GitHub

  • WordPress Community Team Proposes Adopting GitHub to Improve Collaboration

    Although GitHub is primarily used for code collaboration, which is how I use it to show you both the behind the scenes and client side of what I can do for you as a developer, WordPress’ Community team is considering adopting the platform to standardize their project management tools.

    Contributing to open source already is a challenging for some but when it requires signing up for multiple services in order to access the team’s many spreadsheets, trello boards, Slack groups, and other modes of communication, gaining new contributors becomes needlessly difficult.

    Gopal claims that standardizing on GitHub would increase transparency and accountability while supporting better organization with tools like issues, labels, milestones, and project boards.

    “By adopting GitHub for project management and issue tracking, the Community Team will standardize our way of working, making it easier for new team members to get up to speed and enabling more effective cross-team collaboration. This standardization also makes it easier for Community Team members to track progress, identify issues and make data-driven decisions.”

    Gopal said

    Other Make teams, such as Learn, Hosting, Meta, Marketing and more, are already successfully using GitHub to manage their communication and prioritize projects. Gopal proposes the Community team learn from their efforts and adopt these tooling methods for a quarter as an experiment.

    “If after the first Quarter the consensus is that this does not suit our team, we will revert back to initial project and tracking practices and explore more.”

    Gopal said

    A few participants in the discussion have concerns about the transparency and losing track of conversations, as they would not be linked to their WordPress.org profiles, although some activity is shown on their WordPress.org profiles if they link them.

    “The truth is that I am unsure about it. I think the community team is not particularly technical, and using GitHub may pose certain barriers we didn’t have so far. Maybe for many people opening an issue, requesting a pull request, or similar is their everyday life, but for others, it can be a bit blocking. I’m also afraid that discussions will move from this Make site to GitHub, and we shouldn’t lose the spirit of owning our content (linked to our .org profile) and lose the use of this space for decision-making and public discussions like this one.”

    Weglot-sponsored Community team contributor Juan Hernando said

    He addressed this concern by stating that there would be no code and that users who can work with Trello boards will have no problem adopting to GitHub’s tools for planning.

    “Trello was used for planning and often forgotten until time for reviews or recaps. There was no way other teams would know what we are working on or add to the conversation unless they dug up our trello boards AND if we took their suggestion and weighed it in.”

    Gopal said

    He said using GitHub would allow the team to incorporate advantages like automations, assignments, and inter-team collaboration with new advanced reporting capabilities. Overall, GitHub has the potential to increase the visibility of their work for those collaborating across teams.

    Milana Cap, who uses GitHub to help organize the Documentation team for reporting issues and automating tasks, recommended adopting the platform and shared how the Docs team has been using it.

    “All the other benefits: version control, precise contribution tracking, all sorts of project management tools etc., can not be found all in one tool other than GitHub, and I can not recommend it enough – for everything.”

    Cap said
  • State of the Word 2022: A Celebration of the Four Freedoms of Open Source

    WordPress belongs to all of us, but really we’re taking care of it for the next generation.”

    Matt Mullenweg
    For more on the Four Freedoms of Open Source check our my blog post The Four Freedoms

    Referenced Resources 

    Some areas discussed where:

    Q&A

    In an effort for no questions to go unanswered, those submitted on Livestream and Twitter are listed below with answers from WordPress contributors. 

    How do we convince legacy web builders, agencies, and companies to more quickly adopt new WordPress features? I’m seeing a ton of opportunities to support older sites (5.0), but very few agencies/projects/companies are moving to build on 6.0.

    A few teams are working hard to share and educate users about new features in the latest WordPress releases. The Training Team publishes tutorials to help ease adoption. Marketing highlights new #WordPress features across multiple social networks. @annezazu hosts regular Hallway Hangouts in Test. Your thoughts on additional adoption initiatives are welcome.

    How close is WordPress to editor collaboration? It’s sometimes frustrating that two people can’t be in the editor at the same time. 

    The project roadmap shows the big picture goals and upcoming releases, and @matveb shared some early thoughts about building a “multiplayer” experience, but there is no release date for this feature yet. As noted in the Q&A, some big questions need to be addressed before collaboration can be addressed. That said, some exciting plugins explore comments and other collaborative tools.

    Any thoughts on p2’s release date for self-hosting? It looks lovely!

    The new version of P2 requires WordPress.com hosting to power its more advanced feature set, so there is currently no self-hosted version available. You’re welcome to try the O2 plugin and the P2 Breathe theme, but please note that this plugin is not in active development.

    What commitment does WordPress Core have to advance accessibility for disabled WP users and also for baking it into WordPress sites created?

