Mel Choyce

  • What’s Coming in WordPress 4.9

    As y’all might remember, I’m currently co-leading the release of WordPress 4.9. Since we’re winding down toward release, I wanted to take the opportunity to walk through some of the key features of the release.

    Drafting and scheduling changes in the Customizer

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    In WordPress 4.9, you’ll be able to draft your customizations before publishing them, or schedule them to go live in the future.

    Imagine you’ve just started a new site — you have an introduction post up, but otherwise you’re still working on finishing up the design of your site. Now you can draft your changes and come back to them later, so when you are ready to go live, your site looks perfect.

    Another scenario: let’s say your store is having a holiday sale. Rather than staying up until midnight to add a banner about the sale to your homepage, now you can add that new section to your homepage and schedule it to go live later. Once the sale is live, you can hop back in and schedule it’s removal after the holidays. Much less of a hassle!

    Additionally, these new features includes a quick way to share a link to preview your changes on the front-end that anyone can view, not just your site users. Now you can easily share your design updates with clients and teammates before publishing them.

    We’ve also made it safer to make changes in the Customizer. We’ve introduced “locking” (like post locking), so two people can’t work on the same changes at once. This prevents people from overwriting each other’s updates. Hurrah!

    Finally, if you leave the Customizer with unsaved changes, when you come back you’re presented with the option of restoring those changes, which autosaved. Harder to lose your work. ?

    A unified theme browsing experience

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    Since the WordPress 4.2 release, you’ve been able to browse and preview your installed themes from within the Customizer, so you can try a bunch of themes before committing to one. 4.9 iterates and expands on this work. Now, you can also search, filter, and browse themes from the WordPress.org theme directory directly from the Customizer. This means once you start setting up your site, you won’t have to leave the Customizer when trying to find the perfect theme. It’s just one step closer to a completely comprehensive, Customizer-driven site building experience.

    Once you find a new theme you like, switching to that theme has become even easier. Previously, when switching themes, your menus and widgets had a bad habit of coming unassigned, so you’d have to go back and re-add them to your site. We’ve added some improvements to menus and widgets so you can feel even more comfortable with trying out a new look.

    Widget Improvements

    Following up on the Image, Video, and Audio widgets we created in WordPress 4.8, we’re introducing a Gallery widget in 4.9. Secondly, you can now add media directly to your Text widgets for mixed-media content.

    Both of these improvements bring us closer to converging with Gutenbergfeatures — it’ll be much easier to migrate widgets to blocks in the future.

    Menu improvements

    In usability testing, we’ve consistently found that people struggle with creating menus and adding new pages to their menus in the Customizer. I’ve watched easily a dozen tests in which someone went to “Add new menu,” hoping it would let them add a new page to their menu (rather than creating an entirely new menu to put on their site). It wasn’t intuitive.

    Coming in 4.9 is a new flow for creating menus in the Customizer, focusing on splitting up tasks into more manageable chunks and clear, friendly instructions. I worked with our local Happiness Engineers and Editorial team to simplify and clear up confusion around the specific interactions. Team work made the dream work, y’all.

    Better, safer code editing

    I wrote a bit about this in August, but one of the major improvements coming to 4.9 relates to code editing across the WordPress admin.

    For example, syntax highlighting and error checking have been added to:

    • The native WordPress plugin and theme editors
    • The “Additional CSS” panel in the Customizer
    • The Custom HTML widget, introduced in 4.8.1

    Of these, my favorite is definitely the improvements to Additional CSS. Most of the sites I build nowadays use existing themes, so I don’t need to do a bunch of custom coding, but I always want to tweak the design a bit. We’ve had syntax highlighting for a while on WordPress.com, but now I’ll finally be able to use this on my self-hosted sites, too. We’ve also added autocompletion, which makes writing CSS even faster!

    We’ve also made it MUCH safer to make edits in the theme/plugin code editors. We also warn folk before entering the theme/plugin code editors now that you can mess up your site, and make folks click an “I Understand” button before proceeding. And now, if you leave out a semicolon or call an undefined function, instead of white-screening your site, we catch the error and stop you from saving until you fix it.

