WordPress

We recommend open source software whenever we can, and the Firefox browser from Mozilla is one of our favorites. Firefox 3.6 recently came out with persona support, allowing users to skin their browsers with favorite designs and brands. WordPress users everywhere seem to love the W symbol (at WordCamps it shows up on everything from t-shirts to iPhone skins), so it was only natural that WordPress personas would come along.

To kick it off, designer Chad Pugh created two WordPress personas based on the WordPress brand: “Vintage Press” and “Inkwell.” These two designs are a great way to show the WordPress love, even if you’re only showing it to yourself.

The “Vintage Press” Persona is inspired by the style of old-fashioned printing presses and the mechanics of working with type. This persona might appeal to WordPress developers and users who appreciate the way things work under the hood.   “Inkwell” is more of a palimpsest* & watercolor hybrid that might appeal to the artists among us. Music, script and spills of color combine…

Okay, I’m starting to feel like an art critic so I’ll stop there. Check out the WordPress personas for Firefox and decide for yourselves.

* I never thought I would have occasion to use the word “palimpsest” in a dev blog post. Never.

Back in April of last year, Matt posted here on the dev blog about the release of BuddyPress 1.0, a plugin that adds a social networking layer to an installation of WordPress MU. Many people were excited about the idea, but were unable to experiment with BuddyPress because they ran single installations of WordPress rather than the multi-site WordPress MU. To those people, good news! A little over a week ago Andy Peatling, founder and lead developer of BuddyPress, announced the release of BuddyPress 1.2, which can be used on single installations of WordPress. Congratulations, BuddyPress! And congratulations to all the people who’ve been waiting with bated breath for this to happen.

The first thing I thought when I heard the news was, “Awesome! Now everyone can put BuddyPress on their site if they want it.” The second thought I had was, “Shoot! Average WordPress users won’t want to try BuddyPress if they have to switch their site themes over to the BuddyPress default theme just to try it out.” The third thought I had was, “That can’t be right. I’ll ask Andy.”

As it turned out, you could keep your current theme with BuddyPress if you added a couple of files and made a few file edits. There was even a link on the BuddyPress site to download the necessary files. That still seemed a little clunky, though, so Andy, super awesome guy that he is, went ahead and made a plugin to get you started. The BuddyPress Template Pack can be installed directly from your WordPress admin (Plugins > Add New), and will walk you through the theme additions step by step.*

Now you can use BuddyPress with your single site installation of WordPress, and you can keep your existing theme. Seriously, could BuddyPress have made it any easier for you to add social networking to your site? I know I can’t wait to try it out this weekend, how about you?

* Don’t forget to install BuddyPress itself, or the template pack plugin won’t do anything!

A Report from the 3.0 Development Cycle Menus

There’s been a flurry of blog posts about the integration of the WooThemes Custom Navigation into WordPress core, so I thought it was time we posted the official word. For 3.0, the main user-facing feature we wanted to include was a better site menu management system. Currently, dealing with menus is clunky, using Page IDs or in some cases categories, if a theme uses categories instead of pages for the menu. We wanted a menu system that had the drag and drop ease of the widget management screen, could combine Pages, Categories, and Links, was able to be re-ordered, allowed submenus, and enabled hiding specific Pages or Categories from the menu altogether. We were in the process of building this when WooThemes introduced their Custom Navigation system. Watching their introductory video, it seemed that their system did pretty much everything we wanted to do for core, so we reached out to them about contributing to core.

As you’ve probably heard, it worked out, and the first patch has been submitted. It does require some code modification, which is happening now. The decision to incorporate the Woo menus happened right before our planned feature freeze for the 3.0 development cycle, so we pushed our freeze date back by two weeks to allow the addition. We’re now targeting the 3.0 release for early May, and we think it will be worth the extra two-week wait.

I’m personally really happy that it worked out this way, because I think it will show commercial theme and plugin authors that contributing to core is a win-win proposition. More people can contribute to and improve the basic functional code now, while WooThemes can continue to innovate on top of it for their customers. They get massive bragging rights (which I have no doubt will lead to even more customers), core gets a nice menu system without having to reinvent the wheel, and WordPress users all over the world will benefit. I’m hoping other plugin and theme developers will take a cue from Woo and look at core as a place for collaboration, rather than competition.

The Merge

It was announced at WordCamp San Francisco last year that WordPress and WordPress MU would be merging codebases. This has now happened in 3.0-alpha, and we’re working on smashing bugs and tidying up a few screens. If you’re currently using a single install of WordPress, when you upgrade to 3.0 you won’t see any of the extra screens associated with running a network of sites. If you’re currently running MU, when you upgrade you’ll notice a few labels changing, but upgrading should be as painless as usual. If you’re going to set up a new WordPress installation, you’ll be asked as part of the setup if you want one site or multiple sites, so that’s pretty simple. If you want to turn your single install into one that supports multiple sites, we’ll have a tool for you to use to do that, too. So if you’ve been worried about the merge, have a cup of chamomile tea and relax; it will all be fine.

Patch Sprint!

