The plugins directory should now update in near real-time. Previously updates only ran every 15 minutes and some other things (namely adding committers) fired less often.

If you notice any problems, please comment here.

Thanks @bazza for doing this!

Core Team Meetup Recap: Multisite

These are the notes from a breakout discussion on multisite at the core meetup with me, @markjaquith, and @nacin. As with all of these discussion summaries, please remember that they’re just discussions. I’m posting the notes for transparency purposes, not to say that these are the only things discussed or decided. I’m working from notes, and sometimes you don’t get everything down when you’re taking notes (next year I’ll record these things instead).

Multisite!

Who can lead this joint? Since the merge and Donncha moving on to other things, we had Ron for a cycle, Pete for a cycle, then no one. It would be good to have someone act as component owner.

Multisite needs parity with the single site experience. Includes UI, UX, copy/strings, install flexibility (subdomain etc), installation ease (add a site).

First we need to improve the manage/use experience, then fix install stuff and get it into the dashboard to turn on multisite.

We need a useful global dashboard.

We need to have flexibility in where sites and networks live — should be able to live wherever you want on one network. Subdomains/subdirectories/mapping/whatever you want, mixed subdomain/subdirectory, custom domains, global permalink consumer/router.

Need to fix different workflows: adding users to network, adding users to site, invitations. User signup, creation, assignment, invitation all need new flow

We need parity between plugins and themes. Enable vs activation is confusing, need to improve language, indicators. Need ability to network enable but disable for individual sites. Need to standardize network enable/activate etc for plugins/themes. Network activated plugins don’t show in individual site’s plugin list, which is confusing.

UX Action Items:

UX ACTION ITEM — Include network activated plugins in the plugins menu and give message that it is automatically on for the whole network (if admin/have rights to see plugins screen).

UX ACTION ITEM — Autocomplete usernames or site names for network admin and for superadmin everywhere.

UX ACTION ITEM — Get multisite tag/indicator on plugins in directory, add multisite specific/required indicator.

Under the Hood Action Items:

ACTION ITEM — Get rid of MS-FILES.

ACTION ITEM — Enable install in subdirectory so you can use externals.

MT has given the typography on WordPress.org a refresh to bring it more in line with our sans-serif (instead of Lucida) approach in the WP dashboard, and also tightened up the vertical space the sub-heads were taking up on the page. Helvetica / Arial is a bit tougher than Lucida at smaller pixel sizes, so drop a comment here if you notice anything funky on the site.

Been giving a lot of thought to how to give plugin authors more control over their plugin pages. In WordPress custom headers have been hugely beneficial in people’s ability to make a theme their own without having to be a designer. (And designers can make them really sing.)

As an experiment we’ve turned on custom headers for the plugin directory. If you’d like to try out this feature:

1. Make a 772×250 pixel jpeg or png. (No animated GIFs. )
2. Check it in to your plugin’s SVN directory with the path assets/banner-772x250.(jpg|png). Note that the assets directory is added to your plugin’s root directory, not trunk.
3. On the next plugin directory refresh (every 15 minutes or so) you should see your image start showing up on the page.

For an example of this in action, check out Hello Dolly, natch. Our goal is to mainly see how people use them, so if you try this out leave comment below with a link to your plugin!

Final note: this is just an experiment, and there is a 98.254% chance the dimensions, placement, and text overlay for this header will change in the future, or the idea might not work at all. But I think it’s a nice toe in the water for letting authors really make their plugin pages shine.

Between some people still being in transit and some others out for the holiday, there will not be an official dev chat today. Anyone who is around and wants to meet up in the channel could do a scrub on bugs (any/all). Next week we’ll meet to begin discussions about 3.4 process and scope.

Core Team Meetup Recap: Default Theme “Twenty Twelve”

One of the topics discussed at the core team meetup was next year’s default theme. It was determined that the default theme will be Matt’s project for 3.4. Matt will be overseeing a theme designer (via Lance) to ensure a theme that is “kind of different from before, generally palatable, and that Matt likes.” Once Matt chooses a design, a directory will be started and the core team will supervise the code from the start, hopefully with review cycles involving the theme review team.

Some notes about what we want in a new default theme:

• single post/permalink view with post formats is needed
• variable height header image
• mobile version
• default to static front page (will need a function in core to auto-choose)
• editor styles the same as front end.
• avoid clever things that aren’t super-useful (like ephemera widget)
• start with 2011 as base for code (or 2010, which has gotten more updates and had more eyes on it)
• no featured image in header
• by default – no header image

To-do: Reverse engineer from 3.4 timeline to create a schedule of deadlines for theme design and development.

Core Team Meetup Recap – Part II

Picking up where we left off….

Friday

We kicked off Friday with a discussion about the high-level roadmap for 2012. Using our earlier talk about process and scope, we identified areas/userflows that we could use to focus a release. Areas of interest included changing themes/customizing your site, uploading a bunch of photos, interacting with audience/feedback loop. (There were more, but let’s face it, there are too many things we’d like to improve to do them all at once.)

We all donned WordPress gear so that people would recognize us at the happy hour later.

