This month has been characterized by exciting plans and big announcements – read on to find out what they are and what it all means for the future of the WordPress project.

WordCamp Asia Announced

The inaugural WordCamp Asia will be in Bangkok, Thailand, on February 21-23, 2020. This will be the first regional WordCamp in Asia and it comes after many years of discussions and planning. You can find more information about the event on their website and subscribe to stay up to date with the latest information.

This is the latest flagship event in the WordCamp program, following WordCamps Europe and US. Tickets are now on sale and the call for speakers is open. Want to get involved in WordCamp Asia? Keep an eye out for volunteer applications, or buy a micro sponsor ticket. You can also join the #wcasia channel in the Making WordPress Slack group for updates.

WordCamp US Planning Continues

The WordCamp US organizing team is excited to announce some new additions to this year’s WCUS in St. Louis, Missouri, on November 1-3, 2019. The first is that there will be an onsite KidsCamp: child-friendly lessons that introduce your young one(s) to the wonderful world of WordPress.  You can register your child for KidsCamp here. In addition, free, onsite childcare will be provided at this year’s event – you can sign up here.

Looking for further ways to get involved? The call for volunteers is now open. For more information on WordCamp US, please visit the event website.

Exploring Updates to the WordPress User & Developer Survey

To improve the annual WordPress User & Developer Survey, a call has been made for updates and additional questions that can help us all better understand how people use WordPress.

To improve the survey, contributor teams are suggesting topics and information that should be gathered to inform contributor work in 2020. Please add your feedback to the post.

Gutenberg Usability Testing Continues

Usability tests for Gutenberg continued through June 2019, and insights from three recent videos were published last month. This month’s test was similar to WordCamp Europe’s usability tests, and you can read more about those in the part one and part two posts. Please help by watching these videos and sharing your observations as comments on the relevant post.

If you want to help with usability testing, you can also join the #research channel in the Making WordPress Slack group, or you can write a test script that can be usability tested for Gutenberg.

Further Reading:

• The Design team reported on the work they did at the WordCamp Europe Contributor Day.
• The Theme Review Team has released updated versions of their ThemeSniffer tool and coding standards.
• The Security team is looking for feedback on whether security fixes should continue to be backported to very old versions of WordPress. 
• The Design and Community teams have worked together to come up with official guidelines for how WordCamp logos should be designed.
• The Core team has implemented a few changes to the PHP coding standards within WordPress Core.
• The Community Team is looking for feedback on a tough decision that needs to be made regarding the implementation of the licence expectations within the meetup program.
• The Design team has presented some designs for a Block Directory within the WordPress dashboard.
• A recent release of WordPress sam an increase in the minimum required version of PHP – the Core team is now looking at increasing that minimum further.
• The Site Health feature was first introduced in the 5.1 release of WordPress, and at WordCamp Europe this year a new Core component for the feature was added to the project structure.
• The Community Team has posted some interesting data regarding WordCamps in the Netherlands over the last few years, as well as WordCamps in 2018.

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