    Keep an eye out for WordPress 4.9, launching November 14th! And remember, always keep your WordPress sites up-to-date. ?

    mel

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  • From No Code to Pro Code

    Note: this post was originally published on our new Automattic design blog. 

    I’m lucky that Automattic sponsors my time to work on the core WordPress software full-time. This allows me the time and focus to take on more leadership responsibilities in the community, including my current role as Customization Design Lead and the co-lead for the upcoming WordPress 4.9 release. ✌

    One of our major goals during the 4.9 development cycle is to improve the various code editing portions of WordPress: the code editor for plugins and themes, the CSS editor in the Customizer, and the new HTML widget.

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    The current editors in WordPress

    This is a controversial decision. Many people believe that WordPress should remove code editing, for many good reasons! At the very least, the theme and plugin code editors make it very easy to break your site. If you don’t backup your site regularly, this can be anything from a couple minute inconvenience to a catastrophe. ?

    I’m of two minds: that yes, we either need to remove the editors entirely, or
 we need to make them better, and safer for people to use.

    After reflecting, my co-lead and I decided that making them better and safer can have more of a positive impact. WordPress has been a gateway for many new web designers, developers, and builders on the web. I’ve personally met dozens of people who became web professionals because they worked on a WordPress website, and poked around on it for a while. Seeing your site’s source code is, in my opinion, an integral part of this process.

    There’s many ways we can improve the editors:

    • Add syntax highlighting, so it becomes easier to read and write code in the editors.
    • Introduce warnings that inform people that editing the code can break their site.
    • Encourage folks to learn about version control, backups, and safe editing of their site’s code.
    • Redirect people who just want to update CSS to the Additional CSS section of the Customizer.
    • Provide instructions on making a child theme.
    • Don’t let people save code we know is broken.

    By improving the editors and introducing better warnings, and even code linting, we’re creating a teachable moment for new web users. By providing some protection against saving broken code, we’re helping folks safely edit their sites — versus now, where you can just save anything and totally whitescreen your site (which I’ve done before ?).

    One of my biggest breakthrough moments in WordPress was learning how to create a child theme, which allowed me to safely edit themes to my client’s specifications. Suddenly, I had much more control over the site I was building. It felt magical! The code editors seem like the perfect place to introduce this concept, and maybe even create a simple way to make a child theme from WordPress itself.

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    Coming in 4.9: syntax highlighting in the code editors in WordPress

    I see these various improvements as a way to encourage WordPress users to grow into developers. Creating an ecosystem that supports teaching new developers is an important part of WordPress’ influence on the web, and only through providing a way to safely play can we hope to grow. ?

    Interested in helping out? You can get involved on GitHub.

    mel

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  • Back to Childhood: Blocks are the Future

    Note: this post was originally published on our new Automattic design blog. Also check out my previous post about the future of site building & customization in WordPress for more context to this post.

    Photo by Tiffany Terry

    Last month, my colleague Joen wrote a great post about blocks and the Editor Focus for WordPress in 2017. Joen designed a fantastic blueprint for blocks in WordPress that the Customization Focus will continue to flesh out and build on over the next year.

    Recently, I’ve been starting to look at converting widgets in WordPress to Gutenberg blocks. Widgets are the bits of content you can currently drop into your sidebar or footer in WordPress — like the recently updated image widget, some text, or a search bar.

    Current Widget Panel in the WordPress Customizer

    Updating some of these widgets to use Gutenberg’s block patterns has been quite easy — they are simple blocks of content without a lot of settings. However, some widgets are quite complex. Turning them into blocks has been a challenge.

    Take, for example, the Categories widget. It creates a list of all your post categories, and links to the archive pages for those categories. It’s very useful for the large number of bloggers who organize the blog posts on their site using categories. The Categories widget comes with a couple options:

    • Display categories in a dropdown, instead of a list.
    • Display the number of posts in each category.
    • Display category hierarchy, if you have parent and child categories on your blog.

