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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.
Remove update time text after manual update – PR 43
Ensure “Automatic Updates” column is not added if no content would be output in the column – PR 57
Specific messages for delayed or disabled cron events – PR 58
Prevent mis-match between count in Auto-updates Enabled view and the number of plugins displayed for that view by applying ‘all_plugins’ filter before computing that count. – PR 59
Thanks @pbiron for his invaluable help on version 0.3.
@audrasjb shared a screenshot with an example of email notification:
Please feel free to propose string changes to this first implementation of email notifications.
Version 0.4.0 will focus on backporting every auto-updates features to Themes.@audrasjb to merge this pull request as a first step for the work on themes support. Then, the idea is to open pull requests for each function/feature to be backported, so it’s easier to track progress on themes support.
@bookdude13 asked whether it’s better to open up issues to break up the work on the themes port, or to directly address them with pull requests.
@audrasjb will open an issue to list all the functions/feature that need proper backport and to track the team’s progression.
There is also a few background tasks opened by @jeffpaul concerning the GitHub repository.
Concerning Email notifications, @joostdevalk proposed to add links to the plugins changelog in those emails. @pbiron answered that it might be hard for plugins/themes not in the WordPress.org repo. @joostdevalk proposed to make it filterable. @audrasjb proposed to make the notification entirely filterable. @joostdevalk felt concerned about plugins that would override the email even when multiple plugins are updated at once.
@afragen proposed to use a filter that could be specific for each, like for example: apply_filters( 'wp_autoupdates_email', $text, $slug )
This item will be discussed again during the next team meeting.
@pbiron wanted to discuss a specific pull request. It proposes to add filters to control whether the Enable/Disable buttons appear in the UI for a given plugin. @pbiron and @audrasjb agreed that having a filter that is specific to the UI is not the way to go and it is to be filterable then the existing auto_update_plugin hook should be used. For now, the pull request will stay open for further discussion.
Next meeting is planned on Tuesday March 24, 2020 at 18:00 UTC and will take place on #core-auto-updates Slack channel.
@since x.x.x: Should always be 3-digit (e.g. @since 3.6.0).
This is in contrast to the PHP documentation standards, which include guidelines around using @since as a changelog:
If significant changes have been made to a function, hook, class, or method, additional @since tags, versions, and descriptions should be added to provide a changelog for that function.
Proposal: Incorporate some adaptation of the PHP since changelog guidelines into the JavaScript inline documentation standards.
Discussion Points:
@nerrad asks if this could be used to pull documentation automatically from the source code. This is quite possible, and is likely exactly what is done with the PHP source code documentation (example documentation and source).
Action Items:
Update the JS documentation standards, assuming there is no opposition presented in the coming days.
Disable the JSDoc since format validation for Gutenberg in the related changelog (already done)
News Roundup
This roundup contains a few links for Gutenberg and JavaScript related news curated (and commented on) by @nerrad.
Gutenberg 7.7 was released (and shortly thereafter 7.7.1). Highlights in this release are: the new block ui (otherwise known as “G2”) and the initial version of the block patterns ui.
Outside of normal Gutenberg and JS news, but I thought it worth highlighting – All-women release squad. I’m so excited about this!
If you have anything to share for the Task Coordination section, please leave it as a comment on this post. If you have anything to propose for the agenda or other specific items related to those listed above, please leave a comment below.
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:
