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Sarah Gooding

WordPress 4.6 Development Kicks Off This Week, Dominik Schilling to Lead Release

photo credit: Angelina Litvin
photo credit: Angelina Litvin

As soon as WordPress 4.5 was out the door, WordPress 4.6 release lead Dominik Schilling opened up the floor for discussion on wish list items ahead of the kickoff chat on Wednesday. The development community chimed in with feedback on their users’ biggest pain points, important UX issues to be solved, and existing features they would like to see polished.

If the 200+ comments on the post are any indication, WordPress users and contributors are buzzing with ideas for improving the software in the upcoming release. The Make/WordPress core blog doesn’t have a voting system, but a few of the wish list items with the most +1’s include:

Ella Van Dorpe also posted a summary of the most recent meeting for contributors on the core editor component. The team discussed a wish list for the editor in 4.6 and beyond, including the possibility of creating a feature plugin that uses ICE to allow suggestions and comments on content. A revamp of the Publish meta box, more experimentation with inline toolbars, more formatting shortcodes, and other improvements are also on the list.

Weston Ruter and contributors plan to continue chipping away at the customizer roadmap and component page with a focus on customizer transactions. Ruter would also like to introduce basic content authorship in the customizer in 4.6, along with improvements to existing features.

The 4.6 wish list offers a small preview of what might be coming in this release, and there’s still time to contribute new items and feedback. If you want to advocate for your ticket or wish list item, join the WordPress 4.6 kickoff chat in the #core Slack channel on Wednesday at 3:00PM CDT.

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17 responses to “WordPress 4.6 Development Kicks Off This Week, Dominik Schilling to Lead Release”

  1. I am against the proposition:
    “Remove the plugin/theme editor and make it into a plugin”
    They can already de-activate it from wp-config.

    • You’re thinking like a dev – not an end user.

      The average end user wouldn’t know what wp-config is.

      • I do think that if it is a new feature then keeping it as a plugin instead of inside core can be a good choice. But unbundling an existing feature can lead to a ton of issues with folks who manage a large number of sites (as well as causing confusion to a number of DIY enthusiasts who may not know why a thing disappeared)

      • True. But it makes more sense for a dev too make that choice for an end user.

        I never want a end user to edit any kind of code. They will screw it up.

    • I think it makes sense. The real question is whether or not – when putting it into a plugin – they will include some form of validation.

      The number one problem I see with the built in editor is the number of times users white-screen their site because they forgot to add a semi-colon, comma or similar.

      If by moving it to a plugin enables validation, then go for it.

      If it doesn’t, then we should just remove the functionality entirely. It’s probably one of the most dangerous things in WordPress.

  2. Removing some less-using features from core WP and move these into a plugin is a good way. This approach could apply to more things there. So the majority of users will enjoy more lightweight core while users who need/use that function can continue to use it with a plugin.

  4. Sara,

    I am very impressed with the most recent release of WP. However, when they put the ability to view your site in the customizer to see how it would look on different screen sizes, I think that should have been put in for posts as well.

    Overall, there is nothing but amazement that continues to be poured out from the Dev Team at WordPress. That is what makes it such an amazing CMS to utilize either for personal blogging sites or business pages.

    • @greg you can navigate to different pages from within the customizer just like the front end :)

  5. I’m excited for custom comment types. Obviously. I love me some comments.

    It would open the possibility to use the comments system for all sorts of other community interactions: polling/voting, user-contributed content, story leads, comments from social… just to get started.

    • Hmmm. I’m not sure if “comments from social” would be welcome, unless they can really nail down relevant comments from social.

      One of Livefyre’s biggest failings was bringing in non-relevant tweets to the comment section, because a personal convo struck up around the shared URL on Twitter. Very noisy.

      Also, how would formatting work? Say you have a nice comment template that you’re happy with – would Facebook or G+ comments fit into that, for example, or would they be natively styled to the platform they’re being pulled from?

      Personally, I’d love to see support for Inline Comments and Connotations, along with Highlight Content and Comment. There have been a few plugins that have tried this, some with mixed results.

      Commenting on the likes of Medium is a far more elegant solution. Speaking of Medium, it’d be great if WordPress eventually supported front-end content creation (kinda like what Editus is trying to do). Drafting a post in Medium is far smoother than the WP experience currently, and I draft directly into WP.

      • Pulling in comments from Twitter is something I’d still like to explore. It’s not at all possible with the current Twitter api (you can’t query replies to a tweet) but if that changes in the future I’ll certainly give it a try. We could do relevancy (to the post) checks using our existing tech to only pull in the best responses. Might be interesting.

        You could easily style them to represent the network they came from… and even allow native replies to them, which would then reply back via Twitter as well. Something to think about.

        I think the big challenge with inline comments is theme compatibility. It’s a support nightmare from the few dev I’ve talked to who have tried it. But yes, custom comment types would open up a few doors there for sure. I hope someone keeps pecking away at that problem.

        • How would sites handle API issues? So, let’s say you need to connect API to pull in/offer replies to tweets, from the WP comments. If the network has any kind of latency issue, is the impact to the site worth it?

          The problem I’ve found with Livefyre and Disqus (moreseo Disqus) is the comment boxes either hang, or they run really slow, when you have social components added. If Twitter is down, I’ve seen it impact site load times because of the tweets pulled into comments (or, tweet boxes in sidebar widgets, for example).

          Curious if there’d be a way to bypass this. Either way, having moved off Livefyre back to native WP for simplicity, I’d be loathe to reactivate social comments. But I know folks who would be, so curious about this. :)

          • Nah! None of that garbage. All of the good stuff would happen on our server (Postmatic) and when we found a tweet which is a winner… THEN we’d pass it along to your site via the REST API. Wham.

  6. Move the e-mail to post feature to a plugin, how many people actually use it?

    The theme/plugin search should have an option to allow us to limit results based on date of last update. So many times when I am searching for a plugin, the first 1-2 pages of results…plugins that have not updated for over a year.

    Having the WPMS as an option with a button, instead of going through manually editing wp-congif/.htaccess, think of it when you have a maintenance mode plugin, you click on a button to turn it on and off.

    A feature I know will not be included but I would like part of core scheduling of themes. I switch to a christmas-y theme from dec 1-25
    What about scheduling of the logo, think of like Google does it’s logo. Unless specified of a specific logo, the standard logo applies.

    Yeah I know the scheduling theme/logo thing should be a plugin but oh how much I dream of it being in core.

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