A week with us: Contributor day is tomorrow

All the team is very excited about our upcoming contributor day tomorrow. While registrations are already closed, you can still check the information about the day here. You will find all details about the schedule, the different tables as well as the table leads.

Our weekly team updates

Justin

Using REST API in Core e2e tests

Over the past week, I have been working on implementing some e2e tests in Core using the REST API. This helps to reduce the time needed to run some tests by performing tasks over the API rather than doing it with the UI.

For instance, when writing tests for taxonomies (see PR 1714 and 1722), it is not necessary to create posts using the UI, as this is a feature already tested elsewhere. We could then reduce by up to 30% the time to run these tests by switching to the REST API.

Planning e2e tests roadmap in WordPress 5.9

With the Core test team, we have been working on a plan for e2e tests in the upcoming major release. This translates to a working session on Wednesday, October 6, where we discussed the priorities of the team for the next couple of months, as well as big steps we are going to make, in order to improve e2e test coverage and stability in WordPress Core.

Carolina

This week I have been helping with preparations for the contributor day, mainly messaging people hoping that they will get back to me before Friday. Friday is going to be fun and hectic. But before that I am also going to be on Gutenberg Times Live Q & A on Thursday at 16:00 UTC to talk about “Going from classic to block-based Themes”.

Themes

The big news is of course that the next default theme, Twenty Twenty-Two has been announced, and it is going to be a block theme.
The design is beautiful. I have mixed feelings over the choice of making it a block theme, because I have doubts about if the full site editing features like the site editor, template part editing and creation flow and the missing blocks will be ready in time for 5.9.

Gutenberg

I have mostly done triage and PR reviews and continued on the PR’s I worked on last week. Big thanks to Ari for fixing the visually hidden label for the search block.

Ari

Webfonts API

I continued working on the Webfonts API for WordPress Core. I refactored the implementation to allow registering 3rd-party font-foundries easier, and also allow the registration of font-collections to make things smoother for theme-authors. Tonya Mork joined the effort to build a solid Webfonts API, and our collaboration so far is very fruitful.

Update the Updater

In collaboration with Andy Fragen we worked on introducing a move_dir function in WordPress, and making plugin and theme updates safer (#54166).

Code Quality

I started examining the WordPress Core code using PHP Mess Dedector (PHPMD) in order to find issues and improve the code quality. The first patch to come out of that was #54206, and there will be more coming.

Gutenberg

In the Gutenberg front I did some code reviews and continued working on previous pull-requests:

  • We can now specify which blocks are allowed in a column block (#35342).
  • We no longer add polyfills on the frontend for blocks (#35038). This will save ~20kb on each page-load in block-based themes.
  • I continued working on allowing multiple stylesheets to be enqueued on a per-block basis (#32510)

Francesca

Francesca has some days off right now, so we don’t have an update from her this week.

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 eleven 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).

One notable change includes removing the expired DST Root CA X3 certificate from the WP core certificate bundle to resolve issues with OpenSSL 1.0.2. See ticket #54207 for more details.

The certificate has expired on September 30, 2021, and that also affected WordPress PHPUnit tests, which started failing on PHP 5.6 due to an older OpenSSL version. This is now resolved by running the tests on the latest patch version of PHP 5.6 (5.6.40 at the moment), instead of 5.6.20. See ticket #54223 for more details.