Download beta 2.  See changes since beta 1.

Download it, test it, file bugs.

What’s new? All of this.

Good hunting, all you testers.

“I wish they’d implement feature x.”

“Why won’t they put feature y into core? It’s rated really high in the Ideas forum!”

“It doesn’t matter what I think, all the decisions get made by an elite crime-fighting squad funded by an anonymous millionaire. Er, I mean the four core devs.”

These sentiments, and others like them, are the focus of today’s post. Setting aside the similarities between Ryan, Andrew, Mark and Peter to Charlie’s Angels for a moment, the question of how decisions about features are made needs to be addressed. There are a number of mechanisms in place for communication between the community and the core team, but with so many different channels, it’s hard to keep up with them all and still focus on production. Here’s where we are now…

#wordpress-dev IRC channel: The IRC channel used to be more active. These days there’s rarely more than a dozen or two people online at any given time, and hours go by with no activity. When a question pops up, it’s often a tech question from a less experienced developer or site manager looking for help, as opposed to ongoing discussions about the best way to approach core code and features. When core-focused discussions do occur, they tend to fade out as time zone variances cause people to log off before a core dev enters the room.

wp-hackers list: The hackers mailing list reaches thousands of contributing developers, plugin developers, and lurking interested parties. Discussions range from how to use hooks to whether or not something in core should be changed to troubleshooting for other list members. Conversations on this list sometimes can get heated and occasionally stray into rudeness, which makes some people hesitate to utilize this communication channel.

This dev blog: This blog is used mostly for “official” announcements, and more recently, for surveys and polls intended to give the core devs an idea of community opinion on things being considered for future versions. Posting is irregular, sometimes with new content every other day, sometimes with nothing for a couple of weeks.

wpdevel.wordpress.com: Another blog, also an “official” outlet, in which the core team posts about any big code changes they’re working on. This gives plugin authors and contributing developers a heads-up, and provides a place for community discussion around specific issues like the new widgets API.

Trac: The ticket system used for active development has gotten out of control. Hundreds of tickets are already lined up for future versions because they were punted from current releases; many aren’t even relevant anymore. Trac has wound being a place where people report bugs, suggest code changes, request features and debate methodologies; some of these conversations are years old. This broad use of the system makes it harder to power through tickets and get bugs fixed.

Ideas forum: The Ideas forum is a place where anyone can suggest a new feature, rate features suggested by others, leave comments, and generally discuss the future of the WordPress application. However, like Trac, some of the items here are years old. Because of the way the rating system works, older items remain at the top of the list. Some threads are simply he said/she said preference arguments, as opposed to contructive discussions about the value of implementing certain features or changes. There’s no direct connection between the Ideas forum and Trac.

WordPress is an open source project, successful because of the community that both develops and uses it. At the same time, some people find it difficult to become involved in the project, and are unsure of how to engage with the core team and community at large. The channels listed above can be overwhleming to someone just joining the community, and/or frustrating to longtime community members who feel like they used to have more influence. We need to fix this. The WordPress project needs to be welcoming, easy to navigate as a contributor, and provide useful feedback to help grow the expertise of its community members.

I think we should figure this out together. You, members of this community, know how you feel about the communication channels available to you. You probably have ideas about how to make it better. Some of you may even have sketched out digrams of systems that you think would work better.  Link Ideas to Trac? Change the Ideas rating algorithm? Close Trac tickets that don’t get resolved within a certain period of time? Just do everything through Trac? What do you think? What would make it easier for you to keep up with development progress and get involved with the varius contribution opportunities? I *know* you have an opinion.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be gathering your input about how we can improve communication and participation, and then we’ll embark on a project to fix/create a system for collecting ideas, opinions and feedback that will allow WordPress to grow as an inclusive community. Here’s the plan: Gather ideas from people via IRC, forums, live chats, surveys, etc. Assemble a small group of interested parties to help figure out possible approaches, put suggested approaches to a community vote. If redesigning something (like the Ideas forum) is deemed necessary, utilize community designers to create layouts. Beta test it to see if it does work as hoped. Launch and make everyone happy with the new, improved communication/ideas/feedback system!

Up First

Use this forum thread to post your suggestions about this. What do you think needs to be changed or improved? How would you structure it? How do the existing channels fit into your suggestion?

On Tuesday, May 12 at 21:00 UTC (5pm New York time), hop into the #wordpress-dev IRC channel (irc.freenode.com) and talk about your suggestions for how to improve communication. I’ll be there, taking notes and answering questions, and asking follow-up questions when someone pitches a good idea. An hour later, I’ll be joining the WordCast Podcast to talk about this issue. They’re trying to set up a call-in format; if that pans out, we’ll post the call-in info in the dev channel. Otherwise, A call-in number has been set up through TalkShoe.

1-724-444-7444
Meeting ID: 50127
Pin (if you don’t have a TalkShoe account): enter 1#

We’ll also read off suggestions being made in the dev channel and discuss them.

More opportunities to weigh in on this issue to come. Also, further investigation into the similarities between the core devs and Charlie’s Angels.