    Accessibility is top of mind while developing WordPress, and WordPress 6.1 has seen 40 accessibility improvements listed under milestones 13.1-14.1 in the Gutenberg GitHub repository, if you would like to follow along, with more expected in upcoming releases. As Matt mentioned in the Q&A session, there is an interest in slowing down the fast clip of Gutenberg development to allow for necessary improvements, like accessibility.

    What is the plan for making the Site Editor accessible?

    Every new release includes a variety of accessibility improvements. You can read about WordPress 6.0 Accessibility Improvements and expect more in 6.1. You can also get involved with this work by joining the #accessibility channel in Make Slack.

    Are there any plans to make future WordCamps hybrid to take advantage of the aspects of video conferencing that we discovered during the pandemic?

    WordCamp US 2022 had a captioned Livestream available throughout the event(recordings also available). Community members in San Diego and at home kept the conversation going with #WCUS across social platforms, especially on Twitter. WordCamp organizers are committed to iterating and exploring how best to bring the experience to participants both in-person and online.

    What is the timeline for removing the “Beta” tag from the Site Editor?

    The Core Team is discussing open issues and blockers to the removal of the Beta label. You can follow along with the discussion on GitHub.

    Right now, the navigation block is basic. Are they planning to improve this? For example, I would like to easily create a mega menu.

    Navigation is a crucial part of the site editing experience and can cover a wide array of use cases, from simple “all pages” navigation to complex structures. Currently, the project is focused on ensuring the best experience possible for the most common use cases while still allowing extensibility. Once that experience is polished enough, the editor will be extended to allow more complex navigation structures such as mega menus.

  • WordPress to Explore Using GitHub Codespaces for Improving Contributor Experience

    image source: GitHub.com

    “I’m looking to make wordpress/wordpress-develop usable in GitHub Codespaces with an initial target audience of folks getting started with contributing to core on a Contributor Day. This seems to mostly be a matter of making decisions about our container setup(s).”

    -Hou-Sandí

    Users having to get a development environment up and running can be one of the most time-consuming aspects of attending a contributor day, especially with slow wi-fi, as some may have. Hou-Sandí recently experienced this at the 2022 WordCamp US Contributor Day.

    “This experience reminded me that as a project we should take a look at making it ever-easier to contribute to WordPress, and a remote development option is a good thing to have in our toolkit. This allows contributors to get started with minimal setup and without the requirement of a desktop/laptop – you could patch and test WordPress from a tablet or your phone.”

    -Hou-Sandi

    WordPress developers at the event responded positively in support of using Codespaces to improve contributor experience and many of them are eager to help on the project and test when it’s ready.

    Gutenberg engineer Riad Benguella said having a built-in online development and testing environment would be “a great addition to the WordPress and Gutenberg repositories.”

    If, by using Codespaces, a user can reduce the friction and help people get set up with a development environment in a matter of minutes versus hours, it would significantly improve the productivity at events dedicated to contributing.

    “I believe this will help not only new but all contributors. To me, using Codespaces to review PRs is such a great experience. Besides, adding Codespaces support also means adding devcontainer support, which makes it way easier to set up the local development environment for contributors who use VS Code.”

    -WordPress developer Tung Du

    GitHub has a limit of 60 free hours for its users that may also be used up by developers in their own projects so there may still be the need for tutorials on using other local development methods. For the occasional Codespaces user, it will be tough to beat the convenience of spinning up a development environment in seconds.

    “I love this even for contributors who aren’t new. I personally would find this very handy as it removes another roadblock towards contributing. I’m all for it, I can’t wait to give it a try once it’s ready for testing.”

    -Scott Kingsley Clark
  • Microsoft sued for open-source piracy through GitHub Copilot

    This tool was trained with machine learning using billions of lines of code from public repositories and can transform natural language into code snippets across dozens of programming languages, but there’s a problem with them doing this

    Clipping authors out

    While Copilot can speed up the process of writing code and ease the development of software, the fact that it uses public open-source code has caused experts to worry about the fact that it violates licensing rules around attributions and limitations.

    Open-source licences, such as GPL, Apache and MIT licences, require that a person posts attribution of the author’s name and defining particular copyrights.

    Tweet
    • GitHub’s terms of service and privacy policies,
    • DMCA 1202, which forbids the removal of copyright-management information,
    • the California Consumer Privacy Act,
    • and other laws giving rise to the related legal claims.

    The complaint was submitted to the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California, demanding the approval of statutory damages to the tune of $9,000,000,000.

