Hosting Meeting Notes: Wednesday October 23, 2019

This is the summary of the meeting in #hosting-community on Slack Wednesday, October 23, 2019, at 1700 UTC (Slack archive).

Attendees: @jadonn @brettface @duchesscorp @azaozz @amykamala

WordPress 5.3 Release CandidateRelease Candidate A beta version of software with the potential to be a final product, which is ready to release unless significant bugs emerge. is Out

WordPress 5.3 is set to release on November 12th, 2019. Release Candidate 2 is out now, is available for testing and offers many new changes.

WordPress 5.3 Highlights

@jadonn mentioned that “Requiring the JSONJSON JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is an open standard file format, and data interchange format, that uses human-readable text to store and transmit data objects consisting of attribute–value pairs and array data types. It is a very common data format, with a diverse range of applications, such as serving as a replacement for XML in AJAX systems. extension will allow the core team to remove a number of workarounds, polyfills, and other bits of code that tried to accommodate PHPPHP PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a general-purpose scripting language especially suited to web development. PHP code is usually processed on a web server by a PHP interpreter. On a web server, the result of the interpreted and executed PHP code would form the whole or part of an HTTP response. installations that did not have the JSON extension. In relation to this, JSON is already one of the PHP extensions we have listed on the #hosting-community team handbook’s list of PHP extensions.

  • Some changes in 5.3 are aimed at improving the Site HealthSite Health This WordPress functionality will perform a number of checks on your installation to detect common configuration errors and known issues, and also allows plugins and themes to add their own checks. page. The Site Health page will report Should be improved or Good for the various tested items rather than display numeric scores. Additionally, Site Health’s recovery emails will now contain debug information. Core team has provided more details on that here.
  • There are numerous changes to media uploads and handling with 5.3. 5.3 automatically retries uploads and if that fails, serves informative errors instead of an http error.
  • WordPress 5.3 will introduce a number of CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. changes in WordPress admin, as well. You can see dev notes here.
  • In 5.3 a new admin email verification screen is introduced, that will be displayed once every six months for users to confirm their email addresses. The admin login page will have a “Show” button next to the password field for displaying the password.
  • Find out more about whats new in 5.3 here!

Daylight Savings Time

Daylight Savings time in the U.S. ends November 3rd. Should the #hosting-community meeting time be adjusted to accommodate the change? Feel free to comment here!

Open Floor

@azaozz requested help testing image post-processing changes in 5.3, mentioning that you “may need to tweak the test serverServer A server is a piece of computer hardware or software that provides functionality for other programs or devices. Typical servers are database servers, file servers, mail servers, print servers, web servers, game servers, and application servers.’s php.iniphp.ini The main configuration file of PHP. (if possible) to make it timeout or go out of memory. More info here

Anyone can get started with testing by installing the WordPress Beta Tester plugin. Or, you can download the release candidate directly.

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be in #hosting-community on Monday, October 28, 2019 at 1400 UTC. Hope to see you then!

+make.wordpress.org/updates

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