A week with us: WordPress 6.0 Betas

A lot has happened in the WordPress community and for our team in the last few weeks. All three betas of WordPress 6.0 have been released, and we are now entering the release candidates phase.

Our weekly updates

Carolina

Last week I was on Easter vacation, where I took the time to take a course about Laravel, work on personal projects, and learn about locking Gutenberg blocks. This week I am back working on updates for Gutenberg. I have done a fair bit of testing, triage, and pull request reviews, but also meetings and catching up with emails.

On Monday, I needed to fix a typo I had made in the “no results” block. I needed to fix this before the string freeze in WordPress 6.0 Beta 3, because after the string freeze, we can not make any more text changes. I have made some pull requests for the new comments blocks to fix the alignments of the inner blocks like the comment reply link, the comment author name, and the comment edit link.

There are some changes in Gutenberg that are affecting how CSS is loaded for block themes, that I am also trying to troubleshoot. In addition to that, I have been brainstorming over how to improve the no results block and started looking over the long list of feature requests and bug reports for the media and text block.

Justin

In the last few weeks, I’ve continued to work on fixed bugs on Gutenberg, internal projects at Yoast, and E2E testing in WordPress.

Regarding Gutenberg, I’m now regularly triaging the repo. I’m also working on allowing negative values for margin inputs in the block editor. See issue and PR.

On the Yoast side, I mainly worked on creating documentation for new features released on Yoast SEO for Shopify. We also had an internal “Yes-day,” during which I participated with other colleagues to make diversity-related proposals to Yoast.

Sergey

WordPress 6.0

For the past three weeks, I continued triaging and reviewing tickets for the next major release, WordPress 6.0, as part of my duties as a Core Committer. The release is scheduled for the end of May.

I made fifty-three commits to WordPress core, mostly various bug fixes and enhancements. I also ran mission control for three WordPress 6.0 Beta versions and triaged new tickets incoming into Trac (the bug tracking system that WordPress uses).

Some notable changes include:

• 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.
• Some documentation improvements. See ticket #54729 for more details.

Mob Programming Sessions

We had a few more mob programming sessions with Ari, Carolina, and Justin, where we focused on PHP 8.x compatibility improvements for WordPress core. We continued working through the list of issues provided by Juliette Reinders Folmer in one of the earlier sessions. PR #2530 and PR #2590 were opened as a result.

Ari

WordPress releases are always stressful, and things happen at an increasingly fast pace.

Loading multiple JS files per block

#36176 was a proposal to allow enqueuing multiple JS files on the frontend for each block. This represents a significant improvement for sustainability, as we’ll be able to load smaller JS files when visiting a website. Unfortunately, this feature missed the deadline and was not included in the WordPress 6.0 release. It will, however, be part of the next release!

Webfonts API

After a lot of deliberation in the WordPress community, it was decided to include a stopgap solution for the webfonts API. You can read more about it and get more context on what will actually be implemented in this article on make.w.org.

Easter holidays

Easter is always a big deal in Greece. I took the opportunity to spend some more time with family and recharged my batteries a bit.

PHP 8.x compatibility

The whole team has a weekly mob-coding session where we go over PHP 8.x deprecations and incompatibilities. During those sessions, we discuss and fix detected issues in WordPress. These past few weeks were no exception, and we kept working on PHP 8.x. Hopefully, with a consistent commitment to this task, WordPress will soon be able to work with the next generation of PHP without any major issues.

Other tasks

My daily routine consists of taking care of some administrative tasks for the team and doing many, many code reviews in the Gutenberg plugin. Particularly during a time like this! When we’re close to a major WordPress release, I’ll focus on doing as many code reviews as possible in order to facilitate the work of others.

Other than the above, I’ve also been taking a leadership training sponsored by Yoast. This will allow me to be more effective in my communication and management of the team. It’s going pretty well and I’m learning a lot in the process.