Agenda, Dev Chat, Wednesday April 24, 2024

The next WordPress Developers Chat will take place on  Wednesday April 24, 2024 at 20:00 UTC in the core channel on Make WordPress Slack.

The live meeting will focus on the discussion for upcoming releases, and have an open floor section.

Additional items will be referred to in the various curated agenda sections, as below. If you have ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. requests for help, please do continue to post details in the comments section at the end of this agenda.

Announcements

An update for the 6.6 release squad has been posted, please note that the release squad is looking for one or two CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. Triagetriage The act of evaluating and sorting bug reports, in order to decide priority, severity, and other factors. Leads to focus on triaging TracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress. and a Documentation Lead with previous experience for the role.

Also, a reminder that the WordPress 6.5 retrospective post has been published, please fill in the survey if you would like to leave feedback or suggestions for improvements to the release process. The form and comments will be open until April 26th, 2024

There was also a recent discussion in the #core-editor channel around several topics linked to how we can improve how contributors follow along with editor updates and improve communication within the project. There were several potential actions discussed, including:

• Create more high-level tracking issues that are not tied to a 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..
• Create 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/. channels for high-level features, such as navigation (#feature-website-navigation) and the grid blockBlock 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. (#feature-grid).
• Create teams on 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/ for high-level features to create an easy point-of-contact and discussion space for these features.

Forthcoming releases

Next major release: 6.6

We are currently in the WordPress 6.6 release cycle.

Next maintenance release: 6.5.3

There are currently 15 open tickets in the 6.5.3 release milestone. There is more information about this release in this post, including the bugbug 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. scrub schedule and how you can get involved.

Next 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/ release: 18.2

Gutenberg 18.2 is scheduled for April 24 and will include these issues.

Discussions

We are planning on discussing the following topics:

• @peterwilsoncc raised that we should consider syncing the editor packages earlier in the release cycle. Could this be attempted for 6.6? Slack reference.
• @afragen noted that they have published Merge Proposal for Rollback Auto-Update and for this to be included as a discussion topic. Slack reference.

Feel free to suggest additional topics in the comments.

Highlighted posts

• WordPress 6.5 performance improvements
• WordPress 6.6 call for volunteers update
• Merge Proposal: Rollback Auto-Update

Core Editor Updates

Props to @annezazu for putting together these updates.

• Events: Join upcoming Developer Hours: Alternatives to Custom Meta Boxes in the Block Editor.
• Follow up tracking and iteration issues from 6.5: Performance tracking issue for 6.6, new Tracking issue: Block bindings API, and Block bindings API for 6.6.
• Block bindings 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.: a recently merged PR changes the approach so hooksHooks In WordPress theme and development, hooks are functions that can be applied to an action or a Filter in WordPress. Actions are functions performed when a certain event occurs in WordPress. Filters allow you to modify certain functions. Arguments used to hook both filters and actions look the same. aren’t used with follow up PRs underway to update override functionality for synced patterns.
• Overrides in Synced Patterns: a PR was merged to Improve override indication for editable blocks in synced patterns (instead of flashing outline of the blocks that can be edited, the entire background is flashed with purple) along with PRs to refine rename flow for blocks with overrides and adjust allow pattern overrides UX flow. This resolves some UXUX User experience concerns and leaves the behavior as: select a button to Advanced > Allow overrides > Rename field before a confirmation to allow override.
• Unify Site Editor & Post Editor: after a prior PR was closed out a recent PR was merged to Update the publish flow for the Post Editor that can then be unified with the Site Editor for GB 18.2.
• Unify Site Editor details view with the Inspector view: another area where work is underway to consolidate and figure out what can be made into a reusable component. This includes work to Add duplicate post action (a long requested feature), rearrange the order of items, and update the post excerpt panel with new designs.
• Design tools: a PR was merged to allow negative values for margin controls, a big step to solve a long requested feature.
• Design updates: the issue forStyle Book: Iterate on presentation and design has been updated with new designs, including a new “Landing” tab that would serve as the landing page of the stylebook. Alongside this, Site editor responsiveness is being explored to ensure the new paradigm works well across devices. This is part of broader design updates that you can see in the latest design share #54.
• Components: Work is in progress to remove the “experimental” designation for a few components starting with Navigator, BoxControl, BorderControl, BorderBoxControl, and AlignmentMatrixControl.
• Background image: work is underway to add support for absolute theme path URLs which enhances portability of themes. This includes a requested REST APIREST API The REST API is an acronym for the RESTful Application Program Interface (API) that uses HTTP requests to GET, PUT, POST and DELETE data. It is how the front end of an application (think “phone app” or “website”) can communicate with the data store (think “database” or “file system”) https://developer.wordpress.org/rest-api/. enhancementenhancement Enhancements are simple improvements to WordPress, such as the addition of a hook, a new feature, or an improvement to an existing feature. to add stylesheet_uri and template_uri fields to themes endpoint.
• Follow up tracking and iteration issues from 6.5: Full-page client-side navigation tracking issue, Site Editor and Admin Redesign: Build a solid routing foundation.
• General UX: a PR explores enhancing block outlines and selection interactions. 

Tickets for assistance

Tickets for 6.6 will be prioritized.

Please include detail of tickets / PR and the links into comments, and if you intend to be available during the meeting if there are any questions or will be async.

Open floor

Items for this can be shared in the comments.

Props to @joemcgill for reviewing.

#agenda, #core, #dev-chat