WordPress.org

It’s time for our second global contributor weekend, and this time we’re focusing on the video team. For this month’s challenge, in honor of it being our second month, you have two options for how you can participate! The challenge for this month overall is to work with at least one hour worth of WordCamp video, which you can do by either creating subtitles or editing the video file in preparation for upload to WordPress.tv.

One of the great things about contributing to the video team is that you get to learn so much, since all the work basically involves watching WordCamp presentation videos. Subtitling is a doubly important need, as it is needed to make all those WordCamp videos accessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing and can’t listen to the audio track, as well as making it possible for the videos to be consumed (in some cases after subtitle translation) by people who speak different languages.

The challenge will last from Saturday, February 27, 2016 through Sunday, February 28, 2016, and the results will be reviewed afterward by members of the video team. If you enjoy the challenge, the video team would be very excited to welcome you into their ranks! Interested? Here’s how to participate.

What About Last Month?

In January, the inaugural contributor weekend was focused on the support forums. That challenge had 73 participants, including 10 people who provided 20 or more correct answers to open support threads, thereby winning the challenge. Congratulations to Harris Anastasiadis, Ahmad Awais, Takis Bouyouris, Phil Erb, Eric Gunawan, Jackie McBride, Diana Nichols, Kostas Nicolacopoulos, Juhi Saxena, and Sarah Semark! To them and to everyone else who participated, thank you so much for your efforts. Every answer helps, and over the course of this contributor weekend, these amazing volunteers responded to 800 support threads. The support forums queue of requests with no replies went from 28 pages to 7 pages — that was an incredible success, of which every participant was a part!

So head on over to see how to get involved with the one-hour video challenge this weekend, and help us make next month’s post just as impressive! 🙂

WordPress 4.5 Beta 1 is now available!

This software is still in development, so we don’t recommend you run it on a production site. Consider setting up a test site just to play with the new version. To test WordPress 4.5, try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (you’ll want “bleeding edge nightlies”). Or you can download the beta here (zip).

WordPress 4.5 is slated for release on April 12, but to get there, we need your help testing what we have been working on, including:

• Responsive Preview of your site in the Customizer (#31195) – See how your site looks in mobile, tablet, and desktop contexts before making changes to its appearance.
• Theme Logo Support (#33755) – Native support for a theme logo within the Customizer.
• Inline Link Editing (#33301) – Within the visual editor, edit links inline for a smoother workflow.
• Additional Editor Shortcuts (#33300) – Includes a few new shortcuts, like `..` for code and **..** for bold.
• Comment Moderation Improvements (#34133) – An enhanced experience when moderating comments, including preview with rendered formatting.
• Optimization of Image Generation (#33642) – Image sizes are generated more efficiently and remove unneeded meta, while still including color profiles in Imagick, for reduced sizes of up to 50% with near identical visual quality.

There have been changes for developers to explore as well:

• Selective Refresh (#27355) – A comprehensive framework for rendering parts of the customizer preview in real time. Theme and plugin authors should test their widgets specifically for compatibility with selective refresh, and note that it may ultimately be opt-in for 4.5.
• Backbone and Underscore updated to latest versions (#34350) – Backbone is upgraded from 1.1.2 to 1.2.3 and Underscore is upgraded from 1.6.0 to 1.8.3. See the this post for important changes.
• Embed templates (#34561) – Embed templates were split into parts and can now be directly overridden by themes via the template hierarchy.
• New WP_Site class (#32450) – More object-oriented approach for managing sites in Multisite
• Script loader (#14853, #35873) – Introduces wp_add_inline_script() for including inline JavaScript just like wp_add_inline_style() works for CSS, and better support for script header/footer dependencies.

If you want a more in-depth view of what major changes have made it into 4.5, check out all 4.5-tagged posts on the main development blog, or check out a list of everything that’s changed.

If you think you’ve found a bug, you can post to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. We’d love to hear from you! If you’re comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, file one on the WordPress Trac. There, you can also find a list of known bugs.

Happy testing!

A wonderful day
is one that brings new WordPress
Four Five Beta One

WordCamps are locally-organized WordPress conferences that happen all over the world (and are so fun). Sometimes people don’t realize that WordCamps are organized by local volunteers rather than a central organization, and they contact us asking, “Can you bring WordCamp to my city?” When this happens, we always suggest they start with a meetup group, and think about organizing a WordCamp themselves after their group has been active for a few months. We emphasize that WordCamps are locally-organized events, not something that the central community team plans from afar.

This has been successful in many areas — there are currently 241 meetup groups on our meetup.com chapter program! In some regions, though, enthusiastic volunteers have had more of a challenge getting things started. Because of this, we’re going to try an experiment this year called the WordCamp Incubator.

The intention of the incubator program is to help spread WordPress to underserved areas through providing more significant organizing support for a first event. In practical terms, this experiment means we’ll be choosing three cities in 2016 where there is not an active WordPress community — but where it seems like there is a lot of potential and where there are some people excited to become organizers — and will help to organize their first WordCamp. These WordCamps will be small, one-day, one-track events geared toward the goal of generating interest and getting people involved in creating an ongoing local community.*

So, where should we do these three events?  If you have always wanted a WordCamp in your city but haven’t been able to get a meetup group going, this is a great opportunity. We will be taking applications for the next week, then will get in touch with everyone who applied to discuss the possibilities. We will announce the  cities chosen by the end of March.

To apply, fill in the application by February 26, 2016. You don’t need to have any specific information handy, it’s just a form to let us know you’re interested. You can apply to nominate your city even if you don’t want to be the main organizer, but for this experiment  we will need local liaisons and volunteers, so please only nominate cities where you live or work so that we have at least one local connection to begin.

Thanks, and good luck!

* For the record, that describes the ideal first WordCamp even if you have an active meetup — there’s no need to wait until your group is big enough to support a large multi-day event, and small events are a lot of fun because everyone has a chance to be involved and get to know most of the other attendees.

WordPress 4.4.2 is now available. This is a security release for all previous versions and we strongly encourage you to update your sites immediately.

WordPress versions 4.4.1 and earlier are affected by two security issues: a possible SSRF for certain local URIs, reported by Ronni Skansing; and an open redirection attack, reported by Shailesh Suthar.

Thank you to both reporters for practicing responsible disclosure.

In addition to the security issues above, WordPress 4.4.2 fixes 17 bugs from 4.4 and 4.4.1. For more information, see the release notes or consult the list of changes.

Download WordPress 4.4.2 or venture over to Dashboard → Updates and simply click “Update Now.” Sites that support automatic background updates are already beginning to update to WordPress 4.4.2.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to 4.4.2:

Andrea Fercia, berengerzyla, Boone Gorges, Chandra Patel, Chris Christoff, Dion Hulse, Dominik Schilling, firebird75, Ivan Kristianto, Jennifer M. Dodd, salvoaranzulla