One of the reasons WordPress 2.7 was such a success is the amount of usability testing that took place during the development cycle. Starting with testing 2.5 and the Crazyhorse prototype and following with the 2.7 beta, the testing program looked at almost every feature and function in the application. That kind of thing? Takes a lot of time.

For readers who aren’t familiar with the process behind usability testing, here’s an overview. First, determine the scope of your test and create a test protocol/script. Determine the audience segments to be included in the test group(s), and begin recruiting. Recruiting may mean hiring an agency to find participants, but for testing WordPress, it makes more sense to recruit from within this community, so that means making a screening survey, reading all the responses, segmenting the respondents into categories and contacting people until you’ve filled your desired quotas (for whatever segments you’re seeking, such as newbie, experienced user, developer, CMS user, photoblogger, mobile user, etc. ). Then come the test sessions.

Depending on what is being tested, these last anywhere from half an hour to an hour and half apiece. Sessions are generally recorded using screen capture and web cam, with a video camera for backup. The moderator(s) generally take notes during sessions and/or (depending on what software is being used for the session capture) set markers in the video to indicate task completion, comments of interest, etc.  In some cases, auxiliary test methods such as eye-tracking may be included. When the sessions are complete, the results are analyzed. All the notes and videos are reviewed, patterns are identified, and ultimately a report is written and the feedback informs the next round of revisions.

Some people think it shouldn’t take much time to do all this. I’ve lost count of the number of people who cite an old article by Jakob Nielsen that says you don’t need to test with more than 5 users because usability issues become clear right away. While I’ve found that to be generally true, when your user base is as diverse in experience level, usage, platform  configuration, language (right to left languages have a pretty different experience) and demography as the WordPress community is, 5 users really isn’t enough to get a clear picture. We try to test with at least a dozen people each round, but then we are limited to a geographic region (test in NY, test in SF, or test wherever we can schedule enough people back to back to make it worthwhile), while WordPress users are located all over the globe.

To address this, we’re introducing a set of new contribution opportunities to expand our usability testing program. As with development and graphic design, we’re going to create an infrastructure to allow community participation in usability testing on a regular basis and in a much broader capacity than existed before, when it was limited to announcements that we needed participants in x city on y date. We’ll be looking for volunteer moderators as well as participants, hopefully from all over the world.

Moderators. Observational usability testing isn’t rocket science, but neither is it a simple task to reduce bias. Because of this, at first we’ll choose only moderators who have professional experience conducting usability tests. People who conduct testing for design agencies, software companies, usability consulting firms and the like will be our first round draft picks. In the future, when we have a group of regular volunteers and have ironed out any kinks in the process, we’ll ideally match up experienced testers with aspiring ones, using a mentorship model to increase the number of people who can contribute in this fashion.

Participants. If you use WordPress, chances are you could participant in a usability test at some point. In some cases we’re looking for particular behaviors (people who upload large video files, people who blog from their iPhone, people who manage more than 5 blogs, etc.), while other times the behaviors we’re looking for are much more common (do you have widgets in your sidebar, have you changed themes in the last 6 months, is there more than one author on your blog, etc.).

So how will these opportunities come into play, and how will it make WordPress better?

We’ll start with the moderators, and try to get volunteers with a decent geographic spread. Then, we’ll start signing up potential test participants in those areas (though we’ll also allow at-large registrations, since traveling testing will still be happening). We’re working on a registration process for potential participants. You’ll enter your basic info (location, contact info) and answer some questions about your WordPress usage to be entered in the database, and when there’s a testing opportunity coming up that’s appropriate for you, a local moderator will get in touch to see if you’re interested. Further down the road we may experiment with remote testing and other methods, but for now, this approach will broaden the geographic scope of our testing.

All moderators will follow the same test protocols and script, and their results/reports/video will be reviewed and collated, with a composite report (including the protocol/script that was used) published to the community. This will provide designers and developers with broader feedback during the dev cycle, and will allow the wider community to both understand and participate in the testing program.

If you’re interested in being a moderator during this initial phase (meaning you do it professionally), send me an email and introduce yourself. If you’re interested in signing up as a potential test participant, watch this space. We’ll post a link to the registration survey once it’s ready.

What if there was software with the elegance and extensibility of WordPress but all the features you’ve come to expect from social networks like Facebook? Now there is: check out BuddyPress.

BuddyPress is an official sister project of WordPress. The idea behind it was to see what would happen to the web if it was as easy for anyone to create a social network as it is to create a blog today. There’s been an explosion of social activity on the web, it’s probably the most important trend of the past few years, but there’s been a dearth of Open Source tools that enable the social web.

In WordPress we have a robust and extensible base that can scale to many millions of users, and BuddyPress is essentially a set of plugins on top of WordPress that add private messaging, profiles, friends, groups, activity streams, and everything else you’ve come to expect from your favorite social network, like a Facebook-in-a-box.

