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These are the weekly notes for the WP Auto-updates team meeting that happened on Tuesday April 14th, 2020. You can read the full transcript on the core-auto-updates Slack channel.
The team focused on making decisions concerning design and wording changes in WP Auto-updates version 0.5:
Remove “cycle” dashicons from the interface
The team agreed the current use of dashicons is not strictly necessary. It appears on every row and it can be too much. Also, the current update system (known as “shiny updates”) doesn’t use any dashicon except for notification messages of available updates.
The decision is to remove it from the user interface to keep it pure text + text links.
In the previous versions of WP Auto-updates, red color were used for “Disable” action links, and green color were used for “Auto-updates enabled” information texts. Last week the team agreed to replace it with standard blue links (as red is used for destructive actions) and black text.
Previously, the feature plugin was displaying the following messages after enabling auto-update for a theme or a plugin:
“The selected plugins will now update automatically.”
“The selected plugins won’t automatically update anymore.”
The team agreed to simplify confirmation messages, and to replace them with:
“Selected plugins will be auto-updated.”
“Selected plugins will no longer be auto-updated.”
This change brings consistency with plugins and themes existing activation message.
A pull request is going to be opened on GitHub to handle the related changes.
Provide information about themes with auto-updates enabled on single-site Themes screen
On a single-site Themes screen (Appearance > Themes), there is currently no way to quickly know what themes have auto-updates enabled. The user needs to open the theme’s modal, and this is a poor user experience.
During the meeting, two solutions were discussed:
Use an icon on the upper-right corner of each theme in the list. It does the job, but there is a question for when the theme have an update available (there is a notification message on the top of the theme screenshot, and it may conflict with the auto-update icon).
Problem: what to do when there is an update notice?
Add auto-update information (or even an enable/disable auto-updates action link) at the bottom of the theme screenshot and put all the action links on a second row.
@pbiron pointed out that as a general rule, auto-updates content should not appear on any screen where updates can not be performed.
Everyone agreed and Paul will add a pull request to handle this issue (#69) and remove auto-updates user interface from Network Admin > Sites > Edit > Themes.
Plugin Conflicts (#146) We reached the conclusion that such conflicts are actually a non-issue. Plugins are expected to override the default sitemap functionality. For consistency reasons, we keep the wp- prefix.
Last modified date (#145) There is one open question on the PR to keep lastmod for object types that support it out of the box (i.e. posts). Current status: needs reviews.
Rewrite Rules (#147) A change was proposed to improve the way rewrite rules are registered for sitemaps. This would avoid having to flush rewrite rules when custom providers are added. Current status: needs contributors / reviews.
Roadmap WordPress 5.5 is ought to be released in August. We settled on the following roadmap for sitemaps:
Fix remaining big issues – April
Refactor code to be closer to WP core standards, add safeguards so nothing breaks after merge – April
Publish Merge proposal – May
Extensibility It was suggested to add a filter for the <urlset> element’s attributes so that plugins could easily add namespaced elements to a sitemap (e.g. for image sitemaps).
Don’t unerstand why this was set to 20px and why the github issue is still open after 4 month. Is this a difficult issue which has issues with other things? For me it looks like a standalone thing which could be fixed within 2 seconds… Please correct me if I’m wrong here!
A year ago I’ve worked on Media & Text to make them easier to resize. Some of it got merged but there are some bits that went stale. With fresh eyes and things we’ve learned from adding size presets to Columns, for example, can we confirm what’s the best way to approach Media & Text?
Personally I think it makes sense to add the “Percentage width” slider (exactly the same way as in the Column) so users can set it to an exact number or even type the number instead of using sliders.
I’m not 100% sure about the preset part, since that got improved a ton since in other places. Any designer willing to have a look? I can probably bring this up to date and finish it up, once the direction is confirmed.
That’s because all the countries who switch to Daylight time have done that. The US is traditionally the beginning of a four-week process that ends early in April. The process reverses in the fall.
The Core devchat will start at 20:00 UTC, or 8 pm UTC, on Wednesdays.
That in turn will push the New Contributor meeting and the Release Model Working Group meeting, which alternate Wednesdays immediately beforehand, to 19:00 UTC, or 7:00 pm UTC.
The Release Model Working Group will meet on April 15, and the New Contributor meeting will see you on April 22.
So mark your calendar accordingly, and the teams hope to see you there!
In the meantime, if you celebrate a spring holiday, please accept the community’s wishes for a happy, healthy and safe occasion.
@audrasjb pointed out that the Auto-updates team needs a cross-team discussion about wording and specifically concerning the action links text labels. Design and Accessibility teams could help, and of course everyone interested. Design & Wording validation is the main goal for the next version of the feature plugin.
@garrett-eclipse shared that the Privacy team has a multisite focus in 5.5 so any people from Network/multisite component is welcome to assist.
Daylight saving time: devchat meeting time change
As Daylight saving time already started for every countries/locales on our planet 🌏 the devchat meeting time will be adjusted from 21:00 UTC to 20:00 UTC.
