Stay Informed with WordPress.org Notifications

WordPress.org Notifications-Screenshot of the Make WordPress main blog index — Make WordPress.org home

Do you develop or contribute to WordPress? Participate in support forums? As you probably know, a group of official blogs exists for people like you. The “Make WordPress.org” group is home to P2-themed microblogs for the following development areas:

Core
Support
Plugins
UI
Accessibility
Themes
Polyglots
Systems

Keeping your ear to the ground

Some of these blogs can go awhile without seeing any traffic, but you can subscribe to individual “Make” blogs by email and RSS–hopefully ringing your bell when new topics of interest come around.

Just yesterday, August 4th, the team added a new way to keep your ear to the ground. Dubbed “WordPress.org Notifications,” it notifies you:

Any time your WordPress.org profile name is mentioned via the “@username” method.
When any of your custom-added search strings is published.

Recently, I wrote an article about providing better support for WordPress by staying informed of new support forum requests. The new WordPress.org notifications make it that much easier!

Support forums and make blogs combined

Notifications work not only in the “Make” blog areas, but in the support forums, as well. Content you post will not trigger an email to yourself–a nice touch.

Accessing notifications

WordPress.org Notifications-Screenshot showing notifications management link — Link for managing your notifications

To add and manage your notifications, visit your WordPress.org profile page and click the “Notifications” link next to your name. Note: Your may have 2 different profile pages and not be aware of it.

WordPress.org profile page:

http://profiles.wordpress.org/USERNAME/
This is where notifications are managed.

WordPress support forum profile page:

http://wordpress.org/support/profile/USERNAME/
This doesn’t have access to edit notifications, even though notifications do work on support forum content

Managing your notifications

Notifications for your username are automatically active. I don’t expect to see a whole lot of traffic from that.

WordPress.org Notifications-Screenshot of active notifications list — Your active notifications list

The real power is in adding your own notification search strings. For example, I’ve added a notification for “wp-cron” because it continues to be a source of problems that affects a number of my plugins.

At the bottom of the page, you can check a box whether or not to receive notifications by email. This lets you turn off the emails for a while without deleting the notifications you have set up.

While WordPress is a great project, we all must remain vigilant to keep it that way. The new notifications ability is a good way to keep informed about development areas you’re interested in.