The planned redesign for the WordPress.org homepage went live. Moreover, Ella Van Dorpe proposed an alternative to shortcodes.
Core
Idea: URIs as an alternative to Shortcodes
Ella Van Dorpe proposed in her post »Idea: Uniform Resource Identifiers as an alternative to Shortcodes« that any objects which should be embedded in a post should be seen as a separate resource. So a survey of the WordPress editor in 2016 could be integrated with the URI https://example.com/surveys/wordpress-editor-2016/. This approach could be used for things like galleries, forms, and any external resource.
Benefits of this solution are, among other things, that the concept of »links« is already known by many users and URIs are designed for this purpose. You can find more information about that, also about the challenges, in Ella’s post.
Plugins
Remove plugin from directory
If you have a plugin in the directory which is useless for some reason, you can send an email to the plugin team, and they will close the plugin. If you think your plugin has its use, but you cannot or do not want to support it anymore, you can add the tag adopt-me in the readme. Maybe the plugin will then find a new home (on wordpress.org/plugins/tags/adopt-me is a list of plugins looking for a new home).
Meta
New WordPress.org homepage design is live
I wrote about the plans for a new homepage design in the last weekly recap, and now it’s already live on WordPress.org. This is »the first iteration, the plan is to continue design and development to create something truly amazing«, Mark Uraine writes in his post »New Homepage is Launched«.