Core Dev chat notes for Feb 10

Agenda:

Schedule Notes, Status Updates, Open Floor

Schedule Notes

• Today is the feature pluginFeature Plugin A plugin that was created with the intention of eventually being proposed for inclusion in WordPress Core. See Features as Plugins. decision deadline: Responsive Preview and Selective Refresh will be merged.
• Next Wednesday (Feb 17) is the deadline for merge for these, with 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. scheduled for the week after, on Feb 24.
• Reminder: once beta ships, no more enhancements can be committed, so anything that is left or close to finished needs to be shored up in the next two weeks. Enhancements mile-stoned for 4.5 need attention to make it into the release in time.
• Any help triaging the 4.5 milestone is definitely appreciated.
• The 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/. team’s proposal is to merge the four main endpoints when they are ready, and they are not ready for 4.5. As such, no endpoints are targeted for WordPress 4.5. A summary of last week’s chat is on make/core: leave feedback there or in the #core-restapi 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/. channel.

Status Updates:

• Image Improvements: @joemcgill
  •  Cache output of `wp_upload_dir()` to improve performance (#34359) is about ready to go in after some unit testunit test Code written to test a small piece of code or functionality within a larger application. Everything from themes to WordPress core have a series of unit tests. Also see regression. updates )
  • Making progress on Improving Imagick file sizes (#33642) and Better animated GIF handling (#28474)
  • @markoheijnen made some interesting progress on generating thumbnails of PDFs in the media library and could use some feedback if you’re interested #31050.
• HTTPSHTTPS HTTPS is an acronym for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure. HTTPS is the secure version of HTTP, the protocol over which data is sent between your browser and the website that you are connected to. The 'S' at the end of HTTPS stands for 'Secure'. It means all communications between your browser and the website are encrypted. This is especially helpful for protecting sensitive data like banking information. Improvements: @johnbillion
  • Plan is enforcing HTTPS on a per-feature basis (eg. enqueued assets, post content, redirects, canonical, links).
  • HTTPS-by-default on install will be something to aim for for 4.6, but we’ll see what happens over this next week.
• CustomizerCustomizer Tool built into WordPress core that hooks into most modern themes. You can use it to preview and modify many of your site’s appearance settings.: @westonruter, @celloexpressions
  • Pushed out the new version of the Customize Partial Refresh plugin. Needs testing!
  • Introduces a framework for registering partials (refreshable regions) with complete rewrites of nav menu partial refresh and re-implementation of widgetWidget A WordPress Widget is a small block that performs a specific function. You can add these widgets in sidebars also known as widget-ready areas on your web page. WordPress widgets were originally created to provide a simple and easy-to-use way of giving design and structure control of the WordPress theme to the user. partial refresh to use the new framework.
  • Going to write a Make CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. post about it, documenting the 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..
  • Biggest question is whether widgets should opt-in for selective refresh by default. Widgets that use JavaScriptJavaScript JavaScript or JS is an object-oriented computer programming language commonly used to create interactive effects within web browsers. WordPress makes extensive use of JS for a better user experience. While PHP is executed on the server, JS executes within a user’s browser. https://www.javascript.com/. for their display will need get updated to work with selective refresh.
  • Responsive Preview (#31995) @valendesigns:  need to add unit tests and address any remaining issues
    
• Multisitemultisite Used to describe a WordPress installation with a network of multiple blogs, grouped by sites. This installation type has shared users tables, and creates separate database tables for each blog (wp_posts becomes wp_0_posts). See also network, blog, site/WP_Site: @jeremyfelt
  • 15 tickets on the 4.5 milestone. Hoping to establish readiness for these over the next week and get some stuff in.
  • Going to start focusing more multisite related energy toward the REST API’s site (and metaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress.) endpoints.
• Editor: @azaozz, @iseulde
  • No updates this week: planning to get paste shortcuts in and work on mce views.

Open Floor

• @georgestephanis For what it’s worth, while I do think Application Passwords is pretty much ready for 4.5, I’m not sure how much sense it makes to consider merging it into core prior to the REST API endpoints.
• @jorbin: Planning to drop the beta tagtag A directory in Subversion. WordPress uses tags to store a single snapshot of a version (3.6, 3.6.1, etc.), the common convention of tags in version control systems. (Not to be confused with post tags.) from the Accessibility Coding Standards
• Reminder that @eric called for a PHP Unit Test Docs meeting this Friday

#4-5, #dev-chat, #meeting-notes