If you haven’t caught @matt‘s State of the Word keynote at WordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. San Francisco last weekend, you should. It contains a lot of great insight into how WordPress is used (using data from the 2013 user survey) and what should be expected for WordPress 3.7 and 3.8. (Talk about 3.7 starts at around 33 minutes in.)
Here’s what was announced: WordPress 3.7 will be released in two months — early October. (Wat.) Jon Cave (@duck_) and I will be leading the release. It will be a quick “platform-focused” release, with a focus on stability and security.
There are three main things we’d like to get done — language packs, auto-updates for minor releases, and some enhancements to help strengthen user’s passwords. Beyond that, though, the major goal of 3.7 is to offer a bit of a “reset” — which includes a huge cleanup of Trac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress.. We’re currently at 3,800 open tickets, and we’d like to whittle that down as well as make things more manageable for the future. That includes reorganizing our Trac components, making it easier to contribute to certain areas of core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. (rather than, say, drinking from a single Trac firehose), and trying to organize teams around these components.
Outside of core, there will also be work on developer.wordpress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/, which will include a hosted code reference and developer handbooks. As part of this, there will be a lot of inline documentation cleanup in 3.7 — potentially including an inline documentation standard for actions and filters.
Better development tools will also be a goal in 3.7 — see also the post on develop.svn.wordpress.org from earlier.
This is just the beginning. Please join me on Wednesday, August 7, 20:00 UTC for our weekly developer meeting in #wordpress-dev on freenode.net. I expect 3.7 to be a bit crazy, with a high volume of commits (oh, the days of WordPress 3.0), but also with increasing organization that can help set the stage for future releases. Daily bug 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. scrubs! Rapid development! High tempo! Yay! Who is with me? See you tomorrow.
#3-7, #agenda, #release-lead