    These options are easy to present in a block:

    Proposed Gutenberg Category Block — Check it out on GitHub

    The widget settings work well in the “Inspector” on the right, while the block itself is previewed inside of your post or page editor (and eventually your whole site).

    Not all widgets are this easy to turn into blocks. Let’s take a look at Recent Posts widget, which shows a list of your most recently published posts. At first, it seems just as simple as the Category widget, right? Well, what if we took this opportunity to improve the widget while we turn it into a block?

    Currently, you can control the numbers of posts listed in the Recent Posts widget, and you can choose to display post dates. That seems like a good start for a sidebar, but what if you wanted to show a list of posts on your homepage? You’ll probably want to show more details about the post.

    Looking at popular blogging websites and themes, many include the post’s featured image, and either an excerpt, or the content of the whole post. Let’s add that to our list.

    Many sites and themes also show posts as a grid, not a list. What if we gave folks the option of choosing between a list or a grid layout? If we support grids, we’ll likely also want to let people choose how the maximum number of columns in which to display their posts on larger screens.

    Now, our feature list looks like this:

    • List view or grid view
    • Number of posts to show
    • Columns (only if grid view)
    • Display date
    • Display featured image
      • Featured image size (taken from your site settings)
    • Display post content
      • Excerpt
      • Full post

    More powerful, but also much more complex!

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    Proposed Gutenberg Post Block — Check it out on GitHub

    However, the block is still mostly controlled through a list of options in the Inspector. What about a block that you need to build, like the Custom Menu widget?

    At its most basic, this could be a simple block. The widget is pretty simple: just choose an existing menu from a dropdown, and it displays that menu in your widget. This isn’t great, though, since you need to know to make the menu first. It’s a pain and it breaks your flow.

    In a future where all of the navigation menus on your site are blocks, it seems more important to let you actually build that menu where you’re adding a block. We don’t have any established patterns for a task like menu-building yet, so we need to establish some.

    Core contributor Joshua Wold kicked off the brainstorming with a great sketch:

    Proposed Gutenberg Menu Block by Joshua Wold — Check it out on GitHub

    Within the block, you can choose an existing menu, or create a new menu. If you choose to create a new menu, you can drag pages over from the Inspector (or click on them) into the block to build your menu. This is similar to how menus currently work in the Customizer.

    Another direction we can take is cutting out the confusion of duplicate menus, and building the block to make one-off menus instead. That could look something like this:

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    Another Proposed Gutenberg Menu Block — Check it out on GitHub

    This block is still being explored. If you have ideas, you can post them on the GitHub issue! We’d love to see more folks involved in shaping the future of WordPress.

    I hope, by tackling the hard widgets (and shortcodes!) now, we’ll establish all the key patterns and lead the way for other plugins and themes to convert their custom widgets into blocks. I’d like to help create an ecosystem where page builder builders and premium themes can continue to flourish, while remaining consistent and compatible with core WordPress design patterns. Hopefully we’re off to a good start! ?

    Thanks to Joen and Tammie for their ongoing support and feedback as I explore these new block designs!

    mel

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  • Building a Site That’s Right for You

    Note: this post was originally published on our new Automattic design blog. Check it out!

    Hello everyone! ? I’m Mel Choyce, a product designer on the Apollo team here at Automattic. Apollo is comprised of the Automatticians who contribute full-time to the open source side of WordPress over at WordPress.org. I’m the design co-lead of WordPress’ customization focus for 2017. Prior to joining Apollo to work on this focus, I was on another team at Automattic that whose mission was making site building and customization easier on WordPress.com.

    Customization has been a pretty big pain point in WordPress for a number of years. With the emergence of easy to customize, drag-and-drop website builders like Squarespace, Wix, and Weebly, WordPress’ minimal customization tools have been falling further and further behind. To make sweeping changes to your WordPress website, you still mostly need to know PHP. This is totally unrealistic in 2017! In the case of WordPress.com, where we don’t let people edit their website templates, this means you can’t make any big changes to your site (like easily adding recent posts to your homepage or swapping the position of your logo or your navigation menu).

