On WordPress + Git

Can you believe it – we’ve made it through a State of the WordState of the Word This is the annual report given by Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress at WordCamp US. It looks at what we’ve done, what we’re doing, and the future of WordPress. https://wordpress.tv/tag/state-of-the-word/. without anybody asking “when is WordPress moving to GitGit Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency. Git is easy to learn and has a tiny footprint with lightning fast performance. Most modern plugin and theme development is being done with this version control system. https://git-scm.com/./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/?” You may, however, have caught a brief mention of issue trackers in relation to the Triagetriage The act of evaluating and sorting bug reports, in order to decide priority, severity, and other factors. Team focus for 2019. While it’s very important to make the distinction between Git the version controlversion control A version control system keeps track of the source code and revisions to the source code. WordPress uses Subversion (SVN) for version control, with Git mirrors for most repositories. system (VCS) and GitHub the service, as the answer usually goes, it’s understandably a continued area of interest. Many parts of WordPress have been developed using GitHub as the central tool, along with countless plugins and themes and even the WordPress book.

Here’s the tl;dr (but you should definitely keep reading after this): Changing things up doesn’t just mean “let’s make the GitHub mirror at WordPress/wordpress-develop the canonical and migrate TracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress. tickets over” – it means imagining what kind of change would be a net benefit to the coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. development process and eventually the entire .org ecosystem, and then finding the right tools to do it.

To that end, there is a group of people including myself (@helen), @desrosj, and @omarreiss who have been and will continue to be doing more coordinated research and planning around tooling. There is no current planned timeline nor is this a priority on top of the projects already enumerated for 2019, but any potential tooling change is being evaluated as it potentially relates to those projects, especially if it can better support phase 2 of 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/ development and the Triage Team.

This is not about chasing the latest and greatest or evangelizing a preference – it’s important to identify the goals we have for the project and what pain points we are experiencing. More specifically than “democratizing publishing”, in the core development process we should be aiming for diverse participation, a faster-but-steady pace of development, predictable and timely feedback cycles, and continuing to build user trust among users of all types. Recent pain points have been merges between branches (especially 5.0 back to 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.), 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/. package updating, and continued participation when projects move from plugins and GitHub into core and Trac.

Roughly, here are some early thoughts on various moving pieces and potential future improvements.

Repositories and Workflows

  • SVNSVN Subversion, the popular version control system (VCS) by the Apache project, used by WordPress to manage changes to its codebase. repositories would need to remain, essentially flipping the mirroring process to go from Git -> SVN, making SVN (and Git) repos on .org read-only
  • Should the core build process continue to be handled as-is or should we move to something like Travis?
  • Integration of more automated testing – visual regressionregression A software bug that breaks or degrades something that previously worked. Regressions are often treated as critical bugs or blockers. Recent regressions may be given higher priorities. A "3.6 regression" would be a bug in 3.6 that worked as intended in 3.5., end-to-end, accessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility), performance
  • Identification of the ideal lifecycle of an issue and process for a pull/merge request – design, docs, review, testing, etc.
  • Identification of contribution workflows (contributor documentation, Git branching methodology, etc.)
  • Security tracking and releasing

Issue Tracker

  • Critical for a Triage Team to review existing issues and to remain active going forward
  • Potential for the bulk triage process to include migrationMigration Moving the code, database and media files for a website site from one server to another. Most typically done when changing hosting companies. from Trac to another tracker
  • Any issue migration should be determine on a case by case basis by the Triage Team in collaboration with component maintainers; the most automation that should happen is a tool that takes a list of Trac tickets and imports them elsewhere
  • Issue import process needs to take commenter attribution into account
  • Trac would remain in a read-only state
  • How are reports generated and used (i.e. is the built-in filtering capability enough in a given tool or will we need something more robust to support workflows)
  • Is the issue tracker still the best place for feature requests?
  • Implementation of issue templates
  • Identifying existing custom integrations and whether those problems still exist and still need to be solved after a move

Broader Ecosystem (later / bigger question mark)

  • Connectors from GitHub to .org 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 and theme repos (GitHub Actions-powered build+deployDeploy Launching code from a local development environment to the production web server, so that it's available to visitors.)
  • Automated testing – sniffers, Tide, unit tests, WP and PHPPHP The web scripting language in which WordPress is primarily architected. WordPress requires PHP 5.6.20 or higher compat testing, Theme Check
  • Aligning plugin and theme review teams

#git, #trac, #triage