The community is looking to create a media corps to help with the information and publication related to WordPress.
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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 March 18th to 24th, 2024.
Creating a WordPress Media Corps has been proposed to improve WordPress’s presence and provide media coverage for the community.
This team would focus on expanding WordPress’s visibility and narrative through different communication and public relations initiatives. With an emphasis on diversity and inclusion, the project would seek to build a community of communicators to promote a more comprehensive and accurate image of WordPress in the media.
Goals include promoting success stories, collaborating with external organizations, and supporting a diversity of voices and perspectives in media coverage related to WordPress.
Interested individuals have been encouraged to join the team and contribute, although there has been much discussion about the possibility of using information embargoes, with the potential need to sign NDAs.
Some concerns have arisen, such as what is considered good journalism, or whether a site with ads could qualify to be part of this group of sites. Another aspect is the blocking of access by Automattic to some of the sites where information is located, such as social sites. The reach to all Rosetta sites, which include information in dozens of languages in which WordPress is available, is also a blocker.
Some community members think that creating such a team is unnecessary since the community itself is capable of self-managing information with traditional sites already processing it (like this podcast), some agencies or companies behind products, and even hosting providers.
As has happened on other occasions, this proposal is not so much a proposal as a reality that needs to be worked on and adapted because it is almost certain to be implemented soon, raising the classic questions of any project coming from Automattic, about information control, access to people from different teams, why one medium is going to have more access than others… questions that in an open-source community are more than respectable and that can cause media with more resources or sponsorships to have more power and possibly direct information over those without resources.
Undoubtedly, it is a first step in something very few open-source projects have, a press team, and it is more focused on selling WordPress to large companies rather than explaining what the product can do.
The Core team has announced that the compatibility system of putting fonts in the “uploads” folder and not in the “fonts” folder will not make it to WordPress 6.5, with the complications this may bring, especially with certain hosting providers.
The decision has been communicated in a specific entry where alternative options and solutions are provided in case the system causes problems.
The documentation will be updated, the Fonts to Uploads plugin could be converted into a canonical-plugin managed by the community, and the support teams of the forums will be informed of possible issues that may arise.
On the Developer Blog, two entries related to visual elements have been published.
The first one refers to how to develop patterns when creating themes and content, explaining the structure, styles, content, and providing many examples.
The second entry explains the updates in WordPress 6.5 regarding shadows, which will be available on buttons, images, and columns, both from the editing panel and from theme.json for global management.
The Hosting team participated in the Cloudfest Hackathon and made significant progress with a major update to the PHP unit test tool, making it multi-PHP, multi-environment, and supporting all-commits.
With this change, hosting providers will be able to perform multiple tests in each run and will help WordPress developers with more information about its operation and, above all, compatibility.
The Polyglots team has issued a call to revive the Korean language in WordPress translations, looking for new contributors and managers for the configuration, with a medium-to-long-term goal of support, maintenance of the glossary, style guides initiation, and review of all pending translations.
The Community team, which was still using Trello for its projects, has faced the situation of the change in rates and limits that reduce the free plan to only 10 users.
The new approach is to move everything to GitHub, as many other teams have done, and use the Issues and projects system for task management, becoming much more accessible, public, and centralized.
The WordCamp Asia team has published the questions and answers session with Matt Mullenweg, in an entry that includes the full video and the answers that could not be resolved in time.
And finally, this podcast is distributed under a Creative Commons license as a derivative version of the WordPress Podcast in Spanish; you can find all the links for more information at WordPress Podcast .org or follow the content in Catalan, Spanish, and French.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
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