Thanks again to everyone who made their way to Basel and joined us at the Hosting A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their website accessible via the World Wide Web. Table. This post offers a summary of what we accomplished during our time together.
Roundtable Discussion
We started with a roundtable focused on encouraging more hosting companies to run the hosting test suite. With the number of active hosts reporting steadily decreasing, the conversation felt both urgent and valuable. The group included experienced contributors and first-time participants, which sparked a rich exchange of ideas.
Two main priorities surfaced:
- Showing clear value to hosting providers
- Reducing the friction caused by NodeJS requirements, since many hosts focus mainly on PHP PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a general-purpose scripting language especially suited to web development. PHP code is usually processed on a web server by a PHP interpreter. On a web server, the result of the interpreted and executed PHP code would form the whole or part of an HTTP response.
Making the Benefits Clear
Everyone agreed that contributing to the WordPress ecosystem has value. Still, we recognized the need to better communicate the practical benefits for hosts. One idea was to increase visibility for participating providers. If you have ideas to build on this, we welcome them.
Tackling the NodeJS Challenge
We spent time understanding the barriers caused by NodeJS and discussed how the build process could be made more accessible. The group looked at how NodeJS is used today and brainstormed ways to simplify or eliminate that dependency.
Improving the Hosting Test Suite
After the discussion, we got to work on areas we believed could have the biggest impact.
Clarifying the Role of NodeJS
We reviewed the test suite code to understand how NodeJS fits into the current setup. The next step will be to clearly document this dependency so contributors and hosts know what is required and where we might streamline it.
Exploring Practical Solutions
Prebuilt Artifacts
We discussed the option of sharing prebuilt artifacts through a central location. This would allow hosts to skip local builds entirely and work with a shared version of the test suite. It would make testing more consistent and easier to adopt.
Another option involved using GitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. Actions to handle the NodeJS tasks remotely, while letting hosts run the PHP unit tests locally. A proof of concept for this is available here: PHPUnit Test Runner PR #245
Nightly Builds
We also explored using nightly builds. This could simplify things by reducing the need for constant local builds, while still covering the majority of testing needs. We discussed two approaches: relying entirely on nightly builds or using static files from those builds and applying only the core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Team builds WordPress. changes. Even if tests are not based on the very latest commit, we believe this method would be effective.
A PR is in progress to support this idea: PHPUnit Test Runner PR #246
Pull Requests from the Day
In addition to the work on the test suite, several contributions were made across WordPress repositories:
Opened PRs:
Reviewed PRs:
Thank you again to everyone who contributed, asked questions, and shared ideas. Your participation strengthens the WordPress community and helps improve the tools we all rely on.
Kudos to @zunaid321 for reviewing this post
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