Okay, so where are we now? The new feature freeze date is on Monday, March 1, 2010. That means that after that date, no more enhancements or features will be added, and we’ll switch gears to focus solely on crushing bugs and fixing up the features that have already made it in. That means we only have a week to try and finish up the many Trac tickets on the 3.0 milestone that either need a patch or have a patch that needs testing. You can help! From now until noon eastern time on March 1 (that’s 17:00 UTC on March 1), head on over to Trac and pitch in. If you hit a wall, hop into the core development channel at #wordpress-dev on irc.freenode.net and hopefully one of the friendly core contributors can give you a push.

I like to moderate comments when I’m waiting for something: a checkout clerk to help me, the dentist to call me back to the office, a soy chai to be made. I don’t lug my laptop everywhere I go,* so I love it that we have mobile apps that make this possible. I don’t know of any other blogging platform that has mobile apps for iPhone, Android and Blackberry. Do you?

The iPhone app is up to version 2.2 (note that iPhone app version numbers do not correlate to WordPress core versions, due to separate dev cycles), while the Android and Blackberry apps are brand new. You can write posts (save drafts or publish right away), moderate comments, blog photos from your phone (and video on Blackberry!**), and more. Check out the glory that is mobile WordPress in the image below:

“But what about my Nokia,” you ask? Raanan Bar-Cohen, who oversees the mobile projects, recently announced:

“We are very excited to share with all of you that in the coming weeks we’ll be opening up a beta test for the official Open Source WordPress for Nokia app. For developers who are interested in getting involved, we just opened up a dev blog with details, links to the source code and trac tickets, and an early alpha build. We’ll be leveraging the Qt framework which means will be able to support both the S60 and Maemo platforms.”

W00t!

Getting Involved

All of these mobile WordPress apps are free and open source. They are developed in the same manner as WordPress core, which means anyone can contribute! If you’ve got some mad mobile development skills and want to get involved, a) you’re awesome, and b) here are a bunch of useful links.

Development Blogs: Android | BlackBerry | iPhone

Development Tracs: Android | Blackberry | iPhone

Feedback Forums: Android | BlackBerry | iPhone

Language Support: WordPress users come from all over the world. The mobile apps here are available in multiple languages but need volunteers to enable even more people to use them. If you’re interested in helping localize these mobile apps, you can get involved by emailing the translation team. They’ll send you instructions on how to translate.

Getting the Apps

So go for it — download the app for your platform of choice and soon you, too, can be live posting about how slow the cashier is while you wait for him to ring you up!

* Okay, yes, I do bring my laptop everywhere, but I leave it in the bag on these occasions.

** Video support should  be coming soon to the iPhone and Android apps.

Thomas Mackenzie alerted us to a problem where logged in users can peek at trashed posts belonging to other authors. If you have untrusted users signed up on your blog and sensitive posts in the trash, you should upgrade to 2.9.2.  As always, you can visit the Tools->Upgrade menu to upgrade.

It is with extremely great pleasure that I point you to the first post at the new WordPress Foundation site. Not only am I excited about the things that will happen under the auspices of the Foundation, I’m excited to see a site running the 3.0 development version and the nascent theme called 2010. Go check it out for yourself.

2010 is the year we dive into open source design. We’ve dipped our toes in this pool before (icon contest, graphic design component for Trac tickets, header refresh contest, etc.), but this year we’re going to cannonball and make a big splash. Here’s what you need to know if you want to get involved.

A list for all seasons. Developers have the wp-hackers mailing list to discuss core and plugin code. Sometimes UI/UX stuff comes up and gets discussed there, but there is a whole universe of discussion around navigation labels, gradients, button styling, layouts, alignment, etc. that would be clutter on wp-hackers. Designers need a list to call their own, and now we have one. You can sign up for the wp-ui list to discuss ways to improve the interface or user experience of WordPress, and to discuss progress on design-related projects for the open source project, like the design challenges we’re going to have.

Design Challenges. We learned a lot from the icon design and header refresh contests, and we want to do these kind of open design challenges on a regular basis to give UI/UX designers who want to contribute to the WordPress open source project more opportunities to do so. If we could do one per month, that would be ideal, keeping the challenges relatively bite-sized to allow potential contributors an easy way to get involved at first. As each challenge is posted, people can use the list to bounce ideas off each other and work toward optimal solutions. I’m hoping the design challenges will evolve to be less contest and more collaboration. We’ll announce the first one before the end of January, so if you’re interested, please sign up for the list! (Hint: one will likely be a touch up to the Right Now dashboard module, to improve the information design, and there will be a couple of screen layout challenges coming up as well.)

Distributed Usability Testing. We started to try this out last year, and several dozen usability professionals volunteered to help get the program going, but a combination of scheduling and infrastructure issues combined to stall the progress. Having the “UI/UX contributor team” infrastructure in place, starting with the mailing list, will make it much easier to get this project going again.

Chit-chat. The weekly developer chats in IRC at #wordpress-dev have been very productive. We’ve created an IRC room at #wordpress-ui on irc.freenode.net so that we can have the same kind of “water cooler” for UI/UX contributors as for core code contributors. In addition to being a place where you can drop in and discuss core UI/UX (note: this room will not be a place to discuss the design of blog themes, it’s to discuss the design of the Wordpress application itself), we’ll set up a weekly chat. Choosing a day and time for the chats will probably be the first discussion on the mailing list.

