Author Archives: Andrew Nacin

Andrew Nacin 3:26 am on February 5, 2014
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Please suggest agenda items for the weekly developer…

Please suggest agenda items for the weekly developer meeting, Wednesday, February 5, 21:00 UTC.

If there’s a task or ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. we need to work through, or need volunteers for, let’s get those spelled out now. Maybe we can even work through some of them pre-meeting.

I’ll again be asking for a sentence or two (or more, if necessary of course) from each person/team working on a 3.9 task. You can also post those here if you’d like — please cross-reference any relevant tickets or discussions. Worked out great last week. For the state of things as of last week, see Mike’s weekly roundup.

#3-9, #agenda

Andrew Nacin 12:13 pm on January 29, 2014
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Please propose agenda items for the development meeting…

Please propose agenda items for the development meeting today at 21:00 UTC. Let’s try to keep it to under an hour, like last week’s.

Some to start us off:

  • Consider the Widgets Customizer plugin for 3.9 merge. If you haven’t looked at it yet, please spend some time today before the meeting. Obviously, we all like the idea, but we need to study the implementation and provide feedback. Please comment on that post if you haven’t already.
  • I’d like to propose an initiative for cleaning up a group of 556 tickets during the 3.9 cycle. (It has details, will explain in the meeting.)
  • Quick situation reports for various 3.9 tasks. If you’re working on something, please come armed with a sentence so we can do these rapid-fire — or post it in the comments thread. Some things are moving forward quickly, some aren’t. Where can we help? Here’s a list of what was proposed for 3.9 (see also the comments, which were updated after the last meeting). We need to take the “proposed” label off soon…
  • I’d like to get moving on the TracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress. component re-organization; I’ll see if there are any questions. We will need some help to move around tickets (ideally adding feedback to them along the way), so I’ll be looking for volunteers and talking about what is needed.

Aren’t familiar with how these meetings work? They’re especially good for breaking logjams — whether that means talking through a major sticking point, finding volunteers to help with something. We also use them to plan out schedules and tasks, make sure everyone is on the same page, and do release post-mortems to see how things went. (As 3.8.1 was released on Thursday, could be good to discuss this and 3.8.2, for example.)

The meeting takes place 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 chat.freenode.net in the #wordpress-dev channel. See you then!

#3-9, #agenda

Andrew Nacin 9:01 pm on January 27, 2014
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Proposed Trac component reorganization

Warning, this long. tl;dr: I propose a reorganization of our TracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress. components. 34 top-level components with two dozen subcomponents. New tree at the bottom. First, an overview of some of our problems.
Continue reading →

#components, #trac

Andrew Nacin 6:54 pm on January 24, 2014
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Continuing the Trac component re-organization with "focuses"

Based on triaging a few hundred tickets in the General and 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 components, we’ve added five components:

  • Bootstrap/Load — applies to wp-settings.php, ms-load.php, load.php, ms-settings.php, etc.
  • Login and Registration — useful for multisite, but applies to single-site too
  • Options and MetaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. — option.php, meta.php, etc.
  • Script Loader — WP_Scripts, WP_Styles, and script-loader.php
  • Networks and Sites — multisite only

We also removed two components that (poorly) described the problem rather than the affected area of coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.. “Validation” ranged from from validation tickets to XHTML issues. HTMLHTML HyperText Markup Language. The semantic scripting language primarily used for outputting content in web browsers. validation issues now belong in the affected component, like “Template” or “Administration.” “Warnings/Notices” contained tickets ranging from PHPPHP The web scripting language in which WordPress is primarily architected. WordPress requires PHP 5.6.20 or higher warnings to providing feedback to users. The open tickets were moved to more appropriate components. Additionally, the remaining tickets in “AtomPub” were wontfixed and the component was removed.

A new concept: Focuses

We’ve also added seven new “focuses” — ui, accessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility), javascriptJavaScript JavaScript or JS is an object-oriented computer programming language commonly used to create interactive effects within web browsers. WordPress makes extensive use of JS for a better user experience. While PHP is executed on the server, JS executes within a user’s browser. https://www.javascript.com/., docs, multisite, performance, and rtl. Focuses are about broad concepts and help break tickets down by specialties and skills, rather than functional areas of core. Multisite and RTL are widely general “modes” for WordPress, and each have contributors who focus strongly on those areas, but they are not well-contained “components” of core. Accessibility isn’t an area of core — it permates the entire user experience. A ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. about inline documentation should still receive the attention of developers for that area of core (say, comment.php), while those who focus on inline documentation should still be able to do so.

