Hello friends,
Welcome to the December edition of our meetup organizer newsletter! Read on to discover some exciting updates and resources from the WordPress community.
Newsletter contents
- State of the Word 2020
- WordPress 5.6 release
- Learn WordPress
- Online event updates
- News and updates
State of the Word 2020
Mark your calendars for the 2020 State of the Word – the annual keynote address of WordPress given by project co-founder, Matt Mullenweg. The event will be streamed on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter on Thursday 17 December 2020, at 16:00 UTC and will have live captioning in multiple languages. Meetup groups around the world are encouraged to host watch parties to celebrate this year’s WordPress accomplishments together!
Want to ask Matt a question at the State of the Word? Record a video question on your phone or computer in landscape format, and include your name and how you use WordPress in the video. Then, upload the video as an unlisted video on your favorite video hosting site, and send a link to: [email protected].
The deadline to send in your question is 11 December, so don’t delay!
WordPress 5.6 is out!
The latest major WordPress release – version 5.6 “Simone”, came out on 8 December 2020. The release ships with a new default theme: Twenty Twenty One, and offers features like greater layout flexibility, more block patterns, video captioning support, auto-updates, beta-compatibility for PHP 8.0, application password support for the REST API, updates to jQuery, among others. You can find more information in the field guide.
For sites which uses jQuery, to ensure a smooth transition, use the Test jQuery updates plugin to check your site for errors before you update. If you find errors with your site, you can use the jQuery migrate plugin.
The Marketing Team is pulling together resources (Questions and Answers, social media posts you can use, slides, and images) to help meetup groups with WordPress 5.6 outreach. You can find these resources in the Team’s GitHub repository in the coming week. Reach out to the #marketing Slack channel for more details.
Learn WordPress is launching soon!
Learn WordPress, the new online, on-demand WordPress training platform, is close to launch has been officially launched! Are you looking for a fun, different way to connect with your local WordPress meetup group? You can ask participants to watch a Learn WordPress workshop and organize a discussion group based on it for your meetup. Or you can simply schedule a watch party based on a workshop and arrange a quick discussion based on the same. Want to help make Learn WordPress more successful? You can apply to organize workshops and discussion groups. Can you help promote Learn WordPress? Contact the Marketing Team for materials.
Online event updates
Use the #OnlineWPMeetup hashtag to promote your online WordPress meetups! You can find all the upcoming online meetups around the globe at: https://make.wordpress.org/community/events/online/.
Don’t forget to use this opportunity to find participants across the world for your meetups too. If you need help with promoting your meetup, reach out to the Marketing Team in the #marketing Slack channel.
Online WordCamp updates
- WordCamp Mexico Online was held from 25-28 November 2020. Check out the event website to catch up with the recorded live stream. Videos of the camp will soon be available on WordPress.tv. Don’t forget to catch up the forthcoming online WordCamps:
- WordCamp Sevilla 2020 (26-29 December 2020)
- WordCamp India 2021 (30-31 January, 6-7 February, and 14-15 February 2021)
Featured Meetup: WordPress Sofia Meetup
The WordPress Sofia meetup group has been organizing lectures, workshops, and themed community meetups to facilitate community connections, even during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a lockdown was enforced in Bulgaria, the meetup group pivoted online with sessions to support the community, including COVID-19 tips, finding customers from home, email marketing, community development from home, and more. These sessions were held on Zoom and uploaded to YouTube. The group continued their experiments with online events — community members showcased their homes/workplaces during their summer meetups — and they invited members from the larger WordPress community to their other meetups. The group continues to meet online twice a month, and record and upload their meetups to YouTube.
Reimagining the work of the Diverse Speaker Training group
The Diversity Speaker Training group of the Community team wants your feedback on how they can reimagine their work in light of the ongoing world changes this year and in 2021. Please share your feedback as comments on the post by 18 December 2020.
News and updates
Meetup organizers can now request Community Zoom Pro accounts for their local meetup events! In order to get a Zoom Pro account for your meetup, submit a request using the zoom requests form at least a week before your event.
- The Community Team has opened up a discussion on returning to safe in-person events in 2021. Please share your thoughts in the comments.
- There will be a program-wide payment and contract intermission from 19 December 2020 to 3 January 2021 due to the holidays. Please submit any sponsorship invoices and payment requests to WordCamp Central outside of these dates.
- You can now submit your votes to select Community Team representatives!
- Have any suggestions for the 2021 WordPress Community Team goals? Share them with us in the comments on this blog post!
If you have any questions, Community Team deputies are available to help. Please send an email to [email protected] or join the #community-events Slack channel. Thanks for everything you do to grow the WordPress community. Let’s keep sharing knowledge and inspiring each other with our contributions!
We will see you online soon!
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The following people contributed to this edition of the Meetup newsletter: @andreamiddleton @angelasjin and @webcommsat