A month with the WordPress core team – March 2024

In March there were many discussions about WordPress 6.5 and how to resolve problems with the Font Library.
Eventually, the release was postponed until April 2. Read more in the announcement post for WordPress 6.5.
At the beginning of the month, Sergey also joined team Yoast and Bluehost at WordCamp Asia. Checkout this recap of the event.

Luckily, you don’t have to wait until your next WordCamp to attend a contributor day. Yoast Contributor day 2024 – April edition, takes place on April 18, only two weeks away. This is an online event that is open for everyone, and we will be using Zoom. There will be tables for contributing to ​#Core, #Documentation, #Polyglots, #Sustainability, #Themes, #Photo, #WP-Cli.
You can signup below:

Yoast Contributor day 2024 – April edition

Our monthly updates

Carolina

I continue to divide my time between WordPress core, Gutenberg, and the bundled themes. Before a major release there is usually an overlap, since issues need to be solved in both Gutenberg and WordPress core. I have monitored new Trac tickets and Gutenberg issues related to WordPress 6.5, and helped with testing.
I was sick the week before the release, and I am grateful to the documentation leads that followed up on the changelogs for the bundled themes when I was unavailable.

Gutenberg

Gutenberg 18.0 finally includes the option to use the featured image in the Media & Text block. This was not an easy task for me. I have been working on this on and off since June 2023, and I am glad it is merged. There is still a known issue with the alt text.

I want to mention that work has started on allowing negative margins on blocks. I opened the issue for this back in 2021 and I get daily requests for this feature. You can follow the early explorations here.

Bundled themes

Tammie Lister has done a great job kicking off communications around the bundled theme task force. There are plans to post regular updates and to hold ticket triage sessions on the WordPress Slack. Not least, she has closed a number of bundled theme Trac tickets. I hope to catch up after the WordPress 6.5 release. There are currently 356 open issues in the Bundled Theme component.

Core tests

I have continued to learn more about PHPUnit tests and helped prepare existing tests by making them compatible with future versions of PHPUnit. The team has had coding sessions where we have focused on this work. I feel that it is important for me to continue doing this on a weekly basis, or I will forget how to work with the tests.

Andrea

In the last month, I continued focusing mostly on the WordPress editor to fix accessibility issues and improve the user interface consistency. In my research and testing I found out that even some commonly used editor blocks have usability and accessibility issues that still need to be addressed. The Social Icons block, for example, has room for improvements and it is still in a state I’d define not ideal. Other features in the editor have fundamental usability and accessibility issues like, for example, the block variations and the ‘transform block to’ feature. I collected my findings in a series of GitHub issues and submitted some pull requests fo fix some of them.

Besides development, my other tasks as Roma WordPress Meetup co-organizer and delegated person to run the Accessibility team Office Hours proceed steadily. Participation to the local meetup is increasing and our fellow attendees are pretty proactive when it comes to interaction and networking. In the next meetup, we will experiment a new way to host the speaker remotely by setting up a videocall for the speaker presentation, preserving the ability for all attendees to interact and ask questions.

Sergey

WordCamp Asia

In early March, I attended WordCamp Asia 2024 in Taipei. This was my first visit to Asia.

WordCamp Asia is one of the flagship events of the year in the WordPress space, each time held in a different country so that the attendees could get more familiar with other cultures. To me, it feels like a family reunion. I enjoyed catching up with old friends, making some new connections, watching a few interesting talks, and learning more about Taiwan.

On the contributor day, I helped leading the Core Performance table. The goal of a contributor day is to help people find their way around one or more teams making WordPress, and answer their questions so they could get started with contributing. By the end of the day, we made some progress with the Performance Lab plugin and triaged some tickets with the performance focus on Core Trac.

I am very grateful for this opportunity to reunite with the WordPress community in person.

WordPress 6.5

For the past two months I continued triaging and reviewing tickets for the next major release, WordPress 6.5, and started looking into some early tickets for WordPress 6.6, as part of my duties as a Core Committer.

I made thirty-four 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:

• Continuing with various coding standards fixes in core. See ticket #60700 for more details.
• Continuing with various documentation fixes in core. See ticket #60699 for more details.