Yalla Download

This month we feature Hauwa Abashiya, a project manager in Nigeria and the UK, whose passion for community support led her to an adventure in open source.

The People of WordPress series features inspiring stories of how people’s lives can change for the better through WordPress and its global community of contributors.

As we travel through life, sometimes we are drawn to a particular cause, one to which we can get behind and join in. This cause, in whatever field it may be, can help lift us beyond our everyday lives and can help us take stock. This is the journey that depicts Hauwa’s finding a global sense of place and providing a way to re-look at her life and plans. 

That change agent was discovering and becoming part of open source through WordPress. 

Learning development and WordPress

In 2017, Hauwa was working full time as an experienced and successful project manager, but was becoming increasingly aware that she did not feel the same excitement for projects as she once had. She was starting to feel bored. “I knew I still loved working with and in project management, but I needed to do something different.” she said.

Hauwa enrolled in a web development course and studied HTML, CSS and some JavaScript. One of the course options was WordPress, which she elected to take. It was then that a course tutor encouraged her to attend a WordCamp, an event focused on the open source software and its global community.

She felt that she needed to have a basic knowledge of the software before she arrived at the event, so started to learn WordPress. The first WordCamp she attended was in the seaside town of Brighton on the south coast of England. There she met people who would be friends and mentors for years to come.

“I was inspired by meeting people in the WordPress community.”

Hauwa Abashiya

She said: “I was inspired by meeting people in the WordPress community. My life and my wish to support communities have been shaped for the better by some of the people I met, and I continue to be grateful for knowing them.”

Global WordPress community: from Germany to Nigeria

After discovering a WordPress community in the UK, Hauwa wanted to see first hand just what a global connection it had. She had heard that WordCamp Europe was a flagship event and brought thousands from across the world together. She wanted to be part of this, and its organization appealed to her project management training. She applied to be a volunteer at the three day conference, which in 2019 was held in Berlin, Germany. At this event, Hauwa discovered both a global movement and an active local WordPress community in her home country of Nigeria. She was able to connect with all the different parts of this vast community from wherever she was working through an instant messaging tool. 

Inspired by people she met who were using WordPress to help improve people’s lives in Nigeria and other parts of Africa, Hauwa started to delve further into how this open source software and its global community could provide opportunities and improve understanding across cultures and continents.

Hauwa’s father, Dr Audu Kwasau Abashiya and her mother Rosalind Zulai Abashiya, were both well known for their philanthropy, especially in giving practical support to people in Kaduna, in the north of Nigeria and Abuja in the center of the country. Hauwa explained: “My mum comes from a family who give and share their skills to give practical help. From friends I had got to know in WordPress, I saw that there were parts of the community that had this same ethos. This could be something I could be part of, and also take back to Nigeria in the future.”

Her parents had established a charitable foundation focused on helping widows, orphans and children get access to education skills, from finance to music. It connects those who need help and those who can give support. Hauwa said: “Teaching practical skills people which can be used to raise an income or be re-shared with family and others in the local area is so important. Projects like this can help grow a community and keep it strong. Skills such as sewing and cookery are not just skills to put clothing and food on the table, but also are about gaining independence and pride. They are examples of how micro-economies can grow and inspire others to have dreams that they can see becoming real. I had seen through my work and studies that technology used with care and an understanding of different needs can make a difference in local communities too. Projects like WordPress can be part of this empowerment through localized translations and software which can give a way to share ideas.”

With her project management and IT background, Hauwa is getting more involved with how IT skills can be used for not just instilling a sense of community belonging, but also the practical longer term input into the local infrastructure and introduction of fast changing technology.

She said: “I would love to see some of the people who have been helped by the foundation my parents started be able to share their ideas and their achievements to encourage others. One of the routes could be through open source software that is free to access and can work on mobile phones.

“As a previous volunteer team rep in the WordPress Training Team, I saw first-hand just how important it is that a non-technical end user can use software to share their ideas without having to become a developer. We can all help give people a voice, and if we are working in technology, we have a role to play in creating and pushing for genuine access of tools.”

“If we are working in technology, we have a role to play in creating access to tools.”

Hauwa Abashiya

On Hauwa’s future wish list is to help African countries access software and technology in their local languages. She said: “This is part of identity, and respecting and valuing different cultures, and not expecting everything to be translated from the English as it is read. It makes it possible for older people to use the software or the content published.”

Hauwa learned Hausa (a language spoken across several African countries) and English at the same time at home in Nigeria. She had a multi-location education, like her parents, studying and going on to work in different countries. At 16, she first studied computer science on what she describes as a ‘whim,’ not knowing it would be a significant part of her working life in the future. 

She intended to go to university to study finance and sociology. When she went to say goodbye to her computer studies class, the teacher asked what she was going to study. On hearing it was finance and sociology, the teacher said: “You don’t want to be doing that, you want to be doing something in computing.” This conversation proved to be a turning point for Hauwa. She went on to study Computing and Information Systems and Object Oriented Information Systems for her Master’s degree in the UK.

During her second year of university, she also worked with data entry and related areas as she was determined to learn as much as she could about the moving parts of a project. After she completed her master’s, she chose jobs that enabled her to work on systems, out of hours support, project management, supply chain, and procurement. She is an advocate for learning as many aspects of your subject as you can to give you as many tools to really understand what both clients need and how to help them reach workable and timely solutions. These skills proved to be transferable in later years to give her time to support WordCamps, meetups, and the Training Team. She said: “Contributors to open source come from so many different professional and cultural backgrounds. Contributing is a great way to share your skills and keep them fresh and open to new learning opportunities.”

Hauwa fascination for project management and learning continued, and she gained qualifications in the field, including Prince 2 and PMP. She continues her commitment to ongoing learning in her work today with Agile and other methodologies and draws parallels with this and her interest in community learning.

