WordPress.org

As reported by the Wall Street Journal, and an interview about on the WP.com blog, Automattic has acquired the Atavist platform, magazine, and team. Looking forward to working alongside the team: we’re keeping the magazine going and it’ll complement Longreads, and integrating the best of the platform’s CMS and publisher features into WordPress.com and Jetpack and after that’s done providing an upgrade path so all of its publishers can move to being WordPress-powered.

At his WCEU keynote address in Belgrade, Matt Mullenweg laid out a detailed roadmap for Gutenberg to land in WordPress 5.0 within the next few months, garnering mixed reactions from attendees. Gutenberg’s timeline is one of the most pressing questions for those who work in the WordPress ecosystem.

The Gutenberg team has sustained a rapid pace of development over the past year with 30 releases since development began. There are currently 14,000 sites actively using the plugin and Mullenweg plans to roll it out to WordPress.com users in the near future. He announced that the WordPress 5.0 release could be ready as soon as August. In the meantime, the Gutenberg team will continue to refine its current features according to the roadmap Mullenweg outlined in his keynote:

June 2018

• Freeze new features into Gutenberg
• Hosts, agencies and teachers invited to opt-in sites they have influence over
• Opt-in for wp-admin users on WP.com
• Mobile App support in the Aztec editor across iOs and Android

July 2018

• 4.9.x release with a strong invitation to install either Gutenberg or Classic Editor plugin
• Opt-out for wp-admin users on WP.com
• Heavy triage and bug gardening, getting blockers to zero
• Explore expanding Gutenberg beyond the post into site customization

August 2018 and beyond

• All critical issues resolved
• Integration with Calypso, offering opt-in users
• 100k+ sites having makde 250k+ post using Gutenberg
• Core merge, beginning the 5.0 release cycle
• 5.0 beta releases and translations completed
• Mobile version of Gutenberg by the end of the year

Mullenweg said he hopes to increase Gutenberg usage to 100,000 sites with 250,000 posts made over the next few months. WordPress.com will be instrumental in that goal with a call to action for opt-in that will appear on several hundred thousand sites. In July, WordPress.com will switch the Gutenberg editor to opt-out. Mullenweg said he hopes to gather data from how users respond, especially those who have third-party plugins active on their sites.

Switching between editing posts in the mobile apps currently breaks but Mullenweg anticipates this will be resolved by August, with full mobile versions of Gutenberg available by the end of the year.

Mullenweg opened his keynote by drawing attendees’ attention to a new “Public Code” link in the footer of WordPress.org. This campaign, organized by Free Software Foundation Europe, aims to require any publicly financed software developed for the public sector be made available under a Free and Open Source Software license.

Mullenweg also announced St. Louis, MO, as the next location for WordCamp US in 2019-2020. The local WordPress community in the city spans two states with members from both Missouri and Illinois who have hosted seven WordCamps since 2011.

Developers and Agencies Double Down on Gutenberg Preparation, “Playing for Keeps”

The process of getting products and client websites ready for Gutenberg is a leap for nearly every company and freelancer invested in the WordPress ecosystem. Mullenweg said he cannot guarantee a specific date for release but thinks that “5.0 is going be ready within a relatively short time frame.”

Although many WCEU attendees expressed skepticism about the accelerated timeline for Gutenberg’s inclusion in core, most recognize the importance of working towards making their clients and products compatible with the new editor.

Gutenberg technical lead Matias Ventura said it’s too early to tell whether the WordPress community will be ready by the time Gutenberg is included in core. “I think people have already been trying to get ready and we’re already seeing many major sites being launched using Gutenberg,” Ventura said. “From what we’ve seen with plugin authors building compatibility for Gutenberg, it seems there’s already enough momentum going on that it could be achievable.”

Brad Williams, CEO of WebDevStudios, said his company’s team of engineers has been actively preparing for Gutenberg since late last year and is “very excited about what it means for the future of WordPress publishing.” Williams assigned two Gutenberg Leads internally to head up everything related to the new editor and conducted internal training with staff. WebDevStudios also built and released its own Gutenberg add-on framework called WDS Blocks, a framework that includes new custom blocks that many WDS clients use.

“Having a potential release date, even if it’s only a target month, is incredibly helpful,” Williams said. “This gives us a goal to work towards with each of our clients to verify we are ready for the release. I expect the majority of our clients will not enable Gutenberg on release, but we still need to make sure we have an upgrade plan ready for WordPress 5.0. We are working closely with each of our clients so they understand what is coming, the benefits Gutenberg can provide them, and what a potential roll-out plan will look like. We are also making sure any new leads coming in the door are aware of Gutenberg and the impact it will have on their new WordPress project.”

Gary Jones, plugin developer and WordPress engineer at Gamajo, expressed apprehension about the timeline. He also plans to make use of the Classic Editor plugin to opt sites out of using Gutenberg.

“With 737 open issues, I think the August timeline may still be a little short,” Jones said. “That’s only for the ‘critical issues’ to be resolved but introducing such a massive change to the basics of managing content like this needs more than just the critical issues resolved; it needs all of the workflow to be very smooth as well.”

Jones said he doesn’t think the typical rhetoric of getting a ‘1.0’ release out the door applies in the case of Gutenberg. “There’s too much riding on it for it not to make a great first impression for the user base who haven’t been following its progress,” Jones said. “A plugin can have a much quicker release turnaround time for non-critical improvements and fixes than what WP core would have.”

Jones said he plans to wait until the merge proposal before tackling plugin compatibility and will wait until 5.0 is out to start improving the experience for his clients. He said this may require creating custom blocks or installing plugins that add custom blocks clients might need. “By then we’d also know how ACF, Pods. and other plugins we use, and the Genesis theme, are supporting Gutenberg editor (or not),” Jones said.

Jake Goldman, President and founder of 10up, said his company already has an internal mandate that all new public plugins and major plugin updates must have at least “beta” support for Gutenberg. 10up’s Distributor product is already Gutenberg-ready and the company has several Gutenberg-ready plugins and updates expected to ship in the next 1-2 months.

“Clients are trickier,” Goldman said. “We have two big client projects started in the last couple of months that are using Gutenberg, and some pretty complicated custom blocks and extensions. We have a couple of other customers who are curious or in the exploratory phase. Two big client projects have us a bit gun shy about adopting [Gutenberg] as the ‘standard’ on newer projects until it matures a bit more and begins to focus a bit more on the ‘enterprise use case / user stories’ – there are some real challenges with those user stories.”

Goldman also said he was encouraged to hear that Calypso will adopt Gutenberg in the next couple of months, because he hopes it will address some of the confusion and fragmentation issues.

