@francina facilitated the latest weekly Dev Chat on this agenda; here’s the Slack transcript.
Announcements
@whyisjake announced the official release of WordPress 5.4.1.
The group took a moment to cheer this second release accomplished during the pandemic. To quote @whyisjake:
“Thank you all for helping get out this release. It’s an amazing example of the collaboration, dedication, and spirit of open source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL.. Releases like this really make the web a better place.”
@whyisjake
Upcoming Releases
Work is underway for WordPress 5.5 – and has been, since the branch A directory in Subversion. WordPress uses branches to store the latest development code for each major release (3.9, 4.0, etc.). Branches are then updated with code for any minor releases of that branch. Sometimes, a major version of WordPress and its minor versions are collectively referred to as a "branch", such as "the 4.0 branch". at 5.4 RC2. This is prime time for you to actively develop, test, give feedback and more. @davidbaumwald has scheduled the first bug 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. scrub for Tuesday, May 5, 2020, at 18:00 UTC and has already published it on the meetings page.
Highlighted/Blog (versus network, site) Posts
These posts need your feedback, as soon as you can get your thoughts together:
5.4 Retrospective – Call for feedback – Deadline April 30
Please focus your feedback on processes only. Next week @francina will collect it all and publish a recap much as she did for 5.3.
So far, chat participants noted there hasn’t been a whole lot of feedback from 5.4 – why not? Speculation included:
- the release went particularly smoothly,
- privacy concerns,
- the state of the world,
- some combination of the above!
WordPress 5.5: Call for Tickets – Deadline April 30
Please add the tickets you most want to see land in 5.5 to the comments of this post.
Of course, please remember that there are no magic bullets – nobody can guarantee your ticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker.’s inclusion in the next release. With that said, the team (which does include you!) can only fix what we know is wrong. So please bravely share!
Proposal: Core Team Rep Elections
@francina and several others admitted they were confused about whether this post is for adding nominations or getting feedback on the idea of a nomination process ahead of a second post to come, to add nominations. After some discussion, the group decided to ask @jeffpaul for a separate nomination post. He agreed, and it’s up!
WCEU Online 2020 Contributor Day
Thanks to the confusion around Team Reps, since that’s who works with the Contributor 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/. squads of every WordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more., the group tabled the discussion of WordCamp Europe Contributor Day until next week.
REST API: Decision on Introducing a dashboard namespace
In the words of the post, “the REST API The REST API is an acronym for the RESTful Application Program Interface (API) that uses HTTP requests to GET, PUT, POST and DELETE data. It is how the front end of an application (think “phone app” or “website”) can communicate with the data store (think “database” or “file system”) https://developer.wordpress.org/rest-api/. team has decided on giving major features their own namespace. For example, wp-site-health and wp-customize.” This should help all sorts of people find these features and hook into them a lot more easily.
Components Check-in
@garrett-eclipse announced that Privacy + Multisite Used to describe a WordPress installation with a network of multiple blogs, grouped by sites. This installation type has shared users tables, and creates separate database tables for each blog (wp_posts becomes wp_0_posts). See also network, blog, site will share a focus in 5.5 to bring the relevant tools to multisite. Teamwork makes the dream work!💥
@azaozz has been investigating the best way to update jQuery: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/37110#comment:105. The work will take three WordPress releases and can start in 5.5. Please review his plan!
@desrosj is planning to update the SimplePie library and, possibly, PHPMailer in 5.5. He welcomes your reviews and thoughts on both.
@audrasjb updated the group on Plugins & Themes Auto-updates. This week the merge proposal goes live on Make/Core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. — and patches on the tickets, too.
Discussions
How long do we let a merge proposal percolate?
@whyisjake asked: in light of the auto-updates work, how much time do we normally let a merge proposal percolate before moving forward? A lively discussion followed, with resident historians @azaozz and @jorbin chiming in and concurring: it obviously depends on the proposal, but generally speaking, 1-2 weeks and a blog post is reasonable.
What are the plans for 5.4.2?
@asif2bd asked when 5.4.2 might be released. The answer: only if necessary.
If nothing major comes up in the next couple of weeks post 5.4.1, we’ll move onto 5.5. Now, @desrosj did create a 5.4.2 milestone when it became clear 5.4.1 wouldn’t include a bundled-theme update, in case we need it for backporting later. For now, there are no compelling reasons to do another minor — but stay tuned! Things can always change.
Friendly Reminder
Finally, @francina reminded the group that you don’t have to wait for devchat to raise issues for discussion. In fact, you should really start the conversation ahead of time.
Here’s how:
- Post something on the blog – async conversations starts
- Schedule an extra meeting here or in the relevant channel and advertise it far and wide so people can attend
- Post a recap in the blog
- Rinse and repeat as necessary.
Take care!
#5-4-1, #5-5, #meeting-notes, #devchat
#dev-chat
