WordPress Leeds is more than just a monthly event it is a community, and part of an event wider WordPress community here in the UK. One of the ways the wider community communicates is through Slack.

What is Slack?

In a nutshell Slack is an online chat service for teams. After many years of IRC, the WordPress.org team moved all of their conversations onto Slack. This has made having conversations to do with the WordPress.org project much easier to have, regardless of technical ability. You can read more about their decision at chat.wordpress.org

With Slack you can create your own team, and within that team, have multiple channels. It may be helpful to look at it like this:

If Slack was a block of flats, every team is a flat, and every channel is a room within that flat.

Just like a flat in real life, each team has its own key to get in. We will discuss how to get onto the WP Community UK slack team later.

wp-community-uk.slack.com?

WP Community UK, is the team name for the UK WordPress community on Slack. It is currently primarily being used to help support and sustain the many WordPress community organisers up and down the country. This tends to be in the form of discussions around venues, speakers, sponsorship and general discussions about running a group.

In the team, you will also find individual channels for all the WordPress groups, where you will find friendly faces from your local events. The team also enables you to talk with other groups – find out other places to go, other ideas/suggestions for meetings. You can also get involved with the WordCamps and any other WordPress events that are are being organised around the country.

We also use the channel to discuss UK specific issues and ideas. Example topics include our banking system, UK legal issues, and how our lovely government is changing the laws that affects us as freelancers, businesses, and employees.

What it is not

wp-community-uk.slack.com is not a WordPress support channel and we are not in favour of separating ourselves from the greater WordPress community.

This is not to say we don’t get questions on issues to do with WordPress, but we highly recommend you visit the WordPress support forums or online chatroom.


How to join the WP Community UK Slack Team

You can access the wp-community-uk Slack team in two ways:

  1. Get an invitation at wpslack.uk

    How:

    1. Go to wpslack.uk
    2. Enter your email address into the box and press the `Get My Invite` button.
    3. Check your email address inbox for an email and follow the instructions in the email.
  2.  Use a @chat.wordpress.org email address. These are freely available to anyone with a WordPress.org account.

    How:

    1. Get a chat.wordpress.org email address

      1. To start, you need a WordPress.org account. If you haven’t got one, head to https://wordpress.org/support/register.php and sign up for an account.
      2. When this is done, visit https://chat.wordpress.org, and half way down, under Joining the WordPress team on Slack, you will find a link to be invited to the Make WordPress Slack team.
      3. Click on I understand. Please send me an invite. (if you understand all above).
      4. An email will be sent to you.
      5. Follow the instructions in the email to create your account for Make WordPress Slack team – the home of all discussions on contributing to the WordPress project.
      6. You’ll be dropped into the Make WordPress Slack team. From there you can join channels based on where you want to contribute to WordPress (by clicking on the left hand side under “Channels”).
    2. Sign up for an account on wp-community-uk.slack.com

      Now armed with your chat.wordpress.org email address, you can sign up for access to the UK community team.

      1. Go to https://wp-community-uk.slack.com/signup, and put your wordpress.org username in this box. An email will be sent to your email address.
      2. Click on Confirm my Email Address, and you’ll be taken to another username and password box. This can be the same or different to the username & password created for Make WordPress team (step 1.5).
      3. You will be taken to the #general slack channel.

In the UK Slack team, you will find many other channels, including channels for each user/meetup group. To join any other channels:

  1. Click “Channels” in the left hand column
  2. Click on the channel’s name to preview it
  3. Click “Join Channel” to join and chat 🙂

Joining the WPLeeds Channel

Once you have signed up, you can click on Channels in the left hand sidebar and scroll or search for #meetup-leeds. Clicking will bring up our channel.

For more details about the WP UK slack channel please see https://en-gb.wordpress.org/slack/