A month with the WordPress core team – October 2023

In October the team has participated in the Yoast contributor day and continued to work towards the WordPress 6.3.2 and 6.4 releases. A security & maintenance release was published on October 12, and the first release candidate for WordPress 6.4 was published on October 17.

Our monthly updates

Andrea

With the approaching of the WordPress 6.4 release, scheduled for November 7th, I’ve been dedicating my last weeks to testing accessibility of the new features introduced in WordPress, most notably the ones that add new user interfaces. Amongst them, the Image Lightbox is one of the most important ones and it offered room for improvements and fixes. The Lightbox is a setting of the WordPress editor Image block that makes an Image block show an ‘enlarged’ version of the image within a modal dialog. It’s probably the first time the editor adds an user interface on the front end that requires some advanced accessibility treatment. There have been quite a few findings and issues discovered in the initial implementation, all reported in a series of GitHub issues together with other issues. I had the opportunity to propose some Pull Requests to solve some of these issues, while other ones have been solved by other contributors. Overall, it has been a good opportunity for collaboration.

The Accessibility Office Hours meetings proceed steadily, although active participation is still improving. In the meantime, I had the opportunity to get more involved in the WordPress community in Roma, as I’m now a co-organizer of the Roma WordPress meetup. I’m very glad for this new task as I’ll have the chance to get in touch with many other users and contributors, listen to their needs and struggles, and get a better sense of how the WordPress users actually use our beloved publishing platform.

Ari

As we’re getting closer and closer to the WordPress 6.4 release, I spent a lot of time doing code reviews. But that’s not all! This past month I also focused on the following projects:

• Performance improvement: Reduced the use of the _wp_array_get – #5244
• Twenty Twenty-Four theme: Performance improvements in the way block styles get loaded, and some more code reviews there
• PHP autoloader: I continued working on this feature – which I believe is very important for the longevity of WP long-term. I updated the implementation for WordPress 6.4 and everything is once again up to date (#3470).
• Forms blocks: After more than a year of development, we finally managed to merge this feature! You can see the pull-request in  #44214 and can start testing it by enabling the feature in the Gutenberg-experiments screen.
• Allow using CSS level 4 viewport-relative units: A rather small (but important nonetheless) tweak. This will allow theme-developers to use the newest CSS units (#54415)

Carolina

As the temperature grows colder (We are expecting the first snow in Stockholm today), I have not been able to escape the dreaded sinus infections, so I have not worked a full month.

• During the Yoast contributor day I led the core table and the participants worked on both core and Gutenberg issues and on the Twenty Twenty-Four theme.
• For Twenty Twenty-Four I have worked on bug fixes and completed an accessibility-ready review. The review was made over Zoom with two other participants but was not recorded. The accessibility problems that I found have since been solved.

Core & Gutenberg

I have continued to focus on issues related to 6.4 and my Gutenberg pull requests. I am starting to think about what I want to focus on for the next WordPress release.

The theme developer handbook

I have not had time to focus on the handbook, but I bring good news. A new chapter has been published, and you can read it here: Global Settings and Styles (theme.json).

Sergey

WordPress 6.4

For the past month I continued triaging and reviewing tickets for the next major release, WordPress 6.4, as part of my duties as a Core Committer.

I made forty-seven 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 /login.php as an alias for the login page. See ticket #40762 for more details.
• Disabling attachment pages for new installations. See ticket #57913 for more details.
• Allowing Quick Edit to be disabled for custom post types or taxonomies. See ticket #16502 for more details.
• Reducing the use of the _wp_array_get() function to improve performance. See ticket #59405 for more details.
• Upgrading WPCS in core to version 3.0.0. See ticket #59161 for more details.