As I am writing this, Ian has just packed the theme that will be included in Release Candidate 3 of WordPress 5.3.
This means that tonight alone, about 11 issues that we have worked on this week were closed.
I meant to write more regularly about the process, but I was not able to find the time. Both me and my partner had some health issues, and I was not able to help out with the theme as much as I wanted. This was also true for some of the people who has helped us out, so the pace slowed down a bit.
I don’t want to talk about burn out, -that’s not what I want to call it, but I think we will be happy to see the theme released, and work with the future updates a little less… intensely.
I have learnt a lot about the process of releasing a new WordPress version. This is knowledge that I wish I had when we started working on the theme.
What is a bug?
A whole lot of bug fixes, big and small, has been added in this version. Most of the fine tuning of the positioning and spacing of the block elements has been finished.
But what is a bug, and what is an enhancement? That is a question that I have asked myself many times the last two weeks, because only bug fixes can go into a release candidate.
It is important that our time is spent on fixing the right problem, on problems that can be fixed and tested in a timely manner, and then merged. What is important for one person, might not be such a big problem for someone else, so how do you choose? We all have our pet peeves.
Fixing accessibility issues
I have not always been able to communicate directly with the contributors about why something is or may be an accessibility issue.
We have had regressions because the accessibility has not been considered when pull requests has been added. This has meant that it has taken a long time for accessibility issues to be solved. And I see the same pattern with browser testing. I regret this but I still feel that I have done my best. Testing everything is hard.
To me, the main remaining accessibility issue is the sub menus of the desktop horizontal menu. Hopefully we can find some one to help us solve this soon.
-But this does not mean that there aren’t other things that needs to be improved for the theme to be more accessible. It just means that I have not found them.
If you find a problem, please report it and open a new issues. -For now, the theme is still being developed on Github.