Agenda, Dev Chat, Wednesday June 5, 2024

The next WordPress Developers Chat will take place on  Wednesday June 5, 2024 at 20:00 UTC in the core channel on Make WordPress Slack.

The live meeting will focus on the discussion for upcoming releases, and have an open floor section.

Additional items will be referred to in the various curated agenda sections, as below. If you have ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. requests for help, please do continue to post details in the comments section at the end of this agenda.

Announcements

WordPress 6.6 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. 1 is scheduled for June 4. Contributors will now be focused on testing and fixing bugs discovered during beta testing.

Forthcoming releases

Next 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.: 6.6

We are currently in the WordPress 6.6 release cycle. See the Roadmap Post for details about what is planned for this release.

Next maintenance release: 6.5.4

The release candidaterelease candidate One of the final stages in the version release cycle, this version signals the potential to be a final release to the public. Also see alpha (beta). for 6.5.4 is now available for testing. The full release is scheduled for June 5.

Next GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ release: 18.5

Gutenberg 18.5 is scheduled for June 5 and will include these issues. This is the last version of Gutenberg to be included in WordPress 6.6.

Discussions

As we’re in the middle of the 6.6 release cycle, we’ll prioritize any items for this release. Please review the Editor Updates section of this agenda for a list of updates of several key features related to this release.

Editor updates

You can keep up to date with the major Editor features that are currently in progress for 6.6 by viewing these Iteration issues.

Props to @annezazu for putting together these updates.

• Synced Patterns now allow for overrides and they are connected with the BlockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. Bindings APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways. – If you are interested on how this works @santosguillamot just published an Update for the Beta phase – with short videos and a list of how things work and what will have to wait for 6.7
• Inserter: a PR landed to show all blocks when searching for blocks while a block is selected. The prior experience showed either a limited set or no blocks depending on allowed blocks.
• Block bindings: 6.6 will see the ability to edit custom field values directly from blocks when they are connected thanks to some recent work ahead of the beta 1 cut off.
• Color & style variations: a discussion is underway around whether to  Allow theme authors to opt out of color and typography preset autogeneration in WordPress 6.6. Please chime in with your thoughts!
• Unified publish flows: an issue is open to consider returning revisionsRevisions The WordPress revisions system stores a record of each saved draft or published update. The revision system allows you to see what changes were made in each revision by dragging a slider (or using the Next/Previous buttons). The display indicates what has changed in each revision. to a higher level of prominence, another great area to share feedback and your perspective.
• Background images: support was added for relative theme path URLs in top-level theme.json styles, meaning a theme developer can set a relative path to an image asset as a background image value, and that path will resolve correctly to absolute path of the file in the theme directory no matter where the theme is installed. A follow up issue was opened to bring this same option for relative paths to template and pattern files.

Outside of the above, @annezazu has published the 6.6 source of truth early look. It’s expected things might shift during the beta period but hopefully this helps folks prepare for the release and help educate others on what’s to come.

Tickets for assistance

Tickets for 6.6 will be prioritized.

Please include details of tickets / PRs and the links in the comments, and if you intend to be available during the meeting if there are any questions or you will be async.

Open floor

Items for this can be shared in the comments.

Props to @joemcgill for reviewing.

#agenda, #core, #dev-chat