Tag Archives: 5.2

Josepha 9:02 pm on May 10, 2019
Tags: 5.2,   

5.2 Retrospective

As we finish up one release and start looking forward to the next, I’d like to take the time to let people share their thoughts on how the 5.2 release process went. I have listed three questions I’d like feedback on below.

  • What should WordPress start doing as a part of the development process?
  • What should WordPress stop doing as a part of the development process?
  • What should WordPress continue doing as a part of the development process?

Please share your thoughts in the comments below! Remember when commenting to keep the discussion professional and focused on ways the process of creating WordPress is either already working great or can be improved.

#5-2, #retrospective

Anthony Burchell 9:30 pm on May 1, 2019
Tags: 5.2, , , ,   

Dev Chat Summary: May 1

Announcements

Josepha (@chanthaboune) has published a 5.0 retrospective wrap up. There are two questions at the end of the post that you are encouraged to discuss in the comments. Thank you for the time and care you have put into this, Josepha! You can find this retrospective wrap up at the following post:

5.0 Release Retrospective Wrap Up

5.2 updates

RC2 is planned for tomorrow with the target release date ~5 days (May 7).

Josepha brought attention a few items pending:

  1. #47093 – related to the recovery mode email translations. There’s a potential solution being worked on, but it needs review.
  2. #47070 – related to the Recovery Mode Exit button. Design input and a patchpatch A special text file that describes changes to code, by identifying the files and lines which are added, removed, and altered. It may also be referred to as a diff. A patch can be applied to a codebase for testing. is needed, and then it will also need review.
  3. #46901 – related to the About page. A final patch is incoming that will need review.

Most tasks pending for the above tickets have an owner, but it was mentioned by Jonathan (@desrosj) that particular testing and attention to #47093 – recovery mode email translations is encouraged and appreciated.

@audrasjb asked for an idea of the timing for RCrelease 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). 2 tomorrow. Josepha mentioned that it will likely be in the windows of between 1430-1630 UTC and again around 2030 UTC. The earlier window is preference.

5.3

It would be great to start planning scope/teams/timing etc. for 5.3. (potential agenda item for next week!) Jonathan mentioned that we may be able to start the 5.3 branchbranch A directory in Subversion. WordPress uses branches to store the latest development code for each major release (3.9, 4.0, etc.). Branches are then updated with code for any minor releases of that branch. Sometimes, a major version of WordPress and its minor versions are collectively referred to as a "branch", such as "the 4.0 branch". in trunktrunk A directory in Subversion containing the latest development code in preparation for the next major release cycle. If you are running "trunk", then you are on the latest revision. after RC2 has released.

Open Floor

WP Campus’ AccessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) audit released today

A big thank you to WP Campus for this important initiative! You can find the blogblog (versus network, site) post announcing the audit here: https://wpcampus.org/2019/05/gutenberg-audit-results/

#5-2, #core-editor, #design, #dev-chat, #summary

Josepha 11:23 pm on April 30, 2019
Tags: 5.2, , ,   

Dev Chat Agenda: May 1

Below is the agenda for the weekly devchat meeting on Wednesday, May 1, 2019, 2000 UTC.

  • Announcements
  • 5.2 updates
    • Coordination of tasks in our final week
  • Calls from component maintainers
  • Open Floor

If you have anything to propose for the agenda or specific items related to those listed above, please leave a comment below.

This meeting is held in the #core channel in the Making WordPress 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/..

#5-2, #agenda, #devchat

#dev-chat

Marius L. J. 9:26 am on April 25, 2019
Tags: 5.2,   

Site Health Check in 5.2

WordPress 5.2 will include two new pages in the adminadmin (and super admin) interface to help end users to self-service their site through common configuration issues and other elements that go along with having a healthy online presence. It also provides a standardized location for developers to add debugging information.

The new pages can be found under the Tools menu, as Site Health, and presents the user with a fresh new admin interface. As we hope users will regularly ensure their site is up to standards, focus has been put on creating an interface you want to return to in the future.

Site Health Status

Screenshot of the WordPress Site Health Status page

The first page runs a series of tests on the user’s site, and will be categorized as critical, recommended, or good responses. These outcomes also affect the percentage of completion you have (where critical is weighted more heavily than recommended).

Each test result can be expanded to get an explanation of what you as a user should be paying attention to, and which problems are there if any, that need addressing.

Most of the bundled tests will also have actionable items, and provide links directly to the appropriate areas of your dashboard where you can improve upon the relevant settings.