I don’t think BuddyPress will be something you use instead of your existing social networks, I mean all your friends are already on Myspace, but if you wanted to start something new maybe with more control, friendlier terms of service, or just something customized and tweaked to fit exactly into your existing site, then BuddyPress is a great framework to use. Maybe even someday you’ll be able to connect your BuddyPresses to each other and to the existing monolithic social networks.

This is just a 1.0 release and it’s not for everybody yet, for example it currently requires using MU which is a bit trickier to get set up than regular WordPress, but regardless I’d recommend diving into the community at BuddyPress.org, which is great example of the software in action.

Here’s Andy’s official announcement post.

The poll is closed, the votes are counted, and the results are interesting. The table below shows the actual breakdown of the poll votes, of which there were 2,651. As you can see, there were four main contenders: Dean J. Robinson’s Fluency-based submissions (two variations), the existing 2.7 interface, and Matt Thomas’s comp (MT), which exists somewhere between them in terms of style. Note: GB was a late entry, and was posted after over 900 votes had already been collected.

As several people have rightly pointed out, the Fluency-style designs not only took the top spot, but in combination added up to a higher percentage than any other. We’re not focusing solely on that statistic, though, because had other designers submitted multiple versions, the numbers might have looked different. What was most interesting for me was checking in on the votes over the course of the two days the poll was open. The top three (Fluency-dark, Current 2.7, MT) kept beating each other out for the #1 spot as they cycled back and forth through the top three slots, and had the poll closed on time (left it open a little longer in case anyone translated the time zone incorrectly), the order would have been a bit different.

What’s more interesting to me is the overall style that seems to be preferred among voters, as Matt’s comp has some stylistic similarities to Dean’s (see image at left). It also would be interesting to know how many of the votes for the current 2.7 interface were based on thinking it looked the best vs. how many were votes against changing the interface at all so soon after the 2.7 redesign. If you want to comment on what you liked best and/or least about any of the designs, this thread is a good place.

So what happens now? However we look at it, the Fluency-style designs clearly have a lot of fans. Then again, so do the designs of Matt Thomas (he’s behind the current style of 2.7, remember, in addition to the comp labeled MT). To give the interface the attention it is due, and to take seriously some of the interface feedback around usability and accessibility, we’re going to leave the looks alone for 2.8. It’s our guess that a revised style will make into 2.9 early in the development cycle to allow us plenty of time for user testing and revision. How close it winds up being to the comps submitted in this design tweaks challenge will depend, but in the meantime:

Congratulations, Dean J. Robinson, on winning the vote!

Comps for the header/nav design tweaks are in, and the results are mixed. Some people just moved a few things around, while others proposed a new style altogether. We won’t make any major changes to style in 2.8, but if the vote leans toward a submission that proposes it, we’ll do some user testing and make a decision for early 2.9 (which, now that we think of it, is probably the right thing to do anyway. )

Below are the links to the screenshots that were submitted. Please review each one (I’d open them all in tabs so I could look back and forth while they are all large size, because the voting poll just uses thumbnails), then choose the one you think looks the best/is the most usable.

This poll was supposed to close at 8pm NY time on Tuesday (today), but we’re going to leave it open for an extra day. The voting poll will now be closed at 8pm NY time on Wednesday (that’s 2am Thursday, UTC). If you want to discuss the entries’ pros/cons, this thread would be a good place.

Current: The existing interface, for reference

KM: Current nav, header elements moved

AN: Current nav, file folder style header

KD: Current nav, modified header style

JJ: Swap blog title and favorites menu

DR1: Fluency style, dark

DR2: Fluency style, medium

DR3: Fluency style, light

IK: Nav layered over dark background

GB: Modified nav/header intersection

MT: Modified nav and header

Which style do you prefer?(answers)

Results will be posted the day after the polls close.

Jane: It is a thorn in my side that the blog name header is above the “dashboard” nav section in the admin, since in MU installations and with plugins (like stats), things in the Dashboard section span multiple blogs. Makes more sense for the header to head only the per-blog content area.

Mark: I agree about the header. “This is the menu, this is the content.”

All: Yep.

Five minutes later…

Mark: What do you guys this of this quick mockup I just did, playing with the admin header?

Jane: I like it that the nav is not under the header. Might need some styling help. I was also thinking maybe the favorites menu should drop down into the white h2 area by screen options/help tabs.

Ryan: Menu color to the top with blog title pushed over and favorites next to screen options sounds quite nice.

Jane: I’ll ask Matt Thomas if he could style it [ed. note: Matt Thomas created the visual style for 2.7], and we can see what people think, maybe post on wpdevel for feedback.

Ryan: If it’s quick, maybe we could even get it into 2.8.

Matt T: Here are some comps based on what you told me.

Jane: Cool, but where are Screen Options and Help tabs?

Matt T: Still working on that.

Jane: Hm. Wonder if there’s time to open this up to community designers? I know we’re in freeze, and it’s no notice, but you didn’t get any notice either when we dropped this styling request on your lap a few hours ago. That’s the way open software development works: sometimes the best ideas come at the last minute!

