Minified versus development scripts and .min.js

For some time (since r10291), WordPress has shipped minified scripts and styles as .js and .css, with the non-minified, “development” versions at .dev.js and .dev.css.

These weren’t great for discoverability and it has become clear that these are non-standard. So, we’ve moved to using .min.js and .min.css for minified files. You can now find the “development” versions at .js and .css. This also works nicely with tools like ack, which are coded to ignore .min.js.

This was implemented in #21633. Now if only we can get TinyMCE to move away from _src.js. 🙂

A note, for some external libraries, we don’t include the un-minified versions. In this case, you can find them on their respective websites and also in the sources repository. (This is linked from wordpress.org, which in turn is referenced at the bottom of our license file.) @scribu and I were talking about writing a developer pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party to use un-minified versions of these libraries, which would be cool.

More on external libraries in 3.5 here.

#3-5, #javascript