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Welcome to the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and via RSS for your favorite podcatcher. Post Status Draft is hosted by Joe Hoyle — the CTO of Human Made — and Brian Krogsgard.

Brian and Joe discuss many of the factors that are a part of maintaining a website for the long term. They discuss it both in the sense of when you own the site (like Brian with Post Status), and when you are doing long-term client work (like Human Made with retainers).

There are several things to consider, whether it’s in your own code, or the decisions you make on which third party developer’s tools to use.

https://audio.simplecast.com/68341.mp3
Direct Download

Links

• Semantic Versioning
• WooCommerce 3.0 and moving to SemVer

Sponsor: SearchWP

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I don’t have nearly as many countries from Eastern Europe as I’d like.  The ones I do have are along the western edge. Several of the countries represented have more than one essay from them.

Also of note, the first HeroPress essay ever came from Ukraine, and is listed here.

Finding Your Place

The WordPress Mantra Is Mine Too

You Really Have No Excuse

Taking A Chance With WordPress

Rebirth

Growing a Business in Europe with WordPress

Even Crisis Has Options

Blogging, Solopreneurship, & Terrorism

The post HeroPress Geography: Eastern Europe appeared first on HeroPress.

Shopify’s official plugin for WordPress was removed from the plugin directory this week. The plugin allowed users to create “Buy Buttons” for products from their Shopify stores and insert them into WordPress posts and pages using a shortcode. It was built by WebDevStudios and had approximately 9,000 active installations before it was removed.

Shopify’s documentation says the plugin has been discontinued and will not be supported after June 30, 2017. WordPress users who want to display Shopify products on their sites are now instructed to create a Buy Button for a product or collection and paste the embed code into WordPress instead.

The WordPress plugin team would not comment on why the plugin was removed, but a support representative from Shopify said it was outdated and difficult to maintain.

“The reason it was removed is that it was being replaced by Buy Button, which is a better way of selling in WordPress,” Shopify customer support representative Jacquelyn Failano said. “The WordPress plugin was built by a third party and even if we support it, it could break at any time as we make future updates to the Buy Button channel.”

Failano said that by switching from using the plugin to creating Buy Buttons with Shopify, users will have access to updated features, including fonts, colors, layouts, buttons, and multiple images on variants. Merchants will also be in a better position to take advantage of future updates.

“The plugin uses older code and methods that will no longer be updated or supported,” Failano said. “There is no longer a dedicated development team for it. This means that there are no resources to maintain or rebuild the plugin.”

Failano would not confirm whether or not the plugin was removed from the directory by Shopify at the company’s discretion or whether it was forcibly removed by WordPress for a violation of the guidelines.

“I’m afraid I cannot confirm on that part – the main reason why it was discontinued was because the plugin uses older code and methods that will no longer be updated or supported,” Failano said.

In 2016, WordPress meetups had the fastest growth the community has seen in five or six years with more than 62,566 people attending in 58 different countries. Meetups are the seeds of future WordCamps. These local gatherings help users further their WordPress skills and underpin the community’s growth across the globe.

Funding a local meetup can be a challenge, as organizers often have to seek out sponsors just like a WordCamp but at a smaller scale. The San Francisco WordPress meetup (WPSFO) is trying something new by publicly managing its budget and expenses with Open Collective. Last week we featured the service in an article and WPSFO lead organizer Shannon Dunn commented on his meetup’s experience with it so far.

“It creates a level of transparency for the whole community and lets current and prospective customers understand where the money goes,” Dunn said. “I’d say we’re pretty happy with it and it’s an integral part of managing our meetup.”

Dunn started attending and helping out with WPSFO in 2011 and stepped up to be lead organizer at the beginning of 2016. Former lead organizer Zach Berke, who started in 2007, was the one who initially suggested the idea of using Open Collective.

“Before we started with Open Collective, sponsors paid for things directly,” Dunn said. “We’ve had various host sponsors (Automattic, Exygy, Pantheon) that have provided meeting space, food, and drinks. These hosts have always paid for the food directly. We also had a relationship with WPEngine at one point. They paid a videographer to film the meetups. All other expenses, usually for minor things, were paid for by the organizers.”

Dunn said that Open Collective has helped to reduce the out-of-pocket expenses for meetup organizers, as it provides a straightforward process for posting expenses and getting reimbursed.

“Funding a meetup can be pretty tough,” Dunn said. “It’s great that we have hosts to cover the big items, but various other expenses come up. Those small things are usually paid for by the organizers. Also, there are times when one of our primary hosts can’t provide a space to meet. We have several alternative meeting spaces but not all of them provide food and drinks. On those occasions, organizers have paid for the food and drink out of pocket. We could have gone without, but we try to keep each meetup a consistent experience.”

Dunn said the team wanted to cover these costs without digging into the pockets of the organizers, who already volunteer a lot of time and energy to the meetup. They do not charge for the events and don’t plan on doing it in the future, so having additional funds on hand became a priority.

“Pia from Open Collective reached out to Zach about a year ago,” Dunn said. “Zach had a prior relationship with another OC founder, Xavier, from his early Storify days. Zach agreed to sign up for OC because it seemed to address a pain point. Zach handed the reins of OC to Michelle and I, who have brought sponsors onto the platform.”

Dunn said using Open Collective has had many positive advantages over the previous system WPSFO had for managing funds. Receiving donations and submitting expenses is now streamlined into a transparent pipeline. The meetup has an estimated annual budget of $6,658, based on current donations.

“Being able to provide recognition to our sponsors is a big plus,” Dunn said. “It’s worth noting that this is a young and ever-evolving platform so with that you’re provided direct access to Open Collective’s front line, which is beneficial in addressing any questions or concerns that arise.”

Dunn said using Open Collective has opened up additional possibilities, like making WPSFO t-shirts to sell to members and the general public. Having money in the meetup account means the organizers can do it without having to pre-sell the shirts.

“It’s not like we’re floating in cash now, but we have little bit of money to work with,” Dunn said. “It feels great to have that and we’re deeply appreciative of our sponsors for making it possible.”

WPSFO is one of 23 meetups that have started managing their budgets and funds through Open Collective. Other early adopters of the service include multiple WWCode meetups, Women Who Code Atlanta, and SF Data Science Meetup, with budgets ranging from a few hundred dollars to more than $25,000.

Promotion for WordCamp US 2017 in Nashville, December 1-3, is now in full swing, as organizers have ramped up social media efforts to stimulate ticket sales. Instead of releasing batches of tickets in stages, all WordCamp US tickets are on sale at once.

“Our goal is to sell between 2,000 and 2,500, but we could accommodate more,” marketing lead Laura Byrne-Cristiano said. “We will also again have a livestream that is fully closed captioned as it was the last two years. Folks who can’t make it to Nashville from around the globe can see what’s happening in real time.”

Music City Center was selected as the official venue. It is within walking distance to several of the city’s attractions and museums. Last week organizers announced The Renaissance Nashville Hotel as the official hotel for the event, which is also within walking distance of the venue and will offer a special discounted rate for attendees.

“At this stage of the game, ticket sales are light which is to be expected with an event is that is eight months out,” Byrne-Cristiano said. The team plans to release more specific numbers in the fall once the full slate of speakers has been announced. Byrne-Cristiano said speaker submissions will be open within the next few days.

“While we would like to see every seat filled, our focus is on putting together a high quality camp for the community,” Byrne-Cristiano said.

You can sign up on the WordCamp US website to subscribe to the latest news for the event or follow @WordCampUS on Twitter. If you have an Android device, check out the WordCamp Android app to add the event to your calendar and follow updates on speakers and the schedule.

One of the most difficult things about writing online is expressing tone and emotion. Emoticons and Emoji help, but what if there was a tool that uses artificial intelligence to determine the emotional response readers are most likely to have after consuming your content?

That’s the idea behind Watsonfinds, a free WordPress plugin created by Alfredo Gutiérrez and Max Ortu. Using a complex algorithm, Watsonfinds uses IBM’s Watson to understand content like a human by reading and interpreting complete sentences, the reader’s language, and its context.

Once activated, a new button is added to the editor toolbar. Clicking the button will send the content through an API to IBM’s Watson for analysis.

Watsonfinds Toolbar ButtonWhen an analysis is completed, the results are displayed in a modal window. The report is broken down into five emotions: joy, sadness, anger, disgust, and fear.

Watsonfinds AnalysisI submitted five posts of various length and each report was generated quickly. Here are the posts I submitted along with the most likely emotional response from readers.

• Automattic to Close San Francisco Office – Sadness
• New WordPress Plugin Shows Users Where a Plugin’s Settings Link Is Upon Activation – Sadness
• WordPress 4.7.4 Fixes 47 Issues – Sadness
• HeroPress Partners With WPShout to Offer WordPress Education Scholarships – Joy
• Headway Themes Appears to be Dying a Slow Death – Anger

Within the report is a timeline where you can compare results as you add or remove words to the post.

During testing, I found the timeline confusing to use as I thought I had to save the post as a draft after each edit to generate a revision on the timeline. To use the timeline, you need to make changes to a post without saving it and then click the Watsonfinds button to generate a new report.

Being able to see which words are generating the emotions depicted in the report would be a nice feature to have. Gutiérrez says that this feature is in the works and will be in the commercial version of the plugin. The More Insights tab in the report is an advertisement for the premium version which is not yet available.

I tested the plugin on WordPress 4.7.4 and didn’t encounter any issues. While Watsonfinds isn’t going to change how I write, I can see the potential benefits of using such a plugin to try to illicit a certain emotional response from readers and customers whether it’s a renewal email, blog post, or other copy.

You can try out Watsonfinds for free by downloading it from the WordPress plugin directory. To learn more about how it works, check out the plugin’s official site.

Open source software usage is growing across all industries, but this year’s Open Source Security and Risk Analysis (OSSRA) report from Black Duck shows the pervasiveness of security vulnerabilities and license compliance risks. Black Duck conducted audits on more than 1,000 commercial applications in 2016 and analyzed the anonymized data. The audits were primarily related to merger and acquisition transactions but span a wide array of industries, such as healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, aerospace, aviation, and retail.

