A week with us: Beta 1 of WordPress 5.9 postponed

WordPress 5.9 Beta 1 was due on Tuesday of this week. The release squad initially delayed the beta for 24 hours to allow more time to work on the new full site editing features. Contributors are now discussing if WordPress 5.9 needs to be postponed until January 2022. By the time this post is published, we do not have a definite answer, but you can read more about the delay in this post on WordPress.org. What else has the team been busy with? Let’s find out!

Our weekly team updates

Sergey

WordPress 5.9

As WordPress approaches Beta 1 for version 5.9, I continued looking into some tickets to bring them over the finish line. I made eight 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). One notable change includes correcting default image alignment in the editor in the Twenty Twenty-One theme. See ticket #53809 for more details.

Carolina

I did not work Monday and Tuesday, so my update is short. This week, it was on my agenda to test patches for theme- and accessibility-related bugs. I have opened new issues for the navigation and page list blocks on the Gutenberg GitHub repository and contributed by working on some documentation.

I am following the progress of moving full site editing features from Gutenberg to WordPress core. There are lots of ongoing conversations, both with other core contributors and concerned theme developers.

One major part is the interface for selecting templates that do not show post or page content. For example, how to select and edit the website’s 404 page with full site editing. The process of updating the interface is what delayed the beta.

Justin

I was also off work on Wednesday. This week I worked on some internal Yoast tasks. One of them was to get familiar with the tools we use for documentation and project management: Confluence and Jira.

Testing and bug scrubs

I did several bug scrubs on my own and with the Core Test team for tickets that needed testing in the 5.9 milestone. What’s more, I’m still working on end-to-end testing, and I’m currently focusing on testing for the new features of the WordPress Core updater.

Ari

This week I had a few days off as well, so this will be a short update. I started porting the Webfonts API to Gutenberg and implementing it there. So far, I have finished the implementation for theme.json files and started implementing it for the font-family pickers in the editor. This is still a work in progress. For more details, feel free to check out the draft pull request on #36394.

Besides the web fonts API, I dedicated a significant amount of time doing code reviews in the Gutenberg plugin.