Fine-grained Trac notifications

Some housekeeping items to share so I don’t need to cover it in the meeting today:

New notification preferences are live. On the notifications page, you’ll be able to subscribe to activity from all tickets in a particular milestone, component, or focus. You can also subscribe to only new tickets, in case you want to then selectively watch tickets as they come in.

New greeting on make/coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.. Look up. Or if you’re viewing this post directly, check out the homepage. Right now the “Get Involved” menu item leads you to there, but it’d been tough to know where to go from there. This serves to introduce new people and get them information quickly: what this blogblog (versus network, site) is, where to file 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., how to start contributing; and provides some info about 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. and our meetings.

New, simpler new ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. form: I simplified the new ticket form, cleaning up the warnings, text, and chrome (it had a lot of borders and fieldsets and such). It looks much less intimidating now.

New ticket reports and component pages. These went live late last week — here and here.

Create a new ticket This was also helpful because we shifted around where you can go to create a new ticket. You can now do it from search results, all ticket reports and the main reports screen, component pages, the icon in the navigation, and now from the make/core homepage. The new reports screen is a new entry point for TracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress.. You’ll note it actually duplicates the content of Trac’s home page (new ticket button there too), which you’ll have trouble finding a direct link to anywhere.

Focuses/components: Component and focus triaging is pretty much done. (More than one thousand open tickets — 30% — have been modified in the last two weeks alone.) Still have some decisions to make about the Administration component, but I’m not worried.

And with that, I actually have no more changes planned for core trac. Except for ticket smashing. It’s now time to start clearing these two reports: Tickets without a response and Tickets that are ancient and inactive. Who is with me?!

Thanks also @ocean90 for replacing every last icon in Trac with a Dashicon. Love it.

#housekeeping, #trac

The email used for notifications on Trac is…

The email used for notifications on TracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress. is currently specified in Trac preferences. I’m changing this to pull automatically from your 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/ profile. After this change, there will not be a way to have a separate email address for Trac and any manually specified email address will be overridden.

We need to make this change because, very simply, it’s a better user experience. By killing this extra user preference, it’s one less step users need to set up in order to receive notifications. (And a tighter feedback loopLoop The Loop is PHP code used by WordPress to display posts. Using The Loop, WordPress processes each post to be displayed on the current page, and formats it according to how it matches specified criteria within The Loop tags. Any HTML or PHP code in the Loop will be processed on each post. https://codex.wordpress.org/The_Loop. could possibly boost engagement.)

That will affect about a thousand users we have in the system, probably incidentally for most. But, about 50-100 users might have been deliberately declaring a separate email address; for example 50 users had “trac” appear specifically in their email. Even without a dedicated email, it is trivial 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. Trac emails; you just might need to make some adjustments.

As you may have noticed, this is part of a series of changes I’ve been making to Trac. I’ll be doing a summary post in a few days outlining everything that has changed.

NOTE: This does not affect wp-trac@lists.automattic.com. If you subscribe to the “firehose” this is not affected.

Edit, 20:23 UTC. This is now enabled. For the moment, the email address will sync when you next visit Trac. Please find me if you have any questions.

#housekeeping, #trac

Housekeeping

I’ll be posting a summary soon that covers Wednesday’s marathon meeting to scope out features for 3.5. In the meantime, some housekeeping:

make/coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.

This P2P2 A free theme for WordPress, known for front-end posting, used by WordPress for development updates and project management. See our main development blog and other workgroup blogs. blogblog (versus network, site) has moved from wpdevel.wordpress.comWordPress.com An online implementation of WordPress code that lets you immediately access a new WordPress environment to publish your content. WordPress.com is a private company owned by Automattic that hosts the largest multisite in the world. This is arguably the best place to start blogging if you have never touched WordPress before. https://wordpress.com/ to make.wordpress.org/core. The “make” networknetwork (versus site, blog) is still very young, but there are other P2 blogs already underway, including ui, accessibility, themes, and plugins. wppolyglots.wordpress.com also moved to make/polyglots.

Everything was migrated, including email and jabber subscriptions (using Jetpack). Being on the 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/ network opens up some possibilities, including custom features, better integration, and single sign-on.

New test framework

There will definitely be more to come on this, but in the last two weeks, the test suite was converted to a new test runner. You can read more about the effort on @maxcutler‘s blog. Tests are now easier and more straightforward to write, and the runner is also faster, leaner, and more stable. We’ve been working to increase our test coverage with every core commit, so this move was really important.

Unit tests and mailing lists

With the new test framework, we’re also looking to raise the visibility of our tests. We do plan to merge them into core’s Subversion repository in the future, but for now, we’ve merged some mailing lists. The wp-svn mailing list (every core commit, right in your inbox) now receives commits to the unit-tests repository as well. And wp-trac (every TracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress. ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. and comment — “the WordPress firehose”) now receives comments from the unit-tests Trac.

If you are mostly just interested in tests, the wp-unit-tests mailing list receives both commits and Trac notifications, as before. (Also, make yourself known!)

Daily Bug Scrubs

I’d like to continue having daily “office hours.” For now, we’ll continue them weekdays at 19:00 UTC (an hour before the dev chat usually is). A number of us are idling 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. throughout the week anyway, but I think it has worked well to have a set time where you can stop by to help comb through Trac, bring up tickets for discussion, and pitch patches.

 

 

#3-5, #housekeeping, #unit-tests