[wp-meta] [Making WordPress.org] #7016: Restore visibility of all WordPress releases in events and news widget

[Making WordPress.org]

#7016: Restore visibility of all WordPress releases in events and news widget
----------------------------+--------------------
 Reporter:  ironprogrammer  |      Owner:  (none)
     Type:  enhancement     |     Status:  new
 Priority:  normal          |  Milestone:
Component:  General         |   Keywords:
----------------------------+--------------------
 With WordPress 6.2, the Marketing team began experimenting with a "two-
 channel strategy" of posting key milestone release announcements to
 [https://wordpress.org/news/tag/releases/ wp.org/news], with the bulk of
 other pre-release announcements to
 [https://make.wordpress.org/core/tag/releases/ make/core]. This meant that
 the [https://wordpress.org/news/2023/02/wordpress-6-2-beta-1/ Beta 1
 announcement] was in News, but that
 [https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/02/14/wordpress-6-2-beta-2/ Beta 2]
 [https://make.wordpress.org/core/tag/releases+6-2/ and onward] were posted
 to Core.

 === Why the Change?
 The Marketing team observed that News blog release post readership
 declined after Beta 1, so it was thought that subsequent beta release
 posts might better fit in the Core blog. It was reasoned that this shift
 would cut down on heavily technical posts on the main News blog, and
 hopefully find additional readership (and beta testers) from the Core blog
 audience. (See additional background of this approach in the
 [https://make.wordpress.org/marketing/handbook/resources/marketing-
 communications-release-cycle-guide/#planning-preparing Marketing &
 Communications Release Cycle Guide].)

 === What Happened?
 Anecdotal responses from would-be testers in Make WordPress Slack (e.g.
 [https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C02RQBWTW/p1677011442309209 here]
 and [https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C04JZ199XPG/p1678211547076859
 here]) indicated a lack of visibility for post-Beta 1 announcements,
 noting in particular that these were not displayed in the "WordPress
 Events and News" dashboard widget.
 [https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C02RQBWTW/p1678211661127259
 Additional discussion in Core Slack] suggests there is already a deficit
 of early beta testers, and the lack of beta release visibility from this
 change may exacerbate the problem.

 === Possible Update
 A possible solution to restoring visibility of these posts would be to
 utilize the existing news widget's https://planet.wordpress.org feed,
 which could be updated to include make/core release posts (e.g. via a new
 dedicated [https://make.wordpress.org/core/category/releases/ category] or
 [https://make.wordpress.org/core/tag/releases/ tag]). In this way, it
 wouldn't matter to which channel release announcements were posted, as
 they would appear in one or the other feed in this widget.

 ''WordPress Events and News widget screenshot:''
 [[Image(https://cldup.com/SAPuBMgIMT.png, 75%)]]

 === Alternate Considerations
 In [https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/43441 Core Trac #43441], the
 widget's News blog feed was updated to display two posts, because the News
 blog had steadily increased the breadth of content and audience it serves.
 In that ticket [https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/43441#comment:1
 @iandunn mentioned] an idea of flagging release and security posts, but
 due to BC concerns this was deferred and an alternate solution
 implemented.

 While this proposed enhancement is more of a stopgap specific to the news
 widget, there may be other possibilities opened if there was a dedicated
 releases feed (e.g. https://wordpress.org/releases/feed/) which might be
 interesting to explore long term.

-- 
Ticket URL: <https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/7016>
Making WordPress.org <https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/>
Making WordPress.org