[00:00:00] Sé Reed: 7 12, 11, 1.
[00:00:05] Jason Tucker: is episode number 429 of WPwatercooler Do action WordCamp us 2022 contributor day. I’m Jason Tucker. You find me at Jason Tucker on Twitter.
[00:00:22] Steve Zehngut: Steve Zehngut interactive and I, and.
[00:00:28] Sé Reed: He does stuff. Oh, I’m saying hi. I talk smack on Twitter.
[00:00:35] Jason Cosper: And y’all know who it is. It’s your boy, Jason Cosper, AKA fat Mullenweg, back at it again on the world’s most dangerous WordPress
[00:00:42] Sé Reed: oh yeah. We danger
[00:00:44] Jason Tucker: Speaking of danger, go over to Spotify and go listen to us there.
[00:00:49] Sé Reed: LA LA LA.
[00:00:52] Jason Cosper: I forgot that I say, I forgot that I say influential and just ran.
[00:00:57] Sé Reed: Dangerous. You know, what though?
[00:00:58] Jason Cosper: head.
[00:00:59] Steve Zehngut: Look, everybody knows we’re the most influential podcast.
[00:01:01] Sé Reed: Are we the most existential podcast
[00:01:05] Courtney Robertson: Hello. Nice to see everybody
[00:01:07] Jason Tucker: of which
[00:01:08] Sé Reed: of existential threats?
[00:01:12] Courtney Robertson: Hello, I’m Courtney Robertson and I work at good net pro
[00:01:18] Sé Reed: That’s just a giggle for no reason, other than happy to see Courtney, uh,
[00:01:22] Jason Tucker: happy to see Courtney.
[00:01:24] Sé Reed: Uh, Courtney and like the rest of us was actually at contributor day. So, um, whereas I will be speaking, uh, via my knowledge of the, of the slack and the make, uh, the, the virtual contributed.
[00:01:42] Steve Zehngut: oh, make yeah, I got it. Heard
[00:01:44] Sé Reed: Mink, um, M a K E no. Yes. Okay. Um,
[00:01:52] Steve Zehngut: It’s it’s yeah, I’m getting old.
[00:01:54] Sé Reed: you really are. Okay. So anyway, I was virtually paying attention, but Courtney was there in person and, um, Uh, I don’t know if Andy Frain was there. Hi, Andy Frain but, um, you should’ve been, and if you weren’t, you were remiss for missing it, honestly. Uh, although I, I need to say, first of all, I want you to tell you said that you work at GoDaddy Courtney, but I definitely want you to just reiterate what it is you do within, uh, the make project itself.
[00:02:21] Sé Reed: Just so we’re clear on your awesomeness.
[00:02:24] Courtney Robertson: Why? Thank you. So, um, Andy, that just said hello is trying to poach me to go to the core team because Andy helped me get for the first time at contributor day, I managed to get with Andy to get the core local dev environment set up on my laptop. However, I don’t know if Andy’s gonna be able to poach me because my main home in the make WordPress project is over on the training team.
[00:02:48] Courtney Robertson: We make the content that goes on to learn wordpress.org. I got to be a table lead and hang out with some of my longtime favorite historical contributors to the project. And it was amazing.
[00:02:58] Steve Zehngut: way, if anybody wants to poach me, it’s uh, Steve Zehngut.
[00:03:03] Courtney Robertson: good luck. I, I hear your. Gotta go to contribute today. Steve, that’s it just
[00:03:11] Sé Reed: I wanna, I don’t know if I wanna be poached. It sounds uncomfortable slightly, but you know, um, poached by Andy. I mean, maybe that’s different.
[00:03:20] Jason Tucker: Scrambled I’m, I’m more of a scrambled person
[00:03:22] Sé Reed: Yeah.
[00:03:24] Courtney Robertson: a, he’s a surgeon. He knows what he’s doing.
[00:03:26] Steve Zehngut: Uh,
[00:03:27] Sé Reed: I’m looking for more of an over easy type of situation. Just so we’re clear. Uh,
[00:03:33] Steve Zehngut: happened?
