Felix Arntz 11:18 am on December 13, 2018
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PHP Meeting Recap – December 3rd

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

  • @drewapicture announced that he’d start working on a proposal to add modern PHP best practices to the coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. handbook at WCUS contributor dayContributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/..
  • The discussion about feature flags from the previous week was picked up again, particularly regarding the trade-offs of relying on a (networknetwork (versus site, blog)) option vs relying on a constant or environment variable.
    • Since some of the processes to be tested are executed very early in the WordPress bootstrap process, a variable that can be set in wp-config.php or earlier should be used. There possibly could be a wrapper function to access that value, including a filterFilter Filters are one of the two types of Hooks https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Hooks. They provide a way for functions to modify data of other functions. They are the counterpart to Actions. Unlike Actions, filters are meant to work in an isolated manner, and should never have side effects such as affecting global variables and output. that would allow adjusting the constant value dynamically by code that would run later.
    • WP-CLIWP-CLI WP-CLI is the Command Line Interface for WordPress, used to do administrative and development tasks in a programmatic way. The project page is http://wp-cli.org/ https://make.wordpress.org/cli/ could also be used to “more dynamically” set the constants.
    • It was mostly agreed that the Beta Tester plugin should somehow incorporate the feature flags functionality, in favor of core, at least initially.
    • Eventually, it was summarized that the topic should get picked up again later, as the WSOD protection mechanism (see #44458) is not blocked by this and should move forward.
  • Further conversations on the current state of the project will happen at WCUS, with the results being published in a recap. The meeting on December 10th is cancelled because of WCUS and related travel.

Post-WCUS Update

  • As mentioned during the 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/., WordPress core aims to raise the minimum required PHP version to 5.6 by April 2019, and to 7 by end of 2019 – a great success for the ecosystem and the Servehappy initiative.
  • A conversation between members of the core, community and hosting teams happened during contributor day, planning the steps ahead for both Servehappy and the overall Site Health project that it is part of. A detailed summary of this will be published separately.
  • The goal for the initial parts of Servehappy is to release them ahead of the PHP version bump, likely as part of WordPress 5.1. Due to the intended version bump, the core notice should be displayed on all PHP versions below 5.6, contrary to the originally intended idea of only targeting 5.2 initially.

Next week’s meeting

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