Feature Notifications is the project exploring a unified notifications system for WordPress (#43484). It has been quiet since version 0.2.0 shipped in April 2023. This post covers where the project stands today and the plan to get to version 0.3.0, with the goal of shipping 0.3.0 alongside the WordPress 7.2 release in December.

The 0.3.0 milestone was always meant to be the first live preview: a working system that creates, stores, displays, and dismisses notifications. That makes 0.3.0 the project’s first functional MVP "A minimum viable product (MVP) is a product with just enough features to satisfy early customers, and to provide feedback for future product development." - WikiPedia rather than a maintenance release.

I’ve spent some time auditing the codebase and putting together a detailed release plan. In short:

• The foundations are solid. The data models, factories, channel registry, and database schema are well designed and have unit tests. The notification hub UI User interface in the admin (and super admin) bar is in place.
• The system isn’t wired up end to end yet. The persistence layer is still a set of stubs, the REST API The REST API is an acronym for the RESTful Application Program Interface (API) that uses HTTP requests to GET, PUT, POST and DELETE data. It is how the front end of an application (think “phone app” or “website”) can communicate with the data store (think “database” or “file system”) https://developer.wordpress.org/rest-api/ returns empty responses, dismissing a notification doesn’t save anything, and the REST controller tests are skipped. A few subtle bugs (in the schema, the factory, model serialization, and the client-side data store) mean wiring things up isn’t enough. They need fixing first.
• The release tooling has drifted. Version numbers disagree across files, the readme and changelog are out of date, internationalization doesn’t work end to end, and some CI checks pass without testing anything.
• Recent maintenance: the tooling has been brought in line with current WordPress standards (#559), and dependencies are up to date.

It would be remiss of me not to share massive kudos and thanks to the contributors who stepped in to keep the project moving when I had to step away in 2023, especially @sephsekla, @bitmachina, and @erikyo, and everyone who has contributed to the project so far. I hope you can all join in some way as we work toward getting this merged into core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress..

The work is split into phases, and much of it can happen in parallel:

1. Clean up the workspace. Triage The act of evaluating and sorting bug reports, in order to decide priority, severity, and other factors. the open pull requests, including the existing polling PR (#397), and move the relevant issues into the 0.3.0 milestone.
2. Build the MVP. Ship a schema update with a working upgrade path, implement the notification and subscription repositories, add a PHP The web scripting language in which WordPress is primarily architected. WordPress requires PHP 7.4 or higher API An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways. for emitting notifications to a channel, flesh out the REST endpoints with a proper capability A capability is permission to perform one or more types of task. Checking if a user has a capability is performed by the current_user_can function. Each user of a WordPress site might have some permissions but not others, depending on their role. For example, users who have the Author role usually have permission to edit their own posts (the “edit_posts” capability), but not permission to edit other users’ posts (the “edit_others_posts” capability). model, fix the client-side store, and add polling and persistent dismissal. A WP-CLI WP-CLI is the Command Line Interface for WordPress, used to do administrative and development tasks in a programmatic way. The project page is http://wp-cli.org/ https://make.wordpress.org/cli/ command to seed sample notifications will make all of this easier to test.
3. Fix correctness and security issues. These include an open permission check on the subscriptions endpoint, output escaping, URL A specific web address of a website or web page on the Internet, such as a website’s URL www.wordpress.org validation on notification actions, and timezone handling.
4. Get internationalization working, from text domains through to generating the .pot file and shipping translations in the zip.
5. Tidy up the release. Align version numbers, set minimum requirements to WordPress 6.7 and PHP 8.1, write the changelog, and fix the release workflow and test matrix.
6. Release 0.3.0 as a GitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that 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 by the repository owner. https://github.com/ release, submit it to the WordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ plugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party. directory, and invite everyone to start testing.

You can find more details about the release plan in this Markdown document, which will help focus the work that needs doing.

The target date for this release is 1 December 2026, to align with the final WordPress 7.2 RC One of the final stages in the version release cycle, this version signals the potential to be a final release to the public. Also see alpha (beta)..

If you’d like to help, whether through code, testing, design feedback, or reviewing pull requests, join the #feature-notifications channel in Making WordPress Slack. I’ll post regular updates there as the work moves forward, and it’s the best place to find out where help is needed. You can also follow along on the GitHub repository.

#feature-notifications