The WordPress Developers Chat meeting took place on March 1, 2023 at 20:00 UTC in the core channel of Make WordPress Slack.
Key Links
Are you interested in helping draft Dev Chat summaries? You can volunteer to be added to the rotation, either during the meeting or by contacting on the Make Slack abhanonstopnewsuk
Announcements
- WordPress 6.2 Beta 4 went live earlier today and is now available to download and test. Thanks to everyone who contributed to it, including the release party facilitators and all the testers.
- The current target for the final release is March 28, 2023, less than four weeks away.
Highlighted Posts
Changes in Trac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress. between February 20 and February 27, 2023 show some great statistics:
- 45 commits
- 103 contributors
- 50 tickets created
- 7 tickets reopened
- 64 tickets closed
- and 21 new contributors!
- What’s New in Gutenberg 15.2 is out, with accessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) and template editing experience improvements, as well as additional block 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. control support.
- The WordPress Roadmap page has been updated with additional bullet points that will appear under APIs and Block theme dev tools.
- The Core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.-Performance team has published a Core Performance Team Roadmap.
Release Update
Key information on the next major release A release, identified by the first two numbers (3.6), which is the focus of a full release cycle and feature development. WordPress uses decimaling count for major release versions, so 2.8, 2.9, 3.0, and 3.1 are sequential and comparable in scope.: 6.2
Below are some links for anyone new or wanting to get more involved in the release.
Check the #6-2-release-leads channel for the latest updates.
A live WordPress 6.2 demo will take place Thursday, 2 March 2023 at 17:00 UTC. Find more details on the 6.2 Live Product Demo post.
Open ticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. update for 6.2
@costdev noted that 34 tickets remain in the 6.2 milestone (query used). The remaining tickets relate to Build/Test Tools, docs-only, test-only, gutenberg-merge, or the About page, and will be scrubbed in coming days.
With the release of 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. 4, @hellofromtonya reminded the team that if a regression A software bug that breaks or degrades something that previously worked. Regressions are often treated as critical bugs or blockers. Recent regressions may be given higher priorities. A "3.6 regression" would be a bug in 3.6 that worked as intended in 3.5. or issue comes up before RC One of the final stages in the version release cycle, this version signals the potential to be a final release to the public. Also see alpha (beta). 1, then another beta may be necessary. She also noted that the 6.3 (alpha) milestone begins when trunk is branched at RC 1.
Invitation to contributors to help test releases during the development cycle, and to watch for the release party schedule in the #6-2-release-leads channel.
Requests for Help with Tickets/Blockers
Remaining tickets in 6.2 milestone
@azaozz confirmed that there were no core code changes in the remaining tickets.
Dev Notes 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.
@webcommsat highlighted the work progressing on dev notes related to 6.2. @bph noted that in 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/ everything is almost done. @milana_cap noted that Documentation tasks have all been assigned.
@audrasjb provided a link to the WP 6.2 Documentation tracker, and @milana_cap confirmed that each item has been covered.
Open Floor
From the Agenda
@miguelsansegundo raised Trac ticket #56908: The result of locate_block_template function might be wrong prior to the meeting. Given the lack of recent activity, @hellofromtonya suggested it be tested in Gutenberg first, else it could be moved to the 6.3 milestone.
Roadmap Phase 4: Multi-lingual
@pbiron asked if there was any existing documentation or discussion about what the roadmap’s multi-lingual support feature might look like. @jeffpaul recalled Matt’s discussion of this feature at WCEU 2022 (starts around the 10:00 minute mark), and that more detail around Phase 3 (Collaboration) would need to come first.
@audrasjb asked if the feature, built in Gutenberg first, would support taxonomies (used in other multi-lingual plugins), and @azaozz asserted that it should be a “core project” and work with everything.
Following his original question, @pbiron asked when work on Phase 4 might start. @jeffpaul speculated that if Phase 3 runs through 2024, that Phase 4 might start in 2025. He further cautioned against starting too soon to avoid significant rework, depending on how Phase 3 comes together. @azaozz indicated that Phase 3 may be shorter than estimated, since much of the “infrastructure” in the editor has been prepared for the collaboration phase.
@oglekler noted that multi-lingual plugins are complicated, and that the functionality should be native to WordPress. @azaozz agreed, suggesting they might become less complicated once core supports the feature.
@clorith pointed out that there are older multi-lingual experiment PRs in Gutenberg, but that they are rudimentary and don’t necessarily hint at the final feature’s implementation. @pbiron wondered if there was a label for such items, but @clorith didn’t recall.
Call for Documentation and Maintainers
@bph provided a list of tickets (grouped by component) in the 6.2 milestone that don’t have maintainers, where documentation coverage may be incomplete. Here is the list:
She called on contributors to point out any needed Dev Notes, short dev mentions, or Field Guide The field guide is a type of blogpost published on Make/Core during the release candidate phase of the WordPress release cycle. The field guide generally lists all the dev notes published during the beta cycle. This guide is linked in the about page of the corresponding version of WordPress, in the release post and in the HelpHub version page. one-liners to the Documentation team through the Outreach to component maintainers tracker on 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/.
@webcommsat also provided a handbook link to help those interested: What it means to be a component maintainer.
The next meeting will be on March 8, 2023 at 20:00 UTC.
Props to @webcommsat for running the meeting, and to @ironprogrammer for the summary. Review by @webcommsat.
#6-2, #dev-chat, #meeting, #summary
