WordPress contributor teams have shipped several new tools for theme developers in the past couple weeks, which have the potential to raise the quality of new themes coming into the ecosystem. The Theme Sniffer plugin is a new effort from the Theme Review team that uses custom sniffs for PHP_CodeSniffer to test a theme against WordPress coding standards and check for PHP version compatibility.

The plugin is useful for both theme reviewers and developers who want to get their themes approved for the WordPress.org directory. It includes several optional standards to test against beyond the ruleset for theme review requirements. Passing the Theme Sniffer checks is not required for themes entering the directory but reviewers can use the plugin to speed the process up.

The Accessibility Team also published a new tool called WP Theme Auditor that runs Axe tests against a theme for automated accessibility feedback. Axe is an open source library and testing engine created by the accessibility experts at Deque. The WP Theme Auditor package can be installed into a theme’s root directory. Developers can then add test cases. Examples are available in the project’s README file. The tests are run against http://one.wordpress.test by default but developers can specify a different test environment URL.

The Accessibility team plans to expand the test cases in the tool to include all the content from the current Theme Unit Test Data package. In the most recent team meeting, they decided to recommend WP Theme Auditor as a WordPress testing tool and plan to post more details about it on the make.wordpress.org/accessibility blog.

At WordCamp Nordic’s contributor day I had the opportunity to chat with Andrey “Rarst” Savchenko about WordPress’ Date/Time component, the code that manages date, time, and timezone functionality. Savchenko is one of the maintainers of this lesser-known component, which includes code that dates back to PHP 4 times. After volunteering for years in the WordPress Stack Exchange forums, he encountered some of the worst Date/Time bugs, eventually spurring him on to get involved improving the code.

“From there it was a slow descent into the madness of the component,” Savchenko said. “Much of my experience ended up in my WpDateTime library. By last year I was, at last, confident I had a good grasp on the extent of the problem and a way forward for core.”

Date/Time issues affect both developers and users. Savchenko said most of the problems, by volume, are related to an incorrect output of localized time by `date_i18n()`. These things can trickle down to users and affect post scheduling, querying, and other operations.

“Some of them are outright bugs and some are easy to break due to incompatibility with Unix timestamps,” Savchenko said. “But many other parts of the core have problems related to time – most often around time zones and daylight savings time. Posts can end up with the wrong time, not published when needed, sorted in the wrong order, and so on.”

The requirement for backwards compatibility makes progress slow but Savchenko and fellow contributors shipped some of their work in the most recent release of WordPress. They will have more solutions available to pursue when the minimum required PHP version is bumped.

“In WordPress 5.1 we had shipped a set of important fixes for documentation and some of the worst bugs in `date_i18n()`.

“At the moment we continue to work on outstanding issues and get ready to implement a set of major new API functions. The work on the component has also revitalized the discussion of introducing user timezones. However I think those need a lot of UX work to reach workable proposal.”

Check out the video below for a quick overview of the work being done on the Date/Time component and find out how you can get involved at the #core-datetime channel in WordPress Slack.

GitHub users may soon be able to contribute to projects on behalf of an organization. This feature has often been requested by developers who are contributing on behalf of their employers.

“Corporate contributions to the third-party open source projects can still be a source of friction and ambiguity,” GitHub Product Manager Ben Balter said. “We’re beta testing a new platform-agnostic commit pattern we hope can help you contribute on behalf of your employer.”

Committers who are members of an organization can add a commit trailer in the following format:

On-behalf-of: @ORG <ORG CONTACT EMAIL>

The committer must use an email that matches the organization’s verified domain and sign the commit. Committing on behalf of an organization can also be done via the command line.

Balter posted a demo of how the organization’s badge appears next to the committer’s. The feature is now in public beta:

It will be interesting to see how well this is adopted among individuals and organizations committing to open source projects. Some projects have more overt contribution from commercial entities than others. Having individuals commit on behalf of their employers makes it easier to track contributions funded by organizations. It may also provide project owners a more accurate picture of how deeply companies are invested in a project, especially in scenarios where the lines between individual and employer contributions are blurry or unclear.

10up has released a GitHub Action that enables developers to deploy to the WordPress.org Plugin repository by tagging a new version on GitHub. Helen Hou-Sandí, 10up’s Director of Open Source Initiatives, explained how it works:

You’ll be able to manage your entire development lifecycle in GitHub—no more futzing with local Bash scripts or controlling commit/push access in multiple places. You reference our action in your plugin repo’s workflow file, filtered to only run when a tag is pushed, and set your username/password secrets. After that, each time you tag a new version on GitHub, whether by pushing a Git tag from the command line or making one using the GitHub releases interface, your plugin will be deployed to WordPress.org.

Developers who want to use this Action will need to sign up for beta access to GitHub Actions in order to create their own Actions-enabled repo for pushing plugin releases to WordPress.org. Check out 10up’s release post and the README file for instructions on how to use and customize the WordPress.org Plugin Deploy action.

Reception from the WordPress development community has been enthusiastic, as anything that removes WordPress.org’s requirement to use SVN qualifies as a little piece of magic. 10up is working on more WordPress Actions that they plan to release soon.

This project makes me want to make a plugin again https://t.co/aTtTpu6562

— Jeremy Felt (@jeremyfelt) March 14, 2019

WordPress now powers over 1/3rd of the top 10 million sites on the web according to W3Techs. Our market share has been growing steadily over the last few years, going from 29.9% just one year ago to 33.4% now. We are, of course, quite proud of these numbers!

The path here has been very exciting. In 2005, we were celebrating 50,000 downloads. Six years later, in January 2011, WordPress was powering 13.1% of websites. And now, early in 2019, we are powering 33.4% of sites. Our latest release has already been downloaded close to 14 million times, and it was only released on the 21st of February.

Over the years WordPress has become the CMS of choice for more and more people and companies. As various businesses use WordPress, the variety of WordPress sites grows. Large enterprise businesses all the way down to small local businesses: all of them use WordPress to power their site. We love seeing that and we strive to continuously make WordPress better for all of you.

We’d like to thank everyone who works on WordPress, which is built and maintained by a huge community of volunteers that has grown alongside the CMS. This incredible community makes it possible for WordPress to keep growing while still also remaining free. And of course, we’d like to thank all of you using WordPress for using it and trusting in it. To all of you: let’s celebrate!

WordCamp Miami (WCMIA) is heading into its 11th year running this weekend, making it one of the longest running non-profit tech conferences in South Florida. Known for its many learning opportunities and workshops, the event spans three days from March 15 – 17 at Florida International University.

For the vast majority of the WordPress world that cannot make it to Miami, the next best alternative is tuning into the free livestream. WCMIA will be broadcasting a selection of workshops and sessions from the schedule, beginning with the Freelancer’s Workshop on Friday, March 15. The main event features six different tracks, and Saturday’s live broadcast will include sessions from “WordPress & The Web” and the “Design & Community” tracks. Sunday’s livestream will broadcast sessions from the Business track.

WCMIA is also hosting a worldwide WordPress trivia contest on Saturday, March 16, at 6PM EST. It is open to both in-person attendees and livestream viewers. Directions for how to sign into kahoot.it remotely for the game show are available on the event’s website. Digital prizes may be awarded to those playing online and winners will be announced on the WCMIA Twitter account.

Last week Automattic published a video titled “A meditation on the open web” that calls out Facebook as the antithesis of the open web:

As you get closer the air gets smoggier and you realize it’s a vast metropolis. It’s surrounded by high concrete walls, completely contained. Inside it’s bustling, lots of honking traffic, people everywhere, the sound is deafening. You see people arguing in bars and chatting on street corners. Billboards and advertisements are everywhere, touting ever kind of good and service. It’s noisy and dense and overwhelming.

This is Facebook.

The video also likens Instagram to a cookie cutter housing development that is actually just a collection of billboards with no one living there.

My expectation before playing the video was that it would enumerate the positive aspects of the open web but I was surprised to find it juxtaposed with Facebook and Instagram in a somewhat jarring fashion midway through. It effectively communicates the stark contrast between the limitations and restrictions of social media silos and the freedom of owning your own website.

Open Web Meditation was created as a design experiment at Automattic that encourages viewers to look beyond the walls of dominant social media platforms and consider how our experiences on the web differ based on where we choose to share our ideas. The company is looking to gain global exposure for the video by inviting people to create their own versions of it in their own languages.

Automattic’s video is a timely message, as the world pauses to reflect on the 30th birthday of the World Wide Web this week. In his open letter published by the Web Foundation, Tim Berners-Lee urged companies, governments, and the web’s citizens not to give up on building a better web. He identified “system design that creates perverse incentives,” where user value is sacrificed, as one of the most dangerous threats to the web at this time.

“You can’t just blame one government, one social network or the human spirit,” Berners-Lee said. “Simplistic narratives risk exhausting our energy as we chase the symptoms of these problems instead of focusing on their root causes. To get this right, we will need to come together as a global web community.”

Many commercial entities have enjoyed extraordinary and unprecedented opportunities and influence because of the creation of the world wide web. Berners-Lee underscored their responsibility toward the public as stewards of the open web.

“Companies must do more to ensure their pursuit of short-term profit is not at the expense of human rights, democracy, scientific fact or public safety,” he said. “Platforms and products must be designed with privacy, diversity and security in mind. This year, we’ve seen a number of tech employees stand up and demand better business practices. We need to encourage that spirit.”

In an interview with the BBC, Berners-Lee said that global action is required tackle the web’s “downward plunge to a dysfunctional future.” This 30-year anniversary is a good time to re-examine our complex relationships with centralized services and return to the guiding principles that have made the web a universal, open place of opportunity.

“Vague, but exciting.” Thirty years ago yesterday, Sir Tim Berners-Lee submitted his original proposal for an information management system to his boss at CERN — what would later become the World Wide Web (and, it turns out, a huge influence on my life and career).

To help celebrate, I tweeted WordPress’s contribution to the web’s grand timeline (above), and I got to participate in The Economist’s Babbage podcast looking back at the pioneers of the early web. Listen to the whole episode below:

WordPress 5.1.1 was released yesterday evening with an important security update for a critical cross-site scripting vulnerability found in 5.1 and prior versions. The release post credited Simon Scannell of RIPS Technologies for discovering and reporting the vulnerability. Scannell published a post summarizing how an unauthenticated attacker could take over any WordPress site that has comments enabled:

An attacker can take over any WordPress site that has comments enabled by tricking an administrator of a target blog to visit a website set up by the attacker. As soon as the victim administrator visits the malicious website, a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) exploit is run against the target WordPress blog in the background, without the victim noticing. The CSRF exploit abuses multiple logic flaws and sanitization errors that when combined lead to Remote Code Execution and a full site takeover.

