Matt Mullenweg speaks to WordPress contributors worldwide on this special edition of the WP Briefing podcast with Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Join us to hear Matt’s thoughts on Ukraine.
Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to a special edition of the WordPress Briefing. I have Matt here with me today because we want to acknowledge that we are once again at the start of a very difficult time. Neither of us would presume to know what it’s like to be at the heart of such massive disruption in our lives. But who would we be if we didn’t stop and check in with you all, the project that we hold so dear? And with that, I’ll hand it right over to you, Matt.
Matt Mullenweg 00:27
Hello everyone. First, I want to thank Josepha for inviting me to join the WordPress Briefing to share what’s been on my mind in light of recent global events.
Matt Mullenweg 00:37
I’ve been listening and watching events escalate in Ukraine, often in a state of shock. The scale alone is hard to take in. I mean, in the last 7 days, more than 500,000 people have fled their homes, more refugees are expected every day. The downstream humanitarian crises of the invasion are unimaginable.
Matt Mullenweg 00:56
And seeing destruction in the world we live in is confusing, disconcerting, and difficult. In my experience, open source and WordPress bring people together; people from other countries and cultures, people that we know as friends and colleagues. Technology connects us, regardless of where we are. Nothing can negate the bad things happening in the world, but when I see how this community of contributors collaborates, regardless of borders, you all remind me of the good in the world every day.
Matt Mullenweg 01:30
I firmly believe that the web can be an equalizer and a force for good in the world. To me, the WordPress project is the epitome of goodness—everyone has a voice, a platform, and a community. You have the power to make your corner of the world, and the web, a sanctuary for those who need it—especially now.
Matt Mullenweg 01:45
If you or someone you know is affected by this war, I encourage you to be present as the ramifications unfold. While we may all feel fatigued and have a sense of languishing from the past two years of the Covid pandemic, the gift of time and support for one another cannot be overstated. I’m confident that every single person in the WordPress community will approach the situation in Ukraine with sensitivity and understanding.
Matt Mullenweg 02:07
I invite you to join me in standing with those in the world working to end conflict and working toward a world of peace, promise, and opportunity. If you’re looking for a way to help support the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, I will offer some suggested NGOs, or Non-Governmental Organizations, that provide assistance to local peacebuilders in the region.
Matt Mullenweg 02:26
In closing, please know that my thoughts are with everyone in our community. I know that my words here can’t change anything there, but I hope that we all remember that words of support are never unwelcome. And we can never know when a little human kindness can help someone share the invisible heaviness in their heart.
Josepha Haden Chomphosy 02:44
Thanks for that, Matt. My friends, there are links in the show notes to some of the groups that Matt referenced. And that is it for this special edition of the WordPress Briefing. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Be safe, be kind to yourself and others, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks.
There’s a lot going on in the world right now, and safety is top of mind for everyone in the WordPress community. If you don’t know where to begin, or how to support your peers, Executive Director Josepha Chomphosy’s advice to the global community is to start small.
Overall, February has been a busy month for WordPress. To begin with, it was thrilling to see the enthusiasm for the release of WordPress 5.9 Joséphine from January continue last month, and that’s not all.
We have many exciting updates to share, so keep reading to learn about the latest achievements from the WordPress community.
WordPress 6.0: May 24, 2022 is the proposed release date
Gutenberg releases: Versions 12.5, 12.6, and 12.7 were released
The Core Team launched three new versions of Gutenberg last month. All come with new features, code quality improvements, and bug fixes.
Gutenberg 12.7 is available to download. This version improves the Patterns experience, allows you to add border styles to column blocks, and includes other new features.
Gutenberg 12.6 was launched on February 16, 2022. This release includes a new color panel, updated color controls, a new Post Author Biography block, Read More block, and plenty of other exciting updates!
Gutenberg 12.5 was released on February 2, 2022. This version allows switching theme styles variations, custom taxonomies filtering, and more.
The redesign of WordPress News, which was first announced by Matt Mullenweg, Co-Founder of WordPress, in State of the Word 2021, went live on February 16, 2022.
