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  • Mark Jaquith 7:51 pm on March 13, 2013 Permalink
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    The Road to 3.6 Beta 1 

    our original schedule had us hitting beta 1 today, March 13th. We’re not quite there. Beta should mean that we’re feature complete, and we’re not. We could do what we’ve done in the past, and declare a beta, while continuing to do feature work, but that just devalues the meaning of “beta”. I want people in the WordPress ecosystem to trust that when we say “beta”, that means we’re feature complete and that they should start seriously testing their themes and plugins against trunk for issues. If we continue with feature development during the beta period, that will just shove back everyone’s testing to the RC period, which will translate to more issues going unnoticed and tarnishing the release.

    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, Â 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

    Post Format UI

    Twenty Thirteen

    Post locking

    Nav Menus

     
    • Peter Westwood 8:52 pm on March 13, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      The revisions UI Ticket is #23497

    • Myatu 12:06 pm on March 15, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Sigh. I only have three requests for the devs: Comments, comments and comments. There’s a lack of proper developer documentation (read: the outdated Codex). But resorting to the actual source code/phpdoc is of no help either, as there’s a distinct lack of comments (particularly the additions added with 3.5 such as the new Media Library Javascript code). This is compounded by the fact there’s no rhyme or reason to some of the coding styles used – its getting uglier by the day, and I’m wondering if that has to do with missed deadlines (and thus devs feel pressured to make haste). Maybe it’s just me… But its starting to take the fun out of things.

      • Mark Jaquith 4:52 am on March 16, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        I agree. And yes, the media stuff (as wonderful as it is in execution) is too much of a black box. Just like we have people who update our help tabs and our PHPDocs, there should be people who work on improving code commenting, formatting, and readability. Would be a good task for someone who is new to core, as their confusion about unclear sections would be genuine and not simulated, as it might be for someone who already knows what the code does.

    • adamsilverstein 7:47 pm on March 17, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      also on revisions: #22289 (Filter to override WP_POST_REVISIONS)

    • Drew Jaynes (DrewAPicture) 9:05 pm on March 20, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      You want to change #23716 under Nav Menus to #23770 — Secondary tab for Locations?

  • Mike Schroder 6:49 pm on February 13, 2013 Permalink
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    Autosave and Post Locking – 2/13 

    This is a rather late update, and will serve for the last two; apologies!

    Last week, we talked about the locks that went in, and @markjaquith suggested that we replace the “lock” with a Gravatar, which I like quite a bit. Will experiment with that to see if it can work.

    Today we chatted about the most recent update to #23220 posted by @azaozz, which integrates the work done by @asannad (AmitSannad on IRC), and adds a UI for selecting which you’d like to restore: localsaves_screenshot

    In addition, if it’s found that you have an autosave that has failed, and have a newer version locally, you’re warned (either on the Posts list or Post itself), and linked to the UI that allows you to restore the content (post content and title only) and save at will:
    posts_Warning

    It was brought up during the chat by @nacin that the UI included in the patch might be more than we need, and that we should decide what is best for the user regarding restores, and perform it for them. We continue to chat about this, and opinions are welcome!

    Lastly, there is a patch from @mintindeed on #23295 currently waiting for integration! That patch, and the one on #23220 could use some testing — let us know if you run into problems on trac.

    We’ll be meeting again this Friday at 2100 UTC (1pm PST).

     
    • Gabriel Koen 7:28 pm on February 13, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Oops I missed today’s meeting.

      I am working on some revisions to my patch based on feedback from last week’s meeting, unfortunately work is killing me this week so it will probably be the coming weekend (Feb 16–17) before I get a revised patch up there.

  • Aaron D. Campbell 1:07 am on January 8, 2013 Permalink
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    WordPress 3.6: Menus 

    For menus we’re going to try to focus on some UI improvements. Menus work pretty well but users, especially the less-technical ones, are easily confused. We’ve seen them try to add menus without names because they see the “Create Menu” button before they see the menu name field, we’ve seen them add a bunch of menus instead of menu items because they’re unclear on the difference, etc, etc. The goal for the 3.6 cycle is to make menus a little more intuitive and user friendly.

    @markjaquith and I are excited to have @lessbloat leading this. Take a look at all the user testing that has already been happening over at #23119 and make sure you comment here if you’re interested in helping out!