Since WordPress ships with comments enabled by default, an attacker could exploit this vulnerability on any site with the default settings. Auto-updates went out yesterday but administrators who have background updates disabled are advised to update immediately.

The maintenance release also includes the ability for hosts to offer a button to prompt their users to update PHP ahead of WordPress’ planned minimum PHP version bump in 5.2. The “Update PHP” notice can be filtered to change the recommended version.

Version 5.1.2 is expected to follow in two weeks.

Daniel James is putting his Dark Mode plugin up for adoption.

“I’m stepping back from plugin development (and WordPress contributions) and would like to see someone passionate about it pick it up,” James said.

Dark Mode has 2,000 active installations and is the most popular among a handful of dark or “night mode” plugins in the official directory. In August 2018, James submitted a merge proposal for including Dark Mode in core, but it was shot down the same day it was published. Gary Pendergast said the proposal “seemed premature” and noted that the project was lacking several merge criteria outlined on the Handbook page for feature plugins. He cited a lack of weekly chats, no kickoff and update posts, and no testing from the Flow team, among other concerns.

“I decided recently that because of the direction WordPress is going in with the move towards React with Gutenberg that I should probably focus my efforts elsewhere,” James said.

“That’s mostly to do with the merge proposal getting rejected fairly quickly without any helpful next steps on how to improve it. Plus, with how rapidly Gutenberg is being developed, I’d have to pretty much work in tandem with the Gutenberg team to ensure the Dark Mode plugin styled the UI correctly. That’s spare time I just don’t have.

“I feel like WordPress leadership is another reason. It’s really difficult (I think/feel) to get something like Dark Mode pushed through. It’s very much near the bottom of the priority list, which I get, but sucks a bit when you’re volunteering in spare time of course.” James said the plugin currently requires a few hours per week in support and maintenance.

The popularity of dark modes for applications has taken off after macOS Mojave introduced a dark mode, and has also been spurred on by the news that Apple’s 2020 iPhone lineup will be produced with OLED screens. Many popular applications, such as YouTube, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, and Google Maps already have a dark mode that either works automatically based on light conditions or can be manually enabled. Chrome also recently added a dark browsing mode for Mac users. Fans of dark mode claim it is easier on the eyes and conserves battery.

Users who tend to gravitate towards dark mode are still a small subset, but the feature is gaining momentum. A dark mode may one day come to WordPress core but it doesn’t seem likely in the near future. Daniel James’ Dark Mode plugin isn’t ready for core, since it doesn’t support the new editor, but he said he hopes the new owner will find the time to take it where it needs to go.

“I’m happy to transfer the plugin to someone else to continue it, as long as they’re well known/respected,” James said. “I won’t just be giving it away for security reasons. It would be great for it to be included in core one day, but at the very least it would be nice for someone who really likes it to just continue it.”

I always knew I wanted to have a career, and I also knew I wanted a family. As my family grew, I realized that a typical job where you have to show up at an office every day didn’t work with the dynamic and unpredictable nature of kids. I didn’t understand why being at a physical office was a requirement: wasn’t the most important thing getting the work done? I could work just as well from home, and the flexibility would mean I could do my work at hours that worked for me. Who cares if I finished a project at 11 pm, if I did it well and on time?

Creating Change

So after my fourth kid was born, I decided to create that flexibility for myself, and went freelance, but with a vision to grow into a company. That’s why from the beginning I created a brand for my services, and called the “company” illuminea. At first I offered content related services, like marketing writing, and Hebrew to English translation. Increasingly the work I was doing was related to company websites, and the power websites had in terms of communicating messages and content marketing really caught my attention. I also had always been fascinated by technology.

So I started to teach myself how to build websites, using Google as my teacher.

At first I built basic HTML websites, but as I also learned about web marketing I realized that a site that can’t be easily updated is not doing any favors for its owners. Website content needs to be quickly and easily updatable. So I started researching CMS options. Many companies in those days were using expensive and clunky proprietary CMSs, and I was not impressed. I tested the three leading Open Source CMSs, and fell in love with WordPress. I was impressed by the templating system, the plugin ecosystem, and the community.

Moving to WordPress

At that time companies did not take WordPress seriously as a CMS. Blogging was catching on, so companies would install a WordPress blog as a subdomain, but they weren’t using it for general site management. I thought it could be more, and managed to convince a few clients to let me build their sites on WP.

And then version 3.0 was released, and WP became a full-fledged CMS.

Companies started to become sick of the limitations and costs of their proprietary CMSs, and since I was one of the first in the Israeli market to offer WP as a service, I started to get more and more clients for full website projects.

Right before I had my fifth kid, I made my first hire: Rebecca Markowitz. I taught her whatever I knew, and she quickly surpassed me with her skills in many areas. We have been working (and laughing) together ever since!

One thing led to another and illuminea became one of the leading providers of custom WordPress business solutions in Israel. We were privileged to work with inspiring innovators and generally nice people.

Building Something New

I had had many ideas for products throughout the years, but managing a business and having babies meant I could not realistically build a product on the side. However, after about twelve years of illuminea, and when my youngest was no longer a baby, I had an idea for a WordPress-related product: our clients, and ourselves, were suffering from issues related to speed and security. No matter what we did, we could never speed up client websites as much as they or we would have liked; and no matter what we did on the security side, sites still had vulnerabilities too often. So I thought: why not convert WordPress websites to serverless and static versions of themselves so they’ll be fast and secure?

I decided to go for it. I got accepted to a Jerusalem startup accelerator called Siftech, and they gave me the tools and access to resources and mentors that I needed to take the next steps.

I called that venture Strattic, and today we are a venture-backed team of seven with a great product that our clients love.

I can’t imagine how I could have ever achieved my goal of integrating family and an impactful career without WordPress. To this day I love that I am always challenged and learning more, and always meeting more people in our amazing community, while also having the flexibility I need to be a mom. Of course it’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good, thank God.

The post Work Life “Balance” With WordPress appeared first on HeroPress.

Google is launching a new program called Season of Docs with the goal of fostering collaboration between technical writers and open source projects. The initiative is very similar to Google Summer of Code, except it is focused on documentation and technical writing contributions instead.

Prospective participants can apply during the month of April 2019. Google plans to publish a list of accepted organizations with their ideas for documentation projects. Technical writers can choose a project and submit a proposal to Season of Docs. The accepted proposals will be published July 30, 2019, and participants will then spend a month bonding with their open source communities and collaborating with mentors. The Season of Docs program officially runs from September 2 – November 29, and participants will receive a stipend of $2400 – $6,000 USD, calculated based on Purchasing Power Parity.

In 2017, Google’s Open Source Survey results showed that incomplete or missing documentation was one of the most common problems encountered in open source, observed by 93% of respondents. The Season of Docs program aims to give technical writers an opportunity to contribute to open source projects in a more structured way while learning about open source code. Participating organizations gain the chance to improve their processes for documenting their projects while working with a technical writer. Check out the FAQ section of the Season of Docs website for more detailed information.

WordCamp Nordic hosted a successful kids workshop over the weekend where participants learned how to start publishing with WordPress. The event was held during Contributor Day at the same venue, tucked into a comfortable corner with soft chairs and ample floor space for the kids to stretch out.

Petya Raykovska led the workshop and participants followed along with the help of a large screen for demonstrating basic publishing-related tasks. The kids learned how to use the editor, add text and images, create galleries, and customize their sites by selecting a theme. Each participant left the workshop with their own WordPress site hosted at WordPress.com.

“It’s like an exercise in creativity, showing them how to use a tool to express themselves on the web,” Raykovska said.

Teaching kids how to use WordPress is far easier than teaching adults how to use it for the first time, because they don’t have preconceived notions about how the editor should behave. Raykovska said the group at WordCamp Nordic had no issues using Gutenberg.

“It doesn’t matter for them what editor they use,” Raykovska said. “They are very intuitive; they go along with anything that comes their way.”

She also reported that many of the kids from past kids workshop events have kept their blogs going and maintain strong relationships with the volunteers who helped them get started.

Each kids workshop is a new opportunity for organizers to test and refine different methods for teaching kids how to use WordPress. As these workshops become more common at WordCamps around the globe, it would be exciting to see them grow to become large scale events where more experienced kids can present on what they are learning and doing with WordPress.

If you are interested in running a kids workshop at another WordCamp, Raykovska has created an organizer kit for training the next generation of WordPress users and developers. It includes all the tasks and requirements for organizing this type of event, sample content, and a workshop script that organizers can follow.

WordPress 5.1.1 is now available! This security and maintenance release introduces 14 fixes and enhancements, including changes designed to help hosts prepare users for the minimum PHP version bump coming in 5.2.

This release also includes a pair of security fixes that handle how comments are filtered and then stored in the database. With a maliciously crafted comment, a WordPress post was vulnerable to cross-site scripting.

WordPress versions 5.1 and earlier are affected by these bugs, which are fixed in version 5.1.1. Updated versions of WordPress 5.0 and earlier are also available for any users who have not yet updated to 5.1.

Props to Simon Scannell of RIPS Technologies who discovered this flaw independent of some work that was being done by members of the core security team. Thank you to all of the reporters for privately disclosing the vulnerabilities, which gave us time to fix them before WordPress sites could be attacked.

Other highlights of this release include:

• Hosts can now offer a button for their users to update PHP.
• The recommended PHP version used by the “Update PHP” notice can now be filtered.
• Several minor bug fixes.

You can browse the full list of changes on Trac.

WordPress 5.1.1 was a short-cycle maintenance release. Version 5.1.2 is expected to follow a similar two week release cadence.

You can download WordPress 5.1.1 or visit Dashboard → Updates and click Update Now. Sites that support automatic background updates have already started to update automatically.

