Hello everyone! Sorry for the delay in hearing from coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. here. We’re gonna participate in this whole new-fangled updates thing on schedule for now on. Your core team representatives are me and Cristi Burcă (@scribu). I expect future updates for core on make/updates to be a bit more focused on “this week” and “next week”, per the established pattern. For now, here’s a broad overview.
General timeline of events from the past month or so:
- WordPress 3.5 development came to a close on December 11.
- Mark Jaquith announced he was leading WordPress 3.6 on December 19. Aaron Campbell was chosen as his backup.
- Development of WordPress 3.6 started on January 2.
- WordPress 3.5.1 was originally targeted for as early as January 2. It slipped about two weeks because of the complexities of some of the bug fixes, then slipped further while the security team worked on some issues. Final release date was January 24.
Additionally, Helen Hou-Sandi and Sergey Biryukov were granted guest commit access for the 3.6 cycle. Helen has a focus on UI, Sergey on bugs. Jon Cave was also granted permanent commit access, after serving as a guest committer for three cycles over the course of a year. (Those two milestones have been and will continue to be the rule of thumb the lead developers follow.)
WordPress 3.6 development has been broken into 5 main feature teams:
- Revisions, led by Peter Westwood with Erick Hitter
- Autosave, led by Andrew Ozz with Mike Schroeder
- Post Formats, led by Helen Hou-Sandi with Pete Mall
- Editorial Flow, led by Daniel Bachhuber with Konstantin Kovshenin
- Nav Menus, led by Dave Martin with Drew Jaynes
Also, Sergey Biryukov is running maintenance and bug gardening, and working with me, Ryan Boren, and others on architecture. Lance Willett is running a Twenty Thirteen team that is expected to start working publicly come February.
Each team currently has twice-weekly office hours in #wordpress-dev to discuss and plan out their features. Personally, I like the feel of this and it reminds me of the rapid-fire discussions and decisions that needed to happen during 3.0’s development, with a new theme, post types, and of course the multisiteMultisite Multisite is a WordPress feature which allows users to create a network of sites on a single WordPress installation. Available since WordPress version 3.0, Multisite is a continuation of WPMU or WordPress Multiuser project. WordPress MultiUser project was discontinued and its features were included into WordPress core.https://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network. MU merge.
Because each team is mostly still scoping out features and making decisions, actual development has been fairly light so far. Mark has recognized that things are a bit behind based on the 3.6 schedule. Yesterday’s meeting went through a number of major issues with regards to post formats and nav menus, which was very helpful to set direction for both projects. And so, over the next week, feature development is expected to ramp up significantly.