Sustainability for WordPress Core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.
One component of the WordPress Sustainability Team’s effort is to improve the sustainability of our codebase, which led to the creation of a Sustainability Focus on the WordPress core Trac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress. bug 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. tracker.
What does sustainability mean from a code perspective?
For this post, the emphasis is on sustainable or “green” coding which focuses on minimizing the environmental impact of software development and execution. It encompasses practices like:
- Optimizing algorithms and data structures to use fewer resources (Database calls, CPU, memory) during execution, leading to lower energy consumption.
- Reusing resources with caching.
A good reference for understanding the full scope of web sustainability is the Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG).
Tracking sustainability improvements in WordPress core
The sustainability focus was created to provide a central way to track discussions for core code level initiatives related to sustainability. Any ticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. that has a sustainability element can be added to the focus by contributors. Having a set of tickets tagged in the focus enables contributors who want to work on sustainability to find appropriate tickets and allows the Sustainability Team to track initiatives in core.
Saving by doing less
The first ticket fixed in the sustainability focus involved removing an unnecessary process that was running twice a day on every site running WordPress to check if a site supports https. We fixed this by switching this feature to an on-demand check that only runs when users visit the Site Health section of wp-admin (and super admin). Even though the https check was a small bit of code, the impact of removing these extraneous checks is enormous because of the huge footprint of WordPress on the web.
How you can Help
Since the sustainability focus is new, tagging existing tickets with the focus is important at this stage. This would be a great contributor 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/. activity! Also, during bug triage The act of evaluating and sorting bug reports, in order to decide priority, severity, and other factors. sessions, any ticket that has a sustainability impact can be added to the focus. This helps organize the effort and show where we have work to do. Secondarily, picking up any tickets that are already tagged in the focus is always welcome. Contributors who want to work on sustainability in core can head right to the focus.
Thanks to @tweetythierry and @Nahuai for reviewing this post.
#core, #sustainability, #trac
