WordPress Community

What is the WordPress community capable of? A lot of good. And a few bad apples.

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Michelle Frechette
WordPress 6.1 is here, and it's awesome! It takes more than a village — really a small city — to keep us moving forward. Thank a contributor — there are thousands of them. • Thanks especially to Mika Epstein! It’s beyond brave of Mika to share what she has gone through for the Plugins Team and the whole community. No one should ever have to go through what she has. You should know her story if you don't.

What AI and Automation Are — and Aren’t — Good For

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Michelle Frechette
Thoughts on how AI and automation can be enabling to individuals and help us all be part of our communities where human-to-human interaction is the best and most vital part. • We love our community on Twitter, but maybe that's not where our community will be in the future. • Nev Harris is in our Member Spotlight. • Our Black Friday deals are live — and you can still add yours. WordPress Accessibility Day, WordFest, and WP Wealthbuilder Summit are coming right up, and so are WordCamps! We'd love to see you at one of our EU/US weekly Huddles.

Five takes on helpful plugin stats and insights

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Dan Knauss
Good ideas for the future of data disclosed to plugin authors using the wordpress.org repository:

1) Identify surges of unhappy users reacting to a bad release — and the opposite, happier outcome.

2) Use pageview analytics to estimate total potential user interest and conversion rates.

3) Assess a plugin's performance with the .org search algorithm, the quality of releases, and plugin incompatibility as well as PHP compatibility issues.

4) Collect significant user behavior data anonymously without phoning home.

5) Just reveal all the raw data with privacy options for individual authors — no interpretive analysis on wordpress.org.

BONUS: Let's take this discussion somewhere else!

Over, Under, Around, and Through

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Dan Knauss
This week Alex Denning (Ellipsis) draws on Iain Poulson's historical, high-level plugin data at WP Trends to offer some thoughtful, somewhat contrary, but practical and grounded perspectives on the value of Active Install Data. At the WP Watercooler and elsewhere, a realization seems to be setting in that the data is not open source and not the property of the WordPress community. Like last week's episode of Post Status Draft with Katie Keith of Barn2 Plugins, Till KrĂĽss (Object Cache Pro, Relay) offers a lot of lessons this week about less travelled paths to success in the plugin business even as a very small company or company of one. Performance, testing, and support are key, interrelated parts of Till's success and probably the most important ones to borrow in your own life and work if they resonate.

How Open Source is WordPress?

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Michelle Frechette
Decision-by-committee is difficult enough, and decision-by-community is called an election. Surely there must be a way that we can gather information, keep the community informed, and move forward in a mutually-beneficial way.

Trust Issues

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Dan Knauss
Cory Miller asks, "What can we do to better support our plugin developers and product owners?" Katie Keith offers some clues with the story of her WordPress/WooCommerce agency and product shop, Barn2 Plugins. Dan Knauss and Nyasha Green talk about microaggressions, the Active Install Growth Data story, and US federal legislation aimed at Open Source Security. In an increasingly "demon-haunted world," how can we know who is doing what with the hardware and software tools we use? Ben Gabler, CEO and Founder of Rocket.net, is in our Member Spotlight.
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