     
    • Aaron D. Campbell 1:08 am on January 8, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      On a personal note, I’d love to see #16075 addressed if there’s time.

    • Joey Kudish 1:10 am on January 8, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      In last week’s meeting, we discussed some improvement to the nav menu saving code as well. If that’s still on the roadmap, I’d like to help there.

      • Aaron D. Campbell 1:13 am on January 8, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        I don’t specifically remember talking about saving. I know we discussed sluggishness with lots of items, and I know we discussed needing a complete back-end rewrite, but I think we decided both of those were outside the scope for 3.6.

    • F J Kaiser 1:45 am on January 8, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      For those who’re writing the patches and participating on the ticket, the [wp-nav-menu] tag archive over at WordPressStackExchange might be of interest. The views & votes are a good indicator for what devs & users are interested in and what they might need/how they see those tings.

      http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/menus?sort=votes&pagesize=50

    • Gustavo Bordoni 1:55 am on January 8, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Hey Aaron, I was thinking these days, developers should have I way to put fields, or even HTML on the Menu Configuration panel. I could not find a filter or a action to to it.

      If menus, is on the aim for 3.6, I would like to try to implement an API to do it, just like the Widgets one.

    • Drew Jaynes (DrewAPicture) 2:49 am on January 8, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I’m very interested in contributing to this nav-menus refresh. We had great results user-testing the new color picker in 3.5 and I have high hopes for what we can come up with for nav-menus in 3.6.

    • MB Creation 8:24 am on January 8, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Hi. I’m sorry if this is not relevant but recently an offline page was still available in a menu. Don’t you think it should disappear from it ? (at least in the front-end ?). I Agree with gustavo about the idea of an API !

    • keoshi 11:53 am on January 8, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Would love to help with this, I think it’s one area where we could use major UX improvements.

    • GrahamArmfield 12:37 pm on January 8, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I’m pleased to hear that the menu builder is likely to get a refresh. When that is being done, please can we make a menu builder that is keyboard accessible too – the current one is impossible or very difficult for anyone with disabilities/impairments to use. See http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/21289

    • rfair404 1:15 pm on January 8, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Aaron, this is good news. I’ll help out on #16075

    • hereswhatidid 3:03 pm on January 8, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I’d love to see it move away from the tabbed-style navigation and just use the underlying drop down menu for choosing which menu to edit. I’ve had far too many clients name a menu something like “Drop Down Menu for Home Page” which then pushes every other tab off the visible area. Also, managing any more than 4-5 menus is very painful as you constantly have to click the right and left arrows just to be able to select which menu to edit. I would love to help out if needed as I’ve already modified it to use the existing drop down menu on several sites.

    • Rian Rietveld 8:15 am on January 9, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      +1 for GrahamArmfield :”please can we make a menu builder that is keyboard accessible too” and hereswhatidid “just use the underlying drop down menu for choosing which menu to edit”.

    • adamsilverstein 3:40 pm on January 10, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      i’d love to help out with testing/bug fixing. i have several clients managing huge & multiple menus, interested in improving reliability of interface and usability over slower connections; finally accessibility is an issue i’d love to see improved.

    • lOOis 9:55 am on January 16, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      When managing menus with lots of items and levels it would be great to be able to add new items directly to the right place, by drag&drop from the pages widgets to the menu (and not at the end of the list and then having to drag it one by one to the right place)

    • magol 9:35 pm on January 21, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      If I understood everything right, I have to choose if I want the main menu to show the structure of my pages, or if I want to completely free create my own menu. I want to be able to reflect the structure of my pages, and stil be able to making adjustments.
      Eg. like a .path file. I have the structure on the pages to start from, and do adds, modifications, and deletions in the custom menu.

  • Aaron D. Campbell 11:21 pm on January 7, 2013 Permalink
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    WordPress 3.6: Revisions 

    Revisions are an extremely powerful tool for content tracking, but there are a few parts that need a little TLC. Ever since they were first introduced, there’s been a problem with proper author attribution on revisions (see #16215), and we’re going to take a crack at fixing that in 3.6. Additionally, while the current diffs are pretty cool, and make a lot of sense to those of us that look at diffs everyday, there’s a lot of room for improvement for your average user. We’d like to see some UI improvements around the diffs as well as information that makes more sense to an average content creator (words changed, a visual representation of what was added/removed, prettier output, etc).

