The Get Involved tab has been added, docs have been moved under support, home has been hidden. This isn’t ideal — we’d eventually like to move to more of a verb-oriented navigation system — but it is better than everything under Make being its own island and not really linked to or from the main WP.org side, or to each other. Hopefully it will also let more folks know about how to get involved (I added a link to the Make Core Handbook to the top sidebar widget.)

I’ll be talking more about some of the improvements to WP.org tomorrow at 11am PST and you can still get streaming tickets if you’d like to tune in: http://2012.sf.wordcamp.org/tickets/

There is a simple solution for this, using either CSS or Javascript tricks, but the basic principle behind it is to make an image twice as big on each dimension (four times the area), and then let the browser scale it down into the space it’s supposed to fit into. This lets the high-DPI displays have more information to work with and to make images which scale much better. The problem, of course, is that larger images require more space and bandwidth. With various CSS and JS techniques, you can target it such that the high-res images are only sent to browsers that really need them, saving on the bandwidth.

Anyway, lately we’ve been making those sorts of changes to WordPress.org too. If you’re visiting on a high-DPI display, you may notice that the main header logo is of a higher quality, or you might have noticed that the Showcase looks particularly good, or that we now have some very high resolution images on the Logos and Graphics page. Little changes to the graphics, here and there. It’s an ongoing project to “retina-all-the-things”.

Back in December, we made some changes to allow plugin authors to put banner images above their plugins in the directory, and the response has been great. So, now they get the high-DPI love too.

Plugin authors already have the ability to make a banner-772x250.jpg or png file in their assets directory and have that be used for the banner image on their plugin listing. As of today, they can add a banner-1544x500.jpg or png file, for use on high-DPI displays only. When the website detects that the viewing browser both has a high-DPI display and the high-res image exists, then that image will be shown instead of the low-res image, but scaled to fit into the proper space. This makes them look particularly sharp on high-DPI displays.

Now, before you go forth and create, please remember that one thing to keep in mind here is filesize. If you’re using photographic material for your banner, then it is highly recommended that you use the JPG file format. If you’re using drawn or generated materials, PNG is the favored format. However, in either case, you will want to apply high compression and try to keep those files as small as possible. Small files transfer to the browser faster. Also consider that a fair number of high-DPI displays will be phones, for example, and perhaps not using high-speed connections. So keeping that high-res file as small as you can would be a good thing. If you wish to use a PNG compression tool before uploading, that might be a good idea as well.

And there you have it. Plugin authors, go forth, and show us your high-resolution banner skills!

BTW, if you want to see it, I gave my Pluginception plugin a high-res image, for testing. It’s a simple image with some well-defined lines that make the difference easy to spot if you’re looking for it. You’ll need a high-DPI display to see it though.

The only known issue is that query strings were temporarily broken on translate.wordpress.org. The rewrite rule has been fixed.

And not to sound like the PA in a subway or at an airport, but if you see something, say something. Say things to security@wordpress.org.

It was a minor adjustment, so it didn’t occur to me to tell anybody. Sorry about that.