    This is painful. There are so many “why can’t I just
” situations that really trip people up when setting up their sites on WordPress, myself included! For someone like a business owner with no time, that kind of barrier means they’re going to give up and try somewhere else. The platform they move to will likely be closed and proprietary. If their business grows and they need to scale up their website, being on a closed platform like Squarespace will make that even more difficult.

    We want the web to remain open. To ensure it stays that way, WordPress needs to step up its game and make it easier for everyone to make websites, from bloggers, to business owners, to web designers and developers. As a platform, we need to embrace all of these use cases.

    Enter this year’s customization focus. For the first half of this year, I’ve been collaborating with my development co-lead, Weston Ruter, and a couple other key contributors to fix some low-hanging fruit. We’ve identified these small but impactful updates a couple ways:

    • Looking through existing Trac tickets that feel like they would be small projects, but would make a big impact.
    • Building lots of test sites in WordPress, using “real” scenarios so we’re not just aimlessly putting dummy content into a site.
    • Reviewing previous usability tests that touched on site building and customization.
    • Chatting with folks who help support bloggers and business users who are building their own websites to find out what problems people encounter most frequently.

    Using this, we’ve come up with a list of projects that we’ve been slowly working our way through the past couple months, like adding a new image widget, and adding formatting options to the text widget.

    The four widget updates coming to WordPress soon: Image, Video, Audio, and Rich Text.

    The second half of the year is about tackling some of the bigger issues. While we’ve been hard at work on smaller fixes, the editor focus has been building a new paradigm for content creation in WordPress. You can check out their progress on their GitHub project, Gutenberg.

    After the new editor launches, the customization focus will start looking at how we can expand on the patterns Gutenberg has established. We have a number of problems we’ll need to address: how do you tell if you’re editing content on one page, or on all of your pages? What if I want to show my latest news on my homepage, in addition to a welcome message and some information about the services my company offers? What if I want my phone number higher up on the page? How can I edit my website without knowing any code? What if I’m a developer building websites for others — how can I make it easier for my media clients to act on breaking news or updates and edit their sites on-the-fly as their situation dictates?

    All of these are problems people struggle with when building websites on WordPress today. We hope that with Gutenberg’s design patterns as a base, we can start tackling these thorny problems and help empower people to build websites to help promote themselves, their passions, and their work.

    Stay tuned for more updates.

    mel

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  • WordPress 4.8 “Evans” released!

    An Update with You in Mind! Gear up for a more intuitive WordPress! Version 4.8 of WordPress, named “Evans” in honor of jazz pianist and composer William John “Bill” Evans, is available for download or update in your WordPress dashboard


    Check it out: WordPress 4.8 “Evans”

    Super excited about this release! I’ve been pushing for an image widget for years now, so it’s super great to finally see it released. Give it, and the new widget updates, a spin :)

    mel

  • Behind the Scenes of Twenty Seventeen

    It’s a wrap! After months of work and over 100 individual contributors, Twenty Seventeen, the new default theme for WordPress, shipped yesterday in WordPress 4.7 “Vaughan”:

    WordPress 4.7 “Vaughan”

    Twenty Seventeen was the first default WordPress theme I’ve had the pleasure of working on. I wanted to talk a little bit about the design and history of theme, and how we got to where it is now.

    The design that would eventually become Twenty Seventeen went through a couple iterations. At its earliest, it was a one-page restaurant theme that we didn’t feel comfortable tackling yet at Automattic. Once we figured out a good way to do multi-page homepages, I brought it back up and it was suggested I turn it into a business theme. This theme would eventually become Lodestar, a yet-to-be-launched theme on WordPress.com.

    Another couple rounds of iteration to introduce a more interesting grid, sharper typographic system, and the idea of video headers brought us to where Twenty Seventeen is today.

    The coolest part of Twenty Seventeen wasn’t just watching it come to life, it was also watching it work with WordPress core to introduce new features: video headers, starter content, and even edit shortcuts (another feature I worked on alongside the Customizer team). The theme worked well with the release, which was centered around the idea of “your site, your way.” 4.7 is one of the most exciting releases yet, and I’m happy Twenty Seventeen contributed to that.

