WordPress News Out Of Atlanta

Thanks to Nic who streamed the keynote for WordCamp Atlanta featuring Jane Wells. In this keynote, there is a handful of newsworthy items to mention, one of which is brand new.

WordPress 3.0 dev cycle is going through more of a formal format this time. This version will have a tight scope of features and functionality. However, the things going into 3.0 are huge such as the WordPress MU Merge.

WordPress MU will disappear without receiving a new name. It will simply be WordPress with Multi-Site capabilities.

Plugin and theme authors should closely monitor trac as there are a bunch of changes taking place at a rapid pace.

Custom post-types will be added to WordPress 3.0. Custom post-types are generally have their own taxonomies.

Media and such not going to be done in 3.0. Image editing was added into 2.9. The media section has a bunch of complications that are hard to solve thus leading to more development time. Maybe 3.1 for more media stuff.

During the presentation, canonical plugins were referred to ‘core plugins‘. This is the term people voted for in the poll and it looks like this is what they are going to be called from now on. These selected group of plugins will work closely with the core of WordPress to maintain compatibility, security, usability, etc.

The WordPress Developments blog is going to be quite busy the next few months. Make sure you are subscribed the sites RSS feed to keep tabs on the moving and shaking going on.

Two Matts are going to be working on the default theme 2010, Matt Mullenweg and Matt Thomas. (Cue how many matts does it take to make a default theme joke)

While not confirmed that it was happening, Jane mentioned that after ‘core plugins’ get rolling, she could see ‘core themes’ being worked on as well.

WordPress is going to try to get specific people to volunteer for specific features to hold more accountability and responsibility for those features. This also makes it easier to keep track on who’s doing what.

In order to get the core WordPress devs to take notice of your patch, get people behind it, write about it, spread the word, more importantly, get people to test it.

Jane Wells mentioned something quite interesting in that she may spearhead the development of a community code of conduct which would explain how to treat others within the WordPress community. She wants the WordPress community to help write it. Hopefully, this would get rid of some of the mean spiritedness that exists within the WordPress community.

The User Design/Interface aspect of the project will begin to open up to more contributors throughout the year. Look for the post on Monday for more information.

Distributed usability testing will also get going this year. For those interesting in partaking in the User Interface area of WordPress, you should join this mailing list. WP-UI

Mentoring. Jane said they are going to try and implementing a buddy or mentoring system so experience members of the community can help newcomers along. More information and feedback can be found here.

Jane will also be focusing on trying to get more Women involved with WordPress and technology in general. Some stats worth knowing: 25% Of Employed Computer Programmers in The U.S are women. Only 22% of Computer Science graduates right now are women. About 1% of the core contributions to WordPress are from women and that figure was rounded up.

The WordPress ideas forum will most likely be fixed and updated this week. The plugins running on the ideas forum behind the scenes will be updated as well. Also down the road, the Ideas forum will be integrated into Trac so that if an idea is blessed for WordPress, a Trac ticket will automatically be created for that idea. That is pretty darn slick! We can thank Mike Adams for helping to make the ideas forum usable again.

Throughout 2010, the WordPress.org website will undergo a redesign to be more of a community hub instead of a place where announcements are shared. Thanks to BuddyPress and activity streams.

WordCamps.org will have BuddyPress installed on it and the ticketing module that was used for WordCamp New York will be installed as well giving WordCamp organizers a free place to set up sites for WordCamps while also being able to sell tickets instead of relying on third parties.

One of the personal goals Jane has set out for 2010 is to convince five theme authors to go GPL.

During the Question and Answer session, someone asked a question regarding multiple distributions of WordPress and if they would be available like Linux. However, there are no plans on providing these.

Another question that was asked by an audience member dealt with the plugins from WPMU Premium Dev and putting those in the repository. I won’t spoil the answer for you, you’ll have to watch the video and see.

These are all of the newsworthy items I heard during the presentation. Give the video a watch to see and hear everything in more detail.