4.3 was kicked off on April 28th by release lead @obenland and is currently scheduled for August 18th. Enabling users of touch and small-screen devices is the focus of 4.3. make/core is the development hub for WordPress. If you want to follow WordPress 4.3 development, that’s the first place to look. Posts relevant to 4.3 are tagged accordingly.
If you want to dive deeper into 4.3, development is discussed at a weekly meeting in the #core Slack channel every Wednesday. The next meeting is Wednesday 20:00 UTC 2015.
Feature Teams
A good way to contribute to 4.3 is to help out a feature team. 4.3 has five feature teams.
Editor
Priorities:
- Improve the editor on mobile. (ticket#)
- Save and update without a page reload. (ticket#)
- cmd/ctrl+S should work in the text editor and when the visual editor is not focused. (ticket#)
- Full list.
Admin UI
Priorities:
- Better responsive list tables.
- Getting rid of media-new.php.
- Screen-by-screen sweep for low-hanging fruit on small screens and touch devices (e.g. inconsistent spacing or font sizes at a given media query point).
- The state of the CSS roadmap.
- Full list.
Multisite Admin UI
Priorities:
- Piggyback on other Admin UI improvements. The network admin often seems quite a bit behind everything else. Responsive list tables would be fantastic.
- Start looking at network admin screens on mobile. There are many places where workflow can be reimagined.
- It may be possible to start working on what a future site switcher would look like. Especially on mobile, providing context can be tough when working on a network of many sites.
-
#22383-core and #31240-core for nicer ways of creating and editing sites. Might lead to some domain/path validation, which could be useful elsewhere and help address older tickets.
- Under the hood, significant progress on
WP_Network, WP_Site, WP_Site_Query, and maybe WP_Network_Query would be nice.
Customizer
Priorities:
- UI/UX changes, which include the dependencies for Menu Customizer
- Menu Customizer (plugin, issues)
Future:
- Customizer Concurrency (aka Control Locking)
- Partial Refresh — punted non-menus functionality from 4.3
- Theme Installation
Passwords
Priorities:
- Re-work password choosing/changing UI
- No manual or e-mailed passwords for creating other users
- Upon password reset, generate new password, and fill it in
- Password reset links should expire
- Users should be notified of password/e-mail changes
- Full list.
Testing
Use the beta tester plugin to put a site on the bleeding edge nightly track. This will set you up to receive nightly updates for core WordPress.
That’s a pretty convenient way to follow 4.3 development. With that in place, test the customizer and create a captioned gallery visual record full of your feedback. Like this: https://make.wordpress.org/flow/2015/06/04/menu-customizer-iphone-6/
Here are some example comparison vizrecs. These are very useful and valuable.
Pick a goal, such as adding a menu to the top of the front page containing Home, About, what have you. Start on the front page and show the flow. If you have flows of interest to you or your clients, document those in a vizrec using both Appearance > Menus and the menu customizer. Compare the two flows and show your work in a captioned gallery visual record. Help us curate these flows and increase our awareness of what our users are really doing. And don’t just do this on desktop. Do this on mobile. Do this on every device you have.