If you need support, go to the forums. If you want to help make Support awesome, stay here.
If your comment is for support, it will be deleted. If it looks like spam, it will be deleted. Sorry, but there’s no other way to keep up with things.
Hi all.
So last week, things seemed to really get kicked off on IRC in regards to 3.7 and 3.8 planning. There’s some really exciting things being talked about and I’m really keen to help out where I can. For 3.7, I’m hoping to help improve the in-line docs throughout core. I think this would fit in nicely with my Support internship, and could potentially lead to my first core contribution. 
On the subject of contributing to core, Helen Hou-Sandí wrote a great blog post on “Trac Gardening” last week. Approaching Trac is pretty daunting for newcomers, but Helen’s outlined a good approach to take with this, and Trac curation is definitely another area of WordPress that I’m going to try and get involved with. For those interested, the blog post can be found here: http://helen.wordpress.com/2013/08/09/scared-of-wordpress-core-trac-but-want-to-give-it-a-shot-try-trac-gardening/
Aside from this, I aim to do some more theme reviews this week, and of course, keep replying to forum threads.
Next week, I’ll be backpacking around Europe, so there will be no blog posts from me for the next two Mondays. Thanks to everyone for all your positive feedback on my internship thus far. Speak to you again in a couple of weeks!
Hello all. So, I’ve passed the mid-point of my internship and am still very much enjoying being part of the WordPress community.
As I’ve said before, providing support for other users is most definitely helping me to increase my own knowledge base, and helping to resolve problems for people is something that makes me feel happy in the process. Outside of the forums, I’ve started getting my head around the trac ticketing system and am now an official part of the theme reviewer team too.
I’m grateful that I get to do something I enjoy so much full-time at the moment, and I’ll try my best to make the most of this last part of my internship.
Today, everyone that’s interning as part of GNOME’s OPW received an email from Marina Zhurakhinskaya, the program’s organiser, to congratulate us on reaching mid-point of our internship periods. I can’t believe how fast the time’s gone! I’ve really enjoyed helping out on the forums so far, and would love to get more involved with other areas of support such as training or docs. If anyone has any tasks that I could help out on, then please do feel free to throw them at me during this second half of my internship. Thanks.
Tl;dr – if you have old chunks of code, the older blockUI check is mathematically wrong, though human-logical correct.
Many plugins have a good/bad check for your version of jQueryUI, and know they have to be newer than 1.2.3 … Which 1.10.x IS but you know how PHP/JS math goes, right? Right. We have some plugins who need to update. Not a WP problem, and not something devs would have logically known to look for.
Annoying, and I’m sure a LOT of plugins are using 3rd party code for this.
The Master List has been updated, but please correct it if I missed anything or got info wrong.
/CC @nacin
If you’re not following the OTHER blogs, 3.6 dropped.
http://wordpress.org/news/2013/08/oscar/
The official OMG post is up: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/troubleshooting-wordpress-36-master-list
Any and all forum moderators have permission, and are encouraged, to edit that and add plugins/themes/problems as we find ‘em. Don’t hesitate to ask me if it’s okay! If you can edit it, see something wrong or know something that needs to be added, Dooooo iiiiiiiiiittt
Thank you.
If you missed @matt being on Reddit, he talked about us. Yes, us support people!
jb510
What individual do you think is the most under recognized contributor to the WordPress community at large?
photomatt
That’s a tough one… I’m going to say the volunteers on the support forums. There are 2M+ posts there, and it’s easy to forget that a huge number of WP users end up in the forums and get help that allows them to use the software when they wouldn’t otherwise be able to.
That’s awesome! High five to everyone.
nice
A quick, quick update on my internship for you. This past week I:
Sounds like a very productive week. And yea for getting accepted to help out with WordCamp Europe!
Thanks so much for your comment. Yes, looks like there’s going to be some really good talks at WC Europe, looking forward to exploring Leiden too.
Hiya! Mika suggested I post a couple of tips for the new folks joining in the forums. Welcome!
Kees Meijer (keesiemeijer) built a tool that displays your profile-page in order of activity. This is extremely useful for viewing all your most recent forum posts where someone other than you replied last. You can also toggle it to hide resolved posts.
http://www.stoerke.be/recentforumactivity/
If you put a Codex topic in double square brackets, it’ll auto-generate a nice text link in your forum reply:
Example:
[[Integrating WordPress with Your Website]]
becomes:
Integrating WordPress with Your Website
Got more tips to share? Add them below!
If the code for the first one is available somewhere, then it might be a viable enhancement request for WordPress.org itself..
…and we have a trac for that. (hint, hint, nudge, nudge, say no more)
The app is available for download at http://www.stoerke.be/recentforumactivity/recentforumactivity.zip
Great tips! Wish I’d known these earlier.
The forums have a table at the Contrib Day and have begun to take over the forums. You’ll see them running around as “Contributor Day Volunteer” so you know that they’re for real.
I’ve paired up people with more experienced forum people, OR two people with some experience but differing levels of tech ability, and tag teamed them to assist
Where did you get them from 
WordCamp SF I bribed them with cookies.
I’ve now answered just over a hundred support topics on the forums. This may not seem a lot to some of the more experienced mods, who seem to be able to answer a hundred in an hour, but we’ve all got to start somewhere and I’m happy with the problems that I’ve helped to solve and with the feedback I’ve received from users.
In addition to this, helping out with support has helped me to increase my knowledge of WordPress, hone my own skills, and of course, has made me really appreciate the WordPress community as a whole. There’s such diversity in people’s disciplines, backgrounds, and skills, I feel that there is something that I could learn from everyone.
A major thing that I will take with me from this internship is that contributing to Core isn’t the only important thing you can do to give back to the community. Support really does play a big part in making WordPress what it is.
One of the first people I met at WordCamp UK last week wasn’t a developer, but a complete beginner to WordPress. She attended Mike Little’s “WordPress for Beginners” talk and went to the Happiness Bar, at the end of the weekend she said she’d gained “the WordPress bug.”
WordPress has always been built with the user in mind, and it’s arguably this that has given it its edge over other open-source CMS solutions in the market. Support plays an important role in helping to maintain this user-focus and in attracting new people to the community. I’m glad to be a part of it.
I’ll be watching the live stream at WCSF this weekend and will be attending the Contributor Day on Sunday via IRC. Hope all of you who are lucky enough to attend in person have fun, and I look forward to seeing what comes out of the Contributor Day.
Just wondering, do you moderate too?
Hey. Only just saw this sorry! I don’t do as much moderation as I could. I’ll try to do a bit more in the future.
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