This post summarizes the latest weekly Editor meeting (agenda, slack transcript), held in the #core-editor Slack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. channel, on Wednesday, 24 February 2021, 14:00 UTC.
Announcements
- WordPress 5.6.2: a maintenance release with 5 bug 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. fixes.
- WordPress 5.7 RC: we’re officially in 5.7 RC period which means dev notes Each important change in WordPress Core is documented in a developers note, (usually called dev note). Good dev notes generally include:
a description of the change;
the decision that led to this change
a description of how developers are supposed to work with that change.
Dev notes are published on Make/Core blog during the beta phase of WordPress release cycle. Publishing dev notes is particularly important when plugin/theme authors and WordPress developers need to be aware of those changes.In general, all dev notes are compiled into a Field Guide at the beginning of the release candidate phase. will be published this week. Check out @noisysocks message here for more information about how you can help with some regressions.Â
- Gutenberg 10.02: released yesterday to fix some bugs including a white screen on RTL languages.
- Gutenberg 10.1 RC: released just before this meeting began!
As a reminder, Gutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ 10.1 RC is being released this week to allow for a 1 week RC period before the stable release next week. Please test and report any problems.Â
Outside of the above, there are a few FSE Outreach Program updates to keep in mind:Â
- Answers to Full Site Editing related questions have been shared across 5 posts found here. Check them out and expect future calls for questions! Big thank you to everyone who submitted questions, helped review answers, etc.
- Help with the latest call for testing by building a simple homepage with a sidebar A sidebar in WordPress is referred to a widget-ready area used by WordPress themes to display information that is not a part of the main content. It is not always a vertical column on the side. It can be a horizontal rectangle below or above the content area, footer, header, or any where in the theme. using site editing blocks. If you can’t test, it helps to also share the post with others if you’re open to it.
Monthly Priorities & Key Projects updates
With the Monthly Priorities detailed in this post in mind, key project updates were given:
Global Styles Update from @nosolosw
The main activity for the global styles focus has been around this effort to improve the block supports mechanism. A few things landed, but it still needs more work to be complete.Â
Navigation Block 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. Update from @mkaz
Making steady progress on improvements, bringing justification tools to sub-blocks, fix for CPT links, setup state, and a set of small tweaks. The biggest next up piece is menu overflow on mobile.
Full Site Editing Update from @youknowriad
All the big pieces needed for an MVP "A minimum viable product (MVP) is a product with just enough features to satisfy early customers, and to provide feedback for future product development." - WikiPedia are already there and we need to iterate and improve the experience now. Riad has started exploring alignments/Group block and how themes should (or shouldn’t) define these alignments as a way to drastically improve the experience. For example, the wide/full flags we have for the post content editor are optimized for the post content and for backward compatibility but these notions don’t translate properly to a fully editable theme. Expect work to be done here!
Block Based Widget A WordPress Widget is a small block that performs a specific function. You can add these widgets in sidebars also known as widget-ready areas on your web page. WordPress widgets were originally created to provide a simple and easy-to-use way of giving design and structure control of the WordPress theme to the user. Update
The latest update for the Widgets Editor can be found here. The immediate priority is still to allow blocks to be added and edited in the Customizer Tool built into WordPress core that hooks into most modern themes. You can use it to preview and modify many of your site’s appearance settings..
Task Coordination
@itsjonq
- Updates on the new Component System project can be found here.
- @sarayourfriend and I are continuing the integration into Gutenberg and are now ~20% of the way through.
- Work continues on the UI User interface components along with ensuring the code/workflow feels right within the Gutenberg code base.
- Have reached the stage where we’re looking to bring over the foundational systems over with the latest status here.
@mattchowning
Current work on Gutenberg for the mobile apps includes:
- Reusable, embed, and search block
- Finishing up Single-Page Starter Templates
- Planning for global style support
- Preparing to no longer allow users to switch to the Classic editor
- Adding search to the block inserter
- Dual-licensing Gutenberg
@annezazu
@paaljoachim
- Triaging issues with the label “bug�? and “needs design feedback�? + made tracking issues.
- Working on Learn Workshop for setup dev env site for core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress..
- Looking into creating a new UI for the inline images and welcome thoughts.
- Worked on issues included in WP 5.6.2.
