The Test Team helps manage testing and triage across the WordPress ecosystem. They focus on user testing of the editing experience and WordPress dashboard, replicating and documenting bug reports, and supporting a culture of review and triage across the project.
If you’d like to help test Full Site Editing, please join the FSE Outreach Program. You can find current calls for testing for this program here and you can join the fun in #fse-outreach-experiment.
Welcome back to Week in Test, where contributors of any skill level can find a handy list of links and opportunities to test WordPress. Join the Test Team in #core-test for questions and thoughtful discussion.
Did you know that contributions with the Test Team are also a fantastic way to level up your WordPress knowledge and skill? Dive in to contribute, and gain coveted props 😎 for a coming release.
Who? Any contributor.
Why? It is helpful to show an issue exists for other users in order to move a ticket forward for patching.
The following new tickets are awaiting review, and need testers to attempt to reproduce the reported issue (aka “repro”), and then provide a reproduction test report with the results:
Who? All contributors (not just developers) who can set up a local testing environment.
Why? It is necessary to apply proposed patches and test per the testing instructions in order to validate that a patch fixes the issue.
The following tickets have been reviewed and a patch provided, and need testers to apply the patch and manually test, then provide feedback through a patch test report:
open_basedir setting before parsing directories during autoupdate.text-transform setting on H6 heading doesn’t match between Editor and frontend.Who? Any QA or PHPPHP PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. http://php.net/manual/en/intro-whatis.php. developer contributors who can (or are interested in learning how to) build automated PHPUnit tests.
Why? Automated tests improve the software development feedback loopLoop The Loop is PHP code used by WordPress to display posts. Using The Loop, WordPress processes each post to be displayed on the current page, and formats it according to how it matches specified criteria within The Loop tags. Any HTML or PHP code in the Loop will be processed on each post. https://codex.wordpress.org/The_Loop. for quality and backward compatibility.
The following tickets need PHPUnit tests built to accompany their respective patches:
E_DEPRECATED from PasswordHash::gensalt_blowfish.wp_required_field_indicator and wp_required_field_message filterable. Includes test suggestions to get started.<test-scrub> in #core-test.<test-triage> in #core-test .<test-scrub> in #core-test.Interested in hosting a <test-scrub>? Check out Leading Bug Scrubs for details.
This post is the sixteenth call for testing as part of the Full Site Editing Outreach Program. For more information about this experimental program, please review this FAQ for helpful details. To properly join the fun, please head to #fse-outreach-experiment in Make Slack for future testing announcements, helpful posts, and more will be shared there.
Friendly Reminder
If anyone is interested in being a part of the test creation or facilitation process, check out this recent post on how to get involved.
This call for testing returns us to some of the basics of using the blockBlock 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. editor. While it can be fun and exciting to dig into the cutting edge items, it’s just as important to ensure the baseline experience continues to be excellent. This is especially true when full site editing as a concept brings the block paradigm to more parts of the site experience. To that end, the format of this test is going to take on a more open ended, scavenger hunt style experience. As you go through it, you’ll explore the following various features:
Transform menu
Each block offers various blocks you can transform to and from in order to quickly take the same content you currently have and switch it into a new block.
Select text across blocks
This feature was launched in WordPress 6.0 and works with any Rich Text block (Paragraph, Heading, List, and Quote). How can it be improved though? What rough edges can you find?
Drag and drop
Drag and drop is a classic part of the block editor experience, whether you’re writing a post or creating a template. As WordPress evolves with new blocks and new features, it’s important these original features continue to perform and remain reliable.
Various add block options
Adding blocks comes in a few forms: the inserter, slash inserter (/), quick inserter, sibling inserter, and the “insert before/after” options built into the additional menu of each block. Ensuring each appears and functions as expected is key to being able to create what you want with blocks.
New document settings and experience
The document settings were recently revamped in Gutenberg 13.7:
The fields for post format, slug, template, and authors are aligned and have the same width. The template displays ‘default template’ instead of none, and the Permalink link opens a popover to edit the slug, when clicked. The result is a cleaner, more organized display that should help you more readily access all the important information about your post/page at a glance.
Using patterns
Patterns are increasingly important to the creation process and this test explores the basics of adding, moving, and customizing them.
And more!
