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June 10th The Target For 2.8

June 10th The Target For 2.8

By Jeffro on June 3, 2009

wordpresslogoIn the WordPress Developers channel on IRC today, Ryan Boren announced that the target date for the release of WordPress 2.8 is June 10th. There are a couple other things that were announced as well:

  • WP 2.9 will require MySQL 4.1.2 or greater.  This is raised from the current requirement of 4.0.
  • Checks will be added to the automatic upgrader that will prevent upgrading to 2.9 if  MySQL < 4.1.2 is being used.  The upgrader will also issue a notice that suggests asking the host to upgrade MySQL to meet the minimum requirement.
  • In order to promote migration to PHP 5, the upgrader will suggest that those running
    PHP 4 switch to PHP 5. A link to a Codex page describing how to switch for various hosts should be provided.
  • The new weekly IRC meetup time will be every Wednesday at 9pm UTC.

As an aside, I noticed this thread in the hackers mailing list archive which contained not only a link to the 10,000th ticket to be opened and closed in Trac, but also contained a neat tidbit of trivia.

2.8 is the one with the most tickets opened (815, which if memory serves me well is the first time a milestone passes the 800 line), and more importantly with the most tickets closed (758 and counting).

Usually milestones end their lifetime with a couple dozens (if not a couple hundreds, most often) of unresolved tickets, which are then swept under the rug of the next minor or major version.

But this time, thanks to extensions to the release date (and I’m thinking also the tireless participation of external developers, among which one of the most notable is Denis de Bernardy, who devoted himself full-time to tickets-resolving ever since the 24-hour-marathon (http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/9758#comment:10), we’ve seen a steady decrease in number of open tickets, even thought this major release has seen more open tickets than any other previous release: we’re at 758 closed tickets already, and the closest to that is v2.5 with 750 closed tickets, then v2.7 with 668 closed tickets.

If you continue reading into that archived post, you’ll see that based on Xavier’s opinion, going six months without a major release proved beneficial to getting the ticket situation under control. Hopefully with 2.9 and beyond, the core devs and contributors can keep pace with the progress they have made with 2.8. I’d also like to extend Xavier’s thanks to the core developers, external developers, reviewers, testers, and people who participate in in-depth discussions to figure out the best way to solve a particular problem.

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Visual Tour Of The WP 2.8 Widget Interface

Visual Tour Of The WP 2.8 Widget Interface

By Jeffro on May 1, 2009

It’s been awhile since the last time I’ve created a screencast but last night, I finally opened Camtasia Studio 6. It seemed easier to use this time around versus my first two screencasts with version 5. Upon some initial feedback last night on Twitter, I need to work on the audio portion and also adjust the screen resolution I record at but for a start, this isn’t bad.

Let me know if you would like me to produce more screencasts and if so, what on?

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24 Hour Has-Patch Marathon Underway

24 Hour Has-Patch Marathon Underway

By Jeffro on April 16, 2009

wordpresslogoJane Wells has announced on the WordPress.org development blog that the 24 hour has-patch marathon is now underway. The reason it’s called has-patch is because in trac, when someone submits a patch, the tags ‘has-patch‘ is added to the keyword field making it easier to sort through those tickets which actually have a patch.

During the next 24 hours, the core developers will be evaluating patches that have been tested and committing those that are up to par.

Grab yourself a copy of the nightly build to make sure you’re using the right version, then head over to Trac and start looking at the has-patch* tickets. Pick a ticket, download the diff, test it out on the browsers/platforms you have available, and write a comment about the results in the ticket’s comment thread. Move on to the next ticket. Do as many as you can over the next 24 hours.

Next Monday, Jane will publish the results of the marathon and in her message to the testers mailing list, she upped the incentive on contributing to this event:

When I put up the results of the marathon on the dev blog on Monday, I’ll also link to the top 5 testers from the 24-hour marathon period (measured by number of patches tested/commented in trac treads).

Hopefully, all goes well and if I can find the time, I’ll see if I can do a bit of testing on a patch or two. Last but not least, WordPress 2.8 is now feature frozen.

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First Look At New Widget Interface

First Look At New Widget Interface

By Jeffro on April 13, 2009

Upon upgrading my development site for testing to the latest nightly build of WordPress, I discovered that the first bits and pieces of the Widget management system were added. Just as I had hoped for, the system works like a cross between 2.3 and 2.5 leaning more towards 2.3. On the left, you have a listing of available widgets. On the right, you have sidebars available where you drag widgets from the left, to the right, just like it worked in WordPress 2.3. However, there are a few differences.

widgetsin29

Instead of a drop down list of sidebars available, all of them in your theme show up on the right hand side. Also, the sidebar titles are shown on the right so if a theme author has given the widgetized areas of their theme common sense placement names, it should be rather simple to place widgets in the desired location the first time around. Also, multi-widgets works as expected.

inactivewidgets

At the bottom of the page is a container for inactive Widgets. At this stage of the game, I am a bit confused with why there is an inactive widgets container and a container filled with widgets you can use. They are all widgets and if they are there, then they are all usable. But this system is still very early in development. It’s obvious that a few styling issues need to be addressed but more importantly, some UI enhancements need to take place which I’m sure will happen in the coming days.

widgetoptions

But I can honestly say, I like what I’m seeing and I’d rather just drag stuff around rather than clicking around and selecting drop downs from multiple sidebars.