Team updates: #WP Diversity, a new blog for developers, and more
The #WPDiversity working group, which is part of the Community Team, hosted an open Zoom meeting with volunteers on February 23, 2022. If you’re interested in contributing, read the recap of the meeting to view available roles.
The Core Team shared a proposal to start a blog on developer.wordpress.org to share news and updates relevant to developers.
The first Gutenberg Developer Hours session hosted on February 8th by the Core Team was successful. Head over to this page to learn more about the participants’ feedback.
The Core Team published “Feature Project: Plugin Dependencies,” where they identified the problems with plugin dependencies and suggested potential solutions to improve the plugin experience.
The WordPress Photo Directory has a new Make team. There is currently an open call for team reps and collaboration is happening at the new #photos channel of the Make WordPress Slack.
The Polyglots Team shared a proposal for a milestone template for the Polyglots Locale Teams.
The latest edition of People of WordPress highlighting Tonya Mork was published on February 28, 2022. Read Tonya’s story to learn more about how WordPress helped her find herself again after a health crisis.
In a recent episode of WP Briefing titled “Five Cents on Five for the Future,” Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy talks about future-proofing the WordPress project with the Five for the Future pledge.
The Training Team is hosting several WordPress Social Learning Meetups in March 2022.
In this series, we share some of the inspiring stories of how WordPress and its global network of contributors can change people’s lives for the better. This month we feature a website developer and engineer from the US, who found the software and its community provide the impetus to keep her going forward.
WordPress gave Tonya Mork a new lease of energy after a health crisis from which she nearly died. She had spent two decades as an electrical and software engineer in high tech automated manufacturing. But when she discovered the WordPress software, teaching it to others became her new purpose. Through this discovery, she has gone on to help thousands of developers understand and build code in great depth.
As part of her WordPress journey, she has shared her skills in the roles of Release Coordinator and the Core Tech Editor for the most recent major WordPress release, 5.9 Joséphine.
Life takes an unexpected turn
For the first 22 years of Tonya’s life, she rose through the ranks from enlisted personnel in the US Navy to a highly sought after chief engineer with a multi million-dollar industrial automation engineering firm.
However, while she was working in engineering, her life was to change dramatically. In 2007, Tonya started to face health challenges that had an impact on all that she had known.
“My career defined me. It was my canvas and my art. When it was gone, I did not recognize myself.
Tonya Mork
One day, she woke up at home ready to visit a client’s facility where her firm was building a robotic system. She said: “As I headed for the door, I fell to my knees, as this wave of pain crushed down on my chest.”
Doctors diagnosed her with a very rare heart disease that caused her blood vessels to spasm, cutting off blood to whatever was downstream of the blockage.
A few months later, she was diagnosed with a second rare and more serious condition, related to the migraines from which she had been suffering. Combined with her heart condition, this made every migraine attack life-threatening.
For nearly seven years, the unexpected changes to her health left her mostly homebound and constantly monitored. This meant she had to close her engineering firm and say goodbye to staff and clients.
“My career defined me. It was my canvas and my art. When it was gone, I was lost. I didn’t recognize myself.”
But in her darkest hour, she found her strength. Tonya made a choice to move forward, and make the most of her life.
“When you are at rock bottom, you have to make a decision or else it will consume you. My decision was that I chose to be happy,” said Tonya.
One of Tonya’s first steps was to start writing a blog using WordPress. In this she shared insights on how to find peace and joy in any situation. She wrote about kindness and helping one another.
The joy of making solutions through WordPress became a way for Tonya to accept her new life and not feel as limited by her health. She wanted purpose, and in WordPress, she found just that.
Tonya felt she could do something worthwhile in the virtual world.
A ray of hope for Tonya
In 2013, Tonya’s health deteriorated further. She was admitted into intensive care and was diagnosed with a third rare disease, this time related to her autoimmunity. She was not expected to survive this time.
Following what she describes as a ‘miraculous recovery,’ she became stronger and was able to stop relying on a wheelchair. She used the energy from working on websites to keep going. “WordPress kept my mind alive,” said Tonya.