    @markjaquith and I chose @westi to lead this. I’m excited to see the improvements on this one! There’s a little of everything in this project, so please leave a comment if you’re interested in lending a hand.

     
    • Alex Mills (Viper007Bond) 11:25 pm on January 7, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      It’d be nice to have revisions also include post meta and taxonomy data so that when restoring to a previous revision, the whole post’s state could be restored.

    • adamsilverstein 11:28 pm on January 7, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      i’d love to help with this.

    • Rafael Ehlers 11:31 pm on January 7, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      And make define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, false); works!

    • karmatosed 11:32 pm on January 7, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I’d love to help from a UI angle on this.

    • Erick Hitter 11:58 pm on January 7, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I’m very interested in helping with this.

    • zippykid 12:32 am on January 8, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      +1

    • janw.oostendorp 1:49 am on January 8, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      A suggestion. Can revisions be stored like only save one revision a day per post? Most of the time I would want to restore a revision I already overridden the nr I’ve set on that day. So I can’t go back to yesterday.

      Maybe save all revisions of this day and 1 for every day that is defined in `WP_POST_REVISIONS`.
      Just a suggestion.

      • Peter Westwood 9:38 am on January 8, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        This sounds like an interesting idea. I think our primary drive will be around the presentation and making it much more user friendly.

        It may be that we can alter the presentation to provide a less verbose history by default with only one revision per day highlighted while keeping the full history as well – the full history is really useful in the context of one of the key theme of 3.6 – never lose your content.

        • Curtiss Grymala 4:22 pm on January 8, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          While I think this is an interesting idea, I think it might be just as helpful (more helpful in my use-cases) if revisions were actually systematically compared at some point, and identical revisions were either dumped or not highlighted.

          For instance, let’s say I go in to look at a post (for instance, to copy a shortcode I used in it, etc.) and then, out of habit, click “Update”. Although I didn’t change anything in the post, WP stores a separate revision for that update, and shows that in the list of revisions. It would be nice if WP was able to compare that version to the previous version, recognize that nothing changed, and downgrade that revision somehow.

          I think, either way, we would need to look at somehow classifying revisions (possibly with a +1 or -1) to differentiate between revisions that should be highlighted (for reversion purposes) and those that are just stored for record-keeping (basically just to know when someone accessed the edit page for that post).

          • wedi 7:17 pm on January 9, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

            That is really a big point. It’s quite annoying to click through several revisions to find the last real change.

    • esmi 2:53 pm on January 8, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Can some of the accessibility issues associated with revisions also receive some attention? Specifically, the Compare Revisions table.

      1. As this is a form, each of the radio buttons needs an associated label. By all means, position the label offscreen if you must but without those labels, the form is virtually impossible to use in some situations.

      2. Can we have unique text for each of the Restore links? Again, position the unique fragment offscreen if necessary but handful of identical-sounding links creates major problems for some users.

      3. Ideally, get rid of the table markup. Forms + tables = accessibility problems for many users.

      • Peter Westwood 10:55 am on January 9, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Can some of the accessibility issues associated with revisions also receive some attention?

        We will definitely look at the issues you have highlighted and see how we can best address them.

    • lessbloat 9:27 pm on January 8, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Thought I’d play with some visual indicators showing whats changed between diffs, so at a glance you can see: “Oh ya, this is the one where I just removed on line”, or “this is the one where I removed 5 paragraphs”.

      Option 1

      Option 2

      Option 3

      Option 4

      Hat tip to MarkJaquith for the concept.

      • Aaron D. Campbell 9:33 pm on January 8, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        I really like it. Personally I think the bars are more user-friendly than the raw numbers, but I don’t have much preference between those three.

      • karmatosed 9:58 pm on January 8, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        I like the bar dots the most but my worry about any graphical indicator like that is a ‘what does it mean’. 3 red dots to me or a lump of a bar isn’t as instantly recognisable maybe to all users. I guess my question would be: “Is it important to know what of what”? If that’s the case then a number is far more indication. If a vague idea is all that’s needed then exacts aren’t as required.

        Worth exploring around other ways of representing I think aside from ones that require more maybe guess work as to what % of what?

