On today’s episode we are going to talk about different ways to contribute to WordPress as a designer, right here on Your Website Engineer Podcast, episode No. 359.

Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler and today we’ve got a jammed packed show for you. We’ve got five different pieces of announcements. We got one plug-in to share with you and then tons of different ways to contribute to WordPress as a designer. We’ve been doing this over the last couple of weeks. Episode No. 358, we talked as a developer how you can contribute and 357 how we can contribute as a blogger. Today, we are going to dive right in as a designer.

But first, let’s go ahead and take a look at the announcements. The first piece of news that I wanna share with you comes over from WP Tavern, and it’s reporting on WordPress 4.9. That’s actually in beta 2 this week. It basically says that 4.9 will protect users from fatal errors created in themes and plug-in editors. Have you ever played with code inside a WordPress dashboard? Under Appearance and then Editor, or Plug-ins and Editor, you can actually go in and you can modify or add code directly to themes or plug-ins right in the WordPress dashboard. In the past, if you’ve done this and you accidently forget a semicolon or you don’t close a PHP bracket or something along those lines, it’s going to give you a fatal error and you won’t be able to log back into your WordPress site. Then you have to go to your C panel. You have to get into your file manager, go via FTP, and it’s kind of a big pain. It’s really not fun at all.

What they’re thinking about in WordPress 4.9 is creating a way that if a fatal error happens, to not actually save it or revert the code to the previous last version and then highlight what may be wrong and how to fix that before you actually save the code and corrupt your entire site. There’s a whole article on that on WP Tavern. You can go ahead and check that out and look for that in the show notes for episode No. 359.

Another thing that’s happened this week in the world of Woo is WooCommerce 3.2 has been released and 3.2.1, as well. It adds the ability to apply coupons as an admin and introduces pre-update version checks for extensions. Those are the two big features that come from WordPress 3.2. The big one is if you create a manual order, and you create a manual order through the dashboard, a lot of people do this, surprisingly. They’ll take phone orders or they will – that’s mainly the thing. Or if somebody comes into their store they’ll create an order right there on their dashboard and they will go and they’ll say, “Okay, I put this item and this item and this item in the cart,” but they would like to use a coupon code and you wanna track that coupon code. You could never do that or it would never automatically calculate the order after adding the coupon. That has been added in WooCommerce 3.2.

Another thing that you will see new in WooCommerce 3.2 is this extension support version check that’s prior to core updates. You’ll see at the bottom of – I guess when you go to the WordPress plug-ins area you’ll see WooCommerce. You’ll see that there is a new version of WooCommerce available. It will say WooCommerce 3.2 is available. Then it will say underneath it, it says “Heads up! The versions of the following plug-ins haven’t been tested with the latest version of WooCommerce.” It may say WooCommerce GIF plug-in or WooCommerce Stripe or WooCommerce USPS. It’ll put that information right below WooCommerce so before you hit that update button that you’ll know that there may some plug-ins that don’t work well with this new version of WooCommerce.

That is nice, and then there’s also a feature now with WooCommerce.com adds new subscription sharing features. This means that if you have purchased extensions on WooCommerce.com you can now take advantage of a new subscription sharing feature that allows you to specify additional sites via a WooCommerce.com email address where the extension or key can be active. This is very, very useful for agencies, developers, multi-site owners, whoever now goes and purchases. No longer do you need to have your client go and purchase your extensions on WooCommerce. You can go ahead and – you can do that as a WordPress developer, and then you can give access to certain websites, all within WooCommerce.com. There was more than 1600 commits with 98 contributors for WordPress – WooCommerce, that is, 3.2. If you haven’t updated I definitely recommend checking out WooCommerce 3.2 and .1 because that’s the latest version.