[00:03:34] Sé Reed: you mean egg jokes, Steve, obviously. Egg jokes. Cause we’re a bunch of egghead.
[00:03:40] Courtney Robertson: Hmm.
[00:03:41] Sé Reed: We wings wink. Oh, look, Andy’s getting into it down there. All right. I just wanna say real quick that Andy is one of the folks in our community that I think are actually part of what makes our community so interesting because Andy is not necessarily eight word professional. Insofar as that he is a trauma surgeon.
[00:03:59] Steve Zehngut: He’s a surgeon like not a
[00:04:02] Sé Reed: a drama
[00:04:02] Steve Zehngut: a real surgeon.
[00:04:04] Sé Reed: with blood and, and nasty things that definitely work. Um, uh, anyway, we are getting distracted by Andy. Thank you, uh, Tucker for doing that, cuz this his favorite thing to do, but I do wanna talk about contributor today. I, I think that, um, from the pictures I saw and from, from uh, my third party, uh, assessments on Twitter, this was one of. Better attended contributor days that the room was full. Like there were people there. No one wanted to leave.
[00:04:36] Courtney Robertson: Yeah,
[00:04:37] Jason Tucker: was full.
[00:04:38] Courtney Robertson: so I, I forget the exact numbers that I saw for contributor day. There was a rough count. Um, look at all those pictures going by. So there was a rough count during contributor day, right before lunch of all the people that were there, percentage wise, I think I heard we were coming close to 40% of attendees.
[00:04:55] Courtney Robertson: Um, were.
[00:04:57] Sé Reed: so amazing because it was such also, it was such a reduced, um, attendee.
[00:05:02] Courtney Robertson: there’s Andy, but
[00:05:03] Sé Reed: Oh. And you look at that, it’s like, yeah, we did not plan that. But, uh, I think that it was also, it was also a much smaller word camp us much more like a regular. Style word camp, uh, a regional or, or local word camp versus word camp us, um, which, uh, Matt Mullenweg mentioned in his talk also, you know, kind of that intimate feel.
[00:05:24] Sé Reed: But, um, I still did not see multiple people that I was looking for and wanted to see, I don’t know if it was just like spread out that way, but like, I literally did not see people. So it wasn’t that small. So in, so anyway, I, I think it was, um, Uh, the, the turnout is great, even though it’s small. Like, I, I didn’t go.
[00:05:46] Sé Reed: Cause I went to the zoo cuz you know, toddler, but like I
[00:05:51] Courtney Robertson: I I’ve missed a contributor day here or there when I had the toddlers too. And now that mine are not toddlers, it’s great to be back. Um, and it would be great in the future to see, I, I need to check on this for the years that we’ve had kids camp running. If they had kids camp going on during contributor day, how that was handled.
[00:06:12] Courtney Robertson: Um,
[00:06:13] Sé Reed: I know they did. I know they did at, uh, St. Louis. They had stuff happening on the Sunday, but, um, that was like, I think the most elaborate kids’.
[00:06:22] Courtney Robertson: yeah,
[00:06:23] Sé Reed: so we had all of this turnout, right? Y’all did I wasn’t there? So I can’t say us, but us as the word press people. Um, but bandwidth was a no go. Yeah.
[00:06:36] Courtney Robertson: was a bit of a challenge. Yeah. We had some new folks on the team and we did have a little bit of bandwidth, but the photos team certainly wouldn’t have had the bandwidth to handle the photo uploads in the room. Um, so they went on a photo walk, but a lot of us were able to do activities at our tables that didn’t require a whole lot of internet bandwidth.
[00:06:54] Courtney Robertson: I think marketing team was struggling. With their, just getting into Google docs.
[00:07:00] Sé Reed: Oh, no.
[00:07:01] Courtney Robertson: Yeah, yeah,
[00:07:03] Sé Reed: So, I mean, I think that is always, I even commented on it last week that the, the, um, the wi on last week’s episode that the wifi was like everywhere and like really mentioned. And I, I thought it was actually pretty good during the event itself, but, you know, every, apparently on Sunday it was.
