The meeting was conducted on #meta channel of the Make WordPress Slack and on Matrix in the room #meta:community.wordpress.org in parallel. This was enabled by our new Slack/Matrix bridge (see below).
First, the most important takeaways from today’s meeting:
- The Matrix server is now live at community.wordpress.org and you can start chatting there! Login works via your WordPress.org account.
- The Slack bridge is active in all public channels so you can join conversations from either side.
- For some rooms the history is already imported (for example, the meta room or a number of archived Slack channels), for others we’ll continue to import them over the coming week.
In the meeting itself, we first summarized important points from the previous meetings:
Login to the community.wordpress.org Matrix server has been implemented using Single Sign On (SSO) with WordPress.org using OpenID Connect (OIDC). The plugin we created is open source and can also be found in the WordPress.org plugin directory as OpenID Connect Server.
Compared to Slack this means a vastly simplified onboarding process. Instead of waiting for an e-mail arriving at a special e-mail address, you set the server in your Matrix client to community.wordpress.org and click “Login with WordPress.org” (the name of that button might vary by client).
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You can use any Matrix client (that supports SSO) in order to adapt the chat experience to your liking. Examples of client include on Desktop: Element, Cinny, Hydrogen, Thunderbird, Mobile: Fluffychat, Element, soon to come: Element X.
As another way to access Matrix, we’ve created a Gutenberg block that hosts an in-page Matrix client, called Chatrix. It can be added to P2 pages or posts to add a Matrix chat there and when you’re logged in to WordPress.org, joining the chat is a matter of going to that page and proceeding with SSO inside the block (which, the first time, will redirect you to authorize the login). An example of this can be found at https://make.wordpress.org/meta/chat/.
Slack Bridge
We’ve enabled the Slack bridge on all public channels, and we’re gradually importing Slack history to Matrix. For some channels, like #meta, this has already completed.
As part of the history migration, you’ll be automatically invited to rooms on Matrix when you have joined the channel on the Slack side. You’ll also be autmatically invited to the respective Matrix rooms if you said something on Slack in the channel since we started the bridge earlier this week.
DMs are not part of the bridge, so on Matrix you can DM people but you’ll only get a response if they also use Matrix.
Private channels are not bridged at this point either but it will likely be possible to bridge them. In one of the next meetings we’ll discuss that.
You Can Try It Today
So, please go and start trying to use Matrix today and give us feedback!
The simplest ways to do so are either to go to https://make.wordpress.org/meta/chat/, or to go to Element and enter community.wordpress.org as a server.
We’re planning to do some more wide-scale announcements after this has been running stable for a while. If you have any questions, please ask them in the comments!