A week with us: WordPress 6.0 feature freeze is getting closer

We have had lots going on these past two weeks. Sergey has helped with the release of WordPress version 5.9.3, which is a minor release. There are 19 bug fixes in this release, including fixes for the customizer, image blocks and cover blocks. You can read all about the release on WordPress.org.

The WordPress 6.0 release may still feel far away, but this week we have a feature freeze for Gutenberg, with Beta 1 of 6.0 following close after. It is a hectic period because this is when the release leads decide which new features to include.
With only two major releases remaining this year, this may be the last chance to add features to WordPress until October.

Our weekly updates

Carolina

The past two weeks I worked on an internal project. I have also had accessibility training with our colleague Andrea, and I have enjoyed participating in more mob- and pair coding sessions with the team.

Gutenberg

With Ari’s help I completed the first version of the new “No results” block. The no results block is a container block where you can place blocks that show when there are no results on search pages or blogs.

I have helped with triaging and troubleshooting open issues and with pull request reviews. My focus has been enhancements for Gutenberg 13.0 and the theme export functionality in the Site Editor.

There are many quality of life improvements in this Gutenberg release. I have worked on improving the archives block, and helped fixed a bug where meta boxes would get stuck in the center of the post editor.

There is a new call for testing in the FSE outreach program, where the test team is asking for feedback both on the no results block, the new avatar block and the post author blocks.

Justin

In the last two weeks, I’ve been working on WordPress E2E tests and Gutenberg issues, among others.

On the testing side, I’ve continued reviewing the open PRs about the migration of Gutenberg E2E tests to Playwright, and also creating new ones. Although the migration project is large, we are making progress and that is very satisfying.

I’ve also been skimming the open issues on the Gutenberg repository, and lately I’ve been finishing this PR which adds vertical alignment properties on some blocks like group and row blocks.

We’ve also had some very interesting coding sessions with our colleagues, including fixing some bugs related to named parameters, for PHP 8.x in WordPress (see this PR).

Sergey

WordPress 5.9.3

This week I participated in the release party for WordPress 5.9.3. This is a maintenance release that features 9 bug fixes in core and 10 bug fixes in the block editor. If you have sites that support automatic background updates, they have already started the update process.

On the day of the release, some of the Meta tasks I helped with included: 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. The release is scheduled for end of May.

I made twenty-five 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:

• 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 we had another mob programming session 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 2484 was opened as a result.

Ari

These past couple of weeks, I focused mainly on Gutenberg improvements & fixes, as well as doing a lot of code reviews in the Gutenberg repository on GitHub. Other than that, the whole team worked on improving PHP 8.x compatibility in WordPress core. We’re holding a weekly 2-hour mob-coding session where we go over the compatibility issues, discuss each one individually, and then figure out how to fix them. We’ve already pushed a lot of fixes, and more will follow!

There are 3 main features I worked on that should be highlighted and could use some additional feedback:

• Adding support for navigation-link descriptions (#39808)
• Adding support for multiple scripts per-block (#36176)
• Allow registering webfonts from style variations (#39886)