[00:07:20] Sé Reed: Cropped out nonetheless work was done. And, uh, a lot of people were onboarded and I’ve been seeing, um, a lot of tickets come through for, through meta through core, um, was, was, what did the learn team do?
[00:07:38] Courtney Robertson: yeah. Learn and trading team. We had a couple different things going on. Um, one. The learn website is gearing up towards eventually being part of the training program for certification in WordPress. So we need the quality of training materials
[00:07:54] Sé Reed: That’s a big deal.
[00:07:55] Courtney Robertson: Yeah, it, it really is. Right. So I had employers in various industries coming up to me during the event saying, Hey, I’m hiring for this one role right now.
[00:08:03] Courtney Robertson: Do you know anyone? Um, because I help run the job start WordPress that night site. That’s really Chris Wegman running most of it, but I help a little uh . So between that and training people. I, I like to help try and get people connected to job opportunities. I said, I’m not sure that I could find someone right now for that one role, but long term holistically, we’re looking at solving the WordPress jobs pipeline, where we need more qualified talent.
[00:08:27] Courtney Robertson: Right. And so learn could be that home to help improve the quality. Of the talent that we’ve got available to us so that people actually know the programming languages and WordPress itself. If they’re applying for dev jobs or in the design space, that they know a lot of what the WordPress people need them to be able to work with.
[00:08:45] Courtney Robertson: So
[00:08:46] Sé Reed: I actually went real quick. I saw, um, yesterday Angela Bowman, uh, asked WP girl on Twitter. She tweeted, uh, slightly unrelated, but just about that, um, she just had learned about, uh, folks on LinkedIn who, uh, basically like copy people’s careers and background, and then like, Basically pretend to have work experience and then go from job to job, getting signing, bonuses, and getting, um, hired and then, you know, not doing any work and then getting fired in that process.
[00:09:17] Courtney Robertson: no, we need, we need
[00:09:18] Sé Reed: Well, no, so,
[00:09:19] Courtney Robertson: the case.
[00:09:20] Sé Reed: exactly. So this is we, we had talked, you and I had talked previously about the fact that. That is something that can more easily be done in WordPress. Not that not that we think that there’s a ton of people like being fraudulent out there necessarily, but I’m sure there are, but not, it’s not.
[00:09:37] Sé Reed: The point is, uh, it’s hard to know what
[00:09:41] Courtney Robertson: Right?
[00:09:42] Sé Reed: actual development skill level is in WordPress because there is no sort of metric against which to measure it, uh,
[00:09:51] Courtney Robertson: Right.
[00:09:52] Sé Reed: which is different than. So many of the other structures that have certification programs, or at least like, you know, third party certification programs or whatever happens to be.
[00:10:02] Sé Reed: And we are really alone in that. Um, not having that at all. And this is, I, I just, I just wanted to not let that go without you, without bringing it up. Cuz it’s something I think we’ll talk about again,
[00:10:15] Courtney Robertson: Oh, yes.
[00:10:15] Sé Reed: a big deal to me and
[00:10:17] Courtney Robertson: So.
[00:10:17] Sé Reed: in general,
[00:10:18] Courtney Robertson: So know that part of the day, we created some documents to look at other open source projects, what they do for certification, um, just to start collecting that we’re not anywhere near done with that list. I got a great recommendation from Amy June. Who’s over@opensource.com on a lot of, I got a big list of opensource projects where I could go review both their get involved pages and also their certifi.
[00:10:42] Courtney Robertson: Programs and just sort of look at what do we like, and don’t like about those various initiatives so that we can learn from them. Um, but during the day, so those two documents were kind of worked on a little bit in the day. We had one person that was contributing by reviewing accessibility of the content I learned.
[00:10:57] Courtney Robertson: We had other people that were, um, like ally Nimmons comes in from having a lot. Uh, experience teaching WordPress courses for many institutions. So we were discussing about the quality of the materials that we’re creating and making sure that that is up to a professional caliber. Um, we also had some people working on at the training table had, uh, Micah from blue host was working on the GitHub repo that we’ve got.
[00:11:25] Courtney Robertson: We’ve got a GitHub issues, track project. And that ties to what meta does to help us track contributions to the project because let’s leverage technology and take some of the work
[00:11:35] Sé Reed: Technology.