Open source security and license compliance issues can both pose serious financial threats to a company. Black Duck’s findings show 96% of applications scanned include open source software and the average app included 147 unique open source components. The majority of these applications (67%) contained security issues which have been publicly known for an average of four years. These included high-risk and well-known vulnerabilities such as Poodle, Freak, Drown, and Heartbleed.

License compliance issues were even more widespread than the security issues. Black Duck’s audits found 85% of the applications had components with license conflicts. Although 75% of the audited applications included GPL-licensed components, only 45% of them were fully in compliance with the license. The audits also revealed that 53% of the scanned applications had components with “unknown” licenses, which generally means the components were used without permission from their creators.

How GPL Compliance Efforts Affect the Future of the Copyleft Ecosystem

Stephen O’Grady’s recent article on Redmonk.com hails the decline of GPL, referencing repositories surveyed by Black Duck that demonstrate the once-dominant GPL license is “steadily eroding, giving way to licenses at the opposite, permissive end of the spectrum.” Although developers and companies are readily embracing open source software, the trend is towards more permissive licenses.

“In Black Duck’s sample, the most popular variant of the GPL – version 2 – is less than half as popular as it was (46% to 19%),” O’Grady said. “Over the same span, the permissive MIT has gone from 8% share to 29%, while its permissive cousin the Apache License 2.0 jumped from 5% to 15%.”

In a reaction article on Opensource.com, Jono Bacon said he has witnessed this same trend with the GPL falling out of favor in terms of practicality for business owners who are uncomfortable with meeting its black and white demands.

“In recent years though we have seen a newer generation of developers form for whom there is a less critical, and if I dare say it, less religious focus on freedom,” Bacon said. “For them, open source is a pragmatic and practical component in building software as opposed to an ethical choice, and I suspect this is why we have seen such a growth in the use of MIT and Apache licenses.”

The complexity of compliance is one of the chief drawbacks for those who feel uncomfortable using GPL-licensed code. If Black Duck’s open source application audits are any indication, commercial adoption of the GPL has not come with adequate education on license compliance.

However, GPL enforcement rarely leads to litigation. In an article that outlines the Free Software Foundation’s (FSF) stance on the role of lawsuits in GPL compliance, Donald Robertson said compliance is almost always an educational matter.

“Most violators are unaware of their obligations under the license and simply need additional help to come into compliance,” Robertson said. “Almost all GPL compliance cases end quietly with the violator correcting their mistakes, with only a minimal notification of past recipients of the then-violating distribution that anything has happened.”

Robertson emphasized that lawsuits should be a last resort but must remain a legitimate option. FSF’s compliance efforts focus on educating violators, but the organization reserves the right to take action on those who knowingly choose to violate.

“The threat of litigation provides leverage that we need with the rare violators whose GPL compliance problems are not merely mistakes, but are intentional attempts to limit their users’ freedom,” Robertson said. “While compliance work is primarily educational, we need a tool that can work with the rare few who are already educated but chose to violate anyway. Copyleft was designed from the start to serve as that tool.”

Software Freedom Law Center president and executive director Eben Moglen spoke at the SFLC’s conference last October about open source license compliance. He urged listeners to consider the perception of the GPL in the industry at large when weighing the costs of litigating compliance.

“We are not and we never were copyright maximalists,” Moglen said. “We did not do what we have been doing for the past 30 years to build free software on the basis of the assumption that freedom required us to chase down and punish everybody who ever made a mistake or who even deliberately misused copyrighted software made for sharing.”

Moglen said that in situations where it is appropriate to make an example, it is important to declare that you are in a last-resort situation with no other options besides litigation. Securing compliance by force can damage companies’ trust in using the GPL.

“If Richard Stallman and I had gone to court and sued a major global public company on a claim of copyright infringement that was weak enough to be thrown out of court on a motion to dismiss, we would have destroyed the GPL straightaway,” Moglen said. “If we had shown that we were prepared to risk large on coercion, even against a bad actor in our own judgement — if we had done that without adequate preparation to be sure that we won – we would have lost an example of coercion and nobody would have trusted us again.”

Moglen cautioned listeners not to be too quick to take action that might cause people to question whether there is something wrong with copyleft. He advocated spontaneous compliance, as opposed to constantly policing violations, as the most effective way to ensure the future of the GPL.

“We have an opportunity to put this free software where we want it, which is everywhere, and to make it do what we want, which is to spread freedom,” Moglen said. “We’re not in a place where the difficulty is how do we get enough ammunition to force everybody to comply. We don’t need ammunition. We need diplomacy. We need skill. We need to work together better. We need to understand how that working together purposively brings us to the point where everyone is not afraid of FOSS anymore and we are not worried about their complying anymore. We are just all engaging and leading the task of making free software.”

Moglen encouraged diplomacy and discretion when it comes to compliance because the long-term credibility of the free software community is at stake.

“I agree with the people who have suggested that if a campaign of coercive compliance is carried just a moment too far, willingness to use copyleft among the rational businesses of the world will decline to a point which is dangerous to freedom,” Moglen said. “Because I do believe that copyleft is important to freedom.”

While Black Duck’s recent audits show that companies struggle with open source risk management and license conflicts are rampant, the good news is that the world is embracing open source software in every industry. Engineers and product managers may not have a full grasp of the requirements of the GPL, but a compliance approach that focuses on education will go a long way towards building a future that includes copyleft software at the core of innovation.

The journey of a Developer that has the pleasure and gratitude of having WordPress as a resource.

Who am I and am I good?

We define ourselves in order to navigate life. Like we brand our business or our clients’ websites, we brand ourselves. Remember to define yourself, because others are always going to define you. Be true to yourself.

I recall the scene in the movie starring Audrey Hepburn and Rex Herrington where he’s improving her social standing. At the end his manners are called into question. He says,

“You see, the great secret, Eliza, is not a question of good manners or bad manners, or any particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls. The question is not whether I treat you rudely, but whether you’ve ever heard me treat anyone else better.”

We are all the same, yet different. We all hurt and desire, yet what we are motivated by may be different. Be true to yourself to follow what you know is meant for you. Trust in the journey. For it is the journey, not the destination, that not only makes up one’s day, but ultimately defines us once we have arrived!

Embrace Your Uniqueness

When I was in sixth grade, the yearbook asked us what we would like to accomplish. While most of the girls wrote modeling or acting (we are in Southern California after all), I wanted to discover a new animal.

Discovery has always been one of my passions. WordPress has been a way to discover new ways to combine code to ‘make things happen’ by creating plugins. WordPress has provided a place to practice the developer’s craft. I’m a working dev and I have a lot of gratitude to give the WordPress community.

I have been given time, support, and much patience. The Meetups have provided a place to gain the ground work. We talk about of what concerns that need attention and best practices to put in place (like ensuring site performance).

It takes courage to try and fail and fail again. Practice the art of asking lots of questions. Remember, “sometimes it is the people who no one imagines anything of, that do the things that no one could imagine.” So even if someone questions your work, whether you could ever possibly have done that or do that, keep going.

Stereotypes

Imagine an engineer writing a program, a developer creating an application, and a social media specialist crafting creative content. Do you see them at their desks? What does the engineer look like? What does the developer look like? Did you picture them as a female? Typically not. Perhaps the one crafting creative content was pictured as female.

Rarely is a developer or engineer pictured as being female or looking anything like me. We need to change that.

It’s been proven that when given identical resumes with name either David or Maria, the hiring committee will determine David to be identified as more qualified every time. Maria’s accomplishments had to be two times better before she is seen as equally qualified as David.

We, both men and women, hold ‘implicit biases.’ It is a cultural thing. Men are seen as a more qualified developer. Acknowledging this is the first step.

What can we do to help turn this around? First, let’s visit why we should turn this around.

Reason for Diversity (Focusing on Women in Engineering)

We are facing real, large complex problems as a community that requires developers to figure out. Specifically, in the WordPress world, we need a platform, as well as themes and plugins, that appeals to a large audience. True innovation requires a diverse team. It will ensure that different viewpoints, ideas, and solutions are discovered.

Women are an asset to the team, especially in the role of developer. Consider the fact that many women are making the buying decisions. A woman developer helps create a product that appeals to a larger audience, which ultimately affects sales. Female developers bring insight to the possibilities of products that are currently missing and overlooked.

How do we change this? Hire more women developers. Make it a point to include, describe, and depict developers as women in marketing materials. Encourage women to apply for developer positions.

If you’re female reading this and you like to problem solve and build things, give development a try.

Just because things are the way they are doesn’t mean they have to stay that way. Typically, women aren’t developers but that can change. WordPress is a community where women developers thrive. WordPress is stronger as a community because of its diversity of users and creators. We all benefit from diversity. By having diversity within our community, we grow. We build. Ultimately, we create more opportunity for all.

Some Obstacles Facing Women In STEM

Woman as developers are viewed as being different. Many are questioned why they are doing this. Women will even be treated at as if they shouldn’t be there. Women are conditioned from a young age to be princesses, not engineers.

Developers are competitive, like great writers. Competitiveness for the best projects is part of the game. This game is not something that females are ‘taught’ or necessarily have experience in. Men joke with each other differently than women do. Entering the environment from a female perspective, it may seem aggressive and uninviting.

It helps to have experience in team sports to help to manage and navigate the competitive male dominated culture of the field.

Another way to ensure success is to join a group that supports women in tech. It will help to deal with issues that arise and gain confidence in an industry that is dominantly male. Typically, women and men communicate differently. Also, I find it a way to relax and relate without needing to worry about so many other unrelated issues. It provides a platform to discuss issues like family, which many times a big impact on a woman’s career — especially when she has children.

Feminine Aspect

Balancing being feminine in a male dominated field can be difficult. According to Marilyn vos Savant, the person with the highest IQ at 200 and famous advice writer, women who play up their sexual attractiveness make themselves appear ‘lightweight’ and lose ‘parity’ with men. This is not okay since a woman faces pressure in society to look attractive and be nurturing. This is similar to how men are valued by being a provider. This is a real dichotomy. Women are not allowed to be seen as sexually-attractive and competent. It is as if there’s a choice to be made. That is a real problem.

What the WordPress Community has Done for Me

WordPress is to be a community of people who are curious and solve technical questions. Over the years, there has been an emphasis on marketing and business focus. WordPress grows and continues to grow in popularity, creating more and more opportunity.

