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WordPress 5.4 is shaping up to be the best WordPress 2020 has seen!
As a user, you’ll see new blocks and enhancements in the block editor, new embeds, and improvements in the WordPress Admin experience.
As a developer, you’ll see 122 enhancements and feature requests, 210 bug fixes, and more! Of course, all those improvements mean code changes, which could in turn require you to make updates to your site, plugin, or theme.
So take a look through this Field Guide, and see what’s relevant to you and your users, among the many improvements coming in 5.4…
Accessibility
On the 14 updates related to Accessibility in 5.4, you’ll want to particularly note changes to the WordPress Admin Bar, to the calendar and recent comments widgets, on the Menu screen, and bugs reported by the WPCampus accessibility report.
Block Editor
The block editor has continued its rapid iteration since WordPress 5.0. Now it has Gutenberg version 7.5 bundled with WordPress 5.4; that’s ten releases all bundled into WordPress 5.4 (versions 6.6, 6.7, 6.8, 6.9, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4 and 7.5)! Bug fixes and performance improvements from Gutenberg versions 7.6 will also be part of 5.4.
The WordPress 5.4 Beta 1 post highlights a lot of new features and improvements across these releases, though you’ll also want to note the impressive achievement of 14% loading-time reduction and 51% time-to-type reduction (for a particularly long post of ~36,000 words, ~1,000 blocks) since WordPress 5.3.
Below you’ll find details on two new blocks, button component updates, block collections, default fullscreen mode for new installs/devices, custom keyboard shortcuts, general block editor API updates, new block variations API, a new gradient theme API, markup and style-related changes, and a new @wordpress/create-block package for block scaffolding.
On the 14 updates of the Customizer component, WordPress 5.4 improves accessibility of focused elements as a follow-up to WordPress 5.3 Admin CSS changes, adds documentation of existing Customizer functions and hooks, removes apple-touch-icon-precomposed deprecated meta tags, and improves Menu items selection logic.
Please note that some unused Customizer classes are now formally deprecated:
On the 5 updates in the Menus component, WordPress 5.4 improves keyboard accessibility of the Menu items selection tab panel and streamlines the user interface.
If your plugins add custom fields to menu items, you’ll want to update your code to use the new wp_nav_menu_item_custom_fields hook:
On the 22 updates related to the REST API, WordPress 5.4 now supports “OR” taxonomy relation parameter in Post Controller, adds selective link embedding and introduces some changes in the WP_REST_Server method. Read below for more details on these updates:
On the 3 updates to the Shortcodes component, WordPress 5.4 introduces documentation improvements and a new function: apply_shortcodes. This function is an alias of do_shortcode, which is still supported.
On the 9 updates to the Widgets component, WordPress 5.4 introduces accessibility and user interface enhancements on the Widgets Admin screen and changes in the Recent Comments and Calendar Widgets HTML markup.
There are even more goodies in 5.4, like the new wp-env (a zero config tool for painless local WordPress environments), enhancements to favicon handling, better information about errors in wp_login_failed, a new site ID in multisite’s newblog_notify_siteadmin filter, a new TikTok video embed and removal of the CollegeHumor embed, storing the original URL of media attachments in _source_url post meta, improved accessibility by loading the Admin Bar with wp_body_open, avoiding duplicate IDs in the Recent Comments widget, a new parameter in the lostpassword_post action in retrieve_password(), theme headers supporting “Requires at least” and “Requires PHP” declarations, and the delete_posts capability won’t trigger PHP notices for custom post types. Read through the dev notes below to see details on all these changes coming in 5.4.
Over 198 bugs, 121 enhancements and feature requests, and 8 blessed tasks have been marked as fixed in WordPress 5.4. Some additional ones to highlight include:
Bootstrap/Load: Enhancement to favicon handling (#47398)
Bundled Theme: Twenty Twenty: Add social icon for WhatsApp (#49098)
Comments: Add “In response to …” before threaded comments in comment feed (#43429)
Now that 5.4 has been officially kicked off, bug scrubs will happen weekly all the way up to the final release. Keep an eye on this schedule – it will change often to reflect the latest information.
