Tag: community

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WordPress Contributing Effort and Focus

End of 2014 was a turning point in my life, and I have been thinking a lot about my contributing efforts for a while now. About a year ago I was teaching at a university, a school, co-organizing WordCamp Europe 2014 and a meetup, spoke at various conferences and meetings for free as well, contributed patches to plugins (plus free plugins and updating themes), mentoring people, teaching interns, and doing a dozen extra things for free. Things Changed at Work [caption id="attachment_11568" align="aligncenter" width="713"] Working crazy hours.[/caption] Our work back then was pretty well organized - we had a large client with an ongoing… Continue Reading
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Into 2015

2015 is here again, and everyone is recovering from the New Year's Eve parties around the globe. I would like to wish everyone a happy healthy and successful new year. My TODO list so far is endless, so prioritizing and getting the most out of it would be one of my main targets (priorities!). Also, the reason for this post is mostly Brad's post: https://twitter.com/williamsba/status/550374082462883840 Since that's what I plan to do here as soon as I outline the main topics I would like to blog about. 2014 was entirely outside of my comfort zone work-wise, since I dealt with… Continue Reading
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What Does “Open” Mean?

I've been an Open Source advocate for about 10 years now, and this has been something that determined me over the years. If you start applying Open Source to your life, suddenly everything changes. Completely. Contributing to WordPress Marko and I led a workshop on "Contributing to WordPress" for my CMS students last year at "Telerik Academy". I didn't expect anything particular back then, mostly because of the fact that all of them were looking forward to their first jobs and were only interested in learning enough in the tech field to land their job, start earning some money and improve their… Continue Reading
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The $15 WordPress gig

Three weeks ago I received the following message on LinkedIn: Hello, I'm looking for someone who could customize a WordPress plugin we bought. It's a car reservation system, we need to change the pricing model and add a few extra SQL tables that would operate with the plugin. The contact is a manager of some small agency, in his 50s, so I replied with my usual template for people who get in touch with me as I do dozens of WordPress things here and don't look like scam - that I can forward that to my peers and share it in the relevant… Continue Reading
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WP Mentor, Helping and Community

Last month Matt from Matt Report launched a great site called WP Mentor. Setting up a mentorship program for the WordPress community is an incredible idea so kudos to Matt who made it happen :) If you can't see the value in that site, let me explain. Balance and Entertainment I've been helping people since I've started teaching classes in 2006 and I've always enjoyed that. It's challenging to explain a concept, technology or an idea to someone else and it's a process that actually entertains and educates both sides. If you're a senior engineer with a team formed by… Continue Reading
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Theme Reviews, Guidelines and Community

I've accidentally started a long discussion due to a small and fairly insignificant bug that turned out to be more than enough for several major theme authors, reviewers and theme lead devs to chime in and share their thoughts. I usually try to avoid those scenarios, but every now and then the tension needs to be released. These are my observations, thoughts and ideas based on my experience over the past 2.5 years with the theme directory. Theme Reviews in 2011-2012 I have joined the WPTRT in 2011, after doing a dozen reviews as a "candidate reviewer" before getting my… Continue Reading
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WordPress IRC Chats Schedule

Since I tend to forget when most WordPress dev chats are or pick wrong time zones instead, I set up a small weekly schedule with weekly IRC chats: http://devwp.eu/chats/ I got the schedules from the Make blogs and listed them with custom post type entries in a calendar. The handy thing is that one can control the timezone listing with a UTC-relative GET argument (also, few time zones are listed at the top of the calendar that switch that automatically). For example, what I use in Bulgaria is http://devwp.eu/chats/?utc=+3 which triggers the events shifted towards my timing instead of UTC. Even though I… Continue Reading
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Weekly Company Fee for Contributions

I just saw a great initiative that I simply had to share. Full disclosure, never met the guy nor seen the site that launched this one, but here it is the idea. Alex Pott signed up for weekly contributions for Drupal. I found that through a tweet by Robert Douglass, a great team Drupal guy: https://twitter.com/robertDouglass/status/366176381685608449 You know, the contributing discussions around the WordPress core are quite popular and even intense at times, particularly due to several reasons: it requires a significant amount of time to get into the project history and infrastructure it takes a while to to get… Continue Reading
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WordPress Development Hangouts (hi)story

We had a great discussion with Marko Heijnen yesterday recorded in our WordPress Developers community on Google+. It was the fourth video we record with active WordPress community members so I thought that it's time to set a playlist with our WordPress videos and also shed some light on the overall idea. History The WordPress Developers community was created on Dec 7 2012, a day after Google announced their new Communities feature. It was yet another place for WordPress people to 'hang out', still as an Open Source person myself I'm running Android on my phone and the Google integration… Continue Reading
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WordSesh overview

Last week we had the first large WordPress 'meetup' online called WordSesh. It was an incredible event that was yet another proof for how awesome the WordPress community is. I had the chance to speak at WordSesh and I presented the WordPress.org Themes Directory and the process of reviewing themes. The video is embedded below + slides here.   There were several remarkable topics from the ones I was able to watch personally (a few I had to miss due to the urge to sleep), but my top three were: Shane's Managing Distributed Code Teams. That's probably the most inspiring… Continue Reading