Moving right along, I’ve got a series in the show notes for GO WCUS, it’s called. It’s a YouTube series. It is about a 20 minutes episode that comes out every Friday leading up to WordCamp US. It started streaming on September 1st was the first episode. Basically, it’s just going through and sharing some information about Nashville, talking about the community bazaar. They’re talking about how to submit speaker submissions. That’s already been taking place. But then there’s also – let’s see. They’re talking about the happy hour scene in Nashville. They’re talking about the music scene. And they’re talking about restaurants in Nashville. If you’re heading to WordCamp US in Nashville in December and you wanna know a little bit more about Nashville, the place that you’re traveling to, I highly recommend checking out these episodes. Again, they’re right around 19 to 23 minutes and you can find out some great information about the city of Nashville.

I’ve been kind of watching the one – picking the ones that I want as I will be heading to WordCamp US. I’m really excited. It’s my first WordCamp US and since it’s close enough to drive, I’ll be driving down from Ohio. That is WordCamp US and the playlist that’s there on YouTube.

Next up comes from WordPress.com. This is an update to Gravatar. You can update that avatar on your WordPress.com site. This used to be powered by a service call Gravatar. It is the image that represents you online, so that thumbnail appearance appears on your name across the Internet that uses the Gravatar image. Now you can do this on WordPress.com. You don’t have to go to Gravatar.com. You can go to WordPress.com and you can start changing your images there. It’s basically just in your – you go to WordPress.com/me. Click on your profile icon in the top right hand corner of the screen. You’ll see the Edit screen. You can go and you can pick your image and then you can actually align it and figure out where exactly you want it. You can even rotate or flip or crop, all before you set this as your Gravatar picture. Then that will propagate across the Web and anywhere that uses Gravatar or a WordPress.com log you’ll have your brand new image.

I actually did this a few weeks ago. I did it before I knew this was a real thing but it was super easy and super slick, and I now have an updated orange picture for all of my profiles across the Web, wearing orange as that is my favorite, for sure.

Then lastly, what I wanna share with you is a conference that’s coming up. It’s starting on Thursday or Friday of this week, October 19th. This is a two-day conference and it is called WooConf. It’s happening out in Seattle, Washington. I’ve got a link to the schedule if you’re interested in going or if you are going. I know that it is a premium WooCommerce event. It is one of those ones that’s – it’s not like a WordCamp. It’s not a $30.00 event. It’s $300.00, $400.00, $500.00 to get into the space. I went last year and it was a really great – it was a great conference, and it was just really high end. There’s so much information. I was very overwhelmed with all the information there. And I work in WooCommerce support. I see issues every single day.

Some of these sessions are looking really, really good. You’ve got the – Tod Wilkins, who’s the head of WooCommerce, will be giving the opening, keynote speaker. Then there’s just a bunch of – there’s a few automaticians that are giving presentations. But we’re talking about scaling WooCommerce, giving clients the moon, how to test things in WooCommerce. We’re talking about how to buy or customize or extend a plug-in. We’re talking all kinds of things. If you are interested in that, definitely check out WooConf.com. For more information you can see the show notes for episode No. 359.

In the Is There a Plug-in for That section, this is one that I just absolutely had to pick. It is a very new plug-in. It doesn’t have a lot of installs, but man, it has probably the coolest name when it comes to a WordPress plug-in. The name of the plug-in is called Correct Horse Battery Staple. That means absolutely nothing, it is very funny. That’s the name of it and it means absolutely nothing. You can’t really understand what the plug-in does just by that name. This plug-in is a plug-in that replaces WordPress’s default strong password generator with one that creates passwords in a style very similar to those described in the XKCD password strength comic. I have a link to that in the show notes, as well. This allows passwords to be generated on the Add New User and the Your Profile admin pages.

