Dev Chat Summary: October 5 (4.7 week 7)

This post summarizes the dev chat meeting from October 5th (agenda, Slack archive).

Reminders

• Schedule: We are 2 weeks from the final chance to merge in major features. This includes Twenty Seventeen. Reviews and commits should be getting .
• Tickets: There are currently 167 tickets in the 4.7 milestone. This is 29 fewer than last week 🎉However, in just 5 short weeks, this needs to be zero. For any tickets you’ve moved into the milestone, please make sure these are active tickets, with some kind of activity in the last 7 days.
• Bug Scrubs: We’re looking for people to help run 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. scrub, please reach out to @jorbin if you have interest (details here). Bug scrubs this week plus one on Thursday at 3pm UTC (by @jbpaul17 on needs-testing tickets) and Thursday at 7pm UTC (by @morganestes on needs-docs tickets). 62 enhancements and feature requests are still open, we’ve already starting punting so please ensure there is activity on ones you want to land.

Components & Features

• Non-4.7 Feature Proposal: Notifications API (@johnbillion)
  • Discussion on this in #feature-notifications, but no meeting scheduled
• Non-4.7 Feature Proposal: Status API for taxonomy terms (@boonebgorges)
  • Discussion on this next Tuesday at 6pm UTC in #core
• Customize (@westonruter, @celloexpressions)
  • Latest update
  • Feature proposal for 4.7: Discovering and installing themes in the customizer (@celloexpressions)
    • Deadline for feedback and review from various teams is Wednesday, October 12th
    • Need review/audit from Flow (and mobile), Docs, Security, Polyglots/i18ni18n Internationalization, or the act of writing and preparing code to be fully translatable into other languages. Also see localization. Often written with a lowercase i so it is not confused with a lowercase L or the numeral 1. Often an acquired skill., Design/UXUX User experience, AccessibilityAccessibility 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), and when those are done a Code Review (@westonruter)
    • Would like user testing & testing of the 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. itself
    • Please provide feedback as a comment on the Feature Proposal Post, User Testing Post, or via Trac
    • The plan is to begin final code review/commit next Wednesday, October 12th, so feedback needs to be received by then
  • Merge proposal for Customize Changesets (fka Transactions) – Trac & Github
    • Needs developer attention, specifically on expected/best behavior on maintaining changesets across multiple theme previewing/testing. Details to be included in a Make/CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. post by @westonruter with discussion continuing in #core-customize
  • Otherwise we’re working toward finalizing patches for all of our other projects and will publish a feature proposal for custom CSSCSS Cascading Style Sheets. in the next week. All 4.7 customize non-bugs have an owner assigned to work toward commit or 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.) to a future release.
• Twenty Seventeen (@davidakennedy, @melchoyce)
  • Highlight: start testing the theme, we need help on the features from a development perspective, plan is theme merging into core by October 19th with enhancements needing to complete by October 26th
  • Latest theme update
  • Latest features update
  • Theme recap: This week the initial design implementation was merged into 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". on 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/. The rest of the theme is moving along nicely, and the initial design implementation should make it easier to test the theme’s features. Please start testing, and creating issues! The next step is to get a public demo up to help with that. Best way to test is to get it via GitHub ( if using wp-cliWP-CLI WP-CLI is the Command Line Interface for WordPress, used to do administrative and development tasks in a programmatic way. The project page is http://wp-cli.org/ https://make.wordpress.org/cli/, wp theme install <github-url> --activate).
  • Features recap: For the multi-panel feature, at the weekly meeting, the feature was reduced in scope to focus only on the front page of sites, only include content from pages and be implemented in 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.. @karmatosed has some mocks posted (including live preview). For the video headers feature, it still needs to be focused with a reasonable MVPMinimum Viable Product "A minimum viable product (MVP) is a product with just enough features to satisfy early customers, and to provide feedback for future product development." - WikiPedia defined. Although, some recent feedback on the ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. is helping there.
  • Twenty Seventeen needs you. Home pages should be fun to create and a heck of alot easier. Headers can be even more captivating. If you’re interested in working on either of these projects, please let @davidakennedy know.
• 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/. (@krogsgard, @kadamwhite)
  • Settings (PR against the main plugin repo) 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. (PR here against the meta repo) are still open for review from the team; we’ll be formally posting updates on Make/Core outlining the new functionality as these land
  • Need a lot of eyes on Authentication, released v2 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. 14 last weekend and intend to release a beta 15 with the merge-candidate functionality. Plan to propose that OAuth1 be included in the merge.
  • Testing and review is top priority right now. Docs for folks getting up and running with 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. will be getting a strong push post-Proposal.
  • Next meeting: Thursday at 2pm UTC
• Media (@mikeschroder, @joemcgill)
  • Latest update
  • Media search doesn’t include file name (#22744): Just committed a fix for a bug that was trampling existing JOINs. Please test, especially if you’re doing any custom filtering to media queries that might be impacted.
  • Starting work on potential feature pluginFeature Plugin A plugin that was created with the intention of eventually being proposed for inclusion in WordPress Core. See Features as Plugins. to introduce additional UX improvements to the media library. Likely future release material, but expect to fix some bugs and lay groundwork during this release. Development will happen in GitHub. Plan to make a feature project proposal after we’ve had some initial conversations about UIUI User interface/UX direction.
  • After some conversation with @sheri, may still try to land a core media 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. (#32417). Most of the work here has already been done, but need to make some decisions. We’ll plan to talk about this during our meeting on Friday at 5pm UTC in #core-images.
• i18n (@swissspidy)
  • User Adminadmin (and super admin) Language (#29783) landed this week. It allows each user to set their language (localeLocale A locale is a combination of language and regional dialect. Usually locales correspond to countries, as is the case with Portuguese (Portugal) and Portuguese (Brazil). Other examples of locales include Canadian English and U.S. English.) and the admin will be translated accordingly for them. 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. has yet to be written.
  • Focusing on making use of that feature by sending emails in the respective user’s locale. See #26511 if anyone wants to help with a new patch.
  • Introduce some 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/. i18n functions (#20491): progress currently happens outside of core. There’s a proof of concept for extracting strings from JavaScript files as well as a PR on the GlotPress repository to add JSONJSON JSON, or JavaScript Object Notation, is a minimal, readable format for structuring data. It is used primarily to transmit data between a server and web application, as an alternative to XML. export functionality.
• Editor (@azaozz, @iseulde)
  • We’ll work on a better experiences for when nonces expire; posted an idea dump in #core-editor, thoughts on any points are very welcome.
  • Bug scrub Thursday at 4pm UTC in #core-editor.
  • In order to move ahead with several UI proposals/tickets we will need to get more usage data.
  • Planning to update TinyMCE next week, even if no new version by then.

#4-7, #dev-chat, #summary