Sometimes not everyone is able to get to the dev chat due to time zones, work schedules, nap time, etc, so I think it would be useful to do a pre-meeting run-through of what we’ll cover. If any of these things apply to you (you’re working on it) and you won’t be at the dev chat, please leave a comment here before the meeting so we’ll know the status.
3.2 check-in
Freeze is 3 weeks from today, so if anyone has been putting off work on their assignments, now’s the time to get cracking. Quoting from Mark’s scope post for reference:
people stay on target and making sure we don’t try to slip “one more thing” in.
Just remember, if we stay on schedule (or better, get ahead of it), then the next release cycle will be here before you know it. No slipping things in.
List Tables API improvements (Westi and Koop) — finalize the API for third party use and more flexibility.
List Table XHR loading — to be investigated only after List Table API has stabilized. Make sure it’s worth it before we burn time on it.
@westi said last week that he needed to “sit down and summarise the changes I think we should make to make it more extensible and start on them.” Progress report?
PHP 5.2 (5.2.4, specifically) to be required. Drop compat. But don’t go adding a bunch of PHP5 stuff. This release is about dropping the old, not adding the new. More red than green.
MySQL 5 to be required. This quite literally involves no work beyond changing the requirements. Do not change queries.
@ryan: I think you were talking about starting on this before getting pulled onto some other stuff last week. Is this still something you’re handling?
IE6 EOL for the admin. If BrowseHappy is updated in time, we can consider adding a “use a real browser” nag for IE6 users. We probably can’t drop much CSS, as IE7 shares a lot of the issues. This is mostly symbolic, and reduces the platform combos we need to test. This also means any security issues that are shown to only affect IE6 only can be lowered in priority.
Who owns this?
Distraction Free Writing. This is our headline “ooh, shiny” user feature. Replace our current fullscreen implementation with something more beautiful, more useful (in terms of line-length and font size), and simpler (only limited RTE functionality). Look at WriteRoom, OmmWriter, http://www.quietwrite.com/ for inspiration. Koop is investigating this, and may crank out a quick plugin to jump-start development efforts.
@azaozz and @dkoopersmith were working on this, but I haven’t seen a plugin yet. Status?
Upgrade improvements. Changed-files-only upgrades can be done with zero changes to core. For the first effort, let’s just do updates to the latest point-point from within the same major version. So, 3.2 to 3.2.2 and 3.2.1 to 3.2.2. Optionally consider scanning for changed core files and offering them a full upgrade to overwrite those changed files. Skip the wp-contents directory when upgrading (no more upgrading the default theme or bundled plugins).
@dd32: Status?
Speed improvements. There are a bunch of little things we can do to make WordPress load or at least “feel” faster. Nacin is looking at PHP lazy loading. He also is working on a patch to make the admin menu load faster by doing the expansion in PHP.
Second one is in, first one is not, according to @nacin.
Speed improvements. We can make the dashboard faster by not doing async requests for panes if the cache is hot.
Who’s on this?
Speed improvements. Dion has some FTP improvements that should make upgrades a lot faster for people using a certain FTP server.
@dd32: update?
Speed improvements. Everyone can get involved here. Pick sometime small and manageable that will make WordPress a little faster. Together, they’ll add up to a bullet point in the release post.
Anyone working on any patches that fall under this category? Let’s get them on the list.
Not on the original post by Mark, but being actively pursued:
- Low-hanging XML-RPC tickets by @josephscott. Needed to go through them and identify likely candidates. Joseph: any update?
- TinyMCE update being added to trunk by @azaozz, autop also needs an update. @azaozz asked for help with writing tests for autop. @azaozz: any update?
GSoC
By the time of the dev chat, all mentors should have rated/commented on all the student applications and come up with their list of the projects/students they would be willing to mentor. If we have more selected projects than we are likely to have slots, we can discuss the potential projects to see how much community interest there is in each idea. Note that we would have this discussion about projects, not students.
Seriously, these are just notes so we talk about stuff, not features we are building.
Tom Lynch, 
arena 9:03 pm on March 28, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Dev (schit) plan
ticket #18997 was opened 5 months ago, I posted a patch…. happy to contribute to this wonderful project called wordpress !
And … has been arbitrarily postponed today for future release … with the following comment …
A good idea, but too late for 3.4.
are you looking for volonteers ?
Aaron D. Campbell 5:01 am on March 29, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
We’re always looking for volunteers! And we very much appreciate the feature request AND the patch. Unfortunately, in order to get versions out on time (and we’re already behind schedule on this one) we have to draw a line somewhere. Even with the patch already written, it needs to be reviewed, tested, checked for potential security issues, checked for backwards compatibility, etc.
Additionally, this release is specifically focused on giving the site owner the ability to make their site look how they want (mostly theme enhancements). This doesn’t particularly fit with that and we need to try to stay focused so we can accomplish as much as possible. Your idea hasn’t been rejected, just postponed.