She had first used WordPress for her engineering firm’s intranet. But when she discovered the software’s full potential and the collaborative opportunities of open source, it opened a new world.
“Finding WordPress helped me to find myself again”
Tonya Mork
During the years which followed, she donated her time to build some WordPress websites and plugins. She said: “Through giving my time, I was able to do something other than sit in isolation.”
Tonya was amazed by the sharing in open source in general and in WordPress in particular. She said: “I was amazed to see people sharing so much information freely with one another. In my former engineering world, information was proprietary. Throughout my career, I had worked to break down those silos and help anyone to understand complex systems. I was drawn to this open community.”
She also became aware that WordPress developers were hungry to learn more about development. She wanted to be part of the solution with her passion for teaching and the knowledge she had gained in industry.
She said: “Finding WordPress helped me to find myself again. Here in this community, I was able to feel like a person again, not a sick one, but a professional with something to give.”
As her interest in the software grew, Tonya decided to start a non-profit where she turned to WordPress to build the websites. This re-sparked her interest in programming. She said: “I wanted to really know the code and understand what made it tick.”
The realization led Tonya to start the WP Developers’ Club, which in turn spawned Know the Code, to help educate individual developers, and is still used today.
From helping WordPress companies to working on WordPress Core
Tonya went on to work with big and medium size WordPress companies helping their developers and supporting them in raising their firms’ leverage with WordPress.
By late 2020, she knew she wanted to do even more with WordPress.
In February 2021, Tonya joined an international firm in the ecosystem and began working closely on WordPress Core.
At that time, WordPress Core was pulling together a new Triage team. Tonya started volunteering on that team to find collaborative solutions, and help others do so. In 2020 for WordPress 5.6 Simone, she became the release’s Triage lead, and again for WordPress 5.7 Esperanza.
In 2021, she became a Test Team Rep and helped to expand the team and is an advocate for the value of testing and feedback in the release development process.
A new, successful chapter with WordPress 5.9
Tonya’s passion for the software and getting people involved in its growth continued. For the WordPress 5.9 release in 2021, she took on the role of both the Core Tech Lead and the Release Coordinator. As this was a big release and included the first major implementation of Full Site Editing, it had many moving parts and hundreds of contributors. She was able to share the skills she had learned in communication and project management from her days streamlining and documenting engineering software and processes.
In the first 24 hours of WordPress 5.9 landing, it had more than 10 million downloads—and 17 formally reported bugs.
Giving back to open source
Now in what Tonya describes as her third chapter. She said: “I’m a very different person from the engineer I used to know. What really matters in this world is when you reach out and make a difference in someone’s life.”
She feels she has found her purpose in this life. “I’m on a mission to give back and make a difference. Teaching is how I will do it. And in WordPress I have found my professional home, and I have all this software knowledge that I just want to share.”
Share the stories
Help share these stories of open source contributors and continue to grow the community. Meet more WordPressers in the People of WordPress series. #ContributorStory.
Contributors to this feature
Thank you to Tonya Mork (@hellofromtonya) for sharing her story.
Thanks to Josepha Haden Chomphosy (@chanthaboune) and Topher DeRosia (@topher1kenobe) and others for their support of this initiative.
This People of WordPress feature is inspired by an essay originally published on HeroPress.com, a community initiative created by Topher DeRosia. It highlights people in the WordPress community who have overcome barriers and whose stories might otherwise go unheard. #HeroPress
For much of Black history in the US, a lot of stories have gone untold. As we wrap up Black History Month, our team at Automattic — the company behind WordPress.com — wanted to share how we celebrated with our fellow colleagues. Throughout February, our Black/African Descent employee resource group, Cocoamattic, shined a light on some of these untold stories.
Each week this month, we shared infographics highlighting notable Black/African Descent people from around the world, from inventors and pioneers to Black-first and culture influencers.
“Are all your meetings so effective that you look forward to them?” Our CEO, Matt Mullenweg, recently asked us to reflect on this question. Live meetings have their place, and there are conversations that are better done in real-time, whether in person or through video chat. But they can be costly in terms of time and energy.
