Getting Started with a WordPress.org Account

▶️ @00:00:00: Welcome everyone to this online workshop brought to you by learn WordPress.org dot.

This workshop focuses on getting started with a WordPress. org account

▶️ Courtney PK: This is getting started with a WordPress.org account and so what we’ll be doing today, we’re going to tour the different parts of a WordPress.org profile. I’m going to attempt to demonstrate how to create an account live on WordPress.org dot and if we have time we can help or I can help you create your own account on WordPress.org if you don’t have one yet. And to set expectations, I’d also like to mention what we won’t be covering today. We won’t be covering setting up a WordPress site or any support with WordPress site issues. I know that the term workshop kind of gives you the impression that we’re going to be working on something, but it’s the term that we use for any of these like live presentations, whether they’re interactive or not.

▶️ @00:01:08: So this is more of a presentation and a demonstration of a WordPress.org account. And if that’s not what you were expecting, that’s okay if you need to drop out. Okay, so what can you do with a WordPress.org account? This is an overview of what we can do with WordPress.org accounts, but I’ll be going into each of these points in more detail. You can post on the WordPress support forums, you can rate and review themes and plugins. You can join the making WordPress slack, which is the chat that we use, and you can track your activity and contributions to the WordPress open source project.

A WordPress. org profile includes a bio and employer information

▶️ @00:02:03: I’m going to give you a little tour of what a WordPress.org profile looks like. So I’m going to go over the different elements of the profile. So first of all, I’ll just show you mine for starters. So you’ll notice that a WordPress.org profile has following information, so it has your photo if you choose to share one. And the name of your WordPress.org account is first. So mine is Courtney PK and also on Slack. That’s my username there as well. It can include a bio as long or as short as you’d like. So a little bit about you that you can include. It could also include your interests, which I didn’t add here, but yeah, it could just basically be as much as you want to share about yourself.

▶️ @00:03:03: You can also include some general information and employer information that you’ll see on the right hand side here. Again, as much or as little information as you’d like. And then also if you contribute to the WordPress open source project. It shows, you know, if you’re sponsored, so I’m sponsored by automatic and the teams and contributions that I’ve made are below. So you see all these badges that are earned by an individual when they contribute to the project. And something else that you’ll notice, I don’t contribute to the polyglots or the translation team. So something you’ll notice on profiles that do translations, that there will be a list of the translations that they’ve done.

▶️ @00:04:04: I’ll show you an example. My colleague Ben, who lives in Japan, does japanese translations. So you’ll see here under where we also have the activity tab. The translation tab shows what translations that the person has contributed to. We’ll go back to my profile here, just to show you like there’s an activity feed of the kind of, well, activity that I’ve had across the WordPress project. It’ll also include posts that I’ve made or comments on team blogs, the comments that I’ve made on the support forums, and any core WordPress core metatrack activity. So it’s a nice place to see all of your accomplishments here.

▶️ @00:05:05: What else? So a profile also reveals your plugin and theme contributions. I think a good place to see that is on Matt Mullenweg’s profile is the co founder of WordPress. So you’ll see here the same area where we had activity under plugins. You can see all the plugins that a person has worked on. You can also favorite your favorite plugins, kind of like bookmarking or harding them in a way, and it’ll save it under the favorites tab here. So it’s a good place for you to refer to if you wanted to keep track of certain plugins. And I think that is a good overview of what a profile looks like.

Where are WordPress. org profiles used? First, you can post on support forums

▶️ @00:06:01: So next, where are profiles used? So I mentioned this very briefly at the beginning. See, we have someone joining us and we’ll let them in. So where are profiles used? Where are WordPress.org profiles used? First, you’ll notice that you can, when you have a profile on WordPress.org, you can post on the support forums. The support forums are where you can ask the community for help with all sorts of WordPress related topics. So having a profile on WordPress.org will give you the ability to post here. And when you navigate to the support forums, you’ll be prompted to log in where you can create review and support requests. If you click on the usernames in these locations, it leads to viewing that person’s profile.

