A week with us: WordPress 6.1 RC1 & RC2

As WordPress 6.1 enters the release candidate stage, we’re putting some finishing touches on it and start working on early tickets for WordPress 6.2. Read on to learn what we’ve been up to for the past couple of weeks!

Our weekly updates

Ari

Unfortunately, after my trip to the Netherlands in the Yoast headquarters, I came home with Covid19. I had to spend a few days offline – which in turn meant that my productivity was a bit down these past couple of weeks. That being said, I still managed to do lots of things!

• I continued working on the SQLite integration. Right now the integration is built as a module in the performance-lab plugin, but the hope is to get more eyes on it and eventually merge it in WordPress Core. You can see the code (and test the module) in the GitHub pull-request.
• I continued running profiling tests in WordPress Core. I managed to identify a bottleneck and created a ticket on #44772. Thankfully it was fixed on time, so the WordPress 6.1 release won’t suffer from that issue. My profiling tests also resulted in another, minor fix (#56758), but most importantly a lot of discussions with other WordPress contributors – who also started using profiling tools to ensure there are no performance regressions.
• I started experimenting with autoloading WP classes. I think we can find a solution that will satisfy everyone without refactoring the whole codebase (see draft pull-request on GitHub).
• I continued working on the input-fields/form blocks in Gutenberg – #44214. The implementation is going really well, and I converted it to an experiment – hoping that it can get merged early so other contributors can also collaborate on it.
• I continued debugging the performance of the WP_Theme_JSON object. The logic in there is a bit over-complicated, but I believe we can find ways to simplify some things and improve its performance. One of the main issues is the large number of nested loops and array calculations.

Carolina

Gutenberg

This week I have worked on adding padding and margin controls to more blocks. This tracking issue is a good overview of the progress: Tracking: Dimensions Design Tools Consistency. These updates are important for improving the editing experience.

I have also worked on a new details/summary block, a block that you can use to hide and show content such as a text transcript for media blocks. I am still experimenting with different settings and it is not ready for testing.

In the last blog update, I mentioned that I had started working on the post excerpt settings. Unfortunately I have run into blockers for both the post excerpt block and the latest posts block. I think it is important to solve the existing bugs, but I have not found any suitable fixes.

Sergey

WordPress 6.0.3

I was a co-lead for WordPress 6.0.3. This is a security release that features 16 fixes. Because this is a security release, it is recommended that you update your sites immediately. All versions since WordPress 3.7 have also been updated.

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

• Updating the Credits API
• Backporting security patches, running tests, building packages, enabling updates, etc.

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

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 thirty-two 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:

• Introducing wp_cache_supports() function that allows object cache plugins to correctly list their supported features. See ticket #56605 for more details.
• Addressing the remaining known issues on PHP 8.1 and 8.2 to get a passing test build. See tickets #56681, #56712, and #56009 for more details.
• Correcting MariaDB version check in wpdb::has_cap() so that the check for utf8mb4_unicode_520_ci collation support works as expected. See ticket #54841 for more details.
• Avoiding PHP notices from WP_Query when get_queried_object() returns null. See ticket #29660 for more details.
• Fetching user by login in retrieve_password() if not found by email. See ticket #53634 for more details.