      • GrahamArmfield 10:10 am on January 9, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        As a sighted person a visual representation can sum up a concept neatly. Unfortunately not everyone is sighted or has clear sight. Using colour as the only way to convey meaning can also be problematic – especially in your choice of red/green. Some 8% of men and 2% of women are colourblind – with red/green colourblindness being the most common.

        Any solution like this needs to also include plain visible text to indicate what the bars mean. I’d especially echo karmatosed’s point – will even all sighted users understand what’s being represented here. And how would the dots/lines represent removing some characters and adding some different ones?

      • Peter Westwood 10:57 am on January 9, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        These are neat and address a piece of the UI that I hadn’t even considered improving yet :)

        If we don’t focus on trying to condense the visualisation of the whole diff down into some coloured fragments are there ways in which we can highlight if the diff is a large or small change well?

      • wedi 7:18 pm on January 9, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        That is great! An indication if the content or just meta data was edited would be very useful, too.

      • ArielK 7:48 pm on January 9, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        I like “option 1″ it’s very clear & simple.

      • Sam Parsons 11:06 pm on January 10, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Here’s an idea of a mockup that would show both visually and give some words to explain to those not accustomed to this type of image and to those who have visual impairments (either color-blindness or others).

        mockup of the revision interface.

        • Peter Westwood 1:30 pm on January 11, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          This is quite neat, I wonder if this is too specific though :)

          What people probably want to know is things like:

          • Is this the revisions where I fixed that typo
          • Is this the revision where the editor re-wrote my whole post

          It will be interesting if we can present something more like a graduated size of change metric which has more end-user meaning that something very technical like word count – especially when word counting is so hard to get write in some situations like some asian languages.

      • karmatosed 1:07 pm on January 18, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        I had a bit of an experiment around this area. One thing that struck me was how small the content is for that wide area. It perhaps means we can use that area to give more information – people seem to be saying different information is useful to different users so perhaps just saying the time, who and an indicator isn’t enough.

        I also thought a bit about how things like commit messages and ways and along with different representations came up with the following.

        I know it’s very different from what have now it’s more just an exploration of a few things and doesn’t have to all be used.

        • karmatosed 1:09 pm on January 18, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          I just realised that squashed it down a bit in the message so here is the original linked to see it a bit more clearly:

      • karmatosed 1:25 pm on January 18, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        I also did a different exploration using bars.

    • esmi 11:33 am on January 9, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      If you’re going with the red/green combination, please consider using numbers – not bars. http://quirm.net/temp/red-green.png shows the display as it would be seen by those who suffer from 2 out of 3 of the known forms of color blindness. Using numbers would also by-pass any issues for non-sighted users and give everyone a clear indication of the changes made.

      • Siobhan 3:07 pm on January 10, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        In terms of writing, numbers are much more useful as they provide context. Also, word count is more useful than character count.

    • talgalili 10:51 am on January 12, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Hello all,

      I would like to ask for another feature:
      When comparing two revisions, allowing a reviewer to have an “accept/reject” for each section changed (in a similar way as offered by libre-office or MS-word), which at the end of it will create a new revision.

      Background story for the request: I recently had the need for such a feature, since I have three friends working on the same post, where one is more “senior”. The senior friend wanted to be able to accept/reject changes by the other contributors. Since this was not an option in WP, we decided to do the first draft of the post in word, and exchange it by e-mails.

      Thank you all for taking on work at this front :)
      Cheers,
      Tal

  • Aaron D. Campbell 9:00 pm on January 7, 2013 Permalink
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    WordPress 3.6: Editorial Flow 

    I’m really excited to see our editorial flow get some love in the 3.6 cycle! We always want to be as extensible as possible and post statuses are one of those places where we’re not near as good as we should be. The plan goes something like this:

    1. Fully support the existing register_post_status() API in core
      • Make sure things don’t break when you add your own custom statuses
      • Update the metabox UI to show any newly registered statuses in the drop down, etc.
      • Add a ‘moderation’ flag so that unpublished statuses can be explicitly identified
      • Support for non-standard public post statuses
    2. Enhance the existing API
      • Add support for registering post statuses to specific post types
      • Allow for caps checks on different post statuses
      • New remove_post_status() function for removing an already-registered post status
    3. Editing workflow for already published content

    Additionally, we hope to address some issues around post meta for revisions, which is tightly related to the workflow for already published content.

