In Case You Missed It – Issue 5

Human Made Hires Siobhan McKeown

Development firm, Human Made Ltd., announced that it has hired Siobhan McKeown as their events director. Human Made worked closely with McKeown who helped organize and run A Day of REST, a conference devoted to the WordPress REST API. According to the post, McKeown’s role is to expand the company’s events, including the Day of Rest conference.

WordPress is the Light in a Sea of Darkness

Raghavendra Satish Peri from India, who discovered at the age of 14 that he was 80% blind, describes how WordPress became a shining light in a sea of darkness.

WordPress has changed the way I see my life, today I am a full time Digital Accessibility Consultant & I build most of my code examples on WP. This is helping me grow professionally & personally each day. I am financially independent, travel around the world, attend & speak at conferences/meet-ups, fought depression with my writing, wrote a bucket list & am actively pursuing it. All this would have not been possible with the power of publishing & WP has simplified it for me.

In the post, Satish Peri says he has two wishes. The first is to attend WordCamp US and meet Matt Mullenweg. The second is to see every part of WordPress core be accessible. While the WordPress accessibility team is working on his second wish, how can we as a community grant the first?

WordPress’ Greatest Threat Isn’t a CMS

Chris Wallace explains why the greatest threat to WordPress isn’t a competing CMS, but the people who criticize it in a rude and disrespectful way.

But the biggest threat to WordPress right now is not a CMS. Heck, it’s not even a technology challenge or an issue with legacy code. The biggest threat to WordPress is people in the community who voice opinions in a rude and disrespectful way, echoing a deep lack of appreciation for the contributors and project leaders simply trying to make WordPress better within the framework of being used on 25% of the web with a desire to continue increasing that number.

I tried to explain how to be helpful when criticizing WordPress last year, but I’m not sure I made an impact. I know from experience that encountering a constant barrage of criticism is unhealthy and can lead to burnout. The same holds true for those who are committed to improving WordPress on a daily basis.

It’s not that things need to be sugarcoated, it’s that criticism should be given in an actionable way to make things better for all involved. It’s also about civil discourse and treating others with respect.

The final part of Wallace’s post is great advice:

Let’s all take a few minutes to be grateful for the opportunity to make a living off the hard work of thousands of other people who donated their time and code to build something that has made a huge impact on the Internet and in people’s actual lives.

Matt Mullenweg on The Changelog Podcast

Matt Mullenweg appeared on The Changelog podcast to discuss the future of WordPress and how Calypso fits in. It’s a great show as the duo dive deep into the role JavaScript plays in the future of WordPress.

Developing a WordPress Plugin That Uses Service APIs

Smashing Magazine published a great guide that explains how to create a plugin that taps into third-party service APIs.

Adopting Plugins is Life Changing for Some

David Gewirtz, who writes for ZDNet, describes how adopting 10 WordPress plugins changed his life. It’s one of the coolest stories I’ve read on the use of the “Adopt-Me” tag in the WordPress plugin directory. One of the best parts of the story is when Gewirtz explains what happened when he adopted a plugin with more than 10K active installs.

Seamless Donations had more than 10,000 active users on the day I adopted it. I expected my workload would be roughly the same as for the widget. I’d make a few security fixes as they came along and tweaks for compatibility.

I was wrong.

I also expected the users to be seasoned webmasters. After all, if you’re installing an open source project on your server, you’re obviously going to be experienced with Linux and PHP and all the rest, right? Right?

Oh, how wrong I was.

Definitely give this a read if you’re thinking about adopting a popular plugin.

Warm Weather Wapuu

As a traditional part of this series, I end each issue by featuring a Wapuu design. For those who don’t know, Wapuu is the unofficial mascot of the WordPress project. Since the first day of Spring in the US is Sunday, March 20th, I decided to feature the Wapuu family from WordCamp Miami. Each member of the family except for the basketball one, is a reminder that warmer weather is on the way!

The official #wcmia Wapuu family. pic.twitter.com/U2Ao9Yh0qN

— WordCamp Miami (@wordcampmiami) June 3, 2015

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