▶️ @00:07:04: So remember that your activity is visible on your profile. So I have a couple of screenshots here to show you what the forums look like. So if you ever have any questions about using WordPress, or if you have any issues that you’re running into, you can go to this link here and related with your WordPress.org account. You can also rate and review themes and plugins on the reviews forum. So it looks very similar to the support forum. But yeah, this is specifically for posting reviews for WordPress themes and plugins. I’ll share a link to that in the chat as well.

▶️ @00:08:00: So when viewing a plugin the authors will be attributed. So you’ll see on this example the hello Dolly plugin that says by Matt Mullenweg. When you click on the name there, that’ll bring you to that person’s profile. And yeah, you’ll also see at the bottom of this screenshot here that it shows the contributors and developers to a plugin. And again, that goes back to those profiles on WordPress.org dot. Our activity within WordPress.org is tied to our profiles, invisible for everyone to follow. So this includes tracking one’s contributions to WordPress on your profile. Badges are added based on your contributions to the WordPress project. So there are two kinds of badges, contributor badges and team badges.

▶️ @00:09:00: The contributor badges are generally assigned to anyone who has contributed to a particular team. Meanwhile, the team badges are given to those who are active on their team, and so each team sets its own criteria for who gets the badges. But if you do contribute to the team, you will be awarded badges like these and you’ll see it on your profile. Contributor team posts use profiles in a few places. So when I talk about contributor team posts, that is the blog for every contributor team that works on the WordPress open source project. So from WordPress.org comma you can go to there’s a tab that’s like get involved or I think it’s under this community menu here. You can navigate to a particular team site. And so when someone posts on one of these blogs, you’ll see that their name here is at the top of the post and you can click on that to see their profile whenever they comment on a post that will also be linked.

▶️ @00:10:15: And sometimes when people mention you in a post, just like on other WordPress sites, you will see a link to that person’s profile. So this is an example post that I am using here. But yeah, all of the WordPress teams have blogs like this and you can access people’s profiles when they post. And another way that WordPress.org profile is used are on core meta plugin and theme track. So that will all reference profiles. So see here a ticket on the core track, someone that someone submitted and you’ll see the author name.

▶️ @00:11:01: And when you’re logged in you also see your own profile at the upper right. Another way that profiles are used if you are an attendee or a speaker at a wordcamp, which is the large in person gatherings of WordPress users. So attendees and speakers at these events are often featured on the events website using the same email associated with the participants WordPress.org profile or gravatar account. And Gravatar is the tool that provides the profile pictures on WordPress.org dot. So here’s an example from Wordcamp Buffalo. On the left it shows everyone that has opted in to add themselves to the attendee list.

▶️ @00:12:00: And on the right is an example of all the speakers at Wordcamp us this year that all this information is pulled from their WordPress.org profile. So a lot of uses for your.org profile.

WordPress uses Slack as its main real time communication platform

I have one more. So the WordPress project uses Slack as its main real time communication platform. If you haven’t heard of Slack, it’s a chat program where that a lot of organizations use. So for WordPress specifically, Slack is used for communication between contributors. So all the people that make WordPress it is not for support. If you do ask for support in the slack, you will be gently guided back to the forums. So Slack replaced the previous communication platform, IRC. Reason is when we were compiling a list of things that people liked about our previous communication methods, it was obvious that Slack was all of what we wanted and more.

▶️ @00:13:11: So WordPress historically used IRC for its real time communication. It is still where the real time WordPress support channel exists. So if you’re familiar with IRC, you can actually still log into there and get its support in there. But slack communication is used for contributing to the WordPress project, be it code design, documentation and a lot more.

How do you create your own WordPress. org account

So once your WordPress.org account is set up, you’re joining the WordPress Slack community or you can join. So how do you create your own WordPress.org account? Good question. So you can do that here at login dot WordPress.org register.

▶️ @00:14:05: I will put this link in the chat so you all can follow along if you’d like. If you don’t have an account, go ahead and click on register here. You know, I think I am going to do this live with a test account. So I’m going to switch my screen share here, see how that works out. So here is the screen where you can create a WordPress.org account. So here you will enter in your preferred username and your email address. So I’m going to do some sort of test.