Matt T: I’m all for letting the community take a stab at it. Especially if they come up with something brilliant to do with the Screen Options and Help tabs.

Jane: I’ll ask Ryan about release date and see if there’s time. I know they wanted your style recommendations today.

Ryan: Tuesday is probably doable, no later than that for final delivery of style and any gradient graphics, etc.

Jane: Awesome! People will hate me for the short notice after the has-patch marathon, but since it’s a small project and over the weekend, and wasn’t even something anyone was planning until a few hours ago, I’m *really hoping* people will take this for what it is, an attempt to give more people input into an upcoming visual change in the interface, even if it’s not a huge one.

Ryan: Would have the benefit of warning people that header and menu will be changed a bit.

Jane: And we can have a vote. If I can get all the materials together and post in the morning, that would give 2 days of design time for submissions on Monday, and if we do a day of voting Tuesday, that’s 3 days notice for the vote. I’ll make sure to post to all the lists, etc.

Ryan: Will we announce with comps from Matt T as examples of what we’re thinking?

Jane: I’ll write up the UX reasons for considering the change, and Matt T can provide some style guidelines and his original comps so no one will have to waste time mocking up the basic screen layout.

Ryan: That would help set the scope. We just want tweaks here and there, given the timing.

Jane: Woot!

On Your Mark, Get Set…
Okay, so here’s the deal. Modifying the nav/header to be a little nicer is was a last-minute design idea, and if it can’t be worked out in the time we have left before 2.8 (which is very little), we’ll just wait until 2.9 to work on it. But! If someone comes up with something the community really likes and it doesn’t break any of the design guidelines for the rest of WordPress, we could sneak it in.

UX and design guidelines for this mini-project are posted here (so as not to clog up anyone’s feed reader with big graphics). Read through the UX stuff, check out the comps Matt Thomas mocked up last night (with absolutely no notice, for the record). Use the .psd as your base, and when it’s time to submit your ideas, make a .jpg or .png and post a link to it in the comments on this post. (Note: Only comments containing a link to a design submission using this format will be approved. For general discussion about this design challenge or any of the submissions, please head into the #wordpress-dev IRC channel.)

Submit the link to your comps by 1am Tuesday, April 28 UTC (7pm Monday, April 27, New York time). If you have questions or want early feedback, we’ll be in and out of the #wordpress-dev IRC channel between now and then.

Once we’ve received the submissions, we’ll post a voting survey (much simpler than the icon survey; this one will be more of poll, just choose the one you like best) as soon as possible, and will post the link to it here as soon as it’s online. We’ll only keep voting open for one day because of the 2.8 deadline, so put it on your calendar if you think you’ll forget. Voting will close at 2am Wednesday, April 29 UTC (8pm Tuesday, April 28, New York time). Results will be announced the following day.

Go!

* Chats above are a conglomeration of actual chats.

Reminder: Only comments containing a link to a design submission will be published here. All other comments will be deleted.

If you want to leave a public comment about this contest, the design, etc., I’ve created a thread in the forums that you can use. Please discuss these things there. If you leave a regular comment here on this blog, no one will be able to reply to you, because only actual links to design submissions will be posted in the comments here.

Google has announced the successful applicants for the 2009 Google Summer of Code, and WordPress is lucky enough to have eight students allotted to our open source project. It was a tough choice, since we had almost 60 applications to choose from. We’d like to thank all the students who applied, and we’re sorry we couldn’t take on more of you.

Developers, if you see these bright young things in the dev channel, please be your usual friendly, helpful selves. Everyone else, wish our students luck with their projects this summer, which promise to be challenging but awesome. Without further ado, I’m pleased to introduce the GSoC projects (in no particular order) and the students tackling them.

Justin Shreve, Extended WordPress Search Engine. Justin will be mentored by Andy Skelton. One of the complaints I hear over and over again is about the search engine, so this could have great benefit to WordPress core.

Rudolf Cheuk Sang Lai, Adding Photo Grouping by Album Functionality. This project will wind up being a piece of a larger media redux project for 2.9/3.0. Mark Jaquith is mentoring, and Noel Jackson will be a backup mentor.

Daryl Koopersmith, WYSIWYG theme editor/generator. This will allow users to create and edit themes without touching any code. Beau Lebens is the mentor on this project.

Michael Benedict Arul will be working on a similar project. Michael will be mentored by Andrew Ozz, since this project will be using jQuery. It’s our hope that having two students working on this idea separately will foster competition and allow us to compare approaches.

Daniel Larkin, Modified Preorder Tree Traversal (MPTT). Lead Developer Ryan Boren will be his mentor. This is Daniel’s second GSoC working on WordPress.

Diego Caro, a student from Chile, will also work on an MPTT project. Diego will be mentored by Thorsten Ott.

César Rodas, social and text processing algorithms for BuddyPress and MU as related to recommendation engines. Alex Shiels and Andy Peatling will co-mentor this project.

