Make the Planet a hub for fantastic WP community content

[iandunn]

​planet.w.org feeds the news in Core's Events & News dashboard widget.

Right now it subscribes to a lot of early contributors who don't publish often, and some who are no longer active in the project.

Most of the remaining sites don't publish often either. The only ones that do are the Tavern and HeroPress, with the Tavern dominating the majority of the items in the feed.

What are some ways to solve that?

IIRC, changes to the feed need Matt's sign-off.

[iandunn]

I think the simplest way would be to add more sites to the feed. The authors would need to be highly trusted and responsible. If anyone has suggestions, please add them.

If that isn't enough, another idea would be to open a Core ticket to discuss changing the Widget's display logic. Sites could be limited to 1-2 items in the widget, rather than being able to take up all 3 spots. (The first of the 4 spots is always dedicated to official w.org/news posts)

[sippis]

Sharing my quick two cents.

In my opinion, new personal blogs shouldn't be added and existing ones should be (at least mainly) removed. The widget name is "News & Events", not "News, Events & Personal opinions".

Few feeds to add:

• central.wordcamp.org/feed
• wordpressfoundation.org/feed
• wpandup.org/feed
• gutenbergtimes.com/feed

[sippis]

Replying to iandunn:

I think the simplest way would be to add more sites to the feed. The authors would need to be highly trusted and responsible. If anyone has suggestions, please add them.

If that isn't enough, another idea would be to open a Core ticket to discuss changing the Widget's display logic. Sites could be limited to 1-2 items in the widget, rather than being able to take up all 3 spots. (The first of the 4 spots is always dedicated to official w.org/news posts)

Giving that Tavern publishes currently 1-3 new articles almost daily, limiting how many spots each site do get sounds reasonable. Regardless how much new sources would be added, Tavern will supersede articles from those other sources quite quickly.

[greenshady]

Replying to iandunn:

I think the simplest way would be to add more sites to the feed. The authors would need to be highly trusted and responsible. If anyone has suggestions, please add them.

Post Status falls under the umbrella of quality journalism in the WordPress space. I'm not sure if the commercial nature of the site would prohibit its inclusion. If not, that is my one recommendation.

[Otto42]

Proposing any relevant feeds to Matt would be the way to get them included.

[iandunn]

Replying to greenshady:

Post Status falls under the umbrella of quality journalism in the WordPress space.

+1. ​They're already in the feed, but only ​the `planet` category, which doesn't appear to be used frequently.

[iandunn]

@hlashbrooke was talking to Matt about this, and he's going to add a few of the ones suggested above.

Matt also had the idea of being able to add individual posts from any site, without having to add the site's entire feed. I put together a quick version of that yesterday, and am going to test it out on make.w.org/test.

[iandunn]

In 10289:

Reblog Feed: Initial commit.

See #5445

[iandunn]

The Foundation and Central blogs were added in r16488-dotorg.

[iandunn]

Gutenberg Times was added in r17081-dotorg.

[peterwilsoncc]

I've done a quick review of the feeds listed in the sidebar of planet.wordpress.org for status.

Dead links

• Jen Mylo

Off topic

• Andy Skelton (photo blog)
• Dougal Campbell (social feeds)
• Joseph Scott (politics, random)

Dormant (year of last post noted)

• Andrew Ozz (2014)
• Nacin (2015)
• gravatar (2014)
• Lloyd Dewolf (2017)
• Lorelle on WP (2018)
• Mike Little (2014)
• Westi (2013)
• pingomatic (2015)
• WordPress.com Apps (2016)
• WP TV (2016)
• mdawaffe (2015)

Some of the names in the dormant list are names I don't recognise and I'm pretty long in the tooth in terms of being a WordPress contributor. Other names I do recognise and respect, but know they haven't been contributing for a while.

If individuals are to be in the list, it would be good to refresh it to include some more recent and active contributors who blog frequently. There's probably some additional wordpress.org offical content that could be included these days.

[courane01]

Highlighting mention of needing to create variety within Planet again ​https://x.com/photomatt/status/1754519954085532129?s=20.

I'd be happy to help maintain this and get some initial criteria on how to be included within Planet.

[matt]

Some proposed guidelines:

Eligible for inclusion, though they can opt-out if they want:

• Blog of project leader.
• Blog of exec directory.
• Blogs of lead developers active in the past year.

For some currently included that don't fit this criteria, we can move to an Emeritus section in the sidebar, recognizing people who had been included in the past with a link.

This is a perk of being a lead developer.

Expectation of posts is that the sites do not have advertising, affiliate links for web hosts, or promote things that are not available in the .org directories/ecosystem. Otherwise anything goes. These people are here because they build WordPress.

Other publications:

• Any WP-focused blog, Youtube, podcast, Twitter, etc can be part of planet.
• To be considered for inclusion, we would look at publishing consistency, participation in community events, etc.
• They should be primarily promoting community plugins, themes, patterns, or core. Other stuff is fine, we just don't need it in the Planet.

The goal should be for planet.wordpress.org to be the first place that someone interested in the WordPress community to go to keep up with the goings-on and news in the community. Multi-modal is fine: words, audio, video.

[matt]

It's probably worth documenting the other perks of being a lead developer, like the record frames I send everyone.

[jonoaldersonwp]

This is prominent content on the dashboards of millions of users. Let's not confuse or irritate them with links to blog posts from people they don't care about; let's use this space to provide onboarding, education and support that helps and engages them.

Maybe a 'perk' of being a user could be that we don't hijack their admin experience with content that's irrelevant to them, and that we preference user experience over our own vanity?

[JavierCasares]

Should be considered the “language”? For example, if you have your profile in Spanish, to prioritize Spanish feeds.

For example, we have the same podcast in different languages:

— CA: ​https://www.wppodcast.cat/
— EN: ​https://www.wppodcast.org/
— ES: ​https://www.wppodcast.es/
— FR: ​https://www.wppodcast.fr/

But it doesn't make sense to see all 4 podcasts at the same time every week…

[bacoords]

While cleaning this up, it might make sense to filter out duplicate posts that come from the WordPress News feed. As of this posting, there's two copies of two separate articles, that look like this

• WordCamp Asia 2024: Q&A with Matt Mullenweg
• WordPress News: WordCamp Asia 2024: Q&A with Matt Mullenweg

Though I haven't been able to dig into why that is.

[dd32]

Replying to bacoords:

While cleaning this up, it might make sense to filter out duplicate posts that come from the WordPress News feed. As of this posting, there's two copies of two separate articles, that look like this

• WordCamp Asia 2024: Q&A with Matt Mullenweg
• WordPress News: WordCamp Asia 2024: Q&A with Matt Mullenweg

I believe this is because WordPress News is included in planet, and the core news widget displays planet data plus news.

I thought it deduplicated the feeds, but apparently not: ​#core42254

[courane01]

Asking if this post calling for "high quality journalism" can share in creating a definition and criteria for that along with Planet's needs in identifying the same criteria.

​https://make.wordpress.org/marketing/2024/03/20/making-a-wordpress-media-corps/#comment-1975