Monthly Archives: August 2021

Get Your Free Tickets to WordCamp US Online 2021 – WP Tavern

[ad_1] WordCamp US 2021 will be held online this year on October 1. The free, one-day event will be packed with speaker sessions, workshops, and networking opportunities for attendees. Organizers opened the call for speaker nominees earlier this month to speak on topics within the scope identified for this year: Connection, Contribution, and Inspiration: We want to hear about unsung heroes doing great things with the latest WordPress releases, about successful businesses that could only have happened with WordPress, educators who are using WordPress with their students, and inspirational stories of community and connection. We also want to hear about innovative technology implementations and cutting edge design methods that can inspire site owners to do even more with WordPress.  The themes seem to be centered around the kinds of the stories one might hear at an in-person WordCamp around a meal, all of the organic connection that WordPress enthusiasts around the world have craved for the past 18 months. It’s impossible to recreate online but the event’s organizers are committed to spotlighting stories that will “help WordPress users find success with WordPress no matter how they use it.” The deadline to nominate speakers has passed, but those who were nominated can find a list of recommended topics on the talk submission page. Recommendations include block development, making and using block patterns, FSE (full site editing), why companies should prioritize open source contribution, inspiring WordPress stories, entrepreneurship, marketing, e-commerce, SEO, and more. Organizers seem set on bolstering the community during this difficult year of mostly online-only events. The talk submission page encourages speakers to find topics that will help users be successful on their journeys with WordPress: As our goals with programming this year aim towards creating content that will help WordPress users become more successful with the platform, your first submission could ideally be focused on teaching users something they didn’t know when they signed on for WordCamp US 2021. We want to ensure that the content covered at this year’s WCUS is memorable and shared, ensuring that, no matter if online, in-person or hybrid, all future WCUS events are seen as those not to be missed. The deadline to submit talk ideas is August 22 and prospective speakers are limited to three ideas. Organizers receive hundreds of submissions every year (more than 500 in both 2018 and 2019) and speakers are encouraged to send only their best ideas. Selected speakers will be contacted by August 27 and announced August 31. All sessions will be recorded prior to the event and recorded talks are due September 23. Tickets for WordCamp US went on sale this week. They are free but you must sign up on the registration page for your entrance pass. Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link

Continue reading

WordPress Contributors Actually Do Listen to Feedback and Engage With the Community – WP Tavern

