WordPress 5.5 is fast coming around the corner and in my opinion, it is going to be a massive release. There is a lot in this release. With all the extra time I have on my hands, now that I am unable to travel, I decided to focus my energies on open source. This gives me something to do and hopefully helps the wider community. I thought I would highlight some of the tickets, I am especially proud to have worked on and will likely end up in the WordPress 5.5 release.
Menu / Menu item / Menu location REST API endpoints
This ticket has been over year in the making. The original first patch to the feature plugin was in June 2019. But it was then merged to the gutenberg plugin. These endpoints, will allow developers to get menus data. The plan is use to rebuild the menus screens in WordPress core. It will also help with developers that wish to use menu data in a headless WordPress front end.
Block Type REST API endpoint
The block type REST API goes along with another piece of work that the gutenberg team has been working to register all core blocks in PHP. The hope is to someday use this endpoint in the WordPress mobile app, to allow custom blocks to be supported on mobile.
Plugins REST API endpoint
This REST API endpoint, allows developers to install, activate and deactivate on single and multisite. This work was done for the block directory project. But my personal hope is that, it will be used for remote management tools.
Scripts and Style REST API endpoint
This REST API endpoint is again part of the block directory project. But has a lot of useful applications. One of which will be allowing for the gutenberg team to lazy load scripts and styles in core, enabling better performance.
Return all themes into the themes REST API
This is a simple extension to the themes endpoint, so all themes are received. This is a step towards, having all data for themes in the REST API.
Add default value to register meta
This has been in the works for nearly 2 years. Meta data, like post meta, does not support default values. This makes it a little outlier in core, as options and network options do support a default value. This change adds a new filter for default values and leverages, the register meta function.
Introduce wp_cache_get_multi()
This ticket is something I have been thinking about for 8 years. It is has been a lot of work to get this one into core. But it is massive possible performance benefits for WordPress core. It means that object-cache drop-ins can now, get multiple values in one request. The hope is that receiving values from cache will be much faster.
There are many other thing I have been working on, but these are my favours. Thanks to XWP for giving me time to work on these tickets. Here is hoping that all of them make into WordPress 5.5.