Committed to supporting her local community in the UK too, Hauwa joined the London WordPress Meetup and in 2019 became an organizer for WordCamp London. During these events, she had many conversations to encourage others to develop their IT skills and even managed to use some of her project management expertise for the same purpose.

This interest in driving up the skills levels of others naturally led her to become further involved in the Contributor Teams. Inspired to share her skills by another contributor to the project, she joined the Training Team with her first introduction at a WordCamp Contributor Day. In this team, Hauwa began to find a need for easier ways for people to keep up with the software, its features, and how to be part of open source in their own local area. At the heart of this, Hauwa felt accessibility should be key, and she gave time to better understand documentation. She felt this was essential to give people genuine access and identify where more work was needed. Her belief in this grew when she joined the accessibility team for release 5.6, and she continued to contribute to the team in the area of documentation and training.

Hauwa devoted many hours to supporting the Training Team for a number of years as part of her conviction that the right resources can really help communities globally use open source software. She also stressed the importance of materials being user-friendly and easy to translate as WordPress has such a large international usage.

Volunteering in open source can re-energize you

Through the combination of volunteering efforts in UK and Nigeria, and supporting contributors globally, Hauwa began to re-find her love for helping people with their planning and to achieve their goals. She was able to share her 15 years of project management experience in her volunteering role and encouraged others to consider it as a career.

She said: “Through volunteering you work alongside people. Project management is about people. It is about helping people achieve. This can be the same through volunteering, and you can learn much through meeting people from different places. 

“One of my drivers is using technology to solve problems. As a project manager, it is a privilege to help guide people and organizations to identify and reach goals. It is helping them gain that value. This is one of the reasons I was drawn to finding out tech communities and contributing to them. If this is something that drives people reading about my experience, there are vast opportunities to to share your skills. Find something that fits you for where you are now.” 

Hauwa encourages anyone working in technology to further their understanding of managing projects and working with different teams. “Project management skills are so important in whatever kind of project you are in. With long working hours over many years, I felt I had lost the connection with the people element. I was stuck in what seemed to be a repeat cycle. With the people I met in the WordPress community and my professional skills being used, I was reminded of my own values and how as a project manager I can support help others reach new heights or make something of value and quality that others can benefit from and use.”  

In 2022, Hauwa returned to working full time for both national and international, medium and  large scale projects. Though her volunteering time to global community building initiatives has reduced accordingly, she focuses on encouraging skills learning and on the community cultural side.

“I will keep my interest in how open source like WordPress, working alongside other solutions, can help not-for-profit ground level and community building. For me, if there are technology-based solutions out there, we can all play some part in helping them grow and making a difference,” she said.

“How we give to wider communities does not have to be the same throughout time. It is important to keep relooking at what is needed and the difference it can make.”

She added: “Find your central wish for the communities you are connected with, and there may be technologies that can support them. I am glad I started my journey.”

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.

Contributors

Thanks to Hauwa Abashiya (@azhiyadev) for sharing her adventures in open source.

Thank you to Abha Thakor (@webcommsat) for interviews and writing the feature, and to Meher Bala (@meher), Chloe Bringmann (@cbringmann), Mary Baum (@marybaum), Nalini Thakor (@nalininonstopnewsuk) and Maja Loncar (@mloncar) for work on photographs and review.

The People of WordPress series thanks Josepha Haden (@chanthaboune) and Topher DeRosia (@topher1kenobe) for their support.

Ask and most small business owners or bloggers will tell you how difficult it can be to find high-quality, openly licensed stock photography for their websites. If a campaign or website calls for diverse and inclusive stock photography, you’ll more than likely come up short. 

That’s why WordPress.com is excited to announce the release of the Black x Tech stock photography collection! The Cocoamattic ERG, an employee resource group at Automattic, partnered with Nappy.co to release a collection of 90+ beautiful photos of Black people interacting with technology. Nappy, a company on a mission to increase the representation of Black and Brown people in openly licensed stock photography, was a natural fit to collaborate on the initiative. Nappy co-founder Jacques Bastien is a long time WordPress user, and shares the same passion for open source. 

Cocoamattic ERG co-lead Santana Inniss said of the collection, “Cocoamattic is a group that represents Black/African diaspora employees working at Automattic. Part of our mission is to increase representation of Black folks in tech. We know how impactful representation can be, and seeing yourself represented in media about technology can be the jumping off point for getting into a career in tech.” 

Seeing that representation of Black folks creating or engaging with technology was sorely lacking in stock photography, Cocoamattic wanted to tackle the problem head on. Santana continues, “Getting a beautiful, authentic collection of stock photos representing Black folks onto WordPress.com was so important to us. We selected Nappy for the synergy of mission, but also because photos on Nappy.co are now indexed through Openverse.org.”

Openverse, an aggregator of openly licensed media, makes the Black x Tech photos accessible from your WordPress.com website via the Media Library, or the Image and Gallery blocks.

If you’re looking to add diverse and inclusive photos to your WordPress.com site, that just got a whole lot easier with the Black x Tech photo collection, brought to you by Cocoamattic x Nappy. You can also view the collection directly on Nappy.co.

On Episode fifty of the WordPress Briefing podcast, join WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy as she explores the three big trends from the inaugural WordCamp Asia.

Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording.

