Andrew Nacin who many in the WordPress community know as a house hold name by now has published a retrospective post into his first year heavily involved with WordPress development since his first patch was submitted. One of the most encouraging lines within hist post is the following:
I’ve learned what it means to have an opinion without having a personal agenda.
Not only does Andrew tell us what it’s been like for him to be a part of the WordPress development community the past twelve months, but we also find out that he is writing the core contributor handbook which may be ready by the end of this year. Also for those that don’t know, Andrew Nacin is the technical editor of the new book, Professional WordPress Plugin Development which I talked about with Brad Williams during episode 105 of WordPress Weekly. Andrew is one of those people who constantly makes me wonder, how does he do that? Personally, I think he has some robotic DNA within him but who knows.
The bottom line is, thanks to his incredible amount of time devoted to the project, WordPress is better because of it, minus the capital P dangit filter. From me to you, thank you Andrew for your commitment to the project and helping my install of WordPress to perform better.
1.2.6 Release – Many of the tickets left for 1.2.6 have patches. Ticket 2587 appears to be the only blocker dealing with the ability to hide multiple child-level comments. The feeling is that 1.2.6 is really close but a firm date can not be given.
When JJJ entered the chat about a half hour after it started, he mentioned that 1.2.6 needs to be pushed out ASAP. It’s likely that we’ll see it released by the end of this week.
Strict Release Cycles – There was some discussion on whether it was time for the BuddyPress project to adhere to a more strict release cycle. In defining strict, I noted that it probably is more about predictability rather than a strict release cycle. The core development team along with contributors will in the future, discuss whether or not if it’s possible to release 2 or 3 major versions a year per the amount of development effort that BuddyPress currently has.
BuddyPress.org – There was a call for volunteers to help clean up the Codex along with filling in the gaps. The BuddyPress.org support forum will soon show topics you’ve participated in.
I put in the suggestion that the moderator team be expanded so that more users have the capabilities to delete spam user accounts as they pollute the activity stream. It looks like in the future, some additions will come to BuddyPress that helps this issue not only for the BuddyPress website, but BuddyPress powered sites in general.
How To Participate:
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 3:00PM Eastern time on Thursdays. #buddypress-dev.
Advanced Taxonomy Queries – Mark Jaquith updated everyone on the status of his advanced taxonomy queries. Scribu has been working on cleaning up the functionality and that is done with the exception of bug fixing. Now the scope and the best syntax for it needs to be determined, what to support, etc. If the scope can be determined by next week, it should be good to go. The ticket for this functionality is #12891
Blessed Tickets – The following tickets have been blessed for WordPress 3.1
Internal Linking – Progress on the internal linking has stalled somewhat but TinyMCE integration is done, needs some work on the dialog’s UI. You can keep track of the developments of internal linking via ticket #11420.
Searching Installed Themes – Ryan Boren is working on this feature. Looks like the last thing that needs to be done is adding a feature filter.
Separate Network Dashboard – Not much movement, just awaiting some User Interface time.
Admin Bar – The base of the admin bar will most likely be built around the one developed by Andy Peatling for BuddyPress as it has a decent API already.
UX/UI Projects – John Nolan updated everyone on the status of the UI group and the projects they are working on which include: blue bar refresh, accessible skin, CSS refactor, and inconsistencies getting cleared up. You can keep tabs on their work via their development blog.
How To Participate:
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. For an overview of what these development meetings are all about, please read the following post, purpose of the dev chat.
chat.freenode.net or any random server on the Freenode network and then join this channel at 4:30PM Eastern time or 20:30 UTC Thursdays. #wordpress-dev.
WordPress core developer Mark Jaquith has started a new practice on his website where visitors will be able to use a question submission form to ask Mark anything having to do with WordPress. It could be a question regarding WordPress, usage, security, or development issues. From time to time, Mark will be publishing the chosen question or questions and answering them on his site. Considering Marks extensive knowledge in development security, it will be interesting to see how many of those questions are submitted/chosen.
