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Contribute To The Meeting Agenda

Contribute To The Meeting Agenda

By Jeffro on July 20, 2009

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Every week, the WordPress core developers get together to discuss a series of items that are outlined on an agenda. This agenda is not set in stone and in fact, users can suggest topics to be discussed at each meeting by suggesting them on the agenda outline posts on the WordPress development updates blog. For example, Jane is currently taking submissions for items to be discussed during the July 22nd meeting which is this Wednesday. So far, meta tables and committer workflow are on the table. If you are a plugin or theme developer and have something you want to discuss being added or reworked, I suggest trying to get it on the official agenda for the meeting and then showing up to talk about it. These meetings are where a good chunk of decisions happen which shape the direction of the WordPress software.

So how do you join the chat? Developer chats are held each Wednesday in the IRC channel (irc.freenode.com #wordpress-dev) at 9 PM UTC (5pm Eastern, 2pm Pacific). However, there is talk that the time and day might change. For the July 22nd meeting, it will be at the normally scheduled time.

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WordPress Dev Chat For 7-8-09

WordPress Dev Chat For 7-8-09

By Jeffro on July 8, 2009

wordpresslogoThe first part of the meeting provided an update on the Google Summer of Code projects related to WordPress. The best way to stay updated and even check out the work people are doing since it’s open would be to check out http://gsoc2009wp.wordpress.com/

Next we discussed the poll results thus far for priority of features for WordPress 2.9. So far, these are the top choices percentage wise: albums 17.6, basic image editing, 14.6, easier embeds, 14.3, post thumbnails 13.9. As far as the question which I inquired about yesterday with canonical plugins or core, here are the results: core 53.2, canonical 41.2, plugin 5.6. The poll results will be published on Friday. We were told today that so far, 2,400 people have voted.

Next up was the topic of non media features. The big one which was discussed last week was the ability to do a compatibility check for plugins as part of a WordPress core upgrade. Jane spoke with Matt and Peter Westwood and they both believe they can have this in WordPress 2.9 as long as it goes smoothly. This is still being debated quite heavily on how to properly implement such a feature so look for discussions to take place either in followup meetings, the hackers mailing list or the Developers Prologue site.

Then the discussion turned to figuring out who wanted to take on coding the feature set for WordPress 2.9. Obviously, I didn’t raise my hand. Looks possible that WordPress 2.9 may contain a feature where users will be able to login via their email address. There is also talk of something called an Undo feature like in Gmail where instead of getting a prompt to ask for confirmation when you click delete, you can just delete something but have the ability to undo it. This will introduce something called a ‘Trash Status‘ for things that are deleted. One other feature that is up for grabs regarding WordPress 2.9 is Page Management. That is, the ability to exclude pages from showing up in the navigational menu and using a drag-n-drop interface to rearrange the page order.

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WordPress Dev Chat For 7-1-09

WordPress Dev Chat For 7-1-09

By Jeffro on July 1, 2009

So the WordPress development meeting took place today and boy was the atmosphere conducive to discussion. Lots of things discussed while new ideas were generated. Unfortunately, you get a bunch of developers into a chat room and when you announce an idea or feature, the talk immediately turns into implementation which results in an unruly court that needs to be settled down to get back on track. But, the meeting went on and the following are the bullets points that were discussed regarding WordPress 2.9. Jane is currently working on putting the feature list together to be voted upon in a poll that will be published on the WordPress development blog to get a sense of where the end users priority lies.

post thumbnails, mark: The ability to use a custom field key to assign a thumbnail image to a post excerpt.

media albums, mark – The addition of photo albums to display images. I believe this to be different from galleries.

bulk media import API

make adding embeds easier (like viper plugin) – The inclusion of popular shortcodes to support major video sites like YouTube etc.

enable most media settings as defaults that can be overridden on a per image/file or per-use basis.

cropping, resizing, and rotation (in 90 degree increments) for image uploads, filtering – This would be the extend of basic photo enhancement. As a few others said, we really don’t want to see Photoshop in the WordPress write panel for images.

Custom Image Sizes. Instead of hardcoded thumb, med, large (manually configuring maximum image sizes for small, thumbnail etc)

lightboxing images: It’s been decided not to add Lightbox as a core feature just yet.

post types: For WordPress 3.0

page exclude plus reorder for blog nav: nikolayb – The ability to easily remove a page from showing in the navigation menu while also providing UI to sort the order of the menu.

media metadata – The addition of tags and categories to sort media.

uploader feature: ability to choose from most recently used/most often used/marked as favorite files

more default shortcodes. check top ten from wp.com. slideshare and any place that advertises wp.com shortcodes

importers (specifics TBD)

and UI header brushup and uploader UI – I imagine this has to do with the header poll that was announced after 2.7 was released.

That’s about it. Not sure what next weeks topic will be about but if you want to suggest one, you can by visiting the WordPress development updates blog. If you would like to participate in the chat next week, install IRC or an IRC compatible client and connect to the following IRC server.

chat.freenode.net or any random server on the Freenode network and then join this channel at 5PM Eastern time on Wednesdays. #wordpress-dev.

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