WPwatercooler - Weekly WordPress Talk Show

This week the WPwatercooler panel discusses the WordPress Theme Directory based on a post by Justin Tadlock of WPTavern - Curated List of Featured Themes Coming to the Theme Directory. The panel discussed many different ways the Featured Themes section of the Theme Directory is flawed currently in its weird random setup. Curation seems to be a good strategy for fixing this issue but inforcing rules is going to be a tough one.

"While themes in the directory undergo a strict code review, there is no quality control on design."

We noticed this too while on the show, it seems that we need to take some time and build out a strict cutoff and one of them should be, in Jason Tucker's opinion be if the theme is accessible or not. If we came from a culture where "mobile-first" was important at one point in our recent history then "accessibility-first" should be the new goal. 105 themes in the directory are set with the Accessibility Ready tag but when you have poor examples such as Stix in the directory, is quality being looked at?

Sé Reed mentioned the talk that Natalie MacLees did at WordCamp Long Beach regarding accessible themes.

Reading into this a bit more Justin Tadlock writes:

"The team implemented a program that allowed the top reviewers each month an opportunity to pick the featured themes..." "The problem was that nearly all of the top reviewers were theme authors. Their incentive for doing reviews was to get their themes featured. Big theme businesses stood the most to gain. They could put multiple reviewers to work who would knock out review after review."

with that being said it looks like the theme directory and it's Theme Review Team have a plan, Justin writes:

"The general consensus seems to be that featured themes would not have any upsells or other commercial aspects. That could limit the pool of potential themes considerably because many theme authors have some sort of commercial interest in having their themes hosted in the official directory."

Jason Cosper had a prediction regarding restricting the directory to non-upsale themes - "we're going to see a lot of Automattic made WordPress.com themes in the featured themes"

Thanks Justin Tadlock and the team over at WP Tavern for the topic for us to discuss if you want to join us on this episode of WPwatercooler you can do so by visiting our Participant guidelines page to learn more.

WPwatercooler network is sponsored by ServerPress makers of DesktopServer. Be sure to check them out at https://www.serverpress.com

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This week the WPwatercooler panel discusses the joys of good WordPress web hosting.

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WPwatercooler network is sponsored by ServerPress makers of DesktopServer. Be sure to check them out at https://www.serverpress.com

https://www.wpwatercooler.com/video/ep341-wpwatercooler/

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This week on WPwatercooler we talk about WordCamp Long Beach #WCLB and if we uncovered the Future of WordPress.

Join us on this episode of WPwatercooler by visiting our Participant guidelines page.

WPwatercooler network is sponsored by ServerPress makers of DesktopServer. Be sure to check them out at https://www.serverpress.com

https://www.wpwatercooler.com/video/ep340-wordcamp-long-beach-recap-the-future-of-wordpress/

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This week on WPwatercooler we discuss the developer/user gap.

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WPwatercooler network is sponsored by ServerPress makers of DesktopServer. Be sure to check them out at https://www.serverpress.com

Panel

Jason Cosper, Jason Tucker, Sé Reed, Steve Zehngut

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This week on WPwatercooler we’re discussing WordPress page speed and how to make your website performant.

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WPwatercooler network is sponsored by ServerPress makers of DesktopServer. Be sure to check them out at https://www.serverpress.com

Handpicked past related episodes:

• EP312 – WordPress Performance
• EP203 – Plugins to speed up your WordPress website
• EP49 – How to speed up your WordPress website

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This week on WPwatercooler we talk about Automattic raising $300M Series D from Salesforce Ventures and how this would affect if any the WordPress open source project.

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Leave us some feedback https://www.wpwatercooler.com/feedback

WPwatercooler network is sponsored by ServerPress makers of DesktopServer. Be sure to check them out at https://www.serverpress.com

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On this episode, we discuss what’s on our WordPress toolbelt.

The WPwatercooler network is sponsored by ServerPress makers of DesktopServer be sure to check them out at https://serverpress.com.

• Toolbelt – WordPress plugin | WordPress.org
• Site Breadcrumbs
• Compress JPEG & PNG images – WordPress plugin | WordPress.org
• Easily optimize images using WP CLI

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Conflicts of interest with WordCamp and WordPress Meetup organizers.

The WPwatercooler network is sponsored by ServerPress makers of DesktopServer be sure to check them out at https://serverpress.com.

A question was posed to the Make WordPress blog recently that many of us found interesting:

"Recently, I realized that community organizers do sometimes face a conflict of interest situations, but the team does not really have clear guidelines about how to avoid them, nor best practices for when there is one." https://make.wordpress.org/community/2019/08/15/discussion-how-to-handle-conflict-of-interest-situations/

Some questions that were presented to the community were:

• What different kinds of conflict of interest situations we have now and what we might encounter in the future?
• How to work around those?
• Can we accept the conflict of interest in some situations?
• What would be the best approach to disclose situations where someone notices a conflict of interest?

Jennifer Bourn brought this to twitter

https://twitter.com/jenniferbourn/status/1164559134894649345

So we asked her to join us to discuss this on the show.

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This week on WPwatercooler we discuss WordPress forcing updates on the older version of the software. We compare and contrast this to web hosts doing these sorts of things and what the future may hold for updates of this nature.

WPwatercooler network is sponsored by ServerPress makers of DesktopServer. Be sure to check them out at https://www.serverpress.com

WPwatercooler Quotables

"Hell yeah, I think it's good." Jason Cosper

"My opinion is changing because the WordPress rollout schedule has been changing. ...You're talking about sites that are run by non-technical people. They may not know what to do or have the resources to fix it." Steve

"In my opinion, this should be between the hosting companies and site owners, not WordPress and site owners." Manny

Show Topics and Further Reading

• WordPress team working on daring plan to forcibly update old websites
• Computer trespass
• Proposal: Auto-Update Old Versions to 4.7
• Tools to backup and upgrade WordPress installations
• Statistics | WordPress.org
• Mysterious iOS Attack Changes Everything We Know About iPhone Hacking
• News – WordPress 3.7 “Basie” – WordPress.org
• Plugin Detective – Troubleshooting – WordPress plugin | WordPress.org

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On this episode, we discuss what is actually involved in building a website.

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WPwatercooler network is sponsored by ServerPress makers of DesktopServer. Be sure to check them out at https://www.serverpress.com

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