[00:11:36] Courtney Robertson: the, the people. Uh, and in trying,
[00:11:39] Sé Reed: How do we use
[00:11:39] Courtney Robertson: can’t store everything in my head. It just doesn’t fit. So we’re using GitHub to, um, sort of track the contributions of the project and help streamline our workflows with some automation there.
[00:11:52] Sé Reed: We put the link in the chat just so we can have it in our show notes.
[00:11:54] Courtney Robertson: Yeah. Yeah. So it’s, uh, it I’ll just say if, if folks had to make, do request org slash training, everything’s up at the top of that page in the welcome box. Um, so I’ll get the link, but we made a lot of progress and we also had two former team reps in person, one former team rep remotely, and then the other team reps, some of them were able to be present.
[00:12:17] Courtney Robertson: Some were not for them. It was, you know, the middle of. It was a lovely time on our team and lots of cross team collaboration because some of the same things we face other teams like docs experienced too. So it was great. Yeah.
[00:12:32] Sé Reed: Yeah, I I’m sorry. I was . I was trying to be like polite and like li I was listening and then I like, dunno how to stop. Sorry. I gotta stop listening. Um,
[00:12:41] Jason Tucker: I have a quick question real quick, Courtney. So the, the welcome box actually has content in there.
[00:12:47] Courtney Robertson: Uh, it.
[00:12:47] Jason Tucker: when I go to the site and I see the welcome box, I, I go hit the hide welcome, like every single time. And I’ve never noticed that there’s actually like a list of meeting times and stuff like that.
[00:12:57] Jason Tucker: There
[00:12:57] Courtney Robertson: yeah. It’s in there. And you can click to expand it when you go to the site as well. So if you hidden it, you can hit the Unhi option that displays there it’s like show and hide the welcome
[00:13:09] Jason Tucker: Yeah, that that box has always been a huge gripe for me because every time I go to the site, I look at it and I go, it’s the same content on every page. And then come to find out that there’s actually like custom content on there too. Very
[00:13:20] Sé Reed: It, it has been changing, uh, uh, team to team, um, because it actually was very stagnant for a long time. So I think that those, I know marketing has been working on just kind of their intro text, I think. Now I think just kind of maybe it’s because everything else is Gutenberg. So everyone’s kind of turning their attention to like, you know, their GitHub or, or maybe it’s because GitHub, you know, everyone’s transferring over to GitHub.
[00:13:46] Sé Reed: So we’re trying to figure out the balance between what lives on GitHub and you know, what lives on make. I think that’s a really, um, you know, and where are all, where are the handbooks for, for all of this? I think. Courtney. And I particularly in various areas have put pressure and, and brought up the, you know, where, where are these things?
[00:14:06] Sé Reed: Where is, where are these different handbooks and, and stuff. But I mean, it’s, the whole community is looking for that. And I think it’s definitely slow. We all know, you know, the slowness right. Doesn’t happen in a week or two. Uh, but it, it, I, I really feel like. There is some getting some cohesiveness in terms of making the site itself much more useful than it.
[00:14:27] Sé Reed: It was including the nav bar, which was a Matt instigated, um, push to get that done and also has a lot of problems, but it was recently updated, um, to be much more streamlined. So there’s, there’s there’s movement in, within the make community to make participating in, make. And to contribute much easier in addition to expanding the definition of what a contributor is.
[00:14:56] Sé Reed: So that, that is really helping. And I think that’s making people feel like there’s hope.
[00:15:01] Courtney Robertson: related to that this isn’t a finalized or done thing, but if you go to make that wordpress.org/latest, um,
[00:15:08] Sé Reed: yeah.
[00:15:08] Courtney Robertson: just, I gave you the link for that one. This is just an RSS board, literally of all the teams like this is the it’s the one RSS place. It, it auto updates via RSS, all
[00:15:19] Sé Reed: you need to understand that Courtney just made this and made this on her own. She, she was like, this needs to happen. And so has single handedly with, with assistance from different folks, like from meta, but has been the. Force behind. I mean, as far as I’m concerned, this is so basic, like all of the different posts from all of the different teams are here collected in one spot that you can go here and, you know, basically look on a per, per team basis as what the most, the latest things are that are happening and being discussed in that team on the main blog, not the same thing as the GitHub.
