Planet

GSoC time! Google announced GSoC and I’m guessing we’ll do it again, so roll call: who wants to be a GSoC mentor this year? Second: who wants to be the administrator? I’d like to get it off my plate if possible. Candidate should be able to keep track of dates, have good writing skills, be willing to nag (even people you respect), and be able to prioritize GSoC communications.

Team Update: XML-RPC (Friday)

We made great progress this week continuing our focus on the major ticket for implementing wp.newPost (#18429) and working to keep the other bits of this API supporting the same formats. Our 2 week cycle ended on Friday and we are really close to having a patch ready for commit but didn’t quite make it in time. The team are continuing work on the patch and will re-group on Monday to review progress and plan the next cycle.

Relevant Tickets: #18419, #18430, #18431, #18432, #18433
Office hours: 5pm-6pm UTC Mon-Fri

Decided to allow small schema changes in this release so as to clear out some of the schema updates we’ve long considered.

• #19935 – Drop comment_approved index. It has been redundant for a long time.
• #17188 – Remove blog_id column from wp_options. It has never been used.

We’re also considering:

• #19387 post_content_filtered should be longtext
• #10483 – Change post_name’s length from 200 to 400

kurtpayne modified the ajax handlers to use wp_die() — allowing unit tests to provide a custom die handler — and added more ajax unit tests. #15327

duck_ continued with rewrite improvements: #19876 #16092

scribu continued with work on WP_Query performance in #18536. The results look promising.

And there was the usual trac gardening, unit testing, and housekeeping.

Wednesday marked the halfway point of our first iteration. The description of our current cycle can be found in #19910. Development is currently taking place in a plugin (you can find the repo here). For an overview of appearance improvements, see #19909.

We’ve accomplished most of the initial goals for this cycle and are now refining and building out the existing concepts. Currently, the two remaining points are to add an (initially blank) save action and to enable communication between the UI and preview via postMessage.

On Tuesday, we had a UX review with Jane where we decided to proceed with a stacked accordion UI to navigate between different components in the preview frame. We also decided to add a button to collapse the sidebar (similar to the “collapse menu” button in the admin menu, but larger and “more buttony”). Once postMessage support has been added, we’ll also experiment with a zooming feature to allow the user to get a bird’s eye view of the page. In addition to adding the save action and postMessage, ocean90 and I are hoping to get a head start on the accordion UI so we can break more tasks out to subteams.

We have another meeting with Jane in #wordpress-dev scheduled on Monday at 21:00 UTC that will double as office hours. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to swing by the meeting, drop a comment here, or ping me (koopersmith) or ocean90 in IRC. All in all, we’re on track to meet our two week deadline.

Team Update: i18n

Technically, our cycle started today. Really though, a few of us have been hammering away at a pre-cycle cycle for the past week or so. What we’ve been doing is focusing on bugs and enhancements, some of them quite old, that will provide more targeted control to translators.

Since Dion is back in action starting next week, we’re back-dating our current cycle, if you will, to have started on January 23, and end on Feb 6. Soon thereafter a new cycle will begin, and that cycle will focus on the development of language pack installation. This cycle will continue to lay the groundwork for that to happen.

Things that have happened so far:

• Created a document for translators, Important Changes for WordPress 3.4, which outlines all of the changes (audience: translators) what I’m about to outline for you (audience: developers).
• Worked with Gardener Boren on splitting up the pot files and only loading admin strings in the admin. This required some work on GlotPress, WP.org, the i18n repo, and core. #19852
• RTL locales are now automatically detected. #19600 and #19924
• wp_salt() now falls back to the database for all keys and salts, and is much smarter about when it should fall back. The way we handle default secret keys is now improved and will prevent plugin errors when running a localized version of core. #19599 #14024
• wptexturize() now has better locale support for all kinds of curly quotes/apostrophes/primes. This means that a localization like Hebrew can actually turn off curly quote replacement, without needing to resort to weird hacks in their he_IL.php file. #19602
• RSS feeds now properly reflect the language of the blog. The rss_language option is gone. #13440
• Locales can now specify a default timezone and start of week through translated strings (rather than PHP). Also, default links can be localized, #19601
• setup-config.php nows use a regex to replace wp-config-sample.php placeholders, preventing translators from needing to keep the placeholders sync’d. #18180
• The non-gettexted WP_I18N_ strings are all gone. Core now leverages wp_load_translations_early(), which is carefully designed to work in the particular situations we need it. (Not for plugins, yo.) #18180
• setup-config.php is now fully internationalized and uses wp_load_translations_early() to ensure the local package’s mo file is loaded. Between this and the secret key changes, there is no longer a file in wp-admin or wp-includes that translators need to modify in their distribution. #18180
• Like the gardening team, we have been using Future Release and Awaiting Review as a potential gold mine, picking through all of the i18n tickets to find the good enhancements and missed bugs. So far, this has resulted in fixes for #19364, #11270, #18770, #19698, #19788, and a few other tickets now slated for 3.4.

Things that will probably happen in the next week:

• Some decision on support for RTL in feeds. #6425
• Word count work. #8759
• Comma fun. #7897
• Finishing off locale-specific modifications in core. #19603 #19601
• Themes gaining header translation abilities, and translating page template names. Sergey is going to work on this and I’ll follow up with the makepot.php changes. #15858 #6007
• And other things on this report, as well as other aspects of laying the groundwork for language packs.

Office Hours: Daily. We will likely set formal office hours for the second cycle as that will include me, Dion, and Sergey, and we’re evenly spaced around the world (UTC -5, +4, +10).

We focused on flexible headers this cycle (#17242). We have a patch that we think is ready for commit, which adds flexible height and width. We had Nacin and Mark Jaquith look at the patch, they made some recommendations that we integrated, and it seems ready to go into core for some testing.

You can test with the latest version of the Essence Theme on Github or see comment 48 on the ticket for information on how to add support to your own theme.

I worked some more on the patch we had for #19810. The original patch had features that exceeded our original scope (namely: the ability to bulk-add users). I removed that, cleaned up the JS a bit, and we now have a patch that can probably go in and be iterated.

http://core.trac.wordpress.org/attachment/ticket/19810/19810.5.patch

Next up is making it work in the add-user-to-blog interface in the Network Admin.