Filtering the Tests

The tests are filterable via site_status_tests, meaning plugins or themes may add their own tests, or remove existing ones. We’ve also split these into two different types of tests: direct  and async. This was done as some tests may require more time to run, so to avoid potential timeouts within admin pages, any tests added to the async section will be run in succession via AJAX calls after the page is loaded.

Specifically of interest to server admins is the companion filterFilter Filters are one of the two types of Hooks https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Hooks. They provide a way for functions to modify data of other functions. They are the counterpart to Actions. Unlike Actions, filters are meant to work in an isolated manner, and should never have side effects such as affecting global variables and output. site_status_test_php_modules, which is based off the WordPress Hosting Team list of recommended and required PHP extensions.

Removing a Test

An example of a filter use would be a hosting provider that does automated updates. They may wish to remove the test for background updates being enabled or disabled as follows:

function myhost_remove_update_check( $tests ) {
	unset( $tests['async']['background_updates'] );
	return $tests;
}
add_filter( 'site_status_tests', 'myhost_remove_update_check' );

Adding a Test

This is an example of how a caching pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party might check to ensure that it’s cache setting is enabled. 

function myplugin_add_caching_test( $tests ) {
	$tests['direct']['caching_plugin'] = array(
		'label' => __( 'My Caching Test' ),
		'test'  => 'myplugin_caching_test',
	);
	return $tests;
}
add_filter( 'site_status_tests', 'myplugin_add_caching_test' );

function myplugin_caching_test() {
	$result = array(
		'label'       => __( 'Caching is enabled' ),
		'status'      => 'good',
		'badge'       => array(
			'label' => __( 'Performance' ),
			'color' => 'orange',
		),
		'description' => sprintf(
			'<p>%s</p>',
			__( 'Caching can help load your site more quickly for visitors.' )
		),
		'actions'     => '',
		'test'        => 'caching_plugin',
	);

	if ( ! myplugin_caching_is_enabled() ) {
		$result['status'] = 'recommended';
		$result['label'] = __( 'Caching is not enabled' );
		$result['description'] = sprintf(
			'<p>%s</p>',
			__( 'Caching is not currently enabled on your site. Caching can help load your site more quickly for visitors.' )
		);
		$result['actions'] .= sprintf(
			'<p><a href="%s">%s</a></p>',
			esc_url( admin_url( 'admin.php?page=cachingplugin&action=enable-caching' ) ),
			__( 'Enable Caching' )
		);
	}

	return $result;
}

myplugin_add_caching_test() is hooked to the site_status_tests filter. It adds a new test called caching_plugin to the direct tests list. The value of test in this array is the function that will be called when the tests run on the Site Health Status page.

Note: If you add a test to the async test list, then you will also need to register the test function as an AJAX action using the wp_ajax_{$action} hook.

The test function should return an array with data about the result of the test. This array includes:

  • label: What the headerHeader The header of your site is typically the first thing people will experience. The masthead or header art located across the top of your page is part of the look and feel of your website. It can influence a visitor’s opinion about your content and you/ your organization’s brand. It may also look different on different screen sizes. of the section should say.
  • status: Section the result should be displayed in. Possible values are good, recommended, or critical.
  • badge: Array containing:
    • label: What the badge should say.
    • color: Applies a CSSCSS Cascading Style Sheets. class with this value to the badge. CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. styles support blue, green, red, orange, purple and gray.
  • description: Additional details about the results of the test.
  • actions: A link or button to allow the end user to take action on the result.
  • test: The name of the test.

In the above example, the test function, myplugin_caching_test() sets an initial baseline value for the result, and then overrides portions as needed if the call to its internal function myplugin_caching_is_enabled() returns false.

Site Health Info

Screenshot of the WordPress Site Health Information page

The Information tab is meant for debug purposes. It provides a plethora of information about the website and server setup for sharing when looking for support in various locations, alongside a button to quickly copy any non-private information so you can easily paste this to others.

The page is split up into sections. Plugins and themes may introduce their own entries to this page using the debug_information filter, either by adding entries to existing sections, or by creating their own sections.

As mentioned, the copied information only includes non-private information, this can of course be subjective, and is therefore also included in the filter. Marking either a full section, or just individual entries as private can be done by setting the corresponding $private value to true.

