Auto-updates feature meeting summary: April 14th, 2020

These are the weekly notes for the WP Auto-updates team meeting that happened on Tuesday April 14th, 2020. You can read the full transcript on the coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.-auto-updates SlackSlack 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.

As a reminder, the Feature PluginFeature Plugin A plugin that was created with the intention of eventually being proposed for inclusion in WordPress Core. See Features as Plugins. is developed on GitHub and is available for testing on WordPress.org plugins repository.

The team focused on making decisions concerning design and wording changes in WP Auto-updates version 0.5:

Remove “cycle” dashicons from the interface

The team agreed the current use of dashicons is not strictly necessary. It appears on every row and it can be too much. Also, the current update system (known as “shiny updates”) doesn’t use any dashicon except for notification messages of available updates.

The decision is to remove it from the user interface to keep it pure text + text links.

It fixes GitHub issue #71 and it is going to be addressed in pull request #74.

Replace “Enable” with “Enable auto-updates”

The team agreed that single word actions can be confusing, especially for small screens and for screen reader users.

It fixes GitHub issue #72 and it is going to be addressed in pull request #75.

Remove red links and green text

In the previous versions of WP Auto-updates, red color were used for “Disable” action links, and green color were used for “Auto-updates enabled” information texts. Last week the team agreed to replace it with standard blue links (as red is used for destructive actions) and black text.

It was already addressed in GitHub pull request #70.

Confirmation messages

Previously, the feature plugin was displaying the following messages after enabling auto-update for a theme or a 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:

  • “The selected plugins will now update automatically.”
  • “The selected plugins won’t automatically update anymore.”

The team agreed to simplify confirmation messages, and to replace them with:

  • “Selected plugins will be auto-updated.”
  • “Selected plugins will no longer be auto-updated.”

This change brings consistency with plugins and themes existing activation message.

A pull request is going to be opened on 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/ to handle the related changes.

Provide information about themes with auto-updates enabled on single-site Themes screen

On a single-site Themes screen (Appearance > Themes), there is currently no way to quickly know what themes have auto-updates enabled. The user needs to open the theme’s modal, and this is a poor user experience.

During the meeting, two solutions were discussed:

  • Use an icon on the upper-right corner of each theme in the list. It does the job, but there is a question for when the theme have an update available (there is a notification message on the top of the theme screenshot, and it may conflictconflict A conflict occurs when a patch changes code that was modified after the patch was created. These patches are considered stale, and will require a refresh of the changes before it can be applied, or the conflicts will need to be resolved. with the auto-update icon).

@paaljoachim tested this solution:

Icon on the upper-right of each theme.
Problem: what to do when there is an update notice?
  • Add auto-update information (or even an enable/disable auto-updates action link) at the bottom of the theme screenshot and put all the action links on a second row.

@audrasjb made a quick workaround:

Quick workaround: all action buttons are placed on a second row.

Remove auto-updates UIUI User interface from Networknetwork (versus site, blog) Adminadmin (and super admin) > Sites > Edit > Themes

@pbiron pointed out that as a general rule, auto-updates content should not appear on any screen where updates can not be performed.

Everyone agreed and Paul will add a pull request to handle this issue (#69) and remove auto-updates user interface from Network Admin > Sites > Edit > Themes.


Next meeting is scheduled on Tuesday April 21, 2020 at 17:00 UTC

#auto-update, #feature-plugins, #feature-projects, #feature-autoupdates