Plans for WordPress

Background: The participation team is using “pilots” to give resources to ideas for new projects. I’ve been working with @bking to figure out good pilots for Community Ops (IT). One that was obvious was WordPress (multi-tenant, multi-site, etc etc) and we started filling out the pilot template (the template makes the case for choosing the project).

Note: that doc is set to anyone with link can edit, so I won’t link to it from here, if you haven’t seen and you should be contributing to it, please ask me for the link.

There has been discussion on that doc about using the same infrastructure as Mozilla. This isn’t a discussion we’ve really had in full as when we started planning on offering WordPress as a service (WPaaS) to communities, that wasn’t necessarily an option.

There are definitely questions to answer about what would be gained or lost over using Mozilla’s infrastructure vs having our own offering. It is also a possibility that Mozilla is going to be moving to wordpress.com instead of hosting in house (I saw this referenced on Governance so I believe this is not secret). Would that affect how communities would feel about being hosted on the same infrastructure as MoCo?

We discussed this a bit at the collaboration meeting today, and captured the questions and thoughts we had in this pad - https://communityit.etherpad.mozilla.org/wordpress

Please feel free to continue this discussion in this thread as well as add any points you may have to the pad.

I’d love to see someone from Corp IT chime in here, so confirm if we are really moving to wordpress.com. At this point it seems like speculation.

I tried to answer a couple of things in the pad. Of the outstanding questions, the ones that interest me the most are:

  • Architecture/design review. We’ve been at this for more than a year and haven’t been able to produce anything. Do we know why?
  • The biggest reason for doing WP ourselves was to create a contribution and teaching opportunity in this functional area. Would there still be contribution opportunities?

This has taken a while, first because the team needed to get more organized, which we did, but once we dug into trying to to multi-site we hit technical problems. I think the other thing that could have sped this up, besides getting organized, is having access to more mentorship from people who have already tried to solve these problems.

Though some of the beauty of a learning group is having projects where people can learn slowly. Obviously this wouldn’t be one of those cases, but when thinking about how we do things, we should make sure not to plan out all of the opportunities for learning as you hack, as opposed to being told how to do it out of the box.

Hello @Kensie
Can i ask what technical problems you ran into?

Maybe i can chime in.

Can we make a website using wordpress free themes ? I have installed a theme once it was free but it don’t have editor with it , can anyone help ?