    Of course, any good default theme also needs a strong team behind it. Working with Laurel Fulford and David Kennedy on the theme has been an absolute pleasure. Laurel coded my designs with accuracy and precision, and was ever patient and gracious in the face of my nitpicking. DK kept us on-track, and made the hard decisions that led us to success. You can read his writeup here:

    https://davidakennedy.com/2016/12/07/dear-twenty-seventeen-contributors/

    I’m thankful for all 103 contributors who helped create Twenty Seventeen:

    aaroncampbell, acmethemes, adammacias, afercia, ahortin, akshayvinchurkar, alex27, allancole, anilbasnet, b-07, binarymoon, bradyvercher, brainstormforce, caspie, celloexpressions, claudiosanches, clorith, davidakennedy, davidmosterd, delawski, dimadin, dineshc, doughamlin, electricfeet, enodekciw, fencer04, for, grapplerulrich, hardeepasrani, helen, hiddenpearls, idealien, imnok, implenton, implenton, initial, iv, joefusco, joemcgill, johnpgreen, jordesign, joshcummingsdesign, joyously, juanfra, karmatosed, laurelfulford, leobaiano, littlebigthing, lukecavanagh, mageshp, mahesh901122, manishsongirkar36, mapk, mattwiebe, mbelchev, metodiew, mor10, mrahmadawais, netweb, nikschavan, nnaimov, noplanman, nukaga, ocean90, odysseygate, patch, patilvikasj, peterwilsoncc, pratikchaskar, pressionate, presskopp, rabmalin, ranh, rianrietveld, ryelle, sami, samikeijonen, sandesh055, sgr33n, sirbrillig, sixhours, smyoon315, snacking, soean, sstoqnov, swapnilld, swisspidy, swissspidy, taggon, tg29359, themeshaper, transl8or, tsl143, tywayne, valeriutihai, voldemortensen, vrundakansara, westonruter, williampatton, yoavf, yogasukma, and zodiac1978.

    All you folks were a pleasure to work with. We made a pretty dang nice default theme, if I do say so myself.

    mel

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  • Say Hello to Twenty Seventeen ??

    It’s that time again: time to build a new default theme for WordPress! WordPress 4.7 will launch with a brand new theme – Twenty Seventeen. Designed by Mel Choyce (@melchoyce), Twenty Seventeen sports a modern look and will make a good base for any business website or product showcase.

    — Say Hello to Twenty Seventeen ?? – Make WordPress Core

    More to come at the end of the cycle, where I’ll talk about the whole process behind the theme, but for now I wanted to announce that I’m working on Twenty Seventeen, next year’s default WordPress theme. ?

    Check out the post for more details, and key an eye out for my full write-up once WordPress 4.7 is released later this year!

    mel

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  • Why WordPress.com Rocks for Small Business Freelancers

    Disclaimer: I work for (and on) WordPress.com, so I’m obviously biased about how great it is ?

    WordPress.com is underutilized by freelancers in the WordPress community. When I hear freelancers talk about making small business websites for clients, self-hosting WordPress seems to be the only solution people mention.

    That’s a shame — WordPress.com can be a quick, inexpensive, and secure way to build a website. If you’re adept at theme selection and setup, you can sit down with your client and build a website in just a couple hours.

    Here’s why WordPress.com can be an attractive site-building tool for folks who target small businesses:

    Easy for clients to use

    The hardest part of setting up a site is actually setting up the site in the first place. This can be a huge hurdle for people without website building experience. Once you’ve built up that experience, however, setup can become fast and easy. This is the kind of skill freelancers build in abundance.

    Once a site it set up, clients just have to worry about updating and editing content themselves. WordPress.com’s content tools are fairly intuitive. With a bit of training tacked on to your site-building process, you can get your clients up and running on their new site in just an afternoon.

    Tons of Themes to Choose From

    WordPress.com offers over 350 free and premium themes, the vast majority of which are responsive. (As of this post, 167 free and 192 premium, ranging in price from $19 – $175. Most are in the $49 – $79 range.) Though there aren’t any theme frameworks available, the number of available themes makes up for the lack of flexibility. The available themes, both free and premium, can be used for any small business site you can think of.

