This week: WordPress 5.8, Gutenberg, remote work, WP Engine Summit / 2021, headless, plugins, Open Source and many more.
Sergey works on the WordPress core team at Yoast, contributing to WordPress as a Core Committer, and also working on Polyglots, Support, and Meta teams. He is a co-founder of Russian WordPress community.
You can find him on Twitter.
Contributing to WordPress to improve your development, design, translation or communication skills, and become a better person in general.
My passion for open source started with writing some documentation and bug fixes for a popular file manager back in 2002. While creating some websites for my university, I discovered a growing web publishing software called WordPress, which quickly grabbed my attention due to its simplicity, extensibility, and an amazing community. Giving back to the community was a natural thing for me, so I’ve started translating WordPress into Russian, answering questions on support forums, and participating in core development.
Joining Yoast in 2015 made my activities much more sustainable, and since then I’m working on WordPress full time as a core committer and an active member of several other teams: Polyglots (which translates WordPress into 200+ languages), Support (which helps users to find answers to their questions), and Meta (which manages the WordPress.org network). Since 2020, we have a WordPress core team at Yoast, all focused on making WordPress better!
If you’re curious about contributing, I would suggest checking out the FAQ for New Contributors in the Core team handbook. It’s a great place to start and has answers to most popular questions, like where to start on Trac (the bug tracking system WordPress uses), can you use GitHub to submit code (yes!), or how to get involved with bug gardening and triaging.
WordPress Core team also has new contributor meetings every 2nd and 4th Wednesday of the month at 19:00 UTC (an hour before weekly dev chat) in the #core channel on WordPress Slack, where anyone is welcome to ask any questions on contributing, working with patches, ask for a ticket review, next steps, etc. Hope to see you there! In my article on the WordPress core team blog at Yoast, I’ve answered some of the questions that come up in these meetings.
I’m a big fan of getting to know people from across the globe and from all walks of life, and hearing their story. Is it any wonder that HeroPress is one of my favorite websites ever? This is where I head every time I need a moment of inspiration, or to remind myself how truly global, diverse, and welcoming the WordPress community is.
One other thing I enjoy is watching live talks by WordPress contributors. Generally, WordPress helped them at some point along the way, and they decided to give back to the community. WordPress.tv has more than a hundred of these inspirational videos: some of these stories I have already watched multiple times and some I have yet to discover.
In addition to the links above, I’d like to share some suggestions that I think might be helpful for improving your development skills, whether you’re just starting out or already have some development experience. I’ve collected them in a Twitter thread:
Thanks for reading, and happy contributing! 🙌
The summary of what is coming in WordPress 5.8. It’s good to read since the Full Site Editing related changes are starting to flood us.
Meetup group resources: Talking points for WordPress 5.8
I know lots of people considering those working remotely less engaged. Is it really the case? Julie Sarnik from WebDevStudios attempts to find the truth.
Tammie Lister describes how groundbreaking the introduction of theme.json file to the themes will be.
Todd Jones reported what he had picked up from writing over 400 articles for MainWP.
Eric Karkovack listed the ingredients for an excellent plugin.
WP Engine Summit/2021 took place last week. It consisted of many exciting elements:
WP Engine Summit/2021 took place on June 24. If you missed this event, you can easily make up for it – and it’s totally worth it!
LearnDash is taking cutting-edge e-learning methodology and infusing it into WordPress. Trusted to power the learning programs for major universities, small to mid-size companies, startups, entrepreneurs, and bloggers worldwide.
WP Engine launched the Premier platform dedicated for the enterprise sector customers.
Atlas Content Modeler was also presented there, i.e., a plugin that allows to create additional fields with a focus on actions with WPGraphQL and REST API.
Local PRO will be free of charge.
Here’s the summary and statistics for the latest edition of WordSesh.
Chris Lema shares his impressions about FlipWP.
Apart from writing an excellent code – Highrise Digital agency – decided to write a book on how to appeal to customers. The book will be available in August, but you can order it now using a discount.
Ross Wintle released Turbo Admin as a browser add-on. Thanks to it, we will not have to install the plugin on every WordPress site.
Helen Hou-Sandi from 10up celebrates the 10th anniversary of her first reported ticket on Trac. It is interesting that Helen went a path from a single contributor to the Director of Open Source Initiatives at 10up.
Scott Anderson of WebDevStudios explains when we should go headless and when we better not.
WPMRR has launched a website for their community.
GatsbyWPThemes service will start on 30th June. It will offer ready-made themes prepared for cooperation with GatsbyJS and WP.
The shopping fever in the WordPress world continues – this time Infinite Uploads has purchased the Tuxedo Big File Uploads plugin.
If you’d like to adapt Gutenberg somewhere outside of WordPress, you can use this library.
Upcoming events:
WordCamp Santa Clarita will take place on July 17-18.
The second edition of WordFest Live will take place on July 23.