WP Briefing: Episode 34: WordPress 6.1 is Coming!

In the thirty-fourth episode of the WordPress Briefing, hear WordPress Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy discuss planning for the major release and how you can get involved in the WordPress 6.1 release cycle!

Have a question you’d like answered? You can submit them to wpbriefing@wordpress.org, either written or as a voice recording.

Credits

• Editor: Dustin Hartzler
• Logo: Beatriz Fialho
• Production: Santana Inniss
• Song: Fearless First by Kevin MacLeod

References

• WordPress 6.1 Planning Roundup Core Post
• All WordPress 6.1 posts on Make Core
• Speaker Workshop for Indian Women in the WordPress Community
• Submit photos to the WordPress Photo Directory

Transcript

Hello everyone. And welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of some of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project and the community around it, as well as get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I’m your host Josepha Haden Chomphosy.

Here we go.

All right my friends. So it’s been about a month since WordPress 6.0 came out and you know what that means. It means we are already looking at the next major WordPress release because,  as most of you know, WordPress never sleeps. Y’all are honestly up and hustling like 24/7 as far as I can tell, which is great! And is one of the many benefits of being a global community, I suppose. 

But anyway, back to this major release. There was a high-level roadmap shared by Mattias Ventura at the start of June. And it lists some focus areas for the Block Editor, continued refinements to the template editor and navigation block, and some work on global styles and more / better blocks and design tools that are slated to ship with WordPress 6.1. From the WordPress core side, though, there are a couple hundred tickets that are milestoned for the next major.

Being milestoned for a release means that either a ticket wasn’t ready for the last release and was moved to the next available one, or a ticket has become ready for a release since the last major release occurred. That list as it stands might be a little bit too big for a single release. However, honestly, no list is too big if we have enough folks contributing.

So if you’ve never contributed to a major release of WordPress before, and you’re interested to know how that works, there are some things to keep an eye out for over the next few weeks. We are in what is considered the planning phase for the next big release. And so there are two or three things you’re gonna see pretty soon.

First is a planning kickoff post. That post gets published on make.wordpress.org/core, and it includes notes on volunteering for the release squad, some guesses at areas of focus based on the tickets that we’re seeing in track, a schedule, the whole kit, and caboodle. It’s all in there. If you are wanting to know how to lend a hand and how to take your first steps to core contribution, apart from the new contributor meeting that happens before the dev chat, that post is the place to start. 

So keep an eye out on make.wordpress.org/core for that. And then the second thing that shows up in the planning phase for any major release is bug scrub and ticket triage meetings. Like I mentioned, there are the new contributor meetings where they scrub tickets and talk through the basics of what we’re seeing on good first bugs.

And I mentioned that here often, I just mentioned it in the last, in the last bullet point, but there are also regular bug scrubs and ticket triaging sessions where a kind contributor chooses a set of tickets to review and then leads other contributors through the process of checking to see if a ticket is valid to see if it can be replicated to see if it has a patch.

If there are decisions that are blocking it and how to move those decisions forward, and generally just kind of discuss what else has to be done in order to take the ticket to the next step. Those get announced in the dev chat every Wednesday, but also there is a post that will go up on make.wordpress.org/core.

I wish I had a faster way to say that instead of just racing through the whole URL every time. But it’ll be okay. We’ll put it in the show notes in case you would rather just click some stuff. And the third thing to keep an eye out for. If development is not your thing, so writing code is not already part of your tool belt, that’s totally fine. There are many other important areas where you can contribute, too. Design, training, support, polyglots, marketing, documentation, and more. These teams all do work in and around a release that is vital to WordPress’ overall success. 

And a final thought of all. If that felt a little too intense if you want to see where this ship is headed, but you can’t quite commit to grabbing an oar today, that’s fine, too. The most important thing is that if you are a member of the community, as an extender or a user or a die-hard contributor, or a new contributor, the most important thing is that you have some general awareness of what the overall direction is. 

You might do that by experimenting with blocks in your products or by testing screen readers against your workflow or even by setting aside an hour to participate in the latest testing prompt. Being aware of what’s happening in and around your area of the project will help to keep you kind of prepared and knowledgeable to lend a hand whenever it is that you are ready.

And that then brings us to our small list of big things. My friends, registration is now open for the WordPress Speaker Workshop for Women Voices in India. That’s taking place on September 24th and 25th. Uh, it’s happening over Zoom, so location or travel shouldn’t really be an obstacle for you. I’m going to leave a link to some information about that in the show notes. It should be an excellent opportunity that WP Diversity initiative that WordPress has, that the community team helps to foster, is really an excellent experience. And so I hope that you register and attend that. 

And the second thing actually is a bit of a celebration. The Photo Directory recently hit a huge milestone of 3000 photos! And you also can submit your photos to wordpress.org/photos. If you feel so inclined to make a contribution of that type. 

And then the third thing on my smallest of big things is actually kind of a, a WordPress tooltip a little bit of a WordPress project did-ya-know? So, there is a special channel in WordPress Slack for sharing thanks to folks who were especially helpful to you. It’s called the Props Channel. And when someone shares props with you, it even shows up in your activity on your wordpress.org profile. Pretty cool, huh? Props to the Meta team for that one.

And that my friends is your small list of big things. Thank you for tuning in today for the WordPress Briefing. I’m your host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy. And I’ll see you again in a couple of weeks.