At Automattic, we are often asked how we manage remote work and how we avoid excessive meetings, and internal email chains. We use P2, a product powered by WordPress.com, to collaborate with colleagues across time zones. My team, for example, lives everywhere from the Philippines to Romania — there is very little time for us to meet live. P2 is a platform for us to brainstorm ideas, share project updates, and communicate asynchronously. It’s a place where we all start our workdays, no matter where we are in the world, and catch up on what we’re all working on, what tasks need to be done, and what decisions need to be made. Think of it as an internal journal. A bulletin board. A virtual watercooler.
For me, it’s kind of like reading the morning news. P2 can work for different kinds of teams or groups — people who work together within a distributed company, a virtual classroom or workshop cohort, an online business interacting with clients or partners, and more. Wondering how P2 can streamline your work, foster asynchronous collaboration, and eliminate unnecessary meetings? Here are 10 ways:
1. Offer courses that participants can take at their own pace
We offer courses to help you make the most of your WordPress.com site. For this curriculum, we use P2 as a community hub where students read lessons, ask questions, get tips, and interact with other participants. This can be done asynchronously — students do not need to join Zoom calls at times that don’t fit their schedule, which makes it accessible for everyone, from wherever they are.
2. Automate requests across teams and departments
You can use P2 to streamline processes in your organization, such as making requests. Need to send a contract to a new employee? Submit a request on your legal team’s P2. Looking for a designer to make a graphic for an upcoming blog announcement? Fill out a request on your design team’s P2. Hoping to parse stats on a recent campaign? Post a request on your data team’s P2. With these workflows in place, there’s no need to set up meetings to make these requests. Further discussions can happen in the post’s comments as needed.
3. Share status updates from across your company
At Automattic, we have a P2 called Thursday Updates where every team is required to post a biweekly status update, which might include project highlights and high-level summaries. At many organizations, these types of updates are often delivered in PowerPoint or Google Slides at live meetings, often to full rooms with people who don’t need to be there. With P2, you can present information and updates with an array of blocks, including media embeds and project tracking tools.
4. Set up a space to introduce new colleagues
The pandemic has changed the way we work, but traditionally, in many environments, new employees are often taken around and introduced to other staff. Automattic is a fully distributed company, and our teammates live around the world. One company tradition requires every new employee to write a welcome post on a designated P2, where they embed a short intro video about themselves. Other posts as part of the onboarding process include new employee interviews. These are all effective ways of getting to know people and to welcome them to your team — without needing to schedule a bunch of in-person meetings.
5. Create a private site to conduct trials with job candidates
The process of hiring a new employee, from start to finish, can be time-consuming. The entire interview timeline can take weeks, sometimes months, often facilitated through an exhausting combination of phone calls, Slack chats, Zoom calls, and in-person meetings. All roles at WordPress.com and the rest of Automattic involve a trial: a period when candidates work with us on a short-term project, and when both sides can assess whether it’s a good fit. We create P2s for candidates on trial, and at this stage are able to learn a lot about them, particularly the way they think, communicate, and collaborate. And this is important: we believe a culture of strong written communication is essential for remote organizations.
6. Set up a virtual notepad for meetings and brainstorms
Details of live meetings can be lost, especially when no one takes notes! At Automattic, we document external calls with clients and partners, sharing call notes in P2. And because P2s are searchable, employees — past, present, and future — can access important information discussed in meetings, even ones in which they were not present, to understand why decisions were made or to get the context they need to do their work. If you record video calls, you can also embed recordings on P2 with a number of video blocks, including Loom, Vimeo, and more, to supplement call notes.
7. Collaborate with partners and clients in a dedicated space
If you run a business, you might find that partners and clients often want to schedule a recurring meeting, even if there are no major updates to discuss. P2 is a great platform to complement — and eliminate unnecessary — live meetings. You can create a P2 for your partner or client and brand it visually with custom colors and their company logo, and tweak the sidebar with relevant links and resources. On this dedicated P2, partners and clients can share written updates, ask quick questions, set up future calls, and correspond with your team throughout the week. You can then schedule meetings only when needed.
