Core Editor Meeting Notes 26 May, 2021

This post summarizes the latest weekly Editor meeting (agendaslack transcript). This meeting was held in the #core-editor 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 on Wednesday, 26 May, 2021, 2:00 PM UTC and was facilitated by @andraganescu.

GutenbergGutenberg 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/ 10.7 release 

Gutenberg 10.7 was released today. It’s probably one of the biggest, if not the biggest in terms of number of PRs, releases to date.

Feature freeze

This week held the feature freeze for WordPress 5.8. From the wishlist @youknowriad mentioned the Navigation blockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. and the Post Author block as the ones being left out from the merge effort because of various issues. @mkaz mentioned that the navigation block is still searching for the best solution for its markup. @paaljoachim mentioned the refactored gallery block as one other item that didn’t make it into 5.8.

For the future, it was raised that WordPress should have a process that enables more often and early merges instead of doing everything all at once to avoid stressful situations.

WordPress 5.8 board

The 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/ board for monitoring progress for WordPress 5.8 is still open and maintained. Past feature freeze there’s still a log of bugbug 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 polish required and a few additional tasks like dev notesdev note Each important change in WordPress Core is documented in a developers note, (usually called dev note). Good dev notes generally include a description of the change, the decision that led to this change, and a description of how developers are supposed to work with that change. Dev notes are published on Make/Core blog during the beta phase of WordPress release cycle. Publishing dev notes is particularly important when plugin/theme authors and WordPress developers need to be aware of those changes.In general, all dev notes are compiled into a Field Guide at the beginning of the release candidate phase. and such. The board will serve us to track all of that.

Block based Widgets editor call for testing

Help Test the Widgets Editor for WordPress 5.8!  The block based widgets editor is in coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. as part of the merge for 5.8, so now testing can also be done with WordPress trunktrunk 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.. Updating and bug fixing will continue via the Gutenberg 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.

Monthly Plan

The monthly plan for May 2021 is still up. @annezazu brought up that today is the last day for the current call for testing for the FSE Outreach Program and a new call for testing will also be launched soon after 10.7 is released.

Key project updates

Global Styles

@nosolosw shared this week’s global styles update:

  • Global Styles and Global Settings have been ported to WordPress core and will be part of the WordPress 5.8 release. The focus now is on polishing and fixing bugs as we find them.
  • Now that the 1.0 version of this feature has been shipped and we need to revisit focuses, I thought it’d be a good time to pause these reports while we figure out the next steps. Anything relevant should still be posted in the tracking issue but on an on-demand basis not weekly.
  • More at Issue 20331

Block based widgetWidget 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. editor

@andraganescu shared this week’s update:

  • The Block based Widget Editor. has been ported to WordPress core and will be part of the WordPress 5.8 release. The focus now is on polishing and fixing bugs as we find them. As always you can help by checking out the project’s board on GH and participate in the #feature-widgets-block-editor channel – open at all times of day!

Navigation block

@joen shared this week’s update:

  • Still trucking on with the navigation block. There’s a PR in queue that will enable global styles item padding (PR 31878). Also starting to look to helping with the List View component, which plays a key role in the block.

Block based navigation editor

@getdave shared this week’s update:

  • we’re continuing with our recent theme of lots of code quality and UIUI User interface fixes.Other than that we’re gearing up for addressing some of the “bigger picture” issues on the Navigation Editor including:
    • Disabling / enabling features in the block to better support the editor.
    • Adding support for missing hooksHooks In WordPress theme and development, hooks are functions that can be applied to an action or a Filter in WordPress. Actions are functions performed when a certain event occurs in WordPress. Filters allow you to modify certain functions. Arguments used to hook both filters and actions look the same..
    • Improving the experience for editing navigations that are simple or complex.

Mobile/native

@hypest shared this week’s update:

  • Slash inserter!
  • Support for Xcode 12.5.
  • Blocking issue with translations broken which affects the mobile apps (relevant convo too).
  • In Progress: Editor onboarding, Block picker search, Embeds block, working hard to finish up ReactReact React is a JavaScript library that makes it easy to reason about, construct, and maintain stateless and stateful user interfaces. https://reactjs.org/. Native 0.64.x upgrade.

Task Coordination

@aristah

  • focused on the site-logo block. Long story short, after a brief experiment with using the default custom_logo theme-mod, it will revert to using a site_logo option.  PR 32229 – fixes 2 of the items in the 5.8-must-haves board. After this is reviewed and merged I’ll be porting the block to core.
  • Pushed some code-quality PRs, fixing eslint warnings
  • Allow non-latin characters in slugs – PR 32232  some eyes on this one would be appreciated since it fixes a long-standing bug for those of us with non-latin posts-titles.
  • Lots and lots of PR reviews. At this stage in the release process, if anyone has some time to spare pleaaase do some reviews, they help everyone move the project forward.

@joen

  • doing small 5.8 things where I can, including a notices bugfix and some Safari flickering debugging.

@annezazu

@mkaz

  • I’m looking at flaky tests and trying to see how we might be able to automate some bits to flag so people can address. This ticket discusses a little but merely retrying is not enough, we’ll need a way to precisely  identify what test is failing for action.

Open Floor

@poena asked, with the upcoming updates in 5.8 how should we call theme types to best differentiate them. A general consensus was that themes with PHPPHP The web scripting language in which WordPress is primarily architected. WordPress requires PHP 5.6.20 or higher templates will be called classic themes and themes with HTMLHTML HyperText Markup Language. The semantic scripting language primarily used for outputting content in web browsers. templates are called block themes.

@priethor brought up the monthly “what’s next” post and asked for suggestiions to improve the format and on feedback about its usefulness. Reply in a thread here, open a Guthub discussion issue or pingPing The act of sending a very small amount of data to an end point. Ping is used in computer science to illicit a response from a target server to test it’s connection. Ping is also a term used by Slack users to @ someone or send them a direct message (DM). Users might say something along the lines of “Ping me when the meeting starts.” Hector in #core-editor with anything you want to share about this.

@janw.oostendorp brought up their PR 31806 and asked for feedback. The on the spot suggestion was to add the description of a usecase for the filters added by the PR.

#chats, #meeting-notes