@francina led the chat on this agenda.
Announcements
The big news: WordPress 5.7 “Esperanza” landed March 9, and the group took a well-deserved bow.
Moving on, Francesca highlighted these posts:
@jeffpaul noted Trial run: Consistent minor release squad leaders for each major branch. Francesca added that the post is both a highlight and a call for volunteers.
@annezazu put out a last call for FSE Program Testing Call #3: Create a fun & custom 404 page. If you’d like to catch up on the previous two FSE tests, Anne and Francesca said you can find previous calls under this tag. If you’d like to do your own testing, the FSE Handbook has a page with instructions. Capping off the FSE discussion was Marketing Team rep A Team Rep is a person who represents the Make WordPress team to the rest of the project, make sure issues are raised and addressed as needed, and coordinates cross-team efforts. @webcommsat, who said you can also share this LinkedIn promotion.
@francina then turned to posts that need feedback. This Proposal: A WordPress Project Contributor Handbook drew spirited emoji support from the group. Francesca also reminded the group to sign up for the Updates blog to keep up with a variety of team updates, as well as posts from @chanthaboune about cross-team efforts and the latest news from leadership.
Components check-in and status updates
@sergeybiryukov started with jQuery news: the version in 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 updated to 3.6.0, which is mostly 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. fixes and improvements. Two callouts:
Aside from the change to no longer ensure XHTML-compliant tags for you, we do not expect other compatibility issues when upgrading from a jQuery 3.0+ version.
See ticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. #52707 for more details.
jQuery hoverIntent library has updated from version 1.8.3 to 1.10.1. The changes all appear to be minor.
See ticket #52686 for more details.
@adamsilverstein checked in with Media news: he’s working on landing support for WebP images in 5.8 and would like testing and feedback on ticket #35725.
Up next, @audrasjb said he has nothing new for Menus and Widget A WordPress Widget is a small block that performs a specific function. You can add these widgets in sidebars also known as widget-ready areas on your web page. WordPress widgets were originally created to provide a simple and easy-to-use way of giving design and structure control of the WordPress theme to the user., but he’s quietly scrubbing bugs and watching tickets. On Upgrade/Install, he highlighted this feature plugin proposal post.
@sabernhardt wrapped up the Component updates with his announcement of a Toolbar triage The act of evaluating and sorting bug reports, in order to decide priority, severity, and other factors./bug scrub for the following day, March 18, at 16:00 UTC.
Open floor
IE11 support
@adamsilverstein asked: Given that the Project has decided to drop support for IE 11, have we discussed a specific release to make that change in?
The discussion that followed outlined a general process—notify, then act—but pointed out the group still needs to make a specific plan for IE11. Adam noted that IE11 is the only major browser that doesn’t support WebP images.
@desrosj said there might already be a notification in place. @adamsilverstein found a ticket, #48743, to that effect. Further discussion also made it clear that the team needs to do more to announce the change, including stronger language in relevant tickets (@desrosj and @audrasjb), a News blog (versus network, site) post (h/t: @jorbin) and relevant Handbook updates (h/t @jeffpaul)
“Try FSE?”
@sergeybiryukov observed:
It seems that most of WP users (outside of the contributing teams) are still largely unaware that full-site editing is coming later this year.
Perhaps that’s intentional, but once we have something stable to test, have we considered adding a dashboard widget to one of the upcoming minor releases, to invite more users to test FSE before final release, like we did with Gutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ in #41316 for WP 4.9.8?
See the full discussion that followed, with a variety of people sharing a variety of views on the subject.
#5-7-1, #5-8, #core, #dev-chat, #meetings, #summary