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In Case You Missed It – Issue 26 – WordPress Tavern
Admin Posted On June 15, 2019

In Case You Missed It Featured Image

In Case You Missed It Featured Image
photo credit: Night Moves – (license)

There’s a lot of great WordPress content published in the community but not all of it is featured on the Tavern. This post is an assortment of items related to WordPress that caught my eye but didn’t make it into a full post.

Birgit Olzem Could Use the Community’s Help

Birgit Olzem has encountered some financial hard times due to multiple illnesses and paying for acupuncture treatments and osteopathic therapy which are not covered by her insurance. Olzem fell ill earlier this year which prevented her from generating income as a self-employed person.

Olzem has translated WordPress, compiled release packages for de_DE, organized Meetups, WordCamps, answered support questions and has been part of different make/WordPress teams, some of them as a team-rep. She’s also contributed to WordCamps as a Speaker, Volunteer and Contributor day team-lead.

To learn more about her story and to donate, please read her request to the community.

Liam Dempsey’s Take on Gutenberg

Liam Dempsey describes what he likes and doesn’t like about the new WordPress editor.

Defending the Right to Publish Open Source Software in the UK

The EFF and Open Rights Group have submitted comments to the UK government defending the right to publish open source software.

Moreover, source code is a form of written creative expression, and open source code is a form of public discourse. Regulating its publication under anti-money-laundering provisions fails to honor the free expression rights of software creators in the United Kingdom, and their collaborators and users in the rest of the world.

Why Is It Important to Give Back to Open Source?

JC Mae Palmes on Twitter asked, why is it important to give back to the WordPress community? Here are a few responses. To see all of the responses, check out this Twitter thread. 

WordCamp US Speaker Selection Process

If you’re wondering how speakers are being selected for WordCamp US this year, check out this post by the Programming Team. The team is using a new process that includes, limiting the number of submissions per speaker to two instead of unlimited, reviewing submissions based on the organizer’s sphere of experience, and using blind reviews. Speakers who are chosen are scheduled to be notified by the end of this month.

An Easy Way to Make an Impact in The WordPress Community

David Bisset shared the following idea on Twitter and while a few companies have started doing this, I think it will catch on with individuals more than businesses.

That’s it for issue twenty-six. If you recently discovered a cool resource or post related to WordPress, please share it with us in the comments.

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Justin Tadlock Proposes Idea to Solve Common Theme Issues – WordPress Tavern
Admin Posted On June 14, 2019






The Theme Review Team has been discussing ideas in Slack on how to solve the problem of themes in the review queue suffering from common theme issues. Just Tadlock has proposed a idea he calls Theme Feature Repositories.

The idea is to create standardized packages on the Theme Review Team GitHub repo that authors could use in their themes. If enough people bought into the idea and worked together, it would lessen the pain points between reviewers and theme authors. It would also decrease the amount of code written by hundreds of different authors to solve a common problem.

Tadlock used Admin notices and Links to ‘Pro’ versions as two examples that could benefit from this approach. Packages would handle specific use cases and be installed using Composer. For those who don’t use composer, an autoloader would be provided as well as a .zip file that could be dropped into a theme.

Tadlock is asking the theme community what packages do they need or what common problems could be solved together.

“This can literally be any common feature in WordPress themes, not just admin or customizer-related things,” Tadlock said. “Nothing is ‘out of bounds’. Every idea is on the table right now.

“This is an ambitious project. It’d require cooperation between authors and reviewers for the betterment of the theme directory as a whole. It’ll only work if we have buy-in from everyone.”

Tadlock also mentioned that due to his schedule, he will be unable to lead or co-lead the project and is seeking people interested in taking on these roles. Those interested should have knowledge of Git, Composer, and Object-oriented programming.

If you’re interested in this project or want to provide feedback, you can leave a comment on the proposal.

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WordPress Spanish Translation Team Now has Meta Sites, Apps, and Top 200 Plugins 100% Translated – WordPress Tavern
Admin Posted On June 14, 2019

WordPress Spanish Translation Team Now has Meta Sites, Apps, and Top 200 Plugins 100% Translated – WordPress Tavern

The Spanish WordPress community hit a remarkable milestone with translations this week. Polyglots volunteers have now translated the meta sites, WordPress apps, and the top 200 plugins at 100% completion, with no pending translations to review.

The size of the team is a major factor in reaching this milestone. According to stats Naoko Takano shared at WordPress Translation Day 4 last month, Spanish is the locale with the most translation contributors (2,863), followed by German (2,399), Italian (2,190), Dutch (1,584), and Russian (1,515). It is also one of the top non-English locales installed, with 5.0% of all WordPress sites using the translation. WordPress.com reports similar numbers, where Spanish is the second most popular language for blogs at 4.7%.

