In an effort to strengthen and increase our contributions to Five for the Future (#5ftf), WebDevStudios (WDS) announced last month that the agency will dedicate one full workday per month to the open-source initiative company-wide. Here is a quick wrap-up of some of the contributions that WDS team members made in February.
Jay Wood, Lead Backend Developer
Jay picked up where he left off with WooMinecraft-WP, a free Minecraft donation plugin designed to work in conjunction with WooMinecraft for Bukkit/Spigot and WooCommerce to allow the purchasing of virtual items in Minecraft and have them delivered to the servers. Keep up with his work on this project at GitHub.
Justin Foell, Senior Backend Developer
Justin had a busy #5ftf day. Thanks to him, Version 1.4.3 of the WP-Strava plugin is available. Plus, he added a PR to reference WordPress Coding Standards 0.14.1 upstream (no votes needed) and some documentation to reflect how we should handle these upstream changes. See the updates here.
Eric Fuller, Backend Developer
Development of the plugin WP-To-Do continues. When released, the plugin will be an easy way to keep a quick to-do list while working on your WordPress website. Keep up with Eric’s progress on GitHub.
Will Schmierer, Senior Frontend Developer
Will took on the task of CSS “gridifying” the WDS theme wd_s. He’s documenting his development here.
Ben Lobaugh, Lead Backend Developer
Ben continues to progress with the WDS WordPress Docker image, a project intended to assist WDS team members to get spun up on a new dev site in minutes rather than hours. He spent our #5ftf day realigning what that will look like. Below is a diagram of the primary components, but Ben wants everyone to know that it is still in alpha development. “It is not ready to be rolled out generally quite yet,” he says. “The pieces are all there; it is just not ready for prime time.” Stay tuned. We’ll keep everyone updated.
Russell Aaron, Support Technician
Russ worked on improving our intake and Bulk Hours forms used at Maintainn.
Jo Murgel, Frontend Developer
Jo completed the core development of Project Acorn SSR, a Vue.js SPA built around the WordPress REST API with Vuex, Vue Router, Axios. He also updated its documentation. Read up on his progress at GitHub.
Aubrey Portwood, Senior Backend Developer
Tired of corrupt, duplicate, and/or missing images within your Media Library? A solution is on its way because Aubrey spent his #5ftf researching that. Expect continuous updates on his progress.
Michael Beckwith, Support Technician
This was a big win for us and the community. Michael released a new version of the free WordPress plugin Automatic Featured Images from Video. He blogs about it here.
Zach Owen, Senior Backend Developer
Zach made some good progress on logging in Press Sync. The first PR of functionality is ready in GitHub. This update includes a lot of features for logging. See a screencast below.
Jeremy Ward, Backend Developer
One of the ways we continue our education at WDS is through a series of Lunch & Learn sessions conducted internally via video conference. In April, Jeremy will present on Composer and WordPress where he will cover most of the basics of using Composer, as well as some WordPress relevant tips and caveats that will include an interactive demonstration portion. He spent his February #5ftf working on the deck.
Scott Tirrell, Backend Developer
As a new addition to WDS, this was Scott’s first time ever contributing to Five for the Future. He spent his day looking into leveraging Codeception to write automated acceptance tests for our Maintainn client websites. Using this tool, the team should be able to come up with important areas and behaviors on a site to test and kick off a script to test these areas automatically in the background. This should help us have more confidence making changes on sites without causing regressions. Below is a video of a proof-of-concept in action.
John Hawkins, Client Strategist
John focused on two projects for #5ftf. As the founder of the Las Vegas WordPress Meetup group, John has taken back the reigns beginning last month. He spent his Five for the Future day follow up on February’s meeting and planning for March’s program. He also allotted time for working on QA and testing of the soon-to-be-released WordPress plugin CPTUI-Extended Version 1.5. Stay tuned for those details!
Laura Coronado, Communications Specialist
A longtime Las Vegas resident and WordPress user, Laura has joined the Five for the Future efforts of her fellow WDS-ers by volunteering her services as a blogger to the Las Vegas WordPress Meetup group. She used her day to gather her notes and write a blog post about the group’s previous meeting.
Shayda Torabi, Director of Marketing
Did you know that WordCamp speakers are volunteering their time and expertise? As a featured speaker at WordCamp Phoenix, Shayda’s #5ftf contributions include preparing for and presenting her talk “Eat, Blog, Love: How I Learned to Stop Waiting and Start Doing.” Learn more about Shayda’s WordCamp presentation and even watch a video of it on our blog.
Not every WDS Five for the Future contribution has been included in this piece. We have a few surprises under our sleeves and some projects just can’t be revealed yet. We hate spoilers. But, hopefully, our commitment to #5ftf is evident by this published list.
If you are still wondering what Five for the Future is why it’s important that every WordPress enthusiast, developer, company, and user be involved in some sort of capacity, please read the original Five for the Future blog post by Matt Mullenweg. Learn more about our devotion to the initiative by visiting our WDS Gives Back page. And come back to this blog next week when we will make recommendations on ways you can get involved in Five for the Future.
Our next Five for the Future company-wide contribution day will be Friday, March 23. Follow the hashtag #5ftf on Twitter, as our individual team members tweet their projects and progress. Re-tweets and shout-outs of support are greatly appreciated.
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