Hosting Team meeting agenda 2024-10-02

[javiercasares]

Hosting Team meeting agenda 2024-10-02

PUBLIC AGENDA URL:

PUBLIC SUMMARY URL (if needed):

Agenda

WordPress Community

• WordPress Core news
• WordPress Community news

Hosting Team Time

• WordPress 6.6 Server Compatibility
• PHP 8.4
• Create connections between Performance Team and Hosts
• WordPress PHPUnit Test Runner

Hosting Team To-Do

• Hosting / Test badges
• Sustainability page in the Handbook
• WordPress "download mirrors"

Open Floor

• Anything not in the agenda

Closing

• Next Meeting Times

Meeting

/here [meeting type="hosting"] Who's here to chat about hosting?

👋 A warm welcome to all WordPress hosting enthusiasts! We're here to dive into the exciting world of WordPress hosting and development. Have questions? Looking for more information? Check out Make/Hosting for comprehensive guides and updates.

🥇 Participants in the Five for the Future program, we'd love to recognize your contributions! Please share your WordPress.org username in a thread here 👉

🤗 Newcomers, we're thrilled to have you on board! You are welcome to introduce yourself and share your experience or what you hope to contribute to WordPress. 👉

Hello, I am Javier Casares, and today I am here leading this meeting. If you have any questions or queries, please do not hesitate to ask. At the end of the agenda, we have an open time to discuss anything else you want about the team's projects.

Agenda

🟢 Here is the agenda for this meeting

[…] Use the agenda above […]

Would anyone like to add to or change any items on the agenda?

OK, let's get started with the WordPress Community news.

WordPress Community

🟢 WordPress Core news

WordPress 6.7 Beta 1 is ready for download and testing!

• WordPress 6.7 Beta 1
• Help Test WordPress 6.7
• Roadmap to 6.7
• WordPress 6.7 Release Party Schedule

wp core update --version=6.7-beta1 ;)

What’s New in WordPress 6.7 Beta 1

• Meet the Twenty Twenty-Five theme
• Zoom Out to Compose with Patterns
• Media improvements
• Expanding Block Supports
• Preview Options API
• Refined Data Views
• Manage Block Bindings Directly
• Simplified and Smarter Query Loop Block
• Edit and Control Font Size Presets
• View Meta Boxes in the iframed Post Editor
• Template Registration API

Vulnerability bounty doubles during Beta & Release Candidate

The WordPress community sponsors a monetary reward for reporting new, unreleased security vulnerabilities. This reward doubles during the period between Beta 1 on October 1, 2024 and the final Release Candidate (RC) scheduled for November 5, 2024. Please follow responsible disclosure practices as detailed in the project’s security practices and policies outlined on the HackerOne page and in the security white paper.

🟢 WordPress Community news

• Plugin Check and 2FA Now Mandatory For New Plugin Submissions

Ok, let's move on to Hosting Team time.

Hosting Team Time!

🟢 WordPress 6.6 Server Compatibility

• WordPress 6.6 Server Compatibility

Although we are already looking forward to preparing the post about WordPress 6.7 ;), remember that if you have doubts or questions about hosting compatibility with PHP or other services (web server, cache, etc.) you have this post where we explain everything about compatibility.

If you think something is missing, or you would like to have additional information for WordPress 6.7, please let us know and we will include it.

You also have everything much more detailed in the Server Environment section of the handbook.

🟢 PHP 8.4

Roadmap (maybe not 100% exact) for PHP 8.4 / WordPress:

• 2024-09-26: PHP 8.4 RC 3
• 2024-10-01: WordPress 6.7 b1
• 2024-10-08: WordPress 6.7 b2
• 2024-10-10: PHP 8.4 RC 4
• 2024-10-15: WordPress 6.7 b3
• 2024-10-22: WordPress 6.7 RC1
• 2024-10-24: PHP 8.4 RC 5
• 2024-10-29: WordPress 6.7 RC2
• 2024-11-05: WordPress 6.7 RC3
• 2024-11-07: PHP 8.4 RC 6
• 2024-11-11: WordPress 6.7 dry-run
• 2024-11-12: WordPress 6.7 GA
• 2024-11-21: PHP 8.4 GA

Did you do some tests related to PHP 8.4?

• Prepare for PHP 8.4

As on previous occasions, when a new version of PHP is coming, WordPress is working hard to try to achieve the maximum possible compatibility and, above all, to avoid errors (although we maintain some compatibility warnings and notices until we can correct everything 100%).

If it works for you, remember that you can contribute in the ticket or in each of the open subtasks for each of the cases.

🟢 Create connections between Performance Team and Hosts

• Proposal: Create connections between Performance Team and Hosts

This post offers a proposal to create a private Slack channel #performance-hosting where members of both the Performance Team and relevant representatives from hosting companies can come together to share information impacting the performance of sites.

They can test relevant PRs, and have a quick feedback loop for any performance regressions in new releases.

This builds on the current private #security-hosting channel that’s already in place and has proven to be an area of collaboration.

Please read and leave a comment on the comments.

🟢 WordPress PHPUnit Test Runner

WordPress/phpunit-test-runner#212

All the pending work on this PR is finished and tested.

