Consequently, I’m pushing the beta date back two weeks, to March 27th, and the release back one week to April 29th. If our beta period is actually a beta period (to work on bugs,  not features), three weeks should be plenty of time. Ditto for the two-week RC period, for major bugs. We’ve needed longer periods in the past because we’ve been doing major feature development through the beta period and into the RC period, which, as mentioned above, I don’t want to do again.

Here is the major new-feature or new-feature-related stuff that needs to be settled and land in core (if they are going in at all) in the next two weeks (front-loaded as much as possible). Let’s redouble our efforts and get this sorted so we can get a beta out the door.

Revisions

• #16215 – Revisions author “off by one” bug (@markjaquith) (@markjaquith)
• #23497 — Finalize UI (@markjaquith)

Post Format UI

• #20564 — Post meta revisions for PF meta (@markjaquith)
• #23539 — Use preview PF postmeta (@markjaquith)
• #19570 — Main UI tracking ticket (@markjaquith)
• #23282 — Add shortcodes for inline HTML5 audio / video (@markjaquith)
• #23673 — Add functions to generate metadata for video / audio (@markjaquith)
• #23198 — Pass post format as a class to TinyMCE init (@markjaquith)
• #16047 — Post format display on edit.php (waiting on icons) (@helen)
• #23725 — Parsing tracking ticket (@markjaquith)
• #23726 — Show Audio and Video previews on Edit Attachment screen (@markjaquith)
• #22960 — Add functions to extract images from content, attached to post, [gallery], or arbitrary string (@markjaquith)
• #23570 — Add functions to extract a URL from an arbitrary string, HTML, or the current $post (@markjaquith)
• #23572 — Add functions to parse Audio / Video data out of arbitrary content or a post (@markjaquith)
• #23625 — Add function to extract or parse chat as structured data (@markjaquith)
• #23347 — Theme fallbacks for post format meta data (@markjaquith)

Twenty Thirteen

• #23619 — use new URL extraction function for link post format (@markjaquith)
• #23620 — extract video or image from post content and place above the title and post content (@markjaquith)
• #23621 — use core functionality to find first image in gallery post format (@markjaquith)
• #15080 — Comment Form Should use HTML5 input types (@markjaquith)
• #20088 — Improve wp_list_comments() markup (@markjaquith)

Post locking

• #23665 — One autosave per user per post — has patch needs testing and commit (@markjaquith)
• #23697 — Needs some UI love for the lockout message and work around the avatar code (@markjaquith)

Nav Menus

• #23770 — finalize UI for theme locations (@markjaquith)
• #23450 — nav menu sources as accordion (@markjaquith)
• #14045 — accessibility mode for nav menu editing (@markjaquith)
• #23608 — Help text updates (@markjaquith)

Though disappointing, this effort wasn’t wasted. We learned a lot about the challenges involved, and we’re better positioned to tackle it in the future with more advance planning and a better understanding of the core team resources that need time dedicated to it.

A first draft of the Twenty Thirteen theme is now in core, for your inspection and iteration. See: r23452

A demo site is available for you to browse.

@matt set the goals for this theme: a focus on blogging, and great support for post formats (which are getting attention on the backend in 3.6 as well). Under Matt’s guidance, @joen explored the artistic possibilities and was joined by @obenland and @lancewillett in bringing it to fruition.

What you’ll notice first is the colors. Way more use of color than a bundled WordPress theme has had before. Each post format has its own color, so each is distinct, yet they are all complimentary. The bold colors encourage authors to try out all the different formats. This color extends the full width of the window, which breaks your blog up into a lush, segmented timeline. This effect is even more pronounced on mobile browsers, where the screen can be dominated by one or two posts at a time, in all of their chromatic fullness.

On closer inspection, you’ll notice details, like the font-based icons (“Genericons”, by @joen) that scale up to any resolution or zoom level and can be easily recolored using CSS.

You may notice some playful details, like the size-offset pagination arrows:

Or the 404 page (which I’ll leave to you to find).

One of the goals of having a new theme every year was to give ourself room to experiment. That hasn’t really happened. We’ve been far too conservative, trying to make themes that work reasonably well for everyone, but don’t push boundaries too much. That changes with Twenty Thirteen. It’s hard not to have a strong feeling about the theme, one way or another. It defies you to give it a shrug or a kurt nod. Some of you will hate it. And that’s okay. We’ll still be shipping Twenty Twelve, which is an excellent base theme and a canvas on which you can build anything from a blog to a static content site. But with Twenty Thirteen we’re taking a bold stance: this theme was meant for blogging, and it’s not a blank canvas. It comes pre-marinated with playfulness and warmth and opinions.