[ad_1] I am a writer. That gives me a license — not to be overused — to steer into hyperbole once in a while. I get to be critical, sometimes overly, because I can come back the next day and shower the WordPress project with praise. Perhaps, at times, I forget to be as fair or kind as I should be. Maybe I miss the mark when pointing out faults once in a while. I am sometimes simply wrong (as one reader recently pointed out, that was the case with 90% of what I wrote). And, for those times that I do step out of bounds, I am sorry. However, it always comes from a genuine love of our community and loyalty to the WordPress mission. I had planned on writing about an upcoming feature change for WordPress today, but something more pressing came up. As I was working through that article, a new comment landed in my inbox for approval. It was on the borderline, that gray area where I had to determine whether it added enough value to the discussion. I felt like it needed a thoughtful reply and not the knee-jerk reaction I had initially written. It was gnawing at me because I knew few things could be further from the truth: When Matias and Justin respond to comments and ask the commenters to supply more details about the problems they mentioned, I doubt many will do that, since many of us already know that the WordPress developers don’t listen to us. They maybe pretend to listen, but the evidence shows that they do not. As one other commenter mentioned, we are suffering the tyranny of the minority. Christian Nelson It is disheartening when I see comments that state that the core contributors do not listen to users. However, I do understand where some of that sentiment may come from. There have been many pet features I have been passionate about that have never gotten the green light. Tickets that seemingly die out from lack of interest. Unresolved disagreements. It can become easy to think that you are shouting into the void. However, it is not because developers are not listening. That is not a fair statement to make. In my line of work, I follow nearly every aspect of the WordPress project. From Trac tickets to GitHub pull requests, from business acquisitions to theme development, I tend to dabble in a bit of it all. More often than not, I see others who care as deeply about the project as I do. I watch the core/inner developers — the folks who do the bulk of the work — gather and act upon as much feedback as possible. I see the same from people who are less in the public spotlight but just as vital to the community. Everything I see stands as overwhelming evidence that they listen. There is so much engagement on GitHub, Slack, and the Make blogs that I cannot keep up with it all. Matías Ventura, the Gutenberg project lead, has always been approachable and seems to care deeply about the project’s success. I cannot recall ever reaching out to anyone working on WordPress who did not respond, even when I approached them outside of my role as a writer for WP Tavern. I am amazed at how much time and energy Anne McCarthy puts into the FSE Outreach Program. Mostly, it is because I do not think I could do that job. For every complaint, criticism, or issue I have mentioned, she has dug up an existing ticket or filed a new one. She routinely does this for everyone who provides feedback on FSE. I could list name after name after name of others who do the same, going above and beyond their typical roles. Today, I was reminded that we all — including myself — sometimes need to step back and evaluate how we view this project and the people who are working on it. Thousands of people contribute code, documentation, design mockups, translations, and much more. There are plugin authors who see a problem they want to solve. Developers who figure out how to do something and write a tutorial. This, still, is barely scratching the surface. Contributing directly to the core project or being involved with the Make WordPress teams is often a thankless job. But, I am happy that so many are willing to bear the brunt of the criticism and continue working. Not everything we want will be implemented how or when we want it. Developers must balance each new feature or change against different, often conflicting, feedback. They do not always make the “right” call, but the best thing about software is that you can iterate upon it, bettering the platform from feedback on the earlier implementation. Sometimes, WordPress simply needs more folks contributing to create a new feature or implement a change. Developers are only human. We are all riding this ship together. We should strive to be kind and fair, avoiding blanket statements of the people who pour their hearts and souls into the project. If nothing else, let’s take folks at their word when they ask for more details about a problem. That could very well be the first step in actually finding a solution. Before stepping off my soapbox, I want to simply say one thing to those who contribute in any capacity to the WordPress project: thank you. Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link

