A week with us: Recap of October’s contributor day and plans for WordPress 5.9

This week, the team reports from the latest Contributor Day and continues to work on WordPress 5.9. We were also involved in a proposal to form a Performance team and contributed to different parts of Testing. There is never a dull moment for our team!

Our weekly team updates

On October 8th, the first Hybrid Contributor Day was held. This most the most attended day so far. We had many colleagues contributing from one of our new buildings in Wichjen. In addition, contributors from all over the world joining remotely.

Carolina was heavily involved in the organization of it, together with Neringa and Taco from the Community team. We had, again, the honor of hosting team facilitators from outside the company. Milana (Docs) and Tammie (UX) came back for a second time, and Ganga and David joined us for the first time, for Theme and TV, respectively. And our colleagues Taco, Yvette, and Joop helped with other topics.

This is the first iteration of this type of Contributor day, and we are now evaluating how it went to improve every time. In the meantime, you can enjoy a short video about the day and the slides that the organizing team shared at the end of the day with some stats!

Justin

Core e2e tests

The last few days, I’ve continued to work following our roadmap for e2e testing in WordPress 5.9. One of the goals of the Test Team is to make it easy and quick for new contributors to start contributing to testing. And one of the ways to do this is through clear and well-structured documentation. So I reviewed this PR for e2e tests in Core README file. And I also created a PR for the applications passwords functionality tests. The PR is currently under review and on its way to be committed.

Gutenberg e2e tests

Gutenberg now has a report for flaky e2e tests. I am currently working on fixing some of them, including 35483.

Ari

Webfonts API

My collaboration with Tonya Mork continues, and so far, the webfonts API has received a complete refactor. Instead of trying to emulate the styles and scripts APIs that WordPress already has, we opted for a new API. The new structure and schema will make it easier to define webfonts both in classic and block-based themes (and, of course, plugins), using a consistent syntax.

We are progressing at a nice pace and expect everything to be complete within a few weeks, with plenty of time to spare to include the implementation in WordPress 5.9. You can follow our progress at the draft pull-request #1736.

Twentytwenty-two theme

Work on the new default theme for WordPress 5.9 has started, and it’s exciting! This will be the first default theme completely based on blocks, using the new Full Site Editing feature. I submitted some pull-requests on the theme to improve the way CSS gets loaded and improve performance.

Performance team proposal

In collaboration with the Google team, we wrote a proposal for a performance team in WordPress. It took a long time and it’s something WordPress needs, so I can’t wait to see where we go from here. Interested to know more? Read the proposal on make.w.org!

WordPress Core

A bug was reported (#54243) where if a stylesheet gets inlined, relative URLs in the CSS break. I submitted a new patch in WordPress Core (#1752) and ported that same patch to Gutenberg (#35538).

Contributors day

During our contributors day, I focused mostly on code reviews. I helped other contributors where needed and then dedicated most of my time reviewing pull requests in the Gutenberg repository. Code reviews are an important part as we help others get their ideas in WordPress, and at the same time, any observations we have can help others improve their skills.

I’ve neglected code reviews for a while now since I was occupied with other responsibilities, so this was a nice opportunity and a pleasant break.

Sergey

WordPress 5.9

Last week I continued looking into some early tickets for WordPress 5.9 as part of my duties as a Core Committer. I made nine 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 addressing PHP timeouts or missing files during large plugin or theme updates. A couple of solutions were implemented so far, but it looks like the issue might not be fully resolved yet. Any testing and feedback are welcome! See ticket #54166 for more details.

Over to you

We really hope the information and the material we share will encourage more companies to contribute to WordPress.org. If you are thinking of investing some company resources back into the project and want to chat with us, don’t hesitate to reach out! You can leave a comment below or reach out to us on WordPress.org Slack. You’ll recognize us from the Yoast avatars. Happy contributing, everyone!