In addition to the security researcher mentioned above, thank you to everyone who contributed to WordPress 5.1.1:

Aaron Jorbin, Alex Concha, Andrea Fercia, Andy Fragen, Anton Vanyukov, Ben Bidner, bulletdigital, David Binovec, Dion Hulse, Felix Arntz, Garrett Hyder, Gary Pendergast, Ian Dunn, Jake Spurlock, Jb Audras, Jeremy Felt, Johan Falk, Jonathan Desrosiers, Luke Carbis, Mike Schroder, Milan Dinić, Mukesh Panchal, Paul Biron, Peter Wilson, Sergey Biryukov, and Weston Ruter.

WordPress core contributor Alex Shiels has published a proposal for a WordPress.org block directory that would host JavaScript-based, single block plugins. The directory would make blocks searchable and installable from within the Gutenberg editor. Building a directory for discovering blocks and seamlessly installing them is one of the nine projects that Matt Mullenweg identified as a priority for 2019.

Block collections have become one of the most popular ways for distributing a group of related blocks but this method can cause bloat. Users currently cannot search for individual blocks by name and plugin names and descriptions are not always a good indication of what the blocks do.

Shiels proposed the new directory be limited to single block plugins, frontend JavaScript blocks with no UI outside of the editor. It would be a separate section inside the Plugins Directory, optimized for users to find blocks by name and description. Developers would be required to use a block.json file with metadata as outlined in the Block Registration RFC, which provides a technical specification for block type registration.

The most controversial part of the proposal is having blocks installable from within the Gutenberg editor. The long term goal is to make that process as seamless as possible. Block collections and blocks that do not meet the requirements of the single block directory would still be available via the normal plugin installation process. This could be confusing for users who do not know that blocks can be found in two separate directories.

“The Gutenberg editor should NOT be a plugin installation source,” Matt Cromwell commented on the proposal. “That just seems ripe for scope-creep. That’s not its purpose or function. Let it be an editor, layout builder, content manager, etc. Moving into searching an external library and installing plugins is the definition of losing site of the purpose of a ‘product.'”

Cromwell suggested a centralized block manager as an alternative that would offer a better experience for searching and installing blocks. He also echoed other participants’ opinions on the importance of including dynamic blocks in the directory, instead of limiting it to “JavaScript only” blocks.

“A centralized Block Manager like has already been suggested is a far better user-experience for searching and installing blocks than doing that in the Gutenberg editor. I like the idea of single-block plugins being the only option in the Directory. But make sure Dynamic Blocks that depend on other existing plugins or outside functionality are able to be added to that very important Directory as well. I really don’t see a benefit to limiting this Directory so much.”

WordPress developer Jamie Schmid also expressed hesitation about pursuing a solution that puts block installation inside the editor, as it may discourage users from thinking about their block usage across the entire site.

“I am not convinced that making blocks searchable and installable from within the editor is the best solution,” Schmid said. “This, along with page level block controls and style overrides, is encouraging a very short-sighted, page-level solution to an issue that is very likely a global site (or content or even business) issue. I’d love to instead see a central view for all installed blocks – similar to how plugins are, but more organized by type/function/etc and with a visual alongside. This will encourage making decisions at the site level, encouraging some bigger-picture reflection. And same to being able to apply access controls to the installation of new blocks.”

The proposal would place the single block plugin search interface inside the block inserter in the Gutenberg editor. This would enable users to quickly search for and install a block if they don’t see one they need among the existing blocks.

Riad Benguella, Gutenberg’s technical lead for phase 2, encouraged participants in the discussion to think about blocks as pieces of content that do not rely on the post editor but can be configured anywhere inside WordPress.

“It is important to think of blocks as its own unit that have a meaning on its own, and that can be used in different contexts,” Benguella said. “A block is a piece of content (static or dynamic) that can be configured and rendered anywhere.” This includes blocks found both inside and outside post_content, content in a full site editor, inside the WordPress admin, a headless application, or even another CMS.

“We should be ambitious and think about all these contexts (the final picture), but at the same time we should be pragmatic and iterate to achieve this goal,” Benguella said.

The discussion regarding the new block directory and block plugin architecture continues across WordPress contributor teams. Shiels said the proposal was meant as a starting place and contributors are still in the preliminary stage of exploring ideas.

To start a new decade of WordCamps in Paris (France), the Parisian organizing team has scheduled their first Contributor Day on April 24th, 2019.

The « I contribute » badge

As a member of this team, I‘m very excited and as one of the BuddyPress core developers I’m very proud to announce I will run a BuddyPress contributor table !

The WordCamp Paris Contributor Day will start at 8:00am UTC and will end at 4:00pm UTC.

If you’re in Paris on April 24th : you can get your free ticket to have a sit at our table. We’ll work on resolving issues, testing patches, improving the documentation and the french translation and why not on enhancements we can imagine using the BuddyPress REST API (It’s arriving in BuddyPress 5.0.0 !).

BuddyPress is created by a worldwide network of friendly folks

John James Jacoby

Then I thought what about trying to extend our BuddyPress table to a Worldwide BuddyPress Contributor Time ? @boonebgorges & @johnjamesjacoby will try to be around in our Slack channel to help us, to review the code and commit our changes.

If you’re not in Paris on April 24th : you can participate from where you are, you simply need to hang around into our #BuddyPress Slack channel. If you’re not familiar with Slack, please read this short documentation about it.

Let’s contribute to BuddyPress together

Il existe une version française de cet article.

هذا المقال متاح باللغة العربية

I’m about to get real! Vulnerable! Transparent! & guess what…I don’t give a fuck! So buckle up boys…you’re about to go for a ride!

Escape

June 2014 when I decided to leave my life I’ve lived with my husband for thirteen years, left everything behind. My community I always knew, my friends, my way of life, I just dropped everything!

The only thing I took with me was my idea box and my two kids to started our new life in Chandler Arizona. When I moved, I lived with my mom till I figured it out. At the time I was in school for my Computer Science degree at Austin Peay State University. I figured I have only one year, so why not finish, get a good paying job and my mom was ok with us living in her house. It was difficult and the most challenging experiences as my mom had her own health challenge and having her newly divorced 29 year old daughter with two kids in her house was not easy for her. I was so broken. I was broken spiritually. I was broken mentally and this affected my overall physical health. And still had to find the strength to be strong in front of my kids. I did not have a job. I had never worked a day in my life as my husband did not allow it.

So here I was, 29 years old, two kids, divorced, no degree, no work experience…yet I had to find a way to not only support myself but my kids as well.

While living with my mom, the atmosphere got a little tense. As I mentioned above, my mom went through a lot, she had her own struggles, her own journey, and I happened to be a part of her narrative. With the loss of the man she loved so dearly, and her health declining, she as well had her own capacity of what she can handle, and having me in the house with the kids was getting burdensome. I tried to do my part with buying food in bulk as there was nine of us in a five bedroom house. But sometimes, my idea of “doing my part” does not match the other, and issues may arise.

One day my mom approached me with the Cox internet bill and asked me to pay for it. Honestly, I probably could have afford the bill under $100.00 dollars, but the inconsistent deposit of child support from my ex at that time, I was not able to commit to paying for anything. That is why I would buy food from Costco in bulk, etc. But, that was the turning point for my mom to pull the plug and say,

“I don’t want you in my house anymore.”

So the plan to finish school within a year went out the door!

I came home one day I and found my stuff in a baskets in front of the garage. I reversed the car from my moms driveway and went in search of an apartment I could afford. At the time, my ex was depositing a total of $1,000 dollars in the joint account for our kids. I had to find an apartment that was under $1,000 dollars plus cover the cost of gas and food. To my surprise I found an apartment called CrossWinds Apartments for $550 a month on Arizona Ave and Pecos rd.

Restarting

On Aug. 2014 I moved in my first apartment with my two kids.

So here I was 29 years old, no job yet, the idea of finishing school went out the door, and I have to find a way to make it.

Breath…just breath…(sometimes breathing doesn’t work. I mean…I feel like I was gasping for air in order to breath!)

My kids where very sad. I was confused. I had no idea what to do and where to go and I needed a job.

After reaching out my friend,  Deedra Hill Abboud who helped me with revamping my resume based on past experiences, I started applying to every job I could find. And just a side note, Deedra Hill Abboud not only helped with my resume which I was clueless on how to put together, but also helped me with my mindset, reminded me to be grateful even though I felt so defeated, and I was at my lowest point in my life. But, I had no luck with my job hunt and I was ready to settle for anything! I was hired as a nanny on Aug 29, 2014. I moved that month into a new apartment, never lived on my own before, never payed for bills (like what the fuck are those yo), and was able to find a job by the end of the month that payed me $300.00 a week. I was so happy. Like you have noooo idea! I was so happy.

My family visited sporadically. But, on October 2014, my sister Eman, who’s known for Eman B. Fendi, came over to visit. I had no couch, no bed, no furniture for a while. We had a long conversation about life, and everything in between. During the conversation, I pulled out my idea box and shared with her a card game I had created when I used to tutor Muslim kids back in Clarksville TN. She informed me about Score, a non-profit organization that provides free business mentorship all over the USA. She said, “reach out to them. They will help you with your idea.”

First Steps

I’m like…OMG! I was soooo excited! I went to Peixoto coffee in Chandler AZ…for internet…I could not afford internet at the time. I checked out Score website and they had an event I attended on November 2014. I was so nervous and so scared. As I did not know what to really do with my idea. All I know is I had an idea, I was passionate about it, and had the drive to do something about it! The event host asked everyone in the room to stand up and introduce themselves. Everyone had their fancy title and so much amazing experience to represent themselves, and here I am trying to make something out of myself I have never done before. In all my insecurities, self doubt, and internal contradictions, my intro goes as follows…

“Hi! My name is Amena Mabrouk and I have a card game idea that helps kids learn the name and position of Salah(prayer). I am here because I have no idea what to do with my idea.”

After the session was over a man walked towards me by the name of Doug Whitney. He was a certified Score mentor helping clients who want to start or grow their businesses. He approached me and said,

“Hi! My name is Doug Whitney. I think I can help you with your idea. Here’s my business card.”

WOW! I was thrilled! I booked an appointment with him that day and I continued to meet with my business mentor weekly for two years. The journey was lonely. As I was so focused on work, my kids, and my idea, I started to miss being apart of a community.

During the two years I was meeting with my business mentor, Whitney said to me, “You need to start building a website. I recommend you start building your website on WordPress.”