He doesn’t anticipate Gutenberg actually landing in August, however. “I don’t see August, frankly, because I don’t think the core team has a clear vision for ‘how’ an upgrade with Gutenberg will work,” Goldman said. “That said, I suspect Matt is knowingly putting timeline pressure on the team – a bit of ‘if I say August, we can probably hit November’ type mentality.”

Mason James, founder of Valet, said he is confident his clients and products will be ready after testing Gutenberg on hundreds of sites. His team is watching a few products that have compatibility issues but he is hopeful these will be resolved soon.

“The timeline of August seems a bit optimistic,” James said. “I’d be surprised if that is met, but our clients will be in good shape if that happens. We’ve also been sending information to our clients via email, a whitepaper, to try to mitigate any surprises ahead of time.

“We decided last year that Gutenberg was a tremendous opportunity for us to reinforce our value proposition to our clients,” James said. “It’s an ongoing important initiative for us this year; We’re playing for keeps.”

Carrie Dils, a WordPress developer, consultant, and educator, has also jumped head first into getting her products compatible with Gutenberg ahead of the new timeline.

“I’m feverishly working to get an updated version of the Utility Pro theme (my primary product) out the door,” Dils said. “The Gutenberg updates are just one part of a larger overhaul (including a minimum requirement of PHP7 and WP 5.0+). I’ve also made the decision not to incorporate Classic Editor theme styles. All looking forward, no looking back.”

I really love this thread and the replies sharing stories about Val Vesa’s experience talking about WordPress in an Uber / Lyft ride:

My @Uber driver last night, going home from airport asked me where was I coming from.
Told here about #WCEU
– what is that, she asked.
– the European Conference for #WordPress, I said.
Her eyes sparkling, she grabbed the wheel firm, looked in the rear view mirror at me and said,

— Val Vesa | Social Media & Travel Photography (@adspedia) June 18, 2018

In this episode, John James Jacoby and I are joined by Milan Ivanović who helped organize WordCamp EU in Belgrade, Serbia this past weekend. Ivanović describes what it was like to organize such a large event, challenges the team overcame, and a few details related to WordCamp EU 2019 that will be held in Berlin, Germany. John and I finished the show discussing Matt Mullenweg’s keynote presentation and Gutenberg’s proposed timeline.

Stories Discussed:

Gutenberg Team Panel Talks Release Timeline, Theme Building, and Customization at WCEU
WordCamp Europe 2018 Contributor Day Posts Record Turnout Amid Wi-Fi Outage
Mullenweg announced Gutenberg Roadmap
WP Rig – A WordPress Starter Theme and Build Process in One

WPWeekly Meta:

Next Episode: Wednesday, June 27th 3:00 P.M. Eastern

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Listen To Episode #321:

Almost exactly two years ago I was looking at Google Analytics Realtime and someone from St. Lucia popped up.  St. Lucia isn’t a very big place. In the map on the right you can see a little pink dot in the center.  That’s the size of St. Lucia compared to Kansas. The entire country has fewer people than my city. I wondered who that was, so I tweeted out to the world, asking if anyone knew who that might be. A friend from Themeisle said “Our man Uriahs lives there, maybe it’s him!”

I looked up Uriahs, and sure enough, it was him! I was fascinated to learn what a WordPress community would look like on an island that size. As it turns out, he’s fairly alone in WordPress geographically. When I met him, he had never been off his tiny island in the Caribbean.

Uriahs’ essay is about learning and finding a career in a global workspace, having a GOOD job, all while living someplace where that job didn’t even exist.

A Minority Amongst Minorities

The post Proving Geography Doesn’t Matter appeared first on HeroPress.

• The Atlantic on today’s masculinity being stifling and imagining a better boyhood.
  .
  
• When Deportation is a Death Sentence is one of the most devastating articles I’ve read in a long time.
  
• A review of the Cy Twombly show, he has an amazing museum in Houston and I enjoy learning more about him.
  
• The Great Anthropologists: Margaret Mead, so fascinating.
  
• Dating columnist reveals how ‘Sex and the City’ ruined her life, has a happy ending.
  
• Barbearians at the Gate “A journey through a quixotic New Hampshire town teeming with libertarians, fake news, guns, and—possibly—furry invaders.” Amazing.
  
• Lena Dunham Explores Alone Time After a Break-Up
  
  
• My Adventures with the Trip Doctors, aka “Michael Pollan takes psychedelics.” See also: Interview with Longreads.
  .
  
• Kanye West and Why the Myth of “Genius” Must Die.
  .
  
• Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds, also well-covered in a great book I just finished, Black Box Thinking.
  .
  
• Admiral Shovel and the Toilet Roll — wow.
  
• The Work Required to Have an Opinion, wisdom from Charlie Munger.

Version 4.0.8 of the Akismet plugin for WordPress is now available.

4.0.8 contains the following changes:

• Improved the grammar and consistency of the in-admin privacy related notes (notice and config).
• Revised in-admin explanation of the comment form privacy notice to make its usage clearer.
• Added rel=”nofollow noopener” to the comment form privacy notice to improve SEO and security.

To upgrade, visit the Updates page of your WordPress dashboard and follow the instructions. If you need to download the plugin zip file directly, links to all versions are available in the WordPress plugins directory.

Continuing my series about ScoutDocs and the process of building it, this week I’m talking about Build Tools.

What is ScoutDocs? ScoutDocs is a WordPress plugin that adds simple file-sharing to your WordPress site.

Coding in React involves JSX, a bizarre-but-wonderful XML syntax that you dump directly into the middle of your JavaScript code. It feels exquisitely wrong. Browsers agree, so your JSX-containing JS code will have to be transpiled to regular JavaScript. This can involve using a complex maze of tools. Babel, NPM, Webpack, Browserify, Gulp, Grunt, Uglify, Uglifyify (yes, you read that right), and more. You have decisions to make, and you will find fierce advocates for various solutions.

For ScoutDocs, I decided to go with Grunt for task running, because I was already comfortable with it, and I needed it for grunt-wp-deploy. Use a task runner you are already comfortable with. Even if it is just NPM scripts. You’re learning a lot of new things already. It’s okay to keep your task runner setup.

Next, I had to choose a JS bundler which would let me write and use modular code that gets pulled together into a browser-executable bundle. After deliberating between Webpack and Browserify, I chose Browserify. Webpack is really complicated. It is also very powerful. I recommend you avoid it until you need it. I haven’t needed it yet, and found Browserify to be easier to configure and use, even though it’s a bit on the slow side.