    @markjaquith and I have chosen Daniel Bachhuber to lead this. If you’re not sure why, just Google WordPress Edit Flow and it’ll all make sense. There’s a lot of heavy-duty under the hood work here, so please leave a comment if you’re interested in lending a hand.

     
    • Mike Schinkel 9:08 pm on January 7, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Been waiting for this for a while…

    • conservativeread 9:11 pm on January 7, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      i want post tags and related posts to be automatic, i would also like to see more support for posting outside of admin from desktop apps like wlw and the new blogjet.

      • Aaron D. Campbell 9:14 pm on January 7, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Automatic tagging and related posts will both continue to be in plugin territory for now. I know there are some good ones out there, but the usecase is still too small to justify having that functionality in core.

        As for the desktop apps, WordPress as an XMLRPC API that they can use to post to it (the same one the mobile apps use). I don’t personally use any of those tools, but the capability is definitely there.

    • Joey Kudish 9:17 pm on January 7, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I’m interested in helping with this effort!

    • Md Mahmudur Rahman 10:47 pm on January 7, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      This is the ideal time to address some issues pointed out in the below article (WordPress And Government) by @StephenCronin, as we are talking about Editorial Flow for the next release.

      http://scratch99.com/wordpress/government/use-of-wordpress-in-government/

      To be specific (quoted from the article):

      “Enterprise Level Websites

      Everyone has a different definition of ‘enterprise level’. It’s probably not sensible to try to tie that definition down. Instead, I’ll describe the sort of website I’m talking about:

      Anywhere from 3,000 to 10,000 pages (and let’s not talk about PDFs!)
      Anywhere from 3 to 7 levels deep: the site I’m currently working on will be 7 levels deep minimum
      The majority of content not chronologically based
      Several hundred distributed authors, located around the state, spread throughout maybe 60 business areas, each with their own signoff processes.
      Centralised editorial quality assurance
      Complex workflows:
      One piece of content may need to go through 5 levels of approvals
      Another may only need to go through 2 levels
      There will be different approval steps and different users for different content types and different categories
      Example: Content author -> Manager -> Communications -> Web Editor -> Tech QA -> Publish.
      Note: It’s not about traffic. We all know WordPress can scale, for example as in the case of WordPress.com. Rather it is about complexity and the ability of WordPress to handle this sort of site out of the box.”

      Cheers.

      • Mark Jaquith 3:58 am on January 8, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        So, the workflow and QA things you mention are kind of where this is going. Not building that into core directly, but making it easier for a plugin like Edit Flow to implement custom post statuses and a more complex posting workflow.

      • Vitor Carvalho 4:05 pm on January 8, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        You could, however, use a multisite instalation to achieve what you need, separating some of the content and workflow.

    • Justin Sainton 11:12 pm on January 7, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I know @ryancduff and I would definitely love to help out here.

    • Scott Kingsley Clark 11:21 pm on January 7, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Oh very nice, I shall eat cake on this day.

    • Tom Lany 12:32 am on January 8, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      It would be nice if editors could receive an email when a post is saved in the moderation queue.

    • Stephen Cronin 12:39 am on January 8, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Looking forward to watching how this pans out! This has been a pain point for larger organisations for a while.

      Happy to give the perspective of the requirements for a large site (up to 5 levels of approvals, different approval steps / user groups for different content, based on content types, categories, even individual pages, etc), if catering for that sort of site is within scope.

    • nuggetsol 6:16 am on January 8, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      This would be a really nice addition to the core. I have developed a plugin which aims towards supporting workflow management – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/oasis-workflow/

      I have got some good feedback from the users. I am planning to add some new features, but support for custom statuses out of the box would be really wonderful.

    • Konstantin Kovshenin 9:10 am on January 8, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I’m willing to contribute as much as it takes to get this done. Can somebody please list the existing tickets? Ones I’m aware of are #12706 #15132 #21787 #7745

      • Vitor Carvalho 4:22 pm on January 8, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        I would like to contribute to it to. We should be carefull about we deal with post status transitions too.
        Related: #22241

    • Vitor Carvalho 4:06 pm on January 8, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Fantastic idea! That is something I was expecting for some time ago. I will keep in touch with some of that tickets and help where I can.

