A week with us: WordPress 6.1 and 6.1.1

Since its release on November 1st, WordPress 6.1 has been downloaded over 19 million times.

On the Yoast blog, you can find more details about the release, including some of the features we worked on:

• WordPress 6.1: Enhancing the full-site editing experience
• Performance improvements in WordPress 6.1: enhanced database peformance and more

WordPress 6.1.1 is scheduled for release on Tuesday, November 15. It contains several bug fixes fore core and the block editor.

Besides working on the releases, we participated in the Yoast online contributor day on November 4.

Our weekly updates

Ari

These past few weeks, I’ve been focusing on three major projects. These take up the majority of my time, but as always, I make sure to review and comment on other people’s submissions in Gutenberg to help the project move forward.

Forms/Inputs blocks

Almost every site needs a contact form, so we’re trying to introduce a way to build forms in WordPress. In #44214, I’m adding a form and an input block, to allow building any kind of form.

SQLite implementation

It was decided to implement SQLite as a module in the performance-lab plugin. This will allow more people to test it properly and get closer to merging the implementation in WordPress Core. You can see the pull request on #547 for more details.

WordPress performance improvements

We identified a bottleneck in WordPress (specifically, the WP_Theme_JSON class), and I submitted #3555 with the help of Juliette. The changes have already been approved, so they should be merged relatively soon.

Andrea

In the past weeks I had the opportunity to work on some long standing accessibility issues in Gutenberg, mostly related to keyboard interaction and focus. The keyboard shortcut to navigate the editor regions has been finally fixed in #45019. Also related to the editor regions, the focus style for the currently focused region wasn’t fully visible since a while. It is now fixed in #45369.

A serious focus loss occurred when closing the Publish panel, forcing keyboard users to re-start keyboard navigation from the document root. It’s now fixed in #45623. This fix was particularly interesting, as it surfaced an inherent issue with components that manage focus using componentDidMount and components that do that with React hooks. The fix includes two new E2E tests, which gave me the opportunity to get more familiar with Playwright.

Lastly, I fixed the styling of the block toolbar when the ‘Show button text labels’ is enabled in #44779.

Sergey

WordPress 6.1

On November 1, after five months of development, WordPress 6.1 “Misha” was released. Thanks to the work of more than 800 contributors from over 60 countries, it includes hundreds of enhancements and bug fixes, including many accessibility and performance improvements. Congrats everyone! 🎉

For the past three weeks I continued helping with WordPress 6.1 release tasks and looking into some early tickets for WordPress 6.2, as part of my duties as a Core Committer. I ran mission control for WordPress 6.1 RC6, led a meeting for new core contributors, and triaged new tickets incoming into Trac (the bug tracking system that WordPress uses).

On the day of the release, some of the Core and Meta tasks I helped with included:

• Updating the Credits API
• Updating the Roadmap and History pages on WordPress.org
• Running tests, enabling updates, etc.

If you’d like to learn more about the release process, these steps are documented in the WordPress Core handbook: Releasing Major Versions.

Yoast Contributor Day

Last Friday I was excited to co-lead with Enrico the Core team table at the Yoast Contributor Day. The team looked into several tickets for WordPress core, which will further be reviewed for WordPress 6.2 or 6.1.1:

• #43761 CS: Fix violations for wp-admin/install-helper.php
• #50018 Site Health: is_writable() check when there are more than 1 theme directories
• #54225 Request header key case inconsistencies
• #55437 Bugfix: Display correct theme in site editor
• #55922 Update wp_list_comments type parameter to allow array or string
• #55993 Wrong canonical redirect for paged posts page
• #56023 Twenty Twenty-One: Default quote block style overrides citation color on the front
• #56824 SVGs missing title and description in WordPress dashboard
• #56920 Illogical placement link to shortcuts in comments help section
• #56926 Infinite loop in wp_nav_menu()
• #56946 WP 6.1-RC6: `menu-item-has-children` class is not being applied correctly

It felt like a productive day and a fun experience, thanks everyone who joined us! 🙌

WordPress 6.1.1

This week some of my focus is on the next minor release, WordPress 6.1.1, scheduled for November 15. It will contain a few bug fixes for core and the block editor.

WordPress 6.2

I made 105 commits to WordPress core, mostly various bug fixes and enhancements. Some notable changes include:

• Displaying a notice if any of the required KSES globals are not set. See ticket #47357 for more details.
• Improving the wording of “Site Address” field description. See ticket #50629 for more details.
• Improving unit tests for Ajax and multisite test groups. See ticket #56793 for more details.

Carolina

This week I have troubleshooted bugs reported in WordPress 6.1, and continued working on improvements for the theme developer handbook.

For Gutenberg I have mainly worked on a new details/summary block. The block is not complete yet and it has been time consuming, but I have learnt several new “tricks” that I did not know that Gutenberg was able to do.

I have been having problems with reading test reports and updating the correct test fixtures for an improvement for the image block. I have finally managed to run most of the tests locally. It is a small comfort this week (read: annoyance) that there is an Android test that keeps failing or skipping for everyone, not only me ;p.

I have also triaged open issues and made some documentation updates.