PHP Meeting Recap – November 13th

This recap is a summary of our previous 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: @flixo90 @jdgrimes @jon_bossenger @mikelking @mte90 @nerrad @schlessera

@sergey

Chat Summary

We started the meeting by examining the poll that @flixos90 had made regarding a modified meeting time slot.

As most of the votes went to the 16:00 UTC time slot, and nobody had a specific reason for not using that time slot, we decided to make that new time official from now on.

This means that all subsequent meetings are held at 16:00 UTC from now on.

Then we continued working on the “Before Upgrading PHP” section again, which we are working on in a shared Google Doc.

Here’s a brief summary of the corresponding discussions and decisions:

  • We discussed adding a second “Backup” step after all updates have been done. In case of a rollback further down the line, this would avoid going through all updates again, which incur a big time and bandwidth hit.
  • While discussing how to best add this addition “Backup” step, we came up with the idea of adding small “aside” text boxes to the document, which visually communicate that the content therein is not part of the critical path and should not be considered a blockerblocker A bug which is so severe that it blocks a release. in case the user can’t complete that “aside”.
  • We discussed the different animals that Google Docs assigned to the anonymous users, and how they don’t seem to match up everywhere. 😉
  • Regarding the compatibility checker, we discussed whether to include knowledge about the future XWP project that might have an impact here, or not. We decided that we write the content for the current state and context, as there’s no guarantees to when or if any of the WIP projects will be completed and usable.
  • We added an aside to the compatibility checker as well, to warn users against false positives and other detection issues.
  • We acknowledged that our aside might be a bit on the intimidating side, and that we need the help of the #marketing team to rephrase the copy in that regard.
  • We rewrote the “Ask 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 support” topic so that it is clearer and points people to existing resources first before contacting support.

Next week’s meeting

The next meeting will take place on Monday, November 20, 2017 at 16:00 UTC, as always in #core-php, and its agenda will be to finish the rest of the “Before Upgrading PHP” document that we will hand over to the marketing team to get their help with writing the copy. 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, #core-php, #php, #summary