“I’m like, WordPress. Ok! I will start tonight. Like what is it? I press words? “

Ha…ha…Just kidding! I figured you lasted this long reading my blog, we’re practically related at this point….might as well add a little humor…lol

So please continue on…

WordPress

So I went to Peixoto coffee, opened my computer, went to wordpress.org, created an account and started to build my website. This was my first time building a website. I googled everything and lots of youtube videos. And man, I got stuck. I was frustrated. I was so disappointed especially when you see all the pretty websites out-there, I was a little discouraged to continue. In the process of trying to figure out this WordPress thing, I also learned about co-working spaces which I became obsessed with!

Did you know there all over the valley! OMG!

I found out about one near my home called GangPlank in Chandler Arizona. I started working out of GangPlank and fell in love with the community there. This was the first time in two years to finally feel a sense of community after my divorce. I worked there consistently and an amazing woman by the name of Anne Watson Barber. During our conversation, I informed her about my dilemma with my WordPress website. She automatically, without hesitation, offered to help me without any question. I was so so excited! Thrilled! You have no idea!

I consistently met up with Anne Watson Barber at GangPlank for a while. In all honesty, without this WordPress thing, I would have never looked for a place where people work out of, which led me to meeting Anne Watson Barber and many other amazing people. But that was the beginning. As not only did I get a sense of community I was missing in my life at GangPlank, I was making legit friends who selflessly are willing to help out no matter what! WOW!

Can we just stop for a moment and talk about it!

Throughout our meetings my friend Anne informed me about Meetup groups for WordPress.

I started to google Meetup groups around the valley for WordPress. I went to all of them! Some WordPress Meetup where one hour and thirty minutes way! I loved every bit of it! Disclaimer, most of it was over my head, but I still went, made new friends, and continued building my WordPress website.

How WordPress Changed My Life, well the story speaks for itself. Choosing to build my site on WordPress was the catalyst from the beginning that opened many doors I was not aware of. I continued to build my site for a few years, and then moved on to a different venture.

But, without WordPress which lead to the WordPress community, I would not have learned how to build an online presence, to fearlessly ask questions when I’m stuck, to be around people who are willing selflessly help out, even-though I needed the information repeated over and over again for me to understand it.

Without the WordPress community, I would not have learned to be ok with failure that’s free of judgment, as we are all trying to make it. Without the WordPress community, I would not have learned to be ok with the idea of shared information – because your success is my success. Without the WordPress community, I would not have learned how to be tolerant when feeling defeated and to continue with the little courage I had to figuring it out. It really did change my life.

After venturing off with other things, the universe has it’s way of reminding me of where I belong. I was informed about volunteering at WordCamp Phoenix 2019 by a good friend, Justin Nealey at GoDaddy. So I used my volunteer and sick time to take off from work to be apart of the event. I was blown away! I never knew what WordPress really meant to its people. I did not understand the heart of the WordPress project, and how important it is in the way it impacts the community. When I started with WordPress, it was about building my website for my startup business. But this time, I had a glimpse of it’s magnitude in the world and I am so thrilled to be apart of it on a whole new level!

During my time at WordCamp Phoenix 2019 , I meet amazing people and had the time of my life! This event lead to the opportunity to take photos/video during Contributor Day + Organizing WordPress Panels at Galvanize Phoenix. This further opened doors to meeting Topher DeRosia who approached me and inspired me to write this essay for his website called HeroPress; to meeting Adam Warner | Field Marketing Manager for GoDaddy Pro; to the amazing conversation with Aaron Campbell |WordPress Core/Ecosystem; and so many amazing humans who came into my life because of it!

Currently, I work at GoDaddy Hosting Support. I love my job and I’m making a comeback into my WordPress community here in the valley. I am working closely with Matthew Clancy to record and edit the Advanced WordPress Developer Meetup and other upcoming events as well. I am so excited for the future!

Oh, and in case you’re wondering about my Salah(Prayer) card idea…that’s another blog post, another joy ride boys! In the meantime, let’s be friends! Let’s connect! Twitter @AmenaMabrouk

كيف غير وورد بريس حياتي

أنا على وشك أن اصبح صادقة! و قوية و صريحة ! هل تعلم… انا لا اكترث نهائيا! .. أنتم على وشك الذهاب فى نزهه! فى يونيو 2014 عندما قررت أن أترك حياتي التى عشتها مع زوجي لمدة ثلاثة عشر عاما ، تركت كل شيء خلفى. مجتمعي ألذى عرفته ،أصدقائي ، طريقه معيشتى، فقد تركت كل شيء! الشيء الوحيد الذي أخذته معي كان صندوق أفكارى وأطفالي الاثنين لكى نبدأ حياتنا الجديدة في تشاندلر أريزونا. عندما انتقلت ، عشت مع أمي حتى أكتشفت الأمر. ويوم ان كنت في المدرسة لكى أحصل على درجتى العلميه فى علوم الكمبيوتر في جامعة أوستن بيي ستيت. كان لدى سنة واحدة فقط لانهى دراستى، فلماذا لا انهيها ، وأحصل على وظيفة جيدة الأجر ، وكانت أمي طيبه معنا في منزلها. كان ذلك صعبا ومن اكثر  التجارب تحدياً …فقد كانت أمي تواجه تحديهاالخاص من الناحيه الصحيه ، ولديها ابنتها المطلقة حديثا والبالغه من العمر 29 عاما مع طفلين في منزلها لم يكن ذلك سهلا بالنسبه البها. كنت محطمه بشكل كبير . فقد تحطمت روحيا وعقليًا وأثر ذلك على حالتى الصحيه بشكل عام. وكان يجب ان أكون قويه أمام أطفالي. ولم أكن أعمل. فلم أعمل ابدا ولم يسمح زوجي بذلك. ﻟذا ، والان ، انا ابلغ 29 ﻋﺎﻣﺎً ، وأم لطفلين  ومطلقه وليست لدى درجه علميه ولا خبره مهنيه  ورغما عن كل ذلك كان يتوجب على ان ابحث عن وسيله ليس فقط لاعاله نفسى و لكن لاعاله أطفالى أيضا ً. أثناء الاقامه مع والدتى ، أصبحت الحياه  متوترةً شيئا ما . فكما ذكرت ، فقد مرت أمي بالكثير ، ولديها صراعاتها ورحلتها  الخاصة ، وقد أصبحت انا جزءا من قصتها. ومع خسارتها بفقدان الرجل الذي أحبته كثيرا ، وصحتها المتدهوره، فهى أيضا لها قدراتها الخاصة على تحمل ما تتعامل معه ، وأصبح وجودى في المنزل مع اطفالى عبئا ثقيلا بالنسبه اليها. وقد حاولت أن أقوم بدوري بشراء الطعام بكميات كبيرة فقد كنا تسعة أشخاص  في منزل مكون من خمس غرف نوم. لكن أحيانا ، لا تتطابق مع وجهه نظرى عن “القيام بدوري” مع الأخرىن ، وأحيانا تحدث بعض المشكلات. ففي أحد الأيام اتصلت والدتى وطلبت منى دفع فاتوره الإنترنت . بصراحة ، قد استطيع  دفع فاتورة أقل من  100.00 دولار ، ولكن النفقه الغير عادله  لاطفالى من طليقى في ذلك الوقت ، لم تمكننى من الالتزام بدفع أي شيء. وذلك هو السبب في أنني أشتري الطعام من كوستكو بكميات كبيرة ، وهكذا. ولكن ،  كانت تلك نقطة التحول بالنسبة لأمي فقد قالت لى  ، “أنا لا أريدك في منزلى بعد الآن”. لذا فإن خطتى لإنهاء المدرسة في عام واحد اختفت ! وعدت إلى المنزل في يوم ما  لاجد أغراضي قد وضعت في سلات أمام الجراج. فغيرت اتجاه السيارة  وذهبت في البحث عن شقة أستطيع تحمل نفقتها. في ذلك الوقت ، كان زوجى السابق يودع  1000 دولار في الحساب المشترك لأطفالنا. كان علي أن أجد شقة أقل من 1000 دولار بالإضافة إلى تغطية تكلفة البنزين والطعام . ولدهشتي وجدت شقة تسمى شقق كروس ويندز مقابل 550 دولار شهريا فى أريزونا افي وبيكوس . في أغسطس 2014 ، انتقلت للعيش فى شقتى الأولى مع أطفالى. كنت في التاسعة والعشرين من عمري ، ولم يكن لدى وظيفة بعد ، وتلاشت فكرة إلانتهاء من المدرسة ، ولا بد لي من إيجاد طريقة للتغلب على ظروفى . اتنفس … فقط اتنفس … (فاحيانا لا أستطيع. أعني … أشعر وكأنني كنت أبحث عن الهواء حتى اتنفس!) وكان أطفالي فى حاله حزن شديده. وكنت مشوشه. لم يكن عندى أدنى فكرة عما يجب أن أفعله وأين أذهب فأنا أحتاج إلى وظيفة.  بعد أن وصلت إلى صديقتي ، ديدرا هيل ابود التى ساعدتني في ان اجدد السيرة  الذاتية الخاصه بى بناءا على خبراتى السابقة ، بدأت أتقدم بطلب لكل وظيفة أعثر عليها. وكملاحظة جانبية ، فإن ديدرا هيل ابود لم تساعدنى في عمل سيرتي الذاتية والتى لم أكن أعرف طريقه تنظيمها فقط ، ولكن أيضا  ساعدتني  في طريقه تفكيري ، وذكّرتني بأن أكون  شاكره حتى مع  شعوري بالهزيمه ، وقد كنت في أدنى نقطة من مراحل  حياتي. ولكن ، لم أكن محظوظه في البحث عن عمل  ، وكنت على استعدادأن أقبل بأى شىء!  ولكن في أكتوبر 2014 ، جاءت شقيقتي إيمان ، التي كانت شهرتها إيمان بى فندي ، لزيارتى. لم يكن لدي مقعد ، ولا سرير ، ولا أثاث لفتره. وتحدثنا طويلا عن الحياة ، وكل شيء بيننا. خلال المحادثة ، حدثتها عن فكرتي وشاركت معها لعبة بطاقة ابتدعتها عندما كنت أعلم الأطفال المسلمين مرة أخرى في كلاركسفيل تينيسي.  وفى 29 أغسطس  2014 تم تعيينى كمربية. وانتقلت في ذلك الشهر إلى شقة جديدة ، لم أحيا أبدا فى شقه خاصه بى من قبل ، ولم أقم بدفع أيه  فواتير (كما يفعل الاخرون ) ، وأستطعت العثور على وظيفة فى نهاية الشهر وكان راتبها  300.00 دولار في الأسبوع. وكنت سعيدة جدا بدرجه لا يمكن أن تتخيلوها. كنت سعيدة جدا. وكانت عائلتي تزورنى فى اوقات متفرقه.  أخبرتني عن “سكور” ، وهي منظمة غير ربحية تقوم بتقديم  إرشادًات مهنيه مجانيًة في جميع أنحاء الولايات المتحدة الأمريكية. قالت ، “تواصلى معهم. سيقومون بمساعدتك في فكرتك. و انا “يا اللهي!” فقد كنت متحمسة للغايه! ذهبت إلى مفهى بيكسوتو في تشاندلر  أيه زى … للولوج الى الإنترنت … فلم أكن أستطيع تحمل تكلفة الإنترنت في ذلك الوقت. وتفقدت موقع سكور على الإنترنت  وكان لديهم حدث قمت بحضوره في نوفمبر 2014. كنت متوترة وخائفه جدًا.  لاننى لم أكن أعرف ماذا أفعل  بفكرتي. كل ما أعرفه هو أن لدي فكرة ، وكنت متحمسة لها ، ولدى الدافع لعمل أى شيء لتلك الفكره! طلب مضيف الحدث من جميع الحضور الوقوف وتقديم أنفسهم. الجميع كان لهم لقب ممتاز وتجربة رائعة جدا لتقديم أنفسهم ، وعندئذ حاولت ان اقدم شيئا عن نفسى لم اقم به من قبل. بكل ما لدى من عدم الاحساس بالامان ، وعدم الثقة بالنفس ، والتناقضات الداخلية ، وقمت بتقديم نفسى كالتالى  … “مرحبا! اسمي أمينة مبروك ولدي فكرة لعبة بطاقة تساعد الأطفال على ان يتعلموا اسم ومكان  (الصلاة).  أننى هنا لأنني لا أعرف ماأفعله بفكرتي “. بعد الجلسة ، كان هناك رجل يتجه نحوي يسمى” دوج ويتني “. وهو معلمًا معتمدًا في سكور ، وهو يساعد العملاء الراغبون في البدء فى أعمالهم أو تنمية أعمالهم. اقترب مني قائلا: “مرحبا! أنا اسمي دوج ويتني. أظن أنني أستطيع أن أساعدك في فكرتك.هذا هو الكارت المهنى الخاص بى . وااو ! فقد شعرت بسعادة كبيره! وقمت بحجز موعدًا معه في ذلك اليوم ، واستمريت فى مقابلة المشرف المهنى الخاص بى اسبوعيا و لمدة عامين.  كنت أشعر بالوحدة  فى رحلتى . فقد كنت أركز على العمل ، أطفالي وفكرتي ، بدأت أفتقد كونى جزء من المجتمع. خلال السنتين اللتين كنت التقى فيهما مع المشرف المهنى  ، قال لي ويتني: “يجب عليكى ان تبدأى  في بناء موقع إلكتروني. أنصحك  بإنشاء موقع الويب الخاص بك على وورد بريس . ” أنى أحب وورد بريس . حسنا! سأبدأ الليلة. و انا كمن يقول “ما هذا؟ اقوم بالضغط علي الكلمات؟” ها ها اني امزح فحسب! لقد اكتشفت انك استغرقت هذا الوقت في قراءة مدونتي,  حيث ترتبط عمليًا في هذه المرحلة … .كما يضفى قليلا من المزاح …   أكمل ارجوك  … ثم ذهبت إلى قهوة بيكسوتو ، وفتحت جهاز الكمبيوتر الخاص بي ، ثم ولجت إلى wordpress.org ، أنشأت حسابًا وبدأت إنشىء موقع الويب الخاص بي. كانت هذه المرة الأولى التي أنشئ فيها موقعًا على الويب. وبحثت فى جوجل عن كل شيء وكثيرا من  الفيديوهات على يوتيوب. اتدري, لقد تعلقت بما ابحث فيه. فقد كنت محبطة. واحسست بخيبة أمل كبيرة وخاصة عندما رأيت المواقع الجميلة هناك ، كنت متردده قليلاً فى الاستمرار.  ففي محاولة معرفة  هذا الوورد بريس  ، تعلمت أيضًا ماهى مساحات العمل المشترك التي صرت مهووسة بها! هل تعلم أنهم هنا في جميع أنحاء المدينه! يا الله ! لقد اكتشفت أن أحدا هنهم قريبا من منزلى   جانج بلانك في تشاندلر أريزونا. بدأت العمل من خلال جانج بلانك وأحببت ذلك المجتمع. كانت تلك هي المرة الأولى منذ عامين أشعر بالتواصل الاجتماعى بعد الطلاق. عملت هناك باستمرار وقابلت سيدة رائعه اسمها أن واتسون باربر ومن خلال أحاديثنا ، أخبرتها عن مشكلتى مع موقع الوورد بريس

