Call for feedback: Real-time Collaboration (RTC) server-aware approach

Hey hosts 👋

Testing and development on the real-time collaboration feature (“RTC”) has picked up again after initially being removed from WordPress 7.0. A new 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.-aware approach for RTC is being explored, and feedback from you and your teams is needed!

Three candidates for server-aware sync engines are being developed in a pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party.. Hosts are invited to test the implementations, with a focus on performance, and provide feedback along with any supporting data. Responses from hosts will affect the direction of the feature moving forward.

How to test

The new exploration of sync engine candidates is happening in a Gutenberg Sync Engines repository, which can be installed in WordPress as a standalone plugin. The engines being explored are Yjs–server, Distributed Editing (DE-RTC), and Intent log, which all tackle previous bottlenecks that affected RTC performance. The goal for this exploration is to identify the most ideal candidate and then move forward with further testing on that as a feature pluginFeature Plugin A plugin that was created with the intention of eventually being proposed for inclusion in WordPress Core. See Features as Plugins.

Feedback can be shared on the original post and/or in the #feature-realtime-collaboration channel on 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/.

More information is available here:

Many hosts and hostingHosting A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their website accessible via the World Wide Web. team members previously shared thoughts and data about the initial implementation of RTC, and contributed with testing, which was so helpful! Additional testing of this new direction in a variety of server environments will not only benefit development but will also help assure compatibility and smooth performance on your hosting infrastructure. Contributions through testing on the part of web hosts always help keep the development process informed and are so valuable to the WordPress Open SourceOpen Source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. Project!

Thank you all for participating in testing this feature!

Props to @amykamala for collaborating on this post.