Dev Chat Summary – May 4, 2011

We have passed feature freeze, and are now in UI week, leading up to a beta date of May 11. This week’s dev chat checked in on all the things we originally targeted for 3.2.

  • Drop PHP4 compat: This is done, but there are 1 or 2 places we went a little too far and need to revert to not break things.
  • Distraction-free Writing (dfw): Backend is ready. Need to change the buttons used for HTML actions, provide support for escape key, support theme styles, and fine-tune transition times. @azaozz owns this one.
  • List tables API improvements: Not happening for 3.2. Westi’s basic summary of findings: More actions/filters/standardization and don’t support subclassing as an override method. Will try to get to this in 3.3.
  • Twenty Eleven (new default theme): Mostly finished, needs editor style support added.
  • IE6 EOL: Most agreed with @aarondcampbell’s suggestion for the nag — IE < 8 could say "you're insecure" and anything < most recent could say "your browser is outdated" @aarondcampbell will write patch, with confer with nacin about recent api work.
  • Speed improvements: There are lots and lots of speed improvements under the hood. Ryan has done time testing to prove it. If we have release video, Mark J suggested doing side by side view to show the difference. Nacin looked into PHP lazy loading, said it would not bring much improvement, so skipping it.
  • Partial core upgrades: work begun by @dd32, being finished by @nacin. Says nothing needs to be done in core, just on .org side re generating appropriate zips.
  • Style update: @dkoopersmith got first patch into trunk yesterday, had a large chunk of the update in it. Getting the rest in now, and then we’ll do a sweep to see what needs fixing/adding. Asking people to hold off on design feedback/requests/details until we’re ready, to avoid lots of trac messages about details that are already being added, just haven’t been committed yet. Should be there in a day.
  • Trac tickets: feature requests and enhancements mostly getting punted since past feature freeze. If there’s a bug you really wanted fixed, then get in there and find more people to test the patches on the ticket. Tickets withut patches will be punted.
  • Remainder of UI week will be dedicated to finishing the style update, and hitting small UI tickets that weren’t urgent/important enough to take attention away from core functionality, but that just make things a little bit nicer (it’s embarrassing that there are still things we put in during 2.7 that we said we’d clean up in 2.8 and then never got around to).