    • William P. Davis 2:11 pm on January 9, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I’d love to help on this.

    • F J Kaiser 6:02 pm on January 9, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      One thing where I’d really love to see a solution is about that freaky thing that happens when switching “visibility” from “public” to “private”. When doing so, the “Save as (draft/etc.)” button disappears. It doesn’t come back when switching to “public” anymore. Ticket incl. several patches that cover different scenarios is here http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/21563

    • lucasstark 1:33 pm on January 12, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Any way we can also figure out a way for published content to remain published when a user submits updates for review? One of the trickest things to work around is to allow users without publish rights to submit updates to content with out taking that content offline. Seems like we could serve up the last published revision, assuming we have all metadata and taxonomy selection attached to the revision, rather than taking the main page off line. Right now I’m using a customized version of Boston Universities Versions Plugin, which does an OK job, but would be nice if this was built into core.

      The way it works now is “ok” for posts and news style items, but really seems to break down when dealing with pages.

    • Dave Clements 8:59 pm on January 15, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      +1. Would love to be able to register new post statuses. Wish I was savvy enough to help out!

  • Mark Jaquith 9:02 pm on December 19, 2012 Permalink
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    WordPress 3.6 Cycle 

    I’m going to be leading the WordPress 3.6 cycle. I’d personally like the focus of the release to be about content editing (revisions, autosave, workflow, editing modes, etc), but of couse that won’t be locked down until we have our IRC planning meeting in early January.

    What I need in the meantime is to pick a backup lead. Someone who will help me with the planning, execution, and delivery of the release, as well as be able to step in if for some reason I am unable to finish. If you think you’d be a good person for that job:

    Apply to be the WordPress 3.6 Backup Lead

     
    • Marko Heijnen 9:09 pm on December 19, 2012 Permalink

      I’m curious if there would also be a focus on bringing the open tickets down. Even this release there where more tickets opened then closed.

      • Andrew Nacin 9:11 pm on December 19, 2012 Permalink

        Yes. This is going to be a separate initiative from the release itself. More in a few weeks.

    • Nashwan Doaqan 8:04 pm on December 20, 2012 Permalink

      Good , Sure thing we should add more features to WordPress , I have some ideas and I will open some tickets soon , anyway I hope WordPress 3.6 be another success version :)

    • Tom Lynch 10:56 pm on December 20, 2012 Permalink

      @markjaquith is there not room to look at the Settings API which I and others have highlighted several times and keeps being passed over?

    • Erlend Sogge Heggen 2:58 am on December 21, 2012 Permalink

      Would this update to “content editing” include a re-evaluation of TinyMCE and its alternatives? (such as wysihtml5, Aloha Editor and CKEditor)

      Some relevant discussions:
      http://wpmu.org/why-you-hate-the-wordpress-text-editor/
      http://wpmu.org/what-i-would-do-to-improve-wordpress/
      http://wordpress.org/extend/ideas/topic/improved-visual-editor

      • Mark Jaquith 8:23 am on December 21, 2012 Permalink

        I’d like to make it easier to support other editors, for sure. As for looking at alternatives — we do that constantly. But we’re also trying to work more closely with the TinyMCE team. A switch would have high costs, and it would have to be worth it. It behooves us to try as hard as we can to improve TinyMCE first.

        • Vitor Carvalho 9:38 pm on December 22, 2012 Permalink

          Easier support for other editors would be nice, but is it actually achievable? I mean, there are a lot of new JS editors with different configurations…
          I like TinyMCE, in fact neither I nor my clients have anything to say about it.

        • Erlend Sogge Heggen 12:22 am on December 29, 2012 Permalink

          Very understandable, thanks for replying.

    • Mark Jaquith 7:52 am on December 21, 2012 Permalink

      There’s one improvement that I’d like to make, that’s pretty simple: built-in callbacks for some basic input types. Even just handling text input, checkbox, and textarea would cut down a lot on the slog. Happy to listen to other suggestions.

      • Vitor Carvalho 9:30 pm on December 22, 2012 Permalink

        It would be nice to have a WP_Form_UI class with some methods to handle form elements and merging it with Settings API for easier creation of pages and subpages in the admin. For example, one could create a page just extending a WP_Admin_Page class, as we already do with WP_List_table.

