Dev Chat Summary: October 19 (4.7 week 9)

This post summarizes the dev chat meeting from October 19th (agenda, Slack archive).

Reminders

• Schedule: Today is the major feature merge deadline! That leaves us one week until 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., where the list of feature request and enhancement tickets needs to be at zero. It is currently at 39.
• Tickets: There are currently 110 tickets in the 4.7 milestone. This is 35 fewer than last week 🎉However, in just 4 short weeks, this also 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: Scrubs are planned for Thursday, October 20th from 9:30am-11:30am PST and Friday, October 21st from 9:30am-11:30am PST. If you have interest in helping run a scrub and help ensure tickets move forward, please reach out to @jbpaul17 or @jorbin and we’ll find a time & scrub focus that works best for you.

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. / Field Guides

• In general, if you worked on something that needs to be called out for testing or building upon, there should be a post about it.  These are all tagged as `dev-notes` on the Make/CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. site.  The target is everything written before beta 2 so we can get 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. summarizing them and an email sent to all 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 developers while we are still in beta. In general all active components should have at least one post about what has changed.
  • @westonruter and @celloexpressions: summary of 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. in addition to individual ones for specific features
  • @davidakennedy: Twenty Seventeen and its related hooksHooks In WordPress theme and development, hooks are functions that can be applied to an action or a Filter in WordPress. Actions are functions performed when a certain event occurs in WordPress. Filters allow you to modify certain functions. Arguments used to hook both filters and actions look the same.
  • @joemcgill and @mike: Images
  • @swissspidy: Internationalization 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. switching + user language
  • @azaozz and @iseulde: Editor summary of changes
  • @joemcgill: removal of the automatic fallbacks for generating `alt`

Final Merge Decisions

• Twenty Seventeen (@davidakennedy)
  • Merge Proposal & Trac ticket
  • 59 contributors. Merging later today.
  • There are 34 issues left, some of which will be moved to TracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress.. There are 0 pull requests left.
  • A code review was performed by @aaroncampbell, and he didn’t find anything that should hold up merge.
  • Theme does not depend on any core features being merged before/at the same time, but will greatly benefit from any completed.
  • Video headers (#38172) needs consensus on the best approach and testing of functional patches
  • Merge proposal accepted. 🎉
• 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/.: Content 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. (@kadamwhite)
  • Merge Proposal & Success metrics
  • 99 contributors. 25 merged PRs in the past 3 days. 27 issues left in the current milestone and a few stray PRs, which will be closed out shortly or moved to Trac.
  • Monday meeting in #core resulting in conditional merge approval
  • Conditions:
    • 1) 4.7: Press This / Quick Draft Core feature (#38343 and #38342)
    • 2) 4.7: Object / non-single level 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.. @joehoyle, @jnylen and others have been working on this, tracking via GitHub.
    • 3) 4.7: Define success metrics (see link above)
    • 4) 4.7: Continuing to ensure the API forward compatibility (EVERYONE should be building things with it).
    • 5) 4.7: Review .com API settings discrepancies, determine how to resolve or where to document. @joehoyle, @jnylen and others have been working on this; Progress/documentation.
  • WP-API is code-frozen at this time; open enhancements will be ported over by @rachelbaker as appropriate.
  • Merge proposal accepted (“Let’s do it.”). 🎉

Components and Other Enhancements

• 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. (@swissspidy)
  • Nothing newsworthy from the i18n side which isn’t already on Make/Core.
• Make it easier to visualize where to put your content in a given theme (aka “dummy content”)
  • If there are people out there interested in content writing and stuff like customizer integration, hit up @helen.
• Media (@mikeschroder, @joemcgill)
  • We’re working on trying to get #31050 (Better PDF Upload Management) into shape for commit this week. Still some issues to iron out, but it’s getting close.
  • I want to call out that we’ve removed the automatic fallbacks for generating `alt` attributes from images with consultation from the a11yAccessibility 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) team to improve the user experience for screen readers. See: #34635 for details.
  • We have a few other things we’re looking at this week, but if there is anything pressing that needs eyes specifically from someone on the Media team, please reach out in #core-media.
• Customize (@westonruter, @celloexpressions)
  • Remaining three major 4.7 feature projects merged in the last 24 hours.
  • #27403 and #38164 are our larger remaining tickets needing attention currently, with #29158 and #22058 pending final patches for review and discussion.
• Editor (@azaozz, @iseulde)
  • TinyMCE: allow pasting in image captions (#36211) needs some more testing
    • Add an image in the editor, add a caption, then try pasting different things copied from another web page in it. This makes some assumptions of what the user expects, and what should happen, i.e. when pasting an image into a caption it should remove the image but let the text in, or keep all that is pasted but move it under the caption?

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