Credits

Editor: Dustin Hartzler
Logo: Javier Arce
Production: Santana Inniss
Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod

Show Notes

Create Block Theme Plugin
WordPressing Your Way to Digital Literacy
PostStatus Networking Opportunities
WordPress 6.2 Live Demo will be held 2 March, 2023 at 17:00h UTC
Future Plans for the HelpHub
How to Own Your Expertise & Start Speaking at WordPress Events WP Diversity Training 1 March 2023

Transcript

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:00] 

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 00:00:40] 

The inaugural WordCamp Asia happened a couple of weeks ago in Bangkok. There were almost 1300 people in attendance, and I was lucky to be able to talk with a lot of them about their thoughts around the WordPress project and community. So today, let’s talk about three of the most interesting trends that I heard from people: the future of themes, the future of work, and the future of contributions.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:00] 

So first up, the future of themes. This one was not a surprise to me. Not only has it been on my mind lately, but every WordCamp I’ve ever attended in Asia or Australia has had themes as a central element. There are a lot of theme creators making a living in WordPress in this part of the world. So it’s natural that they want to know what to prepare for.

Now, it’s hard to predict the future, but there are a couple of things you can do to kind of get a leg up on it. Firstly, the theme review team, if you know how to make block themes but are still struggling to understand what might make them high value to your users, donating a little bit of time to review them can help.

While I was at the contributor day, the team rep who happened to also be there to represent the table told me that reviewing block themes is way faster than reviewing classic themes. So if it’s been a bit since you stopped by, I would encourage you to give it a shot. It’s a lot easier than it used to be for a lot of reasons, and they can always use a little bit of help.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:00] 

The second thing is this plugin called the Create Block Theme plugin. If you don’t know how to make block themes, you know how to make classic themes. You don’t know how to make block themes. This is a wordpress.org maintained plugin that will make theme creation simpler. It’s a relatively new plugin, though, so if you’re the type of contributor who likes to create good tools for good people, you can also feel free to grab a ticket or two from their repo and help get that moving.

The second thing that came up was the future of work. This was also not a surprise to me. There have been a lot of reports of layoffs in the tech industry and worries about the possibility of a recession. 

Since WordPress is not only a tool that folks use in their jobs but also a tool that empowers people to create jobs for themselves, it’s entirely expected for questions about career prospects to come up during a WordCamp. Here are a couple of thoughts on that. So I mentioned this briefly during the Q&A session on that Sunday, but I’m gonna repeat it here because I believe it with every fiber of my being. 

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:06] 

You can learn every 21st century skill that you need while contributing to an open source project.

I talked about it in episode 17 of this podcast. I’ve talked about it at WordCamps and major event series outside of WordPress for years. Like I really, really believe this, and it’s not just like a WordPress only thing. Although obviously, that is my primary perspective, that’s true for contributing to almost any open source project.

On top of that, if you are contributing to WordPress and you’re doing that in the way that we encourage folks to do, you’ve got public examples of proactive, asynchronous collaboration across cultures and time zones. And I don’t know about y’all, but sometimes it’s hard to explain what my job is. And so having examples of how the whatever it is that you were doing, however, you were collaborating or contributing or working on a project together, having concrete examples to be able to share with someone can never hurt.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:04] 

I’m gonna give us a necessary side note here. I know that volunteering time is a privilege, and if you find yourself between jobs, the last thing you want to do is give up any more of your time for no money.

But if you have contributed to any team in the past, that benefit still exists for you. Your contributions are not taken away just because you’re no longer with your employer.

The second thought on that is actually one that Matt mentioned during the Q&A on Sunday. He said in his experience that open source shines in recessionary times.

I’ll have to take his word for that one since I discovered WordPress in 2009 or so and so after the last recession that I would have experienced in the US. However, I have heard from a lot of people in the WordPress ecosystem and in tech in general who have shared their stories from the last time that we all experienced a recession.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:00] 

And certainly, when they suddenly found that they did not have a company to call the place that they were working, a company that they were working for, they were able to, at the very least, freelance until they found the next thing. 

I know that that’s cold comfort if you’re in the middle of things right now, but it certainly is something that people always have looked back to as like one of those turning points for them in the 2007-2008 era here in the US.

Now I know that is sometimes not what anybody wants to hear. And also like, who am I to be speaking about observed experiences from other people? I did want to let you know that the folks over at PostStatus have opened up some networking opportunities for anyone that’s been caught up in the current downsizing around the ecosystem.

I’ll link to that in the show notes here on wordpress.org/news, but also, if you’re a part of the PostStatus network, they’ve got it posted over there on their sites and things as well. So easy to find and definitely worthwhile if that’s a situation that you find yourself in right now.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:02] 

And the third thing that I heard from a lot of folks about is the future of contributions. So 635 people attended the contributor day that happened ahead of WordCamp Asia, And at WordCamp Europe in Porto last June, it was 800 people or something, which was the biggest one on record. And so this is really close to that.

There’s a lot of people. And a lot of them were attending for the first time. Over the course of the day, I checked in with quite a few of the table leads and heard some pretty consistent feedback, both about what we’re doing to help onboard contributors now but also about how we can help to onboard contributors in the future.

Firstly, we all generally agree that documentation, which is our current problem to solve toward easier contributor onboarding, we all generally agree that that’s going pretty well. We now have a ton of our preferences and processes documented in various team handbooks, but with a ton of documentation comes the potential for overwhelm.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:07:00] 

So across the board table leads shared the need for sort of a quick start guide for each of their teams. Secondly, we also generally seem to agree that mentorship plays a big role in the success of many long-term contributors. I’ve talked about it before. I had some mentors as I was getting started, and I would never have made it past organizing meetup events if it hadn’t been for their help.

And so a bonus item I heard about is actually Meetup events. Meetup groups are one of our most resilient ways to contribute to WordPress, and they also happen to be one of the hardest working. If you’ve never been to one of these events, you may not know that you can learn a skill that’s new to you or teach a skill that you’ve had for a long time.

You can also network to find the jobs that you want or network to hire the people you need. It’s where people learn how to use the CMS or learn how to become an entrepreneur. 

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:08:00] 

But it’s also where they discover our community and eventually learn why we think that open source is an idea that will change our generation.

