Start of the meeting in Slack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/., facilitated by @joemcgill.
Announcements
WordPress 6.5 was scheduled for release on March 26, 2024, however, the release has now been rescheduled for April 2, 2024. Thanks to everyone involved in the related discussions around delaying the release by one week. You can read more in this post.
Forthcoming Releases
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.: 6.5
There was a lot of activity in the #core channel today with everyone coordinating efforts around 6.5. There is a good summary of the conversations from @desrosj on Slack here.
Please continue to test the 6.5 release. See this list of key features to test, which was published alongside WP 6.5 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. 3.
Next 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/ release: 18.1
Gutenberg 18.0 was released on March 27 and included these issues. The next Gutenberg release will be 18.1, scheduled for release on April 10.
Discussion
We discussed the upcoming 6.5 RC4 scheduled for March 28, and we seem to be in really good shape. The following contributors are lined up to help:
We revisited plans for the 6.6 release squad. @priethor has a drafted post ready to publish with further details, however we have delayed the call for volunteers whilst decisions were still being made around 6.5. Now that we are in a good place for 6.5, @priethor suggested that we consider posting the call for volunteers after the 6.5 RC4 release party. Please leave a comment with your thoughts.
@jorbin shared that we’re still looking for a Gutenberg maintainer to help out with the 6.5 maintenance releases, but otherwise, we have all the pieces we need. The current release squad members are always welcome to help (but also understand that they may need a break). @jorbin also confirmed that the date for 6.5.1 is still being decided, but will avoid upcoming holidays where possible.
Please leave a comment if you’re interested in being part of the 6.5 maintenance releases. There are more details in the handbook about what’s involved in being part of a release squad.
Highlighted posts
The full list of posts from the last week in Core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. can be read on the agenda at this link.
Open floor
During the open floor, Shariar Mahmud Prince requested help with an issue with the meta box docs, and @marybaum helped open a docs issue.
@joemcgill mentioned that the past several weeks have been intentionally focused on any discussion around WordPress 6.5, but we will soon have the bandwidth to discuss other topics and it would be great for those topics to be proposed by the attendees. Discussion topics can always be proposed in the comments of the agendas themselves, but @joemcgill and @mikachan would like to start to get a bit of a backlog of ideas to prioritize. We can do a call for topics posts, but would be happy to take any suggestions you have in the meantime.
@jorbin raised the following potential topics:
- How can we get PHP8 support completed and out of “compatible with exceptions”
- Aligning the coding standards for Core and Gutenberg so that both can use the same tooling
Tony Gravagno asked about improving the marketing around each WordPress release, especially about the release teams, and how people contribute to this huge effort in multiple cycles per year. @desrosj mentioned that there is a related ticket here, and @marybaum suggested that this fits well with the Marketing team’s new direction.
Props to @joemcgill for reviewing.
#6-5, #dev-chat, #summary