These scrubs are separate and in addition to the normal scrubbing and triage by individual components. Some of those sessions include:
Design Triage: Every Monday 17:30 UTC at #design Gutenberg Design Triage: Every Tuesday 17:00 UTC at #design Accessibility Scrub: Every Friday 14:00 UTC at #accessibility
Also, the ongoing APAC-friendly #core bug scrub session every Thursday at 06:00 UTC will continue during the cycle, alternating focus between core and editor.
Next, the Accessibility team has announced a few extra scrubs for the 5.4 cycle. You can read about those here.
Finally, a reminder that anyone — Yes, you! — can host a bug scrub at anytime. You can work through any tickets you’re comfortable with. In fact, if you plan one that’s 5.4-focused, we’ll add it to the schedule here along with your name. Finally, you’ll get well deserved props in the weekly Dev Chat, as well as in the #props Slack channel!
All open tickets for 5.4, in order of priority, can be found here. Tickets that haven’t seen any love in a while are in particular need. Those can be found in this query.
If you’d like to lead a bug scrub or have any questions or concerns about the schedule, please leave a comment or reach out to me directly.
WordPress 5.4 Release Candidate 3 is scheduled for Tuesday March 18th, 2020.
trunk is open for 5.5, but the priority is on 5.4 Release Candidate cycle. Polyglots Team already started to work on translation packages.
Components Check-In
@imath worked on Ticket #49236 and needs some feedback. @jeffpaul advised him to slate it to 5.5 with early keyword so it could be handled at the early stage of the development cycle.
@garrett-eclipse found a list of the components and sub-components without maintainers:
There’s the potential to merge some of the less active sub-components like Charset and Emoji into it’s parent Formatting component. But that would needs further discussion.
Open floor
The main discussion of the open-floor was the Block Editor’s Full Screen Mode enabled by default since WP 5.4 Release Candidate 1.
Here is a quick transcript of the discussion. Please note that no decision has been taken during this chat.
@peterwilsoncc wanted to know when was this committed to the WordPress repository. @jorgefilipecosta answered it was introduced during Beta 3, before WP 5.4 RC 1 was released.
@peterwilsoncc: “same for the release in which it was moved from experimental to stable (for want of a better word) Gutenberg?”. @jorgefilipecosta answered that Full screen mode was not experimental, it was stabilized and working for a long time, it was just not enabled by default (although some hosts were doing it), and the Gutenberg team just had a small PR that enabled the mode by default.
@peterwilsoncc noted that in the discussion on the Make/Core blog, @matt mentions some user testing. @peterwilsoncc asked how much was done.
@joostdevalk proposed to revert and take another look for 5.5, given the negative feedback about this change.
@clorith pointed out that it is still being worked on, and even had a design change between RC1 and RC2. It feels like it’s not ready, and needs more UX work before it goes in.
@chanthaboune asked how the feedback has been in support forums. @ipstenu answered that it’s hard to get feedback in support forums at this stage, since only people beta testing would see it and they tend to be a little more technical savvy than mainstream users.
@youknowriad wanted to clarify some of these questions: – “I believe we should just the merits of the full screen on its own not whether it can be disabled or not. For instance the customizer is in full screen and it can’t be disabled. – The UX work after RC1 was a bug fix for RTL languages. – The feedback is balanced. There were good comments about it. Most negative feedback is about the fact that it becomes default. – This feature has been on the Gutenberg plugin for more than a year now, It’s in before 5.0.”
@pbiron asked if it was enabled by default in the plugin before being merged into core.
@youknowriad answered that was a request from @matt as release lead prior to the RC.
@joostdevalk added that it’s sounds good to say that @matt has every right to make that call. But he disagrees that this is a good idea in its current form, and he think it will be necessary to guide changes like this more. The Block Editor is changing its default behavior without explaining that in the interface.
For @peterwilsoncc, at this point the question is whether it should be enabled by default rather than whether the feature should exist.
@joemcgill’s main concern is that the reaction to this change will be for people to install code that permanently overrides the feature preference, which makes it harder to move to a fullscreen mode default in the future.