Twenty Thirteen really prefers a single column layout. Widgets live best in the footer, where jQuery Masonry bricks them together (but it supports a sidebar, if you really insist). Header images have a fixed width and height, and will be cropped at smaller resolutions, so the best choice is an artistic header where not 100% needs to be shown all the time (it ships with three).

Now that we have a first draft of Twenty Thirteen in core, it’s time to start iterating and sanding off some of the rough edges. Accessibility is still important, even when making bold artistic statements, and I’d be surprised if we didn’t have work to do there. We’ll need testing on lots of different browsers and platforms, and with lots of different plugins. @helen‘s Post Format UI team will need to give feedback on upgrading Twenty Thirteen to use the new post format API functions that are available.

@lancewillett and @obenland will be holding Twenty Thirteen office hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 1700 UTC. Interested parties should make an effort to attend and help us get this beauty ready for beta!

Monday and Thursday

• Autosave/Post Locking
• Nav Menus
• Post Format UI

Tuesday and Friday

• Editorial Flow
• Core Maintenance and Architecture
• Revisions

Next, while many features are still being actively planned, the feature teams should hold IRC office hours where more realtime discussion can take place to get the features scoped and planned a little better. Feature teams should announce these hours here on make/core (can be part of their twice-weekly updates).

1. Feature team updates
2. Set up schedule for more frequent feature team updates
3. Unstick anyone who is stuck
4. Rallying call for Ryan’s code maint ticket list

Use PDO for MySQL queries

#21663 — The mysql_* functions in PHP are deprecated, so to get ready for future versions of PHP, we need to start routing queries alternatively for installs that support it.

Caching and Misc DB Tasks

No ticket for this? — Use magic methods to cleanup blogid and siteid in wpdb. These should fetch the canonical versions elsewhere. Also, support blog_id and site_id for consistency.

#23167 and #23173 — Make our object caching more intelligent. One query per cache key. Stored IDs instead of objects where possible.

#22174 and #20875 — Introduce and use wp_cache_get_multi(). Maybe. A bonus, if there’s time.

#21760 — get_term_by() calls are not cached.

#21401 — Load packaged object cache when advanced-cache.php and object-cache.php don’t implement wp_cache_init().

#22661 — Allow object caches to degrade gracefully.

Slashing Sanity

#21767 — Remove stripslashes from API functions.

#18322 — The Road to Magic Quotes Sanity.

#22325 — Abstract GPCS away from the superglobals (maybe not, depending on #21767).

#22023 — Remove UNIQUE for slug in wp_terms. Prep for future taxonomy architecture changes.

Misc Performance

#22301 — Performance problem with Recent Comments widget.

Earlier Discussion

IRC Logs from discussion of some of these items.

Proposed

That we re-run the git-svn import with a proper authors.txt file.

Upsides

We’ll have a proper Git mirror with good and consistent author data, that we can, if desired, use for a future migration to Git. Commits will be properly attributed in GitHub.

Downsides

This will break Git history. If you have a Git checkout of WordPress, either standalone or in a submodule, that’ll mean that you’ll have to rebase your master branch off of origin (or even better, blow the whole thing away and re-clone).

So: thoughts? Would this ruin your day?

• It’s hard to discover. A tiny button that doesn’t stand out from other buttons.
• The transition is a bit jarring. Your content goes away, you land on another screen, and your content reappears. It feels like there is a cost to switching.
• It isn’t as fully-featured as it should be. If it isn’t capable of easily (and by that I, I mean without keyboard shortcuts) doing the majority of the formatting people need to do while writing, people are going to be disinclined to use it.
• It could use some polish. Some of the interactions are janky, and it’s not very responsive to large screens. There are strange issues that happen when you get to the end of a line or do a line break near the bottom of the editor. The Esc key doesn’t work when in TinyMCE. Lots of little stuff like that.

What I need is someone with CSS skills and JS competency to take on a bunch of little improvement projects for DFW. If you have those skills and care about making a beautiful and functional distraction-free writing experience for WordPress, speak up!