Basically, what this does is instead of the random character generator that is built into WordPress, this will generate a four-word password, like correct-horse-battery-staple, using words up to seven letters with dashes in between words. There’s a study that’s saying how hard this is to actually guess. If you have four words, random words, it’s 44 bits of entropy is millions of – 550 years of guesses at a thousand guesses per second, is how it comes out to be. It’s very well – it’s very secure, but it makes it that much difficult for somebody to hack in. But it makes it easy for somebody to remember. You could remember correct-horse-battery-staple. You put a dash between each one of those and that could be a very, very, very strong password.

That is the plug-in that I wanna share with you this week. If you want to make it easier for people logging into your sites to have a password they may remember, as not everyone is using a password manager, then this would be the correct one for you. It’s called Correct Horse Battery Staple.

Moving right along, let’s talk about how we can contribute to WordPress as a designer. This month, we’re just diving into this. We’re looking at different types of genres of contributing and how to get involved in the WordPress community and the WordPress project. A lot of people think that you have to be able to write code to contribute back to WordPress but, in fact, you do not. We talked about, last week, some ways that you could actually write code if you were a developer. But two weeks ago and this week we’re gonna talk about a lot of different ways that require no code whatsoever. Let’s go ahead and they’re in no particular order. They’re in the order that I thought of them. Let’s go ahead and just dive right in.

The first one is you can contribute in – or you can participate in a contributor day and design things. I don’t know exactly what needs to be designed on WordPress.com or WordPress.org or WordCamp.org, the website. There’s tons of stuff that needs work done, and if you go to a contributor day, there’s always a designer track. They can always use an extra set of hands, extra set of eyes to mock things up, draw things out, or even create a real rendering of something. That’s the first one.

Another thing that you can do is you can create mockups for open issues in WordPress. Sometimes there is an open issue that maybe some people don’t understand what the person that had brought the ticket up. Maybe they don’t know what that means or how that works. You can go and create a quick sketch, like “I think this is the right way to do it.” Or give some feedback, like “I don’t really like this and I think this is a better way to lay out this UI.” That’s a way that you can do that.

Another thing you could do is you could join the design channel in WordPress Slack. Last week, we talked about the core channel in WordPress Slack. There is a design channel in WordPress Slack, and you can go in there and you can voice your opinions and share your information and share things and knowledge that you’ve learned over the years and years and years of being a designer, and just share that with the community.

Like I said last week, it’s really kind of cool. You can put your mark on history, in a sense. We’re talking about 80 million websites using WordPress, which is getting close to 30 percent of the Web. Any change, especially that is done to WordPress itself, that’s gonna get seen by millions and millions and millions of people. That is something that you can do: get in the design channel in Slack and just voice your opinions, and help draw that conversation out and help the conversation move forward.

Another thing you can do is you can volunteer on one of the WordPress.org design teams. There are plenty of them out there, even the Meta team and all the other subsets of teams. Almost every one of them need designers to design things. I know that designing is probably my weakest suit. I am not very good at designing, whatsoever, so I always can appreciate a really good design. All of those projects, all of those things that we want to accomplish that need to be accomplished within the WordPress community, they need designers. They need people to put the pixels in the right places to make sure that everything is exactly perfect. That is another thing that you can do: get involved with one of the design teams.

You can also lend your service to local meet-up groups or WordCamps. I know that we have, in the Dayton area, we have a designer that is absolutely awesome, and she does all the design work for WordCamps. She does some work for our WordPress meetup group and whatnot. It is just phenomenal. She spends extra time, she builds websites, and she designs things and she can help out in the WordPress community by creating the t-shirt design and the logo for WordCamp and all of the visuals; that’s the layout for the programs or the badges, the schedule of events. All of that stuff, the signs, all of that needs design by somebody that can take the logos and do cool renderings and do all that kind of stuff. So, you can lend your services to that local WordCamp or local meetup and really lend out a hand. That would be awesome.

