Plugin committers now receive svn notify emails with every commit to their plugin. This is something we’ve been planning to do to assist with collaboration, but we added it today without extra things like being able to sign up for other plugins. (Look for that soon, though.)

And not to sound like the PA in a subway or at an airport, but if you see something, say something. Say things to security@wordpress.org.

Commit access has been restored for plugins. If you get a 403 error, you need to go reset your password. Please, to something new.

If anyone has time this week, there are about 100 tickets that need to be reviewed for potential 3.2 issues we missed. The first page of Report 40 lists “Defects Awaiting Review, reported against trunk” and “Defects Awaiting Review, reported against no version.”

Basically, we’re just looking for bugs to 3.2 features, and regressions. Many of these either need the version numbers dropped (or added) or converted to enhancements. If someone wants to do full triage, ping me or someone in IRC and we’ll arrange milestone adjustments.

Update: Specifics on how to help.

• The Version field is for the earliest known version that the ticket affects. For bugs, this would be the version to which it applies or was introduced. All the ones that say “3.2,” if they aren’t new bugs in 3.2, then they should be changed to 3.1 or, for extra credit, earlier.

• If the ticket is pushing for an enhancement, rather than reporting a bug, then simply change the Type field to “enhancement.” (Rarely “feature request,” never “task.”)

(Contributors who have participated on Trac before will of course know to adjust keywords, perhaps even adjust milestones and what not. But these are two simple ways to help clean up this report.)

I’m doing a talk at Open Source bridge tomorrow/today on encouraging younger contributors. Can any/all contributors do me a favor and so we can get an idea of the average age of our current contributors, and how old people were when they got bitten by the open source bug? Thanks much!

One idea that grew from this thread about the number of developers whose jobs are supported by WordPress was that we should try to get more information about the WP developer community at large. There are probably hundreds, maybe thousands, that have never registered at WordPress.org, let alone been to a WordCamp or subscribed to this blog. It would be interesting to know about them, and also to give them an opportunity to participate in (and maybe even contribute to) the community.

I’m planning on including a link to a survey in the 3.2 announcement post. Because the email goes to end-users as well as developers, this is a great opportunity to capture some feedback from them too. We’ll open source the anonymized/aggregate raw response data and probably present some of the analysis at WordCamps too, like the upcoming State of the Word at WCSF.

The goals of the survey are:

1. Gather data on the number and nature of companies and independent developers that use WordPress. (How many jobs has WP created?) Use this both for some static reporting, but also to track trends over time if we do a similar survey next year.
2. Provide the community with a picture of the end users. What people and companies use WordPress, and how?
3. Inspire greater participation in the community through awareness and the opportunity to receive more information.

It’s currently sitting in the wiki at http://codex.wordpress.org/User:Pjad/WordPress_User/Developer_Survey

What do you think? Any questions missing or ones we should re-word?

Austin happy hour people — please RSVP. Thanks! http://wp-austin-happy-hour.eventbrite.com/

Custom taxonomies have a new string: view_item, defaulting to “View Tag” and “View Category,” respectively. You can define this as part of your labels array. It is currently used in the admin bar.

Austin Happy Hour Next Week

Next week I’m going to be in Austin next week along with the rest of the Automattic Dot Org Team (that’s the team at Automattic that is dedicated full-time to contributing to wp and related open source projects) — that’s me, Ryan Boren, Andrew Ozz, Daryl Koopersmith, Chelsea Otakan, BuddyPress and bbPress lead John James Jacoby, and newcomer Andrea Middleton (who is taking over the administration of WordCamp Central).

Next Wednesday, June 15th, we’ll all be at Doc’s on South Congress for happy hour. If any of you in the Austin area (@technosailor? @sivel?) feel like stopping by,that would be fun.

3.2 Schedule Update

We were scheduled to do RC1 today. With around 100 tickets in Trac, this is not happening. We did a giant push to meet the beta deadline, but then people went back to their other stuff, dealt with 3.1.3 security release along with beta 2, and generally slowed down. I’m pushing back the RC target date on the schedule to Monday.

In the words of Lester Bangs (by way of Cameron Crowe via Almost Famous), let’s be honest and unmerciful in today’s scrub.

• If there’s a patch, make the call: is it in or out? If it’s not a blocker or a regression and the patch isn’t quite there, punt it, even if it is your pet ticket.
• If there’s not a patch, how bad is the bug? Blocker or regression? Assign it to someone and get a patch for testing by tomorrow. Not? Punt it and hit it early in 3.3.
• We need to fish or cut bait on a number of lingering small UI things. If someone wants to run through them with me we should be able to knock them out today or by tomorrow at latest.
• Licensing tickets. We need to do the right thing in all cases, and we need to do it this release.
• String freeze. I’ll do a run through today/tomorrow and look for anything that we’d planned to update but haven’t yet, including Credits and Freedoms screens. We need to do a check on text in help tabs,too, some still need updating. Will write text change patches myself or have a volunteer do them.
• Any tickets left in the milestone by EOD tomorrow should be blockers.

Let’s get this released tidied up and shipped so we can get started on 3.3!