wJosepha Haden shared her “early thoughts” 💭 on WordPress 5.8 planning, including this intention:
“For the release that includes full site editing, I would like to pause our cohort mentorship processes and replace it with a public coordination channel for the release squad that allows passive learning through observation and release squad transparency.”
Josepha recently published an outline of the communication work needed in the pre-merge period for Phase 2 of the Gutenberg project, which focuses on full site editing. There she notes, “Community readiness should be higher for full site editing than for the block editor” with “known (and unknown) gaps in knowledge we still need to bridge.”
One of the many effects of transparency and communication is community self-education. As Josepha notes, community readiness for full site editing is essential merging it with core WordPress. It will also have the effect of “raising awareness and increasing the skills of our community as we go.”
Josepha is also proposing a WordPress Project Handbook for contributors. It would share expectations for “how we, as contributors, work together, who we want to build our products for, and the WordPress interpretation of modern, open source best practices.”
Another post describes the next steps to add “non-negotiable guard rails” for the Theme Review team by specifying what will prevent a theme from being added to the repo. Josepha anticipates a lot of change but thinks “we can get most of this work managed by early 2022.”
It’s good to see these thoughts being posted on the official WordPress.org site. I can recall past criticisms (some balanced more than others) about communication around major WordPress initiatives, including the first release of Gutenberg itself. A high level of transparency and sharing is very welcome. 👍