    All of the themes on WordPress.com have been reviewed for security, speed, and usability. They are maintained, even after retirement (which doesn’t happen until they’ve been around for a couple years). You don’t need to worry about a theme updating breaking your client’s site, or an ignored theme update becoming a vector for hacking.

    Once you buy a Premium theme, there are no recurring fees or subscriptions — you can use it on that site forever. When it is eventually retired, you can continue using the premium theme until you switch to a new one, at which time the theme becomes unavailable.

    If your client springs for a Business plan, they gain access to all themes on WordPress.com, free and premium. It’s a nice perk in a more comprehensive upgrade plan.

    Built-in Constraints

    One of the best parts about WordPress.com is that it has a lot of built-in constraints.

    Because clients can’t upload any random plugins or themes they find, or add their own code to their site without you knowing, the risk of getting their site hacked through insecure code is pretty much eliminated. While this limits the kind of features your clients have available, it can also be used as justification for keeping their site small and focused. When you offer people the world, they’re likely to take it. Limited functionality = limited scope creep.

    Having limited features available also keeps your build time down. When you don’t need to worry about building functionality from scratch, or installing and configuring a bunch of plugins, you save time. When it comes down to it, most small business websites don’t need a bunch of custom functionality — they can make due well enough with the tons of features WordPress.com does offer.

    Provides Most of the Functionality You Need

    So what features does WordPress.com offer?

    In addition to basic content management, it offers:

    • Custom domains and email support
    • Site stats for all users, and access to Google Analytics integration for Business users
    • Google Webmaster Tools
    • Tools for improving your SEO
    • Easy ways to add your contact information
    • Contact forms
    • Sharing across all major social media platforms
    • Portfolios for creative professionals
    • Testimonials to bolster your social proof
    • Some sweet image galleries options
    • Tons of content embedding options
    • Additional integrations from services like Eventbrite, Google Calendar, etc.

    Is it as comprehensive and full-featured as building a custom site for your clients? Heck no. But is it good enough for most small businesses? For sure.

    Maintenance and Support

    One of the best parts of going with a hosted solution like WordPress.com is what happens after you finish building the site.

    Back when I was doing agency work, we’d end up supporting our small business clients pretty much forever. Unless you negotiate a retainer plan, getting emailed every couple weeks or months about updates can be a hassle when you have a bunch of clients or if you’re heads-down in another project.

    When you’re using self-hosted installs of WordPress, there’s a lot to maintain — plugin updates, theme updates, security updates, major release updates, etc. You can mitigate some of that by enabling auto-updates on your client sites, but if you client starts installing their own plugins or even themes, the risk of something breaking can get pretty high.

    On WordPress.com, you don’t have to worry about that. All of the updates are taken care of for you and your clients behind-the-scenes. In the off chance that something breaks, WordPress.com fixes it right away. That means no ongoing maintenance or emergency 2am phone calls for you. If your business it built on ongoing maintenance and retainer plans, maybe this isn’t for you. If you want to serve a variety of clients without getting tied down to them for a couple years, then you should consider the benefits.

    It’s also a super reliable host. WordPress.com hosts some huge names in news and big media, so you can be sure that if one of your client’s blog posts goes viral, or they get linked to from Reddit or something, their site stays up. Downtime is very rare. If something does go wrong? WordPress.com has killer support. Free users get access to forum support, and Premium/Business users get access to email and live chat support (and I really do hope your clients have upgraded off of the free plan — small they may be, but they are a business). Once you build the site, you can essentially push all of the ongoing support to WordPress.com so you can focus on new clients. Your clients get quick answers, and you don’t get emergency phone calls. It’s a win/win.

    Why not give it a try for your next small business client?

    mel

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  • Getting Commit

    I received commit to WordPress this past week.

    The past couple days have been a bit of a haze — Community Summit on Wednesday and Thursday, WordCamp US Friday and Saturday (where I presented with the wonderful Courtney O’Callaghan), and then yesterday’s Contributor Day. I found out on late Saturday night, at a bar, completely by accident, that I was receiving commit. The new batch of committers were formally announced the next day during Matt’s State of the Word. I join a short list of designers with commit access. I am one of now five women who can commit.