Anthony Cole, Event management with WordPress. Co-organizer of WordCamp Australia and New Zealand, Anthony will be working on a suite of plugins (or maybe just one or two out of a planned set, scope TBD) for event management/attendee networking that will be built on BuddyPress/MU/bbPress. We’ll use wordcamp.org as a test case, and release the final product to the community. Jake Spurlock will be mentoring, with Andy Peatling as backup.

Congratulations, guys*!

*Seriously, we didn’t get more than a couple of applications from female student developers. Where are all the geek girls?

As promised, here are the results of the 24-hour has-patch marathon that was announced, begun and completed over the course of a few days last week (more on timing after the results). Results include activity from 8am Pacific time on Thursday, April 16, 2009 to 9am Pacific time on Friday, April 17, 2009.

Total number of patches committed to core: 44

Contributors whose old patches were committed: 9

Marathon contributors whose patches were committed: 13

Tickets closed: 102 (breakdown below)

• Fixed – 45
• Dupe – 16
• Wontfix – 10
• Invalid – 19
• Worksforme – 12

Tickets created: 20 [I guess not everyone got the memo that we were trying to close tickets. ]

Tickets reopened: 4

Number of testers who left comments in ticket threads: 10

Number of testing-specific comments: 18

These numbers are based on opening each ticket that registered activity during the marathon hours and counting the actual comments that indicated some testing of a patch. Contributions to philosophical discussions without a patch, while important, weren’t counted for this purpose. Nor were Trac notices that simply noted a ticket was being closed because it was a dupe, invalid, etc.

Top five contributors (committed patches): Denis-de-Bernardy, filosofo, nbachiyski, scohoust, simonwheatley

Top five testing feedback providers: shanef, Nicholas91, Denis-de-Bernardy, sivel, williamsba, mrmist (tie)

Given the short notice/last-minute nature of the marathon, I think we did pretty well. Granted, there were people who complained that two days wasn’t enough notice to clear their schedules, but let’s be honest, the 24-hour has-patch marathon was more of a rallying cry to help clean out Trac than a deadline based on anything specific. Patches are always welcome/encouraged, and now that the big features for 2.8 are mostly done, the lead devs will be able to spend more time reviewing Trac tickets and patches. Still, not too many people tested existing patches (or if they did, they failed to leave the requisite comment in the ticket threads). Testing patches is one of the easiest things you can do to help further development, since patches won’t be committed or rejected until they’ve been tested by several people.

As we get closer to the 2.8 release, jump into Trac any time and test a few patches (don’t forget to leave the feedback!) if you have time. If there’s a ticket you’re sick of seeing there, write a patch and ask your fellow contributors to test it and comment on the ticket thread. We’ll announce an official bug hunt soon (and yes, there will be more than two days’ notice), but the fact remains that addressing new bugs is easier if Trac isn’t clogged with old tickets. If you spot duplicate tickets, mark it a dupe, note the other ticket number in the comments and close the ticket. If you see one that is no longer relevant because the current code base fixes a problem reported several versions ago, mark it invalid, leave a comment and close the ticket. These simple housekeeping tasks may not seem like much, but they do help. Special props to Denis-de-Bernardy, who in addition to writing a couple of patches during the marathon and testing a few others, did a bunch of ticket maintenance like this, and cleared out a number of tickets.

Thank you to everyone who participated, and until the next marathon, happy patching and testing!

The 24-hour has-patch marathon has just officially begun! For the next 24 hours (until Friday, 4pm UTC), the core developers will be evaluating patches that have been tested and committing those that are good. When they run out of those, they’ll start testing patches that have been submitted but not tested. This takes longer, so help us keep the momentum going by testing patches today.

Grab yourself a copy of the nightly build to make sure you’re using the right version, then head over to Trac and start looking at the has-patch* tickets. Pick a ticket, download the diff, test it out on the browsers/platforms you have available, and write a comment about the results in the ticket’s comment thread. Move on to the next ticket. Do as many as you can over the next 24 hours.

And if you’ve got the mad skills to contribute bug fixes and code patches for enhancements and other tickets, now is also a great time to contribute a patch. Why wait? One of the complaints I hear in the IRC #wordpress-dev channel is that it can be frustrating to write patches because sometimes it takes a long time for them to be reviewed and committed. For those people (and everyone else), this is the perfect time to patch, because we’ll be looking at every has-patch ticket in Trac for 2.8 over the next 24 hours. If you have a patch that’s been submitted but it hasn’t been tested, consider doing a little PR for yourself. Hop in the dev channel, post on your blog, mention on Twitter that you need people to test your patch *today* so that it can move forward in the process. This will speed things along. You can also add the keyword needs-testing in addition to has-patch.

At the end of the 24-hour period, you don’t have to put your pencils down, but the core devs will be going to sleep and then returning to the regular dev cycle, so it’s worth it to contribute today. If you miss the deadline, it’s okay; you can contribute or test patches as usual, you just won’t get the more immediate gratification the marathon promises.

