A week with us: Webfonts, Twenty Twenty Two and WordPress 5.9

Our weekly team updates

This week, the team continued its work on our different projects. Ari made great progress on the webfonts API, Carolina worked on Gutenberg and Twenty Twenty Two, Sergey continues to work on the 5.9 tickets and commit them, Francesca continues her Core team rep tasks and outreach projects to the end, and I’m working on end-to-end testing in WordPress Core.

Sergey

WordPress 5.9

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

I made ten 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 various coding standards fixes in core. See tickets #53359, #54279, #54295 for more details.

Carolina

Gutenberg

I spent a lot of time this week reading Gutenberg GitHub issues and pull requests, and trying to keep up with what is needed for 5.9.
It is not always easy for me to find something that is small or easy enough for me to solve. I try to start the week by going through open issues and taking notes of the items that I may work on later that week. I try to avoid the rabbit holes, but lately I feel like I have started looking into an issue only to find that it is much more complicated than it looks. There are many enhancements that are needed for 5.9, but most of them are too complex for me to contribute to.

I did some more React training, and learnt that I also need to know more about the WordPress Rest API.

Other issues I worked on this week:

• Add aria-current to links in the navigation block
• Split the post author into separate blocks (not likely to be part of 5.9)
• Prevent the post terms block from breaking on pages. Even though Ari helped me with this one, changes had to be requested and it is not ready to be merged yet.
• Use the block name in the “remove block” menu item in the settings dropdown — this change was proposed during the Yoast contributor day in April. George Mamadashvili helped me improve this pull request and I hope it gets merged because I think it would be a good usability improvement.

Ari

Webfonts API

My main focus for this week was again the webfonts API.

If you’re unfamiliar with it, we are trying to implement and merge a new API for webfonts in WordPress core. This will allow theme and plugin developers to add their webfonts in a consistent manner. All webfonts added from the active theme and any plugins that use the API will be collected, combined, and printed consistently. We are taking this opportunity to improve performance and privacy across the board. I can’t wait for us to merge this new feature!

You can find more details for this new API in the Github pull-request (#1736) and the track ticket (#46370),

WordPress Core

I fixed an issue that was throwing a fatal error in WordPress (#54323). Thankfully, the fatal error only occurs when using a combination of new features, so it’s uncommon. Nevertheless, fixing that means there’s one less thing to worry about in the future.

Gutenberg

• I fixed a bug with the dimension control in columns (#35831). We have already merged the patch in Gutenberg, and it will be included in the next release.
• I fixed a bug in the editor where enqueued stylesheets were throwing errors (#35914). While the message was not exactly wrong, it should be a warning and not an error. This is an issue that multiple plugin and theme authors have reported. Though we still need to improve the wording, the fact that these are now a warning makes it easier. It’s a small change, but theme authors will get fewer support tickets from users now. This will help us gain some time while we work on a more permanent solution to the issue.
• Merged #25187. This will allow users to move metaboxes to another area when using the arrow keys in the metaboxes’ header.

Justin

Core e2e tests

The PR for the Applications Passwords feature tests has been approved. It will probably be merged in the current release cycle, and may start running in the next major version of WordPress.

This week, I also did some exploration for the e2e tests of a recent WordPress feature: uploading new versions of plugins/themes that will replace the versions already on a site. This feature is a bit less obvious to test, so to get results I had to draw a lot of inspiration from what has already been done in Gutenberg for uploads.

Yoast e2e test package

I made some improvements to the Yoast end-to-end tests package. This is to allow tests to run faster, to have a more advanced test reporter and also to be able to run tests on a CI system with GitHub Actions, among other reasons.

Documentation

Finally, I also made some documentation additions for an internal Yoast project, which will be public very soon.