وبدون تردد و بتلقائيه عرضت على مساعدتى بدون أى سؤال. كنت متحمسة جدا! ليس لديك فكره عن السعادة الكبيرة التى احسست بها! كنت ألتقي باستمرار مع آن واتسون باربر في جانج بلانك كثيرا. وبأمانة ، بدون الوورد بريس ، ماكنت بحثت  عن مكان يعمل فيه الناس معا ، والذى قابلنى بآن واتسون باربر والكثير من الأشخاص الرائعين . لكن ذلك كان البداية.  فلم احصل فقط على شعور التواصل الاجتماعى والذي كنت افتقده في حياتي في جانج بلانك ، بل قمت بعمل صداقات مع اشخاص رائعين ممن هم مستعدين لتقديم المساعدة مهما حدث ! هل يمكن ان نتوقف لحظه ونتحدث عن ذلك.! فمن خلال اجتماعاتنا ، أخبرتنى صديقتي “آن” عن مجموعات Meetup   في وورد بريس. بدأت أبحث فى جوجل عن مجموعات الميت اب من حولى  للوورد بريس. ذهبت الى كل منهم! بعض من  WordPress Meetup  تكون ساعة وواحد وثلاثون دقيقة  ولقد احببت كل هذا !  ولكني استمريت فى تكوين أصدقاء جدد ، واستمريت في بناء موقعي على وورد بريس. كيف غيرت وورد برس حياتي ، تتحدث القصة عن نفسها.  فاختيارى لبناء موقعي على وورد بريس كان هو الحافز منذ البداية والذي فتح لى الكثير من الأبواب التي لم أكن على علم بوجودها. واصلت بناء موقعي لسنوات عديده ، ثم انتقلت إلى مشروع آخر. ولكن ، بدون الوورد بريس والذى عرفنى على  مجتمع الوورد بريس ، لم أكن لاتعلم كيفية بناء وجود لى على الإنترنت ، لكى أطرح الأسئلة بلا خوف عندما أعجز عن عمل الاشياء ، وأن يكون حولى أشخاص على استعداد للمساعده بلا أنانيه ، وبالرغم من أنى أحتاج إلى تكرار المعلومات كثيرا لكى افهمها.

فبدون مجتمع الوورد بريس  ، لم أكن لاتعلم أن أتقبل الفشل والذى يخلو من  من النقد ، حيث أننا جميعا نحاول أن نحقق مانريد. وبدون مجتمع الوورد بريس ، لم أكن لاتعلم فكرة مشاركه المعلومات  – حيث أن نجاحك هو نجاحي. بدون مجتمع وورد بريس ، لم أكن لأتحمل ألشعور بالهزيمة وان استمر ولو بقليل من الشجاعة التى امتلكها لتحقيق ما أريد. لقد غير الوورد بريس حياتى حقا. بعد المغامرة بأشياء أخرى ، و للكون طريقتة فى تذكيري بما أنتمي إليه. أبلغت عن التطوع. ففي  15 – 17 من فبراير 2019 ابلغنى صديقى جاستن نيلى بالتطوع فى وورلد كامب فينكس #WCPHX  ،  في جو دادى.  لذا استخدمت تطوعي وأوقات المرض  للإبتعاد لاكون جزءا من هذا الحدث. لقد كنت b! لم أكن أعرف أبداً ماذا تعنى الوورد بريس لاصحابها. لم أفهم قلب مشروع الوورد بريس ، ومدى أهميته في طريقة تأثيرة على المجتمع. عندما بدأت مع الوورد بريس  ، فقد كان من أجل بناء موقعي على الويب لنشاطي المبدئى. لكن في هذه المرة ، تلقيت نظره خاطفة عن أهميتها في العالم ، وأننى سعيدة بأن أكون جزءا منها على مستوى جديد! وأثناء تواجدى فى وورد كامب فينكس من 15 – 17 فبراير 2019  قابلت اشخاصا رائعين  وكان هذا من اسعد اوقات حياتى! وقد اتاح لى هذا الحدث الفرصه لالتقاط الصور والفيديوهات فى يوم المشاركة و تنظيم أجتماعات المناقشة الخاصه بوورد بريس فى جالفانيز فينكس.  وفتح ذلك مزيدا من الأبواب لمقابلة توفر دى روسيا الذي اقترح  وألهمني أن أكتب  هذه المدونة لموقعه الإلكتروني والذي أطلق عليه أسم هيرو بريس ؛ ولمقابلة آدم وارنر مدير التسويق الميداني لـ جو دادى ؛  ولمحادثة رائعة مع آرون كامبل | WordPress Core / Ecosystem؛ والكثير من الاشخاص  الرائعين الذين ظهروا فى حياتي بسبب ذلك! والان اناأعمل  في جو دادى هوستنج سابورت. فأنا أحب عملي وأقاتل فى مجتمع الوورد بريس هنا في المدينه.  إنني أعمل قريبه من  ماثيو كلانسي لتسجيل وتحرير برنامج وورد بريس المتقدم وتطوير الاجتماعات وغيرذلك من الأحداث القادمة. أننى متحمسة جدا للمستقبل! ، وأذا ما كنت تتساءل عن فكرتى لبطاقه الصلاة … فهذه مدوّنة أخرى ، و سعادة أخرى. في نفس الوقت ، دعنا نكن أصدقاء! دعنا نتواصل! على تويتر  AmenaMabrouk

The post How WordPress Changed My Life appeared first on HeroPress.

