There was some talk last night about maybe doing a little design brushup on the admin header/nav. We only have a couple of days to decide on the design changes if we want to include it in 2.8. Would like to give community designers the opportunity to do a mockup (could give them a psd of the current style), but since they’d need to submit their design suggestions by Monday, and I’m nervous that there might be some backlash for the short/no notice. I mean, MT didn’t get any notice either, so it seems fair. It’s a pretty small design job… Jaquith did a quick mockup in 5 minutes. If anyone does take up the challenge, we can post the comps for a vote on Tuesday. What do people think?

Widgets redesign

All of the redesigned widgets functionality is in place in trunk. Only remaining is some improvement to the visual design for the widgets screen in admin.

The new way to add widgets to WordPress is by extending WP_Widget. All widgets created that way have support for multiple instances.

Also all existing widgets will have to be converted to this system as the previous API functions will (most likely) be removed in 2.9. This is quite easy and any of the default widgets can be used as an example.

A typical widget is constructed as follows:

class WP_Widget_Archives extends WP_Widget {
	function WP_Widget_Archives() {
		$widget_ops = array('classname' => 'widget_archive', 'description' => __( "A monthly archive of your blog's posts") );
		$this->WP_Widget(false, __('Archives'), $widget_ops);
	}

	function widget( $args, $instance ) {
		// displays the widget on the front end
	}

	function update( $new_instance, $old_instance ) {
		// update the instance's settings
	}

	function form( $instance ) {
		// displays the widget admin form
	}
}

// register the widget
add_action('widgets_init', 'my_super_widget_init');
function my_super_widget_init() {
	register_widget('WP_Widget_Archives');
}

For more details and examples check wp-includes/widgets.php and wp-includes/default-widgets.php.

The plugins management page has been overhauled to better match other management pages. There are status filters for All, Active, Recently Active, Inactive, and Update Available. There’s also search and paging with a screen option for setting the number of plugins to show per page.

When on a management page, the Favorite Actions dropdown now defaults to the create page that corresponds to that management page, and vice-versa. For example, visit edit.php and the dropdown displays “Create Post”. Visit post-new.php and the dropdown displays “Edit Posts”.

plugins.php and edit-comments.php remember the last status filter you selected. Try it out. If we like this we can add it to other pages that have filters.

Reviewing GSOC applications

Idea: We should do a branch prior to release (we do this anyway) and then commit to that branch a minimization of all JS and CSS, so trunk always has pretty-formatted, and release branches always have minimized.

Or this might not be needed with Andrew’s new stuff.