8. Celebrate wins, publish retrospectives, and more
As you browse this list, you can see the power and versatility of P2. Powered by WordPress.com, P2 is, at its core, an internal journal — a space where your teammates, students, or group members can make announcements and share recaps. In some offices and work environments, people might schedule an after-work outing to commemorate a successful year, or plan an in-person retreat to discuss the long-term vision of a company. But these days, since it’s become harder to throw in-person events and to get together in person, we also use P2 to celebrate wins, post “state of the business” missives and share other essential longer-form content.
9. Share meetup guides and event summaries
Teams at WordPress.com and across Automattic periodically meet up in person, giving teammates scattered across the globe a chance to see one another in real life. Planning a meetup can take up a lot of time, from researching locations and booking lodging to ensuring flight and other travel costs are within budget. Meetup planners must also wrangle or be aware of accessibility issues, visa procedures of all attendees, internet speed tests, and other logistics. P2 is a great way to compile details and publish post-trip recaps, and archive travel resources for teams who visit these locations in the future. Folks interested in a particular destination can refer to these guides while planning, which cuts down meetings to essential ones only. (Fun fact: historically Lisbon, Portugal, and Hawaii have been the most popular meetup locations at Automattic.)
10. Publish self-guided resources and internal documentation
Teams across WordPress.com have access to a number of documentation P2s that we call Universities — such as Domain University and Scheduling University — that allow employees to self-train in new areas or brush up on skills. These P2s are quite comprehensive — learning this content might require a full-day live training session — but with these online “universities,” staff can work through resources and tutorials in their own time.
If you’ve been a WordPress user in any capacity, you’re probably aware that we believe in democratizing publishing and e-commerce. We believe in designing products for everyone, emphasizing accessibility, performance, security, and ease of use. We believe great software should focus on you, so you can share your story, product, or services, and achieve your dreams. We believe you have a say in this product and how it can make your life easier every day you use it.
Since last year, we’ve been working hard to enable more features for Professional Email and our other email products. One of the things we heard from you is that you want annual payment options, so you don’t have to worry about monthly payouts and pricing. Now, we’re happy to announce that annual plans are officially available for Professional Email. Don’t worry: our 3-month free trial is still available, so that you can try out the best-in-class email product with either payment method — without committing up front.
And we haven’t stopped there. WordPress.com now offers one-click webmail access, making it easier than ever to access and manage your emails directly within your site admin panel. That’s better for you, your community, and your customers. We’re also working on integrating webmail into the admin panel to make it easier to manage Professional Email and save you more time to focus on things important to you.
We want to make sure we continue building a product that makes your everyday life a bit better. If you have any ideas for features you’d want us to add, or any cool Professional Email experiences to share with us, drop us a line. We’re in this together!
Welcome to our brand new series, “WordPress.com Favorites”! In these interviews, we’ll be highlighting bloggers about their passion project. Caution: contents guaranteed to be inspiring.
First up, The Travel Architect. A teacher from the Twin Cities area of Minnesota, The Travel Architect has been documenting her world-wide travels (usually alongside “the husband”) since 2018. It’s easy to get sucked down the rabbit hole of her writing; she’s always funny and entertaining, provides great tips, and is quite obviously a natural storyteller. Let’s learn more!
1. When did you realize that you loved to travel, and when did you start making it a priority in your life?
It’s difficult to pinpoint an exact moment in time when I recognized travel as this thing I had to have in my life on a regular basis. Travel was a frequent part of my childhood and youth — cross-country road trips, ski vacations in the Rockies, Jamaica twice before first grade, a class trip to Spain, a month in Belgium as an exchange student, among other adventures — so my love almost certainly stems from those experiences.
I’ve always been the kind of person who wants to know what’s just beyond the hill in front of me or what’s just around that bend in the river. While I’m not a danger junkie at all (my husband jokingly calls me “Head Safety”), I am attracted to adventure, whether that adventure is trying via ferrata or exploring a new culture.
