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WordPress Theme Review Team Scraps Trusted Authors Program Due to Gaming and Inconsistent Reviews

After several months of discussion, WordPress.org’s Theme Review Team has decided to discontinue the Trusted Authors (TA) Program that launched in April 2018. The program, which was controversial from its inception, allowed certain authors to bypass the normal theme review queue after demonstrating an ability to submit themes with fewer than three issues. Trusted Author theme submissions went to their own dedicated queue that was handled by team leads.

The objective of the program was to streamline the review process and lessen the burden on reviewers. When it failed to deliver the intended results, the Theme Review team leads made a unilateral decision behind closed doors, implementing a change requiring TA participants to join the team and perform a minimum number of reviews in order to continue having their own themes fast tracked through the review process. This was loudly decried by other members of the Theme Review team who were blindsided by the decision.

“We are removing the Trusted Author Program,” team lead William Patton announced in the most recent meeting. “It has not fulfilled the intended plan and has caused more problems than it is solving.”

Fellow team lead Sandilya Kafle outlined the reasons in a post published today. The entrance requirements for the program did not ensure that participants were truly “trusted” authors, as many had to be removed for gaming the system. Reviewers also reported that there was a group of people releasing clones of themes every week.

“We got lots of help from the TA authors – for which we’d like to thank them,” Kafle said. “However, there was still gaming from some of the authors – which resulted in their removal from the TA program. One of the intentions of the TA program was to reduce the gaming by the use of multiple accounts. However, we still saw some authors having multiple accounts so this intention was not realized though the program existing.”

The TA program’s entrance requirements also did not ensure that participants were prepared to review themes at a high level, which resulted in inconsistent reviews.

“We strongly believed that TA members were highly familiar with the requirements but we found that was not the case for all of them,” Kafle said. “Additionally, some authors did not feel confident enough in their own understanding of all requirements to perform reviews and set themes live. Instead many TA reviews went to the admin queue after approval. This was an indicator that the quality of the themes by TA’s may not be as high as expected.”

Most of the Theme Review team members present in the meeting were generally agreed on shutting the TA program down. Alexandru Cosmin, the former team lead who introduced the program, was the only vocal outlier, whose acrid responses to scrapping the program reflect a long-standing frustration with the slow queue.

“Honest opinion, and I could bet on this: by the end of the year we’ll have 5-month queues and multi-accounters,” Cosmin said. “We’ll see how fair it will be when you have guys with 15 accounts and authors complaining in the main chat about how long the queue is.”

Today’s decision to discontinue the TA program restores the natural order to the queue, with all theme authors receiving the same treatment. Tying an incentive program to the review system was ineffective for taming the queue.

Long queues and gaming the system have proven to be continual struggles for the Theme Review Team, but the existence of these problems underscores the significance of the official themes directory for theme shops. Companies continue to use WordPress.org to gain users for their commercial versions, and the directory remains an important distribution channel for WordPress themes.

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Open Source Integration With Apache Camel and How Fuse IDE Can Help

Take any integration project and you have multiple applications talking over multiple transports on multiple platforms. As you can imagine, in large enterprises, applications like this can get complex very fast. Much of the complexity stems from two issues:

  1. Dealing with the specifics of applications and transports
  2. Coming up with good solutions to integration problems

Making your applications speak transports and APIs is relatively easy on its own. I'm sure everyone knows how to send JMS messages to their broker of choice; though it still requires in-depth knowledge of the JMS specification, which many developers may not have. On top of that, what happens when you want to route that JMS message to another application? You then have to take care of mapping the JMS message to the application plus handle any new concepts related to the application. Add a dozen other applications into the mix and you've got quite a headache on your hands.

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Plugzilla! How to Clone Pluggable Databases

Cloning a pluggable database takes time, and for environments where you'd like to use clones as part of unit testing or other elements of Agile development, it would be nice to be able to bring a clone into operation in the smallest time possible. One mechanism for that is sparse storage clones aka snapshot copy, but depending on your database version and your storage infrastructure, you might hit some limitations.

Enter Plugzilla! This PL/SQL package allows you to clone pluggable databases extremely quickly by having pluggable database pre-cloned in advance.

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Create a Custom Connector Using XML SDK and Deploy it in Anypoint Exchange

Introduction

XML SDK is an alternative approach to build custom modules in Mulesoft. This approach is comparatively easier to build compared to the already existing JAVA Mule SDK. Creating a custom module in Mule SDK is similar to creating a Mule application. This document is focused on demonstrating the steps to build a custom module using the XML SDK and deploying it in Anypoint Exchange. We will create a custom connector in Mule 4 that will perform basic arithmetic operations like addition and subtraction

Requirements

Application/Service

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Help Inform Azure Java EE Migration Guides

The Azure team at Microsoft (myself included) has been strengthening its commitment and outreach to the Java EE community and customers. A few months ago, I ran a study with the community and customers to understand how Java EE developers move to the cloud. One of the interesting findings of the study is that Java EE developers like to see migration guides that speak to their use case from cloud providers like Microsoft. Following up on these findings, the team is now developing just such guidance that hopefully speaks to you, starting with Linux virtual machines and Kubernetes.