So if you took nothing else away from this, I guess the takeaway is that you too can organize a Meetup event that will strengthen your local community and the world!

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:08:27] 

Which brings us now to our small list of big things. So first up, we have a live product demo for WordPress 6.2 on March 2nd, that’s going to be at 17:00 UTC.

There is a post that has gone up about it, which I’ll include in the show notes. This is an opportunity for folks to watch a live walkthrough of the current release with a collection of people from the release squad as well as avid contributors and testers. It’ll give you an idea of upcoming changes, but also we’ll probably expose a bug or two along the way.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:09:00] 

Come with your questions, and we will see you there. 

Item number two is documentation. So apparently, that’s just half of what I wanna talk about today. Documentation, so wordpress.org, has docs that are specifically written for users and pulls in not only the documentation that we have but also information from the codex, the documentation space of yesteryear.

There’s a bit more to do here, and I realize this project has been going on since 2015. It’s because there’s a lot of stuff we have to do. There’s a lot of documentation, and we have to kind of get it in order. But that is the area that we’re in now. We have launched the new documentation page, the new look and feel is out there.

And so the next question is making sure that we have it organized in a way that’s easy to find and easy to learn from as you go. There is a whole working group that meets about it, and I will share a link to that in case you find that to be of interest to you as well. 

And last but not least, there is another speaker workshop coming up on March 1st.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:10:00] 

If you have not heard of these yet, it’s a workshop that helps speakers learn the process of presentation brainstorming and creation. It is a great workshop. It was created over the course of many years within the WordPress project by Jill Binder and crew. It is a wonderful opportunity. 

It’s not a WordPress link that we’re on, but there is an event link that I will make sure that we all have access to here, in case that is something that you have always wanted to try, learning how to speak at WordPress events. 

And 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, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks!

Our latest batch of design tools empower you to create a consistently compelling style across your entire website with just a few clicks. Today we’d like to zoom in on the “Styles” settings, which allow you to make sitewide changes and create new style defaults right from the Site Editor. 

Professional design without a designer  

From basic options like colors and typography, to more advanced parameters like content dimensions, padding, and block-specific settings, you’re sure to find our style customizations useful no matter your level of design expertise (or lack thereof!).  

Though a number of themes come with style variations that you can test out, using custom Styles gives you even more freedom and flexibility to experiment and play around with various design pieces. 

Utilizing these settings creates new default styling for elements on your site, such as headings, paragraphs, and buttons. This means that any new pages or posts created will automatically inherit these styles, making the entire process much more efficient. Additionally, any changes you make will be reflected across the entire site, ensuring a consistent look and feel.

Our Site Editor design tools are perfect for those who want to save time and effort while maintaining a consistent look and feel across their website.

How to DIY design, with ease 

From the Site Editor (on the left sidebar, navigate to Appearance → Editor), click the “Edit” button at the top left of the page, and then the Styles icon on the top right. A sidebar will come up with a number of options to explore. (Note: This option may not appear if the theme you’re using isn’t compatible with the Site Editor.)

The best place to start is with the Style Book. Using Style Book, you can explore the various color and typography schemes and get a sense for what different blocks will look like before implementing them: 

Once you’re out of the Style Book, you can click “Browse Styles,” which allows you to preview what those style elements look like on your actual site. Remember, nothing is set in stone until you hit the “Save” button. 

From there, you can experiment with specific settings for typography, colors, and layout. You can also fine-tune design aspects for specific blocks. For example, if you tweak the color or text size in the Heading Block, it’ll change every heading on your site as well as become the new default for any new headings.

When you set a block-specific style from the Site Editor, any changes you make on specific pages or posts will only apply to that placement – though you can hit the “Apply globally” button to incorporate them across the entire site. 

Styles tools are available on Premium plans and above.

Last month we introduced you to the new Jetpack mobile app. Today we’d like to share information on some upcoming changes to the WordPress app and dig into the key differences between the WordPress and Jetpack apps to help you decide which one is right for you. We’re here to help you make an informed decision. 

What’s changing in the WordPress app? 

Until now, the WordPress app has included a range of Jetpack-powered features focused on managing, growing, and keeping tabs on your site. In early March 2023, we’ll be streamlining the WordPress app to focus on the writing and publishing basics. As part of that update, Jetpack features will be removed from the WordPress app and only be available in the Jetpack app. To continue using your favorite Jetpack features, switch to the Jetpack app today. 

Why are there two apps?

WordPress comes in more than one flavor and is used for everything from newsletters to blogs, enterprise apps to high-traffic publishing networks. After listening to feedback from a diverse range of users and the wider WordPress community, it became clear that there are two main sets of expectations about what a mobile WordPress experience should look like. 

With that in mind, we set about rethinking and designing two distinct ways for you to use WordPress on the go:

• The Jetpack app is intuitive, free-to-use, and puts the full WordPress experience in your pocket, whether you’re new to publishing on the internet or a seasoned veteran. You get all the essential tools that come with the WordPress app, plus a suite of features for growing your site. Discover new content and communities with the Reader, track your site’s performance on Stats, and get notified about comments and reactions with Notifications. You can download the Jetpack app today.
  
• The updated WordPress app will focus on the basics of writing and publishing. If you’re only looking for the essential tools you need to publish on the go, with support for offline editing and the ability to upload media straight from your phone’s camera roll, this might be the best app for you.

We’re excited to hear from you and will continue updating the apps to meet your needs. Please feel free to comment on this post with any questions or feedback.

Which app should I use?

Here’s how the two apps compare, feature by feature:

Features	WordPress app	Jetpack app
Posts	x	x
Pages	x	x
Media	x	x
Comments	x	x
Site Settings	x	x
Stats		x
Reader		x
Notifications		x
Activity Log		x
Jetpack Social		x
Jetpack Backup		x
Jetpack Scan		x
Menus		x
People		x
Themes		x

With the new Jetpack app, you’ll still be able to focus on publishing, but you’ll also have the added benefit of powerful site management and growth tools. The app is free to use. Once you make the switch, you’ll find all the same features that you enjoy with the WordPress app right there, at no extra cost.