This covers the high level items but you can expect to also use duotone, dimension controls, featured imageFeatured image A featured image is the main image used on your blog archive page and is pulled when the post or page is shared on social media. The image can be used to display in widget areas on your site or in a summary list of posts. in a cover block, etc if you complete each smaller task.
Note on InstaWP
The folks behind InstaWP have granted the outreach program an account that we can use for these calls for testing. This means if you want to skip setting up your own test site and instead use a temporary one, you can do so. When you set up a site with InstaWP, no email addresses will be collected which means you’ll need to save the link to access the site again. Big thank you to the InstaWP team!
Launch test site or setup test environment
To set up your own test site:
Overview of content on the test site
Once your test site is in place, please perform the following tasks in one or more of the three posts available in whatever order you’d like! None of the posts have a featured image set and they are all intentionally set as drafts. You do not need to run through all of these and it’s intentional that the task is left open ended, where there might be multiple ways to accomplish the task at hand. While the list looks long, each task should be quick, needing typically just a few seconds of action so please run through as many as you can.
Align, move, and customize images
Add, move, transform text blocks
/, quick inserter, and sibling) as possible.Insert and reorder patterns
Adjust the document settings
What to notice:
A little over a year has passed since the last annual Test Team Rep nomination cycle, and it’s been over two months since an interim acting rep was elected. It’s time again to nominate the Test Team Reps who will serve for the next 12 months 🗓.
This Call for Nominations is open until 2022-08-26 12:00. Please leave a comment identifying your nominee(s) before then.
For a quick refresher of Team RepTeam Rep A Team Rep is a person who represents the Make WordPress team to the rest of the project, make sure issues are raised and addressed as needed, and coordinates cross-team efforts. roles across the project, please see the Team Reps post on Team Updates.
Reps in the Test Team perform primary and secondary (or backup) duties to help support team chats, make updates to the team’s blog and handbook, remove blockers, keep a pulse on team objectives, and promote testing opportunities within the WordPress project.
As a reminder, Reps are not called “team leads” for a reason. While people elected as Team Reps will generally come from the pool of folks that people think of as experienced leaders, the Team Rep role is designed to change hands regularly.
Test Team Rep duties include:
<test-chat> sessions (example).<test-chat> (example) and <test-triage> (example) sessions in #core-test.<test-chat> session recaps, and post to Make WordPress Test.These duties are shared between the primary and secondary Reps (see Rep Responsibilities on the Team Rep page).
A Rep is an active team member who is reliable and trusted, advocates for and is knowledgeable of one or more areas of testing, and wants to represent, nurture, and grow the team to better serve 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.
Test Team Reps must be committed to showing up and performing regular duties, and should expect a time commitment of at least 2-4 hours per week. Reps serve for a term of one year.
The first step is to reach out to the community with a Call for Nominations (this post!)
Please nominate in the comments of this post. You can write a comment as simple as “I nominate @the_persons_username.” Self-nominations are also welcome by leaving a comment such as “I nominate myself.”
Private nominations can be submitted by contacting @Piotrek Boniu or @ironprogrammer in 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/..
If you’ve been nominated, please accept or decline the nomination as a reply to the same comment.
⏰ The deadline for nominations is 2022-08-26 12:00.
After the deadline, each nominee will be contacted to discuss qualifications and to confirm their acceptance of the nomination.
If you get nominated, please do not feel like you have to say “yes”. It’s okay for you to decline the nomination if you don’t feel like this is the right fit for any reason. “Thank you, but no thank you!” 😉
An election will happen only if there are more than two accepted nominations within the nomination period; otherwise the nominees will become the new Test Team Reps.
If held, the election will be conducted by an anonymous poll (example). The poll will remain open for 2 weeks.
Once uncontested nominations have been accepted, or in the event of an election the voting period has passed, the new Test Team Reps will be announced in a post (example).
Are you ready? It’s time to nominate folks to serve as our Test Team Reps for the new term! If you have any questions, please feel free to ask in the comments.
Props to @hellofromtonya for review of this post.
While the FSE Outreach Program enables folks to contribute to testing efforts directly, another important aspect of contributions not quite covered is facilitating calls for testing themselves. This post invites folks into that aspect of contribution with the Test Team to expand the testing efforts across the project. To better understand what this work entails, check out the recently overhauled handbook page on “How to facilitate a Call for Testing”.