Continue reading

“It Has Become Clear to Me that AMP Remains a Google Product” – WP Tavern

[ad_1] Jeremy Keith, a web developer and contributor to the web standards movement, has resigned from the AMP Advisory Committee. Keith was selected for the committee last year, despite his well-documented criticisms of the AMP project. In his resignation email, he cites Google’s control of the project and its small percentage of open source parts as reasons for his growing resentment: I can’t in good faith continue to advise on the AMP project for the OpenJS Foundation when it has become clear to me that AMP remains a Google product, with only a subset of pieces that could even be considered open source. If I were to remain on the advisory committee, my feelings of resentment about this situation would inevitably affect my behaviour. So it’s best for everyone if I step away now instead of descending into outright sabotage. It’s not you, it’s me. During his time with the committee, Keith worked on defining what AMP is and pushing for clarification on whether the project encompasses more than just a collection of web components. The Google-controlled AMP cache and validation aspects of the project were the most concerning in evaluating his continued participation. Although the AMP Validator is open source, the rules for validation are controlled by Google: I was hoping it was a marketing problem. We spent a lot of time on the advisory committee trying to figure out ways of making it clearer what AMP actually is. But it was a losing battle. The phrase “the AMP project” is used to cover up the deeply interwingled nature of its constituent parts. Bits of it are open source, but most of it is proprietary. The OpenJS Foundation doesn’t seem like a good home for a mostly-proprietary project. When AMP joined the OpenJS Foundation in 2019, skeptics hailed the transfer as “mostly meaningless window-dressing.” What Keith witnessed during his time with the advisory committee lends credit to these early doubts about AMP being able to gain independence from Google: Whenever a representative from Google showed up at an advisory committee meeting, it was clear that they viewed AMP as a Google product. I never got the impression that they planned to hand over control of the project to the OpenJS Foundation. Instead, they wanted to hear what people thought of their project. I’m not comfortable doing that kind of unpaid labour for a large profitable organisation. Even worse, Google representatives reminded us that AMP was being used as a foundational technology for other Google products: stories, email, ads, and even some weird payment thing in native Android apps. That’s extremely worrying. Keith’s experience echoes some of the claims in the ongoing antitrust lawsuit against Google, led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and nine other state attorneys general. The complaint states that the transfer of the AMP project to the OpenJS Foundation was superficial: Although Google claims that AMP was developed as an open-source collaboration, AMP is actually a Google-controlled initiative. Google originally registered and still owns AMP’s domain, ampproject.org. In addition, until the end of 2018, Google controlled all AMP decisionmaking. AMP relied on a governance model called “Benevolent Dictator For Life” that vested ultimate decision-making authority in a single Google engineer. Since then, Google has transferred control of AMP to a foundation, but the transfer was superficial. Google controls the foundation’s board and debates internally [REDACTED]. Keith was originally inspired by fellow dissenter Terence Eden to join the committee in hopes of making a difference. Eden eventually resigned from the committee in December 2020, after concluding that Google has limited interest in making AMP a better web citizen: “I do not think AMP, in its current implementation, helps make the web better,” Eden said. “I remain convinced that AMP is poorly implemented, hostile to the interests of both users and publishers, and a proprietary and unnecessary incursion into the open web.” Three days after Keith’s resignation, the foundation published a post titled, “An update on how AMP is served at the OpenJS Foundation.” The post seems to address Keith’s impression that Google does not intend to hand over control of the project. “When the AMP project moved to the OpenJS Foundation in 2019, our technical governance leaders shared a plan to separate the AMP runtime from the Google AMP Cache, and host the AMP runtime infrastructure at the vendor-neutral OpenJS Foundation,” OpenJS Foundation Executive Director Robin Ginn said. “OpenJS is happy to report that this complex task of re-architecting the AMP infrastructure is making tremendous progress thanks to input and guidance from the AMP Technical Steering Committee (TSC) and AMP Advisory Committee, as well as thanks to the AMP Project and OpenJS teams for coming together despite the work and life challenges that were sometimes faced during the pandemic.” The statement reiterated AMP’s status as an open source project multiple times. Ginn did not elaborate on the “tremendous progress” but did announce a new development – the decision to be more hands-on in hosting AMP infrastructure. “What’s new is that after disentangling the AMP runtime from the Google AMP Cache, the OpenJS Foundation will manage the servers that deliver the AMP runtime files (the download server and the CDN),” Ginn said. “As planned, the OpenJS Foundation has been involved in the implementation of hosting the CDN and has been spending additional time to fully understand the technical requirements.” The OpenJS blog had not communicated any updates on the AMP project for nearly a year. While this post seems like a reaction to the news of Keith’s resignation, it publicly confirms that the teams are still working on the infrastructure transfer. In the end, this may not be enough to convince critics that AMP is not simply a Google product with a fancy affiliation designed to make it more appealing to detractors. So far, the project’s new home at the OpenJS Foundation has done little to bolster public opinion in the face of allegations that identify AMP as having an important role in Google’s anti-competitive practices. Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link

Continue reading

Second Annual WPMRR Virtual Summit

[ad_1] Hey, WordPress fans. We are checking in with your latest dose of weekly WordPress news. This week, Gutenberg 11.3 landed in the WordPress plugin directory. This latest release introduces a new dimensions panel for toggling spacing-related block options.  Beyond that, the second annual WPMRR virtual summit will run from September 21 to 23. WooCommerce 5.6 has also been officially released. Let’s get to all of this week’s WordPress news… WORDPRESS NEWS AND ARTICLES TUTORIALS AND HOW-TOS RESOURCES [ad_2] Source link