For example, the database prefix is shown under the Database section, and is marked as private, so when I go to copy all the information, it’s not there:

Example of the database section of the Site Health Information page

The content that gets added to the clipboard for the entire Database section is shown below:

### Database ###

Extension: mysqli
Server version: 5.5.5-10.1.38-MariaDB-1~jessie
Client version: mysqlnd 5.0.12-dev - 20150407 - $Id: 7cc7cc96e675f6d72e5cf0f267f48e167c2abb23 $

A security plugin may for example think that any database information is always seen as private, and would filter this in the following way:

function secplugin_remove_database_info( $debug_info ) {
	$debug_info['wp-database']['private'] = true;
	return $debug_info;
}
add_filter( 'debug_information', 'secplugin_remove_database_info' );

Adding a new section may also be of interest. The example below adds your own plugin and its license key, but marks it as private, to the list:

function myplugin_add_debug_info( $debug_info ) {
	$debug_info['my-plugin-slug'] = array(
		'label'    => __( 'My Plugin', 'my-plugin-slug' ),
		'fields'   => array(
			'license' => array(
				'label'    => __( 'License', 'my-plugin-slug' ),
				'value'   => get_option( 'my-plugin-license', __( 'No license found', 'my-plugin-slug' ) ),
				'private' => true,
			),
		),
	);

	return $debug_info;
}
add_filter( 'debug_information', 'myplugin_add_debug_info' );

Each new section that’s added should use your plugin or theme slug to avoid name collisions. All core entries are prefixed with wp-.

All debug information is added in an unescaped manner, the Information page will run all data through wp_kses, and only allows a, strong, em and span tags (used for emphasis or linking to documentation).
Debug information is expected to be plain text, and is escaped before showing on the page. The displayed data is ran through esc_html(), and data that can be copied is ran through esc_attr().

#5-2, #dev-notes

Anthony Burchell 12:46 am on April 25, 2019
Tags: 5.2, , , ,   

Dev Chat Summary: April 24

Announcements

Josepha (@chanthaboune) is working on bringing us a 5.0 retrospective wrap up, a project digest, and a team lead interest form. She is planning to publish the retrospective wrap up this week and potentially the project digest soon after in the following week. Thank you, Josepha!

5.2 updates

#46898 WSOD Protection could use some copy review

RC1 is planned for today, with the *target release date in ~2 weeks*

Josepha brought attention a few items needing help:

There were 11 tickets open in the 5.2 milestone but that is now down to 3 as of writing this summary. @pento worked through a bunch the evening prior to devchat and @sergeybiryukov has been lending a hand today. Many of these will be moved out of the milestone, but if there are any still at this link, feel free to discuss or do the next step.

The about page outline will be ready for RC1 and will be final in the final release. Most of text should be in by RCrelease 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).-1 but it is not “frozen” in this time period.

Dev Notesdev note Each important change in WordPress Core is documented in a developers note, (usually called dev note). Good dev notes generally include a description of the change, the decision that led to this change, and a description of how developers are supposed to work with that change. Dev notes are published on Make/Core blog during the beta phase of WordPress release cycle. Publishing dev notes is particularly important when plugin/theme authors and WordPress developers need to be aware of those changes.In general, all dev notes are compiled into a Field Guide at the beginning of the release candidate phase.

There are a few dev notes that are still in draft. @jeffpaul is working through the field guideField guide The field guide is a type of blogpost published on Make/Core during the release candidate phase of the WordPress release cycle. The field guide generally lists all the dev notes published during the beta cycle. This guide is linked in the about page of the corresponding version of WordPress, in the release post and in the HelpHub version page. and adding placeholders for those. It would be much appreciated if you’d finalize your notes so we can include them! Ideally these would release along side RC1.

Please use the following link as a list of what is pending for dev-notes: link here. If the dev notedev note Each important change in WordPress Core is documented in a developers note, (usually called dev note). Good dev notes generally include a description of the change, the decision that led to this change, and a description of how developers are supposed to work with that change. Dev notes are published on Make/Core blog during the beta phase of WordPress release cycle. Publishing dev notes is particularly important when plugin/theme authors and WordPress developers need to be aware of those changes.In general, all dev notes are compiled into a Field Guide at the beginning of the release candidate phase. has been made, please remove the needs-dev-note keyword. 🙂

Open Floor

Influx in Forum issues/TracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress. Tickets

