Start of the meeting in Slack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/..
Curated agenda: @webcommsat
Facilitator dev chat: @joemcgill – welcoming one of 2024’s new co-team reps for Core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.!
Discussions
Proposal: What’s next for the Outreach program
- Feedback deadline: February 12, 2024. Add comments to the post.
- A Hallway Hangout is scheduled on February 20, 2024, at 15:00 UTC to further discuss it and next steps.
- Actionable proposal. Potential for cross-team involvement in furthering it.
Forthcoming Releases
Maintenance releases
@jorbin reports there are currently no updates on a 6.4 release.
Major release A release, identified by the first two numbers (3.6), which is the focus of a full release cycle and feature development. WordPress uses decimaling count for major release versions, so 2.8, 2.9, 3.0, and 3.1 are sequential and comparable in scope.: 6.5
@marybaum made a request for contributors to fulfill roles of Mission Control, Committer A developer with commit access. WordPress has five lead developers and four permanent core developers with commit access. Additionally, the project usually has a few guest or component committers - a developer receiving commit access, generally for a single release cycle (sometimes renewed) and/or for a specific component., Security, and MarComms for the release parties, especially Beta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process. 1 on Tuesday.
List of new updates on 6.5 including ones requiring input together with their deadlines, next bug A bug is an error or unexpected result. Performance improvements, code optimization, and are considered enhancements, not defects. After feature freeze, only bugs are dealt with, with regressions (adverse changes from the previous version) being the highest priority. scrubs, and more.
Plugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party dependencies discussion
You can also view discussions taking place in #core-upgrade-install channel on Slack. This has been highlighted as a potentially very valuable feature for 6.5 and was merged into ‘trunk A directory in Subversion containing the latest development code in preparation for the next major release cycle. If you are running "trunk", then you are on the latest revision.’ on Tuesday. Note this is the last dev chat before Beta 1.
The discussion focused on @desrosj‘s first point in the update: “When a plugin’s dependencies are unmet, the plugin is deactivated, and the user is only informed of this if they visit the plugin page, and only if they visit on the same request that the deactivation occurs on. It is my opinion that plugins should not be deactivated if dependencies are suddenly unmet. This could be very unexpected for anyone unfamiliar with the concept of dependencies in the context of software. Instead, the WSOD protection should be allowed to do its job, allowing the site owner to receive an email, and see a path forward to correcting the issue.”
@azaozz asked if it was better for a plugin to throw a fatal error and trigger “fatal errors protection” in WordPress?
@jorbin: highlighted whatever decisions are made they need to be ones that reinforce the trust users have in WordPress and in auto updates.
@desrosj: There are also some scenarios where things may reasonably continue working without the dependency, but that would break or become missing currently. This would especially be true for anything that displays content. The content would just go missing without the site owner knowing.
@azaozz: A plugin that stops working either because it was auto-disabled, or because it is missing a dependency is a bad thing that needs to be fixed.
A discussion on the use of emails to admins followed, Perhaps sending another email to the admins to alert users. View the discussion on Slack.
@jorbin: suggestion to highlight all the ways that a plugin could end up with unmet or mismet dependencies and what the expectation would be in each of them
@christopher allford : For a feature that has sat in discussion for so long I think pushing through with a minimal implementation (sans the consent-less deactivation) is a great first step. That will naturally incite discussions about iteration (such as sending dependency information in update metadata to let WordPress opt-out of updating incompatibilities).
Summary of two main concerns:
- How do we ensure we’ve identified and resolved any issues with this feature during beta so we ship something that does not hurt user confidence in upgrades?
- How can we better communicate these changes so folks can be prepared?
Wider discussion surrounded:
- How we determine that a large feature is “ready” to ship?
- How are can we better communicate when a feature needs further testing after being merged. For example, Is a dev-note enough or should there be some other way to communicate these changes?.
Highlighted posts
The full list of posts from the last week in core can be read on the agenda at this link.
Also, this section provides updates on the core-editor and the Developer blog, including the latest topics that need writers.
Open floor
Anyone can ask for a ticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. or PR to be discussed during an open floor. To help us provide good feedback, please include a link to the issue you want to discuss in the dev-chat agenda notes prior to the meeting.
Props to @joemcgill for reviewing.
#6-5, #dev-chat, #summary