“Focuses” is a new field in TracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress.. They’re like tags, and more than one can be assigned to a ticket. It can be queried using custom queries. And they have their own reports which we hope to properly expose and make better really soon — https://core.trac.wordpress.org/focus/accessibility.

Guidelines to help with the transition

The corresponding components for the new focuses have been removed. The “ui-focus” keyword has also been converted over. Overall, we gained five components but lost eight.

This has the potential to be confusing at first and we’ll surely need to make some adjustments. Also, the component cleanup is not done yet — this is just the beginning. Here are some guidelines for how to use the new focuses.

  • The old RTL component — use the rtl focus and assign a relevant component. If it’s RTL issues with the media library, use the “Media” component. If it’s about the RTL build tools, then use the “Build Tools” component. If it’s more general, then use the “I18ni18n Internationalization, or the act of writing and preparing code to be fully translatable into other languages. Also see localization. Often written with a lowercase i so it is not confused with a lowercase L or the numeral 1. Often an acquired skill.” component.

  • The old Accessibility component — use the accessibility focus and assign a relevant component. For issues with the media library, use “Media.” For issues with activating a theme, use “Themes.”

  • The old Inline Docsinline docs (phpdoc, docblock, xref) component — use the docs focus and assign a relevant component. Hook documentation for user.php belongs in the “Users” component.

  • The old Multisite component — use the multisite focus and assign a relevant component. If it’s related to users, use “Users.” If it’s related to the loading process of multisite (choosing a site based on domain and path, etc.), use “Bootstrap/Load.” If it’s related to the installation process, use “Upgrade/Install.” network_admin_url() goes into the “Permalinks” component. get_site_option() is “Options and Meta.” The Networknetwork (versus site, blog) Adminadmin (and super admin) still has its own component. (Choosing that component or “Networks and Sites” automatically assign the “multisite” focus for you.) @jeremyfelt recategorized about 110 tickets into about 15 different components.

  • The old Performance component — use the performance focus and assign a relevant component. Improving the performance of WP_Query belongs in “Query,” improving the performance of get_option() belongs in “Options and Meta,” etc.

  • The old Graphic Design component — use the ui focus and assign a relevant component. (This is probably going to be “Administration”, at least for now.)

  • The old ui-focus keyword — This has been removed. Simply use the ui focus.

  • The old JavaScript and UIUI User interface components — these have not existed for some time. Use the corresponding focus and assign a relevant component.

We may add more focuses over time. For example, the “Text Changes” component would probably make a better focus, for our wordsmiths.

Any questions, suggestions, or comments?

This is a summary and addendum of one section of this Wednesday’s weekly developer meeting. Logs.

#components, #trac

Andrew Nacin 12:39 am on January 24, 2014
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3.8.1 auto update rollout

I’ll be using this thread to track the rollout of automatic background updates for 3.8.1, released earlier.

The WP.org APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways. is now sending update instructions to about 1 in every 128 sites. This is for all locales (not just English). 3.8.1 was released about four hours ago and I’d like to have the rollout complete in the next six hours or so. Sites check WP.org every 12 hours, but this timetable means all sites should be updating within one day of the initial release.

So, why a slow rollout? Well, we’re monitoring a number of things that would cause us to put a pause on auto-updates, such as whether there were any critical issues in 3.8.1, whether update failure rates are higher than usual, how WP.org is handling the load, etc. The rollout is happening much faster this time than last time (3.7.1), and yes, the goal will be to eventually push out auto-update instructions immediately.

So far, we’ve seen a 100% success rate for about a thousand auto-updates to 3.8.1, and north of 99% for one-click updates. (A reminder: a failure only means the site couldn’t update, not that it broke.) I’ll comment to this thread with more numbers as the rollout continues.

#3-8-1, #updates

Andrew Nacin 11:58 pm on January 22, 2014  

WordPress 3.8.1 Release Candidate

Greetings! WordPress 3.8.1 RC1 is now available for final testing. Here’s a zip, or you can set the WordPress Beta Tester plugin to “point releaseMinor Release A set of releases or versions having the same minor version number may be collectively referred to as .x , for example version 5.2.x to refer to versions 5.2, 5.2.1, 5.2.3, and all other versions in the 5.2 (five dot two) branch of that software. Minor Releases often make improvements to existing features and functionality. nightlies.” (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., which is 3.9-alpha, also has all of these fixes.)

We hope to get this released to you as early as tomorrow, January 23. Once 3.8.1 is released, we’ll wait a few hours before turning on automatic background updates, which will then be gradually rolled out over about a day.