As I was building ScoutDocs and tweaking my dev tools, tweaking my Grunt file, and writing code to search/replace strings etc, I began to feel like the time I was spending too much time on tooling. Was I becoming one of those people who spend all their time listening to productivity podcasts instead of… being productive? I can see how someone could get sucked into that trap, but putting a reasonable amount of time into configuring your development tools can pay dividends for you beyond simply the time saved. It can also prevent mistakes, keep you in coding mode more often, and increasing your confidence in your code builds. Spend the time up front to make your tools work for you.

Other posts in this series:

• Outsourcing
• React
• WordPress Rest API
• PHP 7
• Build tools
• Unit testing

Morten Rand-Hendricksen, Senior Staff Instructor at LinkedIn Learning, has released WP Rig. WP Rig is a WordPress starter theme and build process combined into one. The starter theme provides a minimal set of templates with the ability to drag-and-drop files from the WordPress template hierarchy.

It contains a heavily optimized code and file structure, support for lazy-loading images, and documented helper functions. The build process requires no configuration and provides a modern foundation to develop on top of.

Although WP Rig ships with a starter theme, the build process works with any theme you choose to use. WP Rig uses Gulp to manage and optimize files, BrowserSync to immediately preview from inside the browser, and ES2015 to parse JavaScript. Babel, PostCSS, and CSSNext is used to parse CSS. The WordPress Coding Standards and ESLint are used to check code quality.

VS Code is tightly integrated with WP Rig but developers can use any code editor they choose.

Rand-Hendriksen says the goal of the project is to provide a starting point where developers can write accessible and performant code from the start using best practices.

“WordPress and the web it lives on has evolved,” he said. “So have the tools we use to build experiences and interactions on and with the web. WordPress theme development is no longer ‘just’ about writing PHP and CSS and JavaScript.

“It’s also about accessibility and build processes and coding standards and performance best practices and and modern coding languages and browser support and a myriad of other topics.

“WP Rig bridges this gap by building accessibility, performance, coding standards, and modern coding best practices in by default.”

LinkedIn Learning donated Rand-Hendriksen’s time to WP Rig. In collaboration with XWP, Google, and other members of the WordPress community, it was released as an open source project that is maintained by him and Rachel Cherry.

“It is not owned or branded by any company, nor beholden to a company goal or ideology,” he said. “The purpose and goal of WP Rig is to provide the WordPress community with a theme development rig that puts accessibility, performance, and modern best practices in the front seat to the benefit of the end-user and the web as a whole.”

You can download WP Rig for free from the project’s site or on GitHub. To learn how to use it, LinkedIn Learning is offering a free course entitled “Build WordPress Themes with WP Rig.” The course covers a myriad of topics including, configuring the VS Code workpace settings, Templates, and AMP integration.

For more information about WP Rig check out the project’s official announcement.

WordCamp Europe hosted a successful contributor day in Belgrade despite a wi-fi outage during the first half of the day. The event posted record numbers with 529 attendees registered to contribute across 24 teams.

Contributors had the opportunity to make connections and conversations with team members and representatives from other teams while the wi-fi was down.

Had the chance to meet @aaroncampbell and discuss WordPress core security with him and a couple of attendees on #wceu contributor day. Thanks for the amazing chat folks!

It is my first WordCamp Europe and it definitely won't be the last!

— Bojidar Valchovski (@bdvalchovski) June 14, 2018

Had an awesome #WCEU contributor day today. Had some great conversations and made good progress on a few patches to improve the development experience despite the WiFi issues. Was also very proud to see SIX @Yoast'ers lead different contributor teams! #WordPress #family

— Omar Reiss (@OmarReiss) June 14, 2018

Contributors submitted patches and made more progress online later in the day when the wi-fi resumed.

So proud of the WordPress Coding Standards team at #WCEU contributor day. Look at all the patches which are flooding in!!!!@flipkeijzer @GaryJ @fimdalinha @Wonderm00n @niq1982 @moorscode @vladilie94 @MCiufudean pic.twitter.com/lchrR4ZmHX

— Juliette (@jrf_nl) June 14, 2018

Look at all these lovely people contributing to #WordPress at #WCEU Contributor Day

Thank you, you rock! pic.twitter.com/LtRlyolYPL

— Milana Cap (@DjevaLoperka) June 14, 2018

Attendees worked on a variety of different projects from improving the project’s coding standards to documenting best practices for hosts working with WordPress.

Evangelia Pappa traveled from Greece to attend her first WordCamp Europe, joining the community team to get answers about helping her local deaf community.

“In my country you have a lot of deaf people who want to attend WordCamp and also the meetups that we do for the Greek WP community,” Pappa said. “We have found a way to assist them while they are at WordCamps with sign language, but are still struggling with meetups, so I am trying to find answers here in order to help other members of the community.”

Rocío Valdivia traveled from Spain to attend her 6th WordCamp Europe and also joined the Community Team for contributor day, creating documentation and mentoring WordCamp organizers.

“I’ve been having a meeting with the WordCamp Nordic organizing team,” Valdivia said. “We are talking about the next WordCamp Nordic, a large regional WordCamp, that will be held next year in Helsinki in March.”

The Hosting team was also able to work, despite the wi-fi outage, bringing together representatives from different countries and hosting companies.

“We’ve been going through and writing some best practices and documentation,” Michael Schroder said. “We’ve been making some good progress on the performance area of the docs, so I feel pretty good about getting some of that committed today.”

The Contribution Area is being put to good use at #WCEU . First time we’re using a dedicated room to allow for a continuance of Contributor Day. pic.twitter.com/lTgR8OdLBf

— Remkus de Vries (@DeFries) June 15, 2018

For the first time, WordCamp Europe also set aside a spacious, designated room for attendees who wanted to continue collaborating on contributions during the main conference.

Wifi outages are a common occurrence at WordCamp Contributor days. While many attendees I spoke with said they were frustrated and inconvenienced by the inability to be productive, others expressed happy sentiments about the opportunity to be together in one place.

“The most important thing about contributor day is talking to people, getting to know each other, face timing in real life,” Polyglots team lead Petya Raykovska said. “These are always very useful connections to have, learning everybody’s name, asking questions about their experience contributing, and them asking you questions about general experience with the team. It’s actually been great. I feel like it’s given people a chance to talk to each other. No time is lost in contributor day, really.”

Welcome to the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and via RSS for your favorite podcatcher. Post Status Draft is hosted by Brian Krogsgard and co-host Brian Richards.

