Version 4.3

4.3 was kicked off on April 28th by release leadRelease Lead The community member ultimately responsible for the Release. @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 SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. 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

Leads: @azaozz, @iseulde

Slack Channel: #core-editor

Weekly Chat: Tuesday 21:00 UTC 2015

Weekly Updates | Component Page

Priorities:

  1. Improve the editor on mobile. (ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker.#)
  2. Save and update without a page reload. (ticket#)
  3. cmd/ctrl+S should work in the text editor and when the visual editor is not focused. (ticket#)
  4. Full list.
Adminadmin (and super admin) UIUI User interface

Leads: @helen

Slack Channel: #design

Weekly Chat: Thursday 17:00 UTC 2015

Weekly Updates | Component Page

Priorities:

  1. Better responsive list tables.
  2. Getting rid of media-new.php.
  3. 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).
  4. The state of the CSS roadmap.
  5. Full list.
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 Admin UI

Leads: @jeremyfelt

Slack Channel: #core-multisite

Weekly Chat: Tuesday 20:00 UTC 2015

Weekly Updates | Component Page

Priorities:

  1. Piggyback on other Admin UI improvements. The networknetwork (versus site, blog) admin often seems quite a bit behind everything else. Responsive list tables would be fantastic.
  2. Start looking at network admin screens on mobile. There are many places where workflow can be reimagined.
  3. 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.
  4. #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.
  5. Under the hood, significant progress on WP_Network, WP_Site, WP_Site_Query, and maybe WP_Network_Query would be nice.
CustomizerCustomizer Tool built into WordPress core that hooks into most modern themes. You can use it to preview and modify many of your site’s appearance settings.

Leads: @westonruter

Slack Channel: #core-customize

Weekly Chat: changed to Mondays on Jun 1st Monday 23:30 UTC 2015

Feature Plugins: Menus, Partial Refresh

Weekly Updates | Component Page

Priorities:

  1. UI/UXUX User experience changes, which include the dependencies for Menu Customizer
  2. Menu Customizer (plugin, issues)

Future:

  1. Customizer Concurrency (aka Control Locking)
  2. Partial Refresh — punted non-menus functionality from 4.3
  3. Theme Installation
Passwords

Leads: @mark

Slack Channel: #core-passwords

Weekly Chat: Monday 17:00 UTC 2015

Weekly Updates | Component Page

Priorities:

  1. Re-work password choosing/changing UI
  2. No manual or e-mailed passwords for creating other users
  3. Upon password reset, generate new password, and fill it in
  4. Password reset links should expire
  5. Users should be notified of password/e-mail changes
  6. Full list.

Testing

Use the 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. tester pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party to put a site on the bleeding edgebleeding edge The latest revision of the software, generally in development and often unstable. Also known as trunk. nightly track. This will set you up to receive nightly updates for coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. 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.