How do I make the switch to the Jetpack app?

To make a seamless switch to the Jetpack app from the WordPress app, follow these steps:

1. Make sure you have the latest version of the WordPress app installed. 
2. Download the Jetpack app for iOS or Android.
3. Open the app, and you’ll be “auto-magically” logged in with all your data and settings in place, including locally stored content, saved posts, and other in-app preferences.

After you’ve installed the Jetpack app, we’d advise you to delete the WordPress app. Managing your site across both apps is currently unsupported and may lead to issues such as data conflicts that are best avoided.

We’re here to make the switch from the WordPress app to the Jetpack app as smooth as possible. Thanks for your continued support, and let us know if you have any questions.

Episode forty-nine of the WordPress Briefing explores the What, Why, and Who behind the upcoming Community Summit in National Harbor, DC, USA, August 22-23, 2023. Join Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy to learn the importance of the gathering to the WordPress project.

Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording.

Credits

Editor: Dustin Hartzler
Logo: Javier Arce
Production: Santana Inniss
Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod

Show Notes

Observations on WordPress Contributor Team Structure

Apply to attend the 2023 Community Summit

Topic Submissions for the 2023 Community Summit

Tuckman’s Theory: Stages of Group Development

Chatham House Rules

Proposal for a project-wide mentorship program

Openverse.org

6.2 Beta 1 is open for testing

Transcript

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:00:00] 

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 00:00:40]  

A couple of episodes ago, I mentioned the Community Summit in the small list of big things. That’s coming up on August 22nd and 23rd, right before WordCamp US. And for some of you, that made complete sense, and the only thought in your mind was, wow, our last one was in 2017, how could so many years have passed since then? And since so many years have passed, today we’re gonna talk a bit about the Community Summit, what it is, where it came from, and why it’s so important for the WordPress project.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:01:09] 

First things first, let’s talk about what exactly the Community Summit is. The Community Summit is a small event where folks from around the WordPress project and community come together to work through some of the most difficult topics the project currently faces, many of which are easier or at least less fraught when we can be face-to-face.

The Community Summit is usually done in an “unconference” style, and when we were smaller, we left topic gathering and voting to the day of. That’s evolved a bit as our group of fearless contributors has grown over the years, and this year, we have been asking for topics ahead of time so that we can make sure we have the right folks in the room and are making the best use of everyone’s limited time. 

It’s easy to take a look at this event and think it’s like some fun exclusive thing with a who’s who of WordPress. 

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:02:00] 

But I assure you it’s a working event. Decisions are not finalized during the event, but since we try very hard to account for many, many viewpoints, it ends up being two days of hard discussions, contentious viewpoints, and problem definition at a level of complexity you don’t really see every day.

Hearing how hard this event is, you may be wondering why we put in that effort. There are a lot of reasons, but there are three that come to my mind immediately. So for starters, working across cultures is hard. Apart from the cultural differences, we tend to be aware of things like where we’re located or our lived experiences, things like that– working remotely or distributedly is a whole different set of skills than working in person. This helps remind everyone that we’re humans, that there are humans behind those comments and behind those messages in Slack. The second thing is that I’m a big supporter of Tuckman’s theory of group development.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:03:00] 

If you don’t know what that is, you can look for it, we’ll put a link in the show notes, but it’s that forming, storming, norming, performing kind of concept of how groups come together. Because there are so many of us and our community has such a large footprint, there are little storms a-brewin all the time.

Some get really big, some stay small. But at some point, most of them have to be addressed. And this is a space that is specifically designed to help us do that. Which brings us to the third reason that we do it. This event uses something called the Chatham House Rule, which creates a kind of temporal psychological safety.

Right. Psychological safety, if you’re a leader, you know that that’s something that is built over time and requires a lot of trust and a lot of conversations with people that you’re working with, and we can’t quite do that. 

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:04:00] 

And so Chatham House Rule builds an environment that helps create that suddenly in the moment and requires, you know, some, some faith in one another.

But basically, no one can be quoted about what they said in those conversations. No one’s examples can be attributed to them. But the conversations can be summarized and published, which we do on the Community Summit website. And then, we publish those for our collective knowledge over time. This lets folks who are attending advocate for themselves and others fully without worrying over whether they’re gonna be taken out of context later.

And finally, one of the biggest questions we get ahead of any Community Summit is why it is by invitation only. The most commonly cited reasons for keeping this small and invite only have everything to do with logistics and leadership. You want it to be large enough to have good representation but small enough to have high-quality interactions. It’s just a really narrow Goldilocks moment, if you will. 

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:05:00]

But that reason doesn’t necessarily address the need for invitations rather than letting it be first come, first served. The reason for that is more of a philosophical one and requires you to go on a mini historical journey with me.

This also has changed a bit over the years. The first ever Community Summit, way back in 2012, was before my time, but if I recall my history correctly, it was truly by invitation only. The summit after that included a closed nomination process. The next included a team nomination process, and then the last two, 2017 and 2023, have included open nominations.

Now, even in the nomination era of Community Summit organizing, there is still a selection process. The organizers review the list of suggested attendees and check for the same types of things we expect major WordCamp organizers to look for in their speaker selection. 

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:06:00]

Things like which teams they contribute to, what communities they advocate for, and how long they’ve been a member of the community.

And then they adjust for balance. In addition to those things, there are also four types of voices that we always want represented at our Community Summit. So first is leading voices, people who are already in the community and kind of are helping us to make decisions. I am considered one of those leading voices; I have put in my application to be included in the Community Summit. Really hope we select me. 