        • wycks 10:02 pm on December 30, 2012 Permalink

          This would be a massive benefit to developers and WordPress itself. Right now custom field wrappers are one of the most popular items on github for WordPress, making a more uniform API that covers those more constantly and integrates with internals would be very nice.

    • Ronald Huereca 12:55 pm on December 21, 2012 Permalink

      @markjaquith, would per-thumbnail editing (as defined in the theme add_image_size) ever be part of core? Right now it appears plugin territory (e.g., http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/crop-thumbnails/), but would be nice if this were built into the new 3.5 image edit area.

      • Marko Heijnen 7:50 pm on December 27, 2012 Permalink

        I think for 3.6 this still would be plugin territory. There are some other things to address first to get to a per-thumbnail editing mode.

  • Andrew Nacin 4:40 am on December 19, 2012 Permalink
    Tags: ,   

    For Wednesday, let’s plan on a 3.5.1 ticket triage meeting at 19:00 UTC (2 p.m. Eastern). Please be around if you can (#wordpress-dev of course), especially if you have something in progress for 3.5.1, so we can hammer things out and start thinking about timing.

    The dev chat is normally two hours later, at 2100 UTC. I won’t be available, and will leave that to @markjaquith and co. I expect it will be a light meeting again. 3.5.1 timing should be discussed, which should be easier with the triage session happening earlier.

     
    • Andrew Nacin 8:51 pm on December 19, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I’m currently feeling January 2 for a 3.5.1, which gives us a few weeks to fix everything in the pipeline. We could offer a hotfix now for #22985 and #22944, which both screw with data.

      Specific 3.5.1 tickets to discuss:

      • Whether to remove wp-app.php on upgrade: #22855
      • How to handle recoverable data loss for image editing: #22985 (fairly serious and needs a plan of action)
      • Windows-based servers are going to experience a bit of an issue. Need a plan of action. #22900. cc @dd32, @kurtpayne
      • No idea what is going on with #22899 (load-scripts.php issues). Is this the source of mod_pagespeed woes? Any more ideas (from @ipstenu and @dh-shredder, particular)?
      • Status on the three TinyMCE tickets, @azaozz? #22941, #22766, #22888
      • #22895, a create_posts issue, needs investigating.

      Additional notes on remaining tickets:

      • Any media UI-related tickets are getting reviewed by koopersmith (who is traveling today), so feel free to skip those. None are serious.
      • #22883, #22944, #22858, and #22882 are all API-level (post/user) issues that seem good to go. They need unit tests.
      • I need to pow-wow with @dd32 on Twenty Twelve upgrade issues. If anyone has any other thoughts: #22856
      • I will handle $wpdb->prepare() this week. That’s #22873.
      • Mike Schroder 9:02 pm on December 19, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        I don’t suspect #22899 is the source of the mod_pagespeed issues, since encoding the brackets doesn’t solve the problem. We’re reaching out to the mod_pagespeed guys on this, and adding a temporary rule to avoid mod_pagespeed optimizing wp-admin’s JavaScript (which it arguably shouldn’t be doing anyway).

      • Robert Chapin (miqrogroove) 8:50 pm on December 21, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        #23041 needs review for 3.5.1 milestone.

    • Andrew Nacin 8:55 pm on December 19, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      And as alluded to in the previous comment, is there anything we can offer a hotfix for? This should be based on both severity and impact. Is forcing out a fix for load-scripts.php (that involves either encoding [] or chunking <script> tags) enough to fix most JS issues? If not, is there anything else we can do to avoid a lot of JS conflict/error issues people are having? Is there a common pattern in the support forums that suggest there is something we can target? etc.

  • Jen Mylo 12:48 pm on December 23, 2011 Permalink
    Tags: ,   

    Core Team Meetup Recap: Multisite 

    These are the notes from a breakout discussion on multisite at the core meetup with me, @markjaquith, and @nacin. As with all of these discussion summaries, please remember that they’re just discussions. I’m posting the notes for transparency purposes, not to say that these are the only things discussed or decided. I’m working from notes, and sometimes you don’t get everything down when you’re taking notes (next year I’ll record these things instead).

    Multisite!

    Who can lead this joint? Since the merge and Donncha moving on to other things, we had Ron for a cycle, Pete for a cycle, then no one. It would be good to have someone act as component owner.

