Goals for WordPress 6.9 Release

[karmatosed]

Whilst we start thinking of the goals for this quarter, also thinking about a closer goal for the 6.9 release could be good. Is there anything we can ship under any of those for that?

There currently is only one that stands out to me, that would be the following:

• Noteworthy contributors: iterate this and/or add a section to include different groups.

This falls under the proposed goal of Invisible contributions: #4. Also worth noting is this came up in the Community Summit: https://make.wordpress.org/summit/2023/09/15/community-summit-discussion-notes-increasing-contributor-recognition-and-celebration/

Can the release page be expanded to recognize different groups?

I would like a discussion on:

• Is this a good thing to aim for in 6.9?
• Are there any other goals that have a time factor like that?
• Do we need to aim for 6.9 and could we propose but have this shipped in 7.0?

[annezazu]

If I could "dream" up a goal for 6.9, it would be to have a clear sense of what got punted to 7.0 early so contributors can potentially continue working there and so they have a clear sense of where things left off from the last release. I find that gap in between is quite inefficient.

[jeffpaul]

I would "yes and" this with things that are already planned for 7.0 but are lacking sufficient implementation details / product definition / design mockups that ideally gets attention soon or as soon as it makes sense for folks to divert some attention from 6.9 to attend to those items.

[jeffpaul]

Noteworthy contributors: iterate this and/or add a section to include different groups.

Noting that there is some minimal details on this in:

• https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/about/release-cycle/preparing-the-about-page/
• https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/about/release-cycle/releasing-major-versions/

I've helped coordinate this effort on many releases now and would be happy to chat synchronously with someone to better document how it currently works and then iterate on how to do it better to get that in place at least for 7.0.

[karmatosed]

Looking over these now I think it’s time to focus in on actually shipping these if we are going to do any. My instinct says the doable ones are:

• Improve what we have (By co-ordinating with @jeffpaul and others): this sets us up for 7.0 also.
• Get a punted list and way to chart this. As noted by @annezazu. Also making this public feels a good idea.

[karmatosed]

I am going to close out this discussion but then move things to issues. This means we can focus work on those. It doesn’t mean we can’t have more ideas, but I think it’s important to ship things and 6.9 is rapidly heading our way.