Continue reading

Second Annual WPMRR Virtual Summit To Kick Off September 21 – WP Tavern

[ad_1] WPMRR is gearing up for its second annual WPMRR Virtual Summit after the success of last year’s event. This year’s online-only conference will run from September 21 – 23. WPMRR and WP Buffs founder Joe Howard is hosting the event alongside guest host Brian Richards, the organizer behind WordSesh and WooSesh. The event is free to attend for everyone. Even for those unable to make it, each session’s recording will be available via the WP Buff’s YouTube channel at no cost. WPMRR and WP Buffs will be donating $1 per registrant to Lawyers for Good Government, a non-profit organization of lawyers with a mission to fight for equal rights, opportunities, and justice. A formal announcement of the speaker lineup and schedule is expected next week. As of now, all speakers are confirmed. “The WPMRR Virtual Summit is a three-day online conference that helps us fulfill our mission: to actively help as many people as possible responsibly achieve their MRR goals,” said Howard. He also said the WPMRR Podcast carries this mission forward by telling unfiltered stories of successful entrepreneurs. On the WPMRR Community side, the goal is for members to grow their MRR together. The summit provides an onramp for newcomers into the community. Like 2020, the event’s talks and roundtables will be held over Vimeo Live. However, this year, they will be streamed directly into the WPMRR Virtual Community space. The goal is to make it easier to transition attendees into becoming full-fledged community members, continuing their education and experience beyond a once-per-year event. “The virtual summit will be a fantastic event, but often it’s difficult for conferences to provide ongoing support, advice, and community to make sure what was learned at the event is actually implemented, tested, and integrated into attendees’ businesses,” said Howard. “This will make it far simpler to give direct access to our community to those who want to responsibly build their MRR alongside others all year round, not just for three days.” The three-day event will be broken down as follows: September 21: Sales & Marketing September 22: Operations & Systems September 23: Website Management The summit will use Circle to handle discussions via its commenting system. This should allow communication to happen at everyone’s preferred pace. “Our plans are to do a Q&A, manage the ‘Hallway,’ and provide a space for attendees, speakers and sponsors to all interact via asynchronous communication via the WPMRR Community,” said Howard. All About MRR MRR is an acronym for Monthly Recurring Revenue. It is about generating repeated income every month instead of getting paid once for a product or service — a subscription-based model. I asked Howard to break down why this concept is crucial for new or potential business owners in the WordPress space. He responded with several reasons for going this route over a one-time revenue model. “If you’re selling a product for $100 and want to make $100K in a year, you need to find 1,000 new customers to sign up,” he said. “If you’re selling something for $100/mo instead, you need far less because customers are paying you every month instead of just once. In most situations (especially because lead generation is a pain point for most businesses), delivering ongoing value to ~100 customers is far less work than finding 1,000 new customers!” This leads to having multiple avenues to growing your business. With recurring revenue, entrepreneurs can continue attracting new customers and selling new features to existing ones. Howard also pointed out that subscriptions representing a chunk of total revenue creates a more predictable financial situation. This can lead to making easier budgeting decisions. Focusing on recurring revenue means constantly delivering value to customers instead of always chasing new sales. “Running a subscription business is way less stressful because the business model is simply more resilient,” said Howard. “If you rely on SEO to drive new leads to your business and Google penalizes you, your business will literally stop generating any revenue whatsoever if you only serve one-time customers. But if you have subscription revenue and this happens, you still have a collection of customers who pay you every month, giving you far more runway to figure out next steps before the business fails.” I also asked Howard about the different levels of MRR and how the game changes as revenue increases. “Often, what gets you to $10K MRR evolves significantly if/when you’re on your way to $83K MRR ($1M/year),” he said. “This is what makes the WPMRR Community so valuable, as we have different spaces folks can join based on what their MRR goals are.” He also pointed out the crossover between those starting out and those running larger businesses, saying that it was important for both audiences to learn from the other. “We can listen to advice and best practices all day, but we don’t know when inspiration will hit us,” he said. “That’s why I think it’s important for those starting out to tune into some more advanced talks and for those running larger businesses to listen to beginners as well. “All our speakers will be instructed by Brian Richards (our day-of technical director and speaker preparer) to be really explicit about the context around any advice they’re giving and how it could apply to businesses of different sizes and scales. That way, we can help people at whatever stage they’re at!” The entire written interview with Howard is available via the WPMRR Community site. It is worth reading for those who want to learn more about the event and MRR from his experience or an unfiltered version of this story. Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link