There was discussion around the continued cadence and nature of Minor/Major releases. @joyously said that she has noticed an influx in forum posts focused around bugs. Joy reminded us that directing folks to create tickets in the forums will help greatly in identifying common bugs. This also serves as a reminder that there are teams for triagetriage The act of evaluating and sorting bug reports, in order to decide priority, severity, and other factors. in both Trac and 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/ 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/ repo that would greatly appreciate the help. The Gutenberg triage has recently moved to a weekly cadence and the times are as follows:

Gutenberg #core-editor triage times are – Monday at 13:00 UTC

Gutenberg #design triage times are every Tuesday at 16:00 UTC

@jorbin punted #46293 as there was no decision made and there is a need to freeze strings. Many thumbs up emojis agreed. 👍

#5-2, #dev-chat, #summary

Will Earnhardt 10:22 pm on April 24, 2019
Tags: 5.2, , ,   

Miscellaneous Developer Updates in 5.2

New wp_body_open Theme Hook

5.2 will introduce a new wp_body_open() function that is used to trigger a wp_body_open action. This action is intended to allow developers to inject code immediately following the opening <body> tagtag A directory in Subversion. WordPress uses tags to store a single snapshot of a version (3.6, 3.6.1, etc.), the common convention of tags in version control systems. (Not to be confused with post tags.).

Themes are encouraged to begin using this hook as soon as 5.2 is released. The function should be placed just inside the opening <body> tag of the template file. For example:

<body <?php body_class(); ?>>
<?php wp_body_open(); ?>

Usage of this hook should be reserved for output of unseen elements like <script> tags or additional metadata. It should not be used to add arbitrary HTMLHTML HyperText Markup Language. The semantic scripting language primarily used for outputting content in web browsers. content to a page that could break layouts or lead to unexpected situations.

Backward Compatibility

In order to support previous versions of WordPress, it is recommended you use a shim in your theme to prevent fatal errors from the undefined function. 

if ( ! function_exists( 'wp_body_open' ) ) {
    function wp_body_open() {
        do_action( 'wp_body_open' );
    }
}

Note that if your theme is going to be submitted to the theme repository, then you won’t be able to use the wp_ prefix, as it will get flagged by the Theme Check. An alternative is to call do_action directly where the wp_body_open() function is placed in the first example, like this: 

<body <?php body_class(); ?>>
<?php 
if ( function_exists( 'wp_body_open' ) ) {
    wp_body_open();
} else {
    do_action( 'wp_body_open' );
}

Plugins can detect the use of this function in a theme by calling did_action( 'wp_body_open' ) and falling back to alternative methods if the action has not fired.

See #12563 and #46679 for more information.

Login HeaderHeader The header of your site is typically the first thing people will experience. The masthead or header art located across the top of your page is part of the look and feel of your website. It can influence a visitor’s opinion about your content and you/ your organization’s brand. It may also look different on different screen sizes. Adjustments

The <h1> on wp-login.php previously used the title attribute inconsistently between multisitemultisite Used to describe a WordPress installation with a network of multiple blogs, grouped by sites. This installation type has shared users tables, and creates separate database tables for each blog (wp_posts becomes wp_0_posts). See also network, blog, site and single site. In multisite, the value of this attribute was the title of the networknetwork (versus site, blog), but on a single site, it merely duplicated the link text. As part of #24766, many of the title attributes throughout coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. have been removed, as they are often redundant or useless.

In WordPress 5.2, this title attribute has been removed and its associated filterFilter Filters are one of the two types of Hooks https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Hooks. They provide a way for functions to modify data of other functions. They are the counterpart to Actions. Unlike Actions, filters are meant to work in an isolated manner, and should never have side effects such as affecting global variables and output., login_headertitle, has been deprecated. If the deprecated filter is used, it now applies to the link text. A new login_headertext filter has been added in its place.

In addition to the <h1> changes, the link on the WordPress logo now always points to WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ by default. In prior versions, it would point to the primary site of the network on multisite. This URLURL A specific web address of a website or web page on the Internet, such as a website’s URL www.wordpress.org can still be filtered using login_headerurl.

See: #42537

Editor Image Caption Styles

In the 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. editor, the font-size and color attributes were removed from the figcaption element unless the active theme has opted into default block styles.

Additionally, a margin: 0; attribute applied to .block-editor-rich-text__editable was removed from the RichText component, so as to allow theme styles to control those margins without high specificity. If your pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party relied on this margin, you’ll need to add this back to the necessary elements.

