Dev Chat Summary: July 13th, 2016

WordPress 4.6 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. 3 and the future.

• Beta 3 was released today. Please test and report bugs on Trac.
• There will be one more beta and some RCs, each released at 18:00 UTC like beta 3 was.

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.

• Thanks to everyone who published their notes or are still working on them. All but two (one for the HTTPHTTP HTTP is an acronym for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. HTTP is the underlying protocol used by the World Wide Web and this protocol defines how messages are formatted and transmitted, and what actions Web servers and browsers should take in response to various commands. 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. and one for the editor ) have been completed and published.
• 15 dev notes have already been published for this release.
• The published posts can be found here: https://make.wordpress.org/core/tag/4-6+dev-notes/
• Posts that need to be written can be found here: https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/core/p1467832210003199
• The goal is to have the remaining two published by Monday.

Ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. milestones

The goal for beta 3 was 40 tickets, and at the time of release there were currently 36 open tickets on the milestone.

For the remaining releases, the number of open tickets should be as follows:

• Beta 4: 10 tickets
• RC1: 0 tickets

The tickets left on the milestone can be found here: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/query?status=!closed&milestone=4.6&groupdesc=1&group=type&order=priority

About page

• #37246 is the corresponding ticket and the brainstorming document can be found here.
• The first draft of content, written by @jorbin, has been completed. Please take a look at the document and leave some feedback.
• Everyone is invited to help with the about page.

Feature project updates

Register 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.

• There are currently three open tickets for the register meta feature project that need to be resolved for the 4.6 release (#37340, #35658, and #37345).
• There is a proposed 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. for #35658 where feedback is definitely welcome.
• A meeting on the feature project is scheduled for Thursday, July 14th 19:00 UTC

Font Natively

• 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/ has recently switched over to using system fonts as well.
• There is an open issue with bubbles and tabs (see this comment) that needs to be resolved.
• There is patch for the tabs: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/attachment/ticket/36753/36753.6.patch. If you have time, please test it with different fonts, and report back on the ticket with results.
• @helen mentioned there are outstanding issues with perceived smaller font size, Ubuntu font suitability, and minor alignment details.

Shiny Updates

• There is only one remaining ticket (#37233) which needs some testing.

Component announcements/updates and Open discussion

• @ocean90 (the 4.6 release leadRelease Lead The community member ultimately responsible for the Release.) reminded developers to assign good-first-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 to patch contributors to ensure they’re marked as “claimed” in the Good First Bugs report.
• @ocean90 also reminded component maintainer who cannot add the commit keyword or change the milestone of a ticket, to pingPing The act of sending a very small amount of data to an end point. Ping is used in computer science to illicit a response from a target server to test it’s connection. Ping is also a term used by Slack users to @ someone or send them a direct message (DM). Users might say something along the lines of “Ping me when the meeting starts.” him to fix that.
• @ocean90 also asked for help with two tickets for PHPPHP The web scripting language in which WordPress is primarily architected. WordPress requires PHP 5.6.20 or higher 7.1 compatibility, #37295 and #36435.
• In the Media component, @joemcgill asked for additional testing assistance with #34384 to try to uncover any edge cases that aren’t covered if possible. If none are found, the plan is to commit the latest patch (or similar) later this week.
• Additionally in the Media component, @joemcgill asked for anyone with more experience with the internals of wpMediaElement,  to help with #36735.
• @boonebgorges is planning a minor update to wordpress-importer in the next week or two, specifically for supporting termmeta #37213 and may also fix a couple of minor issues with PHP errors, deprecated function calls, etc. Help putting together or testing the minor update is welcome.
• There was brief discussion on the 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/theme update preview sandbox feature suggestion (#37301).
  • @jorbin pointed out that there’s an issue with plugins that do database updates during upgrade routines between versions, and it isn’t clear how the feature would deal with that.
  • It was proposed that a second copy of the database tables would be used for the sandbox feature (using a separate prefix as the main tables), with the downside of doubling the size of the database.

The full meeting logs can be found here: https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/core/p1468440017003941

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