A week with us: Preparing for Q4 and contributor day

This week, the team was planning for the final quarter of the year, which includes work on Core, Test, and Theme in the WordPress project. We were also preparing for the upcoming contributor day at Yoast. This time it will be open to guests from outside the company, so watch this space for an invitation!

Our weekly team updates

Carolina

Gutenberg

I have continued reviewing pull requests and triaging open issues in the Gutenberg GitHub repository. Furthermore, I worked on an update of the post navigation link block, a fix for a PHP notice in the navigation link block, and an accessibility improvement for the search block.

Themes

I did not have a part in the actual release, but I’m happy to share that the updated version of Theme Check is now in the plugin directory. I’m getting ready to summarize the work that we did in quarter three.

QA

This week, I spent a small amount of time on regression tests of the free and premium versions of Yoast SEO 17.3.

Justin

Last week, I was on vacation because of a long trip I was taking. I came back this Tuesday, and I’m back with the e2e tests in Core. I’m currently focusing on two things in particular: writing new tests and finding a Core committer interested in e2e testing to integrate tests that are stable and properly tested into Core.

Ari

This week felt a bit disorganized, and I did not achieve as much as I wanted to. I spent a lot of time in meetings, talking to people, and trying to find my way again.

Gutenberg

On the Gutenberg front, I continued catching up with recent developments, and I started doing some code reviews again. I always find I learn a lot when reviewing code, but they are pretty time-consuming.

I also found an issue that would impact performance, especially on block-based themes. Apparently, we are adding polyfills for backward compatibility with browsers we no longer support (like Internet Explorer). This had the result of 20kb being loaded on the frontend of all sites using a navigation block. I debugged the issue and submitted a fix on #35038.

Updater

This week, I continued working on some parts of the updater. I worked on the plugin dependencies, as well as an upcoming method for plugins to perform database upgrades.

I also attended a meeting with the core updater team where we discussed aspects of the plugin-dependencies ticket. Unfortunately, this will not be ready for WordPress 5.9, but we are hopeful for 6.0.

Francesca

In the past week, I have been going through the backlog to prioritize and structure the final three months of 2021. What a year! Looking back at what we have accomplished as a team and as people is really uplifting. We shipped, learned, and improved a lot. And, if it ever needed to be proved, going together is always better than going alone.

I am especially looking forward to the upcoming contributor day, which we will hold on October 8. The recipients of the Yoast Diversity Fund will be there too, timezones permitting. And, we will open the day for guests as well! Watch this space for the signup instructions next week.

Sergey

WordPress 5.9

This week, I continued looking into some early tickets for WordPress 5.9 as part of my duties as a Core Committer. I made thirteen 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:

• Making various PHP coding standards fixes. See changesets 51822-51826 and ticket #53359 for more details.
• Adding a translator comment to clarify the “Block HTML” string in the Block widget settings form. This should reduce confusion for Polyglots translating the string. 🙂 See changeset 51814 and ticket #54110 for more details.

Upgrade/Install component meeting

On Tuesday, I attended the Upgrade/Install component meeting. This generally happens on WordPress slack, but we wanted to try something new this time. It also seemed like a Zoom call was a better option to discuss two different proposals implementing WordPress admin UI for plugin dependencies: Ari’s PR 1547 and Andy Fragen’s PR 1674. It was nice to see everyone! ❤️

10-year anniversary of the ”good first bug” keyword

On September 21, I celebrated the 10th anniversary of the” good first bug” keyword in WordPress. Originally started as “easy fix” per Jen Mylo‘s and Amy Hendrix‘s idea, it was based on Angela Byron‘s article about the “novice” keyword in Drupal.

“Good first bugs” are well-contained tasks designed to help you get familiar with WordPress core code, processes, and contributing, and not send you down a rabbit hole 🙂 There are over a hundred of them in WP core and Gutenberg. If you’re on Twitter, I would recommend following the @GoodFirstBugs bot.

Would you like to try and see if some of those “good first bug” fixes are a quick win? Check out the FAQ for new contributors. Or join the new contributors chat every 2nd and 4th Wednesday at 19:00 UTC in #core on WP Slack!

Are you interested in making your first contribution to Gutenberg? Check out the Gutenberg project contributor guide. Or the Good first issue on Gutenberg post and screencast by Marcus Kazmierczak.

Happy contributing! 🙌