A week with us: Getting ready for contributor day

On October 8th, Yoast will organize another contributor day. Anyone who wants to contribute to WordPress is welcome to join! It will be a great opportunity to discover the world of contribution, or for the more experienced, to contribute to WordPress in a collaborative way. The registration for the contributor day is now open!

It doesn’t matter if you are an experienced contributor or if you are a first-timer. Everyone can join this day! Apart from contributing to WordPress, this day allows you to make new connections and get to know many Yoasters and other people in the community. 🥳 We hope to see you there!

Our weekly team updates

Justin

Testing and e2e testing in WordPress 5.9

Currently, the WordPress testing team is working on a roadmap for testing in WordPress 5.9. So I worked on a roadmap for e2e testing in WordPress 5.9 and participated in discussions for forming the test squad for the release.

In addition, I have completely rewritten the tests for taxonomies (categories and tags) which are now more stable.

Carolina

This week I took two days off. Besides working on Gutenberg, I’ve attended a meeting about the Yoast contributor day and talked to table leads. During the contributor day, I will be at the help desk.

Themes

I have written a recap of the work done on the theme requirements and theme tools and it’s being reviewed before publishing. After postponing it for a few weeks, I finally completed the latest call for testing for the FSE outreach program and submitted my thoughts about what should happen when switching themes. I think that the main pain point for me when switching block themes is that there is no easy way to reuse a navigation block.

Gutenberg

For Gutenberg, I have done triage of open issues and reviewed pull requests. I am still sticking to creating smaller pull requests, and have worked on the following:

• Added a visible text to an edit button in the template editor, when the post or page has no title: #35148
• Improvements for the post comment date block: #35112
• Updated a stale accessibility related pull request for post formats: #14124
• Continued on the visually hidden label for the search block: #35034
• Followed up on feedback on fixing the navigation link PHP notice: #34984

Ari

Update the updater

Some issues were reported in WordPress Trac (see this comment), so I debugged the issue and submitted a patch in #54166 to make plugin updates a bit safer. It is an ongoing discussion and still unresolved, so we’ll need to keep working on that some more.

Gutenberg

We started exploring methods to bulk-migrate classic content to block content. Migrating old content to the new block structure will allow sites to use more modern tools and employ modern techniques to serve their content. This however is not on the top of our priorities list, so at this point in time, we are in an exploration phase, thinking of ways to make it work properly. It’s going to be some time before we fully dedicate our resources to this project.

I updated #32510, adding end-to-end (e2e) tests. That pull request may seem like a trivial change, but it will open the door to many improvements. Allowing blocks to enqueue multiple stylesheets will allow themes and plugins to add their additional styles to core blocks, therefore deprecating monolithic stylesheets and allowing us to load styles for rendered-only blocks more efficiently.

Webfonts API

I wrote a post on make/core about our proposal for a webfonts API in WordPress Core. The post has received a lot of feedback already, and I am taking it into account while I keep working on the implementation, preparing it for inclusion in WordPress.

Education

I started reading up on TypeScript. There is a tendency to migrate existing JS to Typescript in Gutenberg, so it is a skill I’ll need to acquire. I still don’t quite fully understand TypeScript, but I understand its benefits and in time I’ll be able to understand it and use it.

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 led a meeting for new core contributors and triaged new tickets incoming into Trac (the bug tracking system that WordPress uses).

Some notable changes include:

• Updating PHPUnit configuration for PHPUnit 9.5.10/8.5.21+. These versions were released on September 25 and contain a breaking change: PHP deprecations are no longer converted to exceptions by default (convertDeprecationsToExceptions="true" can be configured to enable this). See changeset 51871 and ticket #54183 for more details. This is also included in the Changes to the WordPress Core PHP Test Suite dev note, which I highly recommended to read as it includes other important changes for plugin and theme authors using the WordPress Core test framework as a basis for their integration tests.
• Removing unnecessary setUp() and tearDown() methods in multisite tests. See changeset 51869 and ticket #53363 for more details.

Yoast contributor day

Like I mentioned at the beginning of this post, we’re organizing a Yoast contributor day on the 8th of October. Anyone is welcome to join and it doesn’t matter how much experience you have with contributing! Make sure to register if you want to join in on the fun:

Read more: Yoast contributor day on October 8th »