Dev Chat Summary: May 23rd (4.9.7 week 1)

This post summarizes the dev chat meeting from May 23rd (agenda, Slack archive).

4.9.6 feedback

  • 4.9.6 was released on Thursday, May 17th thanks to the leadership from @desrosj and @allendav, heavy assists from @sergeybiryukov, @azaozz, and everyone over in #gdpr-compliance 🎉
  • Important developer and site owner topics included in 4.9.6 (New PHP Polyfills and Changes that Affect Theme Authors) all included within the 4.9.6 Update Guide
  • Auto updates were initially left off for 4.9.6 for about one day to evaluate incoming support requests and make sure there were no issues with the more than “normal” amount of code introduced
  • Initially some reports of users seeing a white screen on their sites, tracked to a small handful of plugins that were hooking into one of the new Privacy features using `init` instead of `admin_init`, and this was causing a very edgy edge case on some installs (see #44142)
  • Thus, auto updates have remained off for 4.9.6 to avoid more potential issues, documentation in the 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 Handbook was updated with a notice describing that using `init` would potentially introduce problems on sites, and @ipstenu reached out to each plugin that was using this hook to inform them of the issue
  • Currently no plugins in the .org directory that implement the new privacy features incorrectly
  • As of devchat, auto updates have not been enabled and we need to plan when 4.9.7 should be released, and what it should contain
  • @matt reiterated that we’re going to put enhancements, new features, notices, and anything else we need into 4.9.x while we work on GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/
  • Discussion on enabling auto-updates lead to agreement to do so; note that @pento enabled auto-updates ~4 hours after devchat

4.9.7 planning

  • Potential focuses: GDPR fixes, TinyMCE update
  • Leads: @sergeybiryukov able to help as deputy (e.g., committing, backporting); @danieltj, @desrosj, and @tristangemus open to help contribute during 4.9.7
  • Please comment on this post, pingPing The act of sending a very small amount of data to an end point. Ping is used in computer science to illicit a response from a target server to test it’s connection. Ping is also a term used by Slack users to @ someone or send them a direct message (DM). Users might say something along the lines of “Ping me when the meeting starts.” @jeffpaul, or comment during the next dev chat for nominations (self or otherwise) for release leads on 4.9.7

Updates from focus leads and component maintainers

  • The Gutenberg team continues to iterate and shipped v2.9 on Friday, May 18th; check the release post for more details
  • The PHPPHP The web scripting language in which WordPress is primarily architected. WordPress requires PHP 5.6.20 or higher team posted a summary from their meeting last week and welcome everyone to join their next meeting on Monday at 15:00 UTC when they’ll discuss whether there’s updates on the “Upgrade PHP” design review and discuss “Requires PHP” enforcement details

General announcements

  • @clorith: When making changes to twenty-themes we should note somewhere that we made changes to them in a release. Not everyone was happy about a theme update in 4.9.6 as well that added output to their footers. (related #44202)
  • @danieltj has also begun a proposal draft for Dark Mode 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/ and is open to help, so please review if you’re interested/available

Next meeting

The next meeting will take place on May 30, 2018 at 20:00 UTC / May 30, 2018 at 20:00 UTC in the #core SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. channel. Please feel free to drop in with any updates or questions. If you have items to discuss but cannot make the meeting, please leave a comment on this post so that we can take them into account.

#4-9-6, #4-9-7, #core, #core-php, #core-themes, #dev-chat, #gdpr-compliance, #gutenberg, #summary, #tinymce