There were some lean travel years when I was in college, but after that I went on a two-and-a-half-month Colorado Outward Bound course that involved mountaineering, rock climbing, river rafting, and canyoneering. Shortly thereafter I moved to the mountains of Montana for a new adventure. Those were lean travel years, too, but living in the mountains in a new state felt a bit like travel. There I met my husband and eventually we relocated back to the Midwest, where I did all the mundane things like get a career and buy a house, but I always had to have travel on the horizon.
That’s the funny thing — I’m actually quite a homebody. I love my home and being at home, but there’s a restlessness there that can only be relieved by travel. Thankfully, I’m married to someone who is a lot like me in that regard. Nearly indistinguishable from my love of travel is my love of travel planning. I know lots of people would sooner take a trans-Pacific flight in the baggage hold of an airliner than plan and book their own travels, but for me it’s pure bliss (except for international COVID travel, when it’s pure hell).
2. Obviously, COVID has totally disrupted “normal” travel. I’m sure some of your plans were set aside — what did you decide to do in place of some of those plans? Was there anything you learned about your passion in the midst of the pandemic?
Yes, aside from a few colleagues at work who tell me they don’t like to travel (huh?!), I hardly know anyone who didn’t have plans ruined. I personally had a solo spring break trip to Sedona that went up in flames, and my husband and I had to cancel our trip to Spain, Andorra, and France.
Instead, we enacted “Plan B.” We have a little 12-foot travel trailer that we took on a three-week Colorado-Utah-Colorado socially-distanced road trip.
Once we were vaccinated we felt comfortable flying domestically, so we took a couple of trips out to different parts of California and one to Arizona. That Arizona trip was for my 50th birthday. I had long planned to do a much bigger trip to mark the occasion, possibly Japan, but that just wasn’t going to work with all the travel restrictions.
As for lessons learned, I guess it would be about money. When you’re good about saving for travel as I am, and then you don’t have any travel to spend your money on, your travel account can start to get wonderfully plump. That was our state of affairs partway into the pandemic. When we finally started flying domestically to travel, we really splashed out on some nice accommodations in some beautiful spots. I learned that this form of travel, while lovely, can quickly deplete the account that once seemed bottomless. Now that we’re back to traveling a bit more regularly, I’m trying to rein in some of my luxury impulses.
3. Do you have a favorite locale that you find yourself recommending all the time? Maybe you could share one stateside and one international?
Though I was born and raised in Wisconsin, I’m a mountain girl at heart. I will shout from the rooftops my love for Colorado — hands down my favorite state. I’m just transfixed by mountains. I’ve been to Colorado so many times I’ve lost count I and can’t seem to stop going back. Then there’s southern Utah, a close second, followed by the entire Four Corners region, and heck, the entire Mountain West all the way to the Pacific. This is why we haven’t seen much of the eastern seaboard and vast swaths of the southern US — the western United States just keeps calling to us.
Internationally, for Americans who’ve never traveled abroad before, we often recommend England, which is where my husband is from. It’s a foreign country, but the lack of a language barrier makes it a great first-timer destination. However, our true favorite is France. We love the food, culture, and history. We love practicing our French with the locals. And no, we’ve never found French people rude or unkind. That’s a stereotype I get asked about often. Frankly, I’ve had people be outwardly rude to me only twice on my travels, and those incidents were in England and Italy.
4. Any favorite travel tips that you can share with our readers? Whether about saving money, or the best apps, or some suitcase/backpack hack — we’re all ears!
I’m more of a “travel stories” than a “travel tips” kind of blogger, but I do have one or two things I’ve learned from experiences that may help others. First, if you’re renting a car, as soon as you take possession of it, take a photo that includes the license plate, make, and model. Accommodations usually ask for this information when checking travelers in, and this way you don’t have to run out to the car.
Second: always, always, always scrutinize your travel documents for accuracy. I failed to do this once and the airline nearly succeeded in denying me boarding on my flight to Jamaica. Another time I didn’t scan a hotel website as thoroughly as I should have and ended up booking a nonrefundable room. That was for the canceled trip to Spain and I’m still on the hook for it. (So far, they keep letting me kick the can down the road.)