In this episode, John James Jacoby and I review feedback from last week’s show, share a few more memories of Alex Mills, and discuss an article that describes what it’s like to be a content moderator for Facebook. We also share our opinions on the idea of WordPress having shorter release cycles.

Stories Discussed:

The Drive Remembers Alex Mills

The Secret Lives of Facebook Moderators

Jetpack 7.1 Released

PressNomics 6 Tickets are on sale

Freemius Patches Severe Vulnerability in Library Used by Popular WordPress Plugins

WordPress Contributors Propose Shorter, Time-based Release Cycles

Fighting uphill

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Next Episode: Wednesday, March 13th 3:00 P.M. Eastern

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The inaugural WordCamp Nordic will be live streamed for free on March 8, from the Paasitorni Congress Center in Helsinki. The conference starts at 9 AM. Those watching remotely can tune into both tracks via the following links:

Track 1
https://2019.nordic.wordcamp.org/live-congress-hall/

Track 2
https://2019.nordic.wordcamp.org/live-sirkus/

The WordCamp’s organizers published the direct links, so there is no need to sign up for a livestream ticket. Session topics include Gutenberg development, environmentally friendly WordPress development, preparing for PHP 7.2, Gutenberg Cloud, WooCommerce, blog marketing, multilingual websites, and more. Check out the full schedule for a list of all the sessions.

WebAuthn is now a W3C recommendation, bringing us one step closer to not having to use passwords anymore. If you’re not familiar with WebAuthn, here’s a little demo (if you don’t own a security key, it’ll probably work best on an Android phone with a fingerprint reader).

That I needed to add a disclaimer for the demo indicates the state of WebAuthn authenticator support. It’s nice when it works, but it’s clearly still in progress, and that progress varies. WebAuthn also doesn’t cover how the authenticator device works, that falls under the proposed CTAP standard. They work together to form the FIDO2 Project. Currently, the most reliable option is to purchase a security key, but quality varies wildly, and needing to carry around an extra dongle just for logging in to sites is no fun.

What WordPress Needs

Anything that replaces passwords needs to provide some extra benefit, without losing the strengths of the password model:

• Passwords are universally understood as an authentication model.
• They’re portable: you don’t need a special app or token to use them anywhere.
• They’re extendable: strong passwords can be enforced as needed. Additional authentication (2FA codes, for example) can be added, too.

Magic login links are an interesting step in this direction. The WordPress mobile apps added magic login support for WordPress.com accounts a while ago, I’d love to see this working on all WordPress sites.

A WebAuthn-based model would be a wonderful future step, once the entire user experience is more polished.

The password-less future hasn’t quite arrived yet, but we’re getting closer.

One of the the most important factors in WordPress’ growth is the software’s availability in 186 languages. Its vibrant community of translation volunteers, known as the Polyglots team, continually update the translations to ensure access for millions of non-English speakers around the world. In 2016, the team began hosting their own events dedicated to educational sessions and topics that affect the translation community, along with coordinated translation sprints.

The 4th edition of the Global WordPress Translation Day (GWTD) has been set for Saturday, May 11, 2019. It is a 24-hour virtual and in-person event that brings together new and experienced translators. The most recent event was held in 2017 with 71 local events in 29 countries. More than 1,300 people RSVP’d for local events and volunteers around the world translated 93,179 strings in core, themes, and plugins. The event was also successful at growing the local translation communities, adding 217 new translators to the project.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of events like this that support and grow WordPress’ vital translation community. This colorful chart shows the percentage of users running the software in different locales. WordPress has a diverse global user base, thanks in large part to the efforts of volunteer translators.

If you want to get involved in the next Global WordPress Translation Day, mark your calendar for May 11, 2019. For more information, check out the #GWTD4 tag on the Polyglots blog and join in on the #polyglots-events Slack channel.

Freemius, a monetization, analytics, and marketing library for WordPress plugin and theme developers, patched an authenticated option update vulnerability in its wordpress-sdk four days ago. The library is included with many popular plugins, such as NextGEN Gallery (1,000,000+ installs), 404 – 301 (100,000+ installs), WP Security Audit Log (80,000+ installs), and FooGallery (100,000 installs+). Freemius CEO Vova Feldman said he would classify it as “a severe vulnerability.”

Feldman had planned to wait to publish anything about the vulnerability until more plugin authors had updated, but the security team at PluginVulnerabilities.com published a detailed explanation of the vulnerability within 24 hours of plugin developers getting notified about the patch:

The vulnerability, an authenticated option update vulnerability, would allow anyone with access to a WordPress account to take complete control of the website. That is a type of vulnerability that hackers will try to exploit if there is significant usage of a plugin. Anyone that allows untrusted individuals access to WordPress accounts and is using a plugin with this library is at a pretty significant risk if they haven’t updated the plugin to a version that fixes this or deactivated the plugin.

Plugin developers using the library have already been notified by Freemius, the team at pluginvulnerabilities.com, and will soon be contacted by the WordPress.org plugin team. A full list of the plugins impacted by this vulnerability is not available yet, but Freemius has a page on its website showcasing 96 WordPress.org plugins and nine themes that use it.

“More than 60% of the developers who are using our SDK have already upgraded to the patched version,” Feldman said. As of today, Feldman said he has not received any reports of the vulnerability having been exploited.

Feldman published a summary of his company’s actions on the security issue and described how Freemius is working to mitigate exposure and try to give users more time to update. The company requested two things from developers using its wordpress-sdk library:

• If this security upgrade will be included in your changelog, please only use generic wording like “Security fix”.
• Even after updating and releasing the patched versions, please do not disclose this issue during the next 30 days, allowing enough time for all our partners and their users to update.

It is in a company’s best interest to keep the details of a product’s security issue under wraps for as long as possible, but that may leave some users exposed when the vulnerability has already been published on the web. Any user who sees an update for a plugin using Freemius is advised to act on that update immediately, regardless of whatever generic note appears in the changelog.

As a company providing a security service, PluginVulnerabilities.com had different priorities in publishing details about the vulnerability, according to a representative who identified himself as John:

In this case where we are not the discoverers. The biggest issue is that vulnerability looks to have already been being exploited when we came across it, so hiding the situation from the public seems highly irresponsible. Our customers pay us to warn them about vulnerabilities in their plugin, so we would need to warn them right away once we became aware of this. If we only warned our customers that obviously raises some serious questions since others in WordPress community would be left in the dark.

In cases like this, where developers are including a third-party library in their plugins, it can take longer for users to receive an update that fixes the vulnerability, since the need for a patch has to be communicated to multiple parties. The situation is similar to the recent vulnerability that Bootstrap patched two weeks ago. Bootstrap announced the vulnerability in the same week it was reported and fixed, instead of trying to delay disclosure, even though thousands of products across the web use the Bootstrap framework.

WordPress.org doesn’t currently have a mechanism to flag certain plugin updates as security updates, but if a security update is severe enough, the plugin team can push updates out faster with cooperation from plugin authors. That route has not yet been pursued in this case, but we will continue monitoring the situation. In the meantime, if you are using a plugin that includes Freemius and the author has not updated, you may want to consider turning the plugin off temporarily until a patch is available.

A new version of WordPress, significant security enhancements, important discussions, and much more – read on to find out what has been going on in the WordPress community for the month of February.

Release of WordPress 5.1

Near the end of the month, WordPress 5.1 was released, featuring significant stability and performance enhancements as well as the first of the Site Health mechanisms that are in active development. Most prominent is the new warning for sites running long-outdated versions of PHP.

You can check out the Field Guide for this release for a detailed look at all the new features and improvements. The next release is already in development with plans to improve the Site Health features, PHP compatibility, and a number of other things.

Want to get involved in testing or building WordPress Core? You can install the WordPress Beta Tester plugin, follow the Core team blog, and join the #core channel in the Making WordPress Slack group.

Gutenberg Development Continues

The block editor that is now a part of WordPress core started out as a project named Gutenberg with the lofty goal of creating a whole new site-building experience for all WordPress users. The first phase of Gutenberg resulted in the block editor that was included in WordPress 5.0, but development didn’t stop there – phase 2 of the project is well underway.

This month, one of the initial goals for this phase was reached with all of the core WordPress widgets being converted to blocks – this will go a long way to allowing full sites to be built using blocks, rather than simply post or page content.

Want to get involved in developing Gutenberg? Check out the GitHub repository and join the #core-editor channel in the Making WordPress Slack group.

Block Editor Comes to the Mobile Apps

As Gutenberg development continues, the Mobile team has been working hard to integrate the new block editor into the WordPress mobile apps. Near the end of February, the team shipped a complete integration in the beta versions of the apps – this a significant milestone and a big step towards unifying the mobile and desktop editing experiences.

Both the iOS and Android apps are open for beta testers, so if you would like to experience the block editor on mobile today, then join the beta program.

Want to get involved in developing the WordPress mobile apps? Follow the Mobile team blog, and join the #mobile channel in the Making WordPress Slack group.

WordPress Triage Team Announced

One of the goals for 2019 that Matt Mullenweg (@matt) announced in his State of the Word address last year was to form a team who would work to manage the ever-increasing number of tickets in Trac, the bug tracker that WordPress Core employs.

This team, known as the Triage Team, has been announced. Their work will involve coordinating with component maintainers, release leads, project leadership, contributors, and other WordPress related projects with issue trackers outside of Trac to ensure that everyone is empowered to focus on contributing.

The team was formed based on nominations of volunteers to take part and will be led by Jonathan Desrosiers (@desrosj). The other members of the team are Chris Christoff (@chriscct7), Tammie Lister (@karmatosed), Sergey Biryukov (@sergey), and Sheri Bigelow (@designsimply) – all of whom have a strong track record of contributing to WordPress, have exhibited good triaging practices, and are overall good community members.

Further Reading:

• In this year alone, the WordPress meetup program has hosted 800 events across the world, all organized by local community members.
• An important discussion has been opened regarding the future of the WordPress Community Summit.
• The Polyglots team has started planning the fourth Global WordPress Translation Day to take place on 11 May 2019.
• The Theme Review team is working on a useful tool named Theme Sniffer to assist theme developers and reviewers in making sure their code is standards-compliant.
• The first WordCamp Nordic is coming up on March 7-8.
• The WordCamp Europe team is looking for feedback on their designs for a Progressive Web Application (PWA) for WordCamp.org.
• The Design team has been working hard on designing the new Navigation Menu block and are looking for feedback.

