Dev chat summary, August 4, 2021

@francina led the chat on this agenda.

Highlighted blogblog (versus network, site) posts

From @audrasjb, A Week in Core highlights the moving parts of CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. and recognizes a week’s worth of contributors at a time.

From @notlaura comes a Call for CSS Contributors. If you’ve been looking for a way to sink your teeth into CSSCSS Cascading Style Sheets. Custom Properties (aka CSS variables), this is your chance to learn them well and help land them in Core.

From @sergeybiryukov comes more news on building the auto-updater ecosystem. If you work on themes and plugins, Sergey’s group would very much appreciate your feedback. The group would also like to hear from web hosts, as @ipstenu and a couple of other folks pointed out.

If you haven’t yet read @desrosj‘s post on Consistent Minor-Release Squad Leaders for Each Major Branchbranch 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".: Trial-run Retrospective and 5.8.x Releases, you’ll want to make time for it — the post is getting great reviews.

“Super interesting! … Super insightful!” — @francina

“Yeah. That’s a good read.” — @johnbillion

@francina suggested that if you’re interested in volunteering as a Release LeadRelease Lead The community member ultimately responsible for the Release. or a Release Deputy for the 5.8.x minors, please leave a comment on @desrosj‘s post.

And, from @chanthaboune and her talented production team comes the WP Briefing podcast. It’s on hiatus now, but more episodes will arrive in September. (So you’ve got time to catch up on the ones that have already dropped!)

Component maintainers

Reporting in on Build/Test tools, @sergeybiryukov had several announcements.

Ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. #52644: when a workflow fails, a message now gets posted to #core. That will make it easier to notice and fix failures in testing, Sergey explained and then thanked @desrosj publicly for his help on this. For details, see the ticket.

Ticket #47381: So that the WordPress Project can use more modern PHPUnit versions, this ticket makes several changes that make it easier to run unit tests against a variety of PHPPHP The web scripting language in which WordPress is primarily architected. WordPress requires PHP 7.4 or higher versions:

  • It removes the composer.lock file.
  • The PHPUnit 9.x mock object classes use a custom autoloader.
  • And the tests now always run in Composer.

Sergey thanked @jrf publicly for her work on the changes.

Reporting on General, @sergeybiryukov thanked @jrf again and announced that work has started on a variety of compatibility fixes for PHP 8.1. Details are in Ticket #52644.

Open Floor

@francina started Open Floor with news of a streaming PHP brainstorming, learning and teaching session that happened on Friday, August 30.

If you missed it, it’s up on YouTube. Featuring @jrf, @hellofromtonya, @sergeybiryukov, and @johnbillion, @hellofromtonya described the session as a “working session on modernizing the test suites. Got consensus and an action plan.”

Tonya noted that commits are in process, and @francina asked for ways the community can help.

In Highlighted Posts, @francina had asked @desrosj what encouraging words he had for people who’d like to volunteer with major and minor releases. Now, in Open Floor, she circled back around, and Jonathan pointed out that you don’t have to have any previous experience leading a major or minor releaseMinor Release A set of releases or versions having the same minor version number may be collectively referred to as .x , for example version 5.2.x to refer to versions 5.2, 5.2.1, 5.2.3, and all other versions in the 5.2 (five dot two) branch of that software. Minor Releases often make improvements to existing features and functionality. to get involved.

So if you’re interested, please comment. And get involved!

@webcommsat brought two items from Marketing to Open Floor: one on promoting favorite features in WordPress 5.8 and one on search terms for release information. Full details are in the chat here.

Thanks and props to post reviewer @desrosj!

#5-8-x, #5-9, #dev-chat, #summary