To improve the hosting experience and educate people on the best practices on hosting WordPress, the Hosting Team is working on several projects.
There is a set of hosting best practices in the Hosting Handbook, including Performance, Reliability, Security and Server Environment recommendations.
The team also runs and maintains a set of automated hosting tests that run across the hosting environment of many hosting companies. You can set up tests to run on your hosting environment(s), and help improve the tools through fixing bugs, adding features, or improving the design of the test reporter pages.
The Handbook contains information about the Hosting Team, along with hosting recommendations for running WordPress.
The recommendations were put together by the team and used as a basis for Site Health recommendations in WordPress. They're meant both as a reference for folks learning to host WordPress, and a way to help WordPress and Hosts improve together.
The handbook is in the process of being audited and improved. You can see the progress and contribute through Github.
You can propose improvements or solve those available in both the PHPUnit test runner (issues) and the PHPUnit test reporter (issues).
The Runner repo contains the parts of the hosting tests that run on a host, and the Reporter repo contains the plugin that runs on WordPress.org for receiving and displaying the tests.
You can find the global WordPress Slack at wordpress.slack.com. A signup and walkthrough are available at chat.wordpress.org. When you are in, find the #hosting channel.
You can sign up using your WordPress.org username. If you don't have one, create a WordPress profile and you'll be able to create an account as MyWordPressUsername@chat.wordpress.org, replacing MyWordPressUsername with your WordPress.org username.
The meeting is usually to connect about WordPress happenings throughout the week connected with hosting and to catch up on the status of the team's ongoing projects.
The agenda usually consists of the following topics:
- Greetings
- About the WordPress Community
- About the WordPress Hosting Team
- Open Floor
During the Greetings we do a "Wave in" to get an overview who is in for the meeting and check how everyone is doing. New attendees are welcomed to introduce themselves.
In the About the WordPress Community section the team talks about the latest happenings in the WordPress space and their impacts on hosts. Examples are new WordPress releases, new proposals or WordCamp.
The About the WordPress Hosting Team part of the meeting focuses on open tasks or issues on hosting related projects like the Handbook or the Automated Hosting Tests. Additionally, we handle requests from other teams here.
Everything else up for discussion will be handled during the Open Floor. Every attendee can bring up topics here to discuss or just to inform hosts.
Taking meeting notes is a great way to help out!
During each meeting, we try to create a post with a synopsis of what is chatted about, to make it easier for those who can't attend to follow along. You can see examples of notes from previous meetings on the Hosting Team's Make site.
There's always a need for more folks to join! If you're interested in helping out with taking notes, chat with one of the Team Reps for access to the team's make site. Once you have access, you'll be able to start with templates of previous meeting notes.
You can check out recommendations on style in this Core Handbook page. They don't all apply because it's a guide from Core — the biggest thing is to be careful not to accidentally representing WordPress.org or the team if it's not a WordPress.org or team decision, and to get peer review before posting.
Feel free to ask in the main #hosting channel for review, or any of the Team Reps directly if you don't get a reply right away.
If you've never been on the Hosting Team before and you want to contribute, a good time to start is on a Contributor Day. You can check to see if your nearest community has a Hosting team, and if not, you can always participate in the Contributor Days associated with WCAsia (WordCamp Asia), WCEU (WordCamp Europe) and WCUS (WordCamp US).
Also, you can access the #hosting channel on Slack, check it and start participating. We always have something to do!
If you want to get an idea of what a contributor day with the hosting team might look like, take a look at some work notes from the team from previous contributor days!
If you are interested in the Hosting Team, you may be interested on these other teams as well:
- Core: The core team makes WordPress. Whether you're a seasoned PHP, HTML, JavaScript or CSS developer or are just learning to code, we'd love to have you on board. You can write code, fix bugs, debate decisions, and help with development.
- Core Performance: The core performance team is dedicated to monitoring, enhancing, and promoting performance in WordPress core and its surrounding ecosystem.
- CLI: WP-CLI is the official command line tool for interacting with and managing your WordPress sites.
- Documentation: Good documentation lets people help themselves when they get stuck. The docs team is responsible for creating documentation and is always on the look-out for writers. The blog has discussion around the team's current projects.
- Support: Answering a question in the support forums or IRC is one of the easiest ways to start contributing. Everyone knows the answer to something! This blog is the place for discussion of issues around support.
- Test: The Test team patrols flow across the entire WordPress ecosystem on every device we have at hand. We test, document, and report on the WordPress user experience. Through continuous dogfooding and visual records, we understand not only what is wrong, but also what is right. We immerse ourselves in the context of what we are making and champion user experience.
- Tide: Tide is a series of automated tests run against every plugin and theme in the directory and then displays PHP compatibility and test errors/warnings in the directory.
- Training: The WordPress training team helps people learn to use, extend, and contribute to WordPress through synchronous and asynchronous learning as well as downloadable lesson plans for instructors to use in live environments, via learn.wordpress.org.
If you enjoy teaching people how to use and build stuff for WordPress, immediately stop what you’re doing and join our team!
The following are ways that a volunteer currently can earn a hosting contributor badge:
- Accepted PRs to the distributed tests
- Contributions to the documentation for best practices
- Contributing with setting up automated tests at a host
- Helping to lead meetings or write up notes
- Actively participating in meetings regularly and giving feedback on things discussed.
- Helping out at a contributor day
If you've contributed and don't yet have a badge, apologies! Visit the Hosting Contributor and ask for it. Please feel free to ping any of the Team Reps for further questions.
[info]If you’re interested in improving this handbook, check the Github Handbook repo, or leave a message in the #hosting channel of the official WordPress Slack.[/info]
- 2023-11-11: Update the Badges section.
- 2023-02-17: Up-to-date. More related teams.
- 2022-06-08: WordCamp Europe 2022 Contributor Day link.
- 2022-06-02: Adding Github process.
- 2021-05-27: Fixing infoboxes.
- 2021-02-17: Changelog added.
- 2020-06-02: Published from Github.