A week with us: Fixing bugs and working on improvements to WordPress

With the arrival of the WordPress 5.8 feature freeze on May 25th, several team members are now focused on fixing the bugs found on both WordPress Core and Gutenberg. Other team members are working on other, internal, Yoast projects as well as the WordPress ecosystem.

Our weekly team updates

Ari

This week I continued working on the WordPress editor and WordPress 5.8. I focused on items that are must-haves for WordPress 5.8. I also reviewed more than 30 pull requests, provided feedback where needed, and helped others. Below, you can read more details about what I did.

Blocks & themes

• It’s important we provide tools to theme developers to ensure a sustainable future for the WordPress ecosystem. To that end, I created a new pull request to allow themes to add inline styles for all blocks (#32275).
• To ensure a healthier future for the WordPress themes repository, I followed Carolina’s exemplary work to improve the theme-check plugin. I reviewed pull requests and did my best to help move the process forward.
• I submitted and merged a pull request to avoid duplicate skip-links when using WordPress 5.8 in combination with the Gutenberg plugin (#32346).
• Tested the blockbase theme, which is marketed in some places as the new underscores (_s) base theme. If it becomes the standard for block themes, we have to make sure it works as expected and helps people build sustainable & performant websites. Submitted a pull request (#3982) so the theme opts-in to separate styles per block (on render).

Continued work

• I continued work on backporting the site-logo block from Gutenberg to WordPress Core. That required refactoring in the block a bit, but the patch is ready. It will be merged once Gutenberg packages get updated. A subsequent pull-request was needed in the Gutenberg repository to ensure the two of them are in sync (#32370).
• Merged a pull-request improving the way slugs get generated when using non-Latin characters (#32232).
• Merged a pull-request to improve the code quality of the Gutenberg plugin (#32153)

Carolina

This week, I continued updating the Theme Check plugin, adding documentation, and updating the older parts of the plugin so that the code follows WordPress coding standards. The plugin analyzes the code in the theme and reports issues with different levels of severity: Required, warning, recommended, and info. As part of the ongoing work to reduce the requirements for the theme directory, the checks have been revised and the severity level of some checks have been changed.

Francesca

This past week, there was a whirlwind of activities and some changes in my role at Yoast.

Internal Tasks

The team is towards the end of its forming process. So, I can spend more time individually contributing to WordPress and work on internal projects. Today, I joined our commerce team part-time. I will be mostly working on issues related to the WP business ecosystem, thanks to the experience I gathered as a contributor. Win-win!

We have been working together for eight months. Together, we figured out what works and what doesn’t. And, we will continue experimenting to find ways to improve our collaboration and communication. These past eight months have been challenging. Not knowing when we will meet person is not the easiest way to form a team. But, everyone is really doing their best within the team while also making WordPress for millions of people!

WordPress Contibutions

In terms of contribution, I have started picking up some issues for the upgrade/install component. I might not be able to contribute with code. But, I can definitely help the maintainers, by running chats, pinging people in tickets, and generally help them move things along.

I was also happy to see that something I pestered pitched to Josepha has finally happened: team representatives now have a public channel in WordPress.org Slack where we can communicate more easily. I am looking forward to working with other contributors on two projects that I have in my pipeline: the aforementioned upgrader initiative and a review of the Core documentation that I started when I coordinated WordPress 5.3.

Finally, allow me to brag for a moment. I submitted my first patch to WordPress.org, and it was merged by Sergey. It doesn’t matter that it was a small one. I feel great about it. It’s been a while since i have used development tools, and it feels good to do it again. I am brushing up my old-stool front-end development knowledge, and hopefully, I will find more tickets that need help from a seasoned HTML developer—seasoned as in “I started using it in version 3.2”. Time flies when you have fun, I guess.

Justin

WordPress 5.8

I continue to triage as many 5.8 Core Trac tickets and issues on Gutenberg as I can. Among other things, I’ve been working on this issue about displaying the error message when there is a problem parsing the theme.json file.

WordPress Core e2e tests

I slowed down a bit on the e2e tests in Core. However, I was able to make some progress in improving the ones already written, especially the category tests.

Yoast e2e tests package

With the help of my colleagues at Yoast, I finally managed to find the solution to the package installation problem that was people were encountering. So I can now concentrate more on writing the other tests, to have the package at a level that can allow it to be merged into the plugin.

Sergey

During the past week last week, my main focus was to continue reviewing bug fixes and enhancements for WordPress 5.8, the next major release, as part of my duties as a Core Committer.

I made thirty two commits to WordPress core, led a meeting for new core contributors, and triaged new tickets incoming into Trac (the bug tracking system that WordPress uses).

Tim

The past week I was hard at work on an internal project. So, unfortunately, I could not dedicate many hours towards WordPress contribution.