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.
Paddleman, 
George Stephanis 7:09 am on December 12, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Considering the abundance of script-loader.php reports we’re getting in on the forums, we may want to reevaluate how we’re chopping and array-izing things from http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/22757 — for example, http://wordpress.org/support/topic/quick-edit-not-working-after-35-update
Andrew Nacin 7:23 am on December 12, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I don’t know if this is specific to our chopping in #22757, or something else. Anecdotally, I too have seen a number of bug reports, but We need to isolate the individual issues and figure out what things exactly are causing things to break for these users.
George Stephanis 7:24 am on December 12, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Agreed. I’m hoping to accumulate some example URLs to a variety of problematic load-scripts.php instances before the meeting tomorrow, so we can sort out what varieties are cropping up.
Clifford Paulick 7:45 am on December 12, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Faster Insert broke: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/doesnt-workdisplay-on-wp-35
I setup a custom write panel that has meta boxes but no ‘editor’ so Faster Insert was a good way to still allow WP native uploads and [ gallery ], so I’m missing it. Maybe that’ll help you out.
Thanks for 3.5!
sourceforge 10:13 am on December 12, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
thank you @nacin, @koop do they pay you extra for all the front end work and contributions?
Maor Chasen 10:36 am on December 12, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Well done guys! This version is definitely a solid one. Hope to see you all then and there.
nofearinc 11:34 am on December 12, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Any plans on setting some order in Trac? There are probably hundreds of tickets with patches with no end resolution, as well as other corner cases.
Some of them require simple gardening which is not a core dev job, but setting priorities to open tickets or closing open discussions that just won’t ever get to Core is a lead decision.
Amy Hendrix (sabreuse) 5:41 pm on December 12, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
There’s been some talk about doing some Trac cleanup post-3.5 — bringing in new bug gardeners, cleaning up old tickets/reports/workflows, and so on. It’s definitely true that we have way too many open tickets for too long. If you’re interested in helping out with that, I’m sure it would be very welcome!
Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 2:32 pm on December 12, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
If you guys are seeing more crazy on the forums, don’t assume I saw everything! Please email the WP-forums list
Lance Willett 7:40 pm on December 12, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Would like to briefly discuss the Twenty Twelve hotfix and #22856
John Blackbourn (johnbillion) 9:08 pm on December 12, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
It was briefly mentioned in #wordpress-dev a few days ago that 3.6 could be a one-feature release, concentrating on media again, possibly with a short release cycle. Discuss?
John Blackbourn (johnbillion) 9:09 pm on December 12, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Actually, it’s probably too early for 3.6 chat. Feel free to punt for now.
Paddleman 12:36 am on December 13, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
OMG @ Download counter
Thanks (esp Nacin and Lance) for taking note of my bug reports from RC3 and fixing it in 3.5.
This is my first experience with WordPress upgrade and cant believe how smooth it went. Well done to everyone.
I got a wish list for 3.6. What is the procedure for communicating it?
Tom Lynch 1:43 am on December 13, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I have been doing a bit of digging and I think the Settings API and use of it in Dashboard might be worth a look, I have pulled out a number of tickets to look at:
https://core.trac.wordpress.org/query?keywords=~settings-3.6&col=id&col=summary&col=owner&col=type&col=status&col=priority&col=milestone&order=id
Looks like the key issues are implementing Settings API in Dashboard, tweaking Settings API and allowing for priority, and removal of Settings.
From a UI perspective implementing a table less css design and reviewing the settings layout for consistency.