Dev Chat summary: January 8, 2020

The chat was facilitated by @francina on this agenda.

Full meeting transcript on Slack

Upcoming Release – WordPress 5.4

@francina reminded the main feature of 2020 will be full site editing. All component maintainers received a 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.” before Christmas to put together a scope for WordPress 5.4. An open call for tickets was also published on Make/CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.. While @francina noted there were mostly bugfixes and not so many new features, @audrasjb raised ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. #48850 from the comments of this post. This ticket is related to automatic updates for plugins (with manual opt-in), which is one of the 9 projects for 2019-2020.

@azaozz noted that the media component team plan to continue with image post-processing. It looks like it will need couple of small UIUI User interface changes/enhancements.

@audrasjb added the 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) team will probably focus on bugfixes on both 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/ and Core for 5.4, and target the next major (5.5) for bigger new features.

Highlighted posts

@francina noted that a lot of volunteers signed up to the release model working group. @francina will write a recap post on Make/Core.

Worth noting @azaozz published a 5.3 release cycle post-mortem.

Components check-in

Comments: @imath is working on #35214. Feedback welcome.

Core privacy: @xkon said the privacy team won’t have any specific focuses for 5.4, only bugfixing & enhancements on existing parts. Some of them need backward compatibility review, especially #44038 and #44176. Both tickets have a patchpatch A special text file that describes changes to code, by identifying the files and lines which are added, removed, and altered. It may also be referred to as a diff. A patch can be applied to a codebase for testing. and are ready for further iterations if needed.

Media: @azaozz is experimenting with #44427. Seems a very worthwhile enhancementenhancement Enhancements are simple improvements to WordPress, such as the addition of a hook, a new feature, or an improvement to an existing feature. for 5.4.

Open floor

In the agenda comments, @justinahinon pointed out some editing needed in the roadmap, and highlighted reactions of the community concerning handling of big media on WP 5.3. @azaozz noted most comments are about “missing” the original image in some way. The initial plan was to have a link to it in the user interface. It should be added in 5.4. Another enhancement for the UI would/may be to show when an image is missing some of the sub-sizes and have a way to create them. There are plugins that handle this, but may be time to have it in core. There are couple of pre-existing edge-cases that need fixing too. Most notably increase of the file size for indexed PNGs when resized to smaller dimensions.

@timothyblynjacobs shared #47192 as a possible 5.4 feature. It’d bring a pretty often requested feature to Recovery Mode. It would need design and copy input as well as a security review from people familiar with the intricacies of the Users/Capabilities 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..

#5-4, #dev-chat, #release-process, #summary