PHP Meeting Recap – February 19th

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.

You can find this meeting’s chat log here.

Chat Summary

• Main topic for this meeting was to discuss the two different implementations of the servehappy notice we have so far:
  • an adminadmin (and super admin) notice that appears at the top of all pages;
  • a dashboard 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. that only appears on the dashboard.
• @flixos90 quickly described the main benefits of the alternative dashboard widget approach:
  • it requires less logic;
  • it is harder to unintentionally hide;
  • it matches what the browsehappy project did.
• We discussed how best to set the priority of the widget, so it won’t be displayed below the fold. @clorith noted that adding it to dashboard.php would ensure it is always shown first, just like the browsehappy one.
• Those present during the meeting unanimously voted for the dashboard widget, instead of the admin notice. We thus decided to go with the alternative approach of the dashboard widget moving forward.
• We decided to work on getting this into trunktrunk A directory in Subversion containing the latest development code in preparation for the next major release cycle. If you are running "trunk", then you are on the latest revision. for now, with the option of backporting it to the next minor releaseMinor Release A set of releases or versions having the same minor version number may be collectively referred to as .x , for example version 5.2.x to refer to versions 5.2, 5.2.1, 5.2.3, and all other versions in the 5.2 (five dot two) branch of that software. Minor Releases often make improvements to existing features and functionality. if there’s consensus later on.
• The reshowing of the widget should not be included in the code for now, but could be part of the “database migrationMigration Moving the code, database and media files for a website site from one server to another. Most typically done when changing hosting companies.” code that gets run on updates. This lets us defer the decision of when to reshow.
• The discussion then moved on to a ServeHappy 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. endpoint on wp.org that could be used to dynamically control the behavior of the dashboard widget.
• @flixos90 has implemented a first version of the API endpoint following the details we’ve discussed, and it is already available right now: https://api.wordpress.org/core/serve-happy/1.0/?php_version=5.2
• The information that is sent to the ServeHappy API endpoint (PHP version + indirectly IP address through server access logs) might have implications on GDPR compliance. We should raise this concern in the #gdpr-compliance channel.
• We discussed how to let hosts provide upgrade information. A mechanism using constants or filters would be preferable to providing this through the API endpoint, as we’d want to decentralize this information and not maintain it ourselves.

Next week’s meeting

• Next meeting will take place on Monday, February 26, 2018 at 16:00 UTC in #core-php.
• Agenda: Discuss the new API endpoint.
• 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.

#core-php, #php, #servehappy, #summary