A week with us: WordPress 6.0, web fonts API, and internal projects

Our team continues to work on WordPress 6.0. Moreover, we released the web fonts API in Gutenberg, did a lot of work in automated tests, as well as internal Yoast projects. Also, after a lot of deliberation, we decided to make these blog posts bi-weekly. This will allow us to post more substantial updates, and it also reduces the team’s weekly stress.

Our weekly updates

Ari

Internal project

These past couple of weeks, a big portion of my time was allocated to an internal project. During that time, we are working with Gutenberg and the latest WordPress features to build something new. It’s refreshing and allows us to gain a different perspective.

Web fonts API

After a long time and a lot of effort, we finally merged the web fonts API in Gutenberg. It’s a significant step forward, and I can’t wait to see it used widely. It will be a big improvement for themes and developers alike. In the long term, we hope to implement additional font providers (such as Google Fonts). When we do that, we’ll improve the performance, privacy, and sustainability of all WordPress sites that use them.

Code reviews

The rest of my time was dedicated to doing code reviews, mostly in the Gutenberg project.

Carolina

For the past two weeks, I have been working on an internal project.

Justin

In the last two weeks, I’ve varied the projects I’m working on a little bit. First of all, as planned, I continued to migrate the Gutenberg E2E tests to use Playwright. The migration is going pretty well so far. Over time, I’m developing the ability to quickly set up new tests, debug errors that occur, and even make optimizations (performance, structure, etc.) while migrating tests. We also have a few members of the WordPress Core testing team who have started working on the project, so we can say that it is well on its way. You can follow our progress here, and if possible help by migrating new tests.

Still on the testing side, I also made some updates to the Yoast SEO plugin E2E test package; mainly concerning documentation, as well as code quality and performance optimizations.

I’ve also started peer coding sessions with my colleague Sergey, during which he kind of introduces me to his workflow on WordPress Core. Mainly for ticket triage on Trac. It’s really a great experience to watch him work and learn from his knowledge.

Sergey

WordPress 5.9.1

Two weeks ago I ran mission control for WordPress 5.9.1. This is a maintenance release that features 82 bug fixes in both Core and 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 Core and Meta tasks I helped with included:

• updating the Credits API;
• committing 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. The release is scheduled for the end of May.

I made twenty-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:

• Bringing some consistency to user role hooks. See ticket #54164 for more details.
• Making sure the current_theme_supports-{$feature} filter is consistently applied. See ticket #55219 for more details.
• Upgrading PHPMailer to version 6.6.0, a minor feature release. See ticket #55277 for more details.
• Avoiding various PHP notices in core. See tickets#54730, #55212, and #55222for more details.
• Fixing SSH2 uploads in WordPress on modern systems. See ticket #52409 for more details.
• Adding a $locale parameter for remove_accents(). See ticket #54415 for more details.
• A WP_Query improvement for author archives. See ticket#55100 for more details.
• Some documentation improvements. See tickets #54729 and #55225 for more details.

Pair programming session

Last Thursday I had a pair programming session with Justin, where we shared and discussed our ticket triaging practices, and went through the list of recent tickets on Core Trac, as well as some tickets for the upcoming WordPress 5.9.2 minor release. This seemed like a good experience for both of us, and we’re going to try it again next week.