Josepha 3:37 am on April 30, 2020
Tags:   

Quarterly Updates | Q1 2020

To help all contributors stay aware of big projects and efforts across WordPress teams, each team’s listed representative has shared an update for the year so far. Below are their top priorities (and when they hope for it to be completed), as well as their biggest wins and struggles. Have questions? I’ve included a link to each team’s site in the headings.

Accessibility

  • Contacted: @audrasjb, @nrqsnchz
  • Priority: For WP5.5: Accessible color schemes (Plugin/repo), alternative WP List Tables views (#49715, #48751, #35391), Refine/replace the upper-right WP-Admin fly-out menu. And the WP AccessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) Day online event!
  • Struggle: The team is in need of accessibility-minded ReactReact React is a JavaScript library that makes it easy to reason about, construct, and maintain stateless and stateful user interfaces. https://reactjs.org/. developers to contribute to the new editing experience.
  • Big Win: WP 5.4 and having a general scope for WP5.5.

Community

  • Contacted: @camikaos, @mariaojob
  • Priority: With in-person events on hold, the current priority is to provide documentation, resources, and support to aid a shift to virtual events.
  • Struggle: There has been a decrease in volunteer participation in reaction to this uncertain climate of the global coronavirus pandemic.
  • Big Win: The team has shown great resilience and compassion in dealing with the pandemic and encouraging a shift to virtual community connection.

Core

  • Contacted: @jeffpaul
  • Priority: Meeting 2020 priorities across the two upcoming releases, WP5.5 and WP5.6, while preparing and mentoring for the latter to be an all-female lead releaseRelease A release is the distribution of the final version of an application. A software release may be either public or private and generally constitutes the initial or new generation of a new or upgraded application. A release is preceded by the distribution of alpha and then beta versions of the software. squad.
  • Struggle: There is a noticeable decrease in productivity of component maintainers, committers, and more senior project contributors.
  • Big Win: WP 5.4 released on time with the help of a large number of new contributors!

Design

  • Contacted: @karmatosed, @estelaris
  • Priority: Achieving timely 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/ editor and WordPress releases.
  • Struggle: There is a decrease in engagement from design contributors.
  • Big Win: Processes have been documented with the help of a new team repTeam Rep A Team Rep is a person who represents the Make WordPress team to the rest of the project, make sure issues are raised and addressed as needed, and coordinates cross-team efforts.!

Marketing

  • Contacted: @webcommsat, @harryjackson1221, @maedahbatool, @miker, @yvettesoneveld
  • Priority: The team is prioritizing recruiting and training contributors to increase capacity and effectiveness.
  • Struggle: Developing new onboarding practices for contributors who are unfamiliar with communication within WordPress.
  • Big Win: Supporting WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more., Meetups, and marketing team members as we acclimate to new routines in response to the health crisis.

Mobile

  • Contacted: @elibud
  • Priority: Priorities include foundational work for new blocks and features in 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. editor, improving the page template UXUX UX is an acronym for User Experience - the way the user uses the UI. Think ‘what they are doing’ and less about how they do it., and supporting new blocks with an ETA of June-end.
  • Struggle: Use of the web block editor code can cause unexpected behavior on mobile. By using integration and snapshot tests, these breaks will hopefully be identified earlier.
  • Big Win: Implemented dark mode support on WordPress Android and added support for seven new blocks: button, column, columns, cover, group, latestPosts, shortcodeShortcode A shortcode is a placeholder used within a WordPress post, page, or widget to insert a form or function generated by a plugin in a specific location on your site..

Polyglots

  • Contacted: @nao, @ocean90, @casiepa, @petya, @tobifjellner
  • Priority: The team’s focus is to increase the number of package releases and the top 100 plugins/theme translation completion range.
  • Struggle: Improved onboarding for local teams and streamlining outreach to new translators that includes feedback and PTE request procedures.
  • Big Win: 36 local packages were created for the 5.4, with 45 developed within 24 hours of the release. Fun statistics: since January there have been 5 new GTEs, 162 new PTEs, and 2,022 new contributors!

Support

  • Contacted: @clorith
  • Priority: The team is focused on forum improvements.
  • Struggle: The metaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. team isn’t always available to assist with improvements.
  • Big Win: There has been an increase in the number of frequent contributors.

Themes

  • Contacted: @kafleg, @williampatton
  • Priority: Easing the transition to Full Site Editing and the new block-based theme foundation.
  • Struggle: TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. cookie issue; a disconnect between theme requirements and what users are submitting; staying in sync with Gutenberg developments; triaging licensing, escaping, and pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party territory; and improving the theme directory without a working database in the meta environment.
  • Big Win: Despite a fair amount of challenges, the team was successful in accessing the Theme Check plugin, preventing malicious themes and authors from entering the repo, an updated theme unit test, and a transition of requirements to GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ for an easier process of proposed changes.

Training

  • Contacted: @chetan200891, @jessecowens, @juliekuehl
  • Priority: Development of a new theme for the Learn site.
  • Struggle: Outreach to developers who could work on the new learn site theme.
  • Big Win: The last few months have had many new contributors join the training team, and all lesson plans have been moved from make.wordpress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org//training to Github.

Triage

  • Contacted: @desrosj
  • Priority: Bringing the total number of tickets in Trac down to a reasonable number and ensuring that every ticket is accurate and actionable.
  • Struggle: The team’s main issue is availability with two team leads having conflicting responsibilities.
  • Big Win: The number of open tickets on Trac has stabilized, indicating that triage is happening organically!

Security

  • Contacted: @whyisjake
  • Priority: The team is currently working towards the 5.4.1 release while also working on larger MFA items. Goals include: 2FA/MFA in coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress., 2FA/MFA on WordPress.org, Auto-Update for Plugins/Themes, Auto-Update for Core, and decrease the Security backlog.
  • Struggle: As with many teams, the current global crisis limits the time contributors can working on pending tasks.
  • Big Win: For the first time, in large part due to @ehtis work, all tickets are under a one hour response time!

Tide

  • Contacted: @jeffpaul
  • Priority: The team’s work is resolving rate limiting and caching issues to allow v1.0.0 release with a realistic ETA of v1.0.0 by WCUS. 
  • Struggle: Tide development is dependent on having enough available contributors with Go coding, WordPress, and WordPress Coding Standards experience.

Hosting

  • Priority: To facilitate org communication with companies that host WordPress websites, while working with hosts to implement automated testing on hosting environments.
  • Struggle: The team is looking for additional contributors to help maintain the hosting tests and update the handbook.
  • Big Win: More contributors have joined the team as a project geared towards improving hosting tests kicked-off at the start of the year. Now 29 hosts are set up to report (+6 since January 1), with each receiving an email notification if their tests fail.

bbPress

  • Priority: Security fixes, and Dotorg/Meta quality-of-life improvements in 2.6.5, and feature development for 2.7.
  • Struggle: The team is looking at bug fixes taking more time than can be made available to research, prioritize, and test through completion.
  • Big Win: No major regressions or issues since 2.6 was released in late 2019!

#quarterly-updates