[00:15:53] Sé Reed: So there’s other, there’s other issues that exist over on the GitHub and of course in the slack itself, but anything that gets. Big traction and also is kind of requesting feedback is generally put onto the blog generally. Um, there’s exceptions to all of that, lots of them. But anyway, so this, um, this page is new and Courtney made it
[00:16:17] Jason Cosper: Yeah, I, I did. I did not know about this. This is, this is great. I can see what’s going on with the, the core team
[00:16:26] Sé Reed: only 20 years later.
[00:16:27] Jason Cosper: and, and the training team and, and everything like right on one page. And I can also see how many meetings the tide project has canceled just right there.
[00:16:39] Courtney Robertson: oh, but polyglots gets the win for like, like they use their, we call them PTUs in inside of.org contribution because that’s the theme that’s running. Yeah. So, so, uh, polyglots is, is there’s differently. People fill out the, the. The way, the posts work on.org. You can leave like a comment at the top of the team site and it like makes it like a post.
[00:17:00] Courtney Robertson: So polyglots takes their requests that way and they get published. So polyglots wins for having the most amount of posts ever. I think.
[00:17:10] Sé Reed: So that’s, and this is part of the, how are people structuring their teams? It’s really interesting when you start, um, delving into the management of all of these different teams, because, you know, we talk a lot about the, the. The leadership void, where I talk a lot about the leadership void, uh, within, uh, WordPress.
[00:17:30] Sé Reed: And you can kind of see it, it, it’s a bit of a, like, like two hands off, but also it’s nice to be hands off cuz it can, you know, kind of create its own thing. But you know, it is what it is. It is a very hands off evolution of team structure and these teams have gone through a lot of evolution. All of the different teams.
[00:17:52] Sé Reed: That saying it nicely, right. Evolution kind of turmoil or WP drama or any of those terms. Um, but it’s really interesting how unique polyglots is, for example, but how, how the, the operation of each team is so unique. I think it’s, it is, it makes it more difficult to understand and participate across the team and not just in one tiny.
[00:18:21] Sé Reed: Area and I think, yeah.
[00:18:23] Courtney Robertson: The nice thing with contributor day, somebody, uh, that was collecting the notes from all that different teams did for a recap post. They were walking around and like writing it on paper and pencil. I, I don’t know how to hand write anymore, but that’s what folks were doing there. and, um, they, they wanted the ability to put it on the update site.
[00:18:42] Courtney Robertson: So I said, okay, let’s go over here to the me table. And ask Otto for permissions to get this person added onto the site. And we were able to do that in person at contributor day, which is great. There are times I think that being in the same room, you can walk around, get to know what the other teams are up to figure out how to collaborate across the teams together in ways that are challenging.
[00:19:04] Courtney Robertson: If you’re only inside of slack.
[00:19:07] Sé Reed: Even if you’re inside slack at the same time, like at the meetings, it’s it can be more, more useful than the. you know, because people forget and their attention drifts away, especially for something that is not everybody’s full-time job. Right. Say something and then you’re like, oh yeah, I also have to work.
[00:19:24] Sé Reed: Let me go work for a minute. And then you’re like, wait, did someone respond? Wait. Oh, okay. I have to, you know, get my brain back into that thing that I do for fun.
[00:19:30] Courtney Robertson: Yeah.
[00:19:31] Sé Reed: I’m winked a lot. In this episode, speaking of winking speak, this is a perfect segue. There was a, another make post that came out on core, um, during contributor day that, um, was contributed I like there’s a wink tally. tally happening down there. Uh, did, did any of you read this? There was actually two, uh, um, core posts that were made by, on contributor day by someone who was not actually at contributor day. Is that correct? Didn’t.
[00:20:05] Courtney Robertson: I didn’t see him.
[00:20:06] Sé Reed: Yeah. So anyway, um, Matt Mullenweg, you may have heard of them. He made kind of two proclamations, essentially.