In this episode, Brian is joined by guest-host Brian Casel. Brian runs Audience Ops, a productized service that offers all aspects of content creation for companies. Brian has been in the WordPress community for a long time, and for years has worked on creating processes around his business to enable him to get beyond a freelancer work life and into treating services like products.

Before Audience Ops, he ran Restuarant Engine — a niche WordPress site provider, where he really honed many of the processes his company still uses today — which he sold for six figures.

We dig in to why he decided to make a transformation with his businesses to be so process oriented, and how he turned that into the 30-person organization it is today, as well as the various courses and communities around Productize and Scale.

By the way, if you like this interview, Brian has an active job posting on Post Status for a blog content writer for Audience Ops.

Links

• Audience Ops
• Productize and Scale newsletter
• Productize Podcast
• Productize Course
• Restaurant Engine
• Ops Calendar
• Tropical MBA DC

Sponsor: Yoast

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The Gutenberg team took questions from a full room users and developers this morning before diving into the specifics of the editor’s design, block creation, and how to further extend the new interface. The first question they addressed is the one everyone is asking: When will Gutenberg land in core?

The team said the editor is pretty close to feature complete and should achieve that in the next few months when version 3.3 is released. At that point the focus will be on refining the current experience. They estimate this to happen in June or the first week of July but also hinted at more information coming in Matt Mullenweg’s keynote address this afternoon.

Developers also asked about the criteria that will be used to decide that Gutenberg is ready for a WordPress release. The project has a scope and features MVP issue on GitHub that provides an overview for the major functionality that will be introduced in the first version of the new editor. It shows which features have already been shipped and which ones are remaining.

The team explained that many of the final features have come from developer and user feedback. Some features were not necessarily planned for V1, but it became more apparent that these were needed because they improved either the developer or user experience. For example, within the past four or five months the team found that the child blocks would be necessary to allow developers to be more expressive in extending the editor. A few of the remaining issues include inline images and post locking for concurrent users, but the team doesn’t anticipate any major new features on the horizon before V1 is released.

Gutenberg engineers also assured workshop attendees that the project is being built with backwards compatibility in mind. One person asked what will happen when the 5.0 release lands. The team explained that the Gutenberg update will not change all the content on WordPress sites. When users open a post in the editor they will have the option to convert that content to block format so it will work with the new editor. If it doesn’t quite work, users be able to fall back to the classic editor.

The team said they took great lengths not to alter how WordPress deals with data. Gutenberg does not change the content structure. One of the cornerstones for the project is providing an update that will not fragment the content structure. There will be a lot of resources available ahead of the release for helping everyone move forward together.

Gutenberg engineers said they are working to be conscious not to delay the project, because the longer the delay, the more potential users WordPress is losing because the software is not easy enough for them to build and customize content and websites.

How Will Theme Building Change with Gutenberg?

Gutenberg designers and engineers also tackled questions about how the new editor will change the theme building experience. Design lead Tammie Lister emphasized the importance of theme developers first getting better at creating themes that do not try to do everything. The basic purpose of a theme is to style the frontend and provide an editor style. One potential way forward for theme developers is to provide additional features by releasing a suite of blocks via a plugin. Lister said she hopes that themes will become a lot lighter in the Gutenberg era and encouraged developers to utilize style guides.

The team also said that existing themes will continue to function and redesigning a theming API, without the hassle of editing a bunch of PHP files, may be possible in the future. However, it’s too early to know what that will look like. For now, the rendering engine is not changing. Theme developers interested in Gutenberg compatibility should start looking towards deconstructing their themes into individual elements and learn how to express a theme as a list of blocks.

How Will Gutenberg Handle Customization?

Attendees asked several questions regarding the specific plan to implement customization, or live previewing, after Gutenberg is in core. The current phase 1 handles content editing and puts the infrastructure in place to support customization. There are some issues on GitHub for transforming widgets into blocks, which will be a step towards the site building experience. The team has already implemented direct manipulation on the WYSIWYG road but phase 2 will cover more aspects of customization.

Gutenberg is not ready to replace the Customizer anytime soon, but the next phase will explore what a block-based experience of customization will look like. When asked if Gutenberg will “kill off some of the page builders,” the team said the goal is for page building type applications to be able to use Gutenberg as a springboard for different implementations that extend the editor in ways that benefit different types of users.

An attendee asked how the team plans to enhance adoption once Gutenberg lands in core. The team said they are working on an experimental feature called ‘tips’ that offers a story walkthrough of the publishing workflow. It includes helpful nudges to assist users in getting better at navigating the interface. The wider ecosystem has already responded with courses and tutorials to help developers get on board. The WordPress training team is also working on some training materials to use at WordCamps with tutorials for developers to learn how to convert existing plugins and themes to be Gutenberg-ready.

In this episode, John James Jacoby and I are joined by Jack Lenox, Software Engineer at Automattic, to discuss his new project, SustyWP. Lenox explains how he built the site so that it only has 7KB of data transfer, what sustainability on the web means to him, and the relationship between sustainability and optimization to create a better user experience. We end the show discussing the latest WordPress headlines and share information on how you can watch WordCamp EU for free.

Stories Discussed:

BabaYaga: The WordPress Malware That Eats Other Malware
Ten WordPress Plugins By Multidots For WooCommerce Identified As Vulnerable And Dangerous
Plugin Detective Wins WordCamp Orange County’s 2018 Plugin-a-Palooza

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Next Episode: Wednesday, June 20th 3:00 P.M. Eastern

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Listen To Episode #320:

WordCamp EU 2018 is scheduled to take place this weekend in Belgrade, Serbia. Although the event is sold out, you can watch the event for free via livestream. Simply visit the WCEU tickets page and register a livestream ticket.

Sessions begin on Friday, June 15th. To see a list of sessions and speakers, check out the event’s schedule. Note that there is a six hour time difference between Eastern Daylight Time and Belgrade, Serbia.

As we near the halfway point of 2018 and no imminent release of WordPress 5.0 on the horizon, it will be interesting to see what information is shared during Matt Mullenweg’s keynote.

I think I met Ed Finkler at WordCamp Milwaukee in 2016. It was at the speaker dinner, and he sat across from me for a while. He seemed like a pretty normal WordPress developer and several weeks later I asked him to do a HeroPress essay. His answer surprised me. “Well sure, that sounds pretty cool, aside from the fact that I don’t really do WordPress anymore”.

As it turns out, he had mostly retired from active WordPress development. His every day world was now filled with working in different frameworks and languages, amongst people who help WordPress in disdain. But Ed’s view fascinated me. For all that he was working with more modern frameworks, WordPress is what made him a great developer. The empathy and compassion for the user that WordPress holds so dearly carried over into the rest of his life.

