In Case You Missed It – Issue 2

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 part of a new series where I share an assortment of items related to WordPress that caught my eye but didn’t make it into a full post.

Taking Care of Each Other

Rich Robinkoff has a great post that discusses wellness in the community and encourages the WordPress community to take care of each other. While it’s great to give back to WordPress, Robinkoff reminds us that we need to invest in ourselves before reinvesting in WordPress.

Without giving back to ourselves, giving to the WordPress project would suffer. Invest in the wellness of WordPress by investing in yourself.

Robinkoff is also working on a side project called WPAmbassador.com, a site that aims to bring people together. It will promote camaraderie and wellness throughout the community. It’s not ready yet but it may launch in February.

If you didn’t get a chance to attend or watch his presentation at WordCamp US, I highly encourage you to do so. However, tissues are not included.

Rich is a great person and steward in the community. If you’re not already doing so, you should follow him on Twitter.

One of The Most Important Comments in WordPress’ History Turns 13 Years Old

On January 25th, 2003, Mike Little, Co-founder of the WordPress project, commented on a blog post where Matt Mullenweg described his blogging software dilemma. It’s his comment along with a few others that inspired the birth of WordPress by forking b2.

Mike Little’s Comment

Check out Milestones: The Story of WordPress to learn more about the significance of his comment.

Prologue Turns 8 Years Old

In January of 2008, Automattic released Prologue, a simple, innovative theme for providing status updates. The company used password-protected Prologue sites to allow employees to keep track of projects and updates.

Prologue in Action

In March of 2009, Automattic released P2, the successor to Prologue. In 2014, the company transitioned internal sites to o2, successor to P2 and open sourced its code in 2015.

Don’t Read The Comments

Anil Dash published a great post on Medium that looks at the phrase, “Don’t read the comments.”

We’ve made a habit out of telling people not to read the comments online. But what started as a cynical in-joke has become a bad habit, and an excuse for enabling abuse across the web.

It’s a phrase I’ve seen many people say on Twitter referencing comments to articles published on the Tavern. Dash goes on to say, “Preventing abuse online requires the people running a site or an app to invest time, effort and attention into protecting their community. That’s the bottom line.”

This is one of the reasons why we created a comment moderation policy and are taking a more active role this year moderating comments. However, in recent weeks, I’ve noticed some of the same people who said the phrase above are now engaging in the conversation which is helping to calm the waters.

For those thinking about disabling comments or need a reminder as to why their important, considering the following statement:

There’s a grave cost to assuming online interactivity is always awful. The burden is felt most acutely in denying opportunity to those for whom connecting to a community online may be the only way to get a foot in the door. Those underrepresented, unheard voices are the most valuable ones we lose when we throw the baby out with the bathwater and assume online comments are necessarily bad.

This Week in Core

If you want to keep a close eye on WordPress core development, there’s no better way than reading This Week in Core. Written and published by volunteers, the post highlights all of the noteworthy changes in an easy to digest format. Check out the most recent post that covers what happened in core between January 19-26.

Week in Core, Jan. 19-26 2016

Envato Hires WordPress Evangelist

Envato hired James Giroux to be its WordPress evangelist. In the post, he explains some of the responsibilities his role entails.

There are many compelling stories to tell. Envato WordPress creatives from all over the world have done some truly innovative things to enhance the experience of everyday users. I want to find and help tell those stories in the WordPress community.

If you’d like to meet Giroux in person, he’s attending PressNomics in March.

How the REST API Changes WordPress Plugin Development

Josh Pollock explains how the REST API changes WordPress plugin development.

WordPress didn’t get to 25% market share on blogs and it’s not going to get to 50% or whatever that way. The growth comes from eCommerce, publishing, membership sites, inbound marketers etc. These are all users that can benefit from being service providers.

I think that those of us who empower these users by giving them the tools needed to make their sites have to think API first. Your plugin’s interaction with the client is going to be more and more coming through the API.

http://joshpress.net/how-wp-api-changes-wordpress-plugin-development/

Is WordPress Made of Spaghetti Code?

If you’ve been around the WordPress ecosystem for any length of time, you’ve likely run into a conversation or two where someone says WordPress’ code is a mess. On the Kinsta blog, Daniel Pataki takes a hard look at what bad code is, whether or not users care, and if it’s a legitimate reason to avoid using WordPress.

Wapuutah!

In what is a traditional part of this series, I end each issue featuring a Wapuu design. For those who don’t know, Wapuu is the unofficial mascot of the WordPress project.

Wapuutah, created by Velda Christensen, represents WordCamp Salt Lake City, Utah, 2015. As you can see, Wapuutah is decked out in camping gear and ready for an extended getaway in the mountains outside of Salt Lake City. I hope Wapuutah remembered to bring some bug spray!

Wapuutah!

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