▶️ @00:15:02: Random string of numbers here and then an email address. Let’s see if this works. With Gmail you can add like a plus and some characters to create a unique email address. So I’m doing that. Um, you have to check that you read and accept the privacy Policy. Um, so you’ll have to, you know, make sure that you’ve read through this before clicking the box here. And it’s optional here. Um, that you can subscribe to the WordPress announcements mailing list. I have that I’m subscribed on many different email addresses so I’m not going to do that on my test account, but that is up to you. If you already have a WordPress.org account, you’ll also see these links at the bottom here where you can log in.

▶️ @00:16:06: So I’m going to go ahead and create this account and it wants to know that I’m a human. Bridges, let’s see. I think that one’s a bridge. Please try again. Thinks I’m a robot. Let’s try this again. All right, so that was accepted and I had to check my email for a confirmation link to set my password. So I’m going to go over to my test email and now I can create a password by clicking on this link.

▶️ @00:17:06: You want to make sure to choose a strong password for your account when you’re prompted. There’s a suggestion here, or you can enter in whatever you want. I’m going to use its suggestion here. And optionally you can add a link to your website, your location, what you do for work and your interests. So that will populate on your, your profile. Oops. So I’m just going to put WordPress.org for my site. Oops to the end. I’m going to create my account.

▶️ @00:18:01: It says my account is pending approval. Let’s see. Maybe it’s because my email looks suspicious or something, but I might have to wait a bit to see that happen. But I’m going to go ahead and save my profile information. Well, I think that’s it for my demo since it looks like I’m waiting for approval on my, on my new test account. Normally that will, your profile will be created right away, but yeah, that’s it for that.

You can create a Gravatar account to represent yourself on WordPress. org

Let me go back to my other screen here.

▶️ @00:19:02: Next, I want to show how you can customize your profile. So if you don’t have a profile photo or a unique avatar, you’ll want to create one. If you want, it helps put a face to the names on our screen. So if you upload your profile photo to Gravatar, it will be added to your WordPress.org.org profile and will be used across all of the WordPress.org sites. So Gravatar is intended to aggregate several of your email addresses and profile photos. So this is how. So not just your profile on WordPress.org, but it’s used on slack and other systems that will have your likeness or whatever image you choose to represent yourself displayed. So details on creating an account here is on Gravatar’s website, and I’ve linked that in the chat.

▶️ @00:20:07: So once your gravatar has been created, you can continue by editing and completing your WordPress.org profile. So let me show you an example here. So I’m looking at my profile. If I click edit profile, you’ll see this screen. So you can edit or add more information as you like. So the general tab here, you’ll see it at the top here under my picture. That will display your username email and allow you to reset your password. You can choose to connect your GitHub account here as well. If you have a GitHub profile, you can complete your preferred name and your about me details. So you’ll see like, there are only a few fields here that are required, your name, of course, but everything else here is optional.

▶️ @00:21:01: So when you’re done filling out this tab here, remember to hit save at the bottom and then under the extras tab here, let me show you what that looks like. You can indicate your employment information and your job title and enter in your interests. Maybe that’s where I will put in mine, since I haven’t done the ad. Apparently, even though I’ve been using this profile for over seven years now. Let’s see. Food and drink. There we go. And you can click if you use WordPress for personal or business reasons. Again, that’s not required. Hit save changes at the end, a confirmation that my change is saved. Then next there’s the contribution tab. On the contributions tab you can specify if you’re sponsored by a company or organization and how many hours a week you give to various teams.

▶️ @00:22:09: So it doesn’t show a field here, since I’ve already confirmed my employment. So that is there. So five for the future is the initiative for organizations to give 5% of their resources back to the WordPress open source project. So I am part of that 5% within automatic. And yeah, that pledge has been confirmed. So that’s listed here and I click that. I am indeed sponsored, I contribute full time so I’m 40 hours a week and I contribute to multiple teams. So when, if you do contribute to teams, you can click on Mac at least I think you click the command button to select multiple teams here and wait here, it says down here could hold control command while clicking to select more than one team when you hit save changes.

