I’m proud to add WordPress core contributor to my resume! It has been a long time goal. My software development career has been focused on developing enterprise WordPress websites, and I wanted to give back and contribute to core.

My first contribution is finding and patching Issue 52584: Editor: Metaboxes fail to save after heartbeat reauthentication in block editor.

I discovered this issue while testing a code change for Alley’s WordPress Fieldmanager plugin, which is a developer toolkit for creating complex administration screens in WordPress. It makes creating metaboxes easy. We use it on most of our WordPress projects because it’s super easy to create fields that allow for the selection and saving of terms, posts, free text, and much more. It also allows for creating settings pages easily. Check out the Fieldmanager documentation if this sounds interesting to you. The way that the data is saved is also very performant and straight forward, so it’s a solution that scales well.

We’ve upgraded the plugin to be fully compatible with Gutenberg, as metaboxes continue to be a well supported feature of the WordPress edit post screen.

This bug is specific to when a user has to reauthenticate due to a failed heartbeat. For example, if a user leaves the edit screen open for a long time and their authentication cookies expire, then there is a modal that pops up and prompts the user to log back in.

On the Gutenberg edit screen, after this reauthentication process, the metabox data didn’t save. It’s a particularly sneaky bug because there is no error message and it likely caused data loss without the user realizing it.

The patch for this issue was committed to WordPress core during the WordCamp US contributor day and will be part of the upcoming WordPress 6.1 release.