A week with us: WordPress 5.9.2, E2E tests and more

The WordPress core team has been working on a variety of interesting projects over the past couple of weeks: E2E testing in WordPress, Core compatibility with PHP 8.x, WordPress 5.9.2, WordPress 6.0, accessibility, Gutenberg and much more. In this blog post, we’ll share with you what each one of us has been up to!

Our weekly updates

Sergey

WordPress 5.9.2

Two weeks ago I participated in the release party for WordPress 5.9.2. This is a security and maintenance release that features one bug fix in addition to three security fixes. Because this is a security release, it is recommended that you update your sites immediately. All versions since WordPress 3.7 have also been updated.

On the day of the release, some of the Core and Meta tasks I helped with included: committing the fixes and 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 Minor Versions.

WordPress 6.0

For the past two weeks, I continued triaging and reviewing tickets for the next major release, WordPress 6.0, as part of my duties as a Core Committer. This release is scheduled for the end of May. I made seventy-one commits to WordPress core, mostly various bug fixes and enhancements. I also triaged new tickets incoming into Trac (the bug tracking system that WordPress uses).

Some notable changes include:

• Allowing block themes to be activated without index.php. See ticket #54272 for more details.
• Continuing with various coding standards fixes in core. See ticket #54728 for more details.
• Renaming function parameters that use reserved PHP keywords. See ticket #55327 for more details.

Mob Programming Session

Last Thursday I had a mob programming session with Ari, Carolina, and Justin, where we focused on PHP 8.x compatibility improvements for WordPress core. Juliette Reinders Folmer was kind enough to join the session and guide us through some practical steps to address PHP 8.x compatibility issues. Thanks, Juliette! A draft PR was opened as a result, and we will continue working on it in the next sessions.

Ari

These couple of weeks have been rather busy! I’ve been splitting my time between an internal Yoast project and WordPress. By working on our internal project I’m getting a new perspective on the block editor and Full Site Editing in WordPress. The lessons we learn from the internal project are reflected in Gutenberg too! We’ve been submitting a lot of patches and small fixes for accessibility, performance, and other features.

Webfonts API

After the release of the webfonts API, people have started using it, and there already are quite a few suggestions and PRs in Gutenberg that use the API, improve it, or modify it in a number of ways. I’ve been reviewing these code suggestions, providing insights and feedback where needed.

PHP 8.x

The whole team started working on PHP 8.x issues in WordPress Core. We made some progress there, and I’m hoping we can make a weekly session where we go over the remaining issues and slowly fix them all.

Performance

One of the things that we wanted to fix in Gutenberg, was to allow a block to use multiple scripts on the frontend. This will allow a block (like the navigation block for example) to register multiple scripts, but enqueue just the parts that it needs. This will improve performance by avoiding monolithic script files and using multiple smaller files instead. After many months, and a lot of help from some amazing colleagues in the WordPress community, we finally have a pull request for this: #36176

Justin

For the last two weeks, I’ve been working on various projects, between fixing bugs on Gutenberg, migrating tests from WordPress to Playwright, and peer programming sessions with my colleagues.

Gutenberg issues

I initially started working on this PR to load several scripts on the blocks. But I had to leave this one because other contributors had already taken it to a significant stage. I also worked on accessibility improvements on the query pagination block. See this PR.

Pair and mob programming sessions with the WordPress team

I did several work sessions with my colleagues. Among others, with Ari and Carolina, we worked on improving our knowledge of OOP with PHP. The team also worked together with Juliette to fix WordPress compatibility with PHP 8.x issues.

Migration of E2E tests from WordPress to Playwright

In the last two weeks, we have made significant progress on the migration side. Among other things, the infrastructure for writing tests with Playwright has been completed and merged by Kai Hao. So we continued creating PRs for new tests in a more fluid way. Read this post on our migration plans for more details on this.

Read more: Two weeks ago: WordPress 6.0, web fonts API, and internal projects »