Rocío Valdivia, a Community Wrangler at WordCamp Central who lives in Spain, gave us a look at what is behind the team’s extraordinary growth and momentum. She identified several key factors that have contributed to their success in working efficiently and sharing useful information among team members during the past 2-3 years.

“We created a Slack instance some years ago, but at the beginning it was common for people to join and ask for support questions,” Valdivia said. “Now we have some protocols: the general channel is an only-read channel. If someone ask for support, we send them with a kind predef to the es.wordpress.org forums, where they get answers in a few hours. There are no questions in the forums waiting for longer than six hours ever, as we have a very active support team that coordinates in the #support channel of our Slack.”

Valdivia said that removing the noise of support requests has given the team very productive channels for translations, plugin and theme translations, meetups (where Meetup organizers share tips and resources using a shared Google drive folder), and WordCamps (where WC organizers share info, tips, answer questions in Spanish, and share resources like email templates.)

“Besides all of this, we’ve worked very well passing the philosophy of the project to the new members from the most experienced ones,” Valdivia said. “For example, people do very soft transitions from one lead organizer to the next one.”

Although some WordCamp attendees have complained in the past that not much is accomplished at Contributor Days, the Spanish community has had success using these opportunities to transfer knowledge to new leaders and contributors. The community hosted 10 WordCamps in 2018 and Valdivia estimates they will have 9-10 in 2019. WordCamp Barcelona 2018 and 2019 had 400 attendees and 180 people at their Contributor Days. WC Irun 2019 had 220 attendees and 100 participants at Contributor Day. WordCamp Madrid 2019 sold out with 600 attendees and approximately 200 participated in Contributor Day.

Although the Spanish community has experienced contributors across several WordPress.org teams, such as WPTV, Community, Support, and Polyglots, Valdivia said they are a bit thin on Core contributors.

“We’re lacking people with experience contributing frequently to Core,” Valdivia said. “We have some of them who have contributed several times, but still need more people with more involvement to be able to pass all this info to newcomers.”

Strong local meetups are another factor in the Spanish community’s success at keeping translations up-to-date. In addition to the largest team of translators in the world of WordPress, Spain has the second highest number of meetup groups and events per month. Spain is running 64 local meetups, with a population of 46 million people, compared to 201 groups in the U.S., which has 7x the population size (327 million).

“The language barrier has been an issue for years, as not everyone speaks English and not everyone feels confident following conversations in English,” Valdivia said. “So, being able to train our own teams of contributors in our own language and having our own shared resources and channels, has been very useful.”

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WPWeekly Episode 356 – Gutenberg, Governance, and Contributing to WordPress with Jonny Harris – WordPress Tavern
Admin Posted On June 14, 2019






In this episode, John James Jacoby and I are joined by Jonny Harris. Jonny describes how he discovered WordPress and some of the core projects he’s been working on including, Site Health Checks, fatal error protection, and Multisite. We discuss WordPress’ focus on users vs developers in recent years, Jonny’s experience contributing to core, and his thoughts on a WordPress governance model.

Stories Discussed:

WordPress Is Borked So Enjoy This Glorious Plant That’s Taking Over the Internet

WP Engine Launches DevKit Open Beta

Drupal Gutenberg 1.0 Released, Now Ready for Production Sites

BuddyPress 5.0 to Update Password Control to Match WordPress

Transcript:

Episode 356 Transcript

WPWeekly Meta:

Next Episode: Wednesday, June 19th 3:00 P.M. Eastern

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Pika Project Launches New JavaScript CDN to Serve Modern, ESM Packages – WordPress Tavern
Admin Posted On June 13, 2019

Pika CDN logo

Pika CDN logo

Fred Schott, a software developer and former Google employee on the Polymer team, has launched a new CDN for his Pika project. Schott’s mission with Pika is “to make modern JavaScript more accessible by making it easier to find, publish, install, and use modern packages on npm.” Pika provides a searchable catalog of “module” packages available on npm – packages that use the more compact ES module syntax (ESM), which result in smaller Javascript bundles.

npm currently lists 59,851 ES modules. This makes up approximately 7% of total packages on npm are exporting an ES module, but the number is steadily increasing:

Pika makes it easy to search for these packages and the results will only include those that have a defined “module” entry point in their package.json manifest. Each listing consolidates the relevant information on one page, highlighting the important details.