    Harming open-source

    Butterick also commented on another topic in a blog post earlier in October, where he discussed the damage that Copilot could bring to the open-source community

    He argued that the incentive for open-source contributions and collaboration is essentially removed by offering people code snippets and never telling them about the creator of the code and how to attribute them for it.

    He fears that given enough time, Copilot will cause open-source communities to decline, and in turn, the quality of the code in the training of the training data for the AI will be diminished

    GitHub
  • Is It Time To Give Up GitHub?

    Those who’ve forgotten history often unintentionally repeat it. Some of us in the developer world may recall that twenty-one years ago, the most popular code hosting site, a fully Free and Open Source (FOSS) site called SourceForge, had proprietarized all their code, never to make it FOSS again. All major FOSS projects slowly left SourceForge since it was in effect now, itself, a proprietary system, and contrary to the philosophy of FOSS. The FOSS communities learned that it was a mistake to allow a for-profit, proprietary software company to become the dominant FOSS collaborative development site for them to use. SourceForge slowly collapsed after the DotCom crash back in 2000, and still to this day, SourceForge refuses to solve these problems. We learned a valuable lesson that was a bit too easy to forget, especially when corporate involvement manipulates FOSS communities to its own purposes. We now must learn the SourceForge lesson again with Microsoft’s GitHub doing the same thing now.

    A parody of the GitHub logo, walling off user rights and demanding payment
    image from article posted on the Software Freedom Conservancy website

    Their three primary questions for Microsoft/GitHub (i.e., the questions they had been promising answers to them for a year, and that they now formally refused to answer) regarding Copilot were:

    1. What case law, if any, did you rely on in Microsoft & GitHub’s public claim, stated by GitHub’s (then) CEO, that: “(1) training ML systems on public data is fair use, (2) the output belongs to the operator, just like with a compiler”? In the interest of transparency and respect to the FOSS community, please also provide the community with your full legal analysis on why you believe that these statements are true. They think that they can now take Microsoft and GitHub’s refusal to answer as an answer of its own: they obviously stand by their former CEO’s statement (the only one they’ve made on the subject), and simply refuse to justify their unsupported legal theory to the community with actual legal analysis.
    2. If it is, as you claim, permissible to train the model (and allow users to generate code based on that model) on any code whatsoever and not be bound by any licensing terms, why did you choose to onlytrain Copilot’s model on FOSS? For example, why are your Microsoft Windows and Office codebases not in your training set? Microsoft and GitHub’s refusal to answer also hints at the real answer to this question, too: While GitHub gladly exploits FOSS inappropriately, they value their own “intellectual property” much more highly than FOSS, and are content to ignore and erode the rights of FOSS users but not their own.
    3. Can you provide a list of licenses, including names of copyright holders and/or names of Git repositories, that were in the training set used for Copilot? If not, why are you withholding this information from the community? It can only wildly speculated as to why they refuse to answer this question. However, good science practices would mean that they could answer that question in any event. (Good scientists take careful notes about the exact inputs to their experiments.) Since GitHub refuses to answer, their best guess is that they don’t have the ability to carefully reproduce their resulting model, so they don’t actually know the answer to whose copyrights they infringed and when and how.

    Most importantly, they are committed to offering alternatives to projects that don’t yet have another place to go to. They will be announcing more hosting instance options, and a guide for replacing GitHub services in the coming weeks. If you’re ready to take on the challenge now and give up GitHub today, they note that CodeBerg, which is based on Gitea implements many (although not all) of GitHub. Thus, they’re also going to work on even more solutions, continue to vet other FOSS options, and publish and/or curate guides on, for example, how to deploy a self-hosted instance of the GitLab Community Edition.

    This goes back to long-standing problems with GitHub, and the central reason why we must together give up on GitHub. They’ve seen with Copilot, with GitHub’s core hosting service, and in nearly every area of venture, GitHub’s behaviour is substantially worse than that of their peers. They don’t believe Amazon, Atlassian, GitLab, or any other for-profit hoster are perfect actors either. However, a relative comparison of GitHub’s behavior to those of its peers shows that GitHub’s behavior is much worse than others out there. GitHub also has a record of ignoring, dismissing and/or belittling community complaints on so many issues, that they must urge all FOSS developers to leave GitHub as soon as they can. Please, join them in their efforts to return to a world where FOSS is developed using FOSS.

  • GitHub

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    About WordPress

    Pre WordPress

    As I just mentioned I have built two other versions of this site prior to being on WordPress, those sites were done in HTML and CSS then the second in Bootstrap. Below are information on those two sites.

    HTML and CSS

    The First site I had built was done by hand coding in HTML and CSS. The following are screenshots taken of that site.

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