WordPress Dev Chat For 7-1-09

So the WordPress development meeting took place today and boy was the atmosphere conducive to discussion. Lots of things discussed while new ideas were generated. Unfortunately, you get a bunch of developers into a chat room and when you announce an idea or feature, the talk immediately turns into implementation which results in an unruly court that needs to be settled down to get back on track. But, the meeting went on and the following are the bullets points that were discussed regarding WordPress 2.9. Jane is currently working on putting the feature list together to be voted upon in a poll that will be published on the WordPress development blog to get a sense of where the end users priority lies.

post thumbnails, mark: The ability to use a custom field key to assign a thumbnail image to a post excerpt.

media albums, mark – The addition of photo albums to display images. I believe this to be different from galleries.

bulk media import API

make adding embeds easier (like viper plugin) – The inclusion of popular shortcodes to support major video sites like YouTube etc.

enable most media settings as defaults that can be overridden on a per image/file or per-use basis.

cropping, resizing, and rotation (in 90 degree increments) for image uploads, filtering – This would be the extend of basic photo enhancement. As a few others said, we really don’t want to see Photoshop in the WordPress write panel for images.

Custom Image Sizes. Instead of hardcoded thumb, med, large (manually configuring maximum image sizes for small, thumbnail etc)

lightboxing images: It’s been decided not to add Lightbox as a core feature just yet.

post types: For WordPress 3.0

page exclude plus reorder for blog nav: nikolayb – The ability to easily remove a page from showing in the navigation menu while also providing UI to sort the order of the menu.

media metadata – The addition of tags and categories to sort media.

uploader feature: ability to choose from most recently used/most often used/marked as favorite files

more default shortcodes. check top ten from wp.com. slideshare and any place that advertises wp.com shortcodes

importers (specifics TBD)

and UI header brushup and uploader UI – I imagine this has to do with the header poll that was announced after 2.7 was released.

That’s about it. Not sure what next weeks topic will be about but if you want to suggest one, you can by visiting the WordPress development updates blog. If you would like to participate in the chat next week, install IRC or an IRC compatible client and connect to the following IRC server.

chat.freenode.net or any random server on the Freenode network and then join this channel at 5PM Eastern time on Wednesdays. #wordpress-dev.