The Core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. team postponed the afternoon dev chat for 24 hours to get past the US presidential inauguration. @metalandcoffee, aka Ebonie Butler, led the meeting on this agenda.
Announcements and highlighted posts
@metalandcoffee brought the group’s attention to these items:
Ebonie also invited the group (and you, too, dear reader!) to stop by a 5.7 test scrub. There’s one every Friday at 13:30 UTC.
Releases
The Core team is busy with one minor and one major 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.
WordPress 5.6.1
5.6.1 has a squad and is deciding on a date; here are the tickets for the milestone.
WordPress 5.7
Beta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process. 1 lands on February 2. Here are the tickets in the milestone.
Per @hellofromtonya, aka Tonya Mork, noted there are 66 open features and enhancements that need committing or punting by Beta 1. (Ed. note: Beta 1 imposes a feature freeze on the release. After that, commits are 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. fixes only. RC 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 imposes a string freeze, so Polyglots can finish translations before final release.)
Tonya had more to share about the milestone tickets. See the full discussion and consider pitching in on some tickets, especially, as @metalandcoffee pointed out, if there’s something you really want to see in the release.
Updates from component maintainers
@sergeybiryukov kicked off the updates with a general announcement that as of January 21, WordPress Core has more than 50,000 commits and thanked every past, present and future contributor.
Sergey also reported in for Polyglots, which added support for Austria to remove_accents() in #49967.
@audrasjb reported in that Menus has two tickets ready for commit. In Upgrade/Install, JB recognized @dd32, aka Dion Hulse, for his helpful insights on rollbacks.
In Design, @estelaris, aka Estela Rueda, asked for testing to review this Core color-change pull request, based on a discussion in the Design channel that was happening at the same time as devchat.
@xkon reported in from Privacy, saying he’s pretty sure they’ll be punting some tickets from 5.7 that need more iteration. The team also expects inputs from other teams, which happens a lot with privacy.
Agenda comments
jQuery UI User interface and #52163
Between standard reports and Open Floor, devchat takes up items people add to the comments on the Agenda post—and other items people specifically add.
That happened with a question @hellofromtonya had on ticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. #52163, which is about updating jQuery UI and removing jQuery migrate. All of that is getting punted to 5.8, but at the moment there’s no firm timeline for the new jQuery UI release. Follow the discussion as it happened here.
Consolidating instructions for local dev environments
Across the WordPress Project you can find several sets of instructions that will walk you through setting up a local development environment for building WordPress sites, themes, and plugins; contributing to all of those things plus Core; and doing lots of different kinds of testing.
Those local-environment instructions vary widely in age, approach and tooling.
@paaljoachim has started a Meta ticket (as opposed to a normal ticket) to discuss consolidating those instructions and would very much like feedback, comments and people to brainstorm with.
So far, @desrosj and @hellofromtonya have offered help. But this is a big, complicated thing — so please pitch in!
WordPress Importers
@pento offers this proposal to modernize the WordPress Importers, complete with a slew of links.
As he told the group, “
There’s a lot to read, but I’d appreciate folks taking the time to go through it. 
2:44Much of it is fairly sensible, but the last post in the series does contain a proposal for writing exporters for CMSes that don’t provide an export option, which is a departure from our usual approach.”
See the real-time discussion here.
Visual regression A software bug that breaks or degrades something that previously worked. Regressions are often treated as critical bugs or blockers. Recent regressions may be given higher priorities. A "3.6 regression" would be a bug in 3.6 that worked as intended in 3.5. tests
@isabel_brison has a pull request that sets up visual regression testing in Core. The Trac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress. ticket is #49606.
@francina raised the point that some hosts are starting to do visual regression. See that discussion here.
Block 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.-based navigation
@metalandcoffee: “Daniel Richards wanted to let everyone know that work on the block-based Navigation screen has picked up again, and there’s a new channel for [it] ” — #feature-navigation-block-editor.
Here’s the GitHub project.
Thoughts on browser versions?
@desrosj would like some feedback on #52331: Consider using more precise browser versions for `browserslist`.
Open Floor
@sergeybiryukov reminded the group that Beta and RC releases used to come with a haiku. He wrote one for the 50,000th commit and would like Core to restart the tradition.
@metalandcoffee volunteered to do a haiku for Beta 1 and closed the chat.
#5-6-1, #5-7, #core, #dev-chat, #summary
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