Continue reading

Gutenberg 11.3 Introduces Dimensions Panel, Adds Button Padding Support, and Speeds Up the Inserter – WP Tavern

[ad_1] Earlier today, Gutenberg 11.3 landed in the WordPress plugin directory. The latest update introduces a new dimensions panel for toggling spacing-related block options. The Button block now supports the padding control, and the Post Featured Image block has new width and height settings. One of the release’s highlights was a speed improvement for both opening and searching within the inserter. The opening time dropped over 200 ms, from 370.35 ms to 137.28 ms. Search speed went from 190.37 ms to 67.24 ms. The latest release includes a simplified color picker library. Rich previews for links, a feature introduced in Gutenberg 10.9 for external URLs, now works with internal site links. Theme authors should enjoy the reduced specificity of the reset and classic editor stylesheets. Such changes always make it a little easier for theme authors to match editor and front-end styling. Dimension Panel for Spacing Controls Toggling the padding and margin controls for the Site Tagline block. Gutenberg 11.3 introduces a new Dimensions panel for blocks that support either margin or padding controls. The feature adds an ellipsis (…) button in place of the typical open/close tab arrow. Users can select which controls they want to use. The long-term goal is to clean up the interface, only exposing controls that a user actually needs. Because such needs are subjective, allowing users to toggle them on/off is an ideal route to take. The current downsides are twofold. Once choosing to display margin or padding controls, the panel itself cannot be collapsed. This exacerbates the very problem that the new feature attempts to solve — decluttering the sidebar interface. For me, at least, I always want quick access to spacing controls. However, I do not always need them shown. The second issue is that the user choice of what to display does not seem to be stored. Each time you work with a block, you must select which controls should appear. The new Dimensions panel is only one part of the process of wrangling sizing (width and height), spacing (padding and margin), and related controls for blocks. Work toward a more well-rounded solution is still underway. Presumably, the development team will address these issues and others in future releases. However, those who run the Gutenberg plugin in production should expect oddities with usage. The Block Visibility plugin has the most user-friendly version of such a toggle control right now. It is not yet a perfect solution, but it works a little better than what is currently in Gutenberg. Button Block Padding Testing the new Button block padding option with TT1 Blocks. It is no secret that I dislike the default padding of the Button block when using the TT1 Blocks theme (block-based version of Twenty Twenty-One). I have made it one of my missions to routinely point it out, even going so far as refusing to use the block in the last call for testing as part of the FSE Outreach Program. An oversized button is not always the wrong stylistic choice on a webpage. Context matters and I somehow continue to run into scenarios where I need something a bit more scaled back. Control over the Button block’s padding has been on my wish list for months, and the Gutenberg development team delivered. As of 11.3, users can control the padding of individual Button blocks. It will now appear as an option within the new Dimensions panel mentioned earlier. Prayer answered. Now, let us move toward adding padding controls to all the blocks. The one potential issue some users might run into is maintaining consistent spacing when using multiple Button blocks together. The easiest way to do this is to add and style the first, then duplicate it to create others with the same spacing. This is not a new issue; it applies to all Button options where users want consistency within a group. Featured Image Dimension Controls Adjusting a Post Featured Image block’s dimensions. The Post Featured Image block has finally received a small but handy upgrade. In the past, users and theme authors only had a single option of deciding whether to link it to the post. Now, they can control the width and height of the image. If a user sets a height for the image, the editor will reveal a separate “Scale” option with the following choices: Cover (default) Contain Stretch What do these options actually do? That would be a good question. Even as someone in the web design and development loop for close to two decades, I sometimes forget and must look them up. They are values for the object-fit CSS property and are likely to confuse users in many instances. Cover and contain allow the image to fit within the containing element’s box while maintaining its aspect ratio (no stretching the image). The difference is that the cover value will be clipped if it does not fit and the contain value may be letterboxed. A stretch value will fill its container regardless of the aspect ratio. Depending on the image’s aspect ratio on its container, each of the values could essentially display the same thing on the screen. Or, they could provide wildly different results. Coupling these dimensions controls with wide and full alignments (also width-related options) could make for some unpredictable experiments too. The theme designer in me wants to disable the UI for this altogether and present something slightly more controlled: an image size selector. Such a selector should not be confused with width and height controls. WordPress theme authors have been registering custom image sizes for years. The primary use case for this was featured images. Users can use these sizes with the current Image and Latest Posts blocks. However, they do not yet have this option with Post Featured Image. I am in the camp that believes image size controls should have been the first addition to the block. It is such an integral part of WordPress theme design that it cannot be left out, and I have

