PHP Meeting Recap – September 18th

This recap is a summary of this week’s PHPPHP The web scripting language in which WordPress is primarily architected. WordPress requires PHP 5.6.20 or higher meeting. It highlights the ideas and decisions which came up during that meeting, both as a means of documenting and to provide a quick overview for those who were unable to attend.

The meeting’s chat log.

Attendees: @brainfork @jdgrimes @mikelking @mte90 @nerrad @pross @schlessera @screamingdev @sergey @tfrommen @xkon

Chat Summary

The entire meeting revolved around discussing the draft document that the #marketing team has produced for our PHP “servehappy” page. We went through the document paragraph by paragraph in order to have a guided approach to discussing the content.

Even though we went way past the normal meeting duration, we only got through the first half of the document so far.

Here’s a non-exhaustive list of observations we had:

  • The page talked about having “detected an issue”. Although that makes sense when we redirect people from within the WordPress adminadmin (and super admin) dashboard, we should first try to build a generic page that makes sense as well when you directly access it.
  • We should make sure that negative points we raise with old PHP versions do not draw a negative picture of WordPress itself.
  • A lot of thoughts went into the paragraph that opposed backward support to the recommended version. We want to emphasize that you should not run on older PHP, even though WordPress does support it.
  • Country-specific assumptions, such as using the term “dollars”, should be avoided as far as possible.
  • Some of the copy feels clunky when reading it as a technical person, but no-one feels able to improve upon it without making too many assumptions about the technical knowledge of its intended audience.
  • We’re still discussing how best to refer to the different PHP versions and branches, and what relative terms like “latest” or “most current” mean in this context. This is why we’re trying to avoid direct version references whenever possible.
  • There were some inconsistencies in terms of what “we” refers to. We decided to consistently use “we” to refer to “we, the people working on the WordPress project” and address the visitor as “you, the site owner”.
  • We had some discussion about “more features being delivered through plugins”, and whether that should include “themes” as well. We opted to leave themes out of there, because, even though you can technically introduce new features through themes, best practices recommend having the theme be about the visual presentation only and having plugins provide new features instead. We don’t want to further spread the misconception that themes should include actual required functionality.

Next week’s meeting

The next meeting will take place on Monday, 25 September 2017, 20:00 CEST, as always in #core-php, and its agenda will be to discuss the second half of the draft document to finish what we started. If you have suggestions about this but cannot make the meeting, please leave a comment on this post so that we can take them into account. See you next week!

#core-php, #php, #summary