So what was he doing at WordCamp? Spreading the word about his cool new organization, which I will leave for you to read about.

How WordPress Taught Me To Be a Better Developer

The post By Helping Others, I Save Myself appeared first on HeroPress.

WordCamp Orange County, CA, took place this past weekend and the winners of the Plugin-a-Palooza have been crowned. Nathan Tyler and Natalie MacLees took the first place prize of $3,000 with their submission, Plugin Detective.

When it comes to troubleshooting WordPress, disabling and re-enabling plugins is one of the first steps in the process. This is time consuming and involves browsing to the plugin management page multiple times to turn a plugin on or off.

Plugin Detective simplifies the process by quickly identifying the culprit. Once installed, a Troubleshooting quick link is added to the WordPress Toolbar. From here, users can open or continue a case. When a case is opened, a bot named Detective Otto asks users to navigate to the page where the problem is occurring.

After the location is identified, users inform Detective Otto which plugins are required for the site to function properly. Interrogations is the act of of disabling and enabling plugins. Multiple interrogation attempts are made until the culprit is identified through the process of elimination. The following video does a great job of explaining and showing how it works.

It can also be used to identify and fix White Screen of Death errors caused by plugins.

Plugin Detective is partly inspired by a software program from the 90s called Conflict Catcher.

“I used ‘Conflict Catcher’ to troubleshoot conflicts between system extensions on my Mac,” Tyler said. “I thought the concept was cool and would often run it for fun to try to figure out how it worked. Eventually, I learned that the computer science concept is a ‘binary search.’

“Applying the concept to WordPress plugins seemed like a good approach to the plugin conflict problem we all experience.”

Tyler developed the functionality and MacLees is credited with the plugin’s design, user experience, JavaScript, API calls, etc. The duo plan to establish relationships with plugin authors to help get them better bug reports.
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“Basically, if an author opts-in, we can help the end-user file a support ticket right there in Plugin Detective after we’ve identified the problem,” he said. “The support team gets a helpful bug report with notes from the customer, along with system information, other installed plugins, active theme, etc.”

If you troubleshoot sites often or want an easier way to figure out which plugin is causing a conflict, consider adding Plugin Detective to your toolkit. Plugin Detective is free and available for download from the WordPress plugin directory.

As the traveller who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.

Margaret Mead

WordCamp Europe debuted its new official mobile app today, providing attendees with a quick way to access the event’s schedule, maps, and announcements. Several unofficial apps have popped up over the years, but this is the first one produced and supported by WCEU organizers.

The team opted for creating a PWA (Progressive Web App), which loads inside a mobile browser while offering an experience similar to native apps. It’s also far less complicated than supporting multiple platform-specific mobile apps. Users don’t have to download anything, since it is loaded via the browser, and the site can be accessed offline in case of network failure.

The app was built using React on the frontend and is hosted on a node server. It uses WordPress for content management on the backend, along with the WordPress PWA plugin and OneSignal Push Notifications .

“This first iteration isn’t scalable for the community, but we wanted to test the possibilities and have the opportunity to explore what it would take to eventually make this available for all WordCamps,” WCEU team leader Jenny Beaumont said. “It’s a lofty goal, and we’re not there yet, but we’ve learned a lot along the way and looking forward to pursuing the ambition.”

Attendees can expect to find any last minute schedule changes in the app and may also opt to receive push notifications for important updates. The Favorites feature lets users to bookmark all the sessions they plan to attend and toggle them into view.

WCEU’s official PWA is lightweight and re-usable – it can easily be updated to display content for future editions of the WordCamp.

“We’ll only need to update our feeds, since WordCamps are issued a new website every year, but the basic functionality will be in place and can be developed on as browsers offer better support and new team members join the team with their great ideas,” Beaumont said.

The current theme is open source and available on GitHub. It can be rebranded for future events to reflect the design for that year and city. Beaumont said the long term goal is to have a PWA generated directly from WordCamp sites.

New Tech for Badges Generates a Barcode for Sponsors to Scan

The technology for badge creation will be getting an overhaul as well this year. WCEU organizers are renting the materials from a Azavista, a Dutch event management company that provides badges, badge printers and scanning devices (iPhones). The new tech will make it more efficient for volunteers to process more than 2,000 attendees at registration.

The badge scanners also streamline attendee interaction with sponsors, replacing the signup sheets and tablets that sponsors usually have for collecting attendee information.

“It’s tied to attendees’ Attendee ID number, created when attendees register on our WordCamp site,” Beaumont said. “Say an attendee is visiting a sponsor booth and having a nice conversation, the sponsor can ask if they’d like to leave their name and email address to stay in touch. If the attendee agrees, then they show their badge to have it scanned by the sponsor using the closed-technology on devices provided by our vendor. “

After the event, WCEU organizers will send the names and email addresses of attendees to the sponsors based on the signups from scanned badges.

If attendee feedback is positive, Beaumont said organizers plan to implement the quick registration feature next year. This will allow attendees to receive a QR code via email and get it scanned in order to receive their badges. These tech improvements should relieve traffic bottlenecks at the registration desk and sponsor booths, freeing up more time for WCEU attendees to spend in sessions and networking activities.

Continuing my series about ScoutDocs and the process of building it, this week I’m talking about React.

What is ScoutDocs? ScoutDocs is a WordPress plugin that adds simple file-sharing to your WordPress site.

After the first iteration of ScoutDocs was built and none of the partners on the project were happy with its experience, it became clear that in order to deliver a clean, simple interface for file uploading and sharing we needed to leave the bounds of the WordPress admin. It didn’t take me long to decide that React would be the tool I used to build the new interface.

There is an incredible momentum behind React, and a rich ecosystem of libraries, tools, and educational resources. But beyond all that, React is just plain fun to code. Once you accept the central premise that a view layer and the controller that handles that view are inextricably linked, and once you get over the weirdness of quasi-HTML-in-JS that is JSX, coding in React is a joy.

Make no mistake, learning React is not a weekend project. It will take a while before it feels like home. But once you get it, you feel very powerful.

The first lesson I learned was don’t learn React by rewriting your app in React. I tried this. I read some tutorials about React and it felt straightforward, and I was like “let’s do this.”

This was a bad idea. I was overwhelmed. I had no idea where to start. Next, I tried following some of the interactive tutorials that required me to build a simple React app and then slowly add functionality to it, refactoring it multiple times, until I understood not just the code that I ended up with, but the process of creating it. This went much better.

