WordPress 3.9 planning

We were supposed to discuss WordPress 3.9 during the weekly meeting last week, but in the absence of a decision on a release leadRelease Lead The community member ultimately responsible for the Release., and with a lot of 3.8.1 things to get through, it got pushed to today. 2100 UTC, #wordpress-dev (so, in an hour).

I’ll be the release lead for WordPress 3.9. Expect some familiar faces helping me out, including Andrew Ozz, who will be overseeing all of the TinyMCE work already underway this cycle; Helen Hou-Sandí, who will be spending most of her time working on and advising ongoing feature plugins efforts; Sam Sidler, who will be helping with project management; and Mike Schroder, who will be backing me up for this release.

Today we’ll be:

  • Setting a schedule. The tentative 2014 roadmap decided in December slated 3.9 for April 15. That’s 90 days from now, and sounds good to me.
  • Reviewing feature plugins. Lots of things in progress — let’s take a quick look.
  • Brainstorming on what this release should be focusing on. There are plenty of possibilities when it comes to iterating on existing features (especially those added in the last five releases — the customizerCustomizer Tool built into WordPress core that hooks into most modern themes. You can use it to preview and modify many of your site’s appearance settings., media, audio/video, theme browser, adminadmin (and super admin) UIUI User interface), general bugbug A bug is an error or unexpected result. Performance improvements, code optimization, and are considered enhancements, not defects. After feature freeze, only bugs are dealt with, with regressions (adverse changes from the previous version) being the highest priority.-fixing, long-standing architecture and APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways. improvements, and such.
  • Discussing changes to workflows. Changes to Trac, ticket reporting, re-doing our components tree, a new Git mirror, and such make this release look a lot like 3.7, when we kicked off the new core development repository. We could use continual help to identify how we can make it easier to contribute, break through bottlenecks, etc. We also need to tagtag A directory in Subversion. WordPress uses tags to store a single snapshot of a version (3.6, 3.6.1, etc.), the common convention of tags in version control systems. (Not to be confused with post tags.) some tickets as good-first-bug!

Hope to see you today. Have any idea, thought, or suggestion about 3.9 or for today’s meeting in particular? Please leave a comment so I can prepare for it. Talk soon.

#3-9, #release-lead