Have a story that we should include in the next “Month in WordPress” post? Please submit it here.

Creating a block for navigation menus is one of the nine projects Matt Mullenweg identified as a priority for 2019, and the future of WordPress menus is starting to take shape. Designers working on the new Navigation Menu block have published a prototype this week with detailed notes on how users will interact with the block.

The proposed solution would automatically generate a menu and users would able to delete menu items using the keyboard or block settings ellipsis menu. Individual menu items can be moved right or left and more advanced options for reordering or nesting would be hidden behind the block inspector.

Adding a menu item opens a search bar that would give quick access to all the content in the site. From here users can create a new page or use advanced mode to bulk add more pages. The designs aim to hide most of the more complex tasks behind the block inspector.

Reading through the list of interactions this design is expected to cover, it’s clear that navigation menus are one of the most challenging interfaces to bring into the block editor. One of the principles the designs are based on is that “The editing state of the block itself should mimic as closely as possible the front-end output.” However, it’s difficult to fully visualize how this will work. Navigation menus are most likely to be used in the header and/or footer of a website, but it’s not yet clear how themes will reveal a navigation area to Gutenberg.

There are still many questions to be answered and the design team is seeking feedback on the prototype. Comments are open on the post and feedback on more specific interactions can be left on the relevant GitHub tickets or in Figma. The tickets related to the navigation block discussion are listed in the proposal. The design team is currently working on usability testing and aims to have a final design by the end of March.

In this episode, John James Jacoby and I start off by discussing the office chair purchasing process. I recently needed to buy a new chair and was surprised by some of the features that were highlighted.

We talked about block managers and some of the pitfalls that will need to be overcome. For example, what should WordPress do if a user disables a block that’s already used in a post?

We wrap up the show by sharing some of the most pressing issues people are having with WordPress.

Stories Discussed:

Yoast CEO Responds to #YoastCon Twitter Controversy, Calls for Change in the SEO Industry

WordPress 5.1 Improves Editor Performance, Encourages Users to Update Outdated PHP Versions

Block Management Features Proposed for WordPress 5.2

5.2 Proposed Scope and Release Schedule

UI/UX Changes for the Site Health Check Plugin

Jeffrey Zeldman Promoted to Automattic Employee

The Most Pressing Issues People Have with WordPress These Days

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Next Episode: Wednesday, March 6th 3:00 P.M. Eastern

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WordPress release cycles may soon take a more predictable cadence, as contributors are considering moving to a time-based approach. The discussion began during a recent core dev chat in mid-February when Gutenberg phase 2 lead Riad Benguella proposed the project move to shorter, automated release cycles.

The Gutenberg team has successfully been releasing a new version of the plugin every two weeks on schedule and any features that aren’t ready are postponed to the next releases automatically. Benguella contends that this type of release schedule has the potential to bring several benefits to WordPress:

• Less stress for contributors
• Predictability: People can plan around the release timelines easily
• No delays as releases are not feature-based

Shortening major releases may prove more challenging for WordPress, which is at a much larger scale than the Gutenberg plugin. The plugin also has the added advantage of being able to manage releases and development on GitHub.

“I think there are a lot of infrastructure problems that need to be solved for WordPress before we could move to a fast, automated release cycle,” Gary Pendergast said.

“Having a major release once a month is achievable, it’s something I’d like us to get to, but the release process is too manual to have multiple releases running at the same time at the moment.”

Jonathan Desrosiers drafted a proposal that summarizes this discussion and outlines some of the manual tasks required for getting a major release out the door. These include time-consuming tasks like Trac gardening, creating a Field Guide, blog posts for the betas, RCs, and official release, documentation updates, videos, dev notes, and other items that are often completed by volunteers.

The 3-4 month release cycles that WordPress had from versions 3.9 – 4.7 allowed for all of the administrative overhead outlined above to be completed in a reasonable amount of time, but the general consensus is that some of these tasks could be more simplified and/or automated.

Desrosiers highlighted several benefits of moving to a shorter major release cycle, including less drastic change for users that might ultimately result in more users being comfortable enabling automatic updates for major releases. Detriments to shortening the release cycle are the increased burden it puts on volunteers as well as theme and plugin developers who need to push compatibility releases. It would also introduce more backporting work for security releases.

Several contributors have left feedback on the post with insight gleaned from other projects’ release scheduling. Jeremy Felt reviewed Firefox’s release owner table that assigns leadership and dates for several releases in advance.

“I think getting to a shorter release cycle in general will involve scheduling multiple releases and assigning their release leads in advance,” Felt said. “So far most of our scheduling is done as soon as the last release has been shipped.”

Joe McGill examined VS Code’s development process and found several similarities to the process he thinks WordPress could adopt in the future:

1. A long term roadmap (theirs is 6–12 months) outlining major themes and features.
2. A monthly release cadence based on 4 week sprints which begin with milestone planning and always results in a release of whatever was completed in that monthly iteration.
3. Regular project triage, with release priorities managed at the team (i.e. Component) level.
4. Documentation integrated into the development process.
5. Automated testing of releases and upgrades.
6. Only important regressions and security issues are handled in minor releases between monthly milestones, everything else is moved forward to the next release (or reprioritized in the backlog).

Several of these points echo feedback from other contributors who have identified documentation integrated into development and automated testing as ways to speed up major release cycles.

“If we don’t have the infrastructure and tooling to support a 1 month cycle, then I think we could attempt a 2 month cycle with a goal towards moving to shorter cycles,” McGill said.

The Gutenberg plugin’s relentless pace of iteration and predictable release cycles have opened up a world of new ideas for improving the process for WordPress core. Discussion around moving the project to shorter, time-based release cycles is still in the preliminary stages. No major changes have been agreed upon yet, but the process of exploring different ideas has put the spotlight on tasks that could afford to be tightened up in the release process. This falls in line with WordPress’ 2019 theme of “tightening up.”

In Peter’s words, “the most basic way to think of WP Pusher is that it replaces FTP with a flow where updates come directly from GitHub/Bitbucket” through the WordPress core auto-updater.

You may not know Peter built the first version of WP Pusher in a shopping mall in Thailand while traveling the globe for four years. Originally from Copenhagen, today Peter is settled down in Glasgow and has just launched Branch, a Docker-based build and deployment tool for WordPress developers that goes quite a bit further than WP Pusher. Branch is a continuous integration service for WordPress that adds “the ‘build’ and ‘test’ steps” before deployment.

DK: You’ve launched Branch with a manifesto that declares “WordPress developers are developers too” before outlining the well-known lack of modern tools for WordPress development. Why do you think that has been such a long-lamented situation and was there something unique in your experience that drove you to do something about it?

PS: One of the things that makes WordPress really special is its low barrier of entry. The 5-minute install and all of that. The WordPress community proudly consists of a large percentage of amateurs and hobbyists. A lot of people have their first experience with programming because of WordPress, which is great and something WordPress should be really proud of. Most development frameworks exist to make the developer more productive, but I think WordPress has another purpose. The purpose of WordPress is to democratize publishing (which is something user facing), not to be an awesome tool for developers. There are obviously some political decisions behind this lack as well. Religiously supporting outdated versions of PHP is just one of them. Not having any sort of dependency management, so everyone has to reinvent the wheel on each project is another one.

Every WordPress developer is asking the same questions. “How do I manage my dependencies?” or “how do I migrate changes to the database?” These are questions people literally ask me because I sell WordPress developer tools. Personally, I didn’t get into programming because of WordPress. I have been doing PHP development since my early teens, and my first job was as a Ruby on Rails junior developer. “Growing up” as a developer, I was raised very strictly! My co-workers would write failing unit tests for me, and I’d have to implement the code. This made me pretty religious about best practices, testing etc. After RoR I discovered Laravel in 2013 and helped build the Laravel community in Copenhagen. However, during high school, I had built quite a few different projects using WordPress for myself and my clients. Once in a while, I’d have to update these old WordPress sites, which always involved installing an FTP client. This was rough after five years of continuous deployment using Git and automated tests. I hate FTP with a passion. It’s an error-prone and outdated way to deploy your code.

Inspired by some of the tooling I knew from RoR and Laravel, I set out to build a better way to deploy WordPress code. After a lot of experimentation, I landed on WP Pusher. However, WP Pusher only moves the code. It doesn’t run your build scripts or your unit tests. It just blindly moves your code from a Git repository to WordPress. I was intentionally ignoring this problem for a while, being kind of intimidated by it I guess. However, people kept asking me the questions I described earlier, so I started experimenting again and believe I found a really cool solution with Branch. Branch is built on top of Docker, so everything you can imagine doing inside of Docker containers will eventually be available within Branch. A major part of building Branch is to make this great, but highly technical, stack available to WordPress developers.

The Branch Dashboard showing the configuration options for a theme’s build steps.

DK: Does Branch build on or incorporate WP Pusher, or are these totally separate technologies? As SaaS businesses, will they remain separate or merge? I imagine some of your agency customers for WP Pusher might want to move up to Branch, if they don’t lose anything in the process.

PS: The best way to understand Branch, and why it’s different from WP Pusher, is to imagine it as two separate parts: The build + test part (continuous integration) and the deployment part (continuous deployment). The deployment part of Branch very much builds upon WP Pusher. The build part is what’s new. It’s the missing link between developing on your local machine and shipping to production.

One of the things that excite me the most about Branch is that it’s a hosted SaaS, compared to WP Pusher which is “just” a WordPress plugin. That allows me to add a much more advanced feature set and ship much faster. With a SaaS, you are in control of the environment in which the software runs. That gives you a lot more flexibility and opportunity. I want WP Pusher to stay around for everyone to keep using. However, I want to make Branch so good that everyone wants to switch eventually. But WP Pusher will stay around. That’s for sure.

DK: What did you learn from life as a digital nomad? Have you given it up for good now, or do you plan to do more traveling?

PS: That’s a good question, I should probably spend some more time thinking about! I came into the “nomadic” lifestyle sort of by accident. It wasn’t very purposeful. I think on a personal level the number one lesson has been how important for me it is to have a base. Traveling for a long time, you become very aware of your roots. You spend a lot of time thinking about the good and the bad parts of being back home. I think ideally it allows you to go “home” and have a better idea of which parts of settled life you like, and which ones you’d rather be without.