I found the community to be a place to bring questions. It has been a place to find inspiration and to inspire others in my professional journey as a developer. The community has helped me to develop the courage and determination to secure a position as a developer. The WordPress community has been a resource of a network of individuals to turn to for help. It is an open source and sharing community with many talented people.

Elizabeth Shilling, a developer with a degree in psychology with a social, developmental emphasis from UC Santa Barbara, specialized in biological sciences, computer science, business, and teaching. Looking at differences between men and women in math and sciences bloomed during research as an undergrad. It was determined to be cultural, not biological. Social expectations dominate the direction of female students away from engineering sciences rather than intellectual capabilities. She loves coffee and the ocean.

The post Hire More Women Developers appeared first on HeroPress.

WordCamp Europe 2017 organizers are counting down 50 days until the largest planned WordPress event to date. Speaker announcements continue to roll out and the recommended hotels are getting booked up at the height of tourist season. As of yesterday, more than 300 of the 500 tickets for Contributor Day have been claimed.

This year organizers are experimenting with sponsor workshops, a perk targeted at the highest levels of sponsorship, which includes Administrator (€ 38,000) and Super Admin (€ 75,000) tiers. This new item in the sponsor’s package is described as a “sponsor “track” in the sponsorship kit brochure and allows sponsors to hold a talk or a workshop in a dedicated space that accommodates approximately 200 people.

In an effort to prevent the event from disproportionately focusing on mega sponsors, the organizing team has created a new sponsorship package exclusively for small businesses.

“We recognized that our sponsorship tiers were more geared towards larger WordPress businesses and felt we were not giving small businesses enough opportunity to showcase their products and services and allow them to connect to attendees,” WCEU Sponsorship co-organizer Remkus de Vries said. “This is why we created the SMB tier and we hope many see this as a wonderful chance to show off their products and services for what’s shaping up to be more than 3,000 attendees.”

The Small Business sponsorship level is priced at € 2,500 and is available to companies that generate the majority of their revenue from WordPress and made less than 1 million euro in revenue in 2016. It qualifies the sponsor for a booth in the middle of the event. The table, banner printing, and setup are all handled by the WCEU Sponsor Team.

“Similar to TechCrunch’s Startup Alley, we want to help highlight smaller companies or ones that have just started out,” WCEU Sponsorship co-organizer Noel Tock said. “Simply seeking out sponsorship funds the fastest way possible would not be fair to attendees. This helps makes the conversations and experiences a lot more diverse and balanced.”

There are 10 remaining Small Business sponsorship slots, along with 288 micro-sponsorships (€ 150.00). Potential sponsors can apply on the WCEU website.

Over the weekend, Matt Mullenweg announced that the upcoming WordPress 4.8 release will drop support for IE versions 8, 9, and 10. Core contributors have been discussing browser support for the past two months in relationship to setting technical requirements for the new editor.

Microsoft discontinued support for IE 8, 9, and 10 in January 2016, which means these versions no longer receive security updates. Mullenweg said that attempting to continue supporting these browsers is holding back WordPress development.

“I realize that folks still running these browsers are probably stuck with them because of something out of their control, like being at a library or something,” Mullenweg said. “Depending on how you count it, those browsers combined are either around 3% or under 1% of total users, but either way they’ve fallen below the threshold where it’s helpful for WordPress to continue testing and developing against.”

In an effort to determine how many people are still using these insecure and obsolete browsers, Jonathan Desrosiers collected data from three different sources. The following are numbers for global IE usage published by StatCounter’s GlobalStats, which Desrosiers said are nearly identical to WordPress.com’s numbers:

• IE8: 0.41%
• IE9: 0.26%
• IE10: 0.26%
• IE11: 3.79%

WordPress will not stop working entirely in these browsers, but after the 4.8 release contributors will no longer test new features against older versions of IE. Some capabilities in wp-admin may be more limited. Mullenweg confirmed that the next versions of TinyMCE will no support older IE versions.

Global IE usage has declined from 7.44% in March 2016 to 4.18% in March 2017. IE marketshare has been shrinking as mobile device usage has gone up. October 2016 marked the first month in history that mobile and tablet traffic exceeded desktop usage worldwide. As this trend of declining desktop usage continues, IE will likely be buried within a couple of years.

“I have been hard pressed to find a U.S. government agency running a version of IE less than 11,” WordPress lead developer Andrew Nacin commented on the announcement. “Government agency websites similarly see negligible traffic from IE < 11.”

The decision to drop support for IE 8, 9, and 10 was met with celebration from the WordPress developer community. Focusing on browsers that still receive security updates is a better use of open source contributors’ time and resources. Developers who do client work can also refer to WordPress’ IE support policy when pressured by clients to support insecure browsers.

Naturally, the topic of raising minimum browser requirements resulted in developers lobbying to drop support for PHP 5.2, which reached end of life more than six years ago. In March 2015, WordPress stats estimated PHP 5.2 usage at 16.6%, but that number has dropped steadily to 5.1% today. The task of updating a browser to the latest version was designed to be easy for users, but upgrading PHP versions is still somewhat complicated for those who are not receiving help from their hosting companies. The 5.1% on PHP 5.2 represents millions of users who would need to cross a significant hurdle into order to stay current with the latest version of WordPress.

Welcome to the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and via RSS for your favorite podcatcher. Post Status Draft is hosted by Brian Krogsgard.

Brian is joined by guest-host Matt Medeiros — host of the Matt Report podcast, and many other ventures in the WordPress ecosystem. They discuss community building, their experiences building community in the WordPress world, and the challenges of getting involved in a new community.

https://audio.simplecast.com/67536.mp3
Direct Download

Links

• Crafted by Matt
• Matt Report
• Post Status WordPress Jobs
• This WordPress community is not for the taking

Sponsor: Prospress

Prospress makes the WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin, that enables you to turn your online business into a recurring revenue business. Whether you want to ship a box or setup digital subscriptions like I have on Post Status, Prospress has you covered. Check out Prospress.com for more, and thanks to Prospress for being a Post Status partner.

If you work with WordPress every day you may have learned to tune out the recommended plugins in the admin by now, but the “Add Plugins” screen is an important part of the new user experience. WordPress developers Joey Kudish and Nick Hamze have released a plugin that brings better recommendations to the admin.

Hamze contends that the first plugins that appear in the featured section have a smaller, niche audience, and are unlikely to be useful to the majority of new users.

The recommended plugins are slightly better, as they are based on plugins that the user and other users have installed. However, Hamze believes they could be tweaked even further to display plugins that specifically benefit new users. The Recommended tab was introduced two years ago to display results based on plugins that are commonly used together. It excludes plugins that users already have installed.

“I really want to help WordPress but I think what is most needed isn’t a new editor or more guidelines but rather someone to take all the stuff in this fractured ecosystem and bring it together,” Hamze said. “Get rid of all the crap and only show people the stuff worth using.”

Hamze said he doesn’t know if WordPress can solve this problem diplomatically with code. He believes manual curation is required to deliver the best new user experience. A ticket for re-thinking the default ‘Add Plugins’ tabs/filters was is open on WordPress trac, as the plugins that appear in these screens have remained unchanged for some time. The ticket hasn’t received much discussion yet.

The Better Plugin Recommendations plugin removes the default and featured recommendations tabs and includes a new recommendations tab curated by Hamze to appeal to new users. Below is an example of the first 10 recommendations the plugin includes:

Hamze uses the following criteria to select the recommended plugins:

• Price (Free)
• Numbers of users
• Average Rating
• Last Updated
• Support Given

When asked why the recommendations don’t include Jetpack, Hamze said it didn’t seem necessary, given its high position in the popular tab and the fact that it already comes pre-installed with many hosts.

@jeherve @jkudish @jetpack Haha, I actually like jetpack but since it's already at the top of the popular tab and preinstalled almost everywhere, didn't seem necessary

— Nick Hamze (@NickHamze) April 21, 2017

Hamze and Kudish created a web service that delivers the recommendations to sites where the plugin is installed. The node server is powered by hapi.js and is open source on GitHub

“If the idea is well received in the community, I’d love to expand on it further and include some plugins from outside the WordPress.org plugin repository in our recommendations, as I think there’s some great third-party plugins that new users should definitely know about,” collaborator Joey Kudish said.

Hamze said he doesn’t expect there to be many regular users who will find and install the plugin but hopes that hosting companies will integrate it by default for their WordPress customers.

“What I’m hoping is that I can convince the hosting companies to preinstall this (maybe in the MU folder) for their customers,” Hamze said. “The app blends in seamlessly with WordPress. There are no ads or branding. The plugin is designed solely to help new users find great plugins to help them on their WordPress journey.”

One of the things that surprised me most about when my Dad was sick last year was that while he was in the hospital over about 5 weeks he lost any interest in music, TV, movies, anything on a screen. Music was particularly surprising given that he had music on at his desk pretty much all the time, and really enjoyed loading a new CD or record into the media library he had set up at home. One of the songs I remember playing for him was from a band, Manhattan Transfer, that we used to listen to a lot when I was younger and just learning about jazz, I chose Tuxedo Junction because it might cheer him up.

I remember him smiling faintly. (I wish I had played him more music. I wish I had recorded more of his stories, ideally before he got sick. I wish I had figured out how to navigate the hospital and health care system better.)

What I didn’t anticipate was how after his death there would be aftershocks of grief that would hit me over and over again, especially while driving or in a plane. I went from crying maybe three times in the past decade to breaking down at the end of a company town hall, when talking to family, when my Mom found out about the anniversary present my Dad had been looking at, and with any number of songs that unexpectedly took on a new meaning.

Wiz Khalifa & Charlie Puth’s See You Again, is obvious, and was in heavy rotation every public place I went; Lukas Graham’s 7 Years completely broke me down when it talked about children — if I ever have any my father will never meet them; Kayne & Paul McCartney’s Only One, the tribute to Kanye’s daughter and passed mother and I think perhaps his best song; Ed Sheeran’s Thinking Out Loud, about growing old together, turning 70 as he was so close to doing; Kanye’s Ultralight Beam snuck up on me, I didn’t expect it, but the questioning and gospel and anger and hope in it captured something I didn’t even realize I was feeling. Even jazz wasn’t safe, Horace Silver’s lyric-less Song for My Father had the same effect.

