Last Friday group of significant WordPress contributors came public with FAIR Package Manager Project that has been in works for around six months.
I won’t get into details what it is and why it was released – read the Linux Foundation press release, The Repository article or piece I wrote to our company blog (in Finnish). Or read blog post by Siobhan, Ipstenu, Ryan or Joost.
What I will say, is that I think one can’t advocate or preach something you don’t do yourself. So as of yesterday, my site has been running FAIR plugin.
What that means in practice?
- WordPress Core, plugin and theme updates come now from federted package repositories
- Avatars are local instead of Gravatar
- Events and News feed widget data comes from federated sources
- I’ve been using Compressed Emoji already for a while to deliver emojis locally instead of WordPress.org CDN, but if I wouldn’t FAIR would have my back
- …and bunch of other stuff are either local or using federated sources, go check out the plugin to see yourself.
I personally, as well as the whole team that has been working with FAIR until now, want to invite you to contribute. To help build and shape better, stronger, transparent and community focused future for WordPress.
This is only the beginning.