Kicking off the WordPress 3.9 development cycle

Helen Hou-Sandi on February 7, 2014

After the excitement of the 3.8 release and a typically quiet winter holiday season, it’s time to start in earnest on WordPress 3.9. This is a particularly exciting release for me: after three cycles of being a guest committer, I’ve been granted permanent commit access to core. My goal is to continue to inform and build the admin experience, provide feedback on community contributions, and bring perspectives from real-world client implementation back to our favorite publishing platform. I’m honored to join these trusted ranks!

Drew Jaynes has also been renewed as a guest committer, and is on track to complete the inline documentation for hooks initiative. A few 10uppers have already begun contributing patches, with several working on unit tests. I’m particularly excited to see work by Adam Silverstein on storing revisions of post meta and a ticket on the topic opened by Jake.

After the excitement of the admin refresh and several other new features in 3.8, WordPress 3.9 will be focused on refining these and other recent additions. For example, I have been helping to organize and shape an initiative to bring more features into the media editor, such as image editing and oEmbed previews. The latest version of TinyMCE (the visual editor) has already been added, and work has begun to improve audio/video support and the themes experience. You can see even more 3.9 proposals in this post on Make WordPress Core.

For the next few months, I’ll focus on proposed feature plugins with an eye on future releases, while simultaneously reviewing and committing patches. I’ve already eliminated some redundancy by merging in the default colors, and have begun splitting up the main admin CSS file into modules, much as it was before 3.3. We expect that this shift will make maintenance and contributions easier to manage.

I also have my eye on are bringing autocomplete to more places to better help it scale (e.g. user and page drop downs), alternative taxonomy meta box display options, and reusable form styles for the admin as a start toward admin UI components. If the last two sound familiar to you, it’s because I’ve talked about them a little before in my talk at WordCamp San Francisco 2013.

Follow along with development on Make WordPress Core, a newly enhanced Trac, and the weekly development chats in IRC, and tell us what you’re looking forward to!