A Summary of the FSE Outreach Experimental’s Word Reduction and Revitalization
The FSE Outreach Program, now known as Outreach, has undergone significant changes to adapt and stay relevant to the evolving WordPress project and needs. The program, initially launched as an experimental initiative in May 2020, aimed to gather feedback and improve the Full Site Editing (FSE) experience for WordPress site builders. After nearly 3.5 years of feedback loops, knowledge sharing, and community building, the program has reached its completion with the release of WordPress 6.3 Phase 2.
Automattic Product Wrangler Anne McCarthy, the longtime facilitator of the program, announced the upcoming changes in September 2023. The intention behind the program was to provide feedback to the right people faster and keep WordPress on track for Phase 2. The program successfully expanded the scope of testers and encouraged users to experiment with new features.
With the growing adoption of the Site Editor (formerly known as FSE or Full Site Editing), the focus now shifts towards discoverability and redefining the program’s goals. The first step in this evolution was renaming the Making WordPress Slack channel to #outreach. However, as Birgit Pauli-Haack, the new program lead, emphasizes, a new name doesn’t change the nature of the program itself.
Pauli-Haack envisions Outreach as an enablement platform where site builders and extenders collaborate with core developers. The goal is to deepen the community’s trust and create a friendly and wide-ranging destination for both newcomers and professionals in the WordPress ecosystem. The rebranded channel aims to connect with Developer Hours and Hallway Hangouts presenters, resurface relevant content from Dev Chat, collect feedback on breaking changes in future releases, allow design and engineering teams to tap into user input, arrange ad hoc working groups for issues raised on social media, and provide support and resources to Meetup organizers.
Outreach is not merely a link between support and marketing or a developer advocacy initiative. Instead, it is seen as an extension of the Test team, focusing on building software, closing feedback loops, and improving current functionality through user testing. The program has also revived the Test team, which now posts regular updates and shares testing instructions aimed at non-developers.
One obstacle that Outreach aims to address is encouraging casual, non-technical contributors to share feedback while lowering the barrier to entry associated with GitHub. The program welcomes constructive and problem-oriented feedback that doesn’t fit into traditional bug reports or feature requests. Through discussion and collaboration, the program aims to discover possible solutions and provide an open ear for extenders to air their pain points on extending WordPress.
To achieve its goals, Outreach plans to set up a GitHub team for early user feedback, encourage engineers to use the channel for requesting extenders’ input on new features, create a wishlist for upcoming releases to prioritize user input, and involve contributors from agencies and extenders in the Extensibility Issues Triage initiative.
The ultimate aim of the revamped Outreach Program is to make it more accessible and sustainable, improve collaboration across teams, and guide WordPress development through early and ongoing user and contributor input. It acknowledges that this can only be achieved through a group endeavor that welcomes those interested in specific focuses of the software.
Moving forward, the program will continue to iterate and evolve, taking into account the needs and interests of its diverse community while ensuring that the channel remains focused. Outreach is version one of an ongoing initiative, and its success lies in the continuous humming of activity within the channel, keeping people informed about what’s happening in the WordPress ecosystem.