John Mayer’s Stop This Train is a song I’ve probably heard a hundred times since it came out in 2006, but all of sudden these words meant something completely different:

So scared of getting older
I’m only good at being young
So I play the numbers game
To find a way to say that life has just begun

Had a talk with my old man
Said, “Help me understand”
He said, “Turn sixty-eight
You’ll renegotiate”

I almost had to pull the car over: he was sixty-eight. What I would give for just one more conversation with him like the one the day before he passed. I wish I had written more down, recorded more of his stories, learned more about his journey.

As the year has passed, the surprise crying is much less common even when one of these songs comes on the radio. Usually when I think of my father it’s with a smile. I’ve even had a few treasured dreams where we’ve been able to talk, nothing that made much sense (it was a dream) but I remember waking up with an overwhelming feeling of enveloping love. While the “new normal” is different, I can’t say it’s better — he’s still gone.

After the controversial changes to Twitter’s @reply feature, which no longer counts usernames towards the 140-character limit, Mastodon registrations rose sharply. Mastodon is a free, open source, decentralized network that has many similarities to Twitter. The software, named in honor of its creator’s favorite metal band, was launched in October and registered 24,000 users in the first six months. A strong negative reaction to Twitter’s changes has fueled a spike in Mastodon registrations. In the last week alone, the software’s user base has grown from 237,000 users on April 15 to more than 414,000 users today.

Mastodon is different from Twitter in that it is broken up into different independently-hosted instances. Whereas Twitter has struggled to combat trolls and abuse on its platform, Mastodon instances can each declare and enforce their own rules. For example, the flagship Mastodon.social instance bans content that is illegal in Germany or France, such as Nazi symbolism and Holocaust denial, excessive advertising, racism, sexism, and other undesirable posts.

Mastodon’s Tweetdeck-style interface allows users to post “toots” with a 500-word character limit. Toots can also be published with a content warning so that users can choose whether to view it.

With all the increased activity around Mastodon this week, there was bound to be someone with the desire to display toots on their website. The first plugin for bringing Mastodon content into WordPress has landed in the plugin directory. Embed Mastodon was created by David Libeau, a French developer and Mastodon enthusiast. It allows users to embed toots using a shortcode.

“I created this plugin because Numerama, a french tech website, was saying that it could be cool to embed Mastodon statuses, like with Twitter, in WordPress,” Libeau said. “I was thinking the same when I wrote a small article on my personal blog. I am using both Twitter and Mastodon but want to progressively leave Twitter.”

Libeau said he is not a WordPress developer and Mastodon Embed is his first plugin. He does not know if it’s coded well but said users may be interested in an alternative plugin on GitHub that is a complete rewrite of his effort. The rewrite includes multiple embeds, caching, proper shortcode initialization, and fallback to “direct” embeds if embed via iframe is forbidden.

Libeau said he doesn’t know what will happen to his plugin in light of the rewrite, but he is continuing to develop small tools for Mastodon users. Mastodon has an open API for apps and services, which makes it easy for developers to build things that integrate with it.

After testing the Mastodon Embed plugin I found that it works but may have a couple of styling issues with the link display. If you find that it’s not working, it’s possible that your particular Mastodon instance configuration does not allow embedding via iFrame. To resolve this you may need to contact the admin of the instance or use the fork of the plugin that has a fallback for this scenario. If you find a bug with the Mastodon Embed plugin hosted on WordPress.org, you can log an issue on Libeau’s Mastodon Tools repository.

It’s been seven months since Grant and Clay Griffiths, founders of Headway Themes, apologized to customers for failing to communicate on a regular basis and provide adequate customer support. In the apology, the founders admit that the company was experiencing financial difficulties and noted that competition in the WordPress drag-and-drop page-builder space was tough. The duo vowed to communicate more, provide better customer support, and continue to develop Headway 4.0. Has anything changed since the apology was published?

Headway Themes Migrates to FlyWheel Hosting

In December of 2016, Flywheel hosting acquired Pressmatic, created by Clay Griffiths. Soon after, Headway Themes migrated to Flywheel hosting which caused a few hiccups such as site downtime due to DNS propagation, login issues, and an issue with the Headway Dashboard. The acquisition raised questions on how it would affect Clay’s ability to work on Headway.

“This acquisition and employment will provide myself and my family much more stability than we’ve had in a long time, and will allow me to better focus on Headway in my spare time,” Griffiths said. “This includes rolling out the upcoming 4.1 release, and working hard to make sure the support and other outstanding issues are resolved for all our customers.”

Influx Confirms Communication Issues With Founders

Soon after the apology, Headway Themes began to use Influx to provide first-tier customer support. Influx provides customer support for companies, including those in the WordPress ecosystem such as Advanced Custom Fields. Any issues that Influx couldn’t solve are escalated to Clay and Grant. In February, Gary Bairéad, a former Headway Themes employee, contacted Headway Themes support about the status of Headway 4.0 and received the following response.

Influx couldn’t answer the question because Headway developers had not informed them of its progress despite inquiring about it. Influx notes that there may be a beta released in the near future but not to be quoted on it because a similar promise was made five months prior. In January, the official Headway Themes Twitter account confirmed that Headway was being supported and that 4.0 would be released soon.

@3BugMedia we are fully supporting Headway. 4.0 update coming soon. ^gg

— Headway Themes (@headwaythemes) January 4, 2017

Around the same time period, another Headway Themes customer submitted a support request asking about the status of a longstanding issue they were having. Influx explained that there was a lull because the main developers were failing to communicate. The support representative also pointed out that it seemed the only way for customers to get information about Headway Themes was by emailing support.

Influx says it tried multiple times to contact Headway Themes developers about the issue and said it was lobbying hard to get it rectified.

Payments Stop for Third-Party Block Developers

In February, Bairéad published a request to third-party block customers to not renew through Headway Themes.com and to instead, purchase and renew directly from the developer’s sites. Chris Howard, founder of Pizazz WP, and Chris Rault, co-founder of HeadwayRocket, confirmed they are owed money from customers who purchased and renewed blocks through Headway Themes.com.

I reached out to both developers to see if they’ve been paid since February.

“I’ve sent Clay a bunch of messages, but he’s completely ignoring me and hasn’t paid over another cent since the last long delay,” Rault said.

“It’s down to only 2 or 3 renewals a month, but I’m not receiving anything still. I’d estimate they still owe me around $2,000,” Howard said.

For Howard, the issue of not receiving payments has been going on for months.

Former Support Staff Still Owed Money

Headway Themes’ apology does not mention the former support team who the company failed to pay on time for months. Since the apology, members of the team have received small payments but are still owed thousands of dollars. Receiving payments from Headway Themes is often a difficult process.

After not receiving a payment in February, a former team member sent a flurry of emails to Grant and Clay Griffiths inquiring about the payment. Clay eventually responded that they would send out payments when they’re able too. After a week of questioning when that would be with no response, the team member received a payment.

Influx Says Headway Themes is Restructuring

A Headway Themes customer recently contacted support to ask about the status of Headway and published Influx’s response to the company’s support forums. Here’s their response:

Hi [Redacted],

Thanks for reaching out.

Currently, Headway is going through a restructuring phase to resolve the challenges being faced at this time. We do not have the full details here at support but the main stakeholders are working to return Headway to its rightful mode of operations.

Please let me know if there are any more questions that I can answer for you. Kind Regards.

To learn more about the restructuring process and what’s going on with Headway development, I reached out to Grant and Clay Griffiths. Both have not responded to my request for comment.

Blox Picks Up Where Headway Left Off

Last year, when it appeared the future of Headway Themes was in jeopardy, Maarten Schraven forked the Headway 3.8.8 codebase and named it Blox Builder. Blox Builder is 100% GPL Licensed and is a direct replacement for Headway. Schraven recently answered a number of questions related to the project, one of which is how easy is it to transfer from Headway to Blox.

There are different ways to convert your Headway Theme to Blox Theme. The best way is to export your template, you get an .json file. In this file you have to change hw to bt and headway to blox. If you have a large website you also can change the database tables. Some of our users have Blox Theme and Headway Themes side by side and switch between them. The last way (not yet available) is our conversion script. This script can do two things, change the database or do the same search and replace. This script will work automatic or as standalone.

Or, if you think this is to difficult, you always can ask us for the conversion, we can discuss this on e-mail or skype

There’s no time frame on when the conversion script will be available. If you’re a fan of the way Headway Themes works and are looking for a similar replacement, check out Blox Builder.

Many in the Headway Themes Community Have Moved On

A number of devoted fans and customers of Headway have switched to other page builders like Divi, Elementor, and Beaver Builder. What was once a vibrant community-run Slack channel for Headway Themes enthusiasts has turned into a ghost town. There is little hope among them that the company will be able to rebound.

Not Much Has Changed

Unfortunately, the issues that prompted Headway Themes’ founders to issue an apology are still present. There is a lack of communication on the company’s blog, social media accounts, and to Influx, the company it has outsourced customer support to. The apology dated Sept 13, 2016, was the last post published to the company’s blog. Former employees and third-party developers are still owed considerable amounts of money and there has been little if any development on the Headway code base.

HeroPress has teamed up with Alex Denning, Fred Meyer, and David Hayes of WPShout to offer 10 copies of Up and Running Second Edition at the deluxe tier. The deluxe tier is valued at $249 and includes everything the course has to offer including video tutorials, creating a theme and child theme, screencast series, creating a WordPress plugin, and more.

The scholarship applications are geared towards three groups of people:

• Those in financial hardship (unemployment, jobseeking, students or underemployment).
• Those in low-income countries without the means to purchase the course.
• Under-represented groups in tech and the WordPress community, including but not limited to:
  • Women
  • Transgender applicants
  • BAME applicants

Those who qualify have until May 9th to fill out the application. Five members of the WordPress community make up a panel that will review the applications and choose 10 recipients who they feel are deserving of the award. HeroPress will then tally the selections and those with the most votes will be awarded a scholarship. In case of a tie, HeroPress will be the deciding vote. The five panelists are:

• Maedah Batool (Creative Director at WPTie, Pakistan).
• Ana Silva (Digital Marketer at Human Made, UK).
• Winstina Hughes (Co-Organizer, WordCamp New York).
• Rahul Bansal (CEO at rtCamp, India)
• Pippin Williamson (Founder at Pippin’s Plugins, USA).

