The Month in WordPress: April 2018
This past month saw a lot of preparation for upcoming events and releases across the WordPress project. Read on to find out more about these plans, and everything else that happened around the community in April.
The WordPress 15th Anniversary is Coming
On May 27 2018, WordPress will turn 15 years old — this is a huge milestone for the project, or, indeed, for any open-source platform. The Community Team has been hard at work helping communities around the world plan local anniversary parties.
Check the central anniversary website to see if there’s already a party being planned near you. These parties are all organized by local communities — if there’s no local community in your area, you can start one today and host a party yourself.
Work has Started on a Gutenberg Migration Guide
With Gutenberg, the upcoming WordPress content editor, in rapid development, a lot of people have been wondering how they will convert their existing plugins to work with the new features. To mitigate the issues here and help people overcome any migration hurdles, a Gutenberg Migration Guide is underway to assist developers with making their code Gutenberg-compatible.
If you’d like to contribute to this guide, you can review the existing documentation on GitHub and open a new issue if you find something to add.
Theme Review Team Launches Trusted Authors Program
Reviews of themes submitted to the Theme Directory can take quite a while to complete. In order to combat this issue and to make the theme submission process smoother for everyone, the Theme Review Team is introducing a Trusted Authors Program.
This program will allow frequent and reliable theme authors to apply for trusted status, allowing them to upload themes more frequently and to have their themes automatically approved. This will allow more high-quality themes to be added to the directory, as well as recognize the hard work that authors put in to build their themes.
If you would like to get involved with reviewing themes, you can read their getting started guide, follow the team blog and join the #themereview channel in the Making WordPress Slack group.
Further Reading:
- WordPress 4.9.5 was released early this month, fixing numerous bugs and potential security issues. The two leads for this release published some interesting feedback about the process.
- In addition to the Trusted Authors Program mentioned above, the Theme Review Team is making some changes to their review process to minimize theme review delays.
- The Marketing Team produced a handy Contributor Day onboarding PDF for organizers to hand out to contributors attending WordCamps.
- The Accessibility Team is actively looking for contributors for their handbook.
- A new type of WordCamp, targeted at organizers, is in the planning stages now.
- The WordPress.org About pages received a significant redesign to make them more clear and useful.
- The Community Team posted the roadmap for this year’s WordCamp Incubator program.
If you have a story we should consider including in the next “Month in WordPress” post, please submit it here.