For any business owner, freelancer, entrepreneur, or anyone interesting in building an online business or side gig. This free webinar from WordPress.com web design pros (YouTube) will teach you tips on site design, SEO, monetization, and mobile optimization.
Two weeks ago, my colleague Marjorie asked if I’d be interested in helping run a webinar for small businesses, with tips on getting the most out of their website. She knew I’d done a lot of public speaking and thought I might be interested. Even though we wouldn’t have a lot of time to prepare, it took me all of three seconds to accept.
Fast forward to yesterday, when my colleague Steve Dixon and I presented a one-hour online workshop called Optimize Your Business Website: Secrets from Web Design Pros. Topics included essential pages for business sites, layout templates, the WordPress block editor, and what it takes to optimize a site so it’s both easy to find in search engines – and easy for visitors to use. We also looked at how to make sure your site is both accessible and mobile-friendly, along with a few different ways to…
Yet another way to contribute! Remember this 20-piece WordPress contribution chart with the tester Easter Egg? Even though testing is growing stronger in WordPress core with each release, it’s still mostly manual — usability, visual regression, accessibility, and beta testing with real sites before launch.
Now the tide is turning a bit more toward automation. I’m beyond thrilled to see this!
Tide is a new software test automation project kicking off in WordPress core.
Announced at WCUS 2017Tide is: “A path to better code across the WordPress ecosystem” — tools to run automated tests for all themes and plugins in the WordPress official directories.
Tide, a project started here at XWP and supported by Google, Automattic, and WP Engine, aims to equip WordPress users and developers to make better decisions about the plugins and themes they install and build.
Tide is a service, consisting of an API, Audit Server, and Sync Server, working in tandem to run a series of automated tests against the WordPress.org plugin and theme directories. Through the Tide plugin, the results of these tests are delivered as an aggregated score in the WordPress admin that represents the overall code quality of the plugin or theme. A comprehensive report is generated, equipping developers to better understand how they can increase the quality of their code.
Once up and running these automated tests would update the plugin and theme description with a status and score so everyone knows whether they pass the tests or not, from PHP version compatibility to the quality of the “front-end output.”
The Tide project is now officially moved over to the WordPress project. See the related story on WP Tavern for a longer history. And, if you’re curious like me about the tech “innards” — take a look at the source code on GitHub.
Screenshot of the Tide API plugin code on GitHub.
I love the genesis of the name:
…inspired by the proverb ‘A rising tide lifts all boats,’ thinking that if a tool like this could lower the barrier of entry to good quality code for enough developers, it could lift the quality of code across the whole WordPress ecosystem.” Rob Stinson
One key to success: Tide makes it super easy for developers to identify weaknesses in their code — and learn how to fix them. It’s not just about getting a high score or to ranking better against a minimum requirement. It’ll teach us all to improve. I love that.
If you use and love WordPress, this is must-watch TV: Gutenberg showcased during the annual State of the Word including a bit of amazing live editing by Matías Ventura. We’ll be seeing much more in 2018, and as everyone starts testing it more — the team improves it daily and progress ramps up — and eventually it comes to the rest of the world via an official WordPress release.
To get involved with Gutenberg, head over to GitHub for design and development, follow along with team updates on Make WordPress, and — of course install the plugin and start using it if you haven’t already.
Technical update from my colleague Alister for how WordPress.com uses automated tests for build confidence, now running for on GitHub pull requests instead of after deployment to production. The tests and webhook “bridge” infrastructure are open source just like the Calypso source code itself.
At WordPress.com we strive to provide a consistent and reliable user experience as we merge and release hundreds of code changes each week.
We run automated unit and component tests for our Calypso user interface on every commit against every pull request (PR).
We also have 32 automated end-to-end (e2e) test scenarios that, until recently, we would only automatically run across our platform after merging and deploying to production. While these e2e scenarios have found regressions fairly quickly after deploying (the 32 scenarios execute in parallel in just 10 minutes), they don’t prevent us from merging and releasing regressions to our customer experience.
Introducing our Canaries
Earlier this year we decided to identify three of our 32 automated end-to-end test scenarios that would act as our “canaries”: a minimal subset of automated tests to quickly tell us if our most important flows are broken. These tests execute after a pull…
If you’re on the East Coast and love WordPress, here’s a great chance to catch my Automattic colleague Scott Stancil speaking live about our work on Flow Patrol for WordPress.com — this Friday July 14, 2017 at 2:15 PM Eastern.
Want to contribute to WordPress apps on Android and iOS? If you aren’t a developer or designer, no worries, we need your help as a tester. Anyone and everyone is welcome to pitch in — all you need is a keen eye and a iOS or Android phone or tablet.
Head over to Make WordPress Mobile and subscribe to receive email updates. Notice certain posts are titled “Call for Testing” — that’s where you can jump in, read the testing notes, and test the new beta versions on your device.
For both iOS and Android there’s a one-time step to join as a beta tester via TestFlight or Google Play Store. After you join, you’ll have access to download and use — and test — the latest and greatest versions of the WordPress apps before they are available to the public.
I am very pleased to announce that all of our e2e tests for the WordPress.com platform are open source as of this morning. This is following in the footsteps of the WordPress.com Calypso front-end which is also open source. I am continually reminded of how fortunate I am to work at Automattic who takes pride in its commitment […]
What would we build if we were starting from scratch today, knowing all we’ve learned over the past 13 years of building WordPress?
Matt today officially announced the new WordPress.com: Dance to Calypso.
Today we’re announcing something brand new, a new approach to WordPress, and open sourcing the code behind it. The project, codenamed Calypso, is the culmination of more than 20 months of work by dozens of the most talented engineers and designers I’ve had the pleasure of working with (127 contributors with over 26,000 commits!).
I’m incredibly proud to be part of this effort. API-driven, JavaScript-based, responsive design, and now open source.
The Sensible Leader 