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.
Thanks for the summary, Jeff.
I often miss the IRC dev chats because they happen about the time our kids get home from school. So it’s a major break time in my work-from-home day. :)
A summary like yours is much easier to digest than just reading the raw IRC logs. I appreciate the effort.
@Dougal Campbell – Well, I figure a WordPress enthusiast site should try to cover these meetups as it makes sense. However, as you can tell from previous chats, I can’t summarize what i don’t understand. HAH
Thanks for the summary, good to hear that the first beta is due tomorrow, I’ve been enjoying playing around with the alpha.