A week with us: Yoast Contributor day and more!

At Yoast, we believe in giving back to the community, and this team is proof of our commitment to our core values. As we do every few months, on September 14, 2022 Yoast is organizing a WordPress Contributor day! It is a great opportunity for all of us to work together and improve WordPress for everyone. Our contributor days are open for everyone, so feel free to join us.

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

Andrea

Back from my vacation, in the last week I spent some time catching up with all the latest updates and managing my queue of emails and notifications. I also had the opportunity to work on some of the more recent issues I created for Gutenberg, mostly related to labelling and tooltips used on some of the buttons in the Gutenberg toolbars.

These kind of issues may look simple at first, but they require a good amount of time to investigate the best approach. This led me to submit a few pull requests, mainly for the toolbar buttons. Besides that, I submitted #43848 to fix the headings hierarchy in the Styles sidebar. That’s an interesting case where the heading levels were used incorrectly, more for visual purposes rather than for establishing a good hierarchy within the sidebar content. Worth reminding headings are meant to be used to build a meaningful content structure so that users can easily identify the main sections within the content. Also, assistive technology users use headings to navigate the content by jumping through headings. A correct headings hierarchy is paramount to alloww these users to get a sense of the content structure.

Carolina

My focus was divided between the default theme and Gutenberg bugs, enhancements, and pull request reviews.
Before the 6.1 feature freeze, there are many enhancements to typography, spacing and color settings for blocks that we still need to test.

Twenty Twenty-Three

The layout setting in Gutenberg, which allows users to change the width of blocks and use wide and full width, has been updated with new properties. This meant we needed to update all the container blocks (such as group blocks) in the HTML templates in Twenty Twenty-Three.

On Wednesday, the default theme leads announced which style variations would get added to the theme. Among them were designs from Jessica Lyschik, Amjad Ali, Rich Tabor and Brian Gardner. See the previews of the designs and read the full announcement.

Sergey

WordPress 6.0.2

I was a Core Tech lead for WordPress 6.0.2. This is a security and maintenance release that features 12 bug fixes on Core, 5 bug fixes for the Block Editor, and 3 security fixes. Since this is a security release, it is recommended that you update your sites immediately. All versions of WordPress since 3.7 were also updated.

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

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

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

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 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:

• Continuing with code modernization efforts on preparing WordPress core for PHP 8.2. Thanks Juliette! See tickets #56033 and #56514 for more details.
• Making various enhancements to the WordPress unit test suite. See ticket #55652 for more details.

Ari

Due to a recent injury, a subsequent surgery, and the recovery that follows, I was unable to work as intensively as I would have liked this past month. But that doesn’t mean that I did fewer things… On the contrary! I just had to focus on different tasks for a while.

These past few weeks I did a lot of code reviews, and focused a lot on the future of WordPress. I’ve been thinking of ways we can help the project move forward, further WordPress’s mission to democratize publishing for everyone, and allow it to reach more markets and people.

I’m pretty excited about the prospects, and you can expect a formal proposal in the make.w.org/core blog soon.