Tag Archives: Call

WordCamp Nairobi, Call For Speakers

[ad_1] I noticed recently that WordCamp Nairobi is on the calendar for 1-2 November. Then I noticed their Camp slogan is “Beyond the Savannah: Connecting the Kenyan WordPress Community to the World”, and I thought “Yes! That’s so perfect for HeroPress!” So much so that it’s going to help drive the mission of HeroPress in the future. At the moment we’re simply a Media Partner, so I’m here to tell you that the call for speakers is open! If you can attend you should apply to speak, we need as many voices as possible. I recently met with Moses Cursor Ssebunya, Patrick Lumumba, and Emmanuel Lwanga, all organizers of the WordCamp. If you see them, say hi and shake their hand for me. It sounds like it’s going to be a great event. Moses Cursor Ssebunya Patrick Lumumba Emmanuel Lwanga Related [ad_2] Source link

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Last Call for the 2023 State of Open Source Survey – WP Tavern

[ad_1] OpenLogic, a company that provides technical support for enterprise open source infrastructure, and the Open Source Initiative (OSI), the nonprofit stewards of the Open Source Definition (OSD, have collaborated to put together the 2023 State of Open Source Survey. The annual survey collects data from professionals to identify trends in the adoption and challenges of using open source technologies. It takes less than 10 minutes to answer the 31-question survey. Respondents are asked if their organizations have increased the use of OSS over the last year and in which categories of software they have invested the most in terms of projects, budget, and resources. The 2022 survey had 2,660 respondents. It found the #1 reason respondents are using OSS is access to innovation, followed by cost reduction and security/availability of patches. More than 36% of respondents indicated that they significantly increased their use of OSS over the past year. The 2022 survey found the biggest barrier to adopting open source software was the lack of internal skills to test, use, integrate, and support it. The last call has gone out to contribute to this year’s survey. It would be good to have WordPress software organizations represented in the results as part of the broader OSS community. Respondents who take the time to fill out the survey are entered for a chance to win a $200 Amazon gift card. OpenLogic is also donating $1 for every response to the World Food Program, a humanitarian organization working to end world hunger. [ad_2] Source link

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Open Meeting and Call for Feedback – WP Tavern

[ad_1] The WordPress.org Themes Team announced an open discussion and date for a Zoom meeting with theme authors. The team is proposing a new set of guidelines that reduces and simplifies what is currently in place. Comments on the proposal are open through July 26, and the meeting is set for July 28, 2 pm CET. This is the next step in an ongoing plan to revamp the review system and make it easier for the WordPress community to submit themes. It comes after months of waiting to see the results of earlier discussions unfold. In January, the state of the theme review system seemed to have reached a crossroads. The Themes Team, a group of gatekeepers that oversees submissions to the official WordPress.org theme directory, had been making strides in the previous couple of years. Its members had cleaned up most of the submissions backlog, but they still had a lot of work ahead to smooth out the review process. On the whole, a series of incremental improvements seemed to be working at the time, albeit slowly. Then, WordPress project lead Matt Mullenweg dropped a bombshell via the Post Status Slack: The .org theme directory is particularly bad when you compare it to any half-decent commercial theme marketing page, or the designs available on other site building services or Themeforest directories. The .org theme directory rules and update mechanism have driven out creative contributions, it’s largely crowded out by upsell motived contributions. It was an age-old discussion of whether the theme review guidelines were too high of a barrier for entry into the directory. Were WordPress users missing out on the best themes because the most innovative theme authors were not playing in the .ORG sandbox? If so, were the rules driving them away? No one can know if a more lenient, free-for-all atmosphere would have unleashed a mountain of creativity paralleling or besting commercial theme producers. But, perhaps if the team opened things up, it would test the theory. That initial post led to a series of discussions and a decision to overhaul the system. However, the Themes Team would need some help from the Meta Team to implement more automation of its grunt work, such as security and other code checks. Behind the scenes, pieces of that system have been put into place in the months since. Guidelines Proposal and Questions Themes Team representative Carolina Nymark listed a set of 13 overarching guidelines, each with sub-guidelines of their own. The proposal significantly simplifies the current rules for submission into the directory. She asks that theme authors review the proposal and answer the following questions in the comments ahead of the meeting: Will the updated requirements make it easier for you to submit themes?– If no, what is making it difficult for you to submit themes? Will the updated requirements make it easier for you to review submitted themes?– If no, what is making it difficult for you to review themes? Are there requirements that need to be removed, and why? Is there anything in the list of requirements that is unclear? Describe the issue. Can the formatting of the page be improved to make it easier to read? The current proposal is more expansive than the shortlist of guardrails WordPress executive director Josepha Haden Chomphosy mentioned in a post that laid out the next steps. Most of these were not meant as blockers for submission. “Rather we should use the list to flag themes that have/don’t have each thing and show them in results accordingly,” she wrote. “Likely exceptions to this would be proper licensing, adherence to fair use of the trademark, and a ban on child pornography or other images of anyone unable to provide consent.” The goal was to put more responsibility into the hands of users, granting them privileges to say whether a theme was working or not. This would take a lot of the work off the shoulders of the review team. Another part of the original proposal was to mark themes with “quality tags” that went above and beyond the baseline for approval. For example, internationalization (i18n) and accessibility (A11Y) are items that do not stop a theme from technically working. Instead of making these requirements, themes would merely be tagged if they met those standards. Presumably, there would be incentives for taking those extra steps for theme authors, such as higher search rankings, the ability to be featured, and more. It is not that i18n and A11Y standards are unimportant, but they are sometimes hindrances to first-time authors. And, they definitely fall within the range of things that end-users can dock themes for in the ratings. Many will take a hard stance on i18n and A11Y, but they are merely examples. A less controversial guideline might be the one that proposes that themes can only recommend plugins directly hosted on WordPress.org. Why should that be a blocker for inclusion in the directory? Some will say there is no good reason for it since themes are disallowed from installing plugins anyway. There are no technical issues with allowing such recommendations. It is these sorts of rules that have plagued the theme review process over the years. Often, it moves discussions into ideological territory that most users do not care about. They just want themes that work. Under the new proposal, moving to 100% blocks would further reduce requirements for developers. Currently, classic themes have a more extensive list of rules they must adhere to. Many of these are unnecessary for block themes, essentially cutting everything back to including a few required files. Most of this can and should be automated in the long term since they are necessary for a functioning theme. Right now, the 13 guidelines (and their sub-guidelines) are only a proposal. Theme authors have a voice, but they must use it. As is so often the case, decisions are made by those who show up. Far too often, the team is shouting into the void, awaiting a response