The second one is future leading voices. Specifically, those are people who are active in the community already and are showing a lot of promise, either because they really understand the values that the WordPress open source project is putting forward or understand the basic processes of communicating and guiding people in such a complex ecosystem as the WordPress project represents. Or because they have said quite plainly they are interested in helping us to make sure that the WordPress project is able to move and continue to create and continue to support democratizing publishing. 

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:07:00]

So it’s a little bit potentially folks who are self-selecting for that. People who already are showing that they are doing that either in WordPress or in their local communities. That’s one of the types of voices we want to include. A third one that we want to include all the time is voices we need, so voices that we need to hear. People that specifically we are building WordPress for, people that have indicated to us that the CMS is not necessarily perfect for some of the use cases that they run into regularly.

So the people and users and community organizers that can and are able to advocate for the types of user interactions, the types of community interactions that we absolutely want to be able to see. 

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:08:00] 

And so that’s a third group of voices that we want to make sure we have represented.

And then the fourth and final group that we always want to have represented is a group that I call voices we miss. And so those are the people that we want to be able to hear more from in our project that we don’t necessarily either have a good group of representative voices for, so it’s hard to hear them, or that we know are probably users of the CMS or they are attending events, they are somehow involved in the WordPress project.

But we don’t necessarily have any way to have accounted for them while we were building solutions way back in 2012 or 2006 when things were being built for us. And so those are the four groups of people, the four types of voices that I absolutely want to have represented at our Community Summit.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:09:00]

And I ask organizers to go through this incredibly complicated selection process because we want not simply a microcosm of the WordPress community as we see it today and hope to see it in the future but also an equitably voiced forum during that critical problem definition phase. 

So TLDL. For, listen?! T L D Real Listen. Although if you didn’t make it through that, you definitely are not getting to this point. So a TLDR for folks who skimmed the transcript and got here, I guess we keep this invitation structure because we want to account for voices we don’t hear every day in the WordPress project. Not because we don’t value them but because we already hear them.

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:09:44] 

And now that brings us to our small list of big things. This week it’s actually kind of a big list of big things, but you know, there it is. 

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:10:00] 

First things first. The applications for the Community Summit are now open. Those are the applications to attend. It’s pretty short. I filled mine out this morning and it’s three questions about who you are and your username on wordpress.org, and then three questions about the topics you are most interested in and the experience that you have in those conversations so far.

Yeah. It took me, like, I think, 90 seconds. Like, a full minute and a half. So head on over there. We have a link in the show notes, but also, you’ll be able to find it in newsletters across the entire WordPress media ecosystem. I am pretty sure about that. 

The second thing is that there is a proposal out for a project-wide mentorship program.

This is a huge potential win for us. It is aiming to fix some of our broken ladders. If you’re not familiar with my Broken Ladder Theory of the WordPress project, I’ll try to remember to find a link to that post and put that in the show notes. 

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:11:00] 

Number three is that Openverse moved. I shared this last week that happened last week. They didn’t move very far, though. They have a new URL, you can find them at openverse.org. It’s the same team. It’s the same product. It’s the same group of excellent openly-licensed images and media that you have come to expect. It just has its own standalone URL now. Huge kudos to the contributors who got that done. 

Another thing that happened last week is that WordPress 6.2 has moved into its beta phase, and so now is the time to get out there and test.

There also was an excellent, excellent write-up about how to test any given release. And I think it also includes how to file a good bug. And so we’ll send all of those things into the show notes. They’ll be easy to find. Get out there and do your testing. 

And number five, longest, small list of big things in recent history. 

[Josepha Haden Chomphosy 00:12:00] 

I got some interest on [a] women, and non-binary led release for 2023, and so since there was some interest shown for that, it is hereby verbally confirmed. Keep an eye out on make.wordpress.org for more information about what that process is gonna look like and how to volunteer your time for that if that is something that calls to you.

Woo. And that, my friends, is your small list of big things, your big list of big things. Thanks for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, and I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks.

Serendipitous connections, like discovering a shared interest with someone in line at the coffee shop, look slightly different in distributed organizations. This year, leveraging the values of open source, Automattic shared the planning and organization of a company-wide 24-hour online event among the entire company, in order to create space for serendipitous connections. 

What followed was energy, diversity, and abundant creativity!

The Purpose: Intentional Random Connections

As we welcomed 2023, this event was an invitation to connect across divisions, timezones, and geographies across 90+ countries: 

• Intentional: We scheduled a date one month in advance so that people could create space to join at times that were convenient to them and their team.
• Random: We invited any and all wonderful ideas to the agenda. We believe that great ideas can come from anywhere and anyone.
• Connections: Communication is the oxygen of a distributed company and our intention was to create space for connections to form.

The Invitation: Open-Sourcing the Agenda

Rather than deciding the agenda up front, we entrusted the agenda to the whole company. We invited people to contribute what they’d like and then join any sessions that interested them. (This structure is built on the values of Open Space by Harrison Owen.)

Hosting a session was simple — all one had to do was choose a topic and add it directly to a shared Google Calendar which we created for the day. All that was left from there was to arrive on the day at their selected time to host their session with the folks who chose to join. 

Movement among sessions was welcome and everything was optional. 

The Outcomes: Abundant Creativity!

In total we had 38 sessions hosted over 24 hours (both synchronous and asynchronous). The creativity, energy, and diversity that was created far exceeded what any one person could have planned on their own.

We had cat parties, dog walks, asynchronous virtual raves, collaborative poem writing, role playing games, lego sessions, language lessons, art parties, parenting discussions, muffin making, company trivias, children’s book readings, open mics, musician parties, walks around the globe, and a lot of games! For the full list of sessions see the bottom of this post. 

