A month with the WordPress core team – June 2024

In June, Andrea and Carolina attended WordCamp Europe 2024 in Torino, Italy. We also put some finishing touches on WordPress 6.6. Read on to learn what we’ve been up to for the past month!

Our monthly updates

Andrea

On June I enjoyed attending WordCamp Europe 2024. For me, the conference journey started the day before gathering with all the Newfold folks in Torino. It was a pleasure to see so many known and new faces. At the Contributor Day I joined the accessibility table helping onboarding new contributors and reconnecting with fellow accessibility specialists. I also had the opportunity to work on a quick patch for a long standing issue in the WordPress admin menu. On the conference days, besides the talks, it was a pleasure to meet, connect, and network with old and new friends in the WordPress community. I also had the chance to have interesting conversations with some contributors of the Gutenberg editor project regarding how to improve the contribution process and solve some important accessibility issues in the editor.

Besides WCEU, as usual I mainly focused on the Gutenberg user interface and accessibility. The editor is evolving fast and the user interface changes continuously. While fast iterations allow for a more agile development process, continuous changes to the user interface do have a cost in terms of usability and accessibility. I’m more and more convinced that a project that moves so fast should strive to make the user interface as simple as possible, with a solid design direction. That is why besides specific accessibility issues I’ve been researching how to improve the overall user interface consistency. There’s a multitude of small inconsistent details in the editor interface that summed together don’t contribute to make the editor perceived as user friendly and easy to use. Better coordination and design direction would help a lot.

On the community side, I’m keeping helping the Roma WordPress meetup activity. This month the meetup will hold its last meeting for this season. It has been a year of meetings already! A year where I learned many things, met many new people, connected with WordPress lovers from Roma and from the other side of the world. It has been a new, refreshing experience for me and an opportunity for professional growth as well.

Carolina

Because I had a vacation before WCEU and lost a full week of work due to health issues afterwards, I do not have much to share about WordPress core or Gutenberg this month.

I enjoyed visiting Torino and explored the flea market, antiques- and book shops, and many of the museums before WCEU. I got lucky with the weather, as the rain did not really start until the WordCamp started. Of course, I bought some pasta to bring back home.

For me the camp kicked-off with the picnic where I was happy to reconnect with friends, share snacks and gossip, and meet new people. If you have the chance to attend one of these event I recommend going. I met with Ganga Kafle (kafleg) for the first time in real life, after contributing to the WordPress themes team together for so many years.

During the contributor day, I spent a few hours before lunch at the themes table. I helped introduce people to community themes and how to work together on the community themes GitHub repository. I also assisted with testing theme related Trac tickets. In the afternoon I was at the core table and participated in discussions about how to work more efficiently on Gutenberg issues. The last two days I attended talks and had many work related conversations and chats with theme developers and other WordPress professionals. Many of the conversations touched on the new features in WordPress 6.6.

I love going to WordCamps, and seeing friends means so much. But the events also cause a lot of stress and anxiety and I had to decline some side-events that I had wanted to attend. I also appreciated having conversations with other neurodiverse attendees.

Sergey

WordPress 6.6

For the past two months I continued triaging and reviewing tickets for the next major release, WordPress 6.6, and started looking into some early tickets for WordPress 6.7, as part of my duties as a Core Committer.

I made thirty-two commits to WordPress core, mostly various bug fixes and enhancements. I also triaged new tickets incoming into Trac (the bug tracking system that WordPress uses).

Some other notable changes include:

• Continuing with various coding standards fixes in core. See ticket #60700 for more details.
• Reducing usage of assertEquals() in favor of assertSame() in unit tests. See ticket #60706 for more details.