A blog of our own. Once again, taking a page from the code contributor infrastructure, we’ll set up a blog for UI/UX updates, announcements, progress reports, etc. This will be on WordPress.org in the nearish future, and will be announced to the mailing list when it is live.

So, if you want to become a contributor to core WordPress by using your design skills, join the wp-ui mailing list and get ready for a fun year!

After over a million downloads of WordPress 2.9 and lots of feedback from all of you, we’re releasing WordPress  2.9.1.  This release addresses a handful of minor issues as well as a rather annoying problem where scheduled posts and pingbacks are not processed correctly due to incompatibilities with some hosts.  If any of these issues affect you, give 2.9.1 a try.  Download 2.9.1 or upgrade automatically from the Tools->Upgrade menu in your blog’s admin area.

Rested up from the holidays? I hope so, because the new year has begun and a lot is going to be happening with WordPress in 2010, and you definitely want to be a part of it. Later this week the scope for version 3.0 (featuring the addition of MU functionality to the WordPress codebase) will be decided in the IRC developer chat*, based on feedback provided by users like you. But it’s no fun to live by IRC alone, which is why we love WordCamps. Attending a WordCamp gives you a chance to meet people in your local community who are working with WordPress, as well as core contributors, theme designers, plugin developers, Codex writers, support forum moderators and other WordPress volunteers who’ve made WordPress what it is today. Add this New Year’s Resolution to your 2010 list if it’s not on there already: Attend a WordCamp, meet at least 5 new local people, learn something new, and if you have the chance, buy a drink for someone who’s volunteered their time and expertise to the WordPress open source project. To help you keep your resolution, here is a list of the upcoming WordCamps for the next three months, followed by what I know so far about each one.

January 8–9: WordCamp Atlanta
January 23: WordCamp Boston
January 30: WordCamp Greece in Thessaloniki
January 30: WordCamp Indonesia in Jakarta
February 27: WordCamp Fukuoka
March 6–7: WordCamp Ireland in Kilkenny
March 27–28: WordCamp Toronto

NORTH AMERICA

January 8–9: WordCamp Atlanta. First WordCamp of the year, and it’s already sold out — twice! They changed to a bigger venue based on demand, from Georgia Tech to the Atlanta campus of Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). They’re still letting people onto the waitlist, if you’re interested. A guaranteed way to get in would be to sponsor the event, and they’re taking last-minute sponsors right now. Atlanta will have sessions on Friday evening and all day Saturday. I’ll be opening the Saturday program with WordPress Resolutions: What to Expect in 2010. After a day of design, development and content track sessions, Lead Developer Mark Jaquith will take the closing slot for a Town Hall-style Q&A. The attendee list (follow link, scroll down) includes a number of WordPress core contributors, theme/plugin developers, and support providers as well as proof that Atlanta has a strong WordPress user base.

January 23: WordCamp Boston. I think WordCamp Boston is trying to one-up every WordCamp the organizers have been to, including the awesome NYC from November, and it looks like they might succeed. From Doc Searls and David Weinberger as keynote speakers to the multiple-track, unconference and Ignite sessions to the sweet-looking venue and the party plans, this one has got it going on. I credit it in part to the fact that they are one of the few WordCamps to follow the advice of having an organizing team of more than just 2 or 3 people, so the work is better distributed. I see a number of familiar names on the attendee list, but even more that I don’t know, so I’m looking forward to meeting the Boston WordPress community. They’re still selling tickets, so if you’re in the northeast, you should try to make it. I’ll be at this one also, talking about how the merge with MU will affect the WordPress admin (by then we should have started figuring it out!).

March 27–28: WordCamp Toronto. The last two Toronto WordCamps have been really good. I heard there would be one in March, but their site right now is just taking emails for notification. I’ve contacted the organizer to see what’s up, and he says the site will likely go live this week. They’re looking for volunteers to help organize this year’s event, so if you’re interested, it would be a great opportunity to get involved. Believe me, volunteering at a WordCamp is one of the best ways to make sure you meet a lot of other attendees.

ASIA

January 30: WordCamp Indonesia. WordCamp Indonesia will be in Jakarta again this year. I love how they worded the beginning of their sessions page. “Come in, we’ll get you breakfast and coffee, you’ll register, there’ll be networking. It’ll be great.” There will be a single track of sessions, but there are several time slots set aside for ad-hoc discussion and breakout sessions.

February 27: WordCamp Fukuoka. WordCamp Fukuoka is just getting its site up, too, so check back periodically a little later for more information. One of their visiting speakers will be Noel Jackson, developer of the Press This bookmarklet as well as themes like P2 and Monotone/Duotone.

EUROPE

January 30: WordCamp Greece. WordCamp Greece will be held in Thessaloniki, and they expect about 100-150 people to attend.The program includes regular sessions on the usual topics (how-to, programming, SEO, multi-language sites, etc) as well as “QuickRounds,” which will showcase Greek projects based on WordPress. I’m especially intrigued by the “WordPress vs. Expression Engine” session. Whenever people compare different publishing platforms, it’s interesting to see which features they highlight. I hope someone gets video from this one and posts it to the WordCamp section of WordPress.tv.

