A week with us: WordPress 5.9 is out

WordPress 5.9 (codename Josephine) was released on January 25, with significant features like Full Site Editing and the new Twenty Twenty Two theme. Of course, several members of the WordPress team at Core and several other colleagues at Yoast contributed to this release. You will find Sergey, Ari, and Carolina, among others, as noteworthy contributors to this release.

Our weekly updates

Carolina

I am excited about the 5.9 release and maybe even more about the plans for 6.0. I am looking forward to building and improving features after a long period of testing the 5.9 release.

This week I have been doing a little bit of everything. I wrote and reviewed content related to full site editing for yoast.com, WordPress end-user documentation, and the theme developer handbook. I have also worked on a tool to help theme authors get started with building block themes. Moreover, I started triaging Trac tickets for the previous default theme Twenty Twenty-One.

It has been a bit of a balancing act where I am still trying to figure out where I can do the most good for the WordPress project.
For Gutenberg, I have done issue triage and testing looked over my older pull requests, and worked on the post author avatar block.

Ari

This week I was mainly testing the 5.9 release and helping fix bugs. That involved doing a lot of code reviews in the Gutenberg repository and helping other contributors.

Now that WordPress 5.9 is out, we can continue working on previous projects that didn’t make it in this release. For instance, the “Update the updater” project, the webfonts API, the performance initiative, and others.

I started catching up with the performance repository on GitHub and the Webfonts API in Gutenberg. In the webfonts API, we’re running into an issue that other implementations will encounter in the coming months as well. It’s currently impossible to hook in the global-styles implementation, and that’s something we need to resolve sooner rather than later.

Sergey

On January 25, after six months of development, WordPress 5.9 “Joséphine” was released. Thanks to the work of 624 contributors, it includes 370 tickets closed on Trac and more than 1900 pull requests on GitHub. Congrats everyone! 🎉

Last week I continued helping with WordPress 5.9 release tasks and looking into some early tickets for WordPress 6.0 as part of my duties as a Core Committer.

I made twenty-one commits to WordPress core, mostly various bug fixes and enhancements. I also ran mission control for WordPress 5.9 release candidates and the final release 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 security tests, building packages and language packs, enabling updates, etc.

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

Justin

I spent the last few days on different tasks in the performance and core test teams.

With WordPress 5.9 approaching, we’ve been doing a lot of triage and feature testing with the test team. Most of these triage sessions have resulted in progress on the relevant tickets/GitHub issues. I also worked on the e2e test migration project from WordPress Core and Gutenberg to Playwright. That included a meeting I hosted with interested/concerned people, as well as two engineers on the Playwright team at Microsoft. If you are interested, check out the meeting recap.

As for the performance team, I continue doing bug gardening on the GitHub repository and mainly pushing forward PRs and issues related to the plugin infrastructure.