Bento WP - Weekly Sync - 2nd June 2021

[maitreyie-chavan]

Attendees

@amedina, @kristoferbaxter, @westonruter, @schlessera, @rahul286, @pradeep910, @jwold, @nainar, @maitreyie-chavan

Meeting Notes

• @amedina gave a brief overview of the team structure for the PX Plugin’s roadmap
• With Bento components playing a key role in the new PX features, @rahul286 highlighted the plan of starting a parallel track where two engineers work alongside the Bento team to extend the Bento library further guided by Newspack sites’ analysis done by Weston
• @schlessera enquired if third-party outputs could be added to this existing set of Bento outputs. Further explaining with reference to the idea of having a canonical set Gutenberg components mapping to the Bento ones. And instead of coding each component one after the other, take the benefit of code generation out of the validator specs and make any custom updates if needed. That will be easy to maintain and keep in sync.
• @kristoferbaxter further added that this may need more investigation but the main motivation behind Bento is its way of encapsulation using Shadow DOM allowing it to be dropped in anywhere without worrying much about styling conflicts.
• @westonruter mentioned the past experience of having added multiple AMP components which were almost never used so cautioned that we will need to be careful about the blocks we do select. Also, different plugins in the ecosystem have their own set of blocks they may come with. It would be better if we document our experience of building the low-level components and let the ecosystem build over it.
• Agreeing to the above point, @rahul286 added an analogy of a Bento component that can be showcased as being similar to jQuery plugins that are fit for particular use cases. As a part of ecosystem activation, we can work with such plugin authors and bring awareness about the possible use of Bento components to make things better.
• @westonruter mentioned he’s experimenting with using the stable versions of the components and allowing the user to switch to using those components which will also enable the experimental mode. This will give us a starting point for trying things out and get a better understanding of what it is to use these Bento components on pages.
• @amedina enquired about how we can support the task of extending the Bento library further
  • @kristoferbaxter stated the next steps would be to work with the Team Leads to take this ahead and that he would touch base with Caroline to help with the onboarding.
  • Kris created a new slack channel, within AMP Projects Slack team, dedicated to this communication and working on this further #wg-bento-newspack - https://amphtml.slack.com/archives/C023TAYHNKV
• @schlessera chimed in about discussing the need to have a higher level tool consisting of lower-level tools that is normalising the output/input to each of these tools. In the long term, we build on a single user interface to drill down into the data. Due to this tool, the data will then contain multiple different checks from various tools but in a normalised way so we won’t have to constantly rebuild user interfaces for every new thing. It will help make iterations faster to include new checks, add new tools to the pipelines and decouples the experimentation of metrics and validation. In terms of execution, we need to figure out what is this normalised data to help work run in parallel efficiently.
• @amedina mentioned the need to have some target deadlines in place soon so that we stay on track. Newspack would be a good starting point to show Bento benefits.
• @nainar would work with Caroline to help ramp up the onboarding list and take things ahead from there.
• @maitreyie-chavan added that during next week’s meeting we will work on module wise meetings and discuss the items that would be a good starting point for the engineers to take up.