While many companies report difficulty getting engagement in online company events, the survey feedback from this event showed that:

• 100% of participants would recommend future events like this
• 95% of participants met with someone they’d never met before
• 100% of people who hosted would host a session again

For a 2,000-person company, these are pretty staggering results. The value of distributed ownership and co-creation speaks for itself!

We hope these results convince you to try this out in your own organization!

A Peek Into Some of the Sessions

Full List of Sessions

Synchronous:

• Hidden Identity Games x2
• Automattic Trivia
• TypeRacer 
• Mandarin Conversation: 中文聊天網聚  
• Tabletop Roleplaying Games 101
• Cat’s Party
• Dungeons & Dragons for Newbies 
• Children’s Book Reading and Conversation 
• Bavarder en Français: French Conversation 
• LEGO AFOLs Unite
• Play Pokemon 
• Cyberpunk 2077 Roleplaying Session
• Make Banana Muffins with Greg 
• Defuse a Bomb x2 
• Drawful Game
• Virtual Dog Park 
• Charla en Español 
• Art Party
• Parenting Teens Conversation
• Brazilian Portuguese Conversation: Papo Farofa 
• Open Mic 
• Power Yoga 
• Play Gartic Phone
• Automusician Connection
• Cat Party 
• Let’s Speak Italiano! 
• Tales from the Table 
• Open Screenshare 
• Animal Crossing Parade of Homes
• Silly Games and Snacks 
• Casual Hangout

Asynchronous:

• Intentional Random Virtual Rave 
• A Walk Around the Automattic Globe 
• Poetomattic

WordPress 6.2 Beta 1 is ready for download and testing!

This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, you should test Beta 1 on a test server and site.

You can test WordPress 6.2 Beta 1 in three ways:

Option 1: Install and activate the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (select the “Bleeding edge” channel and “Beta/RC Only” stream).

Option 2: Direct download the Beta 1 version (zip).

Option 3: Use the following WP-CLI command:

wp core update --version=6.2-beta1

The current target for the final release is March 28, 2023, which is seven weeks away. Your help testing this version is vital to ensuring everything in this release is the best it can be.

Get an overview of the 6.2 release cycle, and check the Make WordPress Core blog for 6.2-related posts in the coming weeks for further details.

How you can help: testing!

Testing for issues is a critical part of developing any software, and it’s a meaningful way for anyone to contribute—whether you have experience or not. This detailed guide is a great place to start if you’ve never tested a beta release.

If you build products for WordPress, you probably realize that the sooner you can test this release with your themes, plugins, and patterns, the easier it will be for you to offer a seamless experience to your users.

Want to know more about testing releases in general? You can follow along with the testing initiatives that happen in Make Core. You can also join the #core-test channel on the Making WordPress Slack workspace.

If you think you may have run into an issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. If you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, you can file one on WordPress Trac. You can also check your issue against a list of known bugs.

Interested in Gutenberg features? Find out what’s been included since WordPress 6.1 (the last major release of WordPress). You will find more details in the currently available What’s new in Gutenberg posts for 15.0, 14.9, 14.8, 14.7, 14.6, 14.5, 14.4, 14.3, and 14.2.

This release contains more than 292 enhancements and 354 bug fixes for the editor, including more than 195 tickets for the WordPress 6.2 core.

A major release for a major project milestone

WordPress 6.2 is one of the last planned major releases of Phase 2 on the Gutenberg project’s roadmap. The platform has come a long way in the past few years. The 6.2 release both celebrates that progress and looks toward a future of publishing that puts ever more powerful tools in your hands. 

Next stop: collaboration tools and more, in Phase 3!

Notable highlights

Want to know what’s new in WordPress version 6.2? Read on for a taste of what’s coming.

• Beta label is gone—signaling that the Site Editor is stable and ready for anyone to explore, create, and experiment!
• Distraction-free mode for a clear, focused writing experience.
• A new Site Editor interface shows you previews of your templates and Template Parts first, so you can choose exactly where you want to start editing.
• Scaled block settings with split controls organize your Styles and Settings options to easily find what you need—and clearly see everything a block can do. 
• Color-coded labels help you find your Template Parts and Reusable Blocks fast, everywhere you look: in the List View, the Block toolbar, even on the Canvas.
• An improved Navigation experience makes menus simple to create and manage—right from the block settings sidebar.
• Patterns are easier to find and insert—with even more categories to choose from like headers and footers! 
• A new Style Book offers one place to see all your Styles across every block, for a complete overview of your site’s design details.
• Custom CSS support for specific blocks, or your whole site, for another level of control over how you want things to look. 
• Openverse integration lets you pull free, openly-licensed media directly into your content as you work—along with a quicker way to insert media from your existing library.
• Widgets become Template Parts when you switch from a Classic to a Block Theme—making the transition that much smoother.

Please note that the features in this list may change before the final release.

A haiku for 6.2

Last of Phase 2 now
Let’s get the party started
WordPress turns 20

Thank you to the following contributors for collaborating on this post: @marybaum @laurlittle @cbringmann, @webcommsat, @audrasjb, @annezazu, @bhp

Welcome to the first 2023 edition of The Month in WordPress! January kicked off with an overview of WordPress’ big goals for 2023 and new projects beginning to take shape. Moreover, work on the next major release, WordPress 6.2, continues with Beta 1 scheduled for next week. Read on for the latest news.

---

WordPress 6.2 Beta 1 is on its way

The first beta release of WordPress 6.2 is scheduled for next Tuesday, February 7, 2023.

As you may have heard, this version will wrap up work on Gutenberg Phase 2 (Customization), but what does this mean in the larger context of the WordPress project?

Tune in to Episode 48 of WP Briefing to hear Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy discuss what it means to conclude a Gutenberg phase.

