The mobile team introduced the Aztec editors, which work with the Google and Apple APIs to improve the editing experience in the mobile apps.
Accessibility
Misc
Core
Core chat from April 5
The WordPress 4.7.4 release is still aimed for early May, and the image widget is close to getting ready for core merge.
More about the meeting in the post »Dev Chat Summary: April 5th (4.7.4 week 5)« by Jeffrey Paul.
Misc
Mobile
Introducing the mobile editors Aztec
The mobile team worked hard since July 2016 on an improved content editing experience. The results are the Aztec editors (one for iOS and one for Android), which should replace the current hybrid approach (JavaScript and HTML »Web view«). To create a better solution, the team used the APIs from Apple and Google to create Aztec, to get an editing experience that feels like made for the platform.
The team hopes, that Aztec is seen as a component which can be used by other apps to provide a »Rich HTML editing experience«. A few of the advantages of Aztec (quoted from Aaron Douglas’ post):
- Accessibility – Using OS-provided text controls makes every piece of what you can see to be visible to technologies like VoiceOver. […] Additionally we can now support dictation!
- Spell Check – Something as simple as spell check is a nightmare to get working properly in the current hybrid editor. No longer a problem with Aztec! […]
- Speed/Performance – Aztec is so much faster and memory efficient since we have control over the small things.
- Undo/redo […]
Currently, the editors are not ready to ship with the stable app release. You can test it via the beta versions of the apps if you have posts where it is not so terrible if the formatting would get lost. How to make this and more about the editors can be found in the post »Introducing the Aztec Mobile Editors« by Aaron.
Theme review team
Misc
Plugins
Plugin submissions are open again
You can submit your plugin to the theme directory again. With the new directory, there are a few changes, for example, you have to upload a ZIP and cannot longer provide an URL. The plugin slug is created from Plugin name: — if you called your plugin My Cool Plugin, the slug would be my-cool-plugin. In that case, you would get an email from the plugin team, because plugin is not allowed in the slugs, with the question if my-cool is okay. If there is an obvious typo, they will fix it. If they are not sure, they will email you.
More info about that in the post »Plugin Submissions Open« by Mika Epstein.