A week with us: WordCamp Europe

This week, Ari and Carolina are at WordCamp Europe in Porto. Since our whole team works remotely, it is our first opportunity to meet some of our colleagues in person! We are looking forward to seeing old friends, meeting new people, connecting with other contributors, and, of course the contributor day and after party.

If you are attending, don’t forget to check out the Yoast booth (there is also a fun competition to win some Lego!). You can find out more about the talks by Marieke and Laura on our WordCamp Europe events page. You can meet Ari and our colleague Rolf at the Performance booth on Saturday, and Carolina at WPCafe on Friday before lunch.

Unfortunately, Justin and Sergey were unable to join. Like with previous regional WordCamps, we are seeing reports from several attendees, speakers and volunteers who are being declined Visas. But no matter where you are, you can watch the talks on the live stream. Watch for links and information on the WordCamp Europe website.

Our weekly updates

Justin

Unfortunately, I will not be able to join in person at WCEU with Ari and Carolina. But that’s only a temporary setback, and I’m already excited about the upcoming opportunities to meet with my colleagues and members of the WordPress community.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve continued to work on E2E testing in Playwright, including migrating a number of tests to Playwright, and reviewing a few others.

I also worked on the block generation script that I had started a few weeks ago. The script is now up-to-date and generates almost all the blocks registered by WordPress Core. You can take a look at it here.

Ari

These past couple of weeks I worked on Gutenberg, and did lots of debugging and testing. WordPress 6.0 was released, and as always, release weeks are a bit stressful.

On the Gutenberg front, I continued working on an implementation to improve the stylesheets performance for block themes (#41020). I also made a commit aiming to improve the color-contrast checker in the editor. This change will allow switching between WCAG AA/AAA compliance (#41363). I’m hoping this change will make it easier for people to build accessible websites in places and industries where the law requires stricter policies.

In addition to the above, I fixed a PHP 8.1 error in Gutenberg (#41193) and also worked on an internal Yoast project.

Today I arrived in Porto for WCEU 2022, where I’ll meet and catch up with many of you in person. It’s been a long time since we were allowed to travel and I can’t wait to see old friends – and make new ones.

Sergey

I was looking forward to WordCamp Europe this year. However, due to a combination of various factors, it is the first time ever that I’m not attending in person. I always enjoyed making new connections there and discussing all things WordPress, but also need to be mindful of my mental and physical energy levels. I hope all my friends and colleagues have an amazing time reuniting with each other. Looking forward to meeting again some other time soon! ❤️

WordPress 6.0

On May 24, after four months of development, WordPress 6.0 “Arturo” was released. Thanks to the work of 500+ contributors, it includes nearly 1,000 enhancements and bug fixes. Congrats everyone! 🎉

For the past two weeks I continued helping with WordPress 6.0 release tasks and looking into some early tickets for WordPress 6.1, as part of my duties as a Core Committer.

I ran mission control for WordPress 6.0 release candidates and final release, led a meeting for new core contributors, and triaged new tickets incoming into Trac (the bug tracking system that WordPress uses).

On the day of the release, some of the Core and Meta tasks I helped with included:

• Updating the Credits API
• Updating the Roadmap and History pages on WordPress.org
• Committing version bumps, running tests, building packages, enabling updates, etc.

If you’d like to learn more about the release process, these steps are documented in the WordPress Core handbook: Releasing Major Versions.

WordPress 6.1

I made twenty-four commits to WordPress core, mostly various bug fixes and enhancements. Some notable changes include:

• Bumping the recommended MariaDB version to 10.3 or greater. See ticket #55791 for more details.
• Replacing `phpversion()` function calls with `PHP_VERSION` constant for better performance. See ticket #55680 for more details.
• Hiding the Comments column icon and `title` attribute from screen readers for better accessibility. See ticket #55555 for more details.
• Adding some defensive coding to fail gracefully when checking mapped capabilities without providing the required object ID. See ticket #44591 for more details.

Carolina

The past week I worked on an internal Yoast Project and prepared for traveling to WordCamp Europe (Raincoat, thick sweaters or shorts? Important decisions!) I hope to see you there and I am always up for chatting about WordPress.