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Quarterly Updates | Q3 2018

To keep everyone aware of big projects and efforts across WordPress contributor teams, I’ve reached out to each team’s listed representatives. I asked each of them to share their Top Priority (and when they hope for it to be completed), as well as their biggest Wins and Worries. Have questions? I’ve included a link to each team’s site in the headings.

Accessibility

  • Contacted: @joedolson, @audrasjb, @arush
  • Priority: Work on authoring a manual for assistive technology users on Gutenberg, led by Claire Brotherton (@abrightclearweb). Continue to work on improving the overall user experience in Gutenberg. Update and organize the WP A11y handbook.
  • Struggle: Lack of developers and accessibility experts to help test and code the milestone issues. Still over 100 outstanding issues, and developing the Gutenberg AT manual helps expose additional issues. The announcement of an accessibility focus on 4.9.9 derailed our planning for Gutenberg in September with minimal productivity, as that goal was quickly withdrawn from the schedule.
  • Big Win: Getting focus constraint implemented in popovers and similar components in Gutenberg.

CLI

  • Contacted: @danielbachhuber, @schlessera
  • Priority: Current priority is v2.1.0 of WP-CLI, to polish the major refactoring v2.0.0 introduced. You can join in or follow progress on their site.
  • Struggle: Getting enough contributors to make peer-review possible/manageable.
  • Big Win: The major refactoring of v2 was mostly without any negative impacts on existing installs. It provided substantial improvements to maintainability including: faster and more reliable testing, more straight-forward changes to individual packages, and simpler contributor on-boarding.

Community

Core

  • Contacted: @jeffpaul
  • Priority: Continued preparation for the 5.0 release cycle and Gutenberg.
  • Struggle: Identifying tasks for first time contributors, as well as for new-to-JS contributors.

Design

  • Contacted: @melchoyce, @karmatosed, @boemedia, @joshuawold, @mizejewski
  • Priority: Preparing for WordPress 5.0 and continuing to work on better onboarding practices.
  • Struggle: Identifying tasks for contributor days, especially for small- to medium-sized tasks that can be fit into a single day.
  • Big Win: Regular contributions are starting to build up.

Documentation

  • Contacted: @kenshino
  • Priority: Getting HelpHub out before WordPress 5.0’s launch to make sure Gutenberg User Docs have a permanent position to reside
  • Struggle: Getting the documentation from HelpHub into WordPress.org/support is more manual than initially anticipated.
  • Big Win: Had a good discussion with the Gutenberg team about their docs and how WordPress.org expects documentation to be distributed (via DevHub, Make and HelpHub). Getting past the code blocks to release HelpHub (soon)

Hosting

  • Contacted: @mikeschroder, @jadonn
  • Priority: Helping Gutenberg land well at hosts for users in 5.0.
  • Struggle: Short time frame with few resources to accomplish priority items.
  • Big Win: Preparing Try Gutenberg support guide for hosts during the rollout and good reception from users following it.

Marketing

  • Contacted: @bridgetwillard
  • Priority: Continuing to write and publish case studies from the community.
  • Big Win: Onboarding guide is going well and is currently being translated.

Meta (WordPress.org Site)

  • Contacted: @tellyworth, @coffee2code
  • Priority: Support for other teams in the lead up to, and the follow-up of, the release of WP 5.0. ETA is the WP 5.0 release date (Nov 19) and thereafter, unless it gets bumped to next quarter.
  • Struggle: Maintaining momentum on tickets (still).
  • Big Win: Launch of front-end demo of Gutenberg on https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/

Mobile

  • Contacted: @elibud
  • Priority: Have an alpha version of Gutenberg in the WordPress apps, ETA end of year 2018.
  • Struggle: Unfamiliar tech stack and the goal of reusing as much of Gutenberg-web’s code as possible.
  • Big Win: Running mobile tests on web’s PRs.

Plugins

  • Contacted: @ipstenu
  • Priority: Cleaning up ‘inactive’ users, which was supposed to be complete but some work preparing for 5.0 was necessary.
  • Struggles: Devnotes are lacking for the upcoming release which slows progress.
  • Big Win: No backlog even though a lot were out!

Polyglots

Support

  • Contacted: @clorith
  • Priority: Preparing for the upcoming 5.0 release
  • Struggle: Finding a good balance between how much we want to help people and how much we are able to help people. Also, contributor recruitment (always a crowd favorite!)
  • Big Win: How well the team, on a global level, has managed to maintain a good flow of user engagement through support.

Theme Review

  • Contacted: @acosmin, @rabmalin, @thinkupthemes, @williampatton
  • Priority: Implementing the Theme Sniffer plugin on WordPress.org which is one step forward towards automation. ETA early 2019
  • Struggle: Not having so many contributors/reviewers.
  • Big Win: Implementing multiple requirements into our review flow, like screenshots and readme.txt requirements.

Training

  • Contacted: @bethsoderberg, @juliek
  • Priority: Getting the learn.wordpress.org site designed, developed, and being able to publish lesson plans to it.
  • Struggle: Getting contributors onboard and continually contributing. Part of that is related to the learn.wordpress.org site. People like to see their contributions.
  • Big Win: We have our new workflow and tools in place. We are also streamlining that process to help things go from idea to publication more quickly.

Interested in updates from the last quarter? You can find those here: https://wordpress.org/news/2018/07/quarterly-updates-q2-2018/