A week with us: WordPress 6.0 RC1

As WordPress 6.0 enters the release candidate stage, we’re putting some finishing touches on it. We are also working on early tickets for WordPress 6.1, and preparing for WordCamp Europe 2022.

Our weekly updates

Ari

This week, my main focus was on Gutenberg. There are a lot of things that we can improve for users and the future of the web. So, I’m getting back to working on things that I believe will make a difference!

In #40726, I made a proposal to use typography scales, and how they can be implemented. Typography is undeniably the most important part of a website and is often neglected. Hopefully, the addition of new tools for designers (like a typography scale) will allow them to build more consistent and beautiful websites.

Another important aspect of a site is its navigation. On #40778, we’re adding a CSS class to the parent menu when a submenu is active. This will allow designers to properly style their menus and give visual cues when needed. It’s a small but impactful change for the user experience.

One of the main goals of the site editor and the Gutenberg project was to make the editor look as much as possible like the front-end of a site. This way, users get a better feel of what their content will look like while they’re building a page. To that end, #40782 fixes an inconsistency in the search block and will make life easier for theme developers.

Last but not least, as always, a big chunk of my time was dedicated to doing code reviews in the Gutenberg repository on GitHub.

Carolina

This week I have mainly worked on an internal project, and I also have finished writing my personal development plan. The plan for this year contains more JavaScript training and is focused on Gutenberg development.

I have continued to do pull request reviews for Gutenberg and tested the release candidate for WordPress 6.0. I spent a significant amount of time trying to debug regressions in how the editor loads CSS. The fixes for the comment block alignments and the navigation block that I worked on last week have been added to the upcoming version of Gutenberg. I am still waiting to see if they will also be used in WordPress 6.0.

Another thing I worked on this week was trying to solve a problem with the focus order in the Media & Text block. This meant changing the markup of the block and deprecating the old version in a way that does not break existing blocks. Deprecations are still the most difficult part for me when I work with Gutenberg, and I think that the only way to learn more about them is to not shy away from using them when needed.

Justin

In the last few days, I’ve been busy working on the preparation of my workshop at WordCamp Europe, E2E testing of WordPress, and also on a new project to facilitate accessibility testing of Gutenberg blocks.

For the WCEU, I worked together with Adam, my co-host of the workshop, to have all the materials and presentations ready for the day. As far as E2E testing goes, we are still working on migrating the tests to Playwright. Kevin is doing a spectacular job of making sure the new tests are stable.

Following discussions with Carolina and Ari this week I am also working on a tool to generate saved blocks in WordPress Core to facilitate accessibility testing.

Sergey

WordPress 6.0

For the past week, 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 thirty commits to WordPress core, mostly various bug fixes and enhancements. I also ran mission control for WordPress 6.0 RC1 and triaged new tickets incoming into Trac (the bug tracking system that WordPress uses).

Some notable changes include:

• Renaming function parameters that use reserved PHP keywords. See ticket #55327 for more details.
• Updating the Microsoft IIS configuration to account for WordPress coding standards. See ticket #53377 for more details.
• Some documentation improvements. See tickets #54729, #54746, #55637, #55640 for more details.