We’ll post the results of the marathon here on Monday, after everyone’s gotten some rest and we can go through the Trac logs to see how many people got involved. This is one reason it’s so important to leave a comment when testing patches…it’s how we’ll be counting the number of marathon testers. Top patch contributors and testers will be recognized in the results post, so if that sort of thing motivates you, let the link love lead the way.

Of note: we are now in feature freeze for 2.8!

* – For those who don’t know why I keep using the term has-patch… When someone submits a patch by uploading it to the Trac ticket, they add “has-patch” to the keywords field, so that the core devs will know there’s a patch attached. Not the most elegant system, true, and you’d think maybe Trac could just recognize that a certain file type had been uploaded, but there you have it.

Waiting patiently for a bug hunt to be announced before you get involved as a WordPress development contributor? Pshaw! Don’t be shy!

2.8 currently has about 500 active tickets that need to be resolved. The core devs are largely working on the bigger feature additions, such as the embedded theme browser/installer, the new widgets management, improving performance, etc. so a lot of tickets that are of lesser priority are still just sitting there. Aren’t they calling to you, just like puppies at the pound? “Adopt me! Please!”

Before we have a bug hunt and see the addition of dozens of new tickets, we need to clear out some of these old ones. Not being the kind of shelter that euthanizes its bugs after a certain amount of time (seriously, there’s one ticket that goes all the way back to version 1.5), we are hoping people will step up and bring home a bug today.

To keep things moving, we’re announcing a new kind of event, related to bug hunts, but with a different slant. We need a sprint to clear out these tickets. Thursday is the day (and Friday for those over the date line). Core devs will spend 24 hours going through all the tickets tagged with has-patch, and committing those that have been tested and work. So how can you get in on the Super-Awesome WordPress 24-Hour Has-Patch Marathon?

Write a patch. There are dozens of tickets for discrete little pieces of correction (change … to actual ellipses in admin interface, change the ‘go back’ link to a ‘view page’ link, etc.), dozens that are browser-specific bugs, dozens that might be more challenging. Pick the one you want to work on, add a comment to the thread so other marathon contributors know someone is working on it, and get the patch submitted before the marathon ends. If you start coding now, your patch could be in by the weekend!

Test a patch. There are, as of right now, 177 tickets marked with has-patch. Patches can’t be committed until they’ve been thoroughly tested. If you’re already running the nightly build start testing out these patches in as many operating system/browser combinations as you have. Only have one? Hey, it’s probably more than has been tested already! If you’re not already running the nightly build, you can download it here to set up a test blog. Don’t forget to add what you found to the comment thread for each ticket. If it doesn’t work, be specific about what is not working so that others can jump in and fix it.

24 hours of patching, 24 hours of testing, 24 hours of committing. Don’t miss the excitement; get started now!

The Super-Awesome WordPress 24-Hour Has-Patch Marathon begins Thursday, April 16 at 8am Pacific time (that’s Thursday, 4pm UTC) and will end, as you might have guessed, 24 hours later. No reason to wait, though… start early and get patching/testing. The more patches that have been tested by Thursday morning, the more that will be committed during the marathon.

Go WordPress!

As mentioned previously, the icon design contest was such a success that we realized we needed to create more ways for graphic designers to contribute to the WordPress open source project. Our community is chock full of talent, and this talent is just itching to get involved. So, we’re trying out a few ideas.

First and most immediate is the creation of a new “component” in Trac for graphic design. We’ll use this component label to create tickets for things like making graphic buttons, such as making a new version of the favorites menu graphic or WordPress mark that looks better with the blue admin theme. In some cases graphic design tasks will overlap with CSS tasks, so designers interested in contributing can search for open tickets with either component label. In cases where a base PSD file is needed as a starting point, we will attach it to the ticket.

In this vein, if you notice a graphic that needs fixing (like the aforementioned favorites menu button needing a blue version), please use the graphic design component label to report it in Trac. Please don’t create tickets for graphic you just don’t like… keep it to things that look broken or overlooked.

Graphic design tasks will follow the same protocol as development tasks in that volunteer work will be overseen/curated by the core team. Both Matt Thomas (who provided the art direction for 2.7) and I will work with the core development team to identify design tasks and review submissions (i.e., we’ll make sure things look awesome before they’re committed). We’ve been trying this process with an early volunteer, and it seems to be working well. In addition to creating individual Trac tickets, if a project arises that requires many graphic elements to be created, we will post about it here on the dev blog to give potential contributors a heads up.

The second opportunity for graphic design contributions will be less about discrete tasks and more about contributing to the evolving visual design of WordPress. When there are larger design tasks in the works, such as creating an admin theme or designing the new media upload process, there will be opportunities for screen design. In these situations, potential contributors will be given access to materials such as wireframes or specifications and will be able to submit comps of design approaches. In the event that we receive multiple good submissions for a screen design, we will use a community vote to influence the final selection, as we did with the icon design contest.

Since 2.8 is wrapping up currently, there aren’t many design tasks waiting to be completed right now, but when we roll into 2.9 development, there will be more opportunities for graphic designers to get involved.

