The Month in WordPress: August 2017
While there haven’t been any major events or big new developments in the WordPress world this past month, a lot of work has gone into developing a sustainable future for the project. Read on to find out more about this and other interesting news from around the WordPress world in August.
The Global WordPress Translation Day Returns
On September 30, the WordPress Polyglots team will be holding the third Global WordPress Translation Day. This is a 24-hour global event dedicated to the translation of the WordPress ecosystem (core, themes, plugins), and is a mix of physical, in-person translation work with online streaming of talks from WordPress translators all over the world.
Meetup groups will be holding events where community members will come together to translate WordPress. To get involved in this worldwide event, join your local meetup group or, if one is not already taking place in your area, organize one for your community.
You can find out more information on the Translation Day blog and in the #polyglots-events channel in the Making WordPress Slack group.
WordPress Foundation to Run Open Source Training Worldwide
The WordPress Foundation is a non-profit organization that exists to provide educational events and resources for hackathons, support of the open web, and promotion of diversity in the global open source community.
In an effort to push these goals forward, the Foundation is going to be offering assistance to communities who would like to run local open source training workshops. A number of organizers have applied to be a part of this initiative, and the Foundation will be selecting two communities in the coming weeks.
Follow the WordPress Foundation blog for updates.
Next Steps in WordPress Core’s PHP Focus
After last month’s push to focus on WordPress core’s PHP development, a number of new initiatives have been proposed and implemented. The first of these initiatives is a page on WordPress.org that will educate users on the benefits of upgrading PHP. The page and its implementation are still in development, so you can follow and contribute on GitHub.
Along with this, plugin developers are now able to specify the minimum required PHP version for their plugins. This version will then be displayed on the Plugin Directory page, but it will not (yet) prevent users from installing it.
The next evolution of this is for the minimum PHP requirement to be enforced so that plugins will only work if that requirement is met. You can assist with this implementation by contributing your input or a patch on the open ticket.
As always, discussions around the implementation of PHP in WordPress core are done in the #core-php channel in the Making WordPress Slack group.
New Editor Development Continues
For a few months now, the core team has been steadily working on Gutenberg, the new editor for WordPress core. While Gutenberg is still in development and is some time away from being ready, a huge amount of progress has already been made. In fact, v1.0.0 of Gutenberg was released this week.
The new editor is available as a plugin for testing and the proposed roadmap is for it to be merged into core in early 2018. You can get involved in the development of Gutenberg by joining the #core-editor channel in the Making WordPress Slack group and following the WordPress Core development blog.
Further reading:
- On the topic of Gutenberg, Matt Mullenweg wrote a post to address some of the concerns that the community has expressed about the new editor.
- A new movement has started in the Indian WordPress community named JaiWP — the organizers are seeking to unite and motivate the country’s many local communities.
- Merlin WP is a new plugin offering theme developers an easy way to onboard their users.
- Ryan McCue posted an ambitious roadmap for the future of the WordPress REST API — many contributions from the community will be needed in order to reach these goals.
- Want to know what you can expect in the next major release of WordPress? Here’s a look at what the core team is planning for v4.9.
- To help combat the difficulties that Trac presents to WordPress Core contributors, Ryan McCue built an alternative platform dubbed Not Trac.
- v1.3.0 of WP-CLI was released earlier in the month, adding a whole lot of great new features to the useful tool.
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