JavaScript Chat Summary: January 21, 2020

Below is a summary of the discussion from this week’s 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/. chat (agenda, Slack transcript).

Have a topic for discussion for the next meeting? Leave a suggested edit on next week’s agenda.

New “create-blockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience.” package

@gziolo has opened a pull request to propose a new “create-block” package, intended to be used by 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 authors to scaffold new blocks. This is the result of work which had been previewed during a previous meeting’s open floor.

Discussion points:

• Separate package vs. part of the existing scripts package?
  • Needs to be separate to be usable as an npm init initializer.
  • We could decide later to add something to scripts which “proxies” commands to the separate package
• Differences from the existing 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/ scaffold script?
  • Embraces build tooling, vs. intention of WP-CLI script to be run-and-done
  • Can be run outside a WordPress environment
• Future goals
  • Integrate with Storybook
  • Overlap with block directory effort?
  • Additional commands to help prepare a plugin to be published on the plugin repository.

Action Items:

• Feedback and testing is invited on the pull request

Open Floor

• @epiqueras shared a problem which has surfaced in development of the block editor relating to values in inner blocks contextual to their ancestor blocks. He has worries about the performance impact of the current approaches, and has proposed an idea for a solution to improve the block 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. in a way which creates a shared context for block values.
• @davilera raised an ongoing discussion regarding date function inconsistencies. This was also discussed during last week’s meeting. As an action item, he would like for a decision on the desired behavior and function signatures. We want to avoid backwards-incompatible changes. The pull request in its current form is sufficient for fixing an existing 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.. After some discussion, a plan emerges that changes toward a more desirable API can and will be made within the current pull request without introducing breaking changes.

#core-js, #javascript