Component Maintainers in 5.3

On the heels of APAC Triage and Bug Scrub Sessions and Bug Scrub Schedule for 5.3, thanks @pento and @davidbaumwald, I’d like to propose something a little bit different.

The WordPress 5.3 release is shaping up to be substantial. There are tons of fixes and improvements in 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 both users and developers. Even if 5.3 only included the Gutenberg update, it would have been a very nice, very desirable upgrade.

There is more to this release! Currently there are 632 tickets on the 5.3 milestone on TracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress., both open and closed. A few smaller new features and user facing enhancements are in the works, and a lot of bugfixes and under-the-hood improvements are coming up or already done.

I’d like to propose that component maintainers take more “charge” of the tickets in their components. There is a general expectation that if you moved a ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. to a milestone you are the “lead” for that ticket and will see it through to completion, or move it to a future milestone if not feasible. But that shouldn’t stop component maintainers from helping to keep those tickets moving.

With the scheduled 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. scrubs, and the per-component bug scrubs that usually happen at the components’ meetings, the 329 open tickets aren’t that big of a mountain. 

The 5.3 Challenge

During the next few weeks (by 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 scheduled for 23 September) join me in making sure all 5.3 tickets in our components will either be resolved or moved to a future milestone. And if there are any hurdles leave a comment on the ticket briefly outlining the difficulties and include a resolution timeline.

It would also be helpful if during this time all component maintainers do a short, concise update about their component on the weekly coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. dev chats. These updates would typically include the number of open 5.3 tickets and whether there are any difficulties with any of them. This will help people know where help is most needed, especially any newer contributors who are having trouble deciding where to spend their time.

Also, we have a Docs Wrangler for our release! After 5.3.0-beta-1 is out, it would be great if component maintainers review all changes to their component (if not already reviewed), then, if possible, help @justinahinon with writing or editing dev. notes. There are currently 301 fixes and enhancements committed to the 5.3 milestone and they will need documentation.

The proposed change for component maintainers is to act early, before beta-1, and to regularly make updates and bring any difficulties to the core dev chat.

#5-3, #bug-scrub, #components, #core