Developer Blog Editorial Meeting – 07 September 2023

A complete transcript of the meeting can be found in the #core-dev-blog channel in Making WordPress 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/..

Attendees: @greenshady @marybaum, @milana_cap, @oglekler, @ndiego, @bph (facilitator) and @webcommsat (async)

Agenda

• Site updates and new posts
• Project Board
  • In Progress
  • Today
  • Needs Review
  • To be approved
• Proposal for modification of the Field GuideField 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.
• In-between meeting approval rounds for time sensitive post around releases.
• Open Floor

Site updates and new posts

The Social image 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 was migrated to JetPack, and since then, we struggled a little to find a good way to automatically generate a decent Social Image when sharing posts on Social networks. We could use some design help for a universal template, as the current one is not the most attention-grabbing one.

If you want to catch up on the discussion, there is this GitHub Issue for the Theme

• Request writers to select a feature image that works with the options in Jetpack
• Set a default template similar to how it worked before, blue background + post title.

Nick Diego and Birgit Pauli-Haack will work on this.

Project Board

New Posts published since the last meeting.

• Adding and using custom settings in theme.json by @greenshady
• Exploring the future of web development with WebAssembly and PHP by Angel De Miguel, Adam Zielinski and Rafa Lopez
• An introduction to block variations by @ndiego
• The anatomy of a letterform by @marybaum
• What’s new for developers? (August 2023) by @greenshady
• Styling blocks: empowering users with CSS custom properties by @mburridge
• Beyond block styles, part 3: building custom design tools by @greenshady

Huge Thank You to the writers and their reviewers!! Fantastic job!

We published in July and August as many articles as in the three months before! So excited to see this! Incredible work! Thank you to all who contributed!

Posts in the works

• New HTML Tag Processor – An in-depth tutorial (now published)
• A tutorial about the highlights of the browser and focus modes of the Navigation Block
• Working with custom slotfills
• What’s new for developers? (September 2023) (Now published)
• Attributes: what do the source and selector properties do? (now published)
• How WordPress plugin developers can keep their users content  (now published)

On the To-Do list:

• Using the Grid layout type for theme creators
• Adding custom color options for blocks
• How to manage block governance
• Tutorial on building block-based templates in classic themes
• Tutorial on building patterns and block styles with Details/Summary block
• Optimizing your WP_Query queries for better performance
• How to disable specific blocks in WordPress

To be approved

• How to add commands to the command palette
• New developer focused workflow article about how the login and registration works in WordPress.
• Creating a custom External Template for the @wordpress/create-block package
• Overview of the coding standards tooling available to WordPress developers
• An overview of the “Auto-inserting Blocks” feature coming in 6.4

These topics have been converted to issues, and the discussions are closed. Prospective authors who would like to contribute to the Developer Blogblog (versus network, site) are invited to select one of these to work on, that have not already been assigned an author.

In-between meeting approval rounds for time sensitive post around releases.

If there is a time sensitive topic, they will be voted on in an async fashion over two days. If there is further discussion is needed, it ought to happen on 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/ discussion thread, and voting is deferred to the next monthly meeting.

Proposal of modification of the Field Guide

It would need more input on why a secondary digest version would be needed beyond the Field Guide, or if there is a way to improve on the Field Guide itself (most important issues on top). The original discussion takes place on the Make Blog. Proposal: An update to the Field Guide.

Next meeting

The next meeting of the Developer Blog Editorial Group will be on October 5, 2023 at 13:00 UTC in the core-dev-blog channel of the Make WordPress Slack. Contributors continue on GitHub.

Props to @ndiego for reviewing

#core-dev-blog, #summary