A week with us: Yoast Contributors Day

Last week, on Friday the 13th, Yoast organized a Contributors Day for WordPress. Contributors Day is an open event and anyone can join in, so this time we had a total number of 52 contributors. 31 of those were Yoasters, and we had 21 external participants, an amazing turnout!

If you missed this Contributor Day or couldn’t make it, you needn’t worry. We’ll have another one soon and hope to see you there! ☺️

Our weekly updates

Ari

The past couple of weeks were very productive! WordPress 6.0 will be released in a few days, so a big portion of my time was invested in testing this release, debugging any issues that came up, and doing code reviews in the Gutenberg plugin, for things that we want to include in this release.

PHP 8.x

Our team is having a weekly mob-coding session where we go over the PHP 8.x issues in WordPress Core, and then fix them one by one. While the first few weeks were “warm-up” sessions dealing with simple things, we have now moved on to more complex PHP 8.x issues. It’s challenging, but we’re learning a lot in the process – including how to properly write PHPUnit tests for Core.

Tree-shaking CSS styles for block themes

One of the things that I find exciting is figuring out ways to improve the performance of WordPress sites – and therefore web sustainability as a whole.

I worked on an implementation to allow minimizing the amount of CSS that gets included in pages. You can check out the code and leave your feedback on #41020. Hopefully this will get merged in Gutenberg soon, and be part of WordPress Core in a future release.

Contributor Day

During our Contributor Day, I attended the Core table led by Sergey. We worked on numerous tickets and helped the other attendees as much as we could. At the conclusion of the day, we had debugged and helped move forward the project in many areas. It was a pleasant experience and I can’t wait for the next one!

Carolina

I am currently working three days per week on internal Yoast projects and two days on Gutenberg and WordPress Core.
The past week I have been busy trying to debug last-minute block editor issues for the third (and most likely final) release candidate of WordPress 6.0. This was also something we worked on together at the core table during the Yoast contributor day.
On Friday, I hope to find the time to finally start learning TypeScript, as I am going to need that for contributing to Gutenberg.

In the next two weeks, we have a lot to look forward to, both the 6.0 release and then, WordCamp Europe. I hope the update goes smoothly for everyone and that I will see you in Porto!

Justin

I couldn’t attend the last Contributor Day at Yoast because I was returning to Benin from Rwanda (where I stayed for about three months) on that day.

These last weeks, I divided my time between contributing to Gutenberg, preparing the workshop I’m co-hosting at WordCamp Europe and migrating WordPress E2E tests to Playwright.

On the Gutenberg side, I have my list of issues I’m working on; mainly accessibility and frontend performance issues. I’ve basically spent time on this one, to enable editing the alternative text of the site’s logo block in the editor. The linked pull request is still in progress, so if you feel like helping out, feel free to look at my approach and leave a comment.

With Adam, my co-host at WCEU, we’ve had several work sessions to refine our presentation and make sure everything is in order for the big day.

On the Playwright testing side, I’m working on migrating as many tests as possible to get us closer to the time when the new test stack will be stable and widely adopted. In the meantime, as always, you can keep an eye on our progress and help with the tracking issue.

Sergey

WordPress 6.0 & 6.1

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 next week, May 24. I also started looking into some early tickets for WordPress 6.1.

I made thirty-six commits to WordPress core, mostly various bug fixes and enhancements. Additionally, I ran mission control for WordPress 6.0 RC2 and RC3 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 #55650 for more details.
• Passing GitHub Actions environment variables to the Docker container, so that unit tests that should only run on the main branch of WordPress code (trunk) could continue to do so. See ticket #55668 for more details.

Yoast Contributor Day

Last Friday, I was excited to lead the Core team table at the Yoast Contributor Day. Some of my colleagues joined the Zoom session, while some onboarded new contributors at the Yoast office in Wijchen.

The team looked into about a dozen tickets for WordPress core and WordPress.org Plugin Directory:

• #41675 Add filter to bypass display/query for Media Months filter in the media modal
• #51120 Share Icon SVG in social-link block missing ‘width’ and ‘height’ attributes
• #55104 is_main_query() fatal error on null
• #55388 Lost Password URL filtration
• #55664 WP post embed: missing labels and duplicate IDs
• #55691 New theme editor uses WP_SITEURL instead of WP_HOME
• #55697 Twenty-Twenty-Two: Dark mode not applied to submenu in the navigation block
• #55701 ms-load mentions MySQL
• #55718 Make sure the aria-label for the “Logged in as” link in the comment form is containing the same string as the visible text
• #55722 Inconsistent guard conditions in query.php
• #55723 Thumbnails Gifs for Plugins do not respect “no motion” device settings
• #meta6312 Gifs in Plugin Directory do not respect “no motion” device setting

Some of these tickets are already committed and will be included in WordPress 6.1, others are still a work in progress.

It felt like a productive day and a fun experience, thank you to everyone who joined us! 🙌