WordPress Core Trac Gets a Design Refresh, New Features and Enhancements

If you haven’t been by to visit the WordPress Core Trac lately, you’ll be delighted to find that a flurry of updates were made over the holidays. Andrew Nacin took some time to add new features, enhancements, and bug fixes to Trac during his break. This long list of tiny improvements adds up in the end to make WordPress development tools more useful for everyone and more approachable for new contributors.

Refreshed Ticket Design

One of the most visible changes is the refreshed ticket design. Nacin added larger Gravatars, more whitespace, a larger font size for the body and he also changed the typeface to Open Sans.

The design refresh makes Trac tickets more readable. If you’re a designer with a few ideas to touch up the ticket design, Nacin invites you to get in touch.

New Features: Duplicate Ticket Suggestions and Cross-Referencing IRC Ticket Mentions

In addition to the new design, he also added a new feature to offer duplicate ticket suggestions. When you create a ticket, it will use your title to search for other “possibly related tickets” to cut down on duplicates.

Another handy new addition is automatic cross-referencing IRC ticket mentions to track conversations and enhance record keeping:

Whenever a ticket is referenced in #wordpress-dev, a link to the channel logs will be posted to the ticket. This ties conversations together and means that a discussion reached “per IRC discussion” is effortlessly documented. (As it is for record-keeping purposes, the comment doesn’t send a needless notification.)

Here’s what that looks like:

A quick summary of other exciting improvements includes:

Automatic image attachment previews: Images uploaded to tickets are now embedded inline

No more HTTP authentication: Jon Cave wrote a Trac plugin that validates existing WordPress.org cookies. Nacin also ported over heartbeat-like authentication checks to Trac, so you won’t lose your comments if you get logged out.

Comments column on reports: Main reports now include “comment count” as a sortable column.

New “good-first-bug” workflow keyword: New keyword added to help identify tickets that are good starting points for new contributors. Also added the existing ui-focus and docs-feedback keywords to the dropdown.

“Open Tickets With Commits Against Them”: To be used as a sign of in-progress tickets. Nacin’s new script finds these tickets and displays them on top of report 6.

Email address syncing: Your WordPress.org email address is now automatically synced to Trac for notification purposes.

Bug fixes mean that Trac RSS feeds are no longer broken. Fixes to the global WordPress.org header/footer make Trac responsive for mobile viewing.

There are quite a few enhancements and bug fixes not mentioned here that Nacin outlines in his post. The WordPress community is pretty lucky to have a developer like Andrew Nacin who makes Trac improvements as a form of holiday rest and relaxation. The new features and dropdowns for sorting will help heavy Trac users and beginners alike. Many thanks to Nacin and others who have contributed to improving WordPress Core Trac.