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. 🔗 Agenda post.
Announcements
The WordPress 6.5 retrospective survey is now closed. Thank you to everyone who responded! Expect a follow-up post with collected, anonymized results once @priethor, @marybaum, and @akshayar have finished processing all of the feedback.
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/ 18.2 was released on April 24. Read about what’s new in this release.
The remaining Phase 3 related overview issues were created for folks to join Phase 3: Block Library, Phase 3: Workflows, Phase 3: Revisions, and Phase 3: Collaboration index. Thanks to everyone who worked on creating and updating these Phase 3 issues!
Forthcoming Releases
We’re in the 6.6 release cycle. @annezazu shared that the roadmap draft is well underway, and @ella has already created this tracking issue to coordinate PHP The web scripting language in which WordPress is primarily architected. WordPress requires PHP 5.6.20 or higher backports.
@fabiankaegy noted that it is worth calling out that there are still a few roles that are looking for volunteers. @priethor added: in particular, the Core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. Triage The act of evaluating and sorting bug reports, in order to decide priority, severity, and other factors. Lead role is the one with the most in need of volunteers. There are a few inexperienced volunteers for the docs lead role, but it would be great if somebody with experience in the role could participate, too. Please reach out to @priethor directly if you have any questions.
A quick update about the next maintenance release, WP 6.5.3. There are currently 3 open trac tickets and 1 Gutenberg ticket left to resolve. A Release Candidate One of the final stages in the version release cycle, this version signals the potential to be a final release to the public. Also see alpha (beta). is planned for May 2 at 17:00 UTC, with a tentative release date planned for May 7. There is more information about this release in this post, including the 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. scrub schedule and how you can get involved.
A quick reminder that our next Gutenberg release (18.3) is in progress and the Release Candidate is scheduled for May 2.
Discussion
We dedicated the discussion time to revisiting the conversation that was kicked off last week during our announcements related to recent #core-editor conversations about how we can improve how contributors follow along with editor updates and improve communication within the project.
To kick things off, @joemcgill shared some suggestions that @youknowriad posted on the agenda:
I know a lot of Core contributors Core contributors are those who have worked on a release of WordPress, by creating the functions or finding and patching bugs. These contributions are done through Trac. https://core.trac.wordpress.org. follow core updates by following the commits that happen on the #core slack channel. I believe that we should be doing the same for editor commits. These commits are already shared on slack on #core-editor-commits channel. That would be IMO a great way for core contributors to keep up with what’s happening on the editor side and potentially interact (even on merged PRs like we do for closed tickets on trac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress.) without waiting for the code to reach Core through backports or anything.
I think we can also consider showing these commits directly in the #core channel in Slack like we do for Core commits because in the end, these are core commits too, they just happen on another repository. Today we have between 10 and 20 commits per day, I think that’s an acceptable number that won’t “flood” the channel that much and would bring more visibility.
We discussed that we could experiment with posting commit summaries to the #core channel for a short period of time, such as a few weeks, and evaluate how it works. We also discussed that the commits from Core provide more detailed summaries compared to the commits to trunk on the Gutenberg repo, so this is a potential improvement for the Gutenberg commits. @audrasjb noted the Core handbook link for Commit message best practices.
@joemcgill said that he will follow up on moving this forward this week.
@azaozz noted:
There was another concern in that discussion: many contributors that cannot contribute very regularly are missing when development starts for (major) new features. That results in not being able to start contributing to them in time, or not providing timely feedback, ideas, being able to test different approaches, etc.
One of the ideas how to fix this was to start announcing when new major features development starts in dev. chat (and in the summaries). Seems most/nearly all contributors follow make/core and that would benefit them.
@priethor noted that Dev chat time is not very EU-friendly, asking folks to announce features here can be a big ask depending on the project.
@joemcgill summarised that there are several things to unpack here, primarily:
- How can we make it easier for people to contribute to new features
- What is the right timing and method for communicating updates at key milestones for a feature (e.g., merges, etc.)
@hellofromtonya suggested: How about a Make/Core post with links to tickets or project board and/or the key labels for tracking?
Open Floor
@afragen gave an update on the Merge Proposal: Rollback Auto-Update, and noted that we haven’t received any issues with testing so @afragen believes that it’s going well and we’re on our way to commit in a week or so. Also, there are 6000+ active users of the feature plugin A plugin that was created with the intention of eventually being proposed for inclusion in WordPress Core. See Features as Plugins.. Please read the proposal and test the feature plugin in the next week, ideally before the next dev chat.
#6-6, #dev-chat, #summary