Why is this important to do?
It’s critical to the success of the project that feedback regularly comes in from daily users to help shape the direction WordPress goes. The FSE Outreach Program can only test so much though and there are many parts of the WordPress experience that need feedback. As the scale of WordPress increases, our testing efforts need to follow.
This is an effort to do exactly that by empowering others to contribute in increasing feedback loops, stabilizing features, and bringing the great WordPress community along with the work being done. Finally, the more folks who feel comfortable facilitating testing efforts, the more potential there are for future outreach programs around areas you know and love (here’s looking at you, Media Library).
What might this look like?
Helping facilitate testing can look like many things and there’s room for your creativity. Here are some examples of how this could work:
Important note: these opportunities do not need to be done within the Outreach Program as testing does and will exist outside of that. I am listing those above as an entry point that I can help onboard into that work personally.
Comment below if interested or if you have any questions/comments/concerns.
If you’re interested in contributing in this way, please comment below! If you’re interested but aren’t quite ready to put your name out there, please share what might help you feel more confident doing so.
Props to @cbringmann @chanthaboune @priethor for helping review this post.
This post is a summary of the fifteenth call for testing for the FSE outreach program. As always, I want to highlight those who helped to bring others along with them in this latest effort:
Shout out to @clubkert @chopinbach @franz00 @osamunize @eboxnet for being first time contributors. Expect a badge on your WordPress profiles for your contribution!
High-level summary
As with prior calls for testing that centered on using the Query LoopLoop The Loop is PHP code used by WordPress to display posts. Using The Loop, WordPress processes each post to be displayed on the current page, and formats it according to how it matches specified criteria within The Loop tags. Any HTML or PHP code in the Loop will be processed on each post. https://codex.wordpress.org/The_Loop. blockBlock 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., the current experience remains equal parts magical and clunky to configure exactly as one wants. When combined with the fact that when creating a new template, you’re met with an empty view, this call for testing mainly weights towards feature requests to ease the experience rather than outright bugs. Of all of what’s shared here, these are the most repeated items of feedback: unclear UX for how to get out of a locked block with headings & paragraph blocks, improve the verbiage around the Query Block settings and revise Query Block controls, edit site link should open the current template, and add fallback template content on creation.
The addition of starter patterns with locked blocks when creating a new post offered a peak at how streamlined and curated the experience can be while also revealing that more visual cues are needed to better understand what exactly is happening, particularly with locked blocks and layout controls. Most of what was discussed matches what has been previously found which underscores the impact resolving these repeated key problems will have.
For any designers and developers who want to see someone walk through the experience, I want to also mention the following videos to check out to see the call for testing in action:
To help ground the following feedback, here are some quotes about the overall experience to keep in mind:
It’s so smooth and easy. The fact that you can create template overrides for specific categories is brilliant. I can’t wait to use that on a custom theme with custom blocks. Post patterns are also great!
@eboxnet in this comment.
So cool to see how far FSE has come and all of the improvements related to templates. We’re getting closer to the power of the template hierarchy of traditional themes!
@bgturner in this comment.
Selecting “categoryCategory The 'category' taxonomy lets you group posts / content together that share a common bond. Categories are pre-defined and broad ranging.” from the “Add new” template menu was unintuitive for me. That UXUX UX is an acronym for User Experience - the way the user uses the UI. Think ‘what they are doing’ and less about how they do it. implies to me that I could add many “category” templates, which is not true. That confused me as to whether I would be creating a “category” template for every type of category, or choosing which categories to assign the template to. When I realized I couldn’t add another “category” I figured out what was going on…I enjoyed playing around with the featured imageFeatured image A featured image is the main image used on your blog archive page and is pulled when the post or page is shared on social media. The image can be used to display in widget areas on your site or in a summary list of posts. / cover interaction and the “inner blocks use full width” feature. At the end of the test it was also cool to see the category template in use.
@arturgrabo in this comment.
Maybe I am too used to classic WordPress themes with headerHeader The header of your site is typically the first thing people will experience. The masthead or header art located across the top of your page is part of the look and feel of your website. It can influence a visitor’s opinion about your content and you/ your organization’s brand. It may also look different on different screen sizes. and footer pretty much always there. But it was very easy to create the template without a footer or header. Which obviously is cool that you can do that, but for whatever reason my brain was expecting header and footer to be auto included by default.