Pippin Williamson, founder of Easy Digital Downloads, says he accepted the panelist role because it’s an opportunity to make a significant difference in someone’s life.

HeroPress, founded by Topher DeRosia in 2015, publishes an essay every Wednesday from members of the community on how WordPress has positively impacted their lives. HeroPress has published essays from people in the Middle East, Oceania, Central and South America, and other parts of the world.

To learn the HeroPress story, listen to our interview with DeRosia. In it, he explains his motivation for creating the site and shares a personal story of someone who couldn’t write an essay because they were spending all of their time trying to stay alive.

To learn more about Up and Running Second Edition, listen to our interview with the founders where they explain how and why they created the course.

Checathlon is new business theme on WordPress.org that was designed to seamlessly integrate with Easy Digital Downloads. The name is a combination of the words checkout and decathlon, according to its creator Sami Keijonen.

Checathlon combines elegant typography with a bold, pink accent color to showcase products and services on a business or e-commerce website. The theme was designed by Finnish designer Toni Suni and is Keijonen’s 13th theme to be listed in the directory.

“I had some kind of vision of what I wanted and Toni created a pixel perfect design based on our discussion,” Keijonen said. “I’m super happy about the end result. Unfortunately, the design and the theme was not good enough for WordPress.com and the theme was rejected from there.” Keijonen opted to create a Checathlon Plus plugin as an alternative way to monetize the theme.

Checathlon has an intuitive way of organizing the content featured on the front page. Unlike many other themes, the front page is not controlled by a custom page template. Once you set the front page as a static page, the Customizer will give access to the service/pricing, products, testimonial, and blog sections.

The theme includes support for a Pricing page template and a Team Page template. These features make Checathlon more flexible for use on a business, agency, non-profit, or e-commerce website.

The pricing template has a “Service and Pricing widget” area where users can drop in the custom widgets available in the Checathlon Plus plugin. The widgets make it easy for users to set an icon, title, content, price, and a link for each pricing tier, as well as the ability to highlight one tier as featured.

Checathlon was built to support several plugins, including Easy Digital Downloads, Custom Content Portfolio, and Jetpack (testimonials and portfolio). The theme includes styles for the Jetpack email subscription widget and EDD downloads and account pages. It’s also tagged as accessibility-ready, which means that it has successfully passed an accessibility audit. Check out the live demo to see Checathlon in action.

Keijonen is taking a unique approach by creating a Checathlon Plus plugin as an alternative to offering a “pro version” of the theme. It extends the theme to include more customizer capabilities, additional widgets, cart customization features for EDD, and two child themes. The free theme is available on WordPress.org and documentation can be found on the theme’s website.

Last month the WordPress Plugin Directory relaunched with a new design and improvements to the search algorithm. The new design replaced the plugin pages’ previous tabbed interface with a wall of text, truncated by numerous “read more” links.

The outpouring of negative community feedback on the new design overshadowed many of the helpful improvements. Removal of the tabs was by far the most unpopular design choice in this iteration, as many found it to be confusing and inferior in terms of navigating the information efficiently. Users, developers, and contributors on the redesign felt their feedback was roundly ignored throughout all phases of the design’s beta and testing period.

Four months ago, contributor Jon Ang (@kenshino) opened a ticket regarding the “read more” links, which he described as “a usability nightmare.” The ticket was closed as a duplicate of another ticket which received very little discussion. Today, Otto marked the ticket as fixed, announcing the return of tabs in the commit message:

Change single-plugin view to have tabbed design. Eliminates read-more on all sections except developers and changelog, adds tabs back to interface using CSS to switch between them. Tabs control both main display as well as widgets.

Known issues: Changelog read-more not working (js issue), developers section is currently split using CSS, future change will split this section into two separate sections.

Members of the Advanced WordPress Facebook (AWP) community, who were among the most critical of the new design, are pleased with the change. The new tabs are subtle, tasteful, and in line with the overall design. They eliminate the clutter that the expanded “read more” links created.

The Reviews tab now displays six of the most recent reviews, as opposed the the previous two most recent. This makes it not as easy to destroy a plugin’s reputation with poor reviews timed to always be visible on the main plugin page. Otto replied to comments on the AWP community, saying that these numbers are not set in stone and that there are good arguments for displaying different sets of reviews, as opposed to simply the most recent ones.

Two weeks ago the meta team brought back stats and older versions of plugins, a couple of features that were removed in the first iteration of the new directory. Screenshot display is still somewhat clunky, requiring users to click on their browsers’ back button in order to return to the plugin details. Future iterations of the design are expected to address the remaining quirks and issues that users and contributors have raised since the relaunch.

WordPress 4.7.4 is available and is a maintenance release that fixes 47 issues reported against 4.7. This update includes a visual editor compatibility fix for an upcoming version of Chrome.

Uploading video and audio files no longer result in broken thumbnails and the REST API received a few enhancements related to data handling. WordPress 4.7.4 also restores the ability to Shift-click a range of checkboxes.

Auto updates are rolling out but if you’d like to update immediately, browse to Dashboard > Updates and click the update button.

To see a full list of changes visit the release notes page on the Codex. Since December, WordPress 4.7 has been downloaded more than 60 million times.

After almost sixty million downloads of WordPress 4.7, we are pleased to announce the immediate availability of WordPress 4.7.4, a maintenance release.

This release contains 47 maintenance fixes and enhancements, chief among them an incompatibility between the upcoming Chrome version and the visual editor, inconsistencies in media handling, and further improvements to the REST API. For a full list of changes, consult the release notes and the list of changes.

Download WordPress 4.7.4 or visit Dashboard → Updates and simply click “Update Now.” Sites that support automatic background updates are already beginning to update to WordPress 4.7.4.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to 4.7.4:
Aaron Jorbin, Adam Silverstein, Andrea Fercia, Andrew Ozz, aussieguy123, Blobfolio, boldwater, Boone Gorges, Boro Sitnikovski, chesio, Curdin Krummenacher, Daniel Bachhuber, Darren Ethier (nerrad), David A. Kennedy, davidbenton, David Herrera, Dion Hulse, Dominik Schilling (ocean90), eclev91, Ella Van Dorpe, Gustave F. Gerhardt, ig_communitysites, James Nylen, Joe Dolson, John Blackbourn, karinedo, lukasbesch, maguiar, MatheusGimenez, Matthew Boynes, Matt Wiebe, Mayur Keshwani, Mel Choyce, Nick Halsey, Pascal Birchler, Peter Wilson, Piotr Delawski, Pratik Shrestha, programmin, Rachel Baker, sagarkbhatt, Sagar Prajapati, sboisvert, Scott Taylor, Sergey Biryukov, Stephen Edgar, Sybre Waaijer, Timmy Crawford, vortfu, and Weston Ruter.

It’s my pleasure to formally introduce the Post Status WordPress job board. It actually went live two weeks ago, but I wanted to give it time to work out any kinks before broadly promoting it.

Now, I think we’re ready for prime time. So, why do we need another place to list WordPress jobs?

The signal to noise ratio — both for employers seeking qualified candidates, and for candidates finding quality job listings — is pretty low across the board in the job market. Most people who hire technical professionals will tell you that it’s very difficult to find good candidates. And anyone seeking great job opportunities knows how hard it can be to find out the best opportunities, especially at the times you’re actually looking.

The goal for the Post Status WordPress job board is to take advantage of both sides of this equation.

Post Status isn’t a huge website with tons of traffic. But the traffic I do get is from a highly targeted audience of primarily WordPress professionals, or web professionals who use WordPress as a primary tool.

By creating a highly targeted job board, I’m able to increase the signal on both sides; employers can get quality applications, and applicants can find quality employers.

Furthermore, our team — meaning Katie Richards, and myself — go through each employer’s listing to confirm that it’s a qualified listing of someone actually hiring, provides relevant information, and is properly described for the available position.

We’ve already got 20+ jobs and counting, and I know many of them have had applications start to roll in, even without public announcement yet.

If you’d like to submit a job, the process is currently only for Post Status members. We may open that up in the coming weeks, but for now, you can join and post, or if someone from your organization is a member, they can post it.

Listings last for 45 days (the first listings are being extended out starting today), and will be marketed to the Post Status Club — now over 900 WordPress professionals — as well as the free Post Status newsletter, where we’ll send digests of new jobs.

In the future, we may create new features for job seekers to keep an even closer eye on available jobs, but for now, the email and listing page are the place to go. And we may build new tools for employers as we get feedback and see demand for them.

I look forward to this being a valuable resource for the WordPress community. We’re dedicated to making it work well for a long haul, and we expect general activity to increase as the word gets out that it’s there.

So, if you don’t mind, we’d love your help to promote this job board, both now and when you hear of companies hiring and people seeking positions. It is a truly great feeling to know that you helped someone find their next workplace.

So, check out some WordPress jobs!

WordCamp Europe 2017 has been rolling out speaker announcements over the past week, slowly building what appears to be a strong lineup of both European and international WordPress experts. Speaker names are being released in thematic groups, the first dedicated to development topics, followed by business and content/marketing groups.

Registration for Contributor Day, which will be held the day before the conference on Thursday, June 15th, is now open. Organizers are expecting more than 3,000 attendees for the WordCamp, but Contributor Day is limited to 500 registrants. The signup form allows attendees to select up to two different contributor teams they would like to participate in.

In addition to the traditional contribution activities, Thursday’s event will also feature workshops and talks for beginners and those who want to learn more about topics such as JavaScript, Vagrant, internationalization, security, accessibility, and plugins. The workshops will be announced at a later date.

WP Tavern will be on the ground in Paris to cover WordCamp Europe as an official media partner. We’re looking forward to connecting with the European WordPress community and finding the stories that might otherwise go untold. The last remaining tickets are selling quickly. There are 288 micro-sponsor tickets left and just 308 general admission tickets remaining before the event is sold out.

For the first time ever, HeroPress is taking part in offering a scholarship! The good folks over at WPShout are soon releasing some great new WordPress training material called Up and Running. As part of that release they’d like to offer ten copies for free to those who fit the application qualifications.