March 6–7: WordCamp Ireland. WordCamp Ireland will be in Kilkenny, and for such a geographically small country, it’s got an impressive list of speakers, including Donncha O Caoimh, lead developer of WordPress MU. The program includes three tracks: Intro, Blogger, and Developer, and I think this will be the first WordCamp I’ve heard of that is deliberately family-friendly, with on-site child care. They’re also going to have a charging station for mobile devices, which is clever. It’s not confirmed yet, but I think I’ll be at this one, too.

If you want to attend a WordCamp but don’t know of one near you, check out WordCamp.org for the official list (updated frequently). That’s also where you would start if you wanted to organize a WordCamp in your area.

*Developer chats are held Thursdays at 21:00 UTC in the #wordpress-dev channel at irc.freenode.com.

Thanks to everyone who tested 2.9.1 Beta 1.  We’re following that up with Release Candidate 1.  RC1 contains a few more fixes, bringing the number of fixed tickets up to 23.  If you are already running Beta 1, visit Tools->Upgrade in your blog’s admin to get RC1.  You can also  download the RC1 package and install manually.  If all goes well, 2.9.1 will be here soon.

Merry Christmas! One of the things that was discussed at the core commit team meetup was release scope (and scope creep). Now that 2.9 is out and it’s time to start thinking about 3.0, we think it would be appropriate to stop and take a breath before diving in, and make a plan in advance. What winds up happening is that during each release cycle a few new features are selected for inclusion, but then right up until feature freeze (and/or beta cycle), people keep adding feature requests, patches for enhancements, and ongoing bug reports. This means each release winds up getting pushed out later than planned, and with so many things going in per release, it becomes harder to catch new bugs.

The as-long-as-we’re-not-in-freeze-yet model isn’t working. People wind up waiting months longer for new features they want, like Trash and Image Editing, because we’re still adding other things and then we need to test them all. If we kept the releases smaller feature-wise, we could push out the new stuff sooner (3 releases per year is the goal) and have more focused beta testing, making the releases themselves better. It’s hard, because everyone has their pet features and fixes, and if there’s a patch, why not get it in this release rather than waiting? Sometimes people complain that a patch has been waiting to be committed for weeks or months, but what no one ever seems to bring up is that sometimes patches introduce new bugs, and the more we add at once, the harder it is to keep it all well-tested on various platforms, in different hosting environments, etc. So. What’s our proposal?

We take a page from the world of project management and we make a project plan before we jump into the dev cycle. We let everyone propose features and enhancements, and we choose a limited number to include in 3.0 (in this case we need to be especially stringent, because the merge of WordPress and WordPress MU will automatically mean a lot of work) and set a realistic release date that we stick to. We create a tentative set of features for the next two releases, to be re-evaluated at the beginning of the next cycle, so that people know the community is committed to certain features, as opposed to the vague “future release” label we now use for everything not included in the current version. We fix bugs that are reproducible and affect a large number of users before focusing on edge case bugs or bugs that haven’t been well-described or reproduced. We stop diverting our attention from agreed-upon goals when a “squeaky wheel” decides we should all be focused on something else. There are always things that pop up unexpectedly, but we need to do a better job of restraining ourselves when it comes to trying to sneak things into the current release (I include myself in this, of course…as a UX person I always wish we could do everything all at once!).

As an open source project, we accomplish more when we work together than we do following individual agendas, and we need to keep our project focused on commonly-agreed-upon goals instead of following tangents whenever a community member starts to take us on one, regardless of whether it’s to follow a cool idea that everyone loves or a suggestion based on a personal agenda, and regardless of whether it’s a newbie who doesn’t know any better or a frequent contributor or committer who has a strong opinion and a loud voice (so to speak). The issue here is that it’s easy to get distracted, so we need to create a structure that will help us keep moving forward instead of getting sidetracked. We need to keep Trac clean for the current dev cycle so that it includes confirmed features and bug reports, and all new feature suggestions go into a different milestone.

We think it’s at least worth a try. When we re-start the weekly IRC dev chats in 2010, the first meeting will be to talk about the scope of 3.0. When we’ve got a general agreement about what will be included, we’ll create the appropriate Trac tickets, and punt tickets for non-3.0 feature requests/enhancements to a future release so we can stay focused. New bug reports will still come in to the current milestone. It’s going to be hard. There are at least a dozen new features that I feel like we’ve pushed back multiple times that I’d like to see in core, but for this experiment, I’m just going to keep reminding myself, “You can do that with a plugin!”

Sound off on the features you would like to see in version 3.0.

Unfortunately, the recent 2.9 release triggered a bug in certain versions of PHP’s curl extension.  With these versions of curl, scheduled posts and pingbacks are not processed correctly.  To fix this problem as well as a handful of other, lesser issues, we are quickly releasing 2.9.1, the first maintenance release of the 2.9 line.  Help us get 2.9.1 ready to go by testing 2.9.1 Beta 1.  The easiest way to test Beta 1 is to install the WordPress Beta Tester plugin, elect to get on the point release development track, and then perform an automatic upgrade via the Tools->Upgrade menu.  You can also download the Beta 1 package and install manually.  Fourteen tickets have been fixed in 2.9.1 Beta 1.  Since the curl problem and a couple of other problems are dependent on specific hosting configurations, any and all testing help is greatly appreciated.