Continue reading

Wirecutter’s Website Builder for 2021: Wix • WPShout

[ad_1] This is an interesting little tidbit for “the web industry” generally, and where it interfaces with real people with non-internet-focused lives and careers. The Wirecutter—the de facto site for time-starved yuppies to quickly find an acceptable-to-great version of a product category (aka, how I buy almost everything)—recommends Wix for those looking to make a website. Now, if you’re reading this site (WPShout) you probably know of another tool or service: WordPress. They did look at WordPress.com. They did not look at “a WordPress site on (your favorite host) with Elementor/Beaver Builder/etc.” And nor do they seem to have been particularly worried about “ease of porting your site” or “ease of augmenting the site with nerdy features.” And you won’t find the term “open source” or “license” anywhere on the page. For those not following me, the last paragraph is some of the reasons us WordPress folks tend to like to use it. But neither Melanie Pinola (the page’s author) nor its primary audience is thinking about those things. And that’s fine. Good even! And as “a WordPress professional” you benefit from always keeping that gap in mind. The arguments and benefits that lead Wix (and after that, Square—the payments people) to be the best for Wirecutter readers are places and spaces that WordPress (or whatever other nerdy CMS you’re into) can and should go to stay vital and relevant in the industry. I think the Gutenberg project is continuing to play out as a long-bet for the future of WordPress, and I remain bullish on it. But clearly winning all the battles for the home for “people needing a website” is something that WordPress has not beat the whole world at. (Yet.) (Hat tip to the Post Status Newsletter for this link) Visit nytimes.com → [ad_2] Source link

Continue reading

WordPress.org Experiments with Rejecting Plugin Submissions with the “WP” Prefix to Mitigate Potential Trademark Abuse – WP Tavern

