Welcome to the official blog of the community/outreach team for the WordPress open sourceOpen SourceOpen Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. project!
This team oversees official events, mentorship programs, diversity initiatives, contributor outreach, and other ways of growing our community.
If you love WordPress and want to help us do these things, join in!
Getting Involved
We use this blog for policy debates, project announcements, and status reports. Everyone is welcome and encouraged to comment on posts and join the discussion.
You can learn about our current activities on the Team Projects page. These projects are suitable for everyone from newcomers to WordPress community elders.
You can use our contact form to volunteer for one of our projects.
We also have regular Community Team meetings on the first and third Thursdays of every month at 11:00 UTC and 20:00 UTC in #community-team on Slack (same agenda).
Events WidgetWidgetA WordPress Widget is a small block that performs a specific function. You can add these widgets in sidebars also known as widget-ready areas on your web page. WordPress widgets were originally created to provide a simple and easy-to-use way of giving design and structure control of the WordPress theme to the user.
Due to the current global health emergency, we strongly encourage you to consider online events instead of in-person in 2020. For more information, please refer to our online events handbook.
After you’ve attended a WordCampWordCampWordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more., one way to show your appreciation and contribute back to the community is to provide constructive feedback to the speakers of the sessions you attended at the event. This not only helps speakers know what worked in their presentation and what didn’t, but it helps organizers get a sense of how successful the event was as a whole.
Most WordCamp sites will have a page called Leave Feedback where you can choose a session from a dropdown list and be taken to the feedback form for that session. You can also access the form by looking at the event schedule, following the link for a session that you attended, and clicking the “Leave feedback” link at the bottom of the page.
Note that there is a limited window in which you can submit feedback! The form is only open for two weeks after the event. Feedback is most impactful when it is timely and the experience is fresh in the minds of both the attendee and the speaker.
Once a WordCamp session is complete, attendees can fill out a form to provide direct feedback about what they liked in the session and what, if anything, they thought could have improved it. The WordCamp event organizers will moderate the feedback before it becomes available to speakers so that they only see relevant and constructive feedback. If a session has multiple speakers, all of the speakers will be able to see this approved feedback, but it is not visible to the public.
When new feedback is available to view for a session, speakers will receive an email notification with a link to go and view it. The email will only be sent once per day, and only for feedback that was not included in a previous notification. After following the link, the speaker must log in with their WordPress.orgWordPress.orgThe community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ account in order to view the feedback.
When reviewing feedback, a speaker can optionally mark specific comments as “helpful”. This feature serves two purposes: it provides a way to filterFilterFilters are one of the two types of Hooks https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Hooks. They provide a way for functions to modify data of other functions. They are the counterpart to Actions. Unlike Actions, filters are meant to work in an isolated manner, and should never have side effects such as affecting global variables and output. only the most useful feedback comments to revisit later, and it helps the WordCamp program assess the effectiveness of the feedback tool as a whole.
Your WordCamp site has a special page titled “Leave Feedback” that provides a convenient access point for attendees to look up sessions they attended at your event and submit feedback about them. This page cannot be deleted, but it can be renamed to whatever makes the most sense for your event. Each individual session page will also have a link at the bottom for leaving feedback, once that session’s start time has passed.
The feedback forms only become available once the event has started. Then they will stay open for two weeks after the event. This is because feedback is most impactful when it is timely and the experience is fresh in the minds of both the attendee and the speaker.
Some ideas for encouraging attendees to provide feedback:
Add a button or link to the Leave Feedback page on your homepage and/or the Day of Event page.
Add a link to the Leave Feedback page in your site navigation once the event has started.
Promote the feedback form in social media.
Announce the feedback form during the opening and/or closing remarks.
Once an attendee has submitted feedback on a session, it goes into a moderation queue. Members of the WordCamp organizing team who have Administrator or Editor capabilities on the site must review and approve all feedback before the session speakers can view it. This protects speakers from abusive and inappropriate comments.
The feedback moderation screen is found under the Sessions item in the main menu of WP-Admin.
For each feedback comment in the queue, a moderator can take one of three actions:
Approve it
Mark it as “Inappropriate”
Mark it as Spam
If a comment is accidentally marked one way when it should have been another, it can be reverted to “Unapproved” and then marked the correct way.
When a session has new feedback comments that have been approved, the speaker(s) for that session will receive an email, up to once per day, notifying them about their feedback and providing a link where they can view it. Speakers view their feedback at the same link that displays the feedback form to attendees. A speaker must be logged in using their WordPress.org account, and then the form will be replaced by a list of the approved feedback comments. On this list, speakers can optionally mark feedback comments as “helpful”, though the feedback author is not notified of this action.
In order to make sure that speakers can see their feedback when logged in, please ensure that their WordPress.org usernames are saved correctly in the session details.
It is recommended that speakers be notified before the event that attendees will be able to submit feedback to them. This way they can be mentally prepared and expect the email notifications that they will receive once their feedback has been moderated.
