WordPress Design & Development Around the Web

Here’s a glimpse of what’s going on in the world of design and development in the WordPress space this past week.

A new way to keep up with that fast-moving project we all rely on, PHP. • Making wordpress/wordpress-develop usable in GitHub Codespaces. • Help count WordPress contributors and sponsors • Directory Serve is our cool tool of the week — a way to serve files to and from your phone.

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

Keeping up with PHP

JetBrains, the company behind a suite of developers tools, including the popular PhpStorm and WebStorm, recently launched PHP Annotated — a channel on YouTube.

The channel’s creator Brent Roose is a well-known PHP blogger and PHP core contributor. Brent previously worked at Spatie and is now a PHP developer advocate at JetBrains, so it makes sense that his employer would want to use his existing YouTube channel and followers.

As before, the channel is focused on engaging with the PHP community. The only difference is that now Brent will be able to offer far more (and better) content. His first episode under the new brand is What’s New in PHP 8.2.

Developing WordPress in GitHub Codespaces

GitHub announced on Twitter that GitHub Codespaces is now widely available for everyone, with access to 60 hours free every month. Codespaces is a full-featured development environment that’s hosted in the cloud, with both the filesystem and code editor working inside your browser.

WordPress lead developer Helen Hou-Sandí, who now works at GitHub (albeit in a different department than Codespaces) sees the value in this for first-time contributors to WordPress. In a post on the Make WordPress blog, she announced her plans to make the wordpress-develop GitHub repository usable in GitHub Codespaces. This could pave the way for a much smoother experience for first-time contributors and set an example that other open-source projects could follow.

Counting sponsored contributors

A while back, I was really pleased to share how Chuck Grimmet (Automattic) has been building a spreadsheet with more granular data on WordPress core contributors. Who their sponsors are (which changes) and whether they're sponsored or not (which also changes) is hard to keep up with. You can help backfill the data on past releases — just get in touch with Chuck.

For the 6.1 release, Chuck just dropped the following numbers in Post Status Slack: 149 contributors were sponsored (18.7%) with Automattic ranking as the top sponsor for 63 contributors (42.28%) followed by WPDeveloper (11/7.38%), Yoast (8/5.37%), GoDaddy (6/4.03%), Awsm Innovations (6/4.03%), XWP (5/3.36%), Multidots (5/3.36%), and Extendify (5/3.36%). [DK]

Cool Tool

Each week we feature one cool tool that can help make your life easier as a WordPress builder.

Directory Serve

Directory Serve is a Node.js CLI tool that allows you to serve a directory on your local computer with file upload/download support. It’s perfect if you need a way to quickly share some files to your mobile devices or move them from the mobile devices to your computer. While most folks in the Apple ecosystem probably don’t need this, it’s great for those using Android mobile devices, or Windows/Linux desktops. It could also pave the way for a smoother experience in local mobile testing for web developers. (And who knows, you could also use it to prove to young people that files and folders actually still do exist.) Get it on GitHub→

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