Start small, and build a bunch of “toy” apps before you use React for your own apps. Once you are able to “think in React”, you’ll be nearly physically itchy to go re-code your app in React, and that’s how you know you’re ready. If you jump the gun, you are going to get stuck a lot, and it will be frustrating.

As you learn React and explore the React ecosystem, you will likely hear about Redux, which is a system for storing application state, and is commonly used with React apps. It looked complicated, and even its creator wrote a post saying you might not need Redux. So I skipped it. This was probably the right call when I was starting out. But as I fleshed out the ScoutDocs app and its complexity increased, I ran into a problem.

See, React breaks your app up into these nested chunks of UI and functionality called components. Data flows down through your components. So if a user updates their name, that change will flow down from higher up components like a Page component down to a PageHeader, down to a NavBar, down to a UserStatus. Once this is all set up and you update data in a parent component, the changes automatically flow downstream, and the UserStatus component updates and re-renders. It’s great. Except that there are a bunch of intermediate components that accept and “forward” that user name data to their children, without actually caring about it themselves. When you inevitably refactor something and need to add new data that flows through these components, every single intermediate one needs to be updated to pass it on. It is tedious. You will hate it.

Worse, because events in React flow upwards, if a user updates their name in the UserName component, that change needs to flow up to ProfileForm, up to Profile, up to Page, and then up to your main App component. When you refactor, you need to make sure this event forwarding chain stays connected. Yet more tedium that you will hate.

Redux solves this by letting your React components, no matter how deeply they are nested, subscribe directly to the data they need.

I really wish Dave Ceddia had written this excellent post about Redux two months earlier.

If you have a component structure like the one above – where props are being forwarded down through many layers – consider using Redux.

This is what I needed to hear, and knowing this would have saved me a lot of frustration and time that I now have to spend converting ScoutDocs to use Redux.

Use Redux when your React data flow starts to get unwieldy.

Another mistake I made early on was making the data my React components accepted too restrictive. For example, I wanted the ability to prefix a Row component with a clickable icon. So I let the component accept an icon and onClickIcon property. I just passed a Font Awesome icon name in, and a function I wanted to run when clicked. It worked great.

Then I needed to add a second icon in front, in some circumstances. Ugh. I certainly didn’t want to do otherIcon and onClickOtherIcon. Instead, what I should have done was let the component accept beforeRow which could be anything… like an array of <Icon> components or a single one or even other components altogether.

This can be used for many more situations than the one (“put an icon before the row”) that I’d originally envisioned.

Your React components should be flexible, so they can be reusable.

Other posts in this series:

• Outsourcing
• React
• WordPress Rest API
• PHP 7
• Build tools
• Unit testing

To help your site be transparent to your visitors about using Akismet to process comments (think privacy and GDPR), our WordPress plugin now gives you the option to display a notice under your site’s comment forms. Site owners can decide if they want to display it, or not, on a per-blog basis.

But we’ve also given options to developers to extend the behaviour, and content, of said notice.

WordPress option

The display of the notice itself, as well as the in-admin notice to set it for one’s site, all revolves around a new akismet_comment_form_privacy_notice option, which needs to be set to either display or hide.

If the option is not yet set, the front-end notice will not be displayed, but the in-admin prompting site owners to set it will.

Once set to either display or hide, the front-end notice will match the choice, and the in-admin notice will disappear.

Filters

In class.akismet.php, there is a new Akismet::display_comment_form_privacy_notice() method, in which you can find the following filters to extend.

• akismet_comment_form_privacy_notice:
  Overrides the returned value of the akismet_comment_form_privacy_notice option. This value can be display, or hide, and controls the display of the front-end privacy notice under comment forms.
• akismet_comment_form_privacy_notice_markup:
  Lets you customise the text and markup of the actual notice, which defaults to '<p class="akismet_comment_form_privacy_notice">' . sprintf( __( 'This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. <a href="%s" target="_blank">Learn how your comment data is processed</a>.', 'akismet' ), 'https://akismet.com/privacy/' ) . '</p>'. Note that if you choose to modify the markup, something needs to eventually point your users to https://akismet.com/privacy/, which will always display, or redirect to, our most up-to-date privacy related documentation.

CSS

As seen above, the default front-end privacy notice is wrapped in a <p class="akismet_comment_form_privacy_notice"></p> tag, which you can extend via stylesheets and Javascript.

WP Multisite or multiple WP installs

If you have a lot of sites/blogs, you might also now be wanting to set the privacy display in bulk.

There are a few ways of doing that.

You can create a quick plugin that checks if the akismet_comment_form_privacy_notice option is set, and if it is not, set it for the current blog: update_option( 'akismet_comment_form_privacy_notice', $state ); where $state is either display or hide.

Or you could write a script that loops on your blog list, and set the same option, in one run.

In this episode, John James Jacoby and I are joined by Gary Pendergast, a WordPress core contributor, to discuss what’s new with Gutenberg. We find out what happened with WordPress 4.9.6, and discuss WordPress’ future. We also discuss Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub and when WordPress core development might transition to GitHub. Last but not least, we share the news of the week.

Stories Discussed:

Microsoft Acquires GitHub for $7.5B In Stock
Gutenberg 3.0.0 Released, 30th Release
Simple:Press Forum Plugin Is Up for Adoption
WordCamp for iOS Renamed to WP Camps, More Events Added
Sustainability + WordPress = SustyWP
Improving WordPress with Static Analysis

WPWeekly Meta:

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

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Simple:Press, a forum plugin for WordPress that has been around for more than a dozen years, is available for adoption. Developers Andy Staines and Steve Klasen announced their plans to shutdown operations last August on their customer support forum and have had little luck finding a suitable replacement.

Staines and Klasen will retire on August 1st. Everything related to the site, including the domain, plugin code, customer information, income, etc. will transfer to the new owner with no strings attached.

The forum plugin has been a labor of love for a long time. We don’t really want to see the plugin die because we have decided to retire. It has provided us a good secondary income for many years and has good potential for anyone who wished to make a go at it.

Steve Klasen

Simple:Press is not available on the WordPress.org plugin directory and generates revenue through memberships, themes, and plugins. Those interested in taking over the plugin or to find out more information can contact Klasen and Staines through the Simple:Press Forum contact form.

BuddyPress 3.1.0 is now available. This is a maintenance release that fixes 23 bugs and is a recommended upgrade for all BuddyPress installations.

For more information, see the 3.1.0 milestone on BuddyPress Trac.

Update to BuddyPress 3.1.0 today in your WordPress Dashboard, or by downloading from the wordpress.org plugin repository.

