and, um, you know, have some of those discussions here today in Portugal.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:07:21] 

Which then brings us to our small list of big things. 

If you missed the announcement, WordCamp Europe will be in Athens next year. And the call for organizers is open already. It’s an experience that is absolutely irreplaceable. So I’ll link to that in the show notes, in case you’ve always wanted to give back to WordPress that way.

The second thing on my list is that work on the next major release of WordPress is already underway. There is a post with roadmap info that was published recently, as well as a slightly more casual thread on Twitter. I’ve linked both of those in the show notes, so that you have some concept of what it is that we are aiming for in 6.1, and also a concept of where to go to get started working on it if that’s what you feel like doing, uh, for the next three to four months– 120 days, roughly.

Uh, and finally. This is less of like a thing to be aware of in the next two weeks and kind of a little WordPress project tool tip. Did you know that we have a calendar that shows all meetings for all teams all week long? It will make you feel tired by the amount of work that gets done in the WordPress project every week, but it’s right there on make.wordpress.org/meetings.

So you never have to wonder where folks are meeting to talk about things ever again. And that my friends is your small list of big things. Thank you for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks.

[Santana Inniss & Héctor Prieto 00:09:11] 

Hello! Mic test. One, two, one, two. 

We are testing the USB microphone. Let’s hope we’re using it actually. 

I think so. I think so. 

Yes. Because now I am far, and now I am much closer to the microphone. Yes. 

And I am sitting in the same spot. 

Good. Hello? 

Hello! 

Mic test one, two.

Mic test one, two. 

[record scratching sound effect]

[laughter]

And, close.

Mic check. 

Mic check. 

[record scratching sound effect]

I’m close to the mic. I’m far from the mic. 

I’m far from the mic. Wow.

Not so far.

[laughter]

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