Join the WordPress Full-Site Editing Outreach program

Anne McCarthy, developer relations wrangler for the open-source WordPress project, spearheads the Full-Site Editing experimental Outreach program.

The goal of the program is to get all the new tools for full-site editing that are coming to WordPress in the near future into the hands of site builders and implementers for testing and feedback.

Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow!

Linus’ Law by Eric S. Raymond

In this short video, McCarthy explains the program and answer a few questions.

The hope is that you, dear reader and listener, will seize the opportunity to contribute and get a look behind the scenes and share your experiences with the Gutenberg developer team.

I joined a few calls for testing. It was great fun to learn more how the new Site Editor works and push the limits of the user interface. Sometimes it felt a little rough around the edges and I got lost a few times. I found my struggles and confusions, in the feedback summaries and quite a few bugs were found and squashed because of the people testing.

Use the comment section below, to let us know what you think or if you have questions we can answer.

Transcript:

Anne McCarthy
Anne McCarthy

Howdy. My name is Anne McCarthy. I’m a Developer Relations Wrangler working for Automattic. I want to share a bit today about the Full Site Editing outreach program.

This is a program that I’m currently working on building out, so I hope by the end you feel compelled to join in on the fun. But let’s jump into some big picture questions, and know, I welcome questions as well in the comments below. I’ll also link to some resources.

What is the Full-Site Editing Outreach program?

So to start what is it? As the name suggests, it’s a program focused on Full Site Editing. Full Site Editing is a major part of phase two of Gutenberg right now.

Currently, it’s in the form of a Slack channel in the wordpress.org slack community with

  • Curated calls for testing,
  • feedback summary posts, and
  • various educational opportunities, like
  • live streams of people building block themes or
  • hallway hangouts, where we talk about Full Site Editing related issues.

What is the Goal of the FSE Outreach Program?

The goal is to ultimately help improve the Full Site Editing experience by gathering feedback from people who use WordPress, specifically WordPress site builders. But while the group was originally started solely to focus on this feedback loop, there’s actually a really neat education component in place where people can join in to start building your own awareness and understanding of what’s to come as well as share what they’re working on and what problems they’re running into.

Why was it started?

It was started originally in May 2020, with about 100 people who signed up to participate. It was intended to help create better engagement with users to get better feedback to developers more seamlessly, especially for change as big as those being brought on with Full Site Editing, it felt important to create a new pathway. And this was also a big lesson that was learned with WordPress 5.0 that we wanted to make better.

What happens in the Program?

As mentioned, there are calls for testing that happen every couple of weeks, followed by a summary post, which I’ll share links to later. And interspersed between that there are things like calls for questions where we’ll do a call for questions, people can submit their questions, and then I’ll go through and find answers for all of them to share the answers openly.

And there’s also some hallway hangouts. There’s also some different educational opportunities and opportunities to give ad-hoc feedback. So for example, launching soon is going to be a survey asking folks who have built things with theme.json to share what they’d like to see in the future.

Do I need to be technical to join?

So this is something I hear a lot is what level of technical ability do I need to have in order to participate in this? So to kind of give you a lay of the land, this is what we typically need for each testing flow.

  • You need to be able to set up a test site,
  • you need to be able to be using the latest version of WordPress, so you know how to update things and keep things up to date,
  • you need to use the Gutenberg plugin, which is just a matter of installing and activating the plug in, and
  • you need to use the TT1 blocks theme.

Otherwise, you don’t need to be hyper technical to join this, we will not be going into code most of the time.

Most calls for testing are very much end user-friendly and site builder friendly. So if this resonates, this feels like something you can do, I highly encourage you to join in.

How to join?

So it’s very simple, you dive into Make Slack and head to the FSE outreach experiment channel #fse-outreach-experiment, which you can see here. And from there, you’re all set.

You just pay attention to pings from yours truly.

And if you’d like you can subscribe to the Make Test blog is that’s where I post both the calls for testing and any other sorts of check ins.

So let’s say you want to learn more and kind of actually see some of the stuff that we’ve done.

Resources to learn more

Here are the different links that you can follow. And I’ll drop these in the description of this video. But there’s the testing calls and summaries, the hallway hangouts, and the Q and A’s.

Stay connected!

Finally, if you want to stay connected with me, I’m @annezazu You can also find me at nomad.blog.

I really hope you join the program if this resonated at all and if you are someone who uses WordPress on a regular basis to build sites for yourself or others.

I really hope you join because we do need your feedback to make this a success.

And WordPress is all about the community, and I’d love to continue to grow that community. Hope to hear from you soon and hope to see you join.

Note: Feel free to leave your questions in the comment section below. I will get them to Anne McCarthy for answers. — Birgit

Featured Image: Justin Tadlock’s exploration for the FSE Call for Testing #4

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1 Comment

Thank you for this wonderful write up and all you do to help with the outreach program <3