It’s been nearly six weeks since 3.8, which has seen more than 9 million downloads. It’s now time to kick 3.8.1 out the door, especially since we’re now ramping up WordPress 3.9 development.

Feel free to leave here any questions or comments about 3.8.1 in general, though if you have found a 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. in WordPress, please report them on Trac.

Below is a complete changelog. Each section is roughly ordered by priority. Also on TracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress., you can also find the full changelog, a diff of the changes, and the list of 3.8.1 tickets.

Embedding tweets:

  • Switch Twitter oEmbed to SSLSSL Secure Sockets Layer. Provides a secure means of sending data over the internet. Used for authenticated and private actions. due to a Twitter APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways. change that broke embedding across all WordPress sites. [26969], #26844.

WP_Query fixes:

  • Fix categoryCategory The 'category' taxonomy lets you group posts / content together that share a common bond. Categories are pre-defined and broad ranging. handling in pre_get_posts when pretty permalinks are in use; fix handling of taxonomyTaxonomy A taxonomy is a way to group things together. In WordPress, some common taxonomies are category, link, tag, or post format. https://codex.wordpress.org/Taxonomies#Default_Taxonomies. queries in get_queried_object(). [26946], #26627, #26634.
  • Avoid a fatal error in wp_reset_postdata() if $wp_query global is not set. (Also affected 3.7.) [26951], #26775.

Themes screen fixes and improvements:

Fixes for the new dashboard design:

  • Fix the “dead zone” on submit buttons, so they actually click. [26998], #26700, Chrome bug.
  • Prevent the adminadmin (and super admin) color scheme from previewing when editing another user. [26937], #26607.
  • Update the styles for the media modal when used on the frontend. [26992], #26677.
  • Add a contrasting border to admin feature pointers. [26970], #26689.
  • Update Dashicons to latest. (The Updates icon now points in the right direction.) [26965], #26518.
  • OCD alignment updates on the Updates screen. [26938], #26699.

Responsive admin fixes:

  • Prevent widgetWidget A WordPress Widget is a small block that performs a specific function. You can add these widgets in sidebars also known as widget-ready areas on your web page. WordPress widgets were originally created to provide a simple and easy-to-use way of giving design and structure control of the WordPress theme to the user. controls from going off the screen when editing extra-wide widgets on small devices. [26964], #26701.
  • When moderating comments, make sure the comment author is always visible. [26961], #26618.
  • Responsive improvements to submenus in the toolbar. [27009], #26720.
  • Improve keyboard accessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) for the admin menu when in responsive mode. [27010], #26639.
  • Prevent the toolbar from wrapping to a second line on narrow screen (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 only). [26949], #26537.

The new dashboard widgets:

  • Quick Draft widget: Don’t ignore default comment status and pingPing The act of sending a very small amount of data to an end point. Ping is used in computer science to illicit a response from a target server to test it’s connection. Ping is also a term used by Slack users to @ someone or send them a direct message (DM). Users might say something along the lines of “Ping me when the meeting starts.” status. [26960], #26722.
  • At a Glance widget: Don’t link to Pages or Posts for Authors or Contributors (respectively). [27001], #26574.
  • Quick Draft widget: Break long words in Quick Draft content to prevent overflow. [26948], #26658.

Miscellaneous:

  • Media: Fix directory permissions for new media upload directories. [26927], #26781.
  • RTL: Force LTR direction for code inputs. [26954], #26666.
  • RTL: Make sure half-stars in star ratings are filled on the correct side. [26953], #26814.
Andrew Nacin 9:03 pm on January 22, 2014
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Possible tasks for WP 3.9

During last week’s dev chat, we decided on a schedule. We also chatted about a major focus in 3.9 on improving workflow for new and current contributors alike. If there are further suggestions on changes we can make to workflow to make coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. easier to contribute to, let us know.

Below is a rundown of what features/enhancements/ideas were discussed as possible for 3.9, including potential volunteers to take point on different tasks. This is all tentative. Thanks @DH-Shredder for compiling this.

In today’s chat, let’s continue to build this out. If you have something you’d love to work on during the release, join us!

Widgets

There are two widgetWidget A WordPress Widget is a small block that performs a specific function. You can add these widgets in sidebars also known as widget-ready areas on your web page. WordPress widgets were originally created to provide a simple and easy-to-use way of giving design and structure control of the WordPress theme to the user.-related feature plugins to review: Better Widgets and Widget Customizer. Decisions on what we’re merging should come by next week, per the schedule. Expect a post from @shaunandrews soon explaining both and requesting help reviewing them.

