GSoC is over, almost everyone passed, and it’s time to see how everyone did. There will be one last round of student IRC chats:

• Template Versioning, David Julia: August 29, 16:00 UTC
• Language Packs, Marko Novakovic: August 29, 16:30 UTC
• Local Storage Drafts backup, Mihai Chereji: August 30, 16:00 UTC
• Enhanced emails, Wojtek Szutnik: August 30, 16:30 UTC
• Extending WP Webservices, Prasath Nadarajah: August 30, 17:00 UTC
• Threaded comments, Lukasz Koprowski: August 30, 17:30 UTC
• WordPress Move, Mert Yazicioglu: Sept 1, 16:00 UTC
• File Uploader Upgrade, Jacob Gillespie: Sept 1, 16:30 UTC
• Document Revisions, Ben Balter: Sept 2, 16:00 UTC
• learn.wordpress.org, Stas Suscov, Sept 2, 16:30 UTC
• Refresh Android app UI, Anirudh S: Sept 5, 17:00 UTC

You can read all about them in advance if you haven’t been following along at http://gsoc2011.wordpress.com/

Chat room in on irc.freenode.net #wordpress-gsoc

Commit This

It is with great pleasure (not to mention optimism, satisfaction, and many other adjectives) that I officially announce the addition of Jon Cave (aka duck_, or said aloud as “duck undah”) to the WordPress version 3.3 commit team. Duck’s consistently good code, communication skills, eye for security, and tireless efforts made it a natural choice to give him a more official role with this release cycle. Also, @ryan is just sick of having to commit his patches.

duck_ joins permanent committers @nacin, @dd32, Nikolay, and Joseph Scott, as well as @dkoopersmith, whose 3.2 commit stint has been re-upped.

Congrats, you deserve it!

Jon Cave aka "duck_" at WordCamp SF 2011 — photo by Mark Jaquith

Matt announced today at the 2011 State of the Word that plugins and themes are now hidden from the search results (on both WordPress.org and in the plugin/theme install screens) if they have not been updated in two years.

For plugins only: Older plugins that are still compatible and secure only need to have their “requires” and “tested up to” version numbers bumped. If you do this, actually releasing a new version of the plugin is not necessary, so leave the version number the same.

FYI in regards to Akismet as a subversion external.

Older versions of WordPress used Akismet -trunk as an external. So for active Akismet plugin development we created a -dev directory, to avoid any accidental breakage.

Current versions of WordPress use a release tag of the Akismet plugin as an external. With that change there isn’t much point in having a -dev for the Akismet WP plugin. This is a heads up for anyone still using Akismet -trunk as an external that it will be used for current development work again. If you don’t want to get those changes you should switch your external to the current release tag (2.5.3):

http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/akismet/tags/2.5.3

I don’t think there are many folks left using Akismet -trunk as an external, but I still wanted to update people on the situation.