@davidbaumwald@audrasjb@marybaum@antpb with @davidbaumwald doing an initial 5.5 early bug scrub on Tuesday, April 14th at 19:00 UTC, would any of you be open to a second scrub to finish reviewing the remaining issues on Thursday, April 23rd at 17:00 UTC? Hopefully that way we cover all 5.5 early issues and get things closer to merge early in the 5.5 release cycle and prepared for early testing/feedback.
With 5.4 released, let’s officially kick-off 5.5! As we do with each release, we want to fix bugs, add new tools and make WordPress the best user experience. The blocker editor (and full site editing) are still at the top of the WordPress goals list, but what other tickets do you think need some attention in this release cycle?
Share Your Feedback!
What do you want to see included in 5.5?
What are current UX pain points?
What features can we add or iterate on?
Component Maintainers: what tickets of yours do you think will be ready to ship in 5.5 and need some review/feedback/approval/etc?
Note: Adding your ticket here won’t necessarily guarantee inclusion. But no one can fix things they can’t see, so bravely share your thoughts!
This small issue around the use of `.has-background` feels like it both needs more eyes and needs quick action if a change will happen. This feels like an oversight in the 5.4 release and I’d love to see a change even make it into 5.4.1.
In the spirit of cleaning up some UX papercuts that I’ve been experiencing in the editor for a long time:
Theme compatibility for WP and PHP is patched and needs testing and hopefully an early commit. This would bring compatibility testing on par with plugins.
During the 2018 State of the Word address, Matt Mullenweg announced that Phase 4 of the Gutenberg project would be aimed at developing an official way for WordPress to support multilingual sites.
is there hope for a multi-language solution in core? is phase 4 any closer?
or at least a chance to get updated on what current plans are regarding the issue?
This will massively help with site migrations between servers/hosting where there are incompatibilities between systems and the tools available on some hosting when trying to migrate simply don’t support international characters and all the possible encodings. Portability of a site simply requires that all filenames only use standard non-international characters.
Allow Theme/Plugins to be updated by uploading a zip – http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20200415152714/https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/9757
Update jQuery to the latest version. Core is currently on v1.12.4 whereas the latest version is v3.5.0. The 1.x and 2.x branches don’t even receive patches anymore.
Fix the Media Library and add the ability to add folders and move media around.
Performance, please.
2 installation versions? Light and Full?
Vanilla Javascript?
It’s a bit “frustrating” to have to tweak and “clean” the full version to be just ok in that department.
Love WP.
I would love to see some WP_Query improvements. The PHP notices that get triggered from WP_Query has been happening for years. Certain hooks run too early for some of the `is_*()` conditional functions. Conditionals are being run against NULL objects which is not optimal.
Due to the fact that WordPress is more and more loaded with other plugins, I think it is already necessary to divide the main version into two versions. Make a “Single site” version and make a “MultiSite” version separately. I have several projects, and I use the “Single site” version everywhere. This way you can speed up WordPress and make It easier. Reduced the number of queries, audits, reducing the number of files decreases database, fewer lines and comments.
Not sure about WP 5.5 tickets, but since v5.4 corrupted my site on April 1st, and I am still trying to find a fix (my host seems to be COVID-19 affected and offering next to no help) and the WP forum fixes seem to require someone with more programming skills than I. I suggest that a careful review of 5.4 be more of a priority for me and probably a few others.
Ray
For existing posts (any post type) that contain no post_content, apply block templates so for example old ACF pages don’t have to be rebuilt from scratch
My suggestion is related to change how WordPress use advanced-cache.php file and how it can be modified, so we can avoid plugins fight over that file. Please check and consider my ticket here:
My major pain point is lack of the ability to organize the media library. Without a folder structure and basic tools to identify files (sort by name, date, etc.), it is very difficult to manage media. Also, there is no way to identify images that are not in use and we need to use a plugin to replace an image – these should certainly be native functions in a robust CMS. Even Windoze has had them for over 25 years.
Would like to throw in this issue:
http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20200415152714/https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/18906
http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20200415152714/https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/49862#comment:3
Don’t unerstand why this was set to 20px and why the github issue is still open after 4 month. Is this a difficult issue which has issues with other things? For me it looks like a standalone thing which could be fixed within 2 seconds… Please correct me if I’m wrong here!
Thanks
Sven
A year ago I’ve worked on Media & Text to make them easier to resize. Some of it got merged but there are some bits that went stale. With fresh eyes and things we’ve learned from adding size presets to Columns, for example, can we confirm what’s the best way to approach Media & Text?
See the stale PR for context and screenshots/mockups: http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20200415152714/https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/14483
Personally I think it makes sense to add the “Percentage width” slider (exactly the same way as in the Column) so users can set it to an exact number or even type the number instead of using sliders.
I’m not 100% sure about the preset part, since that got improved a ton since in other places. Any designer willing to have a look? I can probably bring this up to date and finish it up, once the direction is confirmed.