A month with the WordPress Core team – April 2023

In April, we started working on WordPress 6.3 by refining some of our long-running projects such as the SQLite database proposal, among other things. Read on to learn more!

Our monthly updates

Carolina

Documentation

I spent the beginning of the month working on the WordPress 6.2 end-user documentation, updating and creating new articles. Most of the updates I worked on have now been published. I also attended meetings and participated in discussions about the Block editor handbook and the Theme developer handbook.

Gutenberg and Core

In April, I participated in a contributor day with the rest of the team, where we explored a way to create and save block patterns directly in the WordPress admin area.
For Gutenberg, I continued doing triage and troubleshooting reported issues and worked on the following:

• Re-adding the heading options (typography, color) to text-based blocks in the Styles sidebar in the Site Editor
• Adding support for custom CSS for block style variations and elements using theme.json
• Proof of concept for a playlist block
• Rebasing and solving merge conflicts in my older pull requests that are awaiting review

Andrea

In the last month, I mostly focused, as usual, on some accessibility issues in Gutenberg and submitted a few pull requests. Most of the newly discovered issues and regressions surface recurring patterns with a lack of basic accessibility, keyboard interaction, inconsistent UI, and erroneous usage of accessible components. Looking at the big picture, it appears the Gutenberg project would greatly benefit from a big effort in documentation and training. WordCamp Europe is approaching, which will be an excellent opportunity to have some productive conversations.

Apart from that, I had the pleasure to return back to committing a small change in WordPress core, where a missing post type label caused the editor to use some improper labeling for the Reusable block.

Ari

April was a pleasantly busy month. Among other things, in many countries, it was Easter, so we had a few days off to relax and recharge our batteries.

Yoast hackathon

On April 5, we had a Yoast Hackathon, and the results were amazing! Our group consisted of @mykola, @janw-me, @hdvos, @rolf-yoast, @enricobattocchi, @aristath, @carolinan, @SergeyBiryukov, @mhkuu and @afercia. We worked on building a user interface to allow users to create and edit patterns in the editor. The results of this collaboration can be seen on #49607, and I can’t wait to see this move forward.

Fonts API

Word on the Fonts-API continues in WordPress Core, led by Tonya Mork. We started working on this API almost two years ago, and with the leadership of Tonya, a lot of progress has been made. An early version of the API became part of WordPress last year, and now we are polishing it, extending it, and getting it ready for a bright future.

Frontend performance

Improving the front-end performance of WordPress is a never-ending battle. There are constantly things we can improve, and this month I was figuring out ways to reduce the amount of CSS added to the front-end of a site by applying some rudimental tree-shaking. 

SQLite

Work on the SQLite continues at a fast pace! In April, we pushed a lot of fixes and published a post on the make.w.org blog with a status update. The post received many comments and feedback, so we keep moving forward.

Accessibility improvements

During our weekly mob-coding sessions, we usually collaborate on issues each one of us has and help each other improve our skills. In April, we turned our attention to Gutenberg, and the whole team (@afercia, @carolinan, @SergeyBiryukov, and @aristath) co-authored an implementation to add `lang` and `dir` attributes to the block editor. This will allow content authors to specify if a piece of content on their posts is using a different language than their main post’s content and therefore make life easier for screen-readers and assistive technologies in general.

As a sidenote, I can’t wait to see you all in person next month at WordCamp Europe in Athens!

Sergey

WordPress 6.3

For the past month, I continued triaging and reviewing tickets for the next major release, WordPress 6.3, as part of my duties as a Core Committer.

I made forty-one commits to WordPress core, mostly various bug fixes and enhancements. I also triaged new tickets incoming into Trac (the bug tracking system that WordPress uses).

Some notable changes include:

• Continuing with various coding standards fixes in Core. See ticket #57839 for more details.
• Removing Windows Live Writer manifest file. See ticket #41404 for more details.
• Updating the Requests library to version 2.0.6. See ticket #58079 for more details.
• Update the sodium_compat library to version 1.20.0. See ticket #58224 for more details.