These are the weekly notes for the WP Auto-updates team meeting that happened on Tuesday April 7th, 2020, based on this agenda. You can read the full transcript on the core-auto-updates Slack channel.

As a reminder, the Feature Plugin is developed on GitHub and is available for testing on WordPress.org plugins repository.

Current status of the project – version 0.4 🌹

As a reminder, version 0.4 was released one week ago and contains all the core functionalities of the project. The team opened a call for testers on Make/Tests.

Version 0.5 scope and timeline

For the moment, there are 5 PRs merged into milestone 0.5.

The main goal of version 0.5 is to iterate on design and wording. There is a bunch of design focused issues, but the idea is to iterate on links colors and wording first.

All the attendees think all the links should be blue and text should be black. Indeed, red links are used for destructive actions in WordPress core, and it’s not relevant for auto-updates disabling. So let’s get rid of red links and green “Auto-updates enabled”. Let’s just use blue for links and black for text. This change will be part of 0.5.

About wording, @audrasjb wanted to point out that “auto-update” (don’t forget the hyphen) is the official wording for the feature in WordPress as it has been validated ahead of the Feature Plugin with WP project leads.

 @pbiron pointed out his concerns about removing any filters on the plugins screens, especially the “Auto-update disabled” filter, as it’s really useful to see what plugins are not auto-updated. The team agreed that this filter is not going to be removed.

How to avoid conflicts with third party plugins?

@ronalfy pointed out, from a third-party standpoint, that if a plugin uses a custom option for storing updates, it’d be nice to be able to sync the two through actions and filters. So if WordPress enables an auto-update, the plugin can hook into that action and update their own list accordingly. The same would be useful for filters when retrieving options so the plugin could theoretically merge the two. Ideally third-parties could just use WordPress options, but there’s backwards compatibility issues there.

For reference, see issue #63 and pull request #66.

@timothyblynjacobs added that being able to add bits to the auto update column itself would be useful as well.

Next steps:

• Add an action hook on auto-update enabling and disabling for each theme/plugin.
• Add a hook to filter the auto-update column content itself.

Discussion/decision concerning AJAX handling in the Feature Plugin

While this is not a top priority, it’s a nice to have. The team agreed to target version 0.6 for this enhancement.

Discussion about the labels used for enabling/disabling auto-updates

There is a proposal to change the current action links labels.

@pbiron and @audrasjb pointed out that on/off and “plain” Enable/Disable (without “auto-updates”) could be too easily confused with Activate/Deactivate (even with them being in the Automatic Updates column).

There is definitely a need for a cross-team discussion about the best wording for those links.

Meeting time and Daylight Saving Time

The team agreed to move the meeting time from 18:00 UTC to 17:00 to follow Daylight Saving Time.

#auto-update, #feature-plugins, #feature-projects, #feature-autoupdates