A week with us: WP 6.1-beta3

This week we had YoastCamp; Members of Yoast from all around the world gathered in our headquarters in the Netherlands, for a week full of activities, collaboration, and getting to know each other in person.

In WordPress, version 6.1-beta3 was released with a lot of improvements! You can read more about this beta release on the WordPress News post, where you’ll also find instructions on how to download it and test it.

Ari

This week I continued working on projects that I previously started. More specifically:

• I continued working on the forms & inputs blocks in Gutenberg (#44214).
• I started porting the SQLite integration in the performance-lab plugin (#547)
• I continued working on performance improvements in WordPress Core, profiling the PHP performance on each page-load and analysing bottlenecks.
• I continued doing code reviews and adding feedback in Gutenberg tickets
• I fixed an issue with multiple-scripts in the navigation block (#3395)
• I submitted another performance patch in WordPress Core (#56745)

The whole team is working on the WP 6.1 release. In just a few weeks, it will be released, so we are all focused on that.

Andrea

In the past month I took a few weeks off. Back to work this eek, I’ve had the opportunity to focus my attention on an interesting issue related to the Gutenberg Tooltip component. Turns out that setting a Tooltip conditionally triggers a full re-rendering of the element (usually a button) it’s associated with. From an accessibility perspective, full re-renderings are less than ideal. When they happen on a focusable element, they trigger a focus loss, which is a very confusing experience for all keyboard users. I was able to mitigate the problem, but a full solution is yet to be found. I created a Github discussion to gather thoughts and potential ideas to improve the Tooltip component. Anyone interested is very welcome to join the discussion.

Apart from that, I took care of some issues related to labelling and Tooltips of other buttons, with a couple pull requests that improve the Save buttons and the block toolbar buttons.

Carolina

This week I am at the Yoast office in Wijchen, for both social events and training. It is my first visit to the office and it has been great meeting the colleagues. I have enjoyed both the weather, food, interesting talks about SEO and JavaScript, and opportunities to do pair programming in person.

My focus remains on the WordPress 6.1 release, the theme Twenty Twenty-Three, and bugs in other bundled themes.
In Gutenberg I have worked on updates for to the navigation block, page list and quote block. I have started looking at improvements for blocks that use post excerpts. We need to update these blocks, to handle excerpt length settings and excerpt length filters.

Navigation block: Add padding to buttons when “Submenus Open on click” is enabled
Only include theme.css if the theme declares support for wp-block-styles
Twenty Twenty-Three

Sergey

WordPress 6.1

For the past week 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 twenty-three 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:

• Continuing with code modernization efforts on updating WordPress core and unit test suite for PHP 8.1 and preparing for PHP 8.2. 🍏🐘 As of this week, WordPress core unit tests pass on PHP 8.1 and 8.2. While full compatibility with PHP 8.1 and 8.2 is still a work in progress, this should prevent new PHP issues from being introduced in WordPress core. All remaining known issues are deprecation notices. Massive props to Juliette for continuously working on PHP 8.x compatibility for many months! See tickets #55652, #55656, #55967, #56620, #56681 for more details.
• Preventing excessive notoptions key lookups to improve performance. See ticket #56639 for more details.
• Disabling process timeout when running PHPUnit tests via Composer. See ticket #55919 for more details.
• Calling wpTearDownAfterClass() method in the test suite before deleting all data, instead of after. See ticket #55918 for more details.