I want to make you mine, all the time… oh wait. Hello. I’m here on behalf of the entire WordPress development team and community to announce the immediate availability of WordPress version 2.9 “Carmen” named in honor of magical jazz vocalist Carmen McRae (whom we’ve added to our Last.fm WP release station). You can upgrade easily from your Dashboard by going to Tools > Upgrade, or you can download from WordPress.org. And of course, it wouldn’t be a major release without a short video summarizing some of the cool things about the new version:

The coolest new stuff from a user point of view is:

1. Global undo/”trash” feature, which means that if you accidentally delete a post or comment you can bring it back from the grave (i.e., the Trash). This also eliminates those annoying “are you sure” messages we used to have on every delete.
2. Built-in image editor allows you to crop, edit, rotate, flip, and scale your images to show them who’s boss. This is the first wave of our many planned media-handling improvements.
3. Batch plugin update and compatibility checking, which means you can update 10 plugins at once, versus having to do multiple clicks for each one, and we’re using the new compatibility data from the plugins directory to give you a better idea of whether your plugins are compatible with new releases of WordPress. This should take the fear and hassle out of upgrading.
4. Easier video embeds that allow you to just paste a URL on its own line and have it magically turn it into the proper embed code, with Oembed support for YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket, PollDaddy, and WordPress.tv (and more in the next release).

2.9 provides the smoothest ride yet because of a number of improvements under the hood and more subtle improvements you’ll begin to appreciate once you’ve been around the block a few times. Here’s just a sampling:

• We now have rel=canonical support for better SEO.
• There is automatic database optimization support, which you can enable in your wp-config.php file by adding define('WP_ALLOW_REPAIR', true);.
• Themes can register “post thumbnails” which allow them to attach an image to the post, especially useful for magazine-style themes.
• A new commentmeta table that allows arbitrary key/value pairs to be attached to comments, just like posts, so you can now expand greatly what you can do in the comment framework.
• Custom post types have been upgraded with better API support so you can juggle more types than just post, page, and attachment. (More of this planned for 3.0.)
• You can set custom theme directories, so a plugin can register a theme to be bundled with it or you can have multiple shared theme directories on your server.
• We’ve upgraded TinyMCE WYSIWYG editing and Simplepie.
• Sidebars can now have descriptions so it’s more obvious what and where they do what they do.
• Specify category templates not just by ID, like before, but by slug, which will make it easier for theme developers to do custom things with categories — like post types!
• Registration and profiles are now extensible to allow you to collect things more easily, like a user’s Twitter account or any other fields you can imagine.
• The XML-RPC API has been extended to allow changing the user registration option. We fixed some Atom API attachment issues.
• Create custom galleries with the new include and exclude attributes that allow you to pull attachments from any post, not just the current one.
• When you’re editing files in the theme and plugin editors it remembers your location and takes you back to that line after you save. (Thank goodness!!!)
• The Press This bookmarklet has been improved and is faster than ever; give it a try for on-the-fly blogging from wherever you are on the internet.
• Custom taxonomies are now included in the WXR export file and imported correctly.
• Better hooks and filters for excerpts, smilies, HTTP requests, user profiles, author links, taxonomies, SSL support, tag clouds, query_posts and WP_Query

All of this and more is reflected in the over 500 tickets, bugs, and enhancements that WP developers in this release cycle.

