Helen Hou-Sandi 4:13 pm on August 13, 2014
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All hands on deck for 4.0 Beta 4 and RC 1

We’ve been pushing really hard to get to a place where a final 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. and then RCrelease candidate One of the final stages in the version release cycle, this version signals the potential to be a final release to the public. Also see alpha (beta). phase are appropriate for the 4.0 development cycle.

This impacts a few things:

  • The release date (currently scheduled for August 27, in just two short weeks).
  • Finalizing help and about page text, and thus string freeze (and, therefore, translators).

With the help of everybody who’s contributed to this release thus far, we’ve done a really great job with the features we’ve been working on and the overall ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. queue for this milestone. All of that said, we need your help to get the following done:

Needed to reach the final beta

  • #28328: Focus on editing, while editing (editor scrolling improvements). There is a comment that outlines a few things we feel need at least consideration before we consider this release-worthy. @stephdau has been working through patching – testing of patches is greatly appreciated, as are 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. reports (as always).
  • #28842: Media Grid: Bulk selection mode. User testing and further feedback have led us to give a separate selection mode another try. @ericlewis has been doing very heavy lifting throughout the cycle on the feature. There is a patchpatch A special text file that describes changes to code, by identifying the files and lines which are added, removed, and altered. It may also be referred to as a diff. A patch can be applied to a codebase for testing. for testing (not for commit) along with some observations on ticket. Once again, testing and UIUI User interface/UXUX User experience observations are very welcome. If you would like to help with patching, please let us know and we can coordinate to avoid duplicate efforts.

Needed before RC1

  • Commit or puntpunt Contributors sometimes use the verb "punt" when talking about a ticket. This means it is being pushed out to a future release. This typically occurs for lower priority tickets near the end of the release cycle that don't "make the cut." In this is colloquial usage of the word, it means to delay or equivocate. (It also describes a play in American football where a team essentially passes up on an opportunity, hoping to put themselves in a better position later to try again.) all tickets currently slated for the 4.0 milestone. Anybody can help by testing/writing patches or marking tickets for commit or punt using keywords. If you’re not sure, feel free to ask in 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 ticket, or just move to the next one.
  • Triagetriage The act of evaluating and sorting bug reports, in order to decide priority, severity, and other factors. all tickets reported against trunk. This is especially important in the RC phase, as we need to monitor things reported against trunktrunk A directory in Subversion containing the latest development code in preparation for the next major release cycle. If you are running "trunk", then you are on the latest revision. for bugs introduced in the cycle, particularly regressions. Many tickets opened against trunk will apply to earlier versions – please change the version field as appropriate to reflect that. It may help to filterFilter Filters are one of the two types of Hooks https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Hooks. They provide a way for functions to modify data of other functions. They are the counterpart to Actions. Unlike Actions, filters are meant to work in an isolated manner, and should never have side effects such as affecting global variables and output. out anything already milestoned for 4.0 or Future Release.
  • QA sweeps across browsers and devices, particularly on new features and checking CSSCSS Cascading Style Sheets. for anything introduced that may not work in IE8 or in some cases IE7. For instance, any usages of CSS calc() need to have a fallback for IE8 and older.

If you’d like to tackle something you see here and would like a little more direction to get started, please leave a comment below or head over to #wordpress-dev in IRC. One or more coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. developers is likely to be around at most hours.

Finally, for today’s dev chat at 2014-08-13 20:00 UTC, let’s take a quick look at the above, note any other blockers we see, and get people assigned to tasks/tickets as we can.

#4-0, #agenda