How do I apply?

Visit the Up and Running Scholarship Application page, read the rules, and fill out the form.

The post Announcing the Up and Running Scholarship, from HeroPress and WPShout appeared first on HeroPress.

The results of the BuddyPress 2016 survey have been published. This year the survey received feedback from 302 respondents in 61 different countries, a 43% increase in responses from 2015. The top five countries represented in the survey include the United States (27.15%), India (7.62%), United Kingdom (6.95%), Germany (6.29%), and Canada (3.64%). English remains the most popular language for BuddyPress sites at nearly 70% and this year Spanish (10.7%) replaced French for the #2 spot, followed by German (9.96%).

A new question in the 2016 survey asked users what PHP versions their sites are on. More than 53% of respondents report having sites on PHP 7.0+ and 63% are using a version higher than 5.6+.

Lead developer Paul Gibbs sees these results as an affirmation that the BuddyPress core leadership made the right decision when dropping support for PHP 5.2 nine months ago.

We (@buddypress) made the right call 9 months ago to drop support for PHP 5.2 in our last major release.

— Paul Gibbs (@pgibbs) April 4, 2017

In fact, our 2016 users survey https://t.co/1LClEoOr38 suggests 88% of respondents use PHP >5.6, maybe we can be more aggressive this year.

— Paul Gibbs (@pgibbs) April 4, 2017

Gibbs is currently on a sabbatical from BuddyPress and was not available for comment. Project lead John James Jacoby said that the decision to drop support for PHP 5.2 may not be a direct corollary to its usage falling below 1%, but the core team will continue to bump the minimum version in the future with consideration for user happiness.

“It’s hard to know whether increasing our minimum PHP version made any direct difference,” Jacoby said. “My hunch is most users do not care very much, and the ones that do, care greatly. It’s all about keeping users happy – sometimes that means maintaining compatibility with old dependencies; other times it means kindly motivating users to upgrade things maybe they haven’t thought about in a while.”

The 2016 results show that 45% of respondents have been using BuddyPress for a year or less. While this isn’t necessarily an indication of users’ ability, it is interesting in light of the project’s recent shift to focus on developers and site builders. The survey results indicate that more users identify themselves as a beginner when it comes to knowledge of BuddyPress themes and hooks.

BuddyPress core developers made the decision to focus on site builders and developers based on how they saw the project’s user base changing over time. Making the software 100% turnkey is no longer one of their chief objectives. With the high percentage of users who identify as beginners, the project will need to find a way to get them connected and advancing in their BuddyPress knowledge.

“The BuddyPress.org community forums continue to be the best place to get connected with other users to talk about what they’re working on,” Jacoby said. “Our documentation coverage in the codex is constantly being maintained, and we’re still working behind the scenes on a developer site ala developer.wordpress.org. Nothing will ever beat reading the code from inside a quality code-editor, but having public visibility into the codebase is good for everyone, too.”

April 30, 2017, marks the 8th anniversary of the first stable release of BuddyPress. Version 3.0 will be released this year and contributors are working towards adding a new template pack and improving the BP REST API, in addition to other new features based on comments from the survey.

“The primary focus of BuddyPress for 3.0 and beyond (in addition to being a great foundation for developers) should be to improve member management and communications inside your WordPress,” Jacoby said. “The latest and greatest versions of PHP don’t necessarily help us with those things directly, but the performance improvements of running BuddyPress on PHP 7.0 or 7.1 are impressive, enough to continue aggressively bumping our minimum required and recommended versions to keep users happy and safe.”

A summary of the 2016 survey results was published to the BuddyPress.org blog and the full results are available on GitHub, along with comments from respondents.

A common frustration I’ve experienced in WordPress after installing a plugin is figuring out where the settings link is located. It can be a top-level menu item or tucked away in a sub-menu. Sometimes, the plugin doesn’t warrant a settings link.

A new plugin called Show Plugin Menu Items on Activation created by Kellen Mace and Gary Kovar seeks to calm the chaos. When a plugin is activated, an Admin Notice is displayed that informs the user where to configure it.

The notice can be dismissed by either clicking the dismiss button or hovering over the menu location. The notice does not display for plugins that include a welcome page or wizard such as BuddyPress and WooCommerce.

The number of admin pointers that are displayed depends on the number of menu items that are added. For example, if a plugin adds three menu items, three admin pointers are displayed.

When four or more menu items are added, a notice is shown at the top of the screen that says, ‘Many new plugin menu items were added.’ If no menu items are added, a notice displays at the top of the screen that says, ‘No new plugin menu items were added.’

I tested the plugin on WordPress 4.7.3 and didn’t encounter any issues. Although plugins ought to make finding the settings link easier upon activation, this particular plugin has me wondering if displaying these types of admin notices should be a core feature. In my experience, plugin authors rarely take advantage of admin pointers to explain where to go or what to do next after being activated.

Related to the above, I encourage plugin developers to read this article by Hugh Lashbrooke, that explains how to add a settings link to the plugins listing page. Adding a settings link to the plugins listing page puts it in a predictable location and is something I as a user appreciate.

I was born in Luxembourg (Europe), almost exactly 36 years ago. To be honest, I was not one of the children or teenagers who knew what they wanted to become when they grow up. And to stay honest, I still don’t know exactly to this day.

After school I got advised to start working for the government; jobs are well paid and stressless. But considering my tasks, I did not have the feeling that there was any particular skill or performance needed to get them done, nor was there any desirable achievement in the years to come.

In the following 12 years, I switched administrations and ministries, trying to find more fulfillment and happiness in what I was doing during the day. But sooner or later the daily routine made me feel very miserable and frustrated. I started to realize that though I still did not know what I wanted to become, I knew exactly what I did not want to do anymore: sitting in an office from nine to five, doing the same administrative work, day after day, without any motivation, without any personal goal. There must be more in life for me!?

My husband, Alain Schlesser, at that point also a government agent, was fed up as well and decided to quit his job and start freelancing as a web developer focussing on WordPress – so at least one of us had a specific goal.

Getting Out

In summer of 2014 I opted for a four year sabbatical, we sold everything we owned in Luxembourg and moved to the German “Eifel” quite into the middle of nowhere together with our three french bulldogs Jasper, Duke, and Indra. I did not have the slightest idea of where my personal journey would lead me in the end, but I had the feeling that it was time to take better care of myself.

First, I started studies as a dog health & behavior trainer, which I completed successfully. After the studies, I got sick and depressed. I gained more and more weight, was constantly dealing with all sorts of aches and had severe doubts about what the future might bring to me. And the more I doubted, the less productive I got.

In summer of 2015 I got the diagnosis that I was suffering from lipedema – a chronically progressive disease which is basically a very painful fat disorder, that almost exclusively affects women. I decided to completely change my life and focus on my mental and physical health.

Meanwhile, my husband was working hard to achieve his personal goals. At that point I did not have a very clear idea of what he was actually doing during the day, nor was I interested in any details.

I had nothing to do with the web or computers in general, except for Google, Facebook and writing emails.

Coding, programming, developing, those were foreign words to me. A few years back, I had started two blogs on wordpress.com where I shared my dogs’ stories and my experiences during my studies – that was the only knowledge I had about Alain’s new world – and about WordPress. Today I agree that these were hard times for us: we spent 24 hours together in the same house but we did not have much to share anymore: I had locked myself out of the life my husband was leading during the day due to a lack of interest and knowledge on one side, and fears on the other.

Finding WordPress

I entered the world of WordPress because Alain invited me to join him in a trip to WordCamp Europe 2016 in Vienna. Despite looking forward to exploring a new city and do some shopping, I had no expectations of what I was going to experience in Vienna. To be honest,  I was scared of meeting the “nerdy” part of my husband’s life and of not being able to get involved in it – again. However, what happened in Vienna was totally unexpected and overwhelming for me: I met hundreds of open-minded, interesting, welcoming, friendly and helpful people who were interested in what I had to share with them, although I was not involved at all in WordPress or the community so far.

I probably had the most inspiring discussions I’ve ever had in my life and one of the funniest and joyful weeks too. There were more than two thousand people, and nobody (!) made me feel uncomfortable, ignorant or out of place.

I have never experienced such an unconditionally welcoming atmosphere before – and I noticed that I truly wanted to be a part of that amazing community in the future.

To be honest, I actually had withdrawal symptoms once we were back home. I got very active in following up and my Twitter account, which I had registered years ago without ever having tweeted before, suddenly got filled up with WordPress people.

Diving Deeper

Only a few days after being back in Germany I started to organize trips to other WordCamps, and in September of 2016 Alain and I traveled together with our three dogs to WordCamp Frankfurt (Germany) – both of us as volunteers, and Alain as a speaker too.

Volunteering felt excellent and right, and we got in touch with the German WordPress Community for the first time. Alain’s talk was a success, and the German community adopted our entire family immediately; we loved seeing our dogs getting spoiled with hugs and treats.

In October of 2016 we joined WordCamp Netherlands in Utrecht where we once again met interesting and friendly people. Another premiere for me: “How WordPress Saved My Life” by Sally Mayor was the first talk I ever chose to see at a WordCamp. As you can imagine by reading the title, this was totally inspiring to me.

Just as with the previous WordCamps, Alain and I hardly spent any time on our own: hospitable organizers, volunteers, speakers, and attendees surrounded us and insisted on showing us the best spots and restaurants in town.

Two weeks later, we visited WordCamp Cologne (Germany) where we looked forward to seeing some of the lovely people we met two months before at WordCamp Frankfurt. I helped out at the registration desk, as I did in Frankfurt – definitely one of the best opportunities to get in touch with the community.

At that point, I also took part in my first “Contributor Day”. I participated in the Polyglots team as well as in the Community team, as these don’t require technical knowledge.

At the end of the day, I had localized one free theme into German (which was committed the same day) and joined the discussions for organizing a new type of WordCamp.

As I was more interested in contributing to the community part, I joined Slack and was again diligent in following up. I wanted to become an active part of this community and help create and maintain the welcoming atmosphere I have experienced myself. It worked out very well: I am now a member of the organizing team for a very special German WordCamp with a unique and new concept, to happen in 2018.