On a business level, WP Pusher was born on the road and has a very different nature than most businesses. From day one it’s been a premise that I wasn’t always around 24/7. It’s never been a problem, because it’s never been an expectation. I’ve never had to change anything about WP Pusher to allow me to travel, because I was already traveling when I built it. Now I’m pretty settled, and I live with my fiancé and only travel for smaller trips. I’ll never stop traveling, hopefully, but I don’t think I’ll ever live on the road again! 

Gatsby WordPress Themes is a new collaborative project led by Zac Gordon with help from Jason Bahl, Rich Tabor, Muhammad Muhsin, and Alexandra Spalato. The group is working together to port popular themes for use with Gatsby, the React-based static site generator that uses GraphQL for its data layer.

Known for its performance and ease of deployment, Gatsby has captured developers’ attention and was one of the rising stars of the React ecosystem throughout 2018. Using WordPress as a headless CMS, developers can pull data into Gatsby and enjoy the scalability, speed, and security that comes with serving static files.

Although static site generators have been around for awhile, the current Gatsby craze seems to be rooted in the fact that the project uses React, Webpack, and modern JavaScript and CSS.

“WordPress devs love Gatsby because it lets them throw away the entire old school PHP based WordPress theming system and built sites with React and GraphQL,” Gordon said.

“Gatsby devs are finding a new interest in WordPress because by default you have to edit Gatsby content in Markdown. WordPress gives a much richer editing experience.”

Jason Bahl, creator of the WPGraphQL project, is a technical advisor for the Gatsby WP Themes project. He was inspired to collaborate with the team because he thinks Gatsby has a lot of benefits for WordPress sites.

“The end result of a Gatsby site is a static site with no live Database connection,” Bahl said. “Just HTML and JavaScript files, so performance is better than even the most highly cached WordPress sites, and security is better because there’s no live database connection to be compromised.

“Also, Gatsby is fully React. With Gutenberg in core, WordPress developers are writing a LOT more React. Using Gatsby as the presentation layer for a site allows for components to be re-used across the admin and the theme, where now developers need to create React components for Gutenberg and PHP template partials for the ‘regular’ theme rendering.”

Regular WordPress theme are not immediately compatible with Gatsby, since the entire theme has to be built with React, but developers can use the same styles.

“We are taking a distinctly different direction than the WordPress themes on the Gatsby themes repo currently,” Gordon said. “We are going to base all of our themes on the WP GraphQL plugin. The default Gatsby themes now work on a wrapper on top of the REST API and don’t have live GraphQL endpoints, so they are limited.”

Gatsby WordPress Themes Project Partners with Theme Shops to Offer Free and Commercial Gatsby Themes

The Gatsby WordPress Themes project will offer a combination of free and commercial Gatsby themes. Gordon is partnering with theme shops that are open to his team doing the heavy lifting of porting popular themes over to Gatsby.

“The first two theme partners are Rich Tabor of CoBlocks and ThemeBeans, who is licensing us his super clean and Gutenberg perfect ‘Tabor’ premium theme,” Gordon said. “Then we have Leland Fiegel, a fellow DC WP chap and long time friend, from Themetry. They specialize in themes on WordPress.com, which means they are also battle tested. They have licensed us their great business theme Belmont.”

Gordon said the first versions of the Gatsby themes are targeted towards business and brochure sites that might have a couple pages laid out in Gutenberg and possibly a news/blog section and contact page.

“Since headless sites don’t work with a lot of plugins by default, the V1 of all the themes will be super opinionated and focused (but 100% extendable),” Gordon said.

“The final set of themes are from the WordPress default themes collection. We will have a detailed article showing how we ported the Twenty Nineteen theme over to a Gatsby theme and that will be the first of the default themes we do.”

Although this initiative is aimed at simpler WordPress sites, creating and maintaining a Gatsby site isn’t necessarily going to be well-suited to beginners.

“As far as the target audience, I think any WordPress site that doesn’t have super fast moving content – like the average marketing site or documentation site is perfect for Gatsby,” Bahl said.

“Gatsby does have a ‘Build’ step, where it collects ALL the data needed for the entire site, then outputs the content in the static Gatsby site. So even changing a typo on a post would require the ENTIRE SITE to rebuild, which can take anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes, which may not be acceptable for sites that need content live FAST (like a newspaper).

“But for your average WordPress site, waiting two minutes for your changes to be live in production is acceptable. Many heavily cached WordPress sites already experience a delay in content being live anyway.”

Gordon said he doesn’t believe Gatsby is the right fit for all WordPress sites but for certain projects it “can be a really cool approach both in terms of development experience and gains in speed and security.”

The group is aiming to have its first themes released for WordCamp Miami in mid-March and plans to release more as they make new partnerships and see an actual demand. Gordon is actively looking for more theme shops to bring on board.

“Zac will be primarily maintaining the Gatsby themes, though I’ll help where I’m needed,” ThemeBeans founder Rich Tabor said. “We’re still in the very initial stages of development.

“Overall, it’s a super interesting idea. Static site generators are increasing in popularity and Gatsby is pretty much leading the pack in terms of performance and ease-of-use — both of which WordPress is not particularly well-known for (but is making strides to improve).”

I remember when I was about 10 years and my mom got our first ever computer. She went to the store and got a bunch of CD’s which I was hyped about because I knew some of them were games. She gave me a yellow box that had “Microsoft FrontPage” on the front and said, “Here, learn this”. She saw my confused face and said “It shows you how to build websites. The web is huge right now. If you have this skill, one day you can make a lot of money.” I did go through the course and was pretty good at HTML and CSS but never stuck with it.

Besides, no one else I knew was doing it and what do moms know anyway?

Everything. They know everything.

This was my first taste of coding. But it definitely wasn’t the last.

Growing Out

2016 was a bad year. I was still living in my hometown Philly, constantly working overtime at my low paying job, constantly stressed, trying to prove myself to a company that only viewed me as a number. That combined with the two hour commute both ways daily and I eventually burned myself out severely. I was so depressed that I would go to sleep crying and then wake back up crying again willing myself to get out of bed so that I could go to work. Eventually, I saw a therapist who diagnosed me with depression and she recommended that I take a break from work to recover. I was out of work for three months still recovering when my job called not to check on me, but to see when I was coming back. I ended up quitting over the phone, and never looked back.

But I knew I needed to find out what I wanted to do career-wise. I decided to start teaching myself HTML and CSS again to see what I could do with that skill. I took the CodeAcademy courses and was surprised at how much I remembered.

I eventually found someone who wanted me to do maintenance on their site for really cheap. I was excited because in just a couple of months I landed a client! But it was also a HUGE mistake.

He was constantly nagging me daily on fixing his site, and every time I would fix it he would find something else wrong. Worse part is that went on for months without me collecting any extra money from him. I didn’t have him sign a contract (BIG Mistake) and he would contact me at various hours which I always responded right away because I felt I had to (Another mistake). Eventually, it got to be too much and I had to cut him off completely. I learned quite a bit about the business of web development and knew I needed to do more research before jumping head first into this again.

A Leap Of Faith

Fast forward to December 2017, I got offered an IT Management job in DC and moved within a couple of weeks with only $50 in my pocket which no place to live. But I made it work.  I stayed in a hostel for two weeks while I found an apartment. My mom helped with getting the funds for my apartment and without her support, I don’t know think I would be here now. I stopped my web stuff for a while so I can focus on my transition. I’m not gonna lie, as much as I was happy to move here, I was also very lonely. The folks at my job were older and they were all family people, and I knew no one out here. But the biggest challenge was trying to run a whole IT department by myself and the upper-management C-Suite folks not having a clue about tech or why it costs so much. It also didn’t help that there were folks that had a huge dislike of IT and therefore transferred that dislike to me. I knew about a month into this job that this wasn’t going to be the path that I was going an needed to do something else.

I searched online for a web course that would help me learn front-end development and eventually I came across Skillcrush. They were offering a course to teach WordPress development and all you needed to know was HTML and CSS. They offered the course for $150 a month for 3 months. After researching and seeing how many companies were using WordPress and the value in it I decided to take the plunge and take the course. I started in May and completed it in August.

While taking the course I joined their Slack and met a group of amazing women, some who were alumni and found success from freelancing building websites with WordPress. They shared advice and tips on how to find clients and freelance and how they made the transition.

I took all the knowledge I saw and absorbed it like a sponge. Then in September, I took the plunge and quit my job.

Finding Community

Now, this was reckless of me. While I did have some savings to keep me afloat for a minute I never planned this out. If you’re going to freelance I highly recommend you don’t go this route. I started looking everywhere I could to get gigs. Upwork was the most successful platform especially for finding WordPress gigs. I was able to find a few successful gigs and luckily got to work with a web agency which gave me a steady stream of income for a while. I learned how to do contracts, set rates and expectations and through these methods and more was able to secure quality clients that I still work with today. One client referred me to others who needed work, which brought in even more income. While I was doing this I also decided to join Twitter and found a community of other black folks who were also starting their tech journey. I was able to help others and well as ask for advice when I needed it. Finally, I no longer felt alone.

But then in February, the agency jobs started to slow down. I could have gone a little longer without a proper job but I decided to go back into the workforce because I wanted to build back up my savings faster and also invest in other parts of my business. So I decided to get back into the job world and got a contract job with the federal government. The job was good and I did so well that after 2 months they offered me a full-time position. I still work at this job to this day.

As for my WordPress websites, I still do work for existing clients if they really need it. In addition, I run a blog called #WordPressWednesday (now named #WordPressWisdom) where I share tips and tricks on all things WordPress. But my journey isn’t over. I recently got accepted into Flatiron Software Development Bootcamp where I will be diving into more backend development. I also have a lot of other things coming which I can’t share just yet. It took a lot of work to get to this point.

I don’t think I would have ever gotten to this point without the support of the tech community on Twitter and most notably the Digital Empire community that I’m a part of.

Having a place to share resources, tips and jokes daily have kept me motivated and going for the past year.

WordPress for me has been a life skill that has brought wealth. It has given me the ability to generate a whole other means of income as well and give resources to other people who are looking for a place to start in the coding world. But it wasn’t an easy journey to get this point. And if you feel stuck like I was, know that there are people here for you. Start your journey today. Get on Twitter and introduce yourself to the community. Ask for help. And most importantly, know that you are not alone.

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