Students, secure your awesome summer by applying to the WordPress Summer of Code now! The deadline is in 3 hours, 12 noon PDT / 19:00 UTC.

Be like Billy.

Dad: Well, Billy, another school year is coming to a close. No more college parties, just another summer here at home. What will you do all day?

Billy: Oh, I dunno. I’ll probably work on my blog or something.

Dad: You need more direction! That blog is just your generation’s answer to comic books.

Billy: On the contrary, Dad, working on my blog utilizes my skills in programming, design, writing, critical thinking, and all sorts of other liberal artsy things that you’re paying those professors to teach me.

Dad: If only there were a more practical application for those skills, one that could lead you to fame and fortune!

Billy: Where’ve you been living, Dad? My skills are totally in demand in today’s questionable economy. An awesome WordPress developer is worth his/her weight in gold. Lead, even.

Dad: What is this WordPress?

Billy: Only the greatest open source publishing platform ever created. It’s what runs my blog. I like to fiddle around with the code and come up with cool hacks that make mine better than the average College Joe’s.

Dad: I had no idea you were that capable.

Billy: Duh, Dad. I’ve been using WordPress for a couple of years now. I could practically teach a course on it, though there are definitely things I could learn from the lead devs. They are like kings.

Dad: Hm. That kind of ability ought to be worth something. Seems like there would be programs in place for kids like you to utilize your skills while being nurtured  by people like these lead kings.

Billy: Lead devs, Dad. Not lead kings.

Dad: Maybe you could apply for an internship or something, earn a little money this summer instead of just spending mine.

Billy: Well, there is this one thing like that.

Dad perks up.

Billy: The Google Summer of Code lets college students work with lead developers on a bunch of open source projects, you can get college credit for it, and if you do a good job, you can earn up to forty-five hundred bucks over the summer. And WordPress is one of the participating projects.

Dad: !!

Billy: But it’s pretty competitive. My friend Joe applied last year and didn’t make the cut. I can improve my skills just by fiddling around on my own this summer without the rejection, thanks.

Dad: Don’t be lame! You said yourself you’re awesome. And that you could learn from the kings. And that you could earn over FOUR THOUSAND DOLLARS. Life is full of rejection, kid. Best way to get over that is to make yourself so awesome that no one wants to reject you. And know that even if they do reject you, there’s always next time.

Billy: I dunno, Dad.

Dad: Tell you what, if you apply, I’ll give you $500 toward that car you’ve been wanting, whether you’re accepted into the program or not. And if you get in and complete it successfully, I’ll match that $4500. I’d be so proud of you. And the bragging rights at work! My kid, a Google engineer!

Billy: I wouldn’t actually be a Google engineer, Dad.

Dad: Oh be quiet. Do you think Harold in shipping knows the difference?

Billy: Okay, Dad, I’ll do it!

Dad: That’s my boy.

…………………….

College students! Don’t wait for your parents to bribe you; apply to the Google Summer of Code program now! For the third year in a row, WordPress is participating, and this year we’ve got project suggestions ranging from core functionality to plugins and BuddyPress development. You name it, we want you to propose it. It’s true, competition is fierce, but hey, if you’re already hacking WordPress, you’re ahead of the pack as far as we’re concerned. Applications are being accepted as of today, and the deadline is on April 3, 2009. For more information, check out the WordPress Codex GSoC2009 page, where we suggest some projects and let you know who our kingly mentors will be this year. The GSoC FAQ is also a good place to get an overview of the program. To apply, head to the Google Summer of Code application site. Remember, we want *you* to work on WordPress this summer! And College Janes, this isn’t just for College Joes. Female applicants encouraged to apply!

A week or two ago at WordCamp Denver, I gave a presentation about some plans to create more opportunities for people to contribute to the WordPress open source project. The icon design contest was such a success that it seems clear we need to come up with ways for non-developers to contribute their talents and skills to WordPress. Since the launch of 2.7, we’ve been working out what kinds of contribution opportunities would make sense, and we’ve come up with a handful.

This (long) weekend, many WordPress users and developers (including half the core team) will be in Austin, TX for South by Southwest. Matt Mullenweg, Ryan Boren, Mark Jaquith and I will all be there, so say hello if you’re there, too. In the spirit of all this WordPress community connecting, I’ll be posting here every day during after SxSW with information about the new contribution opportunities we’re creating. Each post will cover one or more of the following:

• Development (of course)
• QA
• Documentation
• Ideas and Opinions
• User Experience
• Graphic Design
• Accessibility
• Usability Testing
• WordPress.tv
• Community Organizing

Since the first thing people think of when they think of contributing to WordPress is PHP development, we’ll start there.

The code (which is poetry) is the meat of the application, so it makes sense that the most opportunities to contribute will continue to fall in this area. Trac is always filled with tickets that need patches, patches that need testing, and issues that need some creative developer thinking/collaboration to find the right solution to a problem that has us going in circles.