5. When and why did you decide to start documenting your travels in a blog? What have you gained from blogging?
For me, blogging is the perfect marriage of my two favorite things: writing and travel. For two decades my only writing outlet was my annual Christmas letter. Every year I got compliments on it and people suggested I start a blog, but I always thought, “What on earth would I write about?” My husband, too, often urged me to start blogging.
One evening, fresh off an afternoon of travel planning and still experiencing some residual giddiness, our dinner conversation gave birth to the idea of a blog based around travel. I had long noticed that, despite being introverted, I could talk at length to anyone as long as travel was the topic. My husband had tried to start a blog once but it didn’t take, so the framework was there. We just transferred ownership of his blog to my name and the rest is history.
In addition to honing my writing skills, I have gained friends (or what I like to call “blog buddies”) around the world. I’ve even met up with some of them — one in Laos, one in Thailand, and one here in Minnesota.
6. What are your travel plans this year?
After a calamitous trip to England this past Christmas when Omicron was at its peak, we’ve sworn off international travel until the US removes its testing requirement to return home (I check weekly for news of its demise).
Still, there’s plenty to see and do in this massive country, so we’re taking advantage of that. I have my long-awaited solo spring break trip to Sedona coming up, two years after it was originally scheduled. Then we’re spending a few weeks in June with our travel trailer in Colorado where we’ll be cycling, hiking a pair of 14ers, and soaking in lots of hot springs. My 85-year-old mom and I might head out to (yet another part of) California for a few days mid-summer, an idea that’s just come about and that will provide me with many hours of glorious travel planning.
Finally, we just booked a week in Death Valley over Christmas. We’ve been there twice before, but always in summer when it’s 125 degrees with overnight lows in the 90s. It’ll be nice to have cooler temperatures so we can finally do some hiking and not have to force-feed ourselves a diet of Gatorade and ice cubes.
Are you inspired to revamp your own blog or bring it back from the dead? Take 10 minutes right now to visit your site and do some writing.
Or maybe you never really got the hang of the basics when it comes to blogging. If that’s the case, our “Intro to Blogging” course will be perfect for you. This free, self-paced course provides not only concrete tips for your site and blog, but also the goal-setting mindset needed to keep a blog going. Register for free today:
In this twenty-fifth episode of the WordPress Briefing, Executive Director, Josepha Haden Chomphosy discusses future-proofing the WordPress project with the Five for the Future pledge.
Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording.
Hello everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing. The podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project. Some insight into the community that supports it and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy – here we go!
Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:00:42]
I have a non-mailbag mailbag question that I would like to answer for y’all today. Non-mailbag because no one actually emailed me about it and mailbag because Twitter is basically like a giant mailbag. And I do get a lot of DMS about this particular topic. If you want to send something to my actual WP Briefing mailbag, you can send it to wpbriefing@worpress.org.
Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:01:06]
But the question that I frequently get asked in my DMS on Twitter is: what is Five for the Future? It’s not always that tidy the question, but that still is the question we’re answering today. So if you take a casual survey of active contributors to the WordPress project, the high-level answer that you’re likely to get to that question is “a way to remind people to give back to the project.” Or, if you run in more business-y circles, you might hear that it is an initiative that encourages companies to give back 5% of their resources.
Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:01:40]
And both of those answers are true. So a quick mini-history lesson; the original concept of Five for the Future came from Matt Mullenweg in 2014. There’s a lovely blog post on it that I will link in the notes below, but it was essentially a call to any companies experiencing success with WordPress to contribute back to the project and make sure that the project was a success.
Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:02:07]
The initial program then included outreach recognition, et cetera, proposed in 2017 by Tracy Levesque and Ian Dunn. Then that was defined and formalized with the help of the WordPress community in 2018. And then, in 2019, we had our first trial run with entire dedicated teams sponsored by companies inside the WordPress ecosystem.
Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:02:36]
So that’s the mini-history lesson chronology of this program. The intentions that informed the work of building the program in 2017 have become a bit lost to the ages. So I’m here to share it with you. The basic heart and soul of the Five for the Future program is to make sure that there is a way to refresh the commons of the WordPress community and ecosystem.
Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:03:00]
And as a result, ensure that the common resources of WordPress are available long after we have stopped being available to care for them. If you are familiar with the concept of the tragedy of the commons, Five for the Future was created to help avoid that tragedy. There were two original goals for formalizing the program.
Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:03:22]
The first one was to acknowledge companies that participated in Five for the Future by sponsoring contributors to work on the WordPress project. And the second was to motivate more companies to sponsor more volunteers. Either by hiring them and paying them to contribute or by assigning their existing employees to contribute to the WordPress project.
Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:03:46]
Of course, it’s hard to quantify participation and hard to qualify what should be seen as an impactful contribution, which is why when the program was originally created, it was in partnership with team reps and community members who were active at the time. There are many posts around that discuss the next steps for this program.
Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:04:07]
And as I’m looking through them, the next steps revolve around some of the hardest and most important questions that we have to answer as a project and as stewards of open source. Those questions are things like:
How do we remain true to these gloriously subversive values of WordPress and open source while also finding a way to thoughtfully secure our organization’s future?
Does contributing without the expectation of reciprocity hold up when we are looking at how to acknowledge contributors who sustain us?
Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:04:40]
And if you’re familiar with Elinor Ostrom’s award-winning work, Governing the Commons, you may also be wondering how this particular program aligns with her eight principles designed to sustain organizations like ours.
Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:04:57]
As an aside to that last question, this particular program does not have all eight principles accounted for, but among WordPress’s many programs, we do account for most of them. Although imperfectly, as is the way with human beings, that’s probably a whole episode unto itself, I did want to quickly answer that particular question.
Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:05:16]
So to get back to my non-mailbag, mailbag question, if I had to tell you in the span of an elevator ride what Five for the Future was, this would be my answer. It is a v1 program with a dual goal of boldly declaring the need to refresh the shared resources of WordPress and offering the ways and means for communities and individuals alike to participate in refreshing those resources.
Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:05:45]
If you want to learn more about the Five for the Future initiative, you can check out wordpress.org/5. Like literally just the number five. Or, if you want to learn more about the program that has grown from the Five for the Future initiative, you can check out the white paper that’s linked in the notes below.
Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:06:11]
And that brings us now to our small list of big things. Number one on my small list, the planning post for WordPress 6.0 is out. I’ve included a link in my massive list of links below. But it includes our best guess at timing, features that we intend to include, and a call for volunteers as well. So if you are looking for ways to give back, that is a clear and immediate option.
Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:06:38]
The second thing on the list is if you are a team rep, don’t forget that we have daylight saving time ending and starting depending on your hemisphere within the month. If you move meetings, if you’re in a team that moves your meetings, discuss it now so that folks have time to adjust their calendars.
Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:06:55]
And the third thing on my small list of big things is that there’s a suite of Full Site Editing courses that are now available on learn.wordpress.org. I will add that to my giant list of links below, but I encourage you to wander on over and see what all the fuss is about. I think the courses are excellent. They’re great for folks who don’t quite know what Full Site Editing is yet, but then also they give you a few intermediate tips and tricks as you’re getting your legs underneath you.
Josepha Haden Chomphosy [00:07:27]
So, that my friends, is your small list of big things. Thank you for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks.
In June 2021, @beafialho in collaboration with @pablohoneyfloated the idea of giving WordPress News a new look. Today, those ideas become a reality—we’re excited to share that redesign of WordPress News is live!
The new design leans on the aesthetics of jazz, intrinsically connected to WordPress and which ultimately translates its uniqueness, historic significance and future potential. Among other improvements, the new design leaves more space for content and includes new typefaces for better readability. It also uses a color palette intended to reflect the evolving Gutenberg language.
The revamp of the WordPress News page includes the header and footer of the page. We also shipped those two global elements to all pages of WordPress.org. However, there’s more work to do within the header to improve the information architecture. This new design is just the first, small step to modernize and improve the site iteratively. Any further discussion on future redesigns will occur in the #design channel on Slack.
Take a look around and subscribe to WordPress News if you haven’t already. If you see something in the design that doesn’t look right, please submit an issue on GitHub.
