A week with us: Preparing for WordPress 5.9.1 and Yoast contributor day

This week, the WordPress core team at Yoast worked on performance improvements, Gutenberg enhancements, end-to-end tests, and the upcoming WordPress 5.9.1 minor release, among other things. We also started looking into some early tickets for WordPress 6.0, and we are preparing for another Yoast contributor day on February 4. Read on for more details!

Our weekly updates

Ari

This week I focused mostly on performance-related issues and doing code reviews. Let’s take a closer look.

Webfonts API

The web fonts API is currently blocked because we have no way to hook in the global-styles mechanism. The issue has already been reported and there are discussions on how to address it. It is something that other editor improvements will also need for WordPress 6.0, so not unique to the web fonts API.

Javascript performance

I continued my exploration on how to allow adding more than one script for blocks. On the editor, this is not an issue, but it will be important for the frontend of sites and will allow us to conditionally load a script based on the block’s settings.
That in turn, will help us improve the frontend performance of WordPress sites, decreasing the total size of loaded scripts. You can check out the details of that patch in #36176, in the Gutenberg repository on Github.

Blocks performance

I created an issue in WordPress Trac (#55005) and started working on a fix (#2252). This will improve the performance of blocks on the server, and help reduce WordPress’s carbon footprint.

Code reviews

As always, one of our responsibilities is to allow other contributors to do their work more efficiently, so I did code reviews both in the Gutenberg, and the Performance repositories on GitHub.

Carolina

This week, I have focused mostly on Gutenberg. Like last week, I have continued working on a set of blocks that will extend or replace the current post author block. By splitting it into separate blocks that can be positioned individually, users and designers will be able to create more varied designs.

I have also made a small update to the post title block and proposed two changes to the archives block: #38324, #38440. I’ve done some exploration around adding a “no results” or “no posts found” message to the query and post template blocks, but there are several challenges. Furthermore, I’m still watching the new issues that users are reporting after the release of 5.9, trying to be attentive to what bugs we may need to solve first.

I am looking forward to seeing you all on Friday’s contributor day!

Justin

I continued to split my time between the WordPress performance and testing teams.

Performance team

We are getting closer and closer to a release of the first version of the performance plugin. This week, I’ve continued to do some triage and PR reviews on the plugin repo. I also created a PR with the plugin’s release documentation.

E2E tests in WordPress Core and Gutenberg

I am currently working on publishing a public roadmap for the migration of tests to Playwright. It contains details about the different steps of the migration, the implications, possible blockers, etc. It should be published early next week.

I’ve also started a new PR on Gutenberg to set up Playwright.

Sergey

WordPress 5.9.1

After WordPress 5.9 shipped last week, I started triaging and reviewing tickets for the next minor release, WordPress 5.9.1. There are currently 34 tickets in the milestone with various bug fixes that the Core Team aims to address in the next week or two.

WordPress 6.0

I also continued looking into some early tickets for WordPress 6.0, as part of my duties as a Core Committer. What’s more, I made twelve 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 fixing the “Show hidden updates” button on the WordPress Updates screen for localized installs. See ticket #54886 for more details.