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A Developer-Centric Call for Testing Theme JSON Configuration – WP Tavern

[ad_1] Round #8 of the Full Site Editing (FSE) Outreach Program began yesterday. Instead of the user-centric call for testing features from the UI, program lead Anne McCarthy asks that volunteers dive into code. The new adventure is all about testing theme.json files. The twist is likely to limit the pool of usual volunteers. However, it could open it up to an audience that may have been sitting on the sideline for the previous tests: theme developers. Before jumping headfirst theme JSON files, we should probably all get on the same page. I have been calling theme.json the tipping point between the old WordPress and the new WordPress. When version 5.0 of the core platform launched in late 2018, it was a revolutionary step forward, but not on the surface. A new editor is just a new editor. Some will love it; others will hate it. And, it was more often clunky than not. For the most part, WordPress was still WordPress. The core software was due for an upending. Newer technologies were not only democratizing publishing in their own ways, but they were also bringing that same concept to design. The introduction of blocks was merely foundational. The new editor was an imperfect tool, often feeling like the proverbial round peg being shoved into a square hole. The only way to live out the early vision of the Gutenberg project was to continue bridging the gap between what the user sees in the admin and what gets output on the front end. That is what the theme.json file is all about. It is a translator that allows users, themes, and WordPress to all speak the same language. What does this mean exactly? From a user’s viewpoint, they see all sorts of controls for changing their blocks. Color, font size, alignment, and other options are tools that allow them to customize their content. Customizing a profile card for my cat using block options. There are severe limitations with what is possible in the current system. Theme authors can register a handful of options. Outside of that, the theme and block systems can feel like they are pitted against each other for control. That is where the theme.json file comes in. It allows themes and WordPress to get on the same page, creating a standardized system that improves the user experience. This file that lives a theme’s root folder hands over the power to configure dozens of presets (e.g., color and font options), custom CSS properties, and default styles for blocks and HTML elements. It also gives themers the power to enable or disable specific features. For example, developers can turn off the ability for users to set a custom font size but provide access to their perfect scale of choices that fit into the design’s vertical rhythm. However, it will move beyond the simple configuration of blocks in the content editor. When the global styles system launches alongside the site editor in the future, users will customize many of the presets and overwrite the default block styles. Because everyone is speaking that same language, fewer conflicts arise. As designer Tammie Lister pointed out in her piece for Ephermeral Themes, Theme.json inspires, themes have been stuck. The software, the community, has put too much responsibility on the shoulders of themers over the years. They have had to innovate and build the systems that should have been coming from WordPress. Not only did the core platform need to be turned on its head, but the design system deserved an overhaul. “I am very aware that saying ‘first major theme process to core’ in years is quite a statement,” wrote Lister. “Theme.json to me is that though. I don’t say this ignoring iterations and improvements, WordPress is a project flowing with the energy of those. However, themes were on life support stuck in a land when the rest of front end development was moving on. It wasn’t for some trying to change that, mostly when they did the time wasn’t right and as it didn’t come from core it was always a harder change.” It is time for a new front-end design era. But, first, we must test. Testing Theme JSON Real-world theme.json file. The more I journeyed into this call for testing, the more I realized it did not feel right for me. Over the past couple of months, I have already been in the thick of working from the theme.json file. I know most of the little quirks and see the gaps. The tricks for working with it feel second nature to me. I have performed all of the beginner and intermediate steps dozens upon dozens of times. I have already filed tickets for any issues I have run into. Or, someone else has already beat me to the punch. Those stages of this testing round need fresh eyes. The best feedback will be from theme authors who will be viewing the problems through a different pair of lenses. If you are in this group, there is no time like the present to test and provide feedback. The advanced stage calls for recreating a classic theme using theme.json. It is best to stick with something simple. Otherwise, you could be looking at a weeks-long experiment. McCarthy recommends Twenty Twenty or Storefront. I have already been performing this song and dance too. My test project was an old theme that I gutted and turned into a block theme. There is one overarching issue that I keep coming back to. It is that theme authors must work from a JSON file at all. I understand the “why” behind using JSON. It is a universal format that we can pass around from JavaScript to PHP. Third-party APIs can understand it. However, I am currently sitting on top of 900+ lines of code in my theme.json. I have heard from a couple of other theme authors who have been doing deep work with similar numbers. I expect it to only grow. “Number of lines”

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