October 17th Support Team Meeting Summary

General announcements

First up, the draft for the 5.3 Master List. I didn’t see any feedback on the make/support post on the preferred location for this, so I’ll go ahead with the GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ as a start, with a make/forums post in addition pointing towards it (and letting folks who are not familiar or unable to use GitHub a place to participate). We’ll be using the shiny new Master List repository for this as well, so looking forward to that, and the post should go up some time tomorrow.

The coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. field guide isn’t released yet, which is a great asset when picking items to highlight or cover, so once that is out we’ll also be in a much better spot to filling out our own stuff.

Next on the agenda, some updates from the land of IRC.

The website that powers the WPBot IRC help bot has been updated and now also provides a handy REST APIREST API The REST API is an acronym for the RESTful Application Program Interface (API) that uses HTTP requests to GET, PUT, POST and DELETE data. It is how the front end of an application (think “phone app” or “website”) can communicate with the data store (think “database” or “file system”) https://developer.wordpress.org/rest-api/. endpoint for the pre-defined replies that are commonly used on that platform.

Along with this, the bot it self was updated to use modern 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. https://www.php.net/manual/en/preface.php., giving it a deeply sought after performance boost, and also allowing the log viewer connected to it to be updated in the same run.

WordPress 5.3 progression

For those keen-eyed individuals out there, you may have noticed that RC1 (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. 1) is available!

https://wordpress.org/news/2019/10/wordpress-5-3-release-candidate/ for those who’ve not yet seen it

As mentioned earlier, the field guide isn’t quite ready yet, but RC1 is when we start working on the Master List for the forums, and it’s roughly 1 month from release at this time, give or take a couple of days.

Checking in with international liaisons

Members from our community in Sweden, Russia, Portugal, Brazil and Italy were part of this weeks discussions, with some great conversations about our check-in process, and also with updates on the HelpHub rollout.

Speaking of HelpHub; Russia, Brazil and Italy have all been added to the HelpHub lists, and have started getting these populated in their respective languages, great work team!


We had a chat about our courtesy pings to named individuals, and although the meeting leader is not a fan of the /here command, it sounds like it might not be a bad idea in some scenarios.

In light of that, we will utilize it on our first meeting after a release, both to gauge the effect, but also broaden the reach as we try to gather information on how a release went and what we should be keeping an eye out for.

Read the meeting transcript in the Slack archives. (A Slack account is required)

#support