Garth Mortensen 4:29 pm on May 19, 2016
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Dev Chat Summary: May 18, 2016

This post summarizes the weekly dev chat held on May 18, 2016 at 14:00 MDT.

Update on WordPress 4.5.3

  • Target date for release is in 2-3 weeks.
  • Only 7 tickets remain in the minor milestone.
  • #36749, #36590, and #36748 all need some additional help. Please look into them if you can.

New TracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress. keyword for Dev Notesdev note Each important change in WordPress Core is documented in a developers note, (usually called dev note). Good dev notes generally include a description of the change, the decision that led to this change, and a description of how developers are supposed to work with that change. Dev notes are published on Make/Core blog during the beta phase of WordPress release cycle. Publishing dev notes is particularly important when plugin/theme authors and WordPress developers need to be aware of those changes.In general, all dev notes are compiled into a Field Guide at the beginning of the release candidate phase.:

  • Dev notes are make/coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. posts which are about new features/APIs or 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. changes. The goal is to have a field guideField guide The field guide is a type of blogpost published on Make/Core during the release candidate phase of the WordPress release cycle. The field guide generally lists all the dev notes published during the beta cycle. This guide is linked in the about page of the corresponding version of WordPress, in the release post and in the HelpHub version page. which summaries all the changes of a release.
  • If you think a ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. needs a make/core post, please add the needs-dev-note keyword so these can be tracked. (needs-dev-note won’t be in the keyword dropdown, however you can manually add it.)
  • Current tickets with needs-dev-note can be found here: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/query?keywords=~needs-dev-note&milestone=4.6&group=component
  • Historically, the ticket owner or committercommitter A developer with commit access. WordPress has five lead developers and four permanent core developers with commit access. Additionally, the project usually has a few guest or component committers - a developer receiving commit access, generally for a single release cycle (sometimes renewed) and/or for a specific component. writes the post, but anyone can author a dev notedev note Each important change in WordPress Core is documented in a developers note, (usually called dev note). Good dev notes generally include a description of the change, the decision that led to this change, and a description of how developers are supposed to work with that change. Dev notes are published on Make/Core blog during the beta phase of WordPress release cycle. Publishing dev notes is particularly important when plugin/theme authors and WordPress developers need to be aware of those changes.In general, all dev notes are compiled into a Field Guide at the beginning of the release candidate phase..
  • Please contact @ocean90 if you have a dev note ready to publish.
  • Reminder: The handbook has a Post & Comment Guidelines page.

Feature project updates

Font Natively

  • This week a 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. with the font shortcut property was fixed.
  • Currently there are no blockers noted.
  • More screenshots across operating systems/browsers/resolutions/devices would be greatly appreciated.
  • Screenshots should be uploaded directly to ticket #36753 if possible. Otherwise, a link to them will suffice.
  • The dashboard with the welcome panel active, the discussion settings page, and the 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. all good for screenshots.
  • @helen has pinged @mattmiklic about the font weight differences that were noted. (Answer)

Customizer transactions/Customize Posts

  • Transactions: setting validation (#34893) is the part of transactions that has been worked on this last week. It is ready for commit from @westonruter‘s point of view.
  • It was proposed to puntpunt Contributors sometimes use the verb "punt" when talking about a ticket. This means it is being pushed out to a future release. This typically occurs for lower priority tickets near the end of the release cycle that don't "make the cut." In this is colloquial usage of the word, it means to delay or equivocate. (It also describes a play in American football where a team essentially passes up on an opportunity, hoping to put themselves in a better position later to try again.) Customize Posts from 4.6 for now and to focus on the underlying API instead.
  • #36879 allows post data to be filtered if is_customize_preview().
  • Work continues on 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., primarily thanks to @valendesigns, with work focusing on being able to create new posts from within the Customizer.
  • There has been some confusion regarding the scope of the feature plugin vs. the scope of what’s being worked on for 4.6, @westonruter and @celloexpressions will work on separating the two to reduce confusion.

Shiny Updates

  • A feature projects landing page was published, and requests for review to make/flow, make/polyglots, and make/accessibility were posted.
  • The team is still targeting 4.6.
  • @swissspidy has merged his work on `update-core.php` to the master branchbranch A directory in Subversion. WordPress uses branches to store the latest development code for each major release (3.9, 4.0, etc.). Branches are then updated with code for any minor releases of that branch. Sometimes, a major version of WordPress and its minor versions are collectively referred to as a "branch", such as "the 4.0 branch". so it’s now ready to be tested.
  • By next week the team wants to have fixed all reported bugs and have found a solution to activate a 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 after it was installed.
  • Please test and report all issues on the Shiny Updates Github repository.
  • Testing instructions are being worked on by @mapk.

Open question: Should `update-core.php` changes be part of the merge proposal? Initially it has not been part of the proposal because it was far from finished. Pros for making it part of the proposal would be that it would completely eliminate The Bleak Screen Of Sadness from there, con would be that it wasn’t ready at the beginning of the cycle and still needs a good amount of testing.

If you have any thoughts on the matter, please chime in.

Toolbar Experiments

Component announcements

  • “@boonebgorges” reminded everyone about https://make.wordpress.org/core/2016/05/18/query-component-bug-scrub-may-24/
  • @ocean90 also reminded everyone that #core-i18n still has weekly bug scrubs every Tuesday @ 18:00 UTC.

Open discussion

  • @voldemortensen proposed that core adopt some prerendering and prefetching by default. He and @swissspidy believe there are some big performance gains to be had. However, prerendering can have some bandwidth impacts that need to be researched/discussed further.
  • @tfrommen would like some feedback on #26511. The basic concept of the ticket is to introduce the ability to switch between locales. He will be making 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. so it can be tested directly with core. Discussion will continue in #core-i18n.
  • @mrwweb would like feedback on #36809. After a healthy discussion about the problems surrounding the removal of the feature, the general consensus is that it would stay for now and be revisited in the future.

The full dev chat logs can be found here: https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/core/p1463601630005394

#4-6, #dev-chat, #summary