One of the chief advantages of using ES modules is that they run natively on the web, without the need for a bundler. In a post titled “A Future Without Webpack,” Schott contends that JavaScript developers are “so steeped in the world of bundlers” that they overlook the possibilities of using ESM dependencies that run directly on the web:

Over the last several years, JavaScript bundling has morphed from a production-only optimization into a required build step for most web applications. Whether you love this or hate it, it’s hard to deny that bundlers have added a ton of new complexity to web development – a field of development that has always taken pride in its view-source, easy-to-get-started ethos.

@pika/web is an attempt to free web development from the bundler requirement. In 2019, you should use a bundler because you want to, not because you need to.

Schott created @pika/web to make it easy for developers to use ES modules, even when they don’t have compatible dependencies. It provides an install-time tool that is not exactly a build tool or a bundler but works to output web-native npm dependencies into a single ESM .js file:

@pika/web checks your package.json manifest for any “dependencies” that export a valid ESM “module” entry point, and then installs them to a local web_modules/ directory. @pika/web works on any ESM package, even ones with ESM & Common.js internal dependencies.

Installed packages run in the browser because @pika/web bundles each package into a single, web-ready ESM .js file. For example: The entire “preact” package is installed to web_modules/preact.js. This takes care of anything bad that the package may be doing internally, while preserving the original package interface.

Here’s a demo of how that works:

This week Schott announced the availability of a new Pika CDN for delivering modern ES module packages. It uses the pikapkg/web package builder to work with any ESM package and the CDN will automagically handle any non-ESM dependencies of that package. Pika CDN automatically detects the visitor’s browser and serves JS that is optimized to the environment, eliminating polyfills and transpiler bloat wherever possible.

“Pika CDN leverages your browser’s natural caching abilities to give your pages faster dependency load times, especially on first visit,” Schott said. “0ms first-loads are even possible (for your dependencies at least) if all packages have been seen before.

“With our CDN, package authors can distribute more modern, unminified packages without worrying about how to serve them directly. Instead, our nifty package-builder automatically resolves each package — and any legacy sub-dependencies — into a single, minified, ready-to-import JavaScript file.”

Schott recently left his position at Ripple to work full-time on Pika, a project that he believes will move the JavaScript ecosystem forward.

“Leaving my team was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made, but I know that I’m needed here,” he said. “I’m so excited to be a part of the future of the web, whatever it ends up looking like.”

Pika is looking for corporate sponsors. For now, Schott is funding the server costs using Patreon.

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Gutenberg 5.9 Brings Major Improvements to Block Grouping, Introduces Snackbar Notices – WordPress Tavern
Admin Posted On June 13, 2019

Gutenberg 5.9 Brings Major Improvements to Block Grouping, Introduces Snackbar Notices – WordPress Tavern





Gutenberg 5.9 is now available for those who are running the plugin to get the latest features on their sites. This release brings significant improvements to the grouping capabilities, allowing users to group and ungroup blocks inside a container block. Once placed inside a group, the blocks can be moved up or down within the group using simple up/down controls.

Nested blocks have also been improved so that users can click through to each layer to configure each and navigate to the deepest nested block.

Gutenberg 5.9 introduces “Snackbar” notices to communicate completed actions in the block editor UI that do not require further action.

The term “Snackbar” doesn’t adequately describe the way these notices behave. The concept was inspired by Material design and is traditionally used for providing brief messages about app processes at the bottom of the screen. Gutenberg’s new Snackbars pop up and disappear after a short delay, so the notice doesn’t have to be dismissed.

“For a distraction-free experience, all the notices used in the editor to inform about the post saving/publishing, reusable blocks creation and updates have been updated to use this new type of notice,” Gutenberg Phase 2 lead Riad Benguella said. He posted a gif demonstrating Snackbar notices in action:

This release brings several visual enhancements to blocks and UI components, including a redesign of the Table block placeholder, refactoring and consolidation of dropdown menus, and improvements the output of the Spacer block.

Gutenberg 5.9 contains more than two dozen fixes for bugs found in both desktop and mobile experiences. The editor took a slight dip in performance from the previous version, going from 4.8 to 4.9 seconds in loading time and 62.8ms to 66.3ms for keypress events. More than 40 people contributed to this release and approximately 15% were new contributors.

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Drupal Gutenberg 1.0 Released, Now Ready for Production Sites – WordPress Tavern
Admin Posted On June 12, 2019

Drupal Gutenberg 1.0 Released, Now Ready for Production Sites – WordPress Tavern

The Gutenberg module for Drupal, created by Frontkom, reached the 1.0 milestone earlier this month. It is the first stable release recommended for use in production with Drupal 8.x.