You can configure notifications that search for your name or any other keyword

▶️ @00:23:12: So on the right hand side you also see there’s an area to edit your forum profile. So this is the profile that is presented on the support forums. So it’s slightly different, a lot of the same information. So it shows different details. It’s worth a quick peek to edit any additional information that you want to add on your forum profile. So just to give you a refresher, a forum profile will look like this. Pretty simple. And what you can see here is like any topics that you’ve started? Well, I’ve never started a topic on the forums, but I answer questions and support issues in the forums so I can quickly refer to all of the replies that I’ve made in the forums.

▶️ @00:24:14: And then lastly from your primary WordPress.org profile, which I’m going to go back to. Let’s go all the way back. All right, so from your primary profile you can configure notifications that search for your name or any other keyword that you’d like. And so these notifications can be received in, in email and slack. This can be a great way to monitor your brand mentions or your name if it’s unique. So I think I have a notification. Let’s see edit notification settings for, oh, I must have taken it off so I can add in.

▶️ @00:25:02: So I get notifications already for my profile name for Courtney PK. So if I wanted to get you notified, if someone mentioned, oh, I don’t know, Gutenberg or something, I can get a notification for that. And you can choose here whether you want to receive a notification by email or by direct message from slack bot and slack. So that’s an automated ping. I think that’s it for profile there. Let’s go back to our presentation here. Yeah, I’ve already gone over all these points here, but I’ll share a link to these slides later. So you’ll have all the links and all this information that I’ve shared.

Now that your WordPress. org account is set up, it’s time to join Slack

So now that your WordPress.org account is set up, it’s the time to join the WordPress slack community.

▶️ @00:26:04: So if you go to chat dot WordPress.org, that’s where you can sign up for an account on Slack. There’s a link for you because it prompts you to log in with your WordPress.org profile. So be sure to read all of the information on this page before getting started. An important thing to note is that the email address that is going to be associated with your slack username will look like your username at chat WordPress.org dot. So make a note of this as it’s the email address that you’ll use to log into Slack. I’m going to paste an example of what that looks like in the chat excuse me? So it’ll be important if you forget your password. So for example, mine would be Courtney pK WordPress.org dot that’s what I use to log into slack. Only slack can email the special address, so you don’t need to worry about getting spam or anyone else contacting you through that email address aside from Slack.

▶️ @00:27:09: So after you accept the invitation to join Slack, you can change your email. But remember that that email address will be public if you end up changing this special email address. And that is all that I wanted to share with you today about WordPress.org profiles. I’d love to hear from you in the chat if you’d like to share your WordPress.org profile. Yeah, I would love to connect if you’re on the WordPress slack of course I am Courtney PK over there. If you’re setting up a profile later, we have a quick video guide that you can follow along as well. So here’s a link to that.

▶️ @00:28:03: And translated versions are being added as they’re available. So you’ll see on that link that there is, there are multiple languages of this tutorial available, so I’ll go ahead and click on that so you can see it too. So you can share this with your colleagues, your friends, your family if they want to set up an account on WordPress.org dot so at first they’ll show an english language guide to that. But then we have many other languages that this video has been translated into, which is fantastic. And if you speak another non english language fluently, we’d love to have you contribute to translations. All of these translations were done by volunteers so it is great motivation for for contributors.

All right, and as promised, I wanted to provide my contact information

▶️ @00:29:01: All right, and as promised, I wanted to provide my contact information here, so please keep in touch. You can find me on the WordPress Slack support PK and as I mentioned earlier, please please get in touch if you’re interested or you’re interested in contributing to the training team and learn WordPress, or contributing to the WordPress open source project in general, I love helping getting new contributors started. The training team would be happy to have you on board if you’re interested and we could guide you through your contribution journey. You don’t need to know code, you don’t need to be a technical person to contribute to WordPress, and we can find something that you can do to help make WordPress. And if you use Mastodon or Twitter, or the platform formerly known as Twitter, these are my usernames there and you can connect with me there.

▶️ @00:30:08: So thank you everyone for learning with us. You can find more educational resources, online workshops, tutorials, lesson plans, stuff to learn and teach WordPress at learn WordPress.org. Thank you everyone for being here today.