With the Update Pilot Server you now automatically get a private Composer repository for all your plugins and themes. All protected with the same product keys used for regular WP updates.

I'll be testing this with my own products before making it public. Is this something you would be interested in?

What’s your take on encrypting environment variables on servers? Where do you store the private key and how do you ensure it doesn’t leak just like environment variables would?

I see that https://github.com/MightyMoud/sidekick is using SOPS, for example.

During the weekend I was able to decode the firmware upgrade process for my Gree mini-split AC. While my unit currently fails to apply the latest official update, this will hopefully allow others to verify the process.

Here is the detailed explanation: https://github.com/cmroche/greeclimate/issues/111

Looking for exciting and useful productivity tools? These two https://syntax.fm episodes have 60 of them! See https://syntax.fm/show/826/you-need-these-30-apps-part-1 and https://syntax.fm/show/826/you-need-these-30-apps-part-2

Todo Tree is a handy VSCode extension that shows all your TODO comments in a single sidebar panel. It can even detect to-dos in README sections. Get it from here: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Gruntfuggly.todo-tree

Thinking of trying out a few popular Linux distros from https://distrowatch.com — from a flash drive and a live boot just like in the old days. Love seeing all the different creative takes at desktop UX.

In order to support distributed WP ecosystem we need to implement vendor isolation for plugin and theme folders to avoid namespace conflicts. How about plugin-name@example.com for folder names? What would you suggest?

Hahaha… guess what happens when you update a plugin on a server running the update service? 🤣 How does one get updates to the update server?

Did you know that plugin and theme ZIPs from WP-org have an additional directory inside them matching the slug? GitHub ZIPs have directories with random suffixes so they require special treatment.

How do you get your kids to do chores around the house? Ours are ~10yo and I feel like we’ve missed the opportunity to start it early 😅

Today I learned that Composer Satis doesn't pull in the project-level auth.json so you must set it globally. Ended up creating an issue: https://github.com/composer/satis/issues/932

Only after building a custom update server and client library for WordPress plugins and themes I realized that the update client must be running at the network level on multisites for the custom update logic to work. The only solution here is to have a standalone update client plugin that is network activated.

Password policies is a very powerful concept used by this plugin from @teydeastudio to match the exact requirements of your security standards. Try out the free plugin to see how well it works! https://teydeastudio.com/products/password-policy-and-complexity-requirements/

Here is another fun and short WP brand idea with an available 5 letter dot-com domain — PinWP-com. Feel free to use it for your project!

I’m thinking of embracing the Conventional Commits standard for consistent changelog generation and versioning. It would most likely require squash merges for pull requests to reduce noise. Do you have a preferred convention for this?

Learn more: https://www.conventionalcommits.org/en/v1.0.0/#summary

And the slides from the original idea 7 years ago https://slides.com/damianopetrungaro/working-with-git

In the WordPress space we have three notable examples of monorepos: Gutenberg for JS packages, Jetpack, and Performance Lab for isolated plugins. Are there any other monorepos that you’re aware of?

I've started collecting all the examples as part of this guide: https://wpelevator.com/guides/monorepos

Did you know that Safari supports .mp4 videos in <img> tags for animated GIFs? https://developer.apple.com/documentation/webkit/delivering_video_content_for_safari/#3030249

Here is the historic context of the feature https://calendar.perfplanet.com/2017/animated-gif-without-the-gif/ and some unexpected consequences https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/img1.html

What do you use for compressing videos and normalizing audio? I'm looking for a simple app that does it all based on sane defaults or custom profiles. My target user (wife) doesn't want to remember to configure anything.

Did you know there used to be a GitHub mirror of all WP-org hosted plugins maintained by Bluehost, but the project was archived earlier in March of this year https://github.com/bluehost/pluginmirror

Access to WP-org Slack now requires a WP-org login and therefore the checkbox.