The 1.0 release removes the Gutenberg-JS dependency and uses Gutenberg core files directly. It is based on Gutenberg version 5.6.1, which was released in early May. The module boasts better handling for media files, adding support for title, caption, and alternative text. It also adds an “Allowed Blocks UI” to the content type admin UI, so administrators can restrict which blocks show up in the block selector.

“We’re now ready for production sites in the sense that we’ll be more careful with structure changes, will try to do update paths when possible, and will create automated tests for crucial functionality,” Frontkom project manager Thor Andre Gretland said. “We’ve solved the blockers for a stable release.”

Upgrading the module from RC-1 may require some extra steps, because it is a big jump, taking the Gutenberg library from 4.8.0 to 5.6.1. Users will need to update the database. It is also necessary to navigate to content types and click save to enable Gutenberg again so that it will begin storing the Allowed blocks in the database. If users get notices about invalid blocks, they are advised to try the Attempt Block Recovery option:

“It’s actually a rather large update,” Gretland said. “We were planning to add a couple of last needed features to release our 1.0 version, but ended up using the latest Gutenberg version with several new great features. We’re also using more of the Gutenberg Core, that we’ve been able to use before.”

The module still has one critical issue that Frontkom is working on. Reusable blocks are not working with the latest release. Users are getting a “this block is unavailable or deleted” message when attempting to insert a reusable block. In the meantime, those who require this feature can roll back to RC1 to get it working again.

So far the Gutenberg module has been well-received. It has been downloaded more than 12,000 times and 494 sites are reported to be using it.

Drupal’s Gutenberg module includes access to the Gutenberg Cloud library of free blocks. Although the library has been slow to gain contributors, it does contain several blocks that are helpful for creating page layouts, such as Content in Columns, Hero Section, Section Wrapper, Section Row, and a Feature Box block. Site administrators can also use the Gutenberg module in combination with Drupal’s new Layout Builder, which was introduced as a stable module to Drupal 8.7 core.

“We see a valid use case for mixing Drupal Gutenberg with the Drupal layout builder when you might want to create layout templates with the layout builder, and keep the actual content editing in Gutenberg,” Gretland said. “For example you could use the layout builder to define fixed byline elements for author and create date, but leave the actual content creation experience to Gutenberg.”

WebWash has a good video tutorial for Drupal users who want to learn how to configure the Gutenberg module and use it on the Page content type. It includes a walkthrough for common actions like uploading images, creating reusable blocks, and using the Gutenberg Cloud. If you want to see how Gutenberg can improve Drupal’s authoring experience without installing the module, check out the frontend demo of Drupal Gutenberg created by the team at Frontkom.

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WP Engine Launches DevKit Open Beta – WordPress Tavern
Admin Posted On June 12, 2019


Those who host or manage sites on WP Engine now have a new tool at their disposal. It’s called DevKit, developed by Chris Wiegman and Jason Stallings.

DevKit is a WordPress local development environment that includes SSH Gateway access, push and pull deployments to WP Engine, Command Line Interface commands for the Genesis theme framework and other tools.

Although DevKit has tight integration with WP Engine the software can be used independently of the host. With Local by Flywheel, Vagrant, XAMPP, and other tools available, Wiegman explains what motivated him to create a new solution.

“I’ve been working on the perfect WordPress developer environment since I learned about Vagrant in 2013,” he said. “As it was never my full-time job, I could never take it to the next level. DevKit gives me the power to do that.”

Stallings added, “We wanted to build a kick ass set of tools for developers building on WP Engine. That’s been our mission from the start, build something that all developers want to use (including us)!”

As what for what sets DevKit apart from the others, “I think our architecture is very different from both tools,” Stallings said.

“Similar to Docker Engine, DevKit CLI is the interface to DevKit. So when we build the GUI it will 100% complement the CLI, and the two can be used interchangeably. This will enable us to build other interfaces in the future too.”

DevKit provides the following features:

  • Container-based local development environment
  • SSH Gateway access
  • Push and pull deployments to WP Engine
  • Preview your local site with others via ngrok
  • PHP version selector
  • Email testing client
  • MySQL
  • Local SSH & WP-CLI
  • Genesis Framework WP-CLI commands
  • phpmyadmin
  • webgrind
  • Varnish
  • HTTPS Proxy
  • xdebug

Currently, DevKit’s user interface is command line only with plans to add a GUI later this year. It’s available for free and is in open beta for Mac and Linux. Those interested in participating in the open beta can sign up on the DevKit landing page.