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    I was given commit with the reassurance that I would not be expected to do a lot of committing (I think this was told to console me when I started looking a bit green). Committing, I was told, was a sign of trust. It was a sign that the lead developers team trust me enough to help guide the future of WordPress that they have granted me the access to change it. I am honored to receive that trust, especially as a designer. I’ve come along way since my first patch was committed by Andrew Nacin, just over three years ago.

    I was instructed to commit something by the end of yesterday’s Contributor Day. Gary found me an easy fix to commit (removing an extra word from documentation in Twenty Eleven, of all things) and walked me through the commit process. Then, I committed my first change to WordPress. It was familiar to how I’m used to committing code for work, but infinitely more terrifying. Afterwards, I felt a little nauseous.

    I’m joined in this new privilege along by a great set of folks. Congratulations to the other six people who received commit this week: fellow designer and Automattician Michael Arestad, Rachel Baker, Joe Hoyle, Eric Lewis, Mike Schroder, and Pascal Birchler.

    Sound fun? You too can get involved with WordPress at https://make.wordpress.org/.

    mel

  • Women, WordPress, & the Web — Two Years Later

    Two years ago today, I published Women, WordPress, & the Web.

    A lot for me, personally, has changed in the past two years. I got a lot more involved in contributing. I joined Automattic. I’m currently on a team meetup in Hawaii. Two years ago, I could have never imagined where I’d be today. Literally! I’m in Hawaii!

    My experiences are not the industry norm.

    A year ago, this retrospective would have been a lot more positive. But after the past few months, I honestly feel like there has probably never been a worse time to be a vocal, prominent woman in tech. Levels of harassment have escalated from casual misogyny and sexism to outright terrorism. Men in tech and gaming are organizing attacks on women who speak up. Just look at some of the harassing tweets Anita Sarkeesian receives in a week. Recently, Model View Culture CEO Shanley Kane’s entire family was doxxed after she criticized Linux leader Linus Torvalds.

    Despite all of this, WordPress kind of remains a relatively safe haven for women in tech. This isn’t just an accident, or a fluke — the WordPress community, and most importantly, WordPress leadership, has carefully cultivated a culture of inclusion, acceptance, and diversity. WordCamps are adding code of conducts. People who say obviously shitty things are called out. The WordPress community team has been hard at work doing diversity outreach and event planning and creating opportunities for mentorship (More, more). Helen Hou-SandĂ­, a total badass and top WordPress contributor and committer, was promoted to Lead Developer this week. This promotion has so far gone off with nothing but congratulations and support, without people questioning her (impeccable) qualifications.

    Quite honestly, you literally can’t turn around without walking into an awesome woman doing something great with WordPress. Women are designing, and coding, and supporting, and speaking, and leading. Seeing that kind of representation, from people who look like you? It’s incredibly empowering. It makes you want to become a part of the community, because you know that people like you have already been welcomed.

    Sure, it’s not perfect. There are plenty of ways we can continue to improve. Outside of gender, we’re not super diverse. There’s still a lot more we need to do, and we need to make an effort. Jerks are still going to be jerks. Well-intentioned people are still going to fuck up, and we’re going to have to apologize and try not to do it again. We need to keep this in mind as we move forward to create an even more inclusive and global WordPress with a variety of diverse perspectives.

    But as a woman in a world where our colleagues are getting doxxed, and swatted, and harassed on a daily basis, dealing with a couple microaggressions, some casual patronization, and the occasional inappropriate email feels like a cakewalk for me.

    That said, given the current tech climate, the act of publishing this post is a significantly scarier idea now than it was two years ago.

    I’m not sure where to leave this off. I hope this is the worst of it. I hope this is the one last hurrah of assholes in tech before things do get better. And I really, desperately hope that it doesn’t take an act of violence to turn the tides.

    But for now, I’m going to enjoy some waves of my own with my amazing WordPress friends and colleagues.

    Cheers.

    hawaii

    mel

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