What’s new in Gutenberg

Gutenberg 15.0 was released on January 18, 2023. Some highlights include a new “paste styles” feature to easily create multiple blocks with identical styling, and a “sticky” option to keep a block at the top of the page while the rest of the content scrolls.

In addition, block settings have been split into two tabs in the sidebar: Styles and Settings. This makes blocks with more controls, such as the Group block, easier to customize, and allows the interface to scale with the growing number of design tools.

The latest “Core Editor Improvement” post highlights the newest style features enhancements. Learn how they can help give your site a unique and cohesive look and feel.

Team updates: Matrix exploration, WordPress.org redesign news, and more

• WordPress and Matrix contributors published a proposal to explore the open source chat system Matrix as a possible replacement for the WordPress community’s Slack.
• Several sections of WordPress.org have been redesigned lately, including Documentation (HelpHub), Enterprise, and Mercantile (the official WordPress swag store). Learn more about the latest redesign updates.
• The implementation of the block editor in the WordPress.org forums is progressing well and the feedback so far has been very positive.
• This comprehensive post clarifies how WordPress Community Support (also known as WordCamp Central) and WordPress Foundation entities are set up and addresses some misconceptions about them.
• The bug scrub schedule for WordPress 6.2 is now published. The goal of bug scrubs is to ensure tickets move towards a resolution—anyone can join these sessions to learn, help, or even lead one.
• The Plugin Review Team is looking for your (intentionally) wrong plugins.
• The latest edition of People of WordPress features Daniel Kossmann, a software engineer from South America.

As part of the discussion on improving the contributor journey, Josepha wrote some thoughts on the Eternal September phenomenon in open source and invites you to share yours.

Feedback & testing requests

• The Community Team is gathering feedback on a proposed move to GitHub for standardizing the project’s management tools.
• To mark WordPress’ 20th anniversary milestone, Core Team contributors are organizing several bug scrub sessions to tackle long-standing Trac tickets. 
• Version 21.6 of the WordPress mobile app for iOS is available for testing.

The Training Team calls all WordPress users to complete this short Individual Learner Survey by February 15, 2023. Your feedback will help identify the most high-impact resources for Learn WordPress.

WordPress events updates

• Would you like to be a speaker at WordCamp Europe 2023? Submit your application by February 5, 2023. The organizing team released the first batch of tickets and is also calling for volunteers and photographers.
• The first WordCamp to be held in Africa in 2023, WordCamp Entebbe, is well underway and set to take place on March 10-11.
• Don’t miss these other upcoming WordCamps:
  • WordCamp Birmingham, Alabama, USA on February 4-5, 2023
  • WordCamp Cebu, Philippines on February 11, 2023
  • WordCamp Chiclana, Spain, on March 3-4, 2023

WordCamp Asia 2023 in Bangkok, Thailand, is only two weeks away! Check out the livestream schedule if you are attending virtually.

---

Have a story we should include in the next issue of The Month in WordPress? Fill out this quick form to let us know.

The following folks contributed to this edition of The Month in WordPress: @webcommsat, @rmartinezduque.

At WordPress.com, we’re always adding features and pushing our blocks and Site Editor to do more so that you can create, design, and publish amazing things with ease. Our newest features are largely design-focused, giving you the confidence to explore a variety of styles and then easily apply them across your entire site. 

Let’s jump in and see what’s new. 

Browse Mode: An easier way to navigate the Site Editor 

Browse Mode allows you to easily explore, navigate, and edit your site’s templates and template parts, including adding new templates right from this interface. To play around with Browse Mode, simply click your site’s icon from the Site Editor. 

When to use this feature: You want to see how all the pieces of your site fit together — and to jump between your templates and template parts for easy editing.  

Clearer access to your advanced block settings

With more powerful blocks comes the need for easier, more intuitive access to advanced settings for those blocks. To that end, we’ve split block settings into two tabs within the sidebar. On the left side, you’ll find standard customization options like color, typography, and spacing. On the right side, you’ll find more advanced options, like layouts, custom CSS, and a button to apply changes across your entire site (more on that below).  

When to use this feature: You’re working on your navigation menu and need more customization than just color or typography options. Go over to advanced settings to change the orientation of the menu from horizontal to vertical — among other things! 

Preview style options with the Style Book 

A number of themes, including staff favorite Twenty Twenty Three, now come with styles, which change the look and feel of your site — color, spacing, etc. — within the overarching design aesthetic of the theme. 

With the newly launched Style Book, you can now see how various styles affect different blocks. You’re able to preview colors, typography, embeddable media, and more. 

When to use this feature: You’re curious about switching up the colors or typography on your site, but you want to know what it’ll look like, especially within specific blocks, before committing. 

Apply design changes across your entire site  

When working and designing in the Site Editor, it’s easy to find yourself having created a certain style that you really like and want emulated across your entire site. With our new “Apply globally” button, you can do just that. 

When to use this feature: You’ve spent some time styling a heading (or other block) on your homepage or a page template, and you want that look to carry over across all the headings (or whichever block you’re working with) on your site. 

In Case You Missed It 

In the midst of holiday season business, you may have missed some of our other recent and exciting updates:  

Boost your traffic with Blaze

Learn how to turn your posts and pages content into clean, compelling ads that run across millions of sites on WordPress.com and Tumblr.

Explore new themes   

We introduced five beautiful new designs in January, including our new default theme, Twenty Twenty Three. 

Grab yourself a .link domain 

A .link domain name and Link in Bio page supercharges your social media by giving you a place to host all of your links.

Insert chapter breaks on your videos 

Chapter breaks offer a quick, convenient way for viewers to navigate longer videos or see the outline of a video’s content at a glance. 

Share your work-in-progress website

With Site Previews, you can generate a unique link for your in-progress Business or eCommerce site that allows your team or clients to access and explore the site without needing to log in.