In this episode of WordPress Weekly, I interviewed WordPress core developer, Andrew Nacin. Andrew joined the core committ team in February of 2010 and since then, he’s been an insanely active contributor all over the WordPress project whether it be through code, the forums, mailing lists, etc. During our conversation, we talked about Andrews life before WordPress, how he became a developer, how he’s able to be so active within the community, his Google Summer of Code project that deals with a theme revision system, and near the end of the show, we talked about some of the ways to contribute to the WordPress project.
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General RC Readiness
RC readiness could be better. However, a big punt is needed but 3.0 is now under 100 tickets. The blockers are under control. Menus are looking good now that the IE issues are fixed. The rest of the menu tickets are trivial and if needed, can be punted. JohnONolan will be submitting a few UI patches for other stuff and Jane will be going through a final walk through this weekend to see if there is any UX that was missed. The list of remaining tickets for WordPress 3.0 can be found here. The patches that are in Has Patch/Needs Testing, needs testing. If anyone could help out on that, it would be appreciated.
It looks like the importers that are bundled with WordPress will be ripped out and turned into a core plugin with the exception of the WordPress one. The WordPress importer plugin can be found here.
Shrinking of WordPress. In order to have WordPress 3.0 avoid tripping memory limits on shared hosts, certain items are being lifted from the core. The importers are one of those items. TinyMCE.js is also on the slate to be removed. Removing stuff form WordPress is just a stop gap measure to the original problem so that WordPress 3.0 will not be delayed any further.
RC1 looks set to be released by the end of next week or sooner.
Meeting Time
Taken off list to figure out timezones etc.
Update On WordPress Tests
Peter Westwood stated that as far as wordpress-tests is concerned – they exist, I use them, I’m trying to keep them up-to-date and I will have them running automatically when it is worth doing – too many failures at the moment which need reviewing. If people want to play with them they are in svn here: http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress-tests/
How To Participate:
If you want to suggest a topic to be discussed at the next meeting, 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 4:30PM Eastern time or 20:30 UTC Thursdays. #wordpress-dev.
Status Check
Despite the decision to release beta 2 last Monday, the menus are still holding everything up. Work is continuing on the menu system and once it’s close to being finalized, beta 2 will be pushed out. Right now, it looks like Beta 2 will be released in the next few days and hopefully, RC1 after the post code sprint at WordCamp San Francisco is completed. As for Multi-Site, Andrew Nacin pointed out that there are still some bugs that need addressed. Specifically: upload directories, network.php needs non-apache awareness, IIS rewrite rules, and 12142.
GSoC
There are a total of 15 students for this years edition of the Google Summer Of Code. They can be found here along with their respective projects. A more detailed post about this is forthcoming for the dev blog once WCSF is over with. There will also be a public blog for student updates that people can follow if they are interested in a specific project.
JavaScript library preferences
Keep an eye on the WordPress Developers Prologue site as a debate regarding the use of jQeury versus Javascript ensues. According to Filosofo, there are issues with performance, bad design, and bugginess with jQuery.
Menus
One of the big ticket items concerning menus is ticket 13154 where editing menus causes pages/posts to be deleted. There are also some serious styling issues seen in IE6. There are also some drag n drop issues. I encourage you to read the log file as it’s an interesting discussion surrounding menus and IE6.
Ticket 10607
There was a bit of discussion around ticket 10607 that ended up breaking WordPress MU.
WPMU literally used is_null() to check, in a loop, which completely tanked a page. We now return an empty array. No problems if a plugin is using empty(). But we’re introducing back compat issues with is_null. I’m okay with that, but if it was used in MU, who knows where else it was used. If we change it back, we’ll continue to need to occasionally cast as an array, or use empty, et al. This is a change that can break plugins.
Plugin developers are reminded to test their plugins on the beta versions of WordPress to see if this particular change breaks them.