TinyMCE improvements (@azaozz, @gcorne, @lgladdy)

  • TinyMCE 4 inclusion and troubleshooting
  • Improving editing/positioning images after insertion into the editor

Editor-related media improvements

  • Bringing the image editor into the media manager (@melchoyce, @johnbillion)
  • Allow a user to drop an item for upload on the post screen. This would then open the media modal (as an initial first step).

A better themes experience, part 2 (@matveb)

  • Taking our new experience to the theme installer (this may be started as a 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)
  • Supporting multiple screenshots, left out of 3.8
  • Backbone routing and subview backend improvements

Improved audio/video support (@wonderboymusic) (see this post)

  • Playlists, subtitles, metadata generation
  • Media manager documentation

JavaScriptJavaScript JavaScript or JS is an object-oriented computer programming language commonly used to create interactive effects within web browsers. WordPress makes extensive use of JS for a better user experience. While PHP is executed on the server, JS executes within a user’s browser. https://www.javascript.com/. and CSSCSS Cascading Style Sheets.

  • wp-admin.css split (@jorbin, @helen) (see this post)
  • Merging colors.css into other CSS files (@helen)
  • Grunt tool for patches (@jorbin)
  • Inline JSJS JavaScript, a web scripting language typically executed in the browser. Often used for advanced user interfaces and behaviors. documentation using JSDoc (@jorbin)

Miscellaneous

  • Adminadmin (and super admin) settings audit (@jenmylo, @melchoyce)
  • Various 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 improvements TBD (@jeremyfelt)
  • Start the taxonomyTaxonomy A taxonomy is a way to group things together. In WordPress, some common taxonomies are category, link, tag, or post format. https://codex.wordpress.org/Taxonomies#Default_Taxonomies. roadmap (@nacin, @wonderboymusic) (see this post)

#3-9

Andrew Nacin 8:05 pm on January 15, 2014
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WordPress 3.9 planning

We were supposed to discuss WordPress 3.9 during the weekly meeting last week, but in the absence of a decision on a release leadRelease Lead The community member ultimately responsible for the Release., and with a lot of 3.8.1 things to get through, it got pushed to today. 2100 UTC, #wordpress-dev (so, in an hour).

I’ll be the release lead for WordPress 3.9. Expect some familiar faces helping me out, including Andrew Ozz, who will be overseeing all of the TinyMCE work already underway this cycle; Helen Hou-Sandí, who will be spending most of her time working on and advising ongoing feature plugins efforts; Sam Sidler, who will be helping with project management; and Mike Schroder, who will be backing me up for this release.

Today we’ll be:

  • Setting a schedule. The tentative 2014 roadmap decided in December slated 3.9 for April 15. That’s 90 days from now, and sounds good to me.
  • Reviewing feature plugins. Lots of things in progress — let’s take a quick look.
  • Brainstorming on what this release should be focusing on. There are plenty of possibilities when it comes to iterating on existing features (especially those added in the last five releases — the 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., media, audio/video, theme browser, adminadmin (and super admin) UIUI User interface), general 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.-fixing, long-standing architecture and APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways. improvements, and such.
  • Discussing changes to workflows. Changes to Trac, ticket reporting, re-doing our components tree, a new Git mirror, and such make this release look a lot like 3.7, when we kicked off the new core development repository. We could use continual help to identify how we can make it easier to contribute, break through bottlenecks, etc. We also need to tagtag A directory in Subversion. WordPress uses tags to store a single snapshot of a version (3.6, 3.6.1, etc.), the common convention of tags in version control systems. (Not to be confused with post tags.) some tickets as good-first-bug!

Hope to see you today. Have any idea, thought, or suggestion about 3.9 or for today’s meeting in particular? Please leave a comment so I can prepare for it. Talk soon.

#3-9, #release-lead

Andrew Nacin 6:49 pm on January 15, 2014
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Git mirrors for WordPress

I’m pleased to share we now have an official GitGit Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency. Git is easy to learn and has a tiny footprint with lightning fast performance. Most modern plugin and theme development is being done with this version control system. https://git-scm.com/. mirror for the WordPress coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. development SVNSVN Subversion, the popular version control system (VCS) by the Apache project, used by WordPress to manage changes to its codebase. repository.

git clone git://develop.git.wordpress.org/

Read-only mirrors are also set up for a few other WordPress.orgWordPress.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/ repositories, including BuddyPress, bbPressbbPress Free, open source software built on top of WordPress for easily creating forums on sites. https://bbpress.org., and the old core.svn “build” repository:

git clone git://buddypress.git.wordpress.org/
git clone git://bbpress.git.wordpress.org/
git clone git://core.git.wordpress.org/
git clone git://glotpress.git.wordpress.org/

Make sure you use the git protocol (not httpHTTP HTTP is an acronym for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. HTTP is the underlying protocol used by the World Wide Web and this protocol defines how messages are formatted and transmitted, and what actions Web servers and browsers should take in response to various commands.) and include the trailing slash.