[ad_1] Many in the WordPress developer community were surprised to learn that WordPress.org is rejecting plugins with the “WP” prefix in the name after Joe Youngblood tweeted the rejection note he received. Although that restriction was put into place approximately seven months ago, there was no official communication on the change. WordPress is now claiming that the @WordPress Foundation has demanded that the developers stop allowing "WP" to be used in plugin names. pic.twitter.com/FyyPJoqXmd — Joe Youngblood (@YoungbloodJoe) August 13, 2021 As the result of the controversy gaining attention on social media and other channels, WordPress Plugin Team member Mika Epstein posted an explanation on the original meta trac ticket, the reasoning for how and why “wp” is being blocked: Using wp- at the beginning of plugin permalinks, yes. Due to how we built this out, the display name is what gets checked and flagged. You can use WPPluginName (no space) and Plugin Name for WP. This stems from part of a longer conversation going on with the Foundation, regarding handling the actual misuse of ‘WordPress’ in plugin names (which, as we all know, is actually trademarked and as such should not be used in your plugin name at all). Because using WP Blah Blah as a name tends to lead to people changing it after approval to “WordPress Blah Blah” we put a pause on it to try and get a handle on how bad is this, what’s the depth of the problem (vs the actual headache of WC -> WooCommerce in names) and so on. There is also the reality that using ‘WP’ or ‘Plugin’ in a plugin permalink is unnecessary and can be harmful to SEO due to repetitive words. No one is claiming WP is trademarked, we’re just trying to minimize confusion and prevent people from accidentally violating trademarks in the future because they change WP to WordPress later on. Whether or not “wp” was trademarked became a particular point of confusion because the commit message on the change said: “Adding in some more things to block based on use and trademarks.” The conversation with the WordPress Foundation that Epstein was referencing was a private discussion about how the team can mitigate trademark abuse. “This came up in the midst of an ad hoc brainstorm about the ways that the loophole could be more effectively managed, and so there wasn’t a lengthy public discussion on it,” WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy said. “It was part of an experiment for handling that loophole more effectively and wasn’t meant to be permanent. The great thing about experiments in WordPress is that when we see that we’re throwing out the good along with the bad, we can make the necessary changes to do it better.” Haden Chomphosy said that although the original discussion was private, the team plans to make it public via the new meta ticket that was opened yesterday for improving the checks on plugin submissions. “All future discussions will be on the ticket, so as people work on it, then the conversations will be available there,” she said when asked how the trademark abuse mitigation experiment will be evaluated. The WordPress Foundation does not have any employees, but Haden Chomphosy said the representatives who can help with the grey areas of trademark guidelines include herself, Andrea Middleton, and Cami Kaos. She also confirmed that “WP” is not a WordPress trademark and the Foundation is not pursuing trademarking the term. Although each of these individuals referenced have a long track record of protective care for the WordPress community and have demonstrated a sincere desire to see the project grow, they are all employed by Automattic. The Foundation could use some outside representation if those running it are engaging in private decision making and giving directives to the WordPress.org Plugin Team that have significant ramifications for the ecosystem as a whole. For years, the WordPress community has been encouraged to use WP instead of WordPress in plugin names, so the decision to reject plugins with WP in the name is a major, controversial change. The problem for me is 1. you are penalizing everyone for something a few people do. 2. it doesn’t actually fix the problem because I could change any of my plugin names to WordPress after the fact and 3. There’s NO official announcement explaining this. — Brad Williams (@williamsba) August 17, 2021 Those who oppose the current experiment have pointed out that it unfairly penalizes everyone for the few who change their plugin names after approval. It polices potential misuse instead of providing a solution that can flag actual trademark abuse. Some plugin developers have noted that having WP in the plugin name is necessary to differentiate it from extensions for other platforms, since WordPress.org is not the only place where their products are distributed. Many successful businesses have been created on top of plugins with WP as a prefix in the name, such as WP Mail SMTP, WP Fastest Cache, WP Migrate DB, to name just a few. Whether it is beneficial or detrimental to use WP in a brand’s name is immaterial to the discussion at hand. With the current trademark abuse mitigation experiment in place, all new plugin developers hoping to use the WP prefix will have their plugins rejected. Fortunately it isn’t retroactive, but if the team decides the experiment of banning WP in plugin names is a success, it may be up for discussion. Springing experiments on the community without publicly communicating the intent is a misstep for the Foundation. If allowing WP in the name creates wrong expectations for plugin developers regarding their ability to change the name to use WordPress, then the problem needs to be fixed at the root. WordPress.org needs to find a better way to inform developers about which terms are actually trademarked and develop a technical solution to flag name changes that do not comply. This may be a difficult technical problem to solve regarding plugin submission and updates, but it’s worth investing

Continue reading
1 … 22 23 24 25 26 … 29