A week with us: WordPress 5.9.1 Release Candidate and e2e test migration

Whether you celebrated Valentine’s Day or Single Awareness Day, there is always love for WordPress, and here is what we have been working on this week. The release candidate for WordPress 5.9.1 will arrive later today, plans for 6.0 are taking shape, and there was a new release of Gutenberg (version 12.6).

Our weekly updates

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 43 tickets in the milestone with various bug fixes that the Core Team aims to address. WordPress 5.9.1 RC1 is planned for this week and the final release for next week.

WordPress 6.0

I also continued looking into some early tickets for WordPress 6.0, as part of my duties as a Core Committer. I made twenty-three 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).

Ari

This week I continued working on some long-standing projects that have been in progress for a while. I spent some time working on an exciting new internal project (shhh… it’s a secret, I can’t share details), as well as many other different projects. As always, I dedicated a portion of my time to code reviews and moving the WordPress project forward.

I admit that at times, I felt a bit overwhelmed. I am working on too many projects simultaneously and I need to learn how to better prioritize, delegate, and manage my time.

Webfonts API

I continued working on the Webfonts API for Gutenberg (#37140). I fixed some failing automated tests, and other contributors started testing the implementation. Testers discovered a couple of bugs, and I fixed them promptly. I believe the implementation is pretty stable at this stage, and an initial version of this API can be merged so more people get exposed to it and start using it.

Performance

I continued refining the patch for PHP blocks performance (#2252). I’m hoping we can get this one in the next release of WordPress Core. It would really make a difference on slow hosts or even fast hosts with loads of traffic.

Carolina

I have only worked one full day this week, on which I did some pull request reviews for Gutenberg and core. I have helped test the web fonts API, the new combined avatar block, and did some work on the secret project that Ari mentioned. I also submitted a simplified solution for the “no results” block, but it still needs improvements and reviews. I was happy to see that Gutenberg 12.6 includes many of the small enhancements I worked on.

Justin

The last few days, I’ve been a little overloaded with the different tasks and projects I’ve been working on. I wasn’t really productive as I wanted to be. After discussing it with our team lead Ari, we decided that I should take a break on some projects in order to properly prioritize the ones I think are important.

I’m currently working on moving forward the e2e test migration from Gutenberg to Playwright as much as possible. So I’m still testing this PR. In addition, I have started this other PR where I have started migrating the utilities. The general progress can be seen here.