Core Team Meetup Recap – Part II
Picking up where we left off….
Friday
We kicked off Friday with a discussion about the high-level roadmap for 2012. Using our earlier talk about process and scope, we identified areas/userflows that we could use to focus a release. Areas of interest included changing themes/customizing your site, uploading a bunch of photos, interacting with audience/feedback loop. (There were more, but let’s face it, there are too many things we’d like to improve to do them all at once.)
We all donned WordPress gear so that people would recognize us at the happy hour later.
Dion (dd32) modeling the latest swag
Dion and Andrew Ozz before lunch
Lunch: Went to The Sentient Bean in Savannah.
The Sentient Bean
Back patio at the Sentient Bean
Koop and Mark, Dion and Ozz in the background
Next we went to ThincSavannah, my coworking space in downtown Savannah. We did the livestreamed Town Hall/Q&A (recording coming soon), answering questions from that forum thread I put up last week and a few that came in live from IRC.
Core team town hall
After that was happy hour at Jazz’d. Only two people came to hang out with us (and to think we dressed up especially!), but they were two great people, so we were fine. Some drinks and appetizers later, we departed for WordPress on Ice, in which we went ice skating at the Civic Center.
Nacin and Koop on skates
WordPress on Ice! Nacin, Mark, Jane, Matt, Jon, Daryl
Then a stop at Huc-a-Poo’s, then home.
Saturday
We spent the morning talking about mobile apps and their place in the WordPress ecosystem, as well as making the dashboard a better experience when viewed in a mobile browser.
Lunch: Went to AJ’s and ate on the deck. Continued talking about mobile. This eventually morphed a bit into a discussion about the lines between .org/.com.
Core team at lunch at AJ's Dockside
After lunch we talked about the default theme for 2012, including what it should do/be that our current themes don’t already accomplish, and the process for its creation. Breakouts followed. One was focused on multisite, while the other was focused on hosting/diagnostics/health check. We tested doing a Google Hangout with screensharing as a way to collaborate more effectively throughout the year, and agreed we would try to do them once a month. For dinner we got takeout BBQ from Gerald’s Pig & Shrimp. We pretended @ryan was with us by playing a video of him from last year’s meetup. Afterward, Koop gave a primer on JavaScript.
Sunday
When we started this morning, we tried to at least quickly hit the things we hadn’t gotten to yet, since today was the last day. These included: Google stuff, core plugins, how leadership in core does/does not translate to leadership of the whole project, wordpress.org site, pairs (creating process to make collaborative/non-solo development the norm), and CMS stuff.
Since a lot of us were pretty interested in making the theme customization process a focus of the next release, we starting identifying what the chunks of that might look like under the new process and with people working in pairs/teams. We continued talking about this over brunch at the Tybee Island Social Club, where @nacin and @dkoopersmith drank bacon bloody marys.
Bacon Bloody Mary
Should Nacin eat the bacon or drink the bloody mary? He can't decide.
After brunch, @markjaquith and @dd32 left for the airport, and @joncave and @azaozz left two hours later. Bye bye, core team!
Now we begin a 2nd mini meetup. Matt, Nacin, Koop, and I are staying, and have been joined by @otto42 and @chexee. The next couple of days we’ll be doing some planning and starting projects to make visiting wordpress.org a better, more useful experience. Â Tonight, though, everyone is catching up on some individual work after a week of long days.
We’ll post summaries of the specific core meetup discussions over the coming week.
Michael Beckwith (@tw2113) 11:26 pm on December 18, 2011 Permalink
Very curious to see how the focus on theme customization process turns out, and maybe I can jump in and help a bit with that as it’s one areas I love focusing on.
Andrew Nacin 12:12 am on December 19, 2011 Permalink
Worth nothing a few things:
First and foremost, that bacon bloody mary was good. Really good. Who cares how you consume it.
Second, please don’t interpret the lack of a mention of any peculiar topic to mean it wasn’t discussed — only that only so much can fit in one of these posts. For the developers, we had some discussions on security practices and procedures, unit testing, and core architecture (and planning for the future). The word “multisite” escapes with a single mention, but in that meeting we came away with a number of immediate action items, as well as a potential roadmap for the next year. And if you didn’t catch the livestream, you may have also missed that we’ve committed to a JSON API in core to go alongside RSS.
This was just the day-to-day play-by-play. There’s a lot more we need to write up. Woo.
David Johnson 2:46 am on December 19, 2011 Permalink
Thanks for the recap write-up!
Any word about backup/restore/migration issues within the WordPress core? It seems like basic security and backup should be in the core installation..but maybe I’m missing something.
Thank you WordPress core team for allowing the community to be involved and aware of the goings on within WordPress.
Jane Wells 2:24 am on December 20, 2011 Permalink
Security is definitely something that was talked about, but a backup utility is more suited to a plugin than core (though we did discuss the possibility of a core/canonical plugin for backups).
Adam W. Warner 2:34 pm on December 19, 2011 Permalink
It’s great to get an “insider” view of your meetup, so thanks, the community appreciates it and all the work you all do to make the World a more open and accessible place for many to have their voices heard.
Also, @Nacin, thanks for the additional mention of Multisite. I’m an avid user and am pleased there will be some additional focus.
Lance Willett 3:00 pm on December 19, 2011 Permalink
Great job with all these newsy updates, Jane. Kudos.
mitcho (Michael 芳貴 Erlewine) 3:07 am on December 22, 2011 Permalink
Wait, is the “Nacin and Koop on skates” photo the answer to my request!?
Here was the original ticket:
https://twitter.com/#!/themitcho/status/147901791776935937
havahula 3:51 am on December 23, 2011 Permalink
ok. i’ll bite. where does one get those fancy, baby blue track jackets Dion, Ozz and Matt are wearing? and did Nacin have one too before he drank the bacon bloody mary, which turned his brown?
Jane Wells 11:45 am on December 23, 2011 Permalink
I had them made special. After the holidays I’ll get some made for the store at http://wordpress.hellomerch.com. The brown ones have a different design and are the ones we were selling last year. They’ll be back eventually, too.