Questions or comments? Check out the 3.1.0 changelog, or stop by our support forums or Trac.

When Marcel Schmitz released his WordCamp for iOS app, there was concern that it violated the WordCamp Trademark policy. Schmitz has changed the name of the app to WP Camps, describes it as a companion app for WordCamps, and has added a number of upcoming events.

In addition to these changes, Schmitz has also redesigned the app’s icon due to user feedback. Version 1.1 sets the stage for search, chat, a who’s on stage feature, and more.

If you’re organizing a WordCamp or WordPress event and want it added to the app, you can contact Schmitz on Twitter. You can also click on the About section within the App to send him an email.

WP Camps is an application for iOS devices and is available for free on the Apple App Store.

Settle in, because you are about to read some worst and some even worst experiences that I have had in my life and yet how I am still pulling myself together.

Before we get into it, I am going to tell you something about me. I am Libertarian, otaku. I LOVE to play with words. By profession I am an IT engineer but by passion I am a writer. I am writing about Microsoft & other Technologies for various publications. I am also writing about Exciting Technology & Mind-Boggling Science and am a co-founder of 2 sci-fi and technological news platform.

I was so engaged in the world of Computer and Technology since the school time. I was excited about HTML, CSS, C and other basic computer programming concept since school. Recently, I completed my Bachelor of Engineering study (result is yet to be declared, but I think I will pass in all subject). And as of now, I don’t have any plans for further studies. Phew.

Talking about WordPress

My cousin introduced me with WordPress in 2010 when I completed 10th standard (grade). OMG! It’s been 8 years! However, at that time he gave me only basic WordPress work i.e.data entry. But later in college I was getting engaged in various freelancing work (mostly WordPress related) and that’s where the real journey with WordPress began!

As of now, I have designed & developed tons of websites with WordPress and modified up to dozens of themes. I enjoy working in WordPress so much that sometimes, I forget to take dinner. I am so committed to my work, it’s like passion to me.

Fast forward to September 2016, I submitted my first WordPress theme “Frindle” to WordPress theme directory. After waiting for nearly 5 months in theme review queue, in January 2017, the theme reviewer rejected my theme, because theme had “5 or more issues” (31 I remembered correctly). And I was back to square one. But after this setback I pushed myself and resubmitted theme again in the very next month. This time everything worked out and the theme was approved in April 2017 and went live on 1st July 2017.

A friend of mine from WordPress community set me up for an interview in her company. I got selected and they wanted me to join from very next day. I was so thrilled and excited but as I was still pursuing my engineering study. But, my college didn’t signed the NDA (for attendance) so I had to give up the opportunity.

Later on, I submitted 2 more themes to the official WordPress theme directory, Horkos & Ogee. Both of them are live right now and Ogee is getting significant user base. Later on, I joined a small web development company as a remote WordPress developer. And worked on so many projects.
While I was working on various freelancing WordPress projects, I was also doing content writing passionately. Now I am writing for several publication and news websites. Mostly I write about mind-boggling science and futuristic technology. Some of my anonymously written articles are featured on popular newsletter such as Slashdot.

This went well:

While I was in the last year of study, my cousin set me up for an interview for internship/training program. Everything was going perfect. The interviewer was impressed from my resume, but all of sudden, he started asking questions about technology which I am not aware of. I straightly said, “With all due respect sir, I don’t know anything about it, but if it’s worth I am ready to learn.” God knows what he heard but within 2 minutes he ended up saying “You are just wasting your life. You can go now.” I was like, man, it took me 30 minutes to find your office, please hear me out.

But everything changed after this interview. When I was driving home from this interview, I got a call from an old friend and he asked me to write sci-fi articles for his new website. Wait! On the same day I got an email from a popular news website asking me to come onboard as a senior editor. I was like this is the worst best day of my life.

So no WordPress?

Well, here’s something good. In addition to this, right now I am perusing internship for PHP/WordPress and front-end developer in an MNC company. I am learning so many things nowadays, collaborating with team, project management, communication with clients and more!

Life nowadays

Every day, I wake up with a new task and go to sleep with a new idea. What is most aspiring in this is the platform that we all associated with. Even though I practice polyphasic sleep, I still need 5 extra hours in a day.

I don’t work for money, I just do it because I am so passionate about it. I mean money is important but work is not just about it. It’s about the satisfaction I feel when I see the impact I make on the community.

I am 22, but as of now, I don’t have a 9 to 5 permanent “job” nor a shoulder to cry on (you know what I mean). But I work a LOT. I love my keyboard. I’m highly sensitive. I spend my days immersing myself in the personal growth world. Maybe in some ways, I’m (definitely) not normal – some of the ways that I go against the grain of the society. And you know what? It’s okay.

So yeah, I’m comfortably okay with the basic skills which I possess. I wonder when people will understand that it’s okay to be “okay”. Everything that was still is. So, whether I like it or not, I pull myself together and I do it all again.

The post Work is not just about Money appeared first on HeroPress.

Jack Lenox, a Software Engineer at Automattic, has launched a new site called SustyWP that focuses on web sustainability using WordPress.

By removing the parts of Underscores he didn’t need, using one inline SVG image, no sidebars, limited CSS, and no webfonts, Lenox was able to launch a WordPress site that only has 7 Kilobytes of data transfer.

As you might expect, the site crushes page speed and performance benchmarks. The site is also hosted in a data center that uses 100% renewable energy.  To learn how and why he built the site, check out his detailed blog post.

While only transferring seven kilobytes of data is commendable, these days, websites are feature-rich. I wonder how practical his methods are for large and complex sites.

Now that ScoutDocs is in the WordPress plugin repository, I’d like to share some lessons I learned making it. Every project teaches me something — this one taught me a lot.

What is ScoutDocs? ScoutDocs is a WordPress plugin that adds simple file-sharing to your WordPress site. You can upload files (which are stored securely in the cloud and served over HTTPS via a global CDN), and share them with individuals or groups of individuals. Email notifications are also handled by the ScoutDocs service, getting around the issue of reliable email delivery on a shared host. You can require that recipients accept or decline the files you’ve shared, e.g. so you can see which of your employees has seen the new employee handbook. Instead of files living as email attachments (if they even fit) or off on some third-party site, people can access them on your site.

In this weekly series, I’m going to cover:

• Outsourcing
• React
• WordPress Rest API
• PHP 7
• Build tools
• Unit testing

First up, lessons learned about outsourcing.

When we started making ScoutDocs, the question was raised as to whether it would be beneficial to outsource any of the coding. My time was valuable and limited, so I figured that if I had another developer code while I slept, I could spend an hour in the morning reviewing the code and giving them direction for the next workday. I had visions of quickly scanning code while my morning coffee brewed, twirling an invisible moustache, and muttering “good, good.”

