Meeting notes on Slack
WordPress 5.0.2 update
Note: WordPress 5.0.1 was released between the publication of the agenda and the meeting, so all references to 5.0.1 are assumed to refer to 5.0.2.
There were no significant updates pertaining accessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) plans in WordPress 5.0.2. There are some outstanding pull requests milestoned in the Gutenberg 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/ GitHub 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/ repository, but no definite progress.
Block 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. Editor Documentation update
While the user documentation was finished prior to the release of WordPress 5.0, there was insufficient time to prepare it for publication. This is largely because of the need to edit and merge different sets of documentation in order to avoid redundancy.
With the upcoming holidays and associated slowdown, the public availability of the the documentation is still unknown.
Follow up from WordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. US hackathon
Deque supported a hackathon to implement automated testing using Axe. The hackathon was well-received and effective, with several potential projects coming out of it.
Two big highlights are the beginnings of a11y tests added to the Gutenberg e2e test suite (https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/12743) and work developed to add automated tests to Twenty Nineteen. The Twenty Nineteen tests are intended to become a base pattern for testing accessibility in themes generally.
The team created a GitHub project to track ideas and progress on these projects. WordPress automated accessibility testing project
Block editor strategic planning
Gutenberg Phase 2 is in very early stages. The only notable publication is a set of early mock-ups. While these shouldn’t be taken as definitive, they are indicators of what is being considered and proposed. However, we should all keep our eyes open to watch for any red flag issues, to try and avoid having problems crop up later.
Open Forum
Discussed raising the topic of the fixing the settings API again. This was last raised about 2 years ago, but was largely dropped as focus turned to the development of the new editor. It’s definitely a worthwhile project, but should be coordinated with any discussions concerning the long term goals for Gutenberg.