(@javiercasares)
I applied the suggestion @pfefferle did on WordCamp Europe, and reduced a lot of duplicated code that we couldn't do at the Cloudfest Hackathon, mostly on the parts when testing multiple PHP versions.
Did some improvements to the documentation, with some scripts, so the software (from the main branch) is updated and maintained automatically.
Been doing some tests on my local machine, and on my production server (where I was doing the former tests) and looks like everything is working.
On my side, I think everything is in order, and we can approve this and put it available for everyone.

Next steps:

• Some reviews and testing outside the "lab testing".
• Some hosters have been testing this. Could you test the new version?
• Publish it on the main branch and start working on production.

The PR has some documentation on how to automate the process, and also maintain updated the code, so when the new versions arrive, it will be applied on the server side.

Hosting Team To-Do

🟢 Hosting / Test badges

Are "bots" and their maintainers Test contributors? Some days ago we opened a discussion: #241. We started now to reach out to the core test team and invited them to join the discussions.

In last week's meeting, several options were discussed regarding this topic. In general, the approach is that:

• "Bots" should not have a profile but rather be redirected to the results page.
• They should automatically be assigned the "Test" badge.
• They should be included in the Five for the Future profile.

Initially, the first two can be done "easily" because when a bot is registered, a specific role is assigned to it, which would allow automating this configuration.

Regarding adding them to Five for the Future, the question remains about how many hours to normalize (by default) for a bot (12, 24, 36 hours per week?).

🟢 Sustainability page in the Handbook

The #sustainability team published their teams roadmap for 2024: WP Sustainability Team Roadmap 2024
This roadmap includes guidelines for making WordPress websites more sustainable, where we as the hosting team can play a considerable role by providing a sustainable hosting infrastructure to all customers.

Surely, the simplest one is to use clean energy, and somehow be able to document it and make it accessible, with reports or whatever.

Apart from this, which is the most obvious thing, what documentation do you think we should suggest to suppliers to implement progressively?

Ideas, and whatever at the handbook Issue: Sustainability Page for Hosting Handbook

🟢 WordPress "download mirrors"

Last Sunday, Matt suggested the possibility of having a series of mirrors for WordPress resources in the GPL section.

https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C3D6T7F8Q/p1727625252960779

Some ideas that have been proposed/discussed:

• Mirrors can be public or private: public are those that anybody can use. Private those who companies can use for internal traffic but not for external. Having private repositores can be good for security, and can be configured in hosting companies by default on their installations. It may sound "not helping", but big companies are doing it with their OS repos.
• We should have something like "mirror.wordpress.org" (and download should be "one of them" and by GeoIP or similar all the public repositories can be there).
• At the wp-config.php should be a new constant where you can configure the mirror. By default may be the "downloads", but whoever wants to configure a different one, can be there (I don't think "now" is a good idea to give the options inside the wp-admin, or maybe is a canonical plugin).
• Usually, the sync is made by rsync (probably we need some SSH access / tokens / whatever for those who have access and some rules to maintain the servers). The syncronization should be incremental.
• Ideally, you could also have multiple sources with a prioritization mechanism to allow hosts to use WP.org and a private repo of Plugins and Themes - similar to how you can use multiple repos for your debian packages.
• Mirrors will be something accountable as per the Five for the Future... obviously, maintaining a mirror requires resources, and, also, having som much mirrors will be better for everybody (less resources for the foundation and also less requests for each one).

On more technical level:

• I was thinking about using rsync to synchronise, but although it is fast it can leave some metadata behind. Since it is a SVN repo you can use svnsync (https://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.7/svn.ref.svnsync.html) and ensure consistency of replication.
• It also discusses the issue of how to manage mirrors that are not updated as often as you want them to be. For this there is a project like mirmon (https://savannah.gnu.org/maintenance/Mirmon/) used by some open source projects like MariaDB (https://mirmon.mariadb.org/) or Mandriva (https://mirmon.openmandriva.org/). Other projects have some own tools to monitor and update in real time the state of the repositories, here are some tools from open source projects as ideas: https://archlinux.org/mirrors/status/, https://mirror-master.debian.org/status/mirror-status.html, https://mirrors.alpinelinux.org/

🟩 Open Floor

Ok, if nothing else, let's move on to the Open Floor. You are welcome to bring any topic up for discussion at this time.

…

Closing

As a reminder for the next meetings / weeks, here are the dates and times (in UTC). DST is approaching, but remember that this team does not change the times of the meetings as they are always in universal time (which every year changing it was a mess).

🟩 Meeting Times

• 2024-10-09 1800 UTC
• 2024-10-16 0900 UTC
• 2024-10-23 1800 UTC
• 2024-10-30 0900 UTC

(future ones - not announced yet)

• 2024-11-06 1800 UTC
• 2024-11-13 0900 UTC
• 2024-11-20 1800 UTC
• 2024-11-27 0900 UTC
• 2024-12-04 1800 UTC
• 2024-12-11 0900 UTC
• 2024-11-18 1800 UTC
• 2024-11-25 - no meeting
• 2025-01-01 - no meeting
• 2025-01-08 0900 UTC

Goodbye

That wraps up today's meeting. Please keep in mind, our discussions can continue in the #hosting Slack channel or on Make/Hosting anytime.

I hope you have a wonderful rest of your week! [/meeting]