@nilovelez noted that it may seem daunting for existing users, as some part of the UI will apparently be gone, but existing users are the ones that won’t even notice the change. Some attendees disagreed on that as the current behavior for existing users is saved with LocalStorage so it won’t stay for users that use different devices to connect to WordPress Admin.
@clorith also mentioned that Apple clears LocalStorage at set intervals, so users would lose their “don’t use fullscreen” option.
@johnbillion feels concerned that how to switch back to non full screen mode is not obvious.
@youknowriad answered the argument can be turned to the opposite direction for people preferring the full screen mode if it’s disabled. That’s why he think the core team should discuss whether it’s good not whether it can be disabled. For @clorith, given that it’s been off by default, then this is an unexpected change, and thus should not be used as the basis.
@joostdevalk proposed to show how to get out of full screen mode and how to set personal preference in the interface, and save preferences as a user meta and not on the user’s browser.
@jorgefilipecosta pointed out that a new welcome modal is shown to new users. He asked if it would make sense to introduce full screen mode there. @joyously stated that most of the users wouldn’t see it. @jorgefilipecosta, answered that users that won’t see the new modal won’t switch to default FullScreen mode, their preferences will be kept unchanged.
@audrasjb added that users don’t necessarily come to the editor from the posts list. With fullscreen mode and the WP logo button, they can only go back to the Posts list instead of having the full Admin menu. This is the only Admin action/link directly available after editing/publishing a post.
@jorgefilipecosta raised that the development of database persisting mechanism is in progress and that should happen soon. @ipstenu added it really should be a requirement for this feature to land in WordPress Core. @jorgefilipecosta mentioned database persisting for user’s preferences is expected to land in WP 5.5.
Adding some onboarding for when the switch is made
Enable once the user’s preference is saved in the database
Clarifying exiting full-screen mode (currently active, stated for completeness)
@johnbillion pointed out Matt mentioned that some hosts enabled full screen mode. He asked what is the feedback been regarding not getting lost, switching modes, etc.
@chanthaboune tried to summarize the concerns raised by the attendees:
Consistency/persistency of the visual experience
More thoughtful user flows
Clearer introduction to the full screen functionality
@youknowriad Strong focus on: the Block Patterns UI and the Full site editing.
@gziolo Focus on block editor features API and registering block types from metadata in PHP.
@nosolosw Focus on expanding the global styles system to other areas: first step the custom colors ( __experimentalUseColor component) and try to make them work with global styles.
@brentswisher Continue working on storybook integration of components.
@karmatosed Focus on Global styles wrap up for v1 and Navigation.
@jorgefilipecosta Focus on the 5.4 release, and work on a package for generic screen functionality (share code between edit-post , edit-site etc), and global styles.
@mapk In relation to FSE (Full Site Editing), Creating/editing templates and isolating template parts.
@itsjonq Focus: adding more style controls to Gutenberg blocks, and making the controls easier to use.
Following on from last week’s discussion about meeting times and daylight savings changes, no one expressed a preference so we decided to keep meeting at the same time relative to UTC.
CSS audit status update
Progress this week was essentially creating tickets:
The REST API weekly component chat will occur this week at March 12, 2020 18:00 UTC in the #core-restapi Slack channel.
Please note: We have not changed the UTC time for this meeting. If your country has recently adjusted for daylight savings time, this may be a different hour than the past few months.
Agenda Items:
Discuss priorities for the 5.5 development cycle
Discuss 5.4 documentation updates
Open Floor
All agenda items are welcome, from all teams and contributors; please post them as comments below or let us know by joining the meeting.
It was the first meeting for the Plugins & Themes Auto-updates feature, and this kick-off meeting was really efficient and worthwhile for the project 🚀
WP Auto-updates feature general scope
Here is the current general scope of the Feature Plugin:
Ability for website administrators to opt-in to automatic updates for plugins and themes in the related WP-Admin screens
✅ Done for plugins
🔲 Themes: needs to be ported. Slated for milestone 0.4.