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Small Preview Of WordPress 2.8

Small Preview Of WordPress 2.8

By Jeffro on March 7, 2009

With the release of WordPress 2.8 pushed back now to April 1st, (dates are always tentative) I decided to download the nightly build for March 7th and wanted to take a look to see what sort of progress has been made. At this point, no widget management features have been added to the core that I am aware of. I do know that Andrew Ozz has been assigned the task to revamp the Widget Management area. I wish him the best of luck! However, syntax highlighting along with function lookups have been added to both the plugin and theme editor. Here is what they look like.

coloredsyntaxhighlighting

functionlookupdocumentation

functionlookup

One thing I noticed already in the 2.8 bleeding edge version is that just like plugins, you can browse the theme repository and install themes without leaving your blogs backend. You can search, preview, and upload themes as well. Check it out.

installthemes

Although work is ongoing, I did want to mention the fact that MagPie RSS will no longer be the default parsing engine that WordPress uses. Instead, it will be SimplePie RSS. Simple Pie will be used in WordPress 2.8 for widget and dashboard feeds. Also at some point, plugins which used MagPie RSS that was built into WordPress will at some point no longer work. So if you have a plugin that does this such as the KB Advanced RSS Widget plugin, make sure to update your code to use the new parsing engine. No need to rush it though as backwards compatibility will be in WordPress for a little while before it is completely removed.

Last but not least, you’ll be able to select between 1-4 columns for your dashboard widgets.

dashboardwidgets

For a look at what will most likely come down the pike in WordPress 2.8, please see this Codex article dedicated to the version.

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Cliff Note Version Of WordCamp Germany

Cliff Note Version Of WordCamp Germany

By Jeffro on February 23, 2009

Community Member Brad recently made me aware of a video on WordPress.TV which contained Matt Mullenwegs Keynote session at WordCamp Germany. In this keynote, Matt discusses a wide range of things such as the history of WordPress/B2, Feature requests for 2.8, confirmed features for WordPress 2.8, unveiling of P2 (Prologue 2), short glimpse of his new blog design, and the GPL. I have not read much in the way of coverage based on what Matt presented in this video so here is the cliff notes version for those interested.


Wordcamp Germany: Keynote Matt Mullenweg from Phil v. Sassen (sassen.org) on Vimeo.

Matt Mullenweg’s first blog was powered by MovableType

Matt then moved onto something called B2

B2 was the first time Matt ever got involved with an Open Source Project

Matt’s passion for typography lead him to writing a patch for B2 which was accepted into the core creating a natural high which is the fuel that keeps Matt developing for Open Source software.

Lead developer of B2 disappeared for 9 months which caused users to create forks of the software.

Matt’s favorite software at the time was TextPattern. Matt said that if TextPattern was open source, WordPress wouldn’t exist.

Mike Little is the co-founder of WordPress and his comment on a blog post Matt made about the blog software dilemma is what really fueled Matt to fork B2.

Matt mentions that WordPress.org blogs have an average of 4.96 plugins installed with the repository now over 4,000 plugins.

Matt says 2008 was big because of the move towards user-driven development. Clearly illustrated with the redesign of the back end.

WordPress 2.8

Matt asks the crowd for feature requests for WordPress 2.8. Someone mentions the photoblog function as seen on Matt’s blog. CMS functions for organizing pages. And a few others.

Matt confirms what will be in WordPress 2.8.

Lots of theme support/upgrades. Entire theme directory browseable and installable from the backend like plugins. Something called CodePress theme editor to provide WYSIWYG template editing with code syntax highlighting. Any functions that are used in the theme will have links next to them which will take you to documentation pages for those functions. Theme upgrades.

Widget improvements such as management.

Custom Taxonomies. Introduced in WordPress 2.3 in the form of tags. A way to create richer semantics.

Faster! Matt says in WordPress 2.7, they added a BAJILLION lines of javascript. In WordPress 2.8, there will be alot of javascript optimizations to make the backend faster.

Matt then addresses using WordPress as a CMS. Matt did not expect people using WordPress as a CMS. WordPress was created as a means of being the best blog publishing tool possible but he showcases many examples of people using the software as a CMS.

Matt gives a sneak peak of his new blog design.

Matt also features the Monotone photoblog theme.

Matt makes the statement that he believe the previous 5 years have been about plugins and that the next 5 years will be about themes.

Matt thinks BuddyPress will be a big thing in 2009. He calls it Facebook in a box.

Matt then talks about Prologue and then showcases a new version code named P2. Prologue is considered to be Twitter in a box. Matt shows off prologue 1 versus prologue 2. P2 is now much wider with comments and everything else is now directly embedded onto the site. The entire site can also be managed using keyboard shortcuts. Comments are ajaxified and are inline. Also, someone who leaves a comment on the site will be able to see other comments published on the site as they are published in real-time. Almost like an ajax based chatroom. Use can use P2 as a real-time chatroom with all the benefits of a blog.

Even though Matt stated P2 would be released that week, I’ve double checked today and it is not currently available to the public. I couldn’t find it on the WordPress.com Theme SVN either.

Matt finalizes his presentation by going over the four freedoms of the GPL.

Matt says if he woke up one day with devil horns and wanted to do something evil, anyone could take the entire WordPress codebase and fork it, redistribute it, charge for it, etc. The ultimate liberty.

This is the first time I’ve heard of Matt actually bringing up the topic of the GPL in his presentations. This makes me wonder if because of the GPL debacle involved with the theme repository a few months ago if he is now trying to educate people across the world why WordPress is licensed under the GPL and the freedoms associated with the license.

One thing about Matt is that he is a great speaker and keeps the crowd entertained as well as focused on the subject at hand. Special thanks to the guys from WordCamp Germany for uploading this video to WordPress.TV.

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