@aristath
- Block-styles loading improvements were merged this week, so now I’ll be focusing on ideas to allow for “hybrid�? themes and allowing users to combine user-created templates with traditional themes. This will allow FSE to work on a per-template basis instead of a per-theme basis.
- Lots of PR reviews to keep things moving.
@nosolow
- Focused on the block supports mechanism.
- Helped with some reviews, including help support TypeScript in the codebase or preparing dev notes for block supports.
- Created a script that pulls data out of block.json JSON, or JavaScript Object Notation, is a minimal, readable format for structuring data. It is used primarily to transmit data between a server and web application, as an alternative to XML. ― if anyone is interested to take that and use it to improve our docs, they’ll be very welcome.
- For next week: continue with block supports + unblocking quote block with inner blocks.Â
@bernhard-reiter
- Big thank you to contributors who helped with a few PRs after my hallway hangout on e2e tests last week
- I’d like to continue to increase our test coverage to make sure we don’t make the same mistake twice.
- It’s greatly appreciated if people file issues to request those when they spot a regression A software bug that breaks or degrades something that previously worked. Regressions are often treated as critical bugs or blockers. Recent regressions may be given higher priorities. A "3.6 regression" would be a bug in 3.6 that worked as intended in 3.5. (Use theÂ
[Package] E2E Tests label.)
@ntsekouras
Two open items that need help:
Open Floor
Is there a plan to support react React is a JavaScript library that makes it easy to reason about, construct, and maintain stateless and stateful user interfaces. https://reactjs.org/. router for navigation between admin (and super admin) menu pages in the future? Raised by Mohamed Magdy.
After confirming this was asking about wp-admin, Riad and Miguel chimed in to say that this something JS JavaScript, a web scripting language typically executed in the browser. Often used for advanced user interfaces and behaviors.-based isn’t in any Core WP plans right now and that it’s unlikely that will change. Riad mentioned that it might possibly happen iteratively in time but it isn’t currently an outright goal.
Is there anything you would like to include in March’s “What’s Next in Gutenberg�? Post? Raised by @priethor.
@priethor is working on this post and asked for people to share any items they’d like to have included. Otherwise, a few contributors shared what they are planning to focus on in the month ahead:
Next Step: @priether will take the above and start writing the post.
Discussion around dropping IE11 support. Raised by @annezazu.
Here are some relevant links & previous discussions for context:
The discussion was mainly in favor with a few warnings and words of wisdom. @youknowriad shared that last time support was dropped for older IE versions, it was around the same level of usage. @desrosjd noted that he’d love to see what exists in WP Core that is IE 11 specific, as this adjustment needs to be made in trunk as well and requires manually adjustments. @mkaz shared that there is an unknown question about screen readers and IE11, that we should get a solid answer to. Ultimately, we all agreed this makes for an ideal proposal on Make Core to discuss a policy before proceeding with specifics around implementation.
Next Step: @mkaz @annezazu @priethor will work on a proposal post focused on setting a policy before figuring out implementation with reviews from @youknowriad and @desrosj. If you’d like to help review this, just DM me (@annezazu on WP.org slack).
Who can help rename the main branch A directory in Subversion. WordPress uses branches to store the latest development code for each major release (3.9, 4.0, etc.). Branches are then updated with code for any minor releases of that branch. Sometimes, a major version of WordPress and its minor versions are collectively referred to as a "branch", such as "the 4.0 branch". to trunk? Raised by @sarayourfriend.
Many months ago it was decided in this Make post to rename the main branch of git repositories to trunk. Sara opened an issue a while ago to plan this in Gutenberg but needs someone with both time and the right permissions to help out. Of note, this PR would need to be merged immediately after to fix CI issues and clean up the rest of the language in the repository.
There was some conversation about whether this could cause confusion or any unintended problems but it became clear that GitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can 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/ has made this quite seamless. Thankfully, as @mkaz pointed out, the PRs will automatically get updates, so it is more retraining yourself to git switch trunk or git rebase trunk.
Next Step: @youknowriad and @sarayourfriend are going to team up to take care of this on March 1st with planning details in this thread.
What’s the expected functionality for reusable blocks? Raised by @danstramer.
Dan re-flagged a prior question about reusable blocks trying to better understand what the expected functionality is. Specifically, he wanted to know where it was expected to be able to edit reusable blocks directly. This led to a conversation about improvements being shipped in 5.7 that should resolve these concerns!
#core-editor, #core-editor-summary