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Former npm, Inc. CTO Announces Entropic, a Decentralized Package Registry – WordPress Tavern
Admin Posted On June 11, 2019

Former npm, Inc. CTO Announces Entropic, a Decentralized Package Registry – WordPress Tavern

CJ Silverio, former CTO of npm Inc., gave a presentation at JSConf EU 2019 in Berlin earlier this month titled “The Economics of Open Source.” More specifically, she discussed the economics of package management as it applies to open source software, based on her unique perspective and experience gained in working for the company that runs the world’s largest JavaScript package registry.

Silverio tells the story of how npm gained official status and characterizes its success as a catastrophe for a centralized package registry and repository. Although centralization has some advantages for usability and reliability, success can be expensive when a centralized service becomes popular. She described the events leading up to npm’s incorporation in 2013. The registry was down more than it was up in October 2013 and npm needed money.

npm’s owner took seed funding from a VC firm and the Node project continued to give npm special privileges. Developers perpetuated this by continuing to use npm, as over time it had come to define developers’ expectations in serving JavaScript packages. Silverio discusses some of the consequences of npm coming under private control, how developers now have no input into registry policies or how disputes are resolved.

Presumably speaking from her intimate knowledge of the company’s inner workings, Silverio describes how VC-funding turned npm Inc. into a financial instrument.

“Financial instruments are contracts about money,” she said. “npm Inc, the company that owns our language ecosystem, is a thing that might as well be a collection of pork bellies, as far as its owners are concerned. They make contracts with each other and trade bits of it around. npm Inc. is a means for turning money into more money.”

Silverio contends that JavaScript’s package registry should not be privately controlled and that centralization is a burden that will inevitably lead to private control because the servers cost money.

Her sharp criticism of centralized package management leads into her announcement of a federated, decentralized package registry called Entropic that she created with former npm colleague Chris Dickinson and more than a dozen contributors. The project is Apache 2.0 licensed and its creators are working in cooperation with the OpenJS Foundation.

Entropic comes with its own CLI, and offers a new file-centric publication API. All packages published to the registry are public and developers are encouraged to use something like the GitHub Package Registry if they need to control access to packages. The project is just over a month old and is not ready for use.

“I think it’s right that the pendulum is swinging away from centralization and I want to lend my push to the swing,” Silverio said. The last decade has been about consolidation and monolithic services, but the coming decade is going to be federated. Federation spreads out costs. It spreads out control. It spreads out policy-making. It hands control of your slice of our language ecosystem to you. My hope is that by giving Entropic away, I’ll help us take our language commons back.”

Silverio’s Economics of Package Management essay is available on GitHub. Check out the video of the presentation from JSConf EU below. If decentralized package management gains momentum and becomes the standard for the industry, this video captures what may become a turning point in the JavaScript ecosystem and a defining moment for the future of the web.

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BuddyPress 5.0 to Update Password Control to Match WordPress – WordPress Tavern
Admin Posted On June 11, 2019


BuddyPress 5.0 development began in December 2018 after 4.0.0 was released in November. The core BuddyPress team has not published a roadmap for what will be coming in 5.0, but features and fixes added so far can be found on GitHub in the commit log.

One noteworthy addition to the upcoming major release is that the BP Nouveau template pack is being updated to use the same password control as the one used in WordPress core. BuddyPress users will now be able to set their passwords using WordPress’ interface on the registration page and on the user’s general settings page.

Here’s what it will look like in the templates:

By default, BuddyPress will generate a strong password, but the user can still edit it, if necessary. If the user selects a password that is too weak, the submit button will be disabled until the user confirms they want to proceed by checking the checkbox.

BP Nouveau replaced the bp-legacy template packs in 2018, introducing JavaScript-powered templates, integration with the Customizer, and more layout options for BuddyPress navigation and component directories. As a result of the password control update, the src/bp-templates/bp-nouveau/js/password-verify.js template is scheduled to be deprecated and deleted in BuddyPress 6.0.0, so developers will want to take note if using the bp-nouveau-password-verify script as a dependency for custom password control implementations.

BuddyPress 5.0 also adds BP-specific debug into to the Site Health Info screen that was introduced in WordPress 5.2. This release will require WordPress 4.7 or greater for optimal compatibility and older versions will not be supported. Site owners running on older versions of WordPress have time to prepare.

Although the BuddyPress core team and contributors have put out several security and maintenance releases since version 4.0.0, regular project meetings have been sporadic in 2019. BuddyPress 5.0 was expected at the end of May but a new timeline may be discussed at the next meeting, which is tentatively planned for Wednesday, June 12.

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