A week with us: Twenty Twenty-Three, Gutenberg, PHP 8.2, and more

As summer comes to an end, some of our colleagues have been enjoying their well-deserved time off, though our work on WordPress always goes on. Read on to learn what we’ve been up to for the past few weeks!

Yoast Contributor day

We also want to let you know that there will be a Yoast contributor day on September 14, 2022!
When: September 14, from 10:00 AM till 4:30 PM (UTC+2).
Where: Online or at the Yoast HQ in Wijchen, Netherlands.
Read more about the contributor day and sign up.

Our weekly updates

Carolina

Since our last update, my focus has been on Gutenberg and the new default theme, Twenty Twenty-Three. I also had a few days off work.

Gutenberg

• I have continued triage and testing of the oldest open issues with the “bug” label on the Gutenberg GitHub repository.
• Added a search title variation of the query title block, that can display the search term. This variation is intended to be used in the search template in block themes.
• Added an option to hide the prefix on the archive title in the same block. The archive title can now show the term name only, for example “News” Instead of “Category: News”.
• Solved a bug with the color of the separator block. I also tried to solve a problem with the visibility of the separator block, but I have not completed it yet as it needs a design decision.
• Made two updates related to dates: Added a new date format to the date format picker component, and added an option to use the post date block to show the date the post was last modified.
• I worked on adding <cite> to the list of elements that can be styled with theme.json. The purpose of this change was to be able to add default styling to the cite in the two quote blocks.
• I have opened a pull request that will rename an existing attribute on the quote block, to make it possible to add more alignment options.

WordPress 6.1

WordPress 6.1 will add several new block patterns, including patterns for the site footer. I made a small patch to add a new block pattern category called “Footers”, so that the patterns can be found easier.

Twenty Twenty-Three

I have mainly focused on the structure of the theme templates and patterns and making the theme translatable. I have participated in discussions and pull request reviews, and tested the limitations of style variations, spacing presets and responsive typography. There is also a list of issues that needs to be solved in Gutenberg.
The work on the theme is going well. Working with a moving target has it’s challenges and leads to many iterations, even if the theme looks like it is a fairly basic theme. We have to stay up to date with all the Gutenberg changes, since there will be a lot of last minute enhancements before the WordPress 6.1 feature freeze.

Sergey

WordPress 6.1

For the past four 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 eighty-seven 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:

• Enabling PHPUnit test runs for WordPress core on PHP 8.2, though addressing compatibility issues is still a work in progress. PHP 8.2 is expected to be released at the end of November 2022. See ticket #56009 for more details.
• Improving compatibility with the recent versions of MariaDB (10.6+) and MySQL (8.0+). See tickets #49364, #51740, and #53623 for more details. With these and some other changes, specifically skipping tests for non-implemented REST API methods, most of the test runs from various hosting environments on the Host Test Results page successfully pass, except for PHP 8.2.0alpha2 for now.
• Continuing with code modernization efforts on preparing WordPress core for PHP 8.2. Thanks Juliette! See ticket #56033 for more details.
• Adding support for Update URI theme header to core. This is a long-awaited enhancement that allows third-party themes to avoid accidentally being overwritten with an update of a theme of a similar name from the WordPress.org Theme Directory. See changeset [53933] and ticket #14179 for more details.

Thanks everyone who contributed to those tickets!