@chopinbach in this comment.
Confirmed Bugs
Previously reported:
New issues:
Locked heading blocks in the provided templates were super, duper frustrating. With normal heading blocks, if I press “return” at the end of a heading I get a paragraph block. With the locked headings I got stuck in the heading blocks. This felt like a major departure from typical interactions in the block editor.
@arturgrabo in this comment.
Feature Requests
As reflected in the high level summary, most feature requests have been mentioned before with a particular focus on various refinements, like adding a “view site” link in the editor or renaming “default template” in the template panel to match what one would see in the template list. While these are listed as feature requests, the lack of each adds up quickly creating an experience that accomplishes what you want but not without repeated moments of confusion.
New issues:
Previously reported:
Another thing that feels a bit bumpy is when saving the template, there’s no way to quickly access your site again.
@luminuu in this comment.
It sometimes feels like I am “trapped” in the site editor without an easy way to get back to the dashboard. One suggestion would be having a dropdown to select whether I want to go back to the dashboard vs. see Site/Template/Template part editor. Similarly, I sometimes wish there was a “view site” option from the site editor. Again, I feel trapped.
@clubkert in this comment
I would prefer to have the same experience each time. It’s confusing to suddenly see patterns when I was expecting blocks. I would like to always see blocks first with a button or such to switch to the patterns.
@antigone7 in this comment.
I found that a different role will have a slightly different saving experience. Under administrator role, after I clicked publish for a new event or a new event recap, a suggestion menu to assign a category appeared. But this didn’t happen under an author role. So, author will have to go back to post tab, if she just remembered that she hasn’t assigned an event category to the post.
@franz00 in this comment.
It works very well, as long as you remember to select “Inherit query from template” when you add the Query Loop. (I forget sometimes.) So I had different templates for one category over all the others.
@antigone7 in this comment.
So I would prefer if it said “Template Single” instead of “Template Default Template”. Or maybe “Template Single (Default)”, though I don’t see how being shown Single is the default is really helpful at that moment.
@robglidden in this comment.
General Usability
Feedback from this experience centered heavily on the Query Loop block and template creation experiences, rather than using block locking or post patterns or the featured image in the Cover block, despite those being newer features. As with every call for testing where a new template is being created, the experience of being dropped into an empty template to build from scratch is underwhelming. Determining when and how to use various settings for controlling both layout and query options continues to be a major pain pointPain point Pain points are “places where you know from research or analytics that users are currently getting hung up and have to ask questions, or are likely to abandon the site or app.” — Design for Real Life. This will likely be eased when better defaults are available (Query loop block automatically added with “inherit query by default” set to true) rather than needing to create more from scratch, even with patterns.
Please ensure to read the quotes below as they help give context to what’s shared below as simple issues.
I really liked the “Inner blocks use full width” option, but I could not figure out what the “Wide” setting did. Changing the value didn’t do anything, and both the icon and description were unclear.
@arturgrabo in this comment.
In the template editor, I was expecting the center-top dropdown (which said home initially) to allow me to easily switch to different templates.
@clubkert in this comment.
When using the query loop block, it isn’t immediately obvious how to view other design options. One suggestion would be to have the grid view displayed by default and allow someone to choose the single view as an option.
@clubkert in this comment.
I don’t mind curated blocks or locked blocks at all… I only wish that the visual editor will prepare me (or the common user as the intended user of a bespoke theme) when dealing with curated blocks…Perhaps giving the curated block a different color? Or any sign that it is not your usual kind of block?
@franz00 in this comment.
When selecting an “Event Recap” pattern, the caption was not visible in the preview because the pattern was too long vertically, and had to scroll to confirm it.
@osamunize in this comment.
Editing the layout of a group is a little tricky. I think getting more comfortable with the UIUI UI is an acronym for User Interface - the layout of the page the user interacts with. Think ‘how are they doing that’ and less about what they are doing. would help, but having additional feedback around what is selected and where I can move things would be helpful.
@bgturner in this comment.
This blur is too strong/too much contrast. It would be helpful with a much more subtle blur. As the current background blur is exhausting on the eyes.
@paaljoachim in this comment.
The Inherit query from template toggle is not obvious for the average non-dev to enable.
@courane01 in this comment.
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