This is not what happened.

The issue I quickly ran into was that for any nebulously defined problem, someone else’s solution was unlikely to match what I wanted. Their assumptions would not be the same as mine. As a result, the odds of me being happy with their solution were very low.

I spent a lot of time rewriting code.

And because I was spending all my time “fixing” the code I wasn’t really looking at the product as a whole.

When the contractors were done, my ScoutDocs partners and I looked at it, and we realized that it… was bad. Forget code quality, which despite all my vain reshuffling was still lacking: what we had was just overall a terrible user experience. Rather horrifyingly, we admitted that what we needed to do to give it the user experience we wanted was nothing short of a total rewrite.

I rolled up my sleeves, learned React, and rewrote ScoutDocs until almost nothing of the original code and user experience remained.

So was outsourcing a waste? Not completely. Some code was retained, mostly relating to the Amazon S3 interface. I was glad that someone else had experienced the singular joy of spending an eternity lost in a maze of Amazon Web Services documentation and confusing code samples. Additionally, if I had set out to build the initial version of the code, it would have taken a lot of my time (which I did not have much to spare), and might have meant that our horrifying realization would have been delayed for several months.

Knowing what doesn’t work is valuable, even if you have to throw it away. That’s mostly what we had gotten for our money: figuring out what didn’t work. If outsourcing can get you to these realizations sooner or for less money, it might be well worth it.

As I rewrote the software, my partners asked me a few times if I regretted outsourcing. I didn’t, for the above reason, but also because outsourcing had solved some of the coding issues that would have been a slog for me. However, if I was doing it all over again, I would have done more work upfront to identify specific, well-defined tasks that I wanted to outsource.

Delegation makes sense when the task is well-defined. At the extreme, you could spend so much time redoing work and asking for revisions that you’d have been better off just doing it yourself. If you can specify exactly what constitutes success in a task, and the time it takes you to specify that is much less than the time it would take you to do the task, outsource it.

Check back next week for my thoughts on rewriting ScoutDocs in React.

This month saw two significant milestones in the WordPress community — the 15th anniversary of the project, and GDPR-related privacy tools coming to WordPress Core. Read on to find out more about this and everything else that happened in the WordPress community in May.

Local Communities Celebrate the 15th Anniversary of WordPress

Last Sunday, May 27, WordPress turned 15 years old. This is a noteworthy occasion for an open-source project like WordPress and one well worth celebrating. To mark the occasion, WordPress communities across the world gathered for parties and meetups in honor of the milestone.

Altogether, there were 224 events globally, with a few more of those still scheduled to take place in some communities — attend one in your area if you can.

If your city doesn’t have a WordPress meetup group, this is a great opportunity to start one! Learn how with the Meetup Organizer Handbook, and join the #community-events channel in the Making WordPress Slack group.

Privacy Tools added to WordPress core

In light of recent changes to data privacy regulations in the EU, WordPress Core shipped important updates in the v4.9.6 release, giving site owners tools to help them comply with the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It is worth noting, however, that WordPress cannot ensure you are compliant — this is still a site owner’s responsibility.

The new privacy tools include a number of features focused on providing privacy and personal data management to all site users — asking commenters for explicit consent to store their details in a cookie, providing site owners with an easy way to publish a Privacy Policy, and providing data export and erasure tools to all site users that can be extended by plugins to allow the handling of data that they introduce.

To find out more about these features and the other updates, read the 4.9.6 update guide. You can also get involved in contributing to this part of WordPress Core by jumping into the #core-privacy channel in the Making WordPress Slack group, and following the Core team blog.

Updates to the WordPress.org Privacy Policy

In a similar vein, WordPress.org itself has received an updated Privacy Policy to make clear what is being tracked and how your data is handled. Along with that, a Cookie Policy has also been added to explain just what is collected and stored in your browser when using the site.

These policies cover all sites on the WordPress.org network — including WordPress.org, WordPress.net, WordCamp.org, BuddyPress.org, bbPress.org, and other related domains and subdomains. It’s important to note that this does not mean that anything has changed in terms of data storage; rather that these documents clarify what data is stored and how it is handled.

Further Reading:

• WordCamp US 2018 has opened up speaker submissions for the December event.
• Live stream tickets are now available for WordCamp Europe, happening on June 14-16.
• Gutenberg, the new editor for WordPress Core, is getting ever closer to the final stages with a major update this month.
• In preparation for Gutenberg, significant work has been done to improve WordPress Core’s build process.

If you have a story we should consider including in the next “Month in WordPress” post, please submit it here.

Providing support on the WordPress.org forums is one of the easiest ways to contribute to WordPress and those who do are some of the unsung heroes of the project. One of those heroes is James Huff known as MacManX on the forums.

Huff has been supporting users for 13 years and recently celebrated an awesome milestone reaching 50K replies.

Achievement Unlocked: Over 13 years of @WordPress support, and 50,000 replies: https://t.co/0un3ggrKGI pic.twitter.com/aKiwOuesk8

— James Huff (@MacManX) May 30, 2018

In this spotlight, we learn what drives Huff to provide support, what he’s learned, and what users can do to improve the likelihood a support request will be resolved.

What drives your desire to help people with WordPress on the support forums?

I like helping people succeed with WordPress. It’s kind of a legacy for me, because you never know if solving one blocker will lead to a life-changing site or service. If anything, I hope I made a few days better for a few folks.

Any trends or common issues you’ve noticed in the past few months/years?

Nothing out of the ordinary. Plugin and theme conflicts will always be the most common.

What tips or suggestions do you have for users to increase the likelihood of solving their problem?

Try the Health Check plugin first, its Troubleshooting Mode is great!

What lessons have you learned by providing support in the forums?

I learned about almost everything I have done to customize my sites first by helping someone else do it. Overall, I have learned quite a bit about WordPress just by helping other people.

To learn more about James and how he got involved with supporting the WordPress community, watch this presentation by Andrea Middleton from WordCamp Seattle 2017.

In this episode, John James Jacoby and I look back at 15 years of WordPress. We discuss the journey so far and where we think the project is going. Hint, it involves JavaScript. We also do a bit of self-reflection on how WordPress fits into our lives and where we see us fitting into its future. For giggles, we did some WordPress trivia as well.

Stories Discussed:

Matt’s Birthday Post
WordPress Now Available
WordPress Release History
#wp15 on Twitter

WPWeekly Meta:

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

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Listen To Episode #318: