@francina facilitated the chat on this agenda.
Full meeting transcript on Slack
This devchat marked week 11 of the 5.4 release cycle.
Announcements
WordPress 5.4 Release Candidate 4 was released on Tuesday March 24, 2020 and everything went smoothly.
@audrasjb shared an update on WP Auto-updates Feature Plugin A plugin that was created with the intention of eventually being proposed for inclusion in WordPress Core. See Features as Plugins.: it was moved from his personal GitHub 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/ account to WordPress/wp-autoupdates which is the new official GitHub repository of this project. The #core-auto-updates team will try to ship version 0.4 before WP 5.4 is released. This new version aims to handle auto-updates for themes.
@afragen asked for a review of some Trac tickets which are all associated with Theme compatibility checks and will likely have interaction with the auto-updates feature. The idea is to ship them early in WordPress 5.5.
@whyisjake pointed out that he really like the work that is going on in #core-auto-updates Slack 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 and think that trying to land in the next few releases would be excellent. Related, He’d love to see #core-passwords (two-factors authentification – 2FA) land in core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. too. In his opinion, the plugin 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 is so mature at this point that having it left out almost seems like an omission. @whyisjake is going to work on a merge proposal.
@clorith raised that it would be necessary to make sure that the 2FA proposal also highlights the concerns with how to address users locking them selves out (which was the major holdback previously).
@azaozz announced that the patch for image lazy-loading attribute is ready for testing.
Upcoming Releases
The current major is 5.4, scheduled to go out on March 31st 2020; please keep testing for all the bugs!
There are two ways do it:
Trunk 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. has been branched to 5.5 on the beginning of March. That means 5.5 is officially in Alpha.
@francina announced that work for 5.6 –which is going to be an all-women release– has kicked off with an initial round of messages going out to the women that expressed interest. @angelasjin @francina and Chloé Bringmann are contacting them to hear if they are still interested, what skills they have and what expectations.
Components Check-in
@francina shared a proposal to change the Components Check-in. This is always done towards the end of the chat and feels rushed. There is never really time to dig into the topics they might bring up. Francesca shared two ideas:
- Schedule a weekly post where they can leave their status update, like the one for Community deputies.
- Adopt a Slack Bot that once a week will ask the maintainers for a status update: maybe in a new component-maintainers Slack channel. Core is getting very busy with Trac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress. and Travis bots, and RSS.
@johnbillion added that trying a weekly post could be a good idea. Maybe every Tuesday so it’s ready for the dev chat on Wednesdays in case anything comes up.
@francina proposed to talk to #meta to set this up and test drive it for 8 weeks.
Open floor
@isabel_brison proposed to create a set of guidelines for Internet Explorer support. The CSS Cascading Style Sheets. team kind of decided on starting to deprecate it, and “graceful degradation” seems a good way to go forward, meaning Core can use unsupported technology to make non-essential enhancements. Isabel wants to agree on what’s “essential” here, and created a Trac ticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. to start the discussion: #49696
@paaljoachim suggested to punt Contributors sometimes use the verb "punt" when talking about a ticket. This means it is being pushed out to a future release. This typically occurs for lower priority tickets near the end of the release cycle that don't "make the cut." In this is colloquial usage of the word, it means to delay or equivocate. (It also describes a play in American football where a team essentially passes up on an opportunity, hoping to put themselves in a better position later to try again.) default full screen mode to 5.5 as there is a pull request on Gutenberg project GitHub repository to provide an alternative approach.
@audrasjb pointed out that the proposal in this pull request would be a way better than the current implementation.
@whyisjake added that this is not a realistic change for WP 5.4, it’s a proof of concept, and not a fully tested feature.
@francina confirmed that @matt took the decision to ship WordPress 5.4 with this feature. Matt also commented in the Accessibility Team statement post.
@joyously stated it’s hard to contribute when concerns are ignored. @chanthaboune answered she can understand how they can feel ignored. A lot of that research gets done solo, and it’s often hard to remember to recap your own research. For full site editing to be a reality by the end of the year, the work can start bringing incremental changes. This change is feeling very jarring, but there is more worry about not have any mid-point between here and Full Site Editing.
@peterwilsoncc, @clorith and @audrasjb agreed that since RC4 was released, it’s not realistic to revert this change. The discussion can continue in a post-mortem post on Make/Core.
#5-4, #5-5, #5-6, #dev-chat, #feature-autoupdates, #feature-lazyloading, #two-factor
