Hello friends,
Welcome to the December edition of our meetup Meetup groups are locally-organized groups that get together for face-to-face events on a regular basis (commonly once a month). Learn more about Meetups in our Meetup Organizer Handbook. organizer newsletter! Read on to discover some exciting updates and resources from the WordPress community.
Newsletter contents
- State of the Word This is the annual report given by Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress at WordCamp US. It looks at what we’ve done, what we’re doing, and the future of WordPress. https://wordpress.tv/tag/state-of-the-word/. 2020
- WordPress 5.6 release
- Learn WordPress
- Online event updates
- News and updates
State of the Word 2020
Mark your calendars for the 2020 State of the Word – the annual keynote address of WordPress given by project co-founder, Matt Mullenweg. The event will be streamed on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter on Thursday 17 December 2020, at 16:00 UTC and will have live captioning in multiple languages. Meetup groups around the world are encouraged to host watch parties to celebrate this year’s WordPress accomplishments together!
Want to ask Matt a question at the State of the Word? Record a video question on your phone or computer in landscape format, and include your name and how you use WordPress in the video. Then, upload the video as an unlisted video on your favorite video hosting site, and send a link to: [email protected].
The deadline to send in your question is 11 December, so don’t delay!
WordPress 5.6 is out!
The latest major WordPress release – version 5.6 “Simone”, came out on 8 December 2020. The release ships with a new default theme: Twenty Twenty One, and offers features like greater layout flexibility, more block Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. patterns, video captioning support, auto-updates, beta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process.-compatibility for PHP PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. http://php.net/manual/en/intro-whatis.php. 8.0, application password support for the REST API The REST API is an acronym for the RESTful Application Program Interface (API) that uses HTTP requests to GET, PUT, POST and DELETE data. It is how the front end of an application (think “phone app” or “website”) can communicate with the data store (think “database” or “file system”) https://developer.wordpress.org/rest-api/., updates to jQuery, among others. You can find more information in the field guide.
For sites which uses jQuery, to ensure a smooth transition, use the Test jQuery updates plugin to check your site for errors before you update. If you find errors with your site, you can use the jQuery migrate plugin.
The Marketing Team is pulling together resources (Questions and Answers, social media posts you can use, slides, and images) to help meetup groups with WordPress 5.6 outreach. You can find these resources in the Team’s GitHub repository in the coming week. Reach out to the #marketing Slack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. channel for more details.
Learn WordPress is launching soon!
Learn WordPress, the new online, on-demand WordPress training platform, is close to launch has been officially launched! Are you looking for a fun, different way to connect with your local WordPress meetup group? You can ask participants to watch a Learn WordPress workshop and organize a discussion group based on it for your meetup. Or you can simply schedule a watch party based on a workshop and arrange a quick discussion based on the same. Want to help make Learn WordPress more successful? You can apply to organize workshops and discussion groups. Can you help promote Learn WordPress? Contact the Marketing Team for materials.
Online event updates
Use the #OnlineWPMeetup hashtag to promote your online WordPress meetups Meetup groups are locally-organized groups that get together for face-to-face events on a regular basis (commonly once a month). Learn more about Meetups in our Meetup Organizer Handbook.! You can find all the upcoming online meetups around the globe at: https://make.wordpress.org/community/events/online/.
Don’t forget to use this opportunity to find participants across the world for your meetups too. If you need help with promoting your meetup, reach out to the Marketing Team in the #marketing Slack channel.
Online WordCamp WordCamps 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. updates
- WordCamp Mexico Online was held from 25-28 November 2020. Check out the event website to catch up with the recorded live stream. Videos of the camp will soon be available on WordPress.tv. Don’t forget to catch up the forthcoming online WordCamps:
- WordCamp Sevilla 2020 (26-29 December 2020)
- WordCamp India 2021 (30-31 January, 6-7 February, and 14-15 February 2021)
Featured Meetup: WordPress Sofia Meetup
The WordPress Sofia meetup group has been organizing lectures, workshops, and themed community meetups to facilitate community connections, even during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a lockdown was enforced in Bulgaria, the meetup group pivoted online with sessions to support the community, including COVID-19 tips, finding customers from home, email marketing, community development from home, and more. These sessions were held on Zoom and uploaded to YouTube. The group continued their experiments with online events — community members showcased their homes/workplaces during their summer meetups — and they invited members from the larger WordPress community to their other meetups. The group continues to meet online twice a month, and record and upload their meetups to YouTube.
Reimagining the work of the Diverse Speaker Training group
The Diversity Speaker Training group of the Community team wants your feedback on how they can reimagine their work in light of the ongoing world changes this year and in 2021. Please share your feedback as comments on the post by 18 December 2020.
News and updates
If you have any questions, Community Team deputies Community Deputies are a team of people all over the world who review WordCamp and Meetup applications, interview lead organizers, and generally keep things moving at WordCamp Central. Find more about deputies in our Community Deputy Handbook. are available to help. Please send an email to [email protected] or join the #community-events Slack channel. Thanks for everything you do to grow the WordPress community. Let’s keep sharing knowledge and inspiring each other with our contributions!
We will see you online soon!
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The following people contributed to this edition of the Meetup newsletter: @andreamiddleton @angelasjin and @webcommsat
