Start of the meeting in 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/., facilitated by @joemcgill.

Announcements

WordPress 6.5 “Regina” was released yesterday! Thank you to everyone who worked on, tested, and supported this release 🎉

Forthcoming Releases

Next 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.: 6.6

We are officially in the WordPress 6.6 release cycle. @priethor published this WordPress 6.6 Planning Proposal & Call for Volunteers post last week. Please take note of the following callouts on that post:

• Please leave your feedback about the schedule and release squad size in the comments by April 7th.
• If you are interested in participating in WordPress 6.6’s release squad as a lead or as a cohort, please show interest in the comments, specifying the role and the type of involvement (lead/cohort).

@colorful-tones and @fabiankaegy will be covering and merging TracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress./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/ Triagetriage The act of evaluating and sorting bug reports, in order to decide priority, severity, and other factors. for 6.6, and if anyone has any recommendations to streamline things for overall Triage to make lives easier, then please reach out to them.

For 6.6, we discussed considering not having a sticky post for 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 instead ensuring the schedule is linked at the top of the main release page.

We also discussed 6.5.1, and noted that @jorbin published a post: Initial Bug Scrub for 6.5.1 for tomorrow. @fabiankaegy mentioned that the editor team have created this new board in GitHub to track any editor-related issues that may be candidates for a point releaseMinor Release A set of releases or versions having the same minor version number may be collectively referred to as .x , for example version 5.2.x to refer to versions 5.2, 5.2.1, 5.2.3, and all other versions in the 5.2 (five dot two) branch of that software. Minor Releases often make improvements to existing features and functionality.. Currently, there are 5 tickets with the backport to wp minor release label.

We also already have quite a few tickets targeted for the 6.5.1 milestone, so any eyes before the initial bug scrub will likely help that be more efficient.

Next Gutenberg release: 18.1

The next Gutenberg release will be 18.1, scheduled for release on April 10, and will include these issues.

Discussion

We began by discussing any potential follow-up actions and reflections following the recent 6.5 release. @fabiankaegy asked about starting a conversation about possibly evolving how we approach 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 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. in future releases.

@jorbin has previously opened a related proposal to updating the field guide. We discussed where the most appropriate place was to start a conversation like this, and whether it sits more with CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress., Docs, or Project. As it touches on many different areas and how we do things within software release cycles, then it seems to fit more into the Core team’s scope.

@audrasjb suggested this may be good to discuss in the future #6-6-release-squad Slack channel so maybe the squad could discuss it in the open with the future Docs Leads and come up with a formal proposal for 6.6 on Make/Core.

@joemcgill also proposed arranging another release retrospective post to collect feedback about the release while it’s still fresh in people’s minds. @chanthaboune mentioned being able to do this in any way that works for folks. For 6.4, we collected the data in an anonymized format and then that data was shared on make/core, and we discussed potentially following a similar approach for 6.5.

Props to @joemcgill for reviewing.

#6-5, #6-6, #dev-chat, #summary