Devchat summary: November 27, 2019

The year is winding down!

@francina led the chat; @marybaum here taking notes on a holiday-travel schedule.

20 people announced their presence – of course somewhere around 30K are members, and we could ALL have been watching. The more the merrier!

The chat worked from this agenda.

Announcements

Next minor: 5.3.1

The announcements were all about the next minor, WordPress 5.3.1.

@justinahinon and I (@marybaum) announced that he would move the Thursday 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 to Friday so folks in the US could join in without interrupting their Thanksgiving plans.

After some discussion, @azaozz suggested ad hoc bug scrubs every day until release on December 11. He got active emoji support from five people, and then @audrasjb volunteered to host a bug scrub every day this week (the week of December 2).

Highlighted Posts

@francina called the group’s attention to four conversations.

Got opinions? Especially if your feelings are strong, now’s the time to get over there and share your views:

  1. Recap from last week “Regular” chat https://make.wordpress.org/core/2019/11/20/dev-chat-summary-november-20-2019/ (edited) 3:15 PM
  2. Recap from last week “After Hour” chat https://make.wordpress.org/core/2019/11/25/devchat-after-the-hour-november-20/ (edited) 3:15 PM
  3. Tons of good feedback about the 5.3 release https://make.wordpress.org/core/2019/11/15/5-3-retrospective-call-for-feedback/ (edited) 3:16 PM
  4. And tentative release for 2020-2021 https://make.wordpress.org/core/2019/11/21/tentative-release-calendar-2020-2021/ (edited)

And you can always come to devchat, Wednesdays at 21:00 UTC. Find the agenda here, 24 hours in advance.

Calls from Component Maintainers

@francina opened the Call with this wide-ranging intro:

Do we have news from components? Do we have abandoned components that someone wants to adopt? (edited) 3:22 PM

Do we have components that are struggling with the amount of work and need more hands on deck? How can we come together as a community to recruit? (edited) 

See the discussion starting here.

What followed was a general clarification of the difference between a component and a focus, thanks to @sergeybiryukov, who linked to two posts that add some detail.

(I’m listing them in reverse order, so you can read from the general to the specific):

@isabel_brison‘s post introducing the idea of a focus versus a component.

And this post, introducing the Core-CSS group in Slack.

As that discussion ended, @isabel_brison offered to write a followup post, which you can find here.

What are our goals in publishing?

@francina handed the (virtual) mic to @joyously, whose comment on the agenda for this chat asked the group to address goals in publishing.

Essentially, @joyously reminded us that publishers – our users [and as I was trained to think of such folks ~30 years ago, our customers, both internal and external] create content that is going to go more places than just a browser: in emails, feed readers and more. And those environments vary radically in their support for CSSCSS Cascading Style Sheets. and JSJS JavaScript, a web scripting language typically executed in the browser. Often used for advanced user interfaces and behaviors..

In her words:

I am concerned that the trend is toward content that looks good only in a web browser (with JS and CSS) and not good anywhere else.

@joyously

See the rest of the discussion in chat here.

A highlight: @francina linked to this post on Smashing Magazine, that looks at another facet of this issue.

And be on the lookout for more blogblog (versus network, site) posts addressing the topic, so you can add your thoughts.

#components, #core-css, #dev-chat, #focuses