See: wordpress/gutenberg/pull/14366

Walker_Category HTML Attributes

A new category_list_link_attributes filter has been added to Walker_Category to allow customization of the HTML attributes applied to a categoryCategory The 'category' taxonomy lets you group posts / content together that share a common bond. Categories are pre-defined and broad ranging. list item’s anchor element.

This complements the page_menu_link_attributes filter in Walker_Page and the nav_menu_link_attributes filter in Walker_Nav_Menu.

See #40666

New Additional Content Filter on User Delete Action

When users are deleted from a site, WordPress checks to confirm that they do not have posts or links assigned to them. However, there are cases where a plugin may have content associated with them outside of a post_author or link_owner relationship.

WordPress 5.2 introduces a new users_have_additional_content filter, which allows plugins to run additional checks for custom content relationships.

Note: This filter specifically doesn’t override the system users_have_content checks to avoid any undesired suppression of the reassign functionality. Instead it enables the ability to flag that a user has additional content.

Developers should note that this filter doesn’t conduct the reassignment operations on the data, this will be done by the delete_user or deleted_user actions which provide the ID of the user as well as the ID of the user for reassignment if selected.

Using the Filter

Below is a simple example of how a plugin could use the filter along with the delete_user action to allow the re-assignment of non-standard content.

First the filter returns true to signify that users have additional content. This triggers the content reassignment UIUI User interface to appear in the adminadmin (and super admin) for all users being deleted.

It then uses the delete_user action hook to reassign additional content at the same time as any standard core content.

function myplugin_users_have_additional_content( $has_content, $user_ids ) {
	if ( ! $has_content ) {
		// Check if any of the the users being deleted have additional content
		if ( myplugin_check_users_have_content( $user_ids ) ) {
			return true;
		}
	}
	return $has_content;
}
add_filter( ‘users_have_additional_content’, ‘myplugin_users_have_additional_content’, 10, 2 );

function myplugin_reassign_user_content( $deleted_user, $reassigned_user ) {
	if ( $reassigned_user ) {
		// Re-assign the content from the deleted user
		myplugin_reassign_coauthor( $deleted_user, $reassigned_user );
	}
}
add_action( ‘delete_user’, ‘myplugin_reassign_user_content’, 10, 2 );

See: #36860

Other Updates of Note:

  • As part of the 2019 focus of improving automatic updates, the sodium_compat library will now be included in WordPress. Sodium Compat is a polyfill for the Sodium cryptography library for PHPPHP The web scripting language in which WordPress is primarily architected. WordPress requires PHP 7.4 or higher versions <7.2. Including this will facilitate security enhancements, with the initial focus of enabling more secure signing and verification of update packages. See: #45806
  • Twemoji is now updated to version 12.0.1. See: #46805
  • Fixed a 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. where an Allow header was not being returned for OPTIONS requests to the 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/.. See: #45753
  • A $domain parameter has been added to translate_user_role(). This will allow translations of custom user roles added in plugins. See: #38736

#5-2, #dev-notes, #editor, #themes

Will Earnhardt 7:24 pm on April 24, 2019
Tags: 5.2, ,   

Notable Accessibility Changes in 5.2

In addition to the semantic improvements to tabs in the admin area, there are a few additional accessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) changes developers should make note of in WordPress 5.2.

Post Formats in List Tables

When post formats were used prior to WordPress 5.2, icons representing the specific format were displayed beside the post title in the Posts list table. These icons served as links that filtered the list by the associated post format.

These icons have now been removed in favor of a dedicated dropdown select filterFilter Filters are one of the two types of Hooks https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Hooks. They provide a way for functions to modify data of other functions. They are the counterpart to Actions. Unlike Actions, filters are meant to work in an isolated manner, and should never have side effects such as affecting global variables and output. above the list table.

See: #35497, #46591

Adminadmin (and super admin) Bar Submenu Link Markup

In the WordPress admin bar, menu items with nested items used arrow icons generated via CSSCSS Cascading Style Sheets. with a .ab-item:before pseudo element. Starting with WordPress 5.2 these arrow icons use a wrapper <span> element:

<span class="wp-admin-bar-arrow" aria-hidden="true"></span>

This change should only affect plugins that modify the admin bar using custom icons. PluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party authors are encouraged to use the new markup and adjust their plugin CSS accordingly.

This change is part of a broader effort—tracked in #40428—to progressively introduce best practices to make screen readers ignore CSS generated content when it’s not intended to be available for speech output.

