WordPress 2.7 has only been out for a short time but the folks at Automattic and the WordPress Developer community are already looking forward to version 2.8. If you haven’t already upgraded to 2.7, you should do so pretty quickly. It’s a major redesign of the backend / dashboard. I have slowly migrated my clients over to the new version and given them an opportunity to ask questions and find their way around before I turned the reigns back over to them and for the most part everyone seems to be very impressed.
From a usability standpoint, actions that used to be 3 clicks in the old dashboard are now 2 clicks, and in some cases 1 click. A lot of care was also taken to ensure that most plugins would continue to function correctly inside version 2.7 as well, I haven’t had any of my core plug-ins fail so far w/ 2.7 and that’s pretty phenomenal considering most major releases will clash w/ plugins like PodPress just about everytime, but the last 2 releases from WordPress have went so smoothly that PodPress continued to function w/out updating.
Jane Wells posted an entry on the WordPress Blog today about version 2.8 and gives us some hints as to what we might expect in the next release candidate!
Prioritizing Features for WordPress 2.8
By Jane Wells. Filed under Development, Features.
Everyone knows by now that WordPress 2.7 is packed with new features. Now that it’s available (almost 600,000 downloads as I write this!), it’s time to start working on 2.8. There were dozens of things that got tabled during 2.7 due to time constraints, and there are a lot of high-rated features in the Ideas forum, so there are a lot of potential features under consideration.
Right now, the lead developers are thinking the top priorities for 2.8 will be widget management, theme browser/installer and performance upgrades. The rest of the development time will be taken up with bug tickets and additional features/enhancements from a prioritized list. To that end, we’ve posted a new survey for you to help us prioritize features for 2.8. The list pulls from the developers’ “2.7 leftovers” list as well as the most popular features from the Ideas forum. Just rank each feature and tell us your top pick (up to three). You also have the option of adding comments or additional suggestions, but this is not mandatory. For your response to count, you must rank all of the features in the list. The survey has only one page.
Note that media features are not included in this list as we will be posting a separate survey for media-specific features soon.
Cast your votes any time this week, but as always the sooner the better. This survey will close at noon on December 31, 2008 UTC.
In the new year, we will be reviving scheduled IRC developer chats, where the lead developers will discuss the week’s progress on feature development, providing opportunities for people to ask questions or make suggestions. These will be held early in the day on Wednesdays (U.S. Wednesday), and the specific time will be posted here on the development blog once it’s been finalized.
As a related aside, we spent a significant amount of time during 2.7 development sifting through Trac tickets that really shouldn’t have been there. Feature ideas and requests do not belong in Trac, they belong in the Ideas forum. Please reserve Trac for reporting bugs and things that need fixing (typos, code enhancements, etc.). If you are asking for a new UI, a new feature, or a new approach to coding something, that’s not an enhancement, it’s a new feature. New features will be entered into Trac by developers once it has been determined that the feature should be included in core. To help speed up development, moving forward we will close Trac tickets that are actually feature requests, with the comment that they should be posted in the Ideas forum instead. Please help the developers maximize their time by following this guideline.
Questions or Comments?