Ability to enable/disable auto-updates on a plugin-by-plugin and theme-by-theme basis
✅ Done for plugins
🔲 Themes: needs to be ported. Slated for milestone 0.4.
Email notifications to send regular auto-update summaries to website administrators
🔲 Plugins: Slated for milestone 0.3.
🔲 Themes: Slated for milestone 0.4.
Hooks and constants to help developers disable or programmatically define auto-update settings
✅ Done for plugins
🔲 Themes: needs to be ported. Slated for milestone 0.4.
For the moment, the team started with plugins autoupdates, then all this work will have to be ported to Themes screen.
@audrasjb shared some screenshots of the current design of WordPress Admin screens:
Click images to open them in full size (it will opens in a new tab).
@mclancy3 will open GitHub issues to provide some feedback on the Plugins screen’s user interface.
Work in progress
@pbiron raised an issue with a premium plugin that assumes there is no extra column on the plugins list table and add its own column with a colspan attribute. As mentioned by @clorith, this is not a bug in WP Auto-update feature plugin but rather a bug in this particular plugin. @jeffpaul proposed to add this to a Known Issues/Caveats section in readme files.
@jeffpaul also proposed to port the Features/to-do list section from readme.md into GitHub issues. @audrasjb already ported Email notifications and Themes auto-updates into issues, and @jeffpaul will take care of the remaining ones.
@jeffpaul pointed out that 10up uses two GitHub Actions to help deploy plugins to WordPress.org as well as readme/asset updates. He proposed to submit a PR to add those here and help streamline deploys to WordPress.org. For the moment, @audrasjbgenerates releases from the GitHub repository and deploy them manually on the plugin repository, using SVN. If it’s not a top priority, it would be nice to improve this workflow.
As proposed earlier in core-sitemaps meeting, @pbiron suggested to add a label to issues when something different will have to be done to the plugin code when it gets merged into core. @audrasjb stated that it would be nice to introduce this kin of labels and also to use DocsBlocks comments to point out things that will need specific implementation on WP Core. @jeffpaul proposed to use a GitHub pull request template for that.
About next development steps, @audrasjb is currently implementing email notifications. It shouldn’t be a problem given there is an useful automatic_updates_complete action to hook on.
Porting auto-updates features from Plugins to Themes will probably be a way more difficult, as there is not so much hooks in the Themes screen template. Themes in multisite is fairly straightforward, since a list table is used there, but for single sites there is no list table so what we’ve done for plugins won’t really apply. We’ll probably end up with JavaScript hacks to include the interface opt-in buttons and informations. @jeffpaul proposed to expand the focus of 5.4.x to include those hooks in the themes screen, which sounds like a perfect option right now.
@audrasjb thinks this issue is out of the feature plugin’s scope. @clorith added that if auto-updates are off by default, yes this would be out of scope for the first release, but definitely something to look into in the future. If they are on by default, this would be a blocker. @audrasjb answered that Plugins, Themes and Core (major) auto-updates are all meant to be opt-in, in the 2020 general roadmap. The team agreed to keep this issue open for the moment.
@audrasjb said Postponing updates is a great feature, but it’s not on this feature plugin scope, and not sure it’s even in Core scope. @clorith pointed out that the core solution should facilitate by providing filters and such, but not add all those options. The team agreed to keep this issue open for the moment.
Next steps
@audrasjb will focus on email notifications development and grant GitHub commit access to @pbiron.
A call for testing will be published on Make/Test once 0.2.1 is released with the PHP notices fixes.
@jeffpaul will work on improving the GitHub repository organization.
@nerrad as been kind enough to offer to share an aggregate of news relevant in the Gutenberg and general JavaScript ecosystem, to include in the summary notes for each week’s meeting.
Discussion:
There was an agreement that it’s a great idea.
The plan is to add this as an extra section in our JavaScript chat summary starting from this week.
Action items:
New agendas should be structured to include separate sections “Agenda Topics” and “News Roundup”
Note-takers should aim to include these items in the published summary notes.
@aduth added a pull request about a potential revision to our default ESLint configurations (i.e. coding standards) at https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/20737. He just wanted to bring it to attention, since any of these sorts of coding standards changes are good to highlight. There’s been some positive feedback already on the pull request that was echoed in the chat.