See: #37513

Archive WidgetWidget A WordPress Widget is a small block that performs a specific function. You can add these widgets in sidebars also known as widget-ready areas on your web page. WordPress widgets were originally created to provide a simple and easy-to-use way of giving design and structure control of the WordPress theme to the user. Dropdown Improvements

To add consistency with the Categories Widget, and to improve contextual awareness for those using screen readers and other assistive technologies, WordPress 5.2 will now pre-select the currently viewed archive in the Archive Dropdown Widget.

This is handled through the addition of a new $selected boolean parameter in the get_archives_link() function. By default, $selected is set to true if the current page is the selected archive page. The new parameter is also available in the associated get_archives_link filter.

In addition, four new date-based parameters have been added to wp_get_archives(). By default, $year, $monthnum, $day, and $w are set to the their current date values, and are used to determine the value of $selected to pass to get_archives_link(), as noted above.

Developers utilizing wp_get_archives() may pass in different date values through these parameters to use as the comparison for the currently viewed archive page.

See: #40662

Other Changes of Note

  • A new media view, wp.media.view.Heading, was added to facilitate adding accessibility friendly headings to the media library/modal. This enables those using screen readers to quickly jump between sections of the interface. See #36925
  • Similarly, headings were added to the data tables on the Export Personal Data and Erase Personal Data pages. See #46041
  • Some minor adjustments have been made to the Alt text and URLURL A specific web address of a website or web page on the Internet, such as a website’s URL www.wordpress.org fields in the media modals. The Alt text field is now the first field displayed, and it has an explanation below it to help educate on proper usage. The label for the “URL” field now says “Copy link” instead of “URL”. See #41612

#5-2, #accessibility, #dev-notes

Josepha 5:22 pm on April 24, 2019
Tags: 5.2, , ,   

Dev Chat Agenda: April 24

Below is the agenda for the weekly devchat meeting on Wednesday, April 24, 2019, 2100 UTC Wednesday, April 24, 2019, 2000 UTC.

Announcements

  • 5.2 updates
    • Coordination of tasks in our final two weeks
  • Calls from component maintainers
  • Open Floor

If you have anything to propose for the agenda or specific items related to those listed above, please leave a comment below.

This meeting is held in the #core channel in the Making WordPress 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/..

#5-2, #agenda, #devchat

#dev-chat

Will Earnhardt 5:12 pm on April 24, 2019
Tags: 5.2, , , ,   

Developer Focused Privacy Updates in 5.2

WordPress 5.2 brings several improvements for developers working with Privacy Policy pages and data exports.

New Privacy Policy Page Helpers

Four new features have been added to make customizing and designing the Privacy Policy page easier:

  • A new function, is_privacy_policy(), can be used in conditionals to identify whether the current $wp_query is for the Privacy Policy page.
  • A new theme template file, privacy-policy.php, is used for rendering the page assigned as the Privacy Policy.
  • .privacy-policy has been added as a body class and is inserted when the currently rendered page is the Privacy Policy page.
  • .menu-item-privacy-policy has been added as a menu item class to specify the menu link that points to the Privacy Policy page.

Backwards Compatibility

The only backwards compatibility concern with using these new helpers is with the is_privacy_policy() function, which would trigger a Call to undefined function fatal error.

Themes and plugins that would like to support the is_privacy_policy() function in older versions of WordPress can use the following shim:

if ( ! function_exists( 'is_privacy_policy' ) ) {
    function is_privacy_policy() {
        return get_option( 'wp_page_for_privacy_policy' ) && is_page( get_option( 'wp_page_for_privacy_policy' ) );
    }
}

For more information, see #44005.

Loosened Tag Restrictions in User Data Exports

User Data exports no longer use a hardcoded list of allowed tags, limited to just <a> and <br>. They will now use the default list of allowed tags in wp_kses().

Furthermore, the code facilitating the export now passes a personal_data_export context to wp_kses(), so that the allowed tags and attributes can be filtered using the wp_kses_allowed_html filterFilter Filters are one of the two types of Hooks https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Hooks. They provide a way for functions to modify data of other functions. They are the counterpart to Actions. Unlike Actions, filters are meant to work in an isolated manner, and should never have side effects such as affecting global variables and output. and checking for the personal_data_export context.