New Wapuu

Another idea was born at WordCamp Cologne: designing a Wapuu with the characteristics of a french bulldog. Meanwhile, our dogs had become an integral part of the German community, who considers our frenchies as the unofficial mascots. Said and done – by channeling designer skills that I did not even know about, I created the “Wabully”. Jasper, our nine-year-old male frenchie was the template.

Taking Control of Life

Besides all the positive and inspiring input for my brain, I took good care of my physical health too. I continued losing weight due to healthy and fresh nutrition, and my fitness level increased because I was doing sports again. My lipedema therapy – including two surgeries – was very successful and so my physical and mental health got better and better. In 18 months I managed to lose almost seventy pounds. I was actively taking control of my life again.

In November of 2016 Alain and I joined our first WordPress Meetup in Cologne. Dominik Schilling was sharing his experience during his WordPress 4.6 release lead. I noticed that all this “WordPress-stuff” was not so strange to me anymore; I managed to follow most of Dominik’s testimonies – and it was interesting to me through the entire talk.

I realized that WordPress was not a mystery to me anymore and that discussions at home must have changed a lot in the past months.

Now I knew the people Alain was talking about, I understood most of the projects and concepts he was referring to, and I was not bored anymore when he was talking about his current development issues.

I encouraged Alain to book a trip to Philadelphia in December of 2016 to attend WordCamp US – an amazing, precious and fruitful experience for him. Unfortunately, I could not join him because of surgery. I admit that I was a bit jealous at that point, but I (rightfully) had a hunch that this trip could be important for my husband and his professional future.

By coincidence, the only talk I saw online at WordCamp US was Topher DeRosia’s presentation of “HeroPress – The People of WordPress” which was totally inspiring to me. At that point, I would never have imagined that a few weeks later he’d find me and ask me to write an essay for HeroPress…

Using My Powers For Good

Earlier that year in spring, I had created a Facebook group for lipedema affected women in Luxembourg together with a friend. Lipedema is largely unknown in Luxembourg and often misdiagnosed as simple obesity. There is almost no help for affected women in my country of birth. I was indeed very lucky having moved to Germany, where the specialists in lipedema diagnosis and treatment are located; otherwise, I would probably not have been diagnosed and treated correctly up until now.

Inspired by my personal success and the growth of our Facebook group I decided, in January of 2017, to fight for a change in Luxembourg together with other lipedema patients.

We have been very active in educational work and we built a significant presence in Luxembourgish media in the past few weeks. The feedback was enormous and we founded a nonprofit association. I knew it would be very useful to create a website to reach more affected women, doctors, and other interested people.

I accepted the challenge and decided to set up a WordPress site. Alain built a theme according to my ideas and I successfully completed my very first plugin installations – most importantly for me a page builder called Beaver Builder. I had never imagined how easy, fun and fulfilling building of a website could be! With almost no skills and within a period of seven days only I managed to create lots of valuable content with a nice structure. I admit that living under the same roof with a devoted and passionate developer made some things easier for me.

But besides that, I began to understand what makes WordPress so special: everybody who has something to share is given the possibility to do so by WordPress.

If I managed to do that, why wouldn’t you? There are plenty of possibilities to help you build your website, blog or business – use them! And many fantastic WordPress people offer their support, contribute every single day to improve the software and to make it accessible for everybody out there. And some specialists offer great courses for absolute beginners like I am, to help them improving their skills.

We have reached many lipedema patients through my website “Lipödem Lëtzebuerg”, who thank us every day for our commitment as so-called lipedema fighters. I am so happy that lipedema is now a topic of discussion in Luxembourg, which is not only a consequence of our devotion but also due to WordPress allowing me to build a website in a very short amount of time, and with almost no skills. Meanwhile, in collaboration with the National Patients Representation, we have formulated concrete demands concerning diagnosis and therapy to the Luxembourgish Government.

I am overwhelmed and happy to see how much attention and gratefulness my work and website have earned. It fulfills me in a way that I had not experienced in the past 12 years during my well-paid job.

Making a Living

It turned out that my enthusiasm and content writing skills were noticed by the CEO of a startup in Luxembourg. I got a remote job offer for writing and managing content on their WordPress website and for being a part of the social media team. We are currently testing a possible cooperation, and I have already been writing some of the content for their website.

Furthermore I got contacted to work on the elaboration and social media spreading processes of an important lipedema study in Germany as well.

I was not even actively searching for a job and the offers come rolling in nevertheless – what an amazing new experience!

At the same time, I was busy in the last months for the WordPress community:

As member of an organizing team, I was in charge of finding the perfect location for a WordCamp in 2018. Together with some of my colleagues I have visited some excellent sites in Germany, and I am leading the negotiations.

Alain and I joined the first German contributor night in Cologne, which was both productive and fun. I proudly presented my very first results of crocheting, which I started in-between my surgeries as a pastime while I needed to stay in bed:

In February of 2017 Alain and I have been asked by Birgit Olzem to be part of the organizing team of the WordPress Meetup Eifel, which we both were delighted to accept. The first Meetup organized by the new team of three will happen at the end of April.

In March of 2017 we flew to WordCamp London. We were both volunteering and I feel honored that I was part of an outstanding team which made every possible effort to organize a welcoming and amazing event for every single attendee. In terms of inclusivity and accessibility, WordCamp London set high standards: there has been a lactation room, a crèche, a multi-faith room, a quiet room, live transcription of the talks, life essential boxes in women’s and men’s restrooms. Almost every area was accessible to wheelchairs – with volunteers designated to help in the few spots that weren’t. We had a lovely and inspiring time there and I have yet to follow up with everyone. It makes me feel like my family grows with every WordCamp.

Last but not least I want to share that I submitted a lightning talk proposal to WordCamp Europe 2017 in Paris. It took all of my courage, but I was feeling so honored and inspired by Topher’s request to write an essay for HeroPress that I realized there might be a story which deserves to be told. I was so proud to have applied as a speaker that it wouldn’t even matter in the end whether my talk is accepted or not.

Alain has applied as speaker as well, and we will both help as volunteers again. I can’t wait to be part of this big event. I look forward to seeing friends and meeting new people. It will be my one-year anniversary of being part of the WordPress community – a year with lots of positive changes and inspiration.

In the end, my talk proposal for WordCamp Europe has not been selected. Of course, I felt a bit sad about this. Even if I was aware that there had been over 300 applications for more or less 40 spots, I had some kind of feeling of having “failed” on my first try… But after having slept on it, I soon got over my deception and I was pleased for Alain for having reached a milestone: his talk proposal got accepted.

And most importantly, I decided not to let this discourage me from applying as a speaker again. There are other WordCamps and all things happen for a good reason: I was pondering for weeks if I should attend WordCamp Berlin or not. I love the community, I love the city but Alain already had other plans. Said and done – I booked a hotel, bought my ticket, applied as a volunteer and submitted my talk proposal, slightly modified and in German. This time my lightning talk got accepted and I will be a speaker for the very first time at WordCamp Berlin on the 13th of May – I am more than excited about it. Alain’s plans were changing so that he’s now able to join me with our dogs on my trip to Berlin.

Thanks for joining me in the more "nerdy" part of my life, @CaroleOlinger ! #WCFRA pic.twitter.com/VuTHtW3EkP

— Alain Schlesser (@schlessera) September 4, 2016

I hope that I can give something back to the WordPress community with what I’m doing. I am a true WordPress community lover by now. I would like to encourage the people out there to use WordPress – especially when they think they don’t have enough skills to build a website. There is no such a thing as “I can’t do this.” – Yes, you can! As long as you have something to share with the world, or a business idea or any other motivation that drives you – just spread it. WordPress gives you the opportunity to be whoever you want to be and to give yourself a voice.

WordPress Is For You, No Matter Who You Are

Furthermore I would love to see every WordPress user, blogger, developer, programmer, designer – and even more so their respective partners – joining the nearest WordCamp (or Meetup) and meeting the amazing WordPress community! Especially when you haven’t done this so far. You’ll be able to find inspiration and friends, develop unknown personal skills, gain new perspectives on your job or life and, in any case, learn a lot, just like I did. And last but not least – it can even bring your relationship to a whole new level.

I still have no idea where my personal journey will lead me in the end but I have this growing feeling that WordPress could be an integral part of my life. Fortunately, it is already a part of me.

The post The Only Journey Is The One Within appeared first on HeroPress.

Open Collective is a new service that aims to make it easy for individuals, groups, and organizations to raise money in a transparent way. Although many projects have communities ready to offer financial support, the paperwork, taxes, and accounting involved in collecting money under the proper legal entity can be a nearly insurmountable hurdle.

“So far, the Internet has been very good at helping people do things together,” Open Collective co-founder Xavier Damman said. “But once it involves money, there is no good solution. Creating a new legal entity is too much overhead, too early. What if we could create a virtual entity that can collect money as easily as creating a Facebook Group?”

Open Collective was created to eliminate the need for setting up a legal entity in order to raise funds. Groups can set up a collective and begin managing their funds immediately. The two key differentiators of the platform are the ability to raise money recurrently and the built-in transparency. Members of the collective must approve or reject an expense before the money can be used. Unpaid expenses and available funds can be viewed by the public.

Open Collective currently has 228 active collectives and 196 of them are open source projects. Many open source maintainers are finding success raising funds on the platform. Webpack, a popular utility for bundling JavaScript files, is one of the most prominent successes, having funded its first full-time developer through the platform. The project’s collective now has an annual budget of $83,659.

I setup a collective for Split, my A/B testing framework on @opencollect, it's now got a yearly budget of $1,338 https://t.co/GCJwxBLwHv

— Andrew Nesbitt (@teabass) April 11, 2017

If your company uses tachyons and would like to support its development we are on @opencollect!https://t.co/NM1zQQONwX

— Tachyons (@tachyons_css) April 7, 2017

Preact, a fast alternative to React, has a collective on the platform to raise funds after maintainer Jason Miller started to experience burnout last year. In a recent interview with Open Collective, Miller said he enjoyed his day job and didn’t want to leave it to set up “Preact Inc.” One of the reasons he chose the platform was to leave room for future key maintainers to be able to access the community’s resources, instead of cannibalizing them all in his own personal fundraising efforts.