If you are proficient in PHP, consider looking through the tickets (especially the ones marked “bug,” since they should get higher priority) and writing a patch for one of them. If you’ve got more advanced skills, consider writing a patch for one of the more complex tickets, or offering corrections to a patch submitted by someone else (if needed). If you don’t trust your coding skills but know your way around the application files, look for tickets tagged has-patch and test the patches in as many browsers as you can, posting your results afterward in the ticket thread.

If you find a bug in the course of your daily use of WordPress, report it. First, check Trac to see if the issue already has a ticket. You could also scan the archives of the wp-testers list to see if people have been talking about the bug, or email the list yourself to see if anyone has any information on the problem. If these actions don’t bear fruit, start a new ticket in Trac (you’ll need to create a login to do this). Be as detailed as you can about the issue, and don’t forget to make the proper selections from the metadata dropdown menus. Just in case anyone is unsure of how to make these selections…

Use the severity field with caution. Most bugs will be of normal severity. Marking a bug as high severity will not necessarily speed up development, and if it turns out that you’ve marked a bug’s severity incorrectly it may even slow down development.

Priority will usually be normal. Leave it to the more senior developers to change the status to a higher priority, as they are familiar with all the tickets and Trac and will be better able to assess the priority in relation to other tickets.

Ticket type. This is one of most misused fields, with many people marking tickets as defects that should not be. To address this, here’s a reminder of the ticket types and their intended uses. Your choices are: defect (bug), enhancement, feature request, and task (blessed).

• Defect (bug). Something is broken. You know how the feature is supposed to work (if you’re unsure, check the Codex or ask in the dev channel), but something has gone awry that needs to be fixed.
• Enhancement. Something is awkward or slow and could be designed or coded better without overhauling the function or screen design. Please don’t mark something as a defect (bug) if it is really an enhancement.
• Feature request. If there’s something that could be improved that would require significant restructuring of code or screen design, it should be marked as feature request rather than enhancement. Please note: this is not really the place to request features that are not currently in WordPress. Please continue to use the Ideas forum to suggest new features. The core developers will add new feature requests to Trac as they review the Ideas forum with each release cycle.
• Task (blessed). This type indicates approval from the core development team. Only core developers should use this selection. If you mark something as Task (blessed) yourself, you will have bad karma.

Bug Hunts*! If you have checked the Codex page for bug hunts lately, you’ll notice it’s been awhile since there was one. No more! Official bug hunts, sprints for finding and fixing bugs, will be brought back on a regular basis. The first one will be announced soon, possibly next week, to try and tackle the bug tickets related to widgets. (No need to wait, though, there are hundreds of open tickets in the 2.8 milestone just waiting for a kind developer to pay them some attention.)

As always, contributing developers can communicate with each other and with the core team in the #wordpress-dev IRC channel at irc.freenode.net, on the wp-hackers list, and in the ticket threads on Trac. Regular developer chats in IRC will be returning to Wednesdays at noon (Pacific time) starting next week.

[* - I used to love the bug hunt challenge in Space Cadet 3D Pinball back in the days of Windows 95]

We’re excited to be part of the Change the Web Challenge.

Basically, the contest is to create a plugin, widget, mash up, hack, or other variety of web application that helps people find and share opportunities to take action. The grand prize is 50 benjis, and the best WordPress plugin will also be featured in the Plugin Directory. But the real prize is spreading a little more love in the world.

Click here for all the details.

“Writing a Plugin” in the WordPress Codex is where I got started when I needed to get hooked in to WordPress. Others might like to grab one of the over 4,000 open source WordPress plugins and tweak the source. If in need of a little help, the Plugins and Hacks forum is full of friends to assist you wrap your head around the code or debug a problem. Social Actions also has provided some developer resources.

Let’s show them how we change the web the WordPress way!

One of the biggest problems and most frequent complaints we’ve had with the WordPress.org Plugins Directory is the horrible, horrible search results.

No longer.  We’re now using Sphinx (a “free open-source SQL full-text search engine”) to power search on the Plugins Directory both from the website and from within your blog’s admin (Plugins → Add New).

It works much better. There are a few oddities floating around (our fault not sphinx’s) that we’ll be cleaning up shortly, but we’re happy enough with it on the whole to start letting everyone else use it

Currently, the search only indexes the plugin’s title and description/installation/FAQ/etc. (from the plugin’s readme.txt file), but we’ll be adding things like authors and tags soon.

2.7.1, the first 2.7 maintenance release, is now available.  2.7.1 fixes 68 tickets.  You can automatically upgrade from 2.7 to 2.7.1 via the Tools → Upgrade menu, or you can download the package and upgrade manually.

You may have noticed that we went much longer than usual to release this .1 update. We’re very proud of this fact because it’s a testament to the testing all of you contributed prior to the release of 2.7 which helped make it the most bug-free release we’ve had.

Consult the list of fixed tickets and the  full set of changes between 2.7 and 2.7.1 for details.

Finally partly due to the stability of the 2.7 we’ve decided to push back 2.8 a few more weeks so we can bring in a few more speed optimizations, taxonomy enhancements, and new theme features. We also need to figure out which jazz musician to name the release after.