Summary, Dev Chat, April 24, 2024

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 Slack 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.

@annezazu called out that she did some recent work cleaning up 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, which should help with this, including getting high-level overview issues in place for all phase 3 items.

Tied to this, 6.6 is the start of having set iteration labeled issues that are targeted for the release and should make it easier to follow release-specific, in-progress work: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/labels/%5BType%5D%20Iteration

@jorbin suggested a make/core post outlining more specifics about the intended process for the iteration issues, to make sure things stay up to date.

@mikachan believes that a summary post is being written to help summarize the next steps from the discussion that happened over in #core-editor.

@johnbillion and @priethor both expressed concerns about potential siloing if we experiment with adding more feature channels.

Forthcoming releases

Next major release: 6.6

We are currently in the WordPress 6.6 release cycle.

• @marybaum asked if we could get more support for Mission Control for this or future releases. @audrasjb has access and is willing to learn, with support from @davidbaumwald and @sergeybiryukov.
• @priethor announced that WP 6.6. is not meant to be a maintenance only release. The reasons are summarized in this comment.

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.

@jorbin gave the following update:

6.5.3 is still on target for 7 May. Scrubs have been moving things forward. There are a couple of at risk tickets so if you see something towards the bottom of https://core.trac.wordpress.org/tickets/minor/workflow, it would be good to jump in to help.

There are also a few tickets on GitHub so look towards the left there to see tickets you can help move forward https://github.com/orgs/WordPress/projects/186

Next Gutenberg release: 18.2

Gutenberg 18.2 is scheduled for April 24 and will include these issues. During the meeting, @colorful-tones asked for support with a problem encountered while publishing.

Discussion

@peterwilsoncc previously raised that we should consider syncing the editor packages earlier in the release cycle. Could this be attempted for 6.6? Slack reference.

• This process is documented here, but @youknowriad warned that a lot of that work is also manual for the PHPPHP The web scripting language in which WordPress is primarily architected. WordPress requires PHP 5.6.20 or higher part and not something that doesn’t have a clear workflow.
• @johnbillion noted a related issue, #60967, which could help with this process.
• @joemcgill suggested that we put some focus on reducing friction of the PHP syncing during this release and will follow up with @youknowriad and tech leads @ellatrix, @vcanales, and @audrasjb about some next steps.

@afragen published the Merge Proposal for Rollback Auto-Update and asked for more testing and feedback in order to commit this early during the cycle.

Highlighted posts

The full list of posts from the last week in Core can be read on the agenda at this link.

Open floor

There was no time for the open floor section during this dev chat, but @drivingralle did mention a potential ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. for 6.6 on the agenda post:

Would be great if ticket #55184 could be included in 6.6.

Props to @mikachan for reviewing.