[00:20:16] Sé Reed: Um, we can talk about both of them, but it’s interesting in so far as the core team, a lot of the core team was there in the building, working on stuff. And this was this, this opinion, this post was delivered as a. Not delivered in person or discussed in person. So I’m just giving that, not with any judgment, just for context.
[00:20:43] Sé Reed: Um, was it, was it leadership? I don’t know you be the judge. Um, oh, maybe it was, that’s what it was trying to happen, but anyway, uh, we linked to it here. Uh, the, there were two posts put out. One was about WebP and core, uh, Cosper. Did you see this?
[00:21:01] Sé Reed: This is your
[00:21:02] Jason Cosper: yeah, this did I,
[00:21:04] Sé Reed: This is your, this is your, uh, your, your ballet whack over here.
[00:21:08] Jason Cosper: Yeah. Uh, no, I, I did see it. Um, and it just basically, um, , I mean, I know that WebP is a very controversial thing
[00:21:22] Sé Reed: We’ve talked about it on the show.
[00:21:24] Sé Reed: How controversial it’s.
[00:21:26] Jason Cosper: Yeah. And the, the people who, uh, have issues with it, I completely understand their issues. I, I think that it is, um, to support a new image format shouldn’t necessarily be so hard, but, um, I mean, it’s, um, it is, uh, people just have opinions both about, um, the.
[00:21:52] Jason Cosper: People pushing it, like, uh, a lot of this has been pushed forward through Google contributors. Right. Um, but also, um, people are just like, but I up, I upload the images that I wanna upload. I carefully, uh, pick my formats of JPEG and I have it compressed a particular way. Um, you know, I, I don’t. Uh, this thing that I upload to all of a sudden, now that I’m running on a new version of WordPress start repressing my images.
[00:22:23] Jason Cosper: So I, I get that, you know, it’s really hard to figure out how to like merge, uh, conversion of new image, uploads into WebP and, and have that active, uh, but it dovetails into. Kind of the, the next thing is that Matt, uh, thinks it would be a good idea. And to, to kind of go back to this thing that I believe Jen Milo proposed all the way back in like 2009, uh, that we have, uh, effectively canonical plugins, uh, plugins that are, um, things that are.
[00:23:02] Sé Reed: Inhouse inhouse plugins. I think that’s the better word than canonical, honestly. Cuz canonical, like what does that mean? They’re like inhouse, plugins,
[00:23:10] Jason Cosper: Right. I well, and it’s
[00:23:12] Sé Reed: canonical. I’m just saying that’s what it, what, what we mean essentially when we say that, right? Like.
[00:23:16] Jason Cosper: yeah. And, and canonical gets especially weird now that we’re living in comic book movie times and everybody’s like, oh, that’s cannon. That’s not cannon. Like, uh, there
[00:23:28] Sé Reed: what I’m thinking about.
[00:23:29] Jason Cosper: Yeah. Uh, there’s, there’s that, uh, thing in, uh, there’s an episode of Bob’s burgers where, uh, Bob maybe has some information about something and, and his, uh, daughter, Tina just keeps going non canonical, non canonical, and she’s getting like very upset over it.
[00:23:45] Jason Cosper: And that’s now, uh, that’s all I can think of when I just see canonical, but effectively. Yeah. Um, plugins that add functionality. Two, uh, two WordPress core that are made by, uh, WordPress core contributors that are made by the, the actual teams, um, that are working on WordPress that may not necessarily, um, go into WordPress.
[00:24:15] Jason Cosper: That kind of, um, how they say. What, what, what is it that, uh, I’m, I’m trying to remember which branch, if it was, uh, Congress or the Senate is, is like the saucer where things go to cool. It’s like, here’s this idea that we have, like, you know, you’re gonna put it on like the saucer on the side, so,
[00:24:36] Sé Reed: Senate, since everything just sits there
[00:24:38] Jason Cosper: right. Um, sure.
[00:24:41] Jason Cosper: But that’s
[00:24:42] Sé Reed: committee and live forever in committee.
[00:24:44] Jason Cosper: exactly.