@isabel_brison created a ticket https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/49606 to introduce visual regression testing in the WordPress core, so we can clean up some of the old CSS with confidence. She was wondering if this type of testing has been discussed or explored at all for core or Gutenberg. Also, would there be value in adding it for Gutenberg, too?
Discussion:
There’s no visual regression testing in Gutenberg as of today, but there are parts of the tooling that could make it possible, like taking screenshots with the headless browser via Puppeteer. At least with the ticket as presented, it seems primarily focused on existing screens which may not be expected to change, and thus primarily with the aim of preventing regressions while doing CSS refactoring.
The tests themselves are minimal, but the reference images are not insignificant though and need to be updated periodically. The biggest concern is the size of the assets that would have to be maintained and how to ensure they don’t pollute repositories with source code.
There is a pull request that explores primitive UI components that can be used both in native mobile apps and in the browser: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/19104. There was no specific discussion item attached to this, but it was requested that anyone interested take a look and provide any feedback they have to drive further development.
News roundup
A few links to Gutenberg and JavaScript related news (curated by @nerrad).
The March edition of What’s next in Gutenberg is up. Focuses are: Block content area, global styles, patterns, and general tightening up of previous work.
A really interesting library of templates has been launched by Gutenberg Hub. Could this help inform some of the patterns work various folks have been looking into? What’s really cool about this library is that the initial launch only uses core Blocks (except for the contact forms)! You can read the wpTavern’s take on this library here.
General Block Editor API Updates include: Meta attribute sources deprecated, Shortcode transforms configuration can include an isMatch function, AsyncModeProvider API, custom media upload handler as a setting, easier drag and drop, rich text won’t set focus when applying a format, a new guide component, and deprecation of @wordpress/nux.
With WordPress 5.4 around the corner, Gutenberg 7.7 is another exciting release. It introduces patterns and the first iteration of a new block UI design which aims to synthetize the learnings from these past couple years of Gutenberg being out in the wild.
New Block UI
After more than a year from its first production release, the community pushed the boundaries of the editor further than we’d have expected. The number of third-party blocks exploded and millions of users are interacting with the editor in different ways. This led to a refresh of the Block UI to apply some of the lessons learned in the meantime.
The redesign includes:
A simpler Block Toolbar.
Better UI color contrast.
Consistent focus styles.
Redesigned icons.
Grid-based spacing and sizes.
And more.
As with any feature in the editor, this is the initial release and there’s still more work planned to bring more consistency in the remaining UI elements: sidebar panels, drop-down menus, etc.
Block Patterns
While the editor has a rich set of built-in blocks, it is sometimes challenging for users to compose these blocks together in order to achieve the best designs for their pages. And as we accelerate towards Full Site Editing, this becomes an important challenge to solve.
Different existing community-provided solutions have addressed this by providing rich sets of templates/layout that are ready to use and prevent that dreaded “white page syndrome”. There is a need to bring some consistency and coherence to these features. Gutenberg 7.7 introduces Block Patterns: predefined block layouts, ready to insert and tweak to address that problem.
As a first iteration, the Block Patterns UI has been added as a sidebar plugin from where you can pick and insert the patterns. This is considered an MVP and the UI is expected to evolve over the next releases.
As a start, the plugin comes with a small limited set of patterns. The list will ultimately grow and be opened to third-party authors.
7.7 🇵🇭
Features
Add the initial version of the Patterns UI as a sidebar plugin (this is not the final interface and work is in progress to integrate with the main block inserter). 20354, 20715.
Plugin: Bump minimum WordPress version to 5.3 20628
@wordrpess/priority-queue: Fix for environments that don’t have window defined. 20486
Update jest configuration to only ignore tests from /wordpress/ as a subdirectory 20420
Performance Benchmark
The following benchmark compares performance for a particularly sizeable post (~ 36000 words, ~ 1000 blocks) over the last releases. Such a large post isn’t representative of the average editing experience but is adequate for spotting variations in performance.
