A week with us: A recap of last week’s contributor day

10 February 2022

Last Friday we had our first Yoast contributor day of 2022! We had 70 participants joining 5 different tables and helping move the project forward. Overall we helped with 15 tickets in WordPress Core, improved 17 documentation pages, helped translations in 10 locales, and answered lots of support tickets. If you were unable to attend this contributor day, you needn’t worry, we’ll soon organize a new one!

Our weekly updates

Ari

I was glad to witness once again the community and our company come together during our WordPress contributor day on Friday, the 4th of February. It’s always refreshing and uplifting to see everyone come together and join forces for the common good.

This week I focused on Gutenberg and performance: I did a lot of triage and code reviews for the WordPress editor, and also worked on some things that we need for the future.

Webfonts API

I resumed work on the webfonts API. It’s one of the things in the WP 6.0 roadmap, and we’ve been working on it for months. After a lot of help and debugging from other Gutenberg contributors, the blockers were removed and we can finally continue with the implementation.

Performance

I continued working on allowing multiple scripts to be conditionally loaded on a per-block basis. This is part of our performance initiative, as well as a continuous effort to improve the way block themes work in a new era for WordPress theme developers.

Carolina

This week I learned more about Tailwind CSS (I am late to the party, I know). I also replied to support questions about WordPress 5.9 and full site editing in different channels and worked on tools for theme developers to help them start creating block themes.

Contributor day

During our contributor day, I spent time at the WordPress Core table. I researched an issue with meta boxes that are not positioned correctly and it turned out to (possibly) be a problem with a script in Gutenberg. In addition, I participated in the documentation team, where we talked about improvements for the block editor handbook. I did not solve the issue with the meta boxes, but other fixes got merged into WordPress core. Thank you to everyone who joined!

Gutenberg

My focus has been on the set of author blocks, tricky style updates to the query pagination block, and some older open pull requests that needed to be updated. I want to highlight two exciting proposals in the Gutenberg GitHub repository. Both are about removing wrapping elements used for alignments in the block editor: #38657 and #38613. If these can be removed, the block editor and front will match better. There are important backward compatibility concerns for plugins and themes that might style these elements, so it needs careful testing.

Justin

This week, in addition to the Contributor Day where I contributed to the support table, I also continued to work on the Playwright setup for Gutenberg. With Kevin Hao, we went through his PR that implements the Playwright setup in Gutenberg. There are still a few details to work out before we have the infrastructure in place and start migrating tests. Other than that, I’m still dragging out the post on Make/Core detailing the roadmap for the migration to Playwright.

I also did some work with Tailwind and Gutenberg blocks for an internal Yoast project.

Sergey

WordPress 5.9.1

Last week I continued triaging and reviewing tickets for the next minor release, WordPress 5.9.1. There are currently 38 tickets in the milestone with various bug fixes that the Core Team aims to address in the next week or two.

WordPress.org

I made fourteen commits to WordPress.org, mostly various UI fixes for translate.wordpress.org.

WordPress 6.0

I continued looking into some early tickets for WordPress 6.0, as part of my duties as a Core Committer. I made nine commits to WordPress core, mostly various bug fixes and enhancements. In addition, I led a meeting for new core contributors and triaged new tickets incoming into Trac (the bug tracking system that WordPress uses).

Ari Stathopoulos

Ari is a member of the WordPress core team where he gets to work full time on the open-source project with some of the brightest minds in the industry. He is an accomplished contributor with a focus on sustainability & accessibility.