Trashed items interfere with page/post slug generation
Based on ticket 11863. After some discussion, there will be some added messaging for users when they are trying to use a permalink that is already present and held within the trash bin.
If you want to suggest a topic to be discussed at the next meeting, 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 4:30PM Eastern time or 20:30 UTC Thursdays. #wordpress-dev.
Menus
Filosofo has submitted his patch for the menu system. A few fixes are needed but it’s mostly there and looks like wireframes. They also work without javascript. The list of to-dos remaining for the menu system are a couple of things involving Ajax and some Internet Explorer stuff. The menu patch needs to be committed to be seen in action but according to Filosofo, it’s almost beta ready.
Filosofos patch has been committed and after some skimmed reviews, it is looking pretty good. He still needs to fix a few bugs that are known before everyone gets a hold of the menu system. Hopefully, we’ll be able to play around with the menu system come Monday in Beta 2.
Schedule
Ryan Boren stated that 3.0 is live on a subset of wordpress.com servers. They fixed a bunch of bugs in the process, all of which are now in WP trunk. A couple of the VIP members for WordPress.com tested the code with their plugins which also highlighted some bugs that were fixed and are also in trunk. A lot of what needs to happen are bug fixes with Menus being the only feature demanding attention right now. Nacin mentioned the following areas that need fixing: post type bugs, some taxonomy bugs, mainly needing final patches… some MS bugs and general incompleteness — i.e. non-broken IIS support — needing some love.
It looks like Monday April 26th will be the day WordPress 3.0 Beta 2 will be pushed out.
WordCamp San Francisco Code Sprint
Anyone who is staying in town on Monday or Tuesday after WordCamp San Francisco will be about to work at the Pier where Automattic is located to work on WordPress 3.0 bugs. Those in attendance will be treated to free beer throughout the day and possibly a Tshirt. A form to signup to the code sprint can be located here.
How To Participate:
If you want to suggest a topic to be discussed at the next meeting, 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 4:30PM Eastern time or 20:30 UTC Thursdays. #wordpress-dev.
Time.com is looking for a seasoned front-end WordPress developer. As the job posting shows, you need to know your stuff if you’re going to apply for the position. If I even know half of the requirements that are needed, I’d be in good shape. Since jobs are few and far between, I thought it would be good to push this one out into the open considering many developers and consultants read this site.
Status And Schedule Update
Jane mentioned that they are behind. There is one month left till the launch of 3.0 unless it gets pushed back. Right now, menus is still being worked on with a chance at having them finished by Monday. If the team could do a massive punt, ID major bugs, start reviewing/testing all existing patches 3.0 could go beta next week. However, there was a 6 week planned beta/RC to allow some leeway in case things were not finished on time. Westi does not think 3 weeks is a long enough beta period. It looks like tomorrow, there will be an announcement of a pre-beta to get people into testing mode.
So far, VIPs have been testing a WP.com merged branch of 3.0 with good results. The plan is to have beta 1 Friday, April 2nd and beta 2 sometime next week.
Core Plugins
Not much has been worked on since the last update. Westi has some code pending plus he wants to review some other code and then he will push out Alphas. UI For the core plugins will most likely come in 3.1, not in 3.0. Core plugins for the rest of the WordPress 3.0 dev cycle will most likely not get much more help.
GSoC
They have scheduled IRC chats on Sunday and Wednesday in #wordpress-gsoc. Students have come and gone throughout the week to ask questions and get feedback. The application period ends April 9th. So far, 10 proposals have been submitted with more expected before the 9th. Two ideas have been removed from the list. User roles and Widget repository as they are too political. But, a couple of new ideas have been added to the Codex page. The application template has also been updated to be a little more formal. Students and those interested can follow WPGSOC on Twitter to keep updated.
How To Participate:
If you want to suggest a topic to be discussed at the next meeting, 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 4:30PM Eastern time or 20:30 UTC Thursdays. #wordpress-dev.
In this episode of WordPress Weekly, I interviewed WordPress core developer,