[00:24:45] Sé Reed: Right. Well, here’s wait. I wanna say one thing. So, and he does mention this. Oh, sorry.
[00:24:50] Jason Cosper: No, no. Do
[00:24:51] Sé Reed: Oh, um, one, he mentions, mentions his mentions MP six, which was, uh, um, was that for, I don’t remember which, uh,
[00:25:01] Courtney Robertson: 9 3 9
[00:25:02] Sé Reed: Three nine.
[00:25:03] Sé Reed: It was like the re uh, redesign of the admin, which was a big deal. And that lived as a plugin at, uh, as it was in its experimental figuring out phase. And then Gutenberg has been following that model where Gutenberg is, was a plugin and then was folded a decor and is still a plugin that is worked on specifically by the Gutenberg team, by the way, which is not necessarily, um, the same thing as WordPress core, which is a whole we’ve talked about and touched.
[00:25:31] Sé Reed: Here, you know, Gutenberg versus WordPress versus which is which, but, um, uh, so those are examples of existing. In house plugins, but I, there are so many issues that I see in terms of, first of all, we are already low on contributors, right? Like this is contribution and the problem of onboarding contributors and keeping contributors and keeping contributors that can be consistent on a project or on a.
[00:26:00] Sé Reed: Uh, a piece of software, like we already are struggling to, to get that happening. And then to add in, in addition to supporting the basic, um, operations of that team, which as I mentioned in the earlier part of the show is just barely becoming functional. I mean, it’s definitely been functional, but barely becoming like functional at scale. and then now we’re gonna be asking those teams, which are very strapped and very. Putting together some very hard fought wins, um, to do these other things like this whole other separate thing. And not only that, which is by the way, maintain, developing, and maintain a plugin is a very core, heavy thing.
[00:26:45] Sé Reed: So he listed plugins. That would be for each team, but. The, the marketing team or the train, a lot of folks on the train team are, but the marketing team or the photos team, those aren’t necessarily devs, right? Those are people who have gone to those areas to participate in ways that aren’t necessarily coding.
[00:27:04] Sé Reed: So now the marketing team would be responsible for maintaining a plugin that does, you know, whatever it is, or, you know, uh, these TV, isn’t just a matter of, you know, captioning videos and getting all that stuff in there. But now they’re maintaining a separate plugin. To me, it makes, I don’t, I don’t understand how the teams could actually support plugin development and maintenance at all.
[00:27:31] Courtney Robertson: Especially when some of the teams have sites that they are also maintaining, like docs, TV, training, and even community has the work camp sites that they maintain.
[00:27:41] Sé Reed: I mean, we’re community is very busy.
[00:27:43] Courtney Robertson: yeah.
[00:27:44] Sé Reed: trying to get the world back together. You know, I guess he didn’t put marketing in here, so marketing’s not
[00:27:49] Courtney Robertson: It, it is.
[00:27:50] Sé Reed: is it on there? Oh yeah. It’s
[00:27:51] Jason Tucker: developers
[00:27:53] Sé Reed: well, that’s exactly what
[00:27:54] Jason Tucker: could be on a team, you could be in WordPress and not be a developer.
[00:27:57] Sé Reed: that’s what I’m saying.
[00:27:57] Jason Tucker: designer. You could be a
[00:27:59] Sé Reed: be a ton of devs.
[00:28:01] Sé Reed: Like people who are on the marketing team tend to, you know, that’s tends to be a split there. Those don’t tend to be heavy dev people who want to manage and develop a plugin or they’d be on a different team or building a plugin like, so. I am completely unclear on how each team would develop and maintain this when each team does not have the actual developer presence to manage this or, or build it.
[00:28:27] Courtney Robertson: Not only that, but I think also I would call attention to Joe Dawson’s comment regarding accessibility and civil rights. If, if the method of, um, getting more accessibility into. Core involves creating a plugin for accessibility. Joe indicates that that would be an issue with civil rights per brown versus board of education.
[00:28:51] Sé Reed: Yeah. I mean, unless the Supreme court takes that away. whatever.
