Team Updates: February 2021

Community Team

We spent most of last month finalizing the update for the Directory, I think we are in a good position to launch the Developer Portal for the Directory by the end of the month or early next month. We will be looking for some “beta” users to help just verify everything is okay before onboarding everyone. If you are interested in helping out please DM me.

Special thanks to @Devrealm_Guy for his help catching some bugs before we released the new version, and his help on some of the new features we have planned for after this update.

Next Major Projects

  1. Image upload support. This is necessary to support themes so is a high priority.
  2. Theme support. If any theme developers are interested in helping us please DM me as well. It would be great to have some themes to test with :slight_smile:
  3. Exploring better search. Look out for another thread as we get closer to this as we would be interested in some feedback on approaches.

Other smaller tasks

We will continue to watch for bug reports/enhancements in the Directory Support category.

8 Likes

Ecosystem Team

Been involved in a mixed bag of things recently (which has been good!).

Plugins & themes update

Work has continued on the development of our three “Classic” plugins and there are new minor updates ready to be released for all three. One change we have made is to make all plugins installable via composer and packagist. A bit of good news regarding Classic SEO is that I’ve been able to obtain the original, unminified CSS and JS source files direct from Rank Math (who, I have to say, were very obliging). These will be integrated into a future version of Classic SEO.

Latest installation stats - Classic Commerce: 45; CC Compatibility plugin: 24; Classic SEO: 140.

At present, updates for these plugins are served from different servers which does not provide optimal performance. We will soon be setting up officialplugins.classicpress.net to provide a central update service using official ClassicPress infrastructure.

Following comments from the community, we have been looking to expand the “Classic” plugins. Work is underway as part of the ClassicPress research programme on Classic Forms (a fork of Contact Form 7), a brand-new theme (currently called “Theme One”) and also Classic Code Snippets, a plugin to display code snippets on a page or post.

Other developments

After the release of WP 5.6, I carried out testing on the CP migration plugin and discovered an issue which had the potential to break websites during migration. To fix this, I submitted a PR to the CP core containing a backport of the relevant WP changeset.

One of the problems we’ve faced with regard to releasing new updates is that Travis, the code testing facility, removed their free open-source plans at the end of 2020. This meant having to migrate all existing tests to GitHub Actions which has been quite a significant project. I have been working with @mattyrob to help complete this transition for ClassicPress core. Huge thanks to @mattyrob for his massive contribution to this.

During this period, I’ve rewritten the ClassicPress Donations plugin and it now includes a “custom amount” feature. This is undergoing testing and, all being well, will be uploaded to the CP website shortly.

Following the Marketing Meeting: January 17, 2021 - #9 by wadestriebel, @Padraig and I updated the website to replace the tagline and other associated content that appeared in numerous places. Thanks also to @omukiguy for carrying out related changes to the CP core.

And last but by no means least, I have been updating some of the documentation pages as well as the Get ClassicPress website page which I expect to go live shortly.

8 Likes

Core team

The core team’s next focus will be releasing version 1.3.0 with some pending updates and fixes. Release plan and timeline to come soon in a separate thread.

Special thanks to @MattyRob and @1stepforward for helping move our automated code tests from Travis CI to GitHub Actions. These checks help us catch and prevent some kinds of issues that may occur when we make changes to ClassicPress core, and we had to find a new provider since Travis CI no longer offers this service to open-source projects. So far, running these checks directly on GitHub is faster and better-integrated with the rest of our contribution workflow.

Infrastructure team

Still keeping our sites running and looking at potential improvements in that area.

We helped out a bit with the migration of petitions to the forums by putting the old content of petitions.classicpress.net back up as a read-only archive. This allows everyone to see past petitions in the format they were originally posted and discussed, and keeps links to those pages working reasonably instead of returning a 404.

We are also working on adding an API endpoint to serve checksums of the ClassicPress core files. This API endpoint is being deployed on our infrastructure and will be used to fix a bug in ClassicPress core.

The next priority for infrastructure-related work will be doing some cleanup and re-organization of some auxiliary sites, for example related to Classic Commerce and documentation.


If you’re available to help with any of these items then send me a message here on the forums or in Slack.

6 Likes