A week with us: after WordCamp Europe

Although the whole team could not attend in person, WordCamp Europe was a great experience for all of us. Between the talks given by Yoast colleagues, and the feedback we received about our contribution to WordPress, it was definitely an exciting gathering.

Our weekly updates

Ari

WCEU was a fantastic experience! I met a lot of people that we’ve been collaborating with for the past 2 years, and caught up with old friends. One of the most exciting things was the number of interesting conversations I had with these people. We discussed the future of WordPress, problems we have and possible solutions. Overall it was very productive – albeit a bit exhausting.

The future looks bright, and one of the most exciting shifts I observed was that people are thinking more about sustainability. Web sustainability has been a personal passion and goal for me for years! A lot of the contributions we’ve made to Gutenberg and WordPress were explicitly aiming to lower its carbon footprint. Until recently, these improvements were performed under the umbrella of “performance”. Now we can start marketing them as sustainability improvements as well!

Unfortunately, after WCEU, I was sick for a few days, so I needed to take a break. As a result, I was unable to make a lot of code contributions these past couple of weeks.

Carolina

I had an amazing time at WCEU and came back home re-energized, hopeful for the future, and full of appreciation for our amazing community and my Yoast colleagues.

The past weeks I have continued working on the internal Yoast project, which I’m not allowed to talk about in this space ;).
For WordPress core, I have attended a couple of bug scrubs, and I have tried to keep up with Gutenberg.
Gutenberg is moving fast and I have found myself doing more reading about what is being worked on, than actually contributing. I want this to change. I helped out with some triaging of open issues, but right now, it feels like all I do is catching up.
– Whether it will be for WordPress 6.1 or later, I am excited about the prospect of combining the different editors into one. And most importantly, making it easier to switch between content editing and template editing.

I have received help from Jorge Costa with solving a deprecation for the Media & Text block. Hopefully, we can update the block to be more accessible and still keep the functionality.
I continued learning TypeScript, and I’m looking closely at the Gutenberg components that are already being converted to learn from them.
Read more about the TypeScript conversions in this Gutenberg GitHub issue.

During and after WCEU, Milana Cap posted calls for more contributors to the WordPress.org documentation team, and I am trying to look at how I could fit that into my workday. If you are interested in learning how to contribute, you can join an onboarding session or watch a recording on WordPress.tv.

On WordPress.tv, you can also find new recordings of workshops related to the block editor. I hope to participate in more of these social learning spaces because it is important for me to hear what users are struggling with and what type of questions they have about working with blocks.
Some of my favorite picks:

• Creating a restaurant website with the block editor
• Everything you need to know about patterns
• Working with templates: part 1, part 2, part 3

Justin

During the last two weeks, I worked almost exclusively on the blocks’ generator. I mainly focused on refactoring the code; for a better structure and to make better use of Playwright’s features. Now the script generates one page per block category, and it is also possible to run it locally on a WordPress site of our choice.

We also had an interesting mob coding session with Sergey and Carolina on the compatibility of WordPress with PHP 8.

Sergey

WordPress 6.1

For the past two weeks I continued triaging and reviewing tickets for the next major release, WordPress 6.1, as part of my duties as a Core Committer.

I made twenty-five commits to WordPress core, mostly various bug fixes and enhancements. I also led a meeting for new core contributors and triaged new tickets incoming into Trac (the bug tracking system that WordPress uses).

Some notable changes include:

• Adding support for WebP images in the Thickbox library. See ticket #55786 for more details.
• Making sanitize_url() the recommended function for sanitizing a URL. See ticket #55852 for more details.
• Making the wp_user_settings() function compatible with PHP 8.1. See ticket #54914 for more details.