[00:28:55] Courtney Robertson: Sure. And that’s an American thing, but
[00:28:58] Sé Reed: Yeah. Sorry. It is American
[00:29:00] Courtney Robertson: the principle of, um, separate but equal is not exactly a great experience that we want to have in.
[00:29:08] Sé Reed: It’s very it’s, it’s completely othering by saying you can have an accessible UI over here.
[00:29:15] Courtney Robertson: Yeah,
[00:29:16] Sé Reed: That’s literally all it is. And that’s what that solution is. And I think, I think that Matt brought that, maybe just thought of that because of the question that was brought to him, uh, the day before about accessibility.
[00:29:28] Sé Reed: And so he’s like, oh, well, you know, why don’t we just make an API that it can be fully accessible, but that’s not the point. The point is not to create an alternate UI that accessible people can use. It’s make the one that we have work for everybody. That’s the problem. And so I, his solution to other it is, I mean, that’s kind of what’s happening in all of these suggestions, right?
[00:29:54] Courtney Robertson: already, the performance team has, um, some plugins. The ones Andy just mentioned in the comments below also are plugins that are related for improving the experience and doing the plugins as feature. And they all need to be tested more thoroughly. Um, we have like site health and that new plugin review.
[00:30:13] Courtney Robertson: Uh, it’s a review, it’s a plugin review by the plugins. Right? So we have some of that in process, but some of it is still really problematic. Um, and also the elevation of what Andy was mentioning with the rollback plugin. Um, that’s one that if you need to roll a version back inside of plugins things for press, that you could do so, and. We need ways to get testing on those. So calling them canonical, it’s sort of almost neglect that these things do exist in features. Those plugins do exist in some way, and it’s the pathway to core and what are we seeing ship and core, uh, during the Gutenberg years and, um,
[00:30:51] Sé Reed: ears.
[00:30:52] Steve Zehngut: Gutenberg years.
[00:30:53] Sé Reed: That’s amazing.
[00:30:54] Courtney Robertson: decisions, not options, right?
[00:30:57] Jason Tucker: cards over here giving us titles for our next
[00:31:00] Sé Reed: Yeah, seriously,
[00:31:01] Courtney Robertson: The Gutenberg ears. So, um, but also the decisions, not options. That’s on the about philosophy page for WordPress and people are asking, could we make these, you know, Gutenberg rolled out and it just rolled out. There was no option initially to enable it. Um, and could we see something that maybe would be like, you have it as an option to enable for a while?
[00:31:22] Courtney Robertson: So we get more people testing and then after a certain point in time, it becomes the decision. um, because that’s kind of what we see happening inside of Gutenberg features that are rolling out right. Instead of, yeah. So there’s,
[00:31:34] Jason Cosper: See, I, I, I know. I, I don’t want to cut you off. I, I know we’re at time. Uh, but it’s really my concern about canonical plugins, uh, especially is it feels like right now, uh, it’s saying that the only changes that will be coming into WordPress are. Gutenberg changes cuz that’s where the big push is and that everything else gets shoved into a canonical plugin that then eventually gets tested.
[00:32:05] Jason Cosper: And uh, you might have to add it on as a plugin for months, years, whatever, before it actually makes it into WordPress core. And that I’m sorry, is a shitty experience for end users.
[00:32:21] Jason Tucker: Yep.
[00:32:22] Sé Reed: should talk. We should, we can talk more about this specific, uh, topic in terms of canonical plugins or these kinds of features or feature ads in the future episode.
[00:32:30] Steve Zehngut: the next episode called the Gutenberg
[00:32:32] Sé Reed: Hi.
[00:32:35] Courtney Robertson: Hey ATO.
[00:32:37] Jason Tucker: righty. Well, thank you very much for hanging out with us, Courtney. We really appreciate it. Here’s our outro go over to DP water core.com/subscribe to subscribe to this content. Some would say that we are canonical podcast for WPwatercooler and for, for WordPress in general. So go over to our website.
[00:33:00] Jason Tucker: We’ll we’d really appreciate it. You have a
[00:33:03] Sé Reed: also Stitcher and apple and Google and YouTube. What happened to that discord by the way?
[00:33:10] Jason Tucker: Yeah.
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