Tonya Mork 9:38 pm on January 27, 2022
Tags: 5.9 ( 104 ), retrospective ( 20 )

WordPress 5.9 ‘Joséphine’ Retrospective

Having fully celebrated the release of 5.9, but before turning focus to 6.0, it would be helpful to this and future squads if all those involved in contributing to 5.9 could take a few moments to share your thoughts about the release process.

Taking the pulse in the form of a retrospective helps to:

Discover the things the WordPress coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. team finds valuable to keep doing in future releases because they were a positive experience and moved the project forward.
Help identify areas that were not helpful in fulfilling release goals or were not positive for people participating.

All feedback is valuable to help to continuously improve the release process.

“Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.”
~ Norm Kerth, Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Review

Anyone is welcome to participate in this retro. Please take a few moments to fill in the form or leave public feedback in the comments below. The form will be open until February 14, 2022.

Please note, the form is not anonymous as it asks for your email address. Your email will only be used for follow-up questions and will not be used for any marketing or other purposes.

Thank you everyone for your contribution to this release! Thanks in advance for taking the time to help make future releases even better!

Props to @audrasjb for peer review.

#5-9, #retrospective

David Baumwald 10:14 pm on January 27, 2022

The release delay is one thing I’ve wondered about. Not the delay itself, but an “extra” process was put in place that would seem to mitigate this sort of thing. That being the “Go/No-Go” meeting(https://make.wordpress.org/core/2021/10/15/wordpress-5-9-feature-go-no-go-october-14-2021/). This was only a few weeks prior to the delay.

Given that the release was delayed by a month, what part of the Go/No-Go process needs to be improved? More CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. stakeholders involved?
- Daniel Richards 7:41 am on January 31, 2022
  
  Similar thoughts here about the Go/No-go meeting. Perhaps a second meeting was required before the 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. period, just to make sure the ‘next steps’ outlined in that post were all completed to a satisfactory level.
  
  This was a particularly big release, so it’s possible the processes that worked well on previous releases weren’t as effective because of that.
Daniele Scasciafratte 11:42 am on January 29, 2022

My thoughts on 5.9 is that also if WordPress get to freeze for new stuff 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/ it isn’t and to me lead to delay of this release. With all the burn-out for this change of the last minute for a pull request in Gutenberg.
An example of people tired of this way to manage the development process: https://twitter.com/Mte90Net/status/1487084641517514755

I like a more long release, as in Open SourceOpen Source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. usually stuff is released when it is ready and not by dates.
From the other side I see that in the last years is always more difficult to get address 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. tickets on WP (not gutenberg ones) and to me, they should get priority as it is clear that Gutenberg follows a different management that doesn’t work with the WP ones.

PS: I was thinking to abandon to contribute to WP for patches a lot of times, but I’m still doing because there are old patches still waiting for a review, and sometimes my customers had issues, so I work on a 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. to fix it. But if I could choose, I will abandon totally to contribute to WP coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. as it is not worth it.
- overclokk 4:06 pm on February 3, 2022
  
  I feel you bro.
  
  This is the same I’m thinking even if I’m not a cotributor like you.
mrwweb 9:28 pm on February 4, 2022
I mentioned this on the #editor slackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. yesterday, but there were some changes to blockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. markup and styles that I didn’t see covered in any fieldnotes. This has impacted me and many other site maintainers I know.

The two things I know about so far:
- Cover block markup changes (exacerbated by 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. that broke old opacity setting to be fixed in 5.9.1)
- Separator block now uses `::before` pseduo-element for styling
As an aside, I’d note that these changes seemed to very explicitly break back-compatibility which has been given as a reason for not fixing a bug I’ve raised in the past. Is there a policy for backwards compatibility with block markup and styles?

Similarly, I didn’t see any major call out of the new typography, padding, and border controls added by default to text blocks, group/cover/columns blocks, and the pullquote block respectively.

I think that for every future release there needs to be a “Changes to CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. Blocks in WordPress 6.X” field note.

Overall, it feels like the huge focus on FSE may have lead to oversights in testing and communication for non-FSE features.
Courtney Robertson 9:04 pm on February 9, 2022

The longer RCrelease 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). window really improved the supporting content on #training available at release. While we work with Docs, Marketing, and release MarComms to have more supporting materials ready at or closer to launch, it is important to remember that any content involving screenshots and screencasts can’t begin really until RC1. Things have stabilized enough that any drop/adds during RC could be tracked in that window.

Ideally, I’d like to unblock the flow for supporting content. Assessing across HelpHub, DevHub, Learn lesson plans, Learn workshops, Learn courses, and creating promotional material with Marketing is all important to user & developer adoption. Assessing each of these areas for revisionsRevisions The WordPress revisions system stores a record of each saved draft or published update. The revision system allows you to see what changes were made in each revision by dragging a slider (or using the Next/Previous buttons). The display indicates what has changed in each revision. and what new content to create is quite a challenge, especially during shorter RC phases. I’ve participated within Training/Learn AND Marketing.

I’d like to be better equipped for the quantity of contribution related to props from supporting teams. At this time, we are migrating content management (not content itself) to GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/. We’d like to continue exploring ways to gather the data from the activity on Learn itself as well. Tracking that in some teams is a large challenge.

Also: As we shift to broadening the adoption of FSE, continued outreach with the 3rd party ecosystem is vital. Would pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party authors like more information, before RC1, that draws attention to areas to test? Whether enterprise corporate or one person devs, what can we do to prepare them? There’s a chicken and egg scenario where many aren’t testing or following changes until things reach a stable point, but then finding the time to implement quite short.

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WordPress 5.9 ‘Joséphine’ Retrospective

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