Last weekend, I went to Europa-Park in Rust, to attend my second CloudFest Hackathon. This year’s event had 11 projects, and 7 of them were WordPress projects (some other were only slightly connected to WordPress). Last year, I joined the Pluginkollektiv team, working on the popular Antispam Bee plugin. This year, the team worked on Statify, a privacy-friendly statistics plugin.
Small steps to a new and better plugin
For the Antispam Bee project last year, we rewrote the whole plugin with the goal to release a new major version. This new version is now in its alpha phase, so even a year after the event, not quite ready. For Statify, the team lead Florian Brinkmann identified some issues an GitHub he wanted to see the team working at. Some of them were “low-hanging fruits”, other quite large issues or features.
A supposedly easy ticket
We had some people in our team that were new to contributions, and we tried to find some easy issues to work on. One issue with the title “Show title instead of permalink” sounded quite easy. The issue was almost 5 years old and there was already some constructive discussion. There was even a PR with a single line change to target one part of the issue. So this issue should be easy to resolve, right? Unfortunately, it was not. The issue was not closed since 2018 for a reason. Talking about it in the group, we found many edge-cases about why it needs more planning to resolve all of them.
Working on a solution and introducing new possibilities
After discussing many different approaches and testing some of them in a proof of concept, it became clear, that the best solution would be to store the actual post title in the database, when the page view was tracked by Statify. As the custom table of Statify is quite simple, we had two possible solutions:
- Add another column to the table
- Add a
statifymetatable to store the title
We have decided to take the second approach. While it seems too much for such a little feature, the introduction of this new table would enable Statify (and any extending plugin) to store more metadata for every entry without the need to extend the table every time. It also makes updates of Statify easier, as updating existing tables can always cause issues on some environments.
Onboarding new people
I have to admit, that I have not written too much code. I only contributed a minor UX improvement. Instead, I helped others with their contributions. One member of the team, who does not write code on a regular basis, made his first contribution and the PR was reviewed and merged. Another team member working on the post title issue was also new to many things. After working for two days on the issue, it was time to commit the new code. Only then he mentioned, that he has never used git before, so I also gave him a quick-start into git, and he was able to commit the changes to his fork. By that time we realized, that some other changes created some merge conflicts, so he also learned a bit how to handle them. Now we have to test the new code before it can get merged. As this issue and other we worked on are quite large, in summary, we will probably release a new major version of Statify containing all the new bug fixes and features from the hackathon.
An event to visit!
While I cannot give you details on all the other teams, I would recommend to check out the #CFHack2023 hashtag to get an idea of the event. For me, it was another amazing event! Not only the “hacking”, but also the social parts of it. There have been some official parties and also some fun site activities like a Mario Kart tournament happening on Sunday evening.
On Monday, just after the announcement of the winners of the different categories, the German WordPress community held a spontaneous “meta meetup”, in which organizers from many different cities shared experiences and ideas from their meetups. We plan to have such a meeting more regularly now:
The CloudFest
In the afternoon, there was a “WordPress Day” kicking off the actual CloudFest event. While the main CloudFest event starting on Tuesday was more of an “industry event”, the WordPress Day had different topics focussing on the WordPress ecosystem. But not the typical sessions you would see on a WordCamp and some of them more of product presentations.
In the evening, there was the “Come2Gather in the Streets” event at the main entrance of Europa-Park, with food stands, drinks and some live music. I finally had the chance to talk to some people that were as busy as I was on the previous days or who just arrived for the main event.
Unfortunately, I had to leave Tuesday at 11 am and didn’t have much time to see any sessions. I briefly visited the “Cloud Fair” expo area and talked to some sponsors of the event. I also missed the chance to ride some of the rollercoaster that opened just for CloudFest attendees. But last year I did that quite a bit.
Conclusion
While I was a bit “disappointed” of myself in terms of active code contributions this year, I really enjoyed onboarding new people to contribute to open source. All of them were excited and motivated to get their first experiences, and they want to continue contributing in the future.
If nothing comes up, I will be there again next year. Maybe I can even come up with a project to submit. For the one idea I had for this year, there was just not enough time to prepare something. If you have never contributed to open source before, I can highly recommend finding a hackathon around our or a WordCamp with a Contributor Day. You learn new skills and find many like-minded people!