Twenty Thirteen project update

The Twenty Thirteen team jumped into 3.6 with two two first office hours this week; things are off to a great start. We’re meeting in #wordpress-dev IRCIRC Internet Relay Chat, a network where users can have conversations online. IRC channels are used widely by open source projects, and by WordPress. The primary WordPress channels are #wordpress and #wordpress-dev, on irc.freenode.net. on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 17 UTC.

Who we are

(These are WP.org usernames.)

  • Leads: lancewillett and obenland
  • Contributors joining us for office hours this week: johnbillion kwight clakeb karmatosed sabreuse taupecat jorbin bpetty MikeHansenMe georgestephanis jayjdk nacin

Many other folks already contributed patches and tickets, thank you.

What we’re working on

Tuesday we started by dividing things up a bit:

  • Color contrast and general accessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) (sabreuse and jorbin)
  • Mobile behavior, the navbar and menu need some work (obenland, johnbillion, and karmatosed)
  • Device testing (karmatosed)
  • General bugbug A bug is an error or unexpected result. Performance improvements, code optimization, and are considered enhancements, not defects. After feature freeze, only bugs are dealt with, with regressions (adverse changes from the previous version) being the highest priority. reporting and patches (everyone)

We also looked at open tickets for Twenty Thirteen.

Thursday we had a more open discussion style. Based on people grabbing tasks I’ve added a “point person” in bold after each — if you want to jump in look for “Unassigned” here and drop a comment or pingPing The act of sending a very small amount of data to an end point. Ping is used in computer science to illicit a response from a target server to test it’s connection. Ping is also a term used by Slack users to @ someone or send them a direct message (DM). Users might say something along the lines of “Ping me when the meeting starts.” me in IRC.

  • Post Formats functionality: a game plan for tying Twenty Thirteen into new 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., working with Helen and Post Formats team. (Point person: lancewillett)
  • Browser support: we’re going to focus on basic usability for IE8 and IE7, doesn’t need to be pixel perfect. Tasks include: remove IE6 hacks (notes) and move IE7 and IE8 hacks to ie.css. (Unassigned)
  • Auditing all our vendor prefixes: #23568 (Point person: jayjdk)
  • Back compatback compat Backward compatibility - a desire to ensure that plugins and themes do not break under new releases - is a driving philosophy of WordPress. While it is a commonly accepted software development practice to break compatibility in major releases, WordPress strives to avoid this at all costs. Any backward incompatible change is carefully considered by the entire core development team and announced, with affected plugins often contacted. It should be noted that external libraries, such as jQuery, do have backward incompatible changes between major releases, which is often going to be a greater concern for developers. will be different for Twenty Thirteen. We’re going to be 3.6+ only for theme features. Goal for older versions is to be error-free, but they do not need to be feature complete. To make this work, we need fallbacks and checks in the API. (Point people: nacin, bpetty)
  • Checking multisitemultisite Used to describe a WordPress installation with a network of multiple blogs, grouped by sites. This installation type has shared users tables, and creates separate database tables for each blog (wp_posts becomes wp_0_posts). See also network, blog, site styles, per notes in #22179 (Point person: kwight)

Two bigger issues we discussed that need a bit more explanation.

SidebarSidebar A sidebar in WordPress is referred to a widget-ready area used by WordPress themes to display information that is not a part of the main content. It is not always a vertical column on the side. It can be a horizontal rectangle below or above the content area, footer, header, or any where in the theme. not clearing the footer: This was a big one that everyone has mentioned, see #23557. The layout looks broken when the sidebar is longer than the content area. The footer is below the content, but the sidebar keeps going and due to the CSSCSS Cascading Style Sheets. techniques to make the color bands 100% wide the footer can’t clear the content. The best idea we’ve had so far is to swap the two sidebars: putting footer sidebar as primary, and explaining why in the description. We’ll make the right-side sidebar secondary — and we’re also considering removing it entirely. (Point person: obenland)

Improving the fixed navbar: This was suggested as a change: include the menu in the fixed navbar for small screens instead of the title and search. Other suggestions included: 1) remove the fixed navbar completely (everywhere in the theme) 2) put the menu in the navbar for all screen sizes and 3) keep menu for small screens but remove search and title. We’ll need to discuss this more before taking action. (Point person: obenland)

Non-theme tickets that relate to Twenty Thirteen

  • HTML5 markup support in coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.: #20088 #15080 and #15081 (Point person: georgestephanis)
  • Standard theme hooksHooks In WordPress theme and development, hooks are functions that can be applied to an action or a Filter in WordPress. Actions are functions performed when a certain event occurs in WordPress. Filters allow you to modify certain functions. Arguments used to hook both filters and actions look the same.: #21506 (Unassigned)

Want to get involved?

Join us in IRC during office hours and we can get you started on a ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. or task.

IRC logs: Tue Feb 19 2013 | Thu Feb 21 2013

#3-6, #bundled-theme, #theme, #twentythirteen