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Miscellaneous Developer Focused Changes in WordPress 5.5
WordPress 5.5 comes with a number of small developer-focused changes. Here’s a summary of what you can expect.
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Dashicons in WordPress 5.5 (the final update)
In the final Dashicons update being included in the 5.5 release, 65 new icons have been added. This includes 26 icons that were merged into the icon font that already existed in the block editor.
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PHP related improvements & changes: WordPress 5.5 edition
As part of an ongoing effort to improve compatibility across all supported versions of PHP (currently 5.6.20–7.4), several tooling additions and improvements have been made during the 5.5 cycle. A large handful of changes were made to address the findings from these tools. Here are some that you need to be aware of.
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External Library updates in WordPress 5.5: call for testing
WordPress 5.5 is currently slated to bring some long awaited updates to a handful of external libraries bundled with Core. A few of the updates are particularly large, and while backwards compatibility measures were taken, they could potentially require adjustments to plugins, themes, and custom code. For that reason, this developer note also doubles as…
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Associating GitHub accounts with WordPress.org profiles
In recent releases, the process of collecting props for non-WordPress.org contributions (namely Gutenberg) has been highly manual and error prone, occasionally resulting in contributors not receiving proper credit. Connecting your WordPress.org and GitHub accounts will allow automatic tooling to be built which reduces the burden on release teams to maintain a credit list.
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Working on Trac Tickets Using GitHub Pull Requests
Starting today, an experimental feature has been added to Trac that will let you link GitHub pull requests opened against the official WordPress Develop Git mirror to tickets. This makes GitHub contributions more visible directly in their related Trac tickets and makes collaborating across the two repositories easier.
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PHP Native JSON Extension Now Required
In WordPress 5.2, the minimum version of PHP supported was raised from 5.2.6 to 5.6.20. In the 8 year period since the last attempt was made to encourage use of the PHP native JSON extension, the number of distributions with this extension disabled has significantly decreased. Because of this, the PHP native JSON extension is…
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WordPress Roulette: WordPress Cape Cod July 2019 Meetup
Last week, I presented at the monthly WordPress Cape Cod meetup. It’s a great little meetup that I always enjoy attending and/or presenting to. Instead of presenting on a specific topic, I chose to let the attendees decide!
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WordPress Triage Team: A 3 Month Reflection
Last week (June 11, 2019) marked the 3 month mark since the initial WordPress Core Triage Team kickoff meeting. As the team lead, a significant portion of my time every week has been spent in the trenches triaging tickets in the WordPress Core Trac instance. The amount of time spent each week triaging tickets has…
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Being a Web Developer: A Presentation to an Elementary School
Today, I gave a talk to around 475 kids in grades 2 through 5 at Hayden-McFadden Elementary School in New Bedford, MA (the city I call home) during their monthly assembly. The assemblies are for recognizing kids who exhibit the value of the month (respect was this month’s), read 5 or more books, and exceptional…