Summary, Dev Chat, February 14, 2024

Start of the meeting in SlackSlack 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: props to @webcommsat

Facilitator dev chat: props to @joemcgill

Forthcoming Releases

Major releasemajor 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 another request this week for contributors to fulfill roles of Mission Control, Committercommitter 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.

• Action: comment on the post 6.5 release parties schedule and host.

@webcommsat asked if there was an update on scheduled bugbug 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 during the betaBeta 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. period of 6.5. In the meantime, she marked the current schedule post as sticky as requested by @oglekler.

• Action: The triagetriage The act of evaluating and sorting bug reports, in order to decide priority, severity, and other factors. leads for 6.5 can update the post with scheduled dates for 6.5

Maintenance releases

There is one ticket in the 6.4.4 milestone that is ready for back-porting. However, @jorbin advised that he does not currently expect another maintenance release before 6.5.

Discussions

Proposal: Implement a PHP autoloader in WordPress Core (Slack link)

To summarize the main topics that were raised during that discussion:

1. A decision needs to be made about how to handle early loading/overriding of coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. classes. This seems to be the primary concern to address.
2. There is some concern about the implementation requiring manual updating of the class file, though it’s acknowledged that this change that can be addressed in the future.
3. A request was made that the previous blocking concerns raised in the original proposal ticket should be summarized and addressed in the new ticket, or the new one closed as duplicate unless there is substantive differences in what is being proposed beyond implementation details.

This will likely need to be included early in a release cycle (WordPress 6.6 at the earliest) and will likely need support of a core committer to help shepherd into the project.

Highlighted posts

The full list of posts from the last week in core can be read on the agenda at this link.

Also, from last week’s agenda, this section provides updates on the core-editor and the Developer blog, including the latest topics that need writers.

Open floor

@costdev provided an update on the PluginPlugin 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 feature for 6.5.

We’ve been triaging and resolving some issues since commit, many of them minor and we’ve discussed some of the larger issues and are on the path to resolving those.

After the meeting concluded, the team published the following post:
Merge Announcement: Plugin Dependencies