A month with the WordPress Core team – July 2023

As WordPress 6.3 enters the release candidate stage, we’re putting some finishing touches on it and continue working on some long-standing projects. Read on to learn what we’ve been up to for the past month!

Our monthly updates

Andrea

In the last month, with the WordPress 6.3 release approaching, testing of new features and user interfaces has been more intensive. Actually, using a software in Beta phase that precedes the release is an effective way to discover small bugs and unpolished features that need to be fixed. Using the software as a normal user would do can surface glitches and bugs that went unnoticed during development and review.

Thanks to this in depth testing phase, I reported a long series of issues mainly related to the Gutenberg editor. A couple of them were pretty interesting from an accessibility perspective: some input fields received focus by the means of the autofocus attribute. It is worth reminding that using autofocus is generally considered not the best choice, as users may find themselves dumped in the middle of a form, potentially without context. Particularly relevant from this point of view: #52601 and #52605.

I spent some time submitting some pull requests to fix some of these issues and thanks also to the prompt intervent of other contributors most of these issues have been solved.

Ari

Since we are very close to a major WordPress release (v6.3), I spent most of my time doing code reviews and facilitating the process for others. It’s not glorified work, but it still is essential and time-consuming to ensure the project’s health.

Besides that, I continued working on some long-standing projects:

• Gutenberg and WP-Core performance improvements
• Introduce experiments forms and input blocks (#44214)
• Code quality improvements in WP-Core and Gutenberg
• Introduce a PHP autoloader in WordPress Core to reduce memory usage.
• Add support for SQLite in WordPress Core

Carolina

The past month I have done a lot of manual testing of WordPress version 6.3. I have reports new bugs, reviewed pull requests and patches, and I have worked on bundled theme trac tickets. I have also started helping out with the 6.3 end user documentation and reviewed upcoming changes to the Theme Developer Handbook.

In the Gutenberg GitHub repository I focused on issues and pull requests related to 6.3, and worked on my other open pull requests. Six pull requests for the new patterns sidebar in the Site Editor were merged. Next, I plan to continue enhancing the text-orientation feature.

I also opened a new discussion: Add theme type to the issue template? Because I am finding it difficult to reproduce or troubleshoot theme issues when the reporter does not mention if they are using a block theme, hybrid, or classic theme.

Sergey

WordPress 6.3

For the past month I continued triaging and reviewing tickets for the next major release, WordPress 6.3, as part of my duties as a Core Committer.

I made eighty-two 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:

• Adding a “Get Involved” tab to the About page. This aims to make all the various ways of contributing to open-source WordPress project more discoverable, as well as make it easier to find an area that aligns with new contributor’s skills and interests. See ticket #23348 for more details.
• Adding a sustainability focus to Core Trac. See ticket #meta7039 for more details.
• Continuing with various coding standards fixes in core. See ticket #57839 for more details.
• Using str_starts_with(), str_ends_with(), and str_contains() PHP functions where appropriate in core. See tickets #58012, #58206, and #58220 for more details.