Hopefully, all of your WordPress installations so far have been successfully upgraded to version 3.4. One of the most exciting things about a release is getting to work on the next one! Here’s a sneak peek at what was discussed in the latest WordPress 3.5 development chat scoping session.

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First, important notes

All information discussed in this week's WordPress Developer Chat is still extremely tentative. So even though a specific feature or change might be talked about, it might not actually appear in WordPress 3.5, or it might end up being different than what was initially discussed. So if it doesn’t look like what I’m going to talk about when WordPress 3.5 is released… you’ve been warned!

Quick Facts: For those of you who don’t know what WordPress Developer Chat is, it’s a weekly meeting held by the WordPress development team in the #wordpress-dev channel of the IRC chat. If you couldn't make it to the actual meeting, or want to see the entire discussion which I'll summarize here, you can read the IRC logs of these chats. You can also follow the WordPress development blog, which has recently moved to the “make” network of WordPress blogs.

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WordPress 3.5 Discussion Content

This week’s discussion is moderated by Andrew Nacin, who was recently promoted to Lead Developer in recognition of his incredible contributions. Matt Mullenweg also spoke to explain his thoughts on the direction of the next version.

Matt's main feature scope proposal is (quote from dev chat):

1. The first thing mentioned is: "Twenty-Twelve", which was originally planned to release version 3.4, but was later postponed.

   "2012 is coming, and while it needs more work, the cycle should be sufficient

   In addition to being bundled with 3.5, we should also consider promoting it separately

   ...

   In the theme directory after we give it a development once/twice in trunk"

   Of course, it will be interesting to see the new Twenty-Twelve themes released with 3.5 and see what might change between now and then. Here is a demonstration of the current state of "Twenty-Twelve": "Twenty-Twelve Demonstration".

2. "When we restructure everything it would be nice to flatten the admin aesthetic a bit to make it easier to zoom in and out in the future (responsive) and also be recolorable (blue for now) The theme is A lot of overhead)

   Inspired by https://github.com/blog/1106-say-hello-to-octicons, WordPress.com has also been using them successfully - http://wordpress. com/i/noticons/example.html

   We have less and less cartoon/icon stuff now”

   The second proposal is not surprising, as this is the direction the web seems to be generally heading, and it makes sense. As Matt mentioned, GitHub is a prominent example of using fonts instead of icons/symbols for scalability. It would also be nice to give the blue management theme some love (or lose it).

3. "It's been a while since we've removed something and I'd like to nominate Link Manager, which is a complete top-level menu item"

   "But I love Link Manager. I use it all the time!" ~ Never anyone. ”

   ~Mark Jaques

   The third thing surprised me even more, but was very welcome! It’s definitely time to remove some of the residual “Blog Memories” features from WordPress that are getting less and less used and fueling the “WordPress is just for blogging” argument. Getting rid of the link manager will help tidy up the admin interface, but will obviously require some thought for the few people who really rely on this feature. Some discussions are leaning toward making it a widget, or a custom menu, or even a plugin.

Some other suggestions from developers for the scope of functionality in 3.5 are:

• Working on the welcome screen, installation wizard, and new user experience (Ben Balter's article "The Death of the Dashboard" is also referenced here), and further UI discussion about what might be coming into 3.5 scope happens at Make WordPress UI on the blog.
• More tweaks to the theme customizer. Specifically working on handling custom headers and background workflow and menus (widgets were mentioned, but more likely for 3.6)
• Redesigned upload/insert media workflow. Nacin noted that it's important to narrow the scope now. Some things he mentions that are out of scope are galleries as objects and multiple parents as attachments. Essentially, anything that is not currently in the media dialog (such as the media library screen, etc.) will not be touched. The idea is to streamline and separate the functionality provided by the media dialog box: task separation.
• Two things Nacin mentioned in the media upload area (if you have extra time) are: background uploading, and dragging and dropping images into the editor. I doubt these features will make it to version 3.5 given the tight timeline, but it's nice to see features like this on the radar and Andrew Ozz seems to feel they might not be as long as you first think. Nacin and Mark Jaquith even mentioned the ability to set up image uploads to other servers!
• Andrew Ozz also proposed the idea of ??security hardening, including admin notification emails for plugin/theme activation, available updates, etc. So hopefully this will get some attention for WordPress 3.5 as well.

These are some very exciting suggestions for scope, and while it's all still very tentative, I'm looking forward to seeing how this all pans out. I'm also looking forward to being part of the development process.

Nacin mentioned three platform improvements that he would like to see included in WordPress 3.5 as well:

• "Copies of files during upgrade should be verified using hashes. I like too many support requests and emails every version and it's because the files are not copied. We should verify and retry as v1 "
• "WordPress.org now supports plugin favorites. I hope Otto42 will be the first to introduce an API that allows you to browse your favorite plugins in the dashboard, just like viewing recently updated plugins."
• "Language packs for default themes and "core" plugins (importers, etc.)"

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When will WordPress 3.5 be released

The tentative release date for WordPress 3.5 was also discussed. The team is targeting a release on or around December 5th. This actually makes the development cycle quite short, less than 5 months from now. It also covers the time span of major events such as WordCamp San Francisco, the WordPress Community Summit, the Automattic Company Meetup, and the PressNomics Conference.

There is also talk of freezing the feature before September 12th, and then completing user testing and adjustments by September 26th. This means there is room for betas, release candidates, etc. before the final release. As Scribu summed it up in the chat, it was basically two months of development and then two months of polishing.

This seems like a fairly optimistic timeline, but if managed properly it will mean this is a focused round of development.

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Next steps in the development process

Early this week, Nacin will release the official summary of the Make/Core scoping sessions, encouraging developers who want to participate to raise their hands to form teams around each major feature. Teams was involved in the development process for WordPress 3.4 and it seemed to be going very well, so they’re sticking with it again this time.

Nacin’s agenda for next week’s WordPress Developer Chat might be:

• The functional scope is mainly determined based on the content discussed in this meeting
• Finalize all platform/API considerations
• Discuss unit testing, XML-RPC, etc. These need to be worked on to keep pace with other developments

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in conclusion

WordPress 3.5 planning is underway, which is very exciting. Some of the features discussed are pretty important, so you'll notice them once they're released and upgraded! Again, I should point out that everything mentioned above is very tentative, but it at least shows the direction of development.

So what are you most hoping to see included in WordPress 3.5? What hasn’t been mentioned but you do think needs improvement? Most importantly, are you going to participate and contribute to WordPress this time? Let us know in the comments below!

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