This release included code from over 140 contributors, here’s everyone we were able to identify: aaroncampbell (Aaron Campbell), abackstrom (Adam Backstrom), aldenta (John Ford), alexkingorg (Alex King), [amilanov], antonylesuisse (Antony Lesuisse), apeatling (Andy Peatling), apokalyptik (Demitrious Kelly), arena (André Renaut), batmoo (Mohammad Jangda), Ben Dunkle, BenBE1987, Benjamin Flesch, bookchiq (Sarah Lewis), brianwhite, c0nstruct, caesarsgrunt (Caesar Schinas), CalebKniffen (Caleb Kniffen), chrisbliss18, chrisscott (Chris Scott), christoph179, coffee2code (Scott Reilly), [cross country flight], Curioso, davecpage (Dave Page), dcole07 (Dan Cole), dd32 (Dion Hulse), demetris (Δημήτρης Κίκιζας), Denis-de-Bernardy, dj-wp, dwright, eddieringle (Eddie Ringle), error (Michael Hampton), ewestp, fabifott, filosofo (Austin Matzko), greenshady (Justin Tadlock), gsnedders/link92 (Geoffrey Sneddon), hailin (Hailin Wu), hakre, hanilovesme, Harald Nesland, harrym, holizz (Tom Adams), ikonst, jacobsantos (Jacob Santos), janeforshort (Jane Wells), jamescollins (James Collins), jdub (Jeff Waugh), jeff_ (Jean-François “Jeff” VIAL), jeremyclarke (Jeremy Clarke), JeremyVisser (Jeremy Visser), jikamens, jmulley, Joern_W, johanee (Johan Eenfeldt), johnbillion (John Blackbourn), johnjamesjacoby (John James Jacoby), johnjosephbachir (John Joseph Bachir), JonathanRogers, joostdevalk (Joost de Valk), Jose Carlos Norte, josephscott (Joseph Scott), junsuijin, kevinB (Kevin Behrens), kometbomb, lilyfan (IKEDA Yuriko), [lostinlafayette], madhyde, MattyRob, mdawaffe (Michael Adams), Mittineague, miqrogroove, morfiusx, mrmist (David McFarlane), mtdewvirus (Nick Momrik), mysz, nacin (Andrew Nacin), nanochrome, nao (Naoko McCracken), nathanrice (Nathan Rice), nbachiyski (Николай Бачийски), niallkennedy (Niall Kennedy), nickohrn (Nick Ohrn), ninjaWR (Ryan Murphy), noel (Noël Jackson), Otto42 (Samuel Wood), pairg, peaceablewhale (Franklin Tse), prettyboymp (Michael Pretty), ProDevStudio, ramiy, redsweater (Daniel Jalkut), ruslany, sambauers (Sam Bauers), scribu, Sewar, Simek, simonwheatley (Simon Wheatley), sirzooro (Daniel Frużyński), sivel (Matt Martz), skeltoac (Andy Skelton), snakefoot, stephanreiter (Stephan Reiter), strider72 (Stephen Rider), taco1991, takayukister (Takayuki Miyoshi), tellyworth, tenpura, usermrpapa, utkarsh, Viper007Bond, vladimir_kolesnikov (Vladimir Kolesnikov), VoxPelli (Pelle Wessman), [voyou1], wahgnube, waltervos, westonruter (Weston Ruter), wnorris (Will Norris), xenlab (Eric Marden), yoavf (Yoav Farhi). Wowza!

2.9 has been an exciting development cycle, and I must say it has whetted our appetite for 3.0, which is coming next (probably this spring) and will include at the very least the merge of MU with the WordPress core, and a new default theme. We can’t wait to start working on it. But first, some Carmen McRae tunes and a beer. Join us!

(After you upgrade, of course!)

I hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday season.

After the video from the core team meetup was posted, the topic that seemed to get the most attention on Twitter and various community sites was Matt’s announcement that there would be a new default theme in 2010, so I thought I’d start with that as the first of the meetup summaries.

When Kubrick was bundled with core back in 2005, it was a cutting edge theme. Custom header, rounded corners, clean design… if you were using WordPress back then, let’s face it, you were impressed. Time moves on, though, fashions change, new styles become old standards, and what was once cutting edge suddenly seems old-fashioned and out of date.

So, a new bundled theme in 2010? We think it’s a good idea. Something nice and light that can serve as a good example theme, include newer theme-based features, and look nice (and current) on a public site. We’d like to introduce a new default theme with version 3.0, which is anticipated to come out in mid-2010 (hence the name), and think it would be good for it to blend well aesthetically with WordPress itself.

I’d been advocating moving toward Elastic, the theme framework/WYSIWYG theme editor that was one of our Google Summer of Code student projects, but after some discussion I agreed with the guys that while Elastic is awesome and should be promoted as a community development project, it’s heavier than a default theme needs to be. The default theme doesn’t need to be a full-featured framework, it just needs to work well, look awesome, have good code and be a good starting point for beginning themers. We were thinking of a fairly minimalist design that would make it easy to customize.

As for the code, there’s a question of if it will really be a new theme, or if it will be a re-styled and updated version of Kubrick.  We don’t know the final answer to that yet, because the ultimate decision will be made with the community’s input, but we believe all new markup is the way to go. What do you think? Without venturing into theme framework territory, are there features you think a new default theme should have? Some people have been talking about it on Trac over the past year, if you wonder what’s been tossed around so far. I thought about posting a poll here (you know how I love posting polls to gauge opinion), but in this case I think a discussion thread might be better, so that each vote can explain the reason behind it. So, have an opinion on what a new default theme should include? Weigh in at the forums.

We’re at that exciting point in WordPress development where the dev team feels like version 2.9 is complete and ready for the world.

If you’ve been waiting for your moment to pitch in, it’s now. First we need tech savvy testers to upgrade their blogs and kick the tires, make sure everything is rolling like you expect it to. Here’s a list of all the fun and geeky new stuff in 2.9 to try out. Second, and more importantly, we need everyone to test out their plugin compatibility.

If you’re a user of plugins, there’s a groovy new compatibility feature on the plugin directory where you can vote on whether a plugin is compatible with a version or not and it’ll get registered in the new plugin compatibility checker. This is as a replacement to the old wiki-based lists we’d do before. To see it in action check out this Akismet plugin page, as you can see 14 people have already registered that it’s compatible with 2.9.

If you’re a plugin author, of course you should update your “Tested up to:” in the readme.txt for your plugin.

If all goes according to plan, WordPress 2.9 will be out before the end of the week. You can download the release candidate here.

For more details on the changes since Beta please review the revision log on Trac, and happy testing!

To get started, here’s a short video from the meetup discussing some of the topics and 2.9. In the opening pan, you’ll see (L-R) Andrew Ozz, Mark Jaquith, Jane Wells, Peter Westwood, and Ryan Boren, followed by Matt Mullenweg as the first person talking. Tip: go full-screen in HD to feel like you were there.

