Dev Chat Summary, June 7, 2023

The WordPress Developers Chat meeting took place on June 7, 2023 at 20:00 UTC in the core channel of Make WordPress Slack.

Key Links

Announcements

  • WordPress 6.4 Development Cycle: The third planned major releasemajor 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. for 2023 is taking shape! Check out the release team and supporting cohort, the release schedule, and learn how you can get involved with 6.4.
  • Gutenberg 15.9.1 available: This 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. provides two fixes: custom fonts are again visible on the editor, and social icon colors now correctly reflect changes in Global Styles. Thanks to everyone involved in this release.

Highlighted posts

Here’s an overview of updates in TracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress. between May 22 and June 5, 2023:

  • 37 commits
  • 63 contributors
  • 91 tickets created
  • 9 tickets reopened
  • 71 tickets closed
  • and 10 new contributors in this period ♥️
  • Contribute to Core at WordCamp Europe Contributor Day 2023: Are you preparing to join the WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Europe 2023 CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. tables on Contributor DayContributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/.? Check out this helpful post to get started, and to set up a local environment in advance of the event. Note: there are no more tickets for Contributor Day, the additional attendee tickets have now all gone.
    For those people who want to get started contributing to core, but were unable to get tickets, the links below are a good start:
  • June 2023 Developer Blog Editorial Meeting: Update from @webcommsat for the Editorial Group – If you are looking to contribute through writing blogblog (versus network, site) posts, check out the summary from this most recent Developer Blog editorial meeting for a list of articles under discussion or in need of a writer. There are editors who support the posts through the process of being published, so don’t worry if you have not contributed to the Developer Blog previously.
    • Have an idea for a post? Great! You can also suggest posts that you would like to read or contribute to the blog. Or do you just want to read excellent content geared toward WordPress developers? Got you covered there, too: check out the latest posts.
    • The Editorial Group wants is encouraging developers to come along and contribute on topics that are approved and suggest new ones, including on how to use new features in a release etc. Please do chat with people at WCEU who might be interested. There is a lot of support available.

Release updates

WordPress 6.3 will be the next major release. Stay in the loopLoop The Loop is PHP code used by WordPress to display posts. Using The Loop, WordPress processes each post to be displayed on the current page, and formats it according to how it matches specified criteria within The Loop tags. Any HTML or PHP code in the Loop will be processed on each post. https://codex.wordpress.org/The_Loop. by checking out:

  • Roadmap to 6.3
  • WordPress 6.3 Planning Roundup
  • and following along in the #6-3-release-leads channel
  • with 6.3 BetaBeta 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 less than 3 weeks away are there any enhancements or feature requests milestoned there that need help with patches, testing, review, or committing?

Query on Fonts-APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways.

  • @joemcgill raised during the performance ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. scrub earlier, a few contributors were wondering about the Fonts-API and whether any support was needed to test that feature since it’s being developed in the 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/ repo. 
  • @hellofromtonya: Help is always appreciated! Always! There are a number of issues / enhancements being worked on that can use some testing reports and code help.
    • The Fonts API project board on GitHub.
    • The Ongoing Roadmap which has a list of “required for Core introduction” items.
    • In addition to those tickets/items, general testing to try and break it are appreciated.
    • When it’s moved out of “experimental” (note, the API is still experimental and will be until all of the required items are done and released in Gutenberg), then it’ll be a single PR to test and commit.
    • Why single PR? Because it’s been well-tested in Gutenberg over many months. Once it’s ready, it should be fully ready for Core introduction.
    • What is keeping it in “experimental”?
      The biggest reason is: the interaction between Theme JSONJSON JSON, or JavaScript Object Notation, is a minimal, readable format for structuring data. It is used primarily to transmit data between a server and web application, as an alternative to XML. and Fonts API for populating typography pickers in editors (not including the Site Editor). This issue. The scope of this will change with the introduction of the Font Library.
    • What’s the Font Library?

Tickets/ Component Maintainers help requests

To start, there were a couple of requests for help in the open floor section of the #core-editor meeting on May 31, 2023, including:

No comments were raised during the live meeting on these two areas.

Open floor

Two items:

  • WordCamp Europe attendees were encouraged to ask any questions during the meeting or in the contributor-channel/ core channel relating to Core contribution.
  • @hellofromtonya: A proposal is drafted and will be published before next week’s dev chat. The proposal is for setting criteria for removing “beta support” from each PHPPHP The web scripting language in which WordPress is primarily architected. WordPress requires PHP 5.6.20 or higher 8+ version. It includes seeing the criteria in action for WordPress 6.3 which could possibly mean removing “beta support” label from PHP 8.0 and 8.1 – maybe.

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on June 14, 2023 at 20:00 UTC.

Are you interested in helping draft Dev Chat summaries? Volunteer at the start of the next meeting on the #core Slack channel.

Props to @ironprogrammer and @webcommsat for the summary, and @hellofromtonya for peer review.

#6-3, #6-4, #dev-chat, #meeting, #summary