“If you’re fundraising for a community, there’s a clear implication that it’s for the betterment of the project as a whole,” Miller said. “By putting the project at center stage, as opposed to a person, there’s no need to explain that. In our case, I think it’s why people were so willing to contribute.”

The structure that Open Collective provides puts the focus on the community, instead of solely focusing on funding the talents and efforts of the most prominent maintainer. It also gives projects the opportunity to distribute funds to different types of contributors.

“My advice would be to put channels in place for all the different kinds of support an open source project needs, and offer people clear options: write features, raise issues, make a pull request, do code reviews, give money,” Miller said. “Don’t try to hide the fact that the project needs funding, and don’t skirt around that fact that it’s specifically about money, or it will come off as disingenuous. If there’s something users want from the project that money can enable, give them an avenue to make it happen.”

Open Collective has helped raise more than $200,000 for open source projects on the platform to date. Projects like MochaJS, Babel, GulpJS, Vapor, Qubes OS, and Hoodie have raised thousands of dollars for ongoing maintenance and support. Many of these projects are critical to the open source ecosystem and strapped for resources.

Although the platform is currently dominated by open source software projects, Open Collective was built to be capable of funding many different types of group efforts. Co-founder Xavier Damman described the platform’s goals in an interview with Dataconomy:

Our goal as Open Collective is to create this new light type of association for our generation who really love doing those side projects, creating those meetup groups, taking the initiative to create a conference located in your city, do open source projects together, create movements like occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, all of that. There’s a whole bunch of things that our generation is doing but we don’t have any platform to enable those movements and these communities to collect money. So it’s all about finding a new way, fund those communities that can have a larger impact.

Open Collective’s co-founders share a strong commitment to open source and the majority of the platform’s code is MIT-licensed and available on GitHub.

“I’m a big fan of open source myself and we open source everything,” Damman said. “Open Collective is an open source platform because we believe in open source. We believe it’s the future of work. There’s no reason for having two different engineers in two different parts of the world solving the same problem. And also open source is the right business decision. I’m an engineer, as well as a developer, and we tend to make much better code if we know that other people can look at it.”

Open Collective takes 10% of funds raised by a collective in addition to credit card fees, which are estimated at 3% + $0.30/transaction). The platform’s fee structure is slightly higher when compared to other crowd-funding and fundraising platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, which charge a 5% fee for successfully funded projects and 3-5% for credit card processing. However, these platforms are more goal-based and not necessarily designed for generating recurring funding. Open Collective’s fees include use of the platform for managing bookkeeping, taxes, and reimbursing expenses.

Open Collective for organizations is currently in private beta. It allows local chapters and other organizations to raise money and manage funds without having to open a separate bank account. Women Who Code is an organization that is using the platform this way and has an annual budget of $171,978 based on current recurring donations.

Money issues can be the source of bitter disputes in communities, especially when maintainers are short on time and neglect to document how donated funds are being used. Open Collective’s approach to financial transparency is sorely missing in most fundraising platforms, which don’t require their users to account for how the money has been spent after it is donated. Its built-in transparency and accountability mirrors the values of many open source projects and gives communities a healthy and convenient way to monitor the distribution of funds.

Automattic’s San Francisco, CA office is located at 140 Hawthorne. Since 2013, it has served as a coworking space, hosted the WordCamp San Francisco 2014 after party, and has been used as a venue for local meetups.

On episode 101 of the Stack Overflow podcast, Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, announced that the company will be closing its San Francisco office.

At the 45:50 mark, Joel Spolsky, co-host of the show, asks Mullenweg if Automattic is one of the largest fully distributed companies in the world.

“Yeah, in fact, we’re looking at shutting down our San Francisco office,” Mullenweg said. “We got an office there about six or seven years ago, pretty good lease, but nobody goes in it. Five people go in it and it’s 15,000 square feet. There are as many gaming tables as there are people.”

Automattic has listed the property through Colliers International, a global real estate company that has more than 500 offices across 67 countries.

The building used to be a Fairtex location. Fairtex is a manufacturer of combat equipment and clothing for Muay Thai and Mixed Martial Arts. The building was completely renovated in 2013 and designed by Baran Studio Architecture.

The design was based on accommodating 15 to 20 people on a daily basis with options to expand to accommodate a few hundred people.

One of my favorite parts of the Automattic office is the T-Shirt museum where shirt designs from WordCamps across the world are displayed. Mullenweg says the items in the museum will be saved somewhere.

If you’ve never had the opportunity to visit Automattic’s US office, you can tour the inside of it without leaving your home.

In 2016, San Francisco was named the most expensive city to conduct business according to a report by the CBRE. If Automattic’s office isn’t being used by 20 or 30 people a day, as was originally intended, it makes sense to invest that money elsewhere.

The closing of the San Francisco office leaves Automattic with two physical offices in the world: One in Cape Town, South Africa where a number of WooCommerce employees live and Automattic East in Westbrook, Maine.

Randomly stumbled across this @automattic office in Cape Town, SA after having just listened to @photomatt on the @jaltucher podcast. pic.twitter.com/lnKe8o6XbL

— StatusQuont (@statusquont) March 31, 2017

Automattic is hosting a free, remote conference called Design and Exclusion on April 21. The event will bring together design and technology experts who will discuss solutions for the ways that digital products and services exclude people.

Lead organizer Ashleigh Axios, Design Exponent at Automattic, said inspiration for the event came from the exclusion that is everywhere in the industry. Automattic is partnering with Mash-Up Americans and MIT Center for Civic Media to bring awareness to the issue.

“Exclusion is all around us, but we don’t often take the time to understand how it’s come to be this way, our place in its existence, and our place in combating it,” Axios said. “Together, we’re using research, design, and conversational narrative to open source the prompt to understand the issue of exclusion for further community involvement and refinement.”

The schedule for the event includes a message on “Design and Inclusion” from Automattic’s John Maeda and a session on “Opportunities Missed from Excluded Voices” from Joan Shigekawa, former Senior Deputy Chairman for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) during the Obama Administration. The conference also includes four panels with experts from Autodesk, Etsy, Airbnb, and other companies.

“Design and Exclusion” is a pointed conference name that puts the spotlight on the problem participants are trying to address. Axios said this name, as opposed to something like “Design and Inclusion,” was a deliberate decision. She said that she and John Maeda felt the need to change the language to reflect a new vantage point on the issue in order to garner new insights.

“It should now be a well-known fact that technology companies are suffering from a lack of diversity or lack of inclusion in their teams and companies,” Axios said. “This is well-reported and the pressure is building to take on this issue from early-childhood education to educating company human resource offices and hiring managers from questioning social and gender norms as relates to professional roles to crediting those who have been doing the work and not having their contributions and presence well acknowledged. This important work has dominated the ‘inclusion’ dialogue within technology-enabled spaces for good reason.

“However, equally important and much less discussed, are all of the ways in which products and services can be, and often are, designed and built to exclude individuals and people groups, even if unintentionally. We shouldn’t have to wait until a company crosses the line, creating a public relations nightmare, in order to evaluate the failures in creating inclusive products.”

More than 1,000 people have already signed up for a reminder about when the event takes place. Axios said that even if the event is successful, organizers are not planning to make it an in-person event in the future. The online-only event was designed to offer more access to the conversation than traditional in-person conferences generally provide.

“In-person conferences tend to exclude those without financial means to travel or with geographic hurdles to attendance, those with time-prohibiting personal or professional commitments, those who have difficulty navigating crowds or in-person social interactions, and those who prefer to consume information at their own pace and in their choice of format,” Axios said. “Given the topic, it’s our aim that Design and Exclusion be as inclusive as it can while limiting its environmental impact.”

Axios said one of the goals of the conference is to understand the industry’s failures in excluding people as a first step towards creating more inclusive products.

“Design and Exclusion aims to do that as an honest and open dialogue with many representatives from across tech,” Axios said. “Success will be active participation in this event followed by the broader conversation around this topic from contributors beyond those involved in the initial discussion. To broadly measure success, we’ll look at views on the content, engagement online using #DesignX, and will track any increase in conversation by use of keywords associated with this topic.”

Design and Exclusion kicks off at 9am PT / 12pm ET / 4pm UTC / 5pm GMT on April 21 and the schedule has been published to the event’s website. Participants who want to join the discussion on making the web more inclusive are invited to use the #DesignX hashtag on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and other social networks.

If spending time in the woods in Oklahoma to disconnect from technology is not your thing, perhaps staying at a cabin in Florida is. CabinPress, organized by David Laietta, takes place November 3-5, at Lake Louisa State Park in Clermont, FL.

The location is about an hour’s drive from Orlando, FL and is 4,500 acres large with lakes, hills, and scenic areas.

Similar to CampPress, CabinPress’ goal is to disconnect people from technology to allow them to focus on building and strengthening personal relationships.

“I enjoy camping and spending some time disconnected from technology, spending time with others,” Laietta said. “I get the most out of a conference when I have the opportunity to have deeper discussions with others than general ‘we’re crushing it, work is fine’ chats.

“This is much more comfortable than camping though, so the focus can be on having fun and making connections, while still having a real bed and hot showers.”

Accommodations include fully furnished cabins with beds, air conditioning, kitchens, and bathrooms. Activities within the park include hiking, kayaking, board games, canoeing, and more. Laietta suggests packing for the event as if you’re staying at a hotel.

Early bird tickets are available until April 30th when prices will increase from $250 to $300. At the time of writing, there were 15 tickets remaining. Each ticket provides the following:

• Accommodations for Friday and Saturday night
• Meals and snacks from Friday dinner to Sunday lunch
• Canoe and Kayak rentals
• Coworking space with high-speed internet the week following the event in downtown Orlando, FL
• Swag!

Sponsorship opportunities are available and the funds will be used to offset the cost of the event. Although CabinPress and CampPress were officially announced around the same time period, Laietta has been planning this event for some time.

“We were discussing it after WordCamp Orlando was postponed due to a hurricane last year,” he said.

“We happened to find good timing availability for one of the nice state parks. Many of them you have to book far in advance to get cabins.”

Those interested in attending are encouraged to review the event’s Code of Conduct. To learn more about Lake Louisa State Park and what it offers, visit the park’s official site.