The WordPress Community should have full control of event data, something that doesn’t happen with Meetups.
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Program transcript
Hello, I’m Javier Casares, and you’re listening to WordPress Podcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
You’ll find updates from January 22nd to 28th, 2024.
Currently, we all depend on Meetup.com as the platform for WordPress Community Meetup events. But the cost to the Community exceeds $200,000 annually to maintain this service, which is extremely expensive for what it offers.
That’s why, back in 2019, a group of contributors decided to start thinking about GatherPress, a WordPress plugin that allows for the creation and management of events, as well as venues and seat reservations.
The plugin is now in a functional phase, and there is a proposal to launch a pilot project in which various local communities will use it to improve and start considering it as a major platform that unifies all users directly from WordPress.org.
Pros and cons? On the one hand, the data will be in the hands of the Community and not private companies, the tool’s improvement will depend on the Community and not external parties, and the project will be open source, allowing for improvements and reviews from all over. However, on the other hand, it will be almost like starting from scratch, because everything will depend on the Community itself to publicize the events.
Additionally, the current cost of Meetup.com can be redirected to events, rather than an external company to WordPress.
Half a year has passed since the Community Summit, and based on all the feedback from various meetings, a list of recommendations has been presented to improve Five for the Future, the project within WordPress that encourages companies to get involved with WordPress in some way.
Among the proposals, we have improving tools for new contributors’ arrival, as well as better communication among those who decide to get involved with a team.
Another facilitation is the way companies that provide sponsorship do so by tasks or projects, or even sponsor specific individuals for a certain time, for example, during the launch of a new WordPress version.
We now have a future version of WordPress at hand: WordPress 6.4.3 candidate 1, which fixes 5 core elements and 16 from the editor.
The final version is scheduled for Tuesday, January 30th.
The Core team has announced that one of the major updates of WordPress 6.5 will be the revision system, mainly due to the significant change it represents. Tests can already be seen in WordPress 6.4.2 with Gutenberg 17.5.1.
The update, in addition to offering a new design, provides a more granular system of information and a summary of changes, making it not solely dependent on a visual review.
Changes will be paginated, and changes in the Style Book are also included.
On the Developers’ blog, a post was published explaining how to improve templates related to attachments.
Generally, these pages display an image or video with default elements, with little to say.
The post suggests, for example, improving the image size and including the EXIF data of the photograph, something we probably wouldn’t find where it’s likely to be displayed.
The Themes team has received a request from major theme authors to allow the submission of more than one theme for review at a time.
Among some opinions is that authors who usually send themes that require little or no review, basically because they do it well, should be allowed this possibility. Even so, it wouldn’t be allowed for an author to send a hundred themes, but it could be limited to having 2 or 3 pending themes at most.
In any case, for now, the decision on this change has been left in the hands of the team representatives, although, considering the approval time is quite fast, even for block themes it’s almost hours, it seems the strategy won’t change.
The Training team aims to launch the Learning Pathways project by July 2024, in which community content creators help learn something specific within the WordPress ecosystem.
However, it seems that due to a lack of collaborators, this project will be delayed, forcing a prioritization of the proposal, focusing on identifying the minimum necessary elements to start, and then expanding them. A proposal to improve the arrival of new contributors will also be launched.
The Community team has organized an online presentation for February 8th, where they will present some tips related to budgets for a WordPress event. How much money do I need? What’s normal?
Finally, this podcast is distributed under the EUPL license. For more information and links, please visit WordPress Podcast .org or follow the content, also, in Catalan, Spanish, and French.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
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