WordPress Dev Chat For 9-17-09

This weeks meeting covered basic image editing which is being worked on by Andrew Ozz, Gallery improvements, embeds, and the possibility of a new supported legacy branch of WordPress. The chat heavily focused on the topic of handling gallery improvements along with the use of photo albums. This is a topic that has been discussed in great length in previous meetings.

WordPress IRC Channel Ops – Back in March of this year, a poll was conducted for individuals to vote on who should be added as channel operators for WordPress on IRC. Sometimes in IRC, it turns into the wild west and it becomes frustrating very quickly when there is a troll or spammer which can’t be dealt with thanks to the lack of operator presence. Hopefully, that will no longer be the case as Matt has added Vipder007bond and Sivel to the ops list.

Basic image editing –
azaozz – sure, image editor has been in for few days, no much comments on it for now..
azaozz – at the moment it keeps all old files, so when editing an image many times, files accumulate
azaozz – perhaps needs a way to check which (old) sizes have been used in posts and delete the rest
junsuijin – post meta?
azaozz – may need to separate the attachments meta into 3 fields, old meta, sizes and exif
azaozz – any questions/wishes/complains about it?
sivel – azaozz: honestly haven’t had time to look at the code or play with it
azaozz – ok, if there are any, add them to the ticket :)

I have no idea what the ticket number is. A search in trac for image editor or image editing didn’t provide me with any clear answers.

MarkJaquith – Galleries — this has been disappointing to me. We need to make some decisions. I feel like we’ve thrown a bunch of ideas around but we need to stop waffling.

This topic took up the bulk of time for the meeting. It looks unlikely that the code created through the GSoC project for Media in general will not be used. The general line of thought is to create an album taxonomy which would not be limited to the traditional ‘album’ displays. Considering the magnitude of this project, images will be the primary focus as first with other media types to follow. Last but not least, this project has a high possibility of being one of the first canonical plugins for core which just means one plugin but many contributors.

jeffr0 – Directed at Mark. Has their been any talk of a new supported legacy branch?

Considering the security stuff earlier this month, some folks have been suggesting that WordPress bring back a supported legacy branch of WordPress. I decided to ask if any talk of this has been ongoing in the inner dev circle and Mark replied that he wasn’t aware of any. In fact, Mark stated he would be extremely opposed to an LTS (Long Term Service) branch. Sivel doesn’t think it is something that they are ready to undertake.

MarkJaquith – I’d rather direct resources to making upgrades smoother and showcasing well-coded plugins that won’t break on upgrade.
westi – The only way a LTS branch is going to exist is if the person that wants it creates it. our resources are better directed elsewhere

Embeds – Viper007Bond has been cranking away on something called embeds which would make embedding video content easier. (Trac Ticket 10337) The talk was a bit too technical for me to understand but Mark Jaquith along with some others believe that the code will need an independent security review. If you want to read more about easier embeds, point your browser to here and scroll up.

How To Participate:

If you want to suggest a topic to be discussed at the next meeting, 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 or 9PM UTC Thursdays. The meeting day was changed to accommodate European users.#wordpress-dev.