    Multisite needs parity with the single site experience. Includes UI, UX, copy/strings, install flexibility (subdomain etc), installation ease (add a site).

    First we need to improve the manage/use experience, then fix install stuff and get it into the dashboard to turn on multisite.

    We need a useful global dashboard.

    We need to have flexibility in where sites and networks live — should be able to live wherever you want on one network. Subdomains/subdirectories/mapping/whatever you want, mixed subdomain/subdirectory, custom domains, global permalink consumer/router.

    Need to fix different workflows: adding users to network, adding users to site, invitations. User signup, creation, assignment, invitation all need new flow

    We need parity between plugins and themes. Enable vs activation is confusing, need to improve language, indicators. Need ability to network enable but disable for individual sites. Need to standardize network enable/activate etc for plugins/themes. Network activated plugins don’t show in individual site’s plugin list, which is confusing.

    UX Action Items:

    UX ACTION ITEM — Include network activated plugins in the plugins menu and give message that it is automatically on for the whole network (if admin/have rights to see plugins screen).

    UX ACTION ITEM — Autocomplete usernames or site names for network admin and for superadmin everywhere.

    UX ACTION ITEM — Get multisite tag/indicator on plugins in directory, add multisite specific/required indicator.

    Under the Hood Action Items:

    ACTION ITEM — Get rid of MS-FILES.

    ACTION ITEM — Enable install in subdirectory so you can use externals.

     
    • Frank 1:39 pm on December 23, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Great; i love solutions with mutlisite and i wait now for an global dashboard; current i use the root blog (1) for this job. Great news
      I wish the team mery christmas and really nice new year. Best regards

    • Lauro Faria 1:45 pm on December 23, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Good.
      These are items that interest me.
      An updated website (multisite), to version 3.3, and found some difficulty in managing permissions and what is accessible by users. It may not have found the right plugin. It aims to improve this item?

    • mitcho (Michael 芳貴 Erlewine) 12:25 am on December 28, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      +1 Happy to help as time allows. I’ve been involved with and rolling out more and more Multisite installs… there’s definitely a lot of space for improvement.

  • Jen Mylo 10:53 pm on December 18, 2011 Permalink
    Tags: ,   

    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

    Dion (dd32) modeling the latest swag

    Dion and Andrew

    Dion and Andrew Ozz before lunch

    Lunch: Went to The Sentient Bean in Savannah.

    The Sentient Bean

    The Sentient Bean

    Back patio at the Sentient Bean

    Back patio at the Sentient Bean

    Koop and Mark, Dion and Ozz in the background

    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 video screen cap

    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

    Nacin and Koop on skates

    Nacin, Mark, Jane, Matt, Jon, Daryl

    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

    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

    Bacon Bloody Mary

    Nacin attempting to consume a 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 | Log in to Reply

      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 | Log in to Reply

      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 | Log in to Reply

      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 | Log in to Reply

        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 | Log in to Reply

      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 | Log in to Reply

      Great job with all these newsy updates, Jane. Kudos.

    • mitcho (Michael 芳貴 Erlewine) 3:07 am on December 22, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      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
      :D :D :D

    • havahula 3:51 am on December 23, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      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?

  • Andrew Nacin 11:42 pm on September 18, 2011 Permalink
    Tags:   

    Write a tutorial for setting up a local dev environment 

    A section of the core contributor handbook will be about how to set up a local test install, including a web server, Subversion, and WordPress. Because of the various operating systems and software packages out there, we’re going to need a few different tutorials.

    I need some people willing to write up procedures for a number of standard setups. This includes:

    • WordPress on XAMPP (both Windows and Mac) MAMP, and MacPorts
    • TortoiseSVN and a tutorial on command-line Subversion usage, including co, up, revert, diff; patch; conflicts, etc.
    • Whatever you Linux guys use :)

    I’d also love an article on getting the test suite up and running. Anything I’m missing?

    So, for these procedures, people can volunteer (probably for their current setup). Once steps are written, others will need to test them. Many procedures may heavily borrow from or link to outside resources (such as the vendor sites themselves) — this is fine. And, there may already be some good things in the Codex or on other sites about getting WordPress running. Again, fine. (There are SVN articles by both @westi and @markjaquith, and those are probably great to start from.) Gather links, screenshots, further reading, whatever will help.

    So, who is in?

     
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