Feature development is now in full swing. Over the last few weeks, a number of major decisions have been reached, and a lot of code has begun to land in trunk (or will be landing soon). About 50 commits in the last week.
- Twenty Thirteen landed on Monday, February 18. Already, 33 tickets have been filed. (Here’s a link to open Bundled Theme tickets for 3.6.) The team is holding twice-weekly meetings in IRC to triage and hammer out issues.
- RevisionsRevisions The WordPress revisions system stores a record of each saved draft or published update. The revision system allows you to see what changes were made in each revision by dragging a slider (or using the Next/Previous buttons). The display indicates what has changed in each revision. has honed in on a promising UI featuring a slider. There’s already a functioning patch undergoing rapid iteration; that should hit trunk as early as next week. Also being worked on, lots of other smaller enhancements and bug fixes.
- Autosave (local storage, etc.) is aiming for a new patch later this week. This feature is more or less defined as a way to protect your content better than server-only autosaves have, and most of the how-should-it-work issues that blocked it have been resolved. This ties into revisions, so these two teams will be working very closely together soon.
- Post formats have the beginnings of a UIUI UI is an acronym for User Interface - the layout of the page the user interacts with. Think ‘how are they doing that’ and less about what they are doing. in trunk. The current conversations have focused on theme and content compatibility. As in: what should the new theme template APIs look like? How should a theme declare support for these new “structured” post formats? How can we handle metadata-driven posts in older themes? How can we handle older posts without metadata in newer themes? Lots more going on here, stay tuned. #19570 #23347.
- Menus implemented some changes to the user experience for when the theme registers at least one menu location and the user has yet to create a menu. Very rough so far. More changes are being considered. #23119.
- Slashing changes hit coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.. If you’re running trunk, it is quite the bumpy ride. We have been evaluating the original approach, and plan to make some major changes to it come next week in order to alleviate the many problems. #21767.
- Icons and admin UI… Icons hit core a few weeks ago; an initial pass at removing gradients to “flatten” the admin has also landed. More conversations and adjustments to follow. #23415 #23333.
- Editorial flow was dropped. This consisted of a small (but cool) feature, essentially allowing a user to submit a pending change to an already published posts. Unfortunately, the heavy overlap with both revisions and autosave, along with a number of other architectural concerns, made it impractical for now. (This team was also working on some APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways. development, basically beefing up custom post status support, which didn’t end up having to do with the feature, and is still being considered.)
Feature freeze and betaBeta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process. 1 are scheduled for Wednesday, March 13, about three weeks away.