Shiny Updates Approved for Partial Merge Into WordPress 4.6

The Shiny Updates project was approved for partial merge today during an additional meeting designated for reviewing improvements added within the last week. A decision was expected last week but was delayed after contributors discovered that the plugin required three more audits to be ready for merge. Drew Jaynes completed a documentation audit and Dominik Schilling completed a security review and found no issues.

Although the Shiny Updates team requested a design review in mid-May, WordPress designers weren’t able to perform a thorough review until last week. Their review revealed several jarring aspects of installing/deleting plugins and inconsistencies with theme interactions. Several of these issues have already been addressed, but the design for the core update process will require more iteration, as it still contains a redirect after update and other blockers.

The consensus of the design team and core contributors after today’s meeting is to do a partial merge of the Shiny Updates plugin. Plugin and theme updates have been sufficiently polished up and are approved for merge, but the changes to update-core.php will not make it into WordPress 4.6.

Specific aspects of the project that will be merged, according to Shiny Updates project leader Konstantin Obenland, include: “Themes and plugins in single and multisite, in plugin.php, plugin-install.php, import.php, themes.php, themes-install.php, and the ‘more-detail’ modals in those screens.”

“As disappointing it is for the folks who’ve worked on it, namely @mapk and @swissspidy, I think it’s clear at this point that that part needs more time,” Obenland said.

The Shiny Updates team is working to prepare a patch for partial merge by Wednesday, which is the deadline for merging feature plugins. The first beta is expected to follow two weeks later on June 29.