WP Notify Project Review

It has been approximately 5 months since the WP Notify team wrapped up the Requirements gathering process, and kicked off the next phase of the project. This post aims to summarise the work done so far and to start looking at how the project will evolve in the new year.

Call for office hours hosts

Our weekly office hours are held every Monday at 2pm UTC. Originally I was the sole host of these meetings/office hours, but due to the yearly daylight savings time change, that meeting now conflicts with a work-related meeting I have every week.

Fortunately, @raaaahman has stepped in to help host these office hours, but I would like to make an open call for a second office hours host, to help share the load. Another option would be to move it to a different time slot, but I don’t want the meeting time to be specific to my availability.

The requirements to host are very little, we provide you with a script you can follow, and all the relevant details of the project, and all you merely need to do is ensure that the office hours are opened, and closed, and be available to take any relevant notes that may come up during office hours.

If you are interested to assist, please comment on this post, or reach out to myself or @raaaahman.

GithubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ repository

It was agreed that the project would be designed/developed publicly through GitHub, and a repository was created for this purpose. At the present time, the project 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. is empty, but the develop branchbranch A directory in Subversion. WordPress uses branches to store the latest development code for each major release (3.9, 4.0, etc.). Branches are then updated with code for any minor releases of that branch. Sometimes, a major version of WordPress and its minor versions are collectively referred to as a "branch", such as "the 4.0 branch". contains the initial work done by @schlessera, which we will be using as a base for development.

Design

It was also agreed that our first steps would be to start iterating on the design of the new WordPress notification system, and much work has been done by @folletto, @ibdz, @hedgefield, and others, to visualize the requirements of the project. Much of the design work has been detailed in issue #23 and issue #26, and we invite other designers to challenge the direction, or just suggest different approaches. While we’re starting to get close to a final agreed-upon design, suggestions are still welcome.

Development

While the designs are being iterated on, the development efforts have focused on tooling and processes. As soon as the designs are finalized, we plan to start active development of the new features.

#feature-notifications, #summary