Dev Chat Summary: September 26th (4.9.9 week 7)

This post summarizes the dev chat meeting from September 26th (agenda, Slack archive).

4.9.9 and 5.0 updates

• @schlessera: just about time to begin work on the 5.0 release cycle
  • @antpb and I will step back as release leads and wind down the 4.9.9 release
  • Over the next couple of weeks we will start coordinating the transition to ease into 5.0 release cycle
  • Will review the work that teams are already in the middle of and determine how best to proceed
  • Announcing this change as soon as possible to provide a longer transition period to smoothly transport as much work over as possible
• @chanthaboune: “I lead the open sourceOpen Source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. teams at Automattic and am a full time sponsored volunteer to the WordPress Project.”
  • We will reach out to team reps, discuss what you’ve been working on, and what we can do to keep things moving forward so that we can make sure everyone is heard as we settle in for 5.0
  • Current understanding is that @matt is leading 5.0 and any other leads are yet to be determined
• @jorbin: concern with canceling 4.9.9 due to upcoming PHP7.3 release, some things need to be done to make sure WordPress runs fine on this new version of PHPPHP The web scripting language in which WordPress is primarily architected. WordPress requires PHP 5.6.20 or higher, I want to ensure the version of WordPress in use on December 13th is compatible with PHP7.3, a very small scoped 4.9.9 may still be needed from myself and ideally @sergeybiryukov @pento @schlessera as well
• @desrosj: #44416 and #44771 appear to be the open PHP 7.3 compatibility tickets in TracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress.
• @pento: seems possible to wrangle a small 4.9.9 release with PHP 7.3 related bugbug A bug is an error or unexpected result. Performance improvements, code optimization, and are considered enhancements, not defects. After feature freeze, only bugs are dealt with, with regressions (adverse changes from the previous version) being the highest priority. fixes, while 5.0 is ramping up
• @matveb: 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/ leads are near ready to start planning merge proposal for Gutenberg, currently focused on finishing the coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. Gutenberg tasks, @youknowriad has made a proposal for how JS packages could work
• @youknowriad: recommend iterative merge vs. a big merge proposal, technical proposal on how this would work was shared in #core-js meetings
• @sergeybiryukov: some new 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. or enhancements already backported to the 4.9 branchbranch A directory in Subversion. WordPress uses branches to store the latest development code for each major release (3.9, 4.0, etc.). Branches are then updated with code for any minor releases of that branch. Sometimes, a major version of WordPress and its minor versions are collectively referred to as a "branch", such as "the 4.0 branch"., will need to determine whether or not that should be reverted
• @jeffpaul: in summary… (1) it appears like a possible agreement with @jorbin @pento (and possibly others who’ve been “voluntold” but yet to confirm) to work on a 4.9.9 focused solely on PHP 7.3 support and (2) @chanthaboune will review existing 4.9.9 work with team reps to see how that should be handled with the 5.0 cycle likely starting shortly

Updates from focus leads and component maintainers

• The Editor / Gutenberg team released v3.9 last week including the ability to create reusable templates of blocks and exporting them to a JSONJSON JSON, or JavaScript Object Notation, is a minimal, readable format for structuring data. It is used primarily to transmit data between a server and web application, as an alternative to XML. file
• The JavaScriptJavaScript JavaScript or JS is an object-oriented computer programming language commonly used to create interactive effects within web browsers. WordPress makes extensive use of JS for a better user experience. While PHP is executed on the server, JS executes within a user’s browser. https://www.javascript.com/. team posted this week’s meeting summary and specifically called for help looking for npm maintainers, so please let them know if you’re interested and available. Related to that, @youknowriad shared #44987 and is looking for review there.

General announcements

• @psykro continues to look for review and feedback on the alternate devchat proposal
• @joyously: Theme Review Team discussing what to allow theme authors to put in the adminadmin (and super admin), possibly allowing themes the same interface as plugins do with a readme.txt file and a View Details link to enhance the theme documentation, change logs, screenshots, upsells. Will look to have discussion in Core Trac ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. or Make/Themes post (and cross-post to Make/Core).

Next meeting

The next meeting will take place on October 3, 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.

#4-9-9, #5-0, #core, #core-editor, #core-js, #dev-chat, #gutenberg, #summary