Agenda for the two meetings. Thanks to @thewebprincess and @hellofromtonya for leading the 05:00 and 20:00 UTC devchats respectively.
Link to 05:00 UTC devchat meeting on the core channel on Slack
Link to 20:00 UTC devchat meeting on the core channel on Slack
Announcements and news
WordPress 5.7 Beta 1 is out and available for testing.
WordPress 5.6.1 landed after devchat.
Month in WordPress for January 2021 (published 3 February 2021)
Reminder from Marketing, @webcommsat: we start our marketing planning well in advance, so if you are working on something for later in the year or that could be in the Questions and Answers on 5.7 or 5.6.1, please let @webcommsat, @yvettesonneveld, and @meher know.
Week in Core – edition 1 February 2021
What’s next in Gutenberg?
Full Site Editing (FSE)
Component maintainers and committers update
Post from @chanthaboune on encouraging and recognizing committers and maintainers following on from discussions – Committers, Maintainers and Emeriti. This will also help show which areas need support in core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress..
- Discussion during the meeting:
- making it easier for people to see how they can become committers
- using official emeritus status outside core for particular roles
- Specific comments:
- @hellofromtonya: Any concerns with deactivating their commit status with a path to reactivate when/if they become active again? No one in the meeting raised any concerns on this.
- @sergey: A place to mentor potential new committer A developer with commit access. WordPress has five lead developers and four permanent core developers with commit access. Additionally, the project usually has a few guest or component committers - a developer receiving commit access, generally for a single release cycle (sometimes renewed) and/or for a specific component..
- @webcommsat: This would help so much with the recruitment and longer term contribution of committers too.
- @nalininonstopnewsuk: Suggested more promotion on what skills and computer facilities potential committers would need. Supports the emeritus idea.
- @annezazu and @hellofromtonya are interested in discussing a mentorship program.
Updates from component maintainers
Build/Test Tools: The Sass implementation that Grunt uses has switched from node-sass to Dart Sass. That’s because LibSass and node-sass have been deprecated. Ticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. #51763 for more details.
- General: The get_home_url() function now consistently returns an https HTTPS is an acronym for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure. HTTPS is the secure version of HTTP, the protocol over which data is sent between your browser and the website that you are connected to. The 'S' at the end of HTTPS stands for 'Secure'. It means all communications between your browser and the website are encrypted. This is especially helpful for protecting sensitive data like banking information. URL A specific web address of a website or web page on the Internet, such as a website’s URL www.wordpress.org if the current request is already https, both for the admin (and super admin) and front end. This fixes a previous inconsistency between the admin and front end URLs. See ticket #52421 for more details.
- Date/Time, I18N Internationalization, or the act of writing and preparing code to be fully translatable into other languages. Also see localization. Often written with a lowercase i so it is not confused with a lowercase L or the numeral 1. Often an acquired skill., Permalinks: No major news this week
Upgrade/Install, Menus & Widgets: no major new this week, except that all our enhancements and features were finally committed before 5.7 beta 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. 1.
- 5.7 Beta 1 is out in the wild and ready for you to test and give feedback
- It includes 143 tickets with 68 new features and enhancements
- Now the focus shifts to defects as well as supporting your feedback on the beta releases
- There are currently 118 tickets open in 5.7 [ listing ]. Please help get as many as we can into the release during the beta cycle.
Update on WordPress 5.6.1 from @audrasjb:
Update and discussion on 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/Theme Rollback
- GitHub details on the plugin/ theme rollback update
- @hellofromtonya: We had planned to include plugin/theme rollback in WordPress 5.7, but it will become a feature plugin A plugin that was created with the intention of eventually being proposed for inclusion in WordPress Core. See Features as Plugins. first. @afragen is doing the building, and it’s almost ready to submit to WordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/.
- @ipstenu will flag it as an official beta for review
- @davidbaumwald: is that plugin slated to roll over to the WordPress 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, or is it a gap-filler that doesn’t require that? @afragen: not sure it needs lots more actual work. But whatever the usual process is will be fine.
- @hellofromtonya: currently, it’s set for feedback to validate if there are performance issues that could cause additional update failures.
- Question: should it remain as a separate plugin repo (not on the WordPress GitHub) until we know more? Thoughts invited. @afragen: It will also be very difficult to evaluate that, but I’m open to saying if there’s a server timeout it could be related.
- some support for moving it to WordPress GitHub account
- @davidb suggested gaining more visibility would help and following view of the maintainers. Agreement from the meeting of the benefits of extra visibility. @audrasjb shared how promoting visibility had helped a lot for plugins and themes auto-updates, and he will share what was done for that feature plugin
- @hellofromtonya: Getting more on it will also help us to further improve plugin and theme updates. Hoping to collect more information on the root causes for update failures
- @sergeybiryukov: My concern is that the plugin in its current state doesn’t seem to follow the direction outlined in comment 56 on the ticket. More discussion planned for the next #core-auto-updates meeting.
- #51857: Add rollback for failed plugin/theme updates – I don’t think that comment was as much about rollback as making the update process more robust. I think that was suggested as an alternative to rollback that would have fewer performance concerns. We could probably have both.
- @hellofromtonya: improving the update process itself is important! If we get robust enough, it negates the need to rollback when a failure happens. That assumes though that failures will never happen, which not sure if that’s a reasonable assumption.
Next steps:
Open Floor
Who is moderating feedback on the Code Reference? @audrasjb once a week and @crstauf more regularly. This is part of the Docs Team’s work.
#5-6-1, #5-7, #dev-chat, #fse, #plugin-theme-rollback