Can you use develop.git.wordpress.org for core development? Yes! For all practical purposes, the SVN and Git repositories are now equals. Pick your poison; use whatever you’d like for all your development and deployment needs.

For creating patches: If you’re into the command line, simply use git diff — to be specific, git diff --no-prefix is ideal. This format is easily applied with patch, just like SVN diffs. For more, check out scribu’s post on contributing using git. Might also be a good time to plug grunt-patch-wordpress, a work in progress — help make it awesome, if you can.

With this mirror, we’ve applied some lessons we learned from previous experiences:

  • Tags for major releases receive an extra .0 (“3.8.0”, not “3.8”), making them compatible with tools requiring semver-like version numbers, and allowing branches to have their own namespace (“3.8”, not “3.8-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".”).
  • Committercommitter A developer with commit access. WordPress has five lead developers and four permanent core developers with commit access. Additionally, the project usually has a few guest or component committers - a developer receiving commit access, generally for a single release cycle (sometimes renewed) and/or for a specific component. data is pulled from WordPress.org.
  • The SSLSSL Secure Sockets Layer. Provides a secure means of sending data over the internet. Used for authenticated and private actions. versions of the SVN repositories are used.

Note that these Git repositories have different hashes than anything currently mirrored on 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/. We never did break these hashes as promised a year ago. Next steps will be to figure out how to best mirror these to GitHub (and replace what’s there), which is complicated by now having old and new repositories for core development. Additionally, I’m sure we’ll find at least one glitch in this in a matter of a few days, so consider the next week or so a 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. test.

Edit: Well, I mentioned the next week would be a beta test. We found an error (that didn’t take long) in how authors got synced over, so we’ll be breaking the hashes tonight.

There are a lot of other repositories on WordPress.org not yet mirrored. Notably: plugins and themes. These are massive multi-project repositories and will require a bit more investment.

#git

Andrew Nacin 5:31 pm on January 10, 2014
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Brainstorming ticket reports

One thing I’d like to work on is improve our reports on TracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress. with the hope we can better manage the ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. queues. We currently have about 50 reports on Trac. Many of them were created in a push 5-6 years ago to build reports around keywords. A number of others are one-offs created in the last few years for specific use cases. In reality, few of these are ever used on a day-to-day basis.

I checked the access logs to get an idea of the most popular reports. Besides the first six reports (my favorite “home base” is report 6), they are report 16 (“Needs 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.”), report 18 (“Blockers for Releases”), and report 21 (“Latest Tickets”).

What I’d like to do is brainstorm all sorts of new reports we should have. How can we make what we have better? I’ll then go to work about implementing them. Dream big — if the data’s there, I’ll figure out the gnarly SQL required. We can also think about how we can improve columns, grouping, ordering, etc. If you have a concept for a report but aren’t sure how we’d query for those tickets, toss the idea out there and maybe someone will add to it.

I’l probably design a new /report screen so it’s not just a list ordered by something random like when the report was created, and so we can highlight important reports, group similar reports together, and put less emphasis on some of the more specialized ones.

Here are some half-baked ideas, to start us off:

  • Open tickets without a response. Find all tickets where no one has commented, or where only the reporter has commented. This would create a punchlist of tickets to review. (Ideally, the report should always be empty.) The ability to group or 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. this by component would be helpful, for contributors who specialize in and want to take responsibility for different areas.
  • Report of “dead” tickets. Tickets that haven’t been modified in four years are ripe for action and/or closure. We should empty a report of this nature, then reduce it to 3.5 years, then 3 years, etc.
  • Good first bugs. A report of all tickets marked as a good first 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.. (None yet, as the keyword is new.) Next steps: How can we best identify these kinds of tickets?
  • Report of “untriaged” tickets. Our milestones have gotten out of hand, which is something we should discuss. Tickets should immediately leave “Awaiting Review” once they’ve been initially reviewed, but then not forgotten about if they are shifted to “Future Release”. Let’s figure out metrics for what makes a ticket “untriaged”. We could create a simple UIUI User interface to filter by component for a report like this. We currently have Tickets Awaiting Review which groups tickets by the “Version” they were reported against — maybe this is a good start.

What’s your idea?

#trac