The idea is to target Azure migration of major Java EE application server workloads (such as WebSphere ND, WebSphere Liberty, WebLogic, JBoss EAP, and WildFly). The guidance will likely include online documentation, ARM templates, Azure Marketplace solutions, Docker images, Helm charts, samples, workshops, talks, and so on. All the materials will be developed completely in open source so customers and the community can contribute at any point.

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A Beginner’s Guide to Creating an Interactive Chatbot Flow in Teneo

Chatbots that can have human-like conversations are at the top of many company wishlists. To be able to create human-like conversations, there are certain capabilities the chatbot needs to possess — one of these is interactive flows.

An interactive flow is where the chatbot can ask for more information from the user before giving an answer; this enables more precise answers and creates a better user experience.

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Integrating Istio With TIBCO BusinessWorks Container Edition (BWCE) Applications

Introduction

Services Mesh is one of the “greatest new things” in our PaaS environments. No matter if you’re working with K8S, Docker Swarm, pure-cloud with EKS or AWS, you’ve heard and probably tried to know how you can use this new thing that has so many advantages because it provides a lot of options in handling communication between components without impacting the logic of the components. And if you’ve heard of Service Mesh, you’ve heard of Istio as well because it is the “flagship option” at the moment. Even though other options like Linkerd or AWS App Mesh are also great options, Istio is the most-used Service Mesh at the moment.

You've probably seen some examples about how to integrate Istio with your open source-based developments, but what happens if you have a lot of BWCE or BusinessWorks applications…can you use all this power, or are you going to be banned from this new world?

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Write for WP Tavern

WP Tavern is hiring full-time writers. We are looking for reporters with the ability to write WordPress news every day, covering a wide range of topics, including (but not limited to) Gutenberg, core development, community, open source software, plugin and theme ecosystems, Tumblr, developer trends, and the open web.

The position requires the ability to discern the immediacy of stories that need to be told, attention to accuracy, and the ability to cultivate sources. Applicants must have a commitment to serve the public interest and remain impervious to a constant barrage of companies wanting to influence the press. A deep knowledge of the WordPress ecosystem is helpful for this position.

WP Tavern is, by reputation, WordPress’ newspaper of record. We are looking for writers who can approach this community with a critical and unbiased point of view, preserving the independent and provocative spirit of the Tavern. Interested applicants should use the contact form to get in touch, and be prepared to submit at least three writing samples for consideration.

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Knowledge Graphs and NLP. The Year of the Graph Newsletter: July/August 2019

Pinterest gets with the knowledge graph program. Facebook releases a new dataset for conversational Reasoning over Knowledge Graphs. Connected Data London announces its own program, rich in leaders and innovators.

And as always, new knowledge graph and graph database releases, research, use cases, and definitions. A double bill summertime newsletter edition, making your knowledge graph living easy.

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Why You Need Static and Dynamic Application Security Testing in Development Workflows

DevOps is a quickly growing practice for companies in almost every market. With the influx of cyberattacks over the past decade, security has slowly crept forward in the SDLC to the point where we’re now hearing the term DevSecOps in developer circles.

To keep things tidy and help developers manage additional security responsibilities, tools for static and dynamic application security testing (SAST and DAST) have made their way into the fray. In this post, we’ll explain what SAST and DAST are, how they fit into developers’ workflows, and when they should be used.

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Black Hat USA 2019 Conference Report

I had the opportunity to attend Black Hat USA 2019 at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas along with 19,000+ security professionals. I met several folks who had been attending Black Hat for more than 10 years. 

There were 20 different learning and breakout tracks including cryptography, cyber insurance, exploit development, IoT, mobile, network defense, and reverse engineering.

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TensorFlow 2.0: Dynamic, Readable, and Highly Extended

TensorFlow 2.0 Introduction

Considering learning a new Python framework for deep learning? If you already know some TensorFlow and are looking for something with a little more dynamism, you no longer have to switch all the way to PyTorch thanks to some substantial changes coming as part of TensorFlow 2.0. In fact, many of the changes in 2.0 specifically address the alleged shortcomings of TensorFlow.

With eager execution by default, you no longer have to pre-define a static graph, initialize sessions, or worry about tensors falling outside of the proper scope when you get over-zealous in your object-oriented principles. TensorFlow still has about 3 times the user base of PyTorch (judging from the repositories on GitHub referencing each framework), and that means more extensions, more tutorials, and more developers collaboratively exploring the space of all possible code errors on Stack Overflow. You’ll also find that despite the major changes starting with TensorFlow 2.0, the project developers have taken many steps to ensure that backwards compatibility can be maintained.