WCUS 2024 Core Committers Meeting Notes

At WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. US last week, CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. Committers in attendance (including emeritus) gathered for a brief informal meeting.

There was no formal agenda, but a few goals for the meeting were mentioned at the beginning:

  • Allow newer committers to meet more senior ones.
  • Allow anyone to raise questions, concerns, or suggestions that have been on their minds.
  • Just spend some time together chatting and getting to know each other.

Below are some brief notes from discussions that happened following Chatham House Rule.

A group photo taken the day after the meeting. A few committers are missing that were present at the actual meeting. – Photo credit: @rzen with alternate angles form @afragen.

What is the right way to commit?

A newer committercommitter A developer with commit access. WordPress has five lead developers and four permanent core developers with commit access. Additionally, the project usually has a few guest or component committers - a developer receiving commit access, generally for a single release cycle (sometimes renewed) and/or for a specific component. mentioned that established committers have been very supportive and helpful getting them set up and comfortable. However, they often question whether they are doing things right. There is baseline documentation in the handbook around committing and some extensive documentation around commit messages, but every committer seems to have a different setup with a different tool set.

Some takeaways

  • There’s no wrong way to set up your environment or make commits.
  • To increase the amount of documentation around committing, every committer should blogblog (versus network, site) about their set up (and more about committing in general)! A new page has been created in the Core Handbook to serve as a blogroll for these posts and will be updated as new ones are published. Everyone is welcome to publish, including emeritus and committers who were not in attendance at WCUS.
  • Using the #core-committers channel for questions around committing process is always appropriate.

Clarity around requesting feedback

The next discussion was around how to properly seek feedback from other contributors and committers. The Make Core Blog has recently felt a bit too “official” for these more casual posts. But in the past, these types of posts were perfect for the Make Core blog. Is this no longer the place for these types of discussions?

The ideal purpose of Make Blogs was discussed a bit, and it was mentioned that there was a 2 part discussion at the 2023 Community Summit focused on this. It was suggested to read through the session notes to see if there were any mentions of this.

Some takeaways:

  • There’s value in posting on your own blog to validate your own ideas and understandings vs. speaking on behalf of WP to the community.
  • It’s OK to share posts on your blog seeking feedback as long as findings are summarized in the TracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress. ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker..
  • As long as it’s accompanied by a problem statement/theory/points needing validation, posting on the Make blog seeking feedback about that problem seems reasonable.
  • It’s always preferred to have a Trac ticket outlining the problem, even if it’s unclear whether it’s something that will actually be fixed (there’s always wontfix and maybelater).
  • Moving more “official” communication to the relatively new Developer blog makes sense. This would include 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., developer notes, etc.
  • No matter where these discussion points are shared, make sure to be clear about what type of feedback you are seeking.
    • Is this idea unrealistic?
    • Are there blockers that are not apparent?
    • Is there history behind why something is a certain way that is not immediately obvious?
    • etc.

Props @jorbin for pre-publish review.

#committers

New Committers: 2021

2021 has sped by with two major releases and a final one underway. These releases are made possible by many coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. committers who actively review and merge contributions (on top of other things). This year six new people were added to that list of committers, so please join me in welcoming and thanking them for their contributions.

First up is David Baumwald (@davidbaumwald). David served as Triagetriage The act of evaluating and sorting bug reports, in order to decide priority, severity, and other factors. Release LeadRelease Lead The community member ultimately responsible for the Release. for releases 5.3, 5.4, and 5.5 and has acted as a mentor throughout the 5.6 and 5.7 releases.  David has also served as a Component Maintainer for Comments.

Our next new committercommitter A developer with commit access. WordPress has five lead developers and four permanent core developers with commit access. Additionally, the project usually has a few guest or component committers - a developer receiving commit access, generally for a single release cycle (sometimes renewed) and/or for a specific component. is William Patton (@williampatton). William, a self-proclaimed lover of all things sandwich, has been a diligent contributor since 2010 and brought his expertise to the Theme Team and 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., WP-CLIWP-CLI WP-CLI is the Command Line Interface for WordPress, used to do administrative and development tasks in a programmatic way. The project page is http://wp-cli.org/ https://make.wordpress.org/cli/, and Plugins.

Jonny Harris (@spacedmonkey) has been an active member of the WordPress project since 2009! While Jonny is a professional WordPress developer, he gives back to the project by working in CLICLI Command Line Interface. Terminal (Bash) in Mac, Command Prompt in Windows, or WP-CLI for WordPress. and Core and working as one of our new committers.

Next up is Jeff Ong (@jffng)! Jeff’s introduction to WordPress began in 2013 when he made a blogblog (versus network, site) to document his media art. Fast forward to today, Jeff contributes 40 hours a week to the Themes team. In addition to seeing him in his committer role, you’ll often see his name associated with default themes (looking at you, Twenty Twenty-Two).

If you have visited our 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/. #core channel, you will have seen our next committer, Jb Audras (@audrasjb). Jb is a current WordPress Core team representative, is one of the French General Translationtranslation The process (or result) of changing text, words, and display formatting to support another language. Also see localization, internationalization. Editors since 2017, has acted as a Widgets and Menus components maintainer, and was an 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) team representative. He has also been a focus lead on WordPress releases 5.3 (accessibility), 5.4 (documentation coordinator), 5.5 (accessibility lead), 5.6 (Core auto-updates wrangler), and 5.7 (documentation lead).

Marius Jensen (@clorith) began his WordPress journey in 2010, and since, his contributions span from bbPressbbPress Free, open source software built on top of WordPress for easily creating forums on sites. https://bbpress.org. to Core to translations. Marius is a warm presence in the support forums and has made a positive impact on the Project with his work on the Site Health feature pluginFeature Plugin A plugin that was created with the intention of eventually being proposed for inclusion in WordPress Core. See Features as Plugins., the jQuery upgrade, and is now a Core committer.

Last but certainly not least is the inimitable Tonya Mork (@hellofromtonya). Tonya has been part of WordPress since 2015 and has since been triage lead for WordPress releases 5.6 and 5.7, a team representative for Test, and is now a Core committer!

Please join me in congratulating this excellent cohort of committers! 🎉💫

#committers

#commit