Last week, I posted about the fact that Trac would be quiet for a few days while the core commit team met in person for the first time to talk about some goals for WordPress in the coming year. That prediction wound up being a little inaccurate, as having everyone together inspired a Trac sprint to get us closer to shipping 2.9. As of this morning there are only 11 tickets left against the 2.9 milestone. Yay! I’m sensing a Release Candidate in the near future.

I’d planned to write a summary post to encapsulate the discussions we had over our 3 day meetup, but to be honest, all-day (and night) every-day meetings creates a ton of things to summarize, and the post would be a novella. So instead of one long post, I’m going to split it up into a series and post a summary of the discussion on one or two topics per day until I’ve posted them all. Think of it like a WordPress advent calendar. For today’s post, enjoy the video above and I’ll list the topics we covered to give you an idea of what will be included in the upcoming summary posts.

Topics: Direction for the coming year(s), canonical plugins, social i18n for plugins, plugin salvage (like UDRP for abandoned plugins), WordPress/MU merge, default themes, CMS functionality (custom taxonomies, types, statuses, queries), cross-content taxonomy, media functions and UI, community “levels” based on activity, defining scope of releases, site menu management, communications within the community, lessons learned from past releases, mentorship programs, Trac issues, wordpress.org redesign, documentation, community code of conduct.

You can see why I didn’t want to try to cram it all into one post, right?

Just to make sure it’s clear in everyone’s minds, I want to reiterate that these discussions were just that: discussions. They were not secret meetings ending in hard and fast decisions. The idea was to 1) get the core commit team on the same page in order to improve workflow efficiency and communication, and 2) come out of the meetup with a long list of things we know we want to work on in the coming year, and from there to work with the broader community to determine priorities/strategies before starting the work of getting it all done. As I finish off 2009 by posting summaries of the meetup conversations, I hope you’ll all plan to start 2010 with enthusiastic participation in one or more of the projects that will take these conservations from concept to reality.

There have been a lot of references to “canonical plugins” over the past year, especially at WordCamps by Matt, but we haven’t really posted anything official about the idea, nor have we really made much progress beyond discussions about how awesome it would be to have canonical plugins and how good it would be for the community. But what are canonical plugins, you ask? Well, that’s one of the many things the core commit team has been talking about over the past few days, and everyone agrees that we need to prioritize this aspect of the project sooner rather than later. So, here’s a super high-level description of how we’re currently thinking about canonical plugins, which we’d like to use to initiate some focused community discussion on the topic.

Canonical plugins would be plugins that are community developed (multiple developers, not just one person) and address the most popular functionality requests with superlative execution. These plugins would be GPL and live in the WordPress.org repo, and would be developed in close connection with WordPress core. There would be a very strong relationship between core and these plugins that ensured that a) the plugin code would be secure and the best possible example of coding standards, and b) that new versions of WordPress would be tested against these plugins prior to release to ensure compatibility. There would be a screen within the Plugins section of the WordPress admin to feature these canonical plugins as a kind of Editor’s Choice or Verified guarantee. These plugins would be a true extension of core WordPress in terms of compatibility, security and support.

In order to have a system like this, each canonical plugin’s development community would probably need similar infrastructure to WordPress itself, including things like Trac, mailing lists, support forums, etc. These things will be worked out within the development community over the coming months, but in the meantime, we really need a better name for this. Many people have no idea what canon/canonical means (clearly, they are not Dr. Who fans!), and having to define the word distracts from discussing the core ideas behind the concept. So, we thought we’d do a community poll to see what people think we should call canonical plugins. We brainstormed a few dozen ideas yesterday and whittled it down to our top handful. Based on the definition of canonical plugins given above, which of these terms do you think best describes them? I’m including a short description of our thoughts on each.
Standard - Implies that these are the standard by which all other plugins should be judged, as well as the idea of them being the default plugins.
Core - Makes the close relationship to core WordPress development very clear, and has the implication of bundled plugins (even though we don’t need to actually bundle them now that the installer is right in the admin tool).
Premium – Identifies these officially-supported plugins as best-in-class and of the highest value, and could potentially disambiguate the word Premium as it is currently being used in the community (to refer to anything from commercial support to licensing terms to actual code quality).
Validated - Focuses on the fact that the code is reviewed for compatibility with core and for security.
Official – Makes it plain that these are the plugins officially endorsed by the core team as being the best at their functions.
Canonical – Maybe once people get used to it, canonical wouldn’t confuse so many people?

Cast your vote in the poll below to have your opinion considered during the decision-making process. And if you can think of a word that we haven’t listed here that you think is better, please submit it in the poll! The poll will remain open until 11:59pm UTC Thursday, December 10, 2009.

