It’s been just over a year since the creation of the Media Corps working group, and though it had already been inactive for several months, it now officially comes to an end.
Remember that you can listen to this program from Pocket Casts, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the feed directly.
Program transcript
Hello, I’m Alicia Ireland, and you’re listening to WPpodcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
In this episode, you’ll find the information from May 5th to 11th, 2025.
The Media Corps experiment, launched in March 2024, was intended to help independent WordPress media professionals produce high-quality content with less effort, through regular briefing sessions and continuous Slack support.
Although initially well-received and actively engaged with, three main obstacles arose: difficulties in scaling a model based on scheduled meetings; the lag between information shared during briefings and real-time updates available via social media; and the progressive drop in participant engagement, eventually dwindling to barely a dozen active members with increasingly irregular attendance, despite many relying on asynchronously published videos.
To address this, strategies were considered, such as centralizing interviews and dialogues in the #media-corps channel, encouraging cross-collaboration between media and developers, and designing a structured content roadmap with shorter, more frequent briefings.
Now, officially, this specific initiative has been closed, redirecting media and independent professionals toward established resources. Although one of the official reasons is the lack of conversation in the channel, it must be noted that since the legal battle and community member expulsions, several participants requested explanations in the channel—explanations that were never provided—ultimately leading to this informational blackout, coupled with the departure of Reyes Martínez, the project’s most visible figure.
The Community team will soon begin a personalized “check-in” process with active Event Supporters and Program Supporters. The goal is to better understand each person’s engagement—from Slack moderators or event mentors to those on hiatus or unsure how to re-engage—confirm their level of contribution, and ensure they have appropriate access and permissions.
They’ll first reach out via private message on Slack, and if there’s no response within a week, follow up via email with a short survey link. This survey will gather data about current tasks, weekly availability, willingness for mentorship, interest in training, and desired topics. This information aims to identify inactive contributors, complete their offboarding if necessary, detect barriers or growth areas, and ultimately optimize collaboration and mutual support within the team.
WP-CLI 2.12 has been released, marking another step in the tool’s maturity, thanks to 68 contributors and the integration of 382 pull requests to improve stability and compatibility.
Notable updates include enhancements to the cache and transient commands, which now support pluck and patch of specific subkeys, making it easier to manipulate cached data without rewriting entire arrays; the ability to pass JSON for complex queries in post list; and the new --single (and its opposite --no-single) flag in post meta get, to control whether to return one or all values associated with a key. Additionally, --exclude has been added to core verify-checksums, Requires and Requires_PHP headers are now respected in plugin/theme commands, and the make-json command has been enhanced with options for custom text domains and file extensions.
Simultaneously, this version achieves full compatibility with PHP 8.4—work that required multiple hacks to maintain PHP 5.6+ support—and paves the way for raising the minimum requirement to PHP 7.2 in the next release.
View Transitions is the Performance team’s proposal as a canonical plugin, aiming to expose in WordPress a specific API to enable cross-document view transitions at the theme level.
These transitions allow for fluid animations between two pages of the same origin without full reloads or complex JavaScript implementations. Overall, this plugin seeks to modernize the WordPress navigation experience, offering developers and designers a simple way to implement cohesive page animations and improving the site’s perceived performance.
And finally, this podcast is distributed under a Creative Commons license as a derivative version of the podcast in Spanish; you can find all the links for more information, and the podcast in other languages, at WPpodcast .org.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
Leave a Reply