WordPress 5.4 Planning Roundup

According to the tentative release schedule for 2020-2021, we are due to start 5.4 this week.

These are the milestones, based on the previous cycle:

• Kickoff: 14 15 January 2020
• BetaBeta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process. 1: 11 February 2020 (4 weeks from kickoff)
• Release Candidaterelease candidate One of the final stages in the version release cycle, this version signals the potential to be a final release to the public. Also see alpha (beta). 1: 03 March 2020 (3 weeks from beta 1)
• General Release: 31 March 2020 (3 weeks from release candidate 1)

Proposed WordPress 5.4 Scope

The main goal for 2020 is full site editing via GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/.

For 5.4 these are the tasks:

• Create a block for navigation menus
• Update Gutenberg to the latest release version

As with every release, all component maintainers and teams are invited to prioritize their bugbug A bug is an error or unexpected result. Performance improvements, code optimization, and are considered enhancements, not defects. After feature freeze, only bugs are dealt with, with regressions (adverse changes from the previous version) being the highest priority.-fixes and enhancements for 5.4. Some suggestions that came from a few maintainers included:

• Build/Test Tools
  • Add support for the newer versions of PHPUnit
• Comments
  • The component was dormant for a while so during this cycle the new maintainers will do gardening and bug fixing
• Design
  • The Design Team has a long list of issues they want to work through and they are polishing it for publication.
• Privacy
  • UIUI User interface Improvements
• Site Health
  • Improve Discoverability
  • Enhance the checker page functionality
  • Allow users to enter recovery mode via their registered email
• REST APIREST API The REST API is an acronym for the RESTful Application Program Interface (API) that uses HTTP requests to GET, PUT, POST and DELETE data. It is how the front end of an application (think “phone app” or “website”) can communicate with the data store (think “database” or “file system”) https://developer.wordpress.org/rest-api/.
  • Performance improvement
  • Work on endpoints needed by Gutenberg (Menu APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways. and Settings API)
• Users
  • Changes to sites with a large number of users
  • Tweaks to REST API endpoints
• Media
  • Lazy-loading of images by default in the front-end

In addition, all components and teams are invited to continue polishing current interactions and making the UIs more user-friendly.

I also collected all the proposals from the open call for tickets: I will submit them to the relevant component maintainers so they can evaluate if there are enough resources to address them during this release cycle and update the status.

Please bear in mind, if a ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. is still waiting for review, has no patchpatch A special text file that describes changes to code, by identifying the files and lines which are added, removed, and altered. It may also be referred to as a diff. A patch can be applied to a codebase for testing., or no owner, it is unlikely that it will land in 5.4. This shouldn’t stop you from continuing to work on it, gather feedback and ultimately polish it enough to have it in a future release.

Proposed WordPress 5.4 Leads

This section is still pending some answers. I will fill it in as I get Yeses and Noes from people. 

The roles needed for the release are:

• Design Coordinator
• Editor Tech
• Editor Design
• CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. Tech
• Docs Coordinator
• Docs Writer

@matt will continue his role as release leadRelease Lead The community member ultimately responsible for the Release..

As suggested by @desrosj in a comment, it makes sense to have some roles not change for every release because it takes a while to learn and pass on the information. So David Baumwald and I will stay on for at least a couple more releases, as Triagetriage The act of evaluating and sorting bug reports, in order to decide priority, severity, and other factors. PM and Release Coordinator respectively. The goal is for us to learn enough so we can then mentor a new group of release and focus leads.

Let’s do this!

#5-4 #planning