What should we call canonical plugins? “________________” Plugins(survey software)

Just a heads up that Trac commits will be pretty low over the next couple of days, as all the core committers are in Orlando: Matt, Ryan, Andrew, Peter and Mark. We all came for WordCamp Orlando (fun!) and are staying a couple of extra days to discuss the vision for WordPress in the coming year, the merge, canonical plugins, the WordPress.org site, community stuff, and all the other things that are important but that we never seem to have time to address. Since when things like this come up in the IRC dev chat or in various forums there’s inevitably a point at which someone says, “We really need to have [insert a core committer name here] here to make a decision,” we thought it would make sense to get together and figure out where everyone stands on all these ideas so that we can move forward a little more efficiently. Also, not all the committers had met in person before (and I’d never met Andrew or Peter), so it’s also a chance for us to just get to know each other a little. Watch this space around Tuesday or Wednesday for a post summarizing the things we’ve discussed, and the beginning of planning for how members of community can get involved in (or spearhead) the things that interest them.

Version beta-2 of WordPress 2.9 is ready for your testing pleasure. You can download it or use the WordPress Beta Tester plugin and auto-upgrade a test installation. See all changes since beta 1.

Thanksgiving was last week, and I thought about doing a post to thank the people who contribute to WordPress core, since this is a group of people I’m thankful for on a daily basis. I started a draft, and then realized that with 2.9 in beta, we’ll have a release announcement sometime in the next few weeks (barring unforeseen complications, etc), and all the core contributors will be thanked then. Though I think it’s worth giving thanks every day for the people who make WordPress possible, I don’t like to clutter up anyone’s feed readers with repetitive posts, so I decided to wait until today for my post, and to focus solely on the other group I’d planned to include: support forum volunteers.

Forum volunteers don’t get a lot of flashy attention. There aren’t flame wars about whether or not the support forums should be commercial instead of free and community-run. There generally aren’t big arguments and debates over whose point of view is the right one. What the forums do have is amazing volunteers who give their time to help other WordPress users and developers learn. People who only know a little answer easy questions that maybe they’ve only recently learned the answers to themselves. People with more expert skills help troubleshoot larger issues. If someone offers advice that could be better, others will add their solutions to the mix. Of all the WordPress users I’ve met in person, not one person got started without visiting the forums. In many cases, people turn to the forums even before the Codex. In the support forums, I see a lot of what is best about our community, and almost none of that which is not.*

Without further ado, here’s my thank you to the volunteers who make the support forums work. Without them, we would be less than what we are today. I’m listing people by their Wordpress.org usernames, since that’s how you see them in the forums.

Official WordPress.org Support Forum Moderators

These are the people who’ve officially got your back and have been active in the past few months. See them at a WordCamp? Buy them a beer! Otto42,  jeremyclark13, MichaelH, samboll, Chris_K. MichaelH suggested we also recognize Moshu, Podz, Kafkaesqui for past meritorious service.

The Honor Roll
These people are not official moderators, but their knowledge and activity levels have caught the attention of those who are. A big round of thanks to these folks for selflessly sharing their knowledge with other WordPress users.

Most active volunteers, nominated by more than one official moderator for recognition (for the reasons given):
alchymyth – “Overall knowledge”
apljdi – “Overall knowledge and programming skills”
t31os_ – “Programming skills”
whooami – “For her security responses” “Knows her stuff”

Generally active volunteers, nominated by official moderators for recognition:
esmi, ClaytonJames, numeeja, stvwlf, buddhatrance, songdogtech, alism, alchymyth, Ipstenu, RVoodoo, jdingman, kmessinger, ArnoldGoodway, Shane G., figaro, jonimueller, blepoxp, cais, mfields, designdolphin, doc4, greenshady, mercime, mrmist, bh_WP_fan , henkholland, krembo99, jdembowski, pboosten, adiant, andrea_r, GDHosting, Gangleri.

Some newcomers who’ve been getting active:
a_johnson, equalmark, WebTechGlobal, kymac.

And an additional shoutout to plugin authors who take an active role in moderating threads regarding their plugins, again nominated by official moderators for recognition:
scribu, GDragoN, sivel, MikeChallis, GamerZ, alexrabe, arnee, sociable, takayukister, hallsofmontezuma, joostdevalk, filosofo, roytanck, donncha, Hiroaki Miyashita, manojtd, froman118, error, Viper007Bond, alexkingorg, cavemonkey50, azaozz, aaroncampbell, isa.goksu, flipper, joedolson, redwallhp, eight7teen, orenshmu, WebGeek, Otto42, toddiceton, the_dead_one, mywpplugin, MattyRob, markjaquith, TobiasBg, Txanny, elfin, jolley_small, stastoc, anmari, micropat, frekel.

One more time, a huge THANK YOU to everyone who contributes to the support forums at WordPress.org.

As we close out 2009 and get closer to 2010, it would be great for us to start thinking about some ways we could make it easier/more rewarding for people to be involved in the forums and other aspects of the open source project. I’ve started a forum thread to discuss some ideas with the thought that we can try a couple after the holidays and see what takes.

* I say almost because let’s face it, we all get caught in the traps of trolls sometimes, and patience can be hard to keep when someone is a jerk. So a reminder to all who use the forums: be nice to the people who are trying to help you!

P.S. While I’m at it, here’s another tip/request. Search the forums for your problem before posting; if it’s already been answered before (often more than once), you’re kind of wasting people’s time by posting it again without trying the previous solutions first. Please respect the time of the volunteers by searching first (and mention in your post what you’ve already tried).