Upgrade/Install Component meeting summary – November 10, 2020

These are the weekly notes for the Updates/Install component meeting that happened on Tuesday November 10, 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.

The meeting was focused on the component’s major project for 5.6: an UIUI User interface for opting in to core auto-updates. The feature was merged into core at the end of the alpha cycle of WordPress 5.6, when ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. #50907 was committed.

As per the post previously published by @chanthaboune on Make/Core, there will be some changes in core auto-updates scope for WordPress 5.6.

Here is our goals for WP 5.6:

• Provide some updates to the design of the UI.
• For existing installations, the behavior will remain the same as it is today: opted-in to minor updates by default, but a user must opt-in to major updates (constants and filters that are already in use by hosts or agencies will still take precedence).
• For new installations, default behavior will change: opted-in to minor updates by default and opted-in to major updates by default.

On Monday 9, @audrasjb opened two tickets/patchs to handle those changes:

• #51742: Make sure constants and filters are disabling the major auto-updates option
• #51743: Auto-updates for major version is set by default to true for fresh installations

Both tickets can be merged independently. For the moment, ticket #51742 doesn’t address any UI change.

During the last devchat, @helen shared some concerns about the UI overload caused by the changes introduced in #50907. @karmatosed worked on some mockups to simplify the current interface. The intention is to get rid of the auto-updates section and to replace it with an action link when auto-updates are already activated:

After discussing those changes, the team agreed to consider using action links for both enable and disable actions, for better consistency. Indeed, it wouldn’t be great to have a full auto-updates section with a checkbox for enabling the feature, and a simple action link moved to the top of the screen to disable it. Replacing the section with a simple action link could also eases the burden caused by the multiple buttons on this screen.

Next steps until WP 5.6 BetaBeta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process. 4 scheduled on Thursday:

• Enabling auto-updates by default for fresh installs is a small 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 it’s ready to be committed in ticket #51743
• Taking into account constants/filters was already done in ticket #51743, but not committed yet.
• [TODO] UI changes:
  • @audrasjb to update the patch in ticket #51743 to transform the form/checkbox interface to action links located in the main section on the top of the update-core screen.
  • @helen and @karmatosed to iterate on the design/copy.

@pbiron also raised ticket #50870 and @hellofromtonya provided some feedback after the office hour to help this ticket to move forward. The ticket is now marked as ready for commit.

#auto-updates, #core-auto-updates, #upgrade-install