Here’s a filter example that adds support for the <sub> and <sup> tags to the personal data export:

function prefix_allowed_html_filter( $allowedtags, $context ) {
	// Only target personal data export.
	if ( 'personal_data_export' !== $context ) {
		return $allowedtags;
	}

	// Add support for the sub tag.
	if ( ! isset( $allowedtags['sub'] ) ) {
		$allowedtags['sub'] = array();
	}

	// Add support for the sup tag.
	if ( ! isset( $allowedtags['sup'] ) ) {
		$allowedtags['sup'] = array();
	}

	return $allowedtags;
}
add_filter( 'wp_kses_allowed_html', 'prefix_allowed_html_filter', 2, 10);

For more information, check out the documentation for the wp_kses_allowed_html filter.

See: #44044

#5-2, #core-privacy, #dev-notes, #privacy, #themes

Jonathan Desrosiers 7:15 pm on April 17, 2019
Tags: 5.2, , ,   

Block Editor Detection Improvements in 5.2

In 5.0, WP_Screen::is_block_editor() was introduced to allow developers to conditionally execute code depending on whether the 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. editor is being loaded. This method returns the is_block_editor property of the WP_Screen instance. However, there were some large gaps in the loading process where an incorrect value could potentially be returned.

For example, when using the current_screen action hook, the value was always false, even when the user was visiting a block editor enabled screen. This happened because block editor support is flagged much later in the loading process when edit-form-blocks.php is included.

function myplugin_current_screen( $screen ) {
	if ( $screen->is_block_editor ) {
		// This conditional would never execute.
	}
}
add_action( 'current_screen', 'myplugin_current_screen' );

This has been fixed in 5.2 to account for all possible scenarios when a post is edited. However, there are still a few very narrow edge cases when a new post is created where WP_Screen::is_block_editor() may still incorrectly indicate block editor support.

Edge Cases When Creating New Posts

The use_block_editor_for_post() function and replace_editor filterFilter Filters are one of the two types of Hooks https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Hooks. They provide a way for functions to modify data of other functions. They are the counterpart to Actions. Unlike Actions, filters are meant to work in an isolated manner, and should never have side effects such as affecting global variables and output. require a WP_Post object to be passed as a parameter. Because a new post has not yet been created when WP_Screen is instantiated, it can only make its best guess whether the page is loading the block editor.

When creating a new post, WP_Screen will set is_block_editor property to the value returned by use_block_editor_for_post_type() for the current post type. In most cases, this guess will be correct. But, the following scenarios have edge cases to consider.

  • When the replace_editor filter is used to replace the editor, this value may be incorrect.
  • When the use_block_editor_for_post filter is used to change block editor support.

For both of these scenarios, the use_block_editor_for_post_type filter can be used to ensure the correct value in most circumstances.

function myplugin_replace_editor_filter( $replace_editor, $post ) {
	// Logic to replace editor.
}
add_filter( 'replace_editor', 'myplugin_replace_editor_filter', 10, 2 );

function myplugin_replace_editor_post_type( $use_block_editor, $post_type ) {
	// Similar logic to replace editor, but without a WP_Post object to work with.
}
add_filter( 'use_block_editor_for_post_type', 'myplugin_replace_editor_post_type', 10, 2 );

With this filter, all scenarios that do not require checking a specific property of a post (a taxonomyTaxonomy A taxonomy is a way to group things together. In WordPress, some common taxonomies are category, link, tag, or post format. https://codex.wordpress.org/Taxonomies#Default_Taxonomies. term, metaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. value, etc.) can be accounted for. For example, filtering based on user capability, site option, or user meta value for editor preference are all possible using use_block_editor_for_post_type.

When WordPress creates a new post, it uses the get_default_post_to_edit() function. This function creates a new post in the database using wp_insert_post() and then allows the default content, title, and excerptExcerpt An excerpt is the description of the blog post or page that will by default show on the blog archive page, in search results (SERPs), and on social media. With an SEO plugin, the excerpt may also be in that plugin’s metabox. to be filtered. When terms, post meta, or content are added to posts with actions such as save_post or wp_insert_post, it is possible that this could change the block editor support for the post being created.

This scenario would result in WP_Screen:is_block_editor possessing an incorrect value from the current_screen action until roughly the load-{$pagenow} action.

Logic should be added to the use_block_editor_for_post_type filter to account for these scenarios (which are normally post type specific) and guarantee the accuracy of WP_Screen::is_block_editor().

For more information on this, consult the ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. on TracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress. (#46195), or the changeset ([45224]).

#5-2, #block-editor, #dev-notes, #gutenberg