Another thing that you can do, and this one is kind of a serve yourself type thing, but if you see something in WordPress that just drives you crazy, you can submit a ticket and create a fix for it. Maybe you don’t like the way the buttons are laid out or maybe the menus and the fab icons don’t line up perfectly. Or maybe – there’s hundreds and hundreds of little details that go into WordPress. Maybe there are some things that you just don’t like. Go ahead and write in a ticket. Figure out how to fix it and then fix it. Then you don’t have to look at it anymore and millions of other people don’t need to look at it anymore, either.

This one was mentioned last week, but you can always improve the WordPress mobile app. That just means start using the mobile app. What can you do? What does it look like? How does it work? What features don’t you like? You can always go in – you’re not necessarily creating mockups but you can create mockups. “I think this button should be over here” or “This button should be a little bigger” or “Why is this like this?” If you have a professional eye in the design realm, bring up those questions and concerns. There are people that will listen and it will help the overall community out at large. A better WordPress app or a better mobile experience is going to better for, like I say, millions and millions of people, which is another thing. So, keep an eye on the mobile apps.

This one was mentioned last week, as well, but train and teach others. That one was geared towards your setups, your systems, how you build WordPress plug-ins, how you build themes, things along those lines. But in this case, for designers, teach about design. How can you teach people how to use Photoshop, how to use Illustrator? How do you design something and then export it for the Web? There’s a bunch of things that you, as a designer, do daily that somebody like me has no idea how to do. It’s the hardest thing in the world for me to take a Photoshop file, modify it, and then export it to the right size or dimension or frame or whatever. That’s not one of my skillsets. But I always love learning from a designer or just watching him use Photoshop; it just blows my mind how powerful the program is and how quick and efficient you can be at it. That’s something you can do: teach and train others.

You can build a theme for the WordPress repository. If you like designing themes as a designer, you can go in and you can build a theme for the repository. Build that. Even if you don’t hand-code that or turn that into a WordPress theme, you can design it and then you can meet up with a developer or find somebody in the WordPress community that can turn that Photoshop mockup into a live site or into a live template, and then go from there and start building that into WordPress. Give that back to the community and say, “Here’s one of my designs. Let millions of people use it.”

And then the last thing that I thought of is you could study design trends and voice these opinions to the WordPress team. I know that there’s so much that changes all the time when it comes to design your own. Remember we used to like having skew morphisism, which was everything needs to look like the own physical objects. Then we had buttons that were rounded, and then buttons that were square, and then buttons that had 3-D effects to them. We had all kinds of things. We had the scrolling text across the website. So many things were wrong and so many things have changed in the last 20 years when it comes to the Web. We’re getting more minimalistic and our thoughts are changing and our fonts are getting bigger. We’re more into accessibility when it comes to the Web and all of these pieces of the puzzle. If you stay up on design trends and study that industry and study that area of the Web that is a great place to voice those opinions and bring those opinions back to the WordPress community.

Those were all the ideas that I had as a designer. I’ve got one more show for you next week and we’re gonna talk about how to – what you can do a website owner: how you can own that and how you can contribute back to WordPress as a WordPress owner, a WordPress website owner.

That’s what I wanna share with you today. I do wanna wrap up and say thank you to folks up in Ann Arbor for an amazing WordCamp last weekend. It was so much fun. Friday was a great day. They had a half-day WordCamp on Friday and then actually some activities in the afternoon, which was different. It was pretty cool. I ended up getting to play flag football on one of the University of Michigan’s legit practice fields. It was one of those rubberized fields. I had those little rubber specks everywhere for the next couple days, in my shoes, in my socks. But it was a lot of fun. Got to spend some time with some quality WordPress people and learn from the community, hang out there. And I volunteered my time and just gave back to the community by answering questions and giving a couple talks and just spreading the knowledge or WordPress.

In anything that you do this week, try to find a way to give back to the WordPress community, in a small way, in a big way. Try to give back and find opportunities that need work or need fixed, and you can go ahead and do that yourself or find somebody that can.

That’s what I wanna share with you this week. Take care and we’ll talk again soon. Bye bye.