Dion (dd32) modeling the latest swag

Dion and Andrew Ozz before lunch

Lunch: Went to The Sentient Bean in Savannah.

The Sentient Bean

Back patio at the Sentient Bean

Koop and Mark, Dion and Ozz in the background

Next we went to ThincSavannah, my coworking space in downtown Savannah. We did the livestreamed Town Hall/Q&A (recording coming soon), answering questions from that forum thread I put up last week and a few that came in live from IRC.

Core team town hall

After that was happy hour at Jazz’d. Only two people came to hang out with us (and to think we dressed up especially!), but they were two great people, so we were fine. Some drinks and appetizers later, we departed for WordPress on Ice, in which we went ice skating at the Civic Center.

Nacin and Koop on skates

WordPress on Ice! Nacin, Mark, Jane, Matt, Jon, Daryl

Then a stop at Huc-a-Poo’s, then home.

Saturday

We spent the morning talking about mobile apps and their place in the WordPress ecosystem, as well as making the dashboard a better experience when viewed in a mobile browser.

Lunch: Went to AJ’s and ate on the deck. Continued talking about mobile. This eventually morphed a bit into a discussion about the lines between .org/.com.

Core team at lunch at AJ's Dockside

After lunch we talked about the default theme for 2012, including what it should do/be that our current themes don’t already accomplish, and the process for its creation. Breakouts followed. One was focused on multisite, while the other was focused on hosting/diagnostics/health check. We tested doing a Google Hangout with screensharing as a way to collaborate more effectively throughout the year, and agreed we would try to do them once a month. For dinner we got takeout BBQ from Gerald’s Pig & Shrimp. We pretended @ryan was with us by playing a video of him from last year’s meetup. Afterward, Koop gave a primer on JavaScript.

Sunday

When we started this morning, we tried to at least quickly hit the things we hadn’t gotten to yet, since today was the last day. These included: Google stuff, core plugins, how leadership in core does/does not translate to leadership of the whole project, wordpress.org site, pairs (creating process to make collaborative/non-solo development the norm), and CMS stuff.

Since a lot of us were pretty interested in making the theme customization process a focus of the next release, we starting identifying what the chunks of that might look like under the new process and with people working in pairs/teams. We continued talking about this over brunch at the Tybee Island Social Club, where @nacin and @dkoopersmith drank bacon bloody marys.

Bacon Bloody Mary

Should Nacin eat the bacon or drink the bloody mary? He can't decide.

After brunch, @markjaquith and @dd32 left for the airport, and @joncave and @azaozz left two hours later. Bye bye, core team!

Now we begin a 2nd mini meetup. Matt, Nacin, Koop, and I are staying, and have been joined by @otto42 and @chexee. The next couple of days we’ll be doing some planning and starting projects to make visiting wordpress.org a better, more useful experience.  Tonight, though, everyone is catching up on some individual work after a week of long days.

We’ll post summaries of the specific core meetup discussions over the coming week.

Core Team Meetup Recap – Part I

As most people know, the core team (leads, primary committers, Matt) is having its annual meetup this week, packed into a house in Tybee Island, GA with an hour by hour schedule to try to get through as many things as we can. We’ll try to do recaps of everything we talk about to keep everyone in the loop (feel free to ask questions in the comments).

Monday/Tuesday

Matt, Mark Jaquith, Westi and I arrived (well, they arrived; I live here) on Monday and had a day to plan out the agenda topics and work out how we wanted to schedule the week.  Rather than plot out a unique schedule every day, we put together a repeatable pattern for morning and afternoon that looked like this:

For the record, “Break” means “Check email, catch up on Trac tickets, etc,” not, “Hang out on the couch watching Hulu.”

On Tuesday we also took a field trip to buy a cable modem capable of handling the bandwidth increase we’d ordered. That night, everyone else arrived: Nacin, Koop, Dion (dd32), Andrew (azaozz), and Jon (duck_). We had dinner at the Crab Shack and planned an early start on Wednesday.

Wednesday

Wednesday was our first day as a full group. We followed the schedule fairly well, though as always with us, some things took longer than expected.

Breakfast: We went to eat at the Breakfast Club, where a bunch of the guys had Blackhawk burritos in honor of our absent member, Ryan Boren.

Our first main topic was a 3.3 debrief to discuss for about 45 minutes how the 3.3 development cycle went. (Going to split out the notes from these sessions into separate posts, or this post will be a mile long.)

After that we had breakout sessions, where the intention was for smaller groups to brainstorm/discuss an issue, then come up with a proposal/recommendation to present to the group. The two topics were QA and Updates (specifically the road to auto-updating and how we could get there). Mark assigned people to each session and half the group went upstairs. Coincidentally, that was the UPdates group. (sorry) Afterward, we regrouped and caught each other up on our proposals.

Lunch: Blackhawk burritos keep you full for days, so people just made sandwiches.

Round 2 started bringing in @ryan via Skype video from his home in Texas. The main discussion centered on our development cycle/release process/scoping/timelines. We discussed a number of things we could try to keep the cycles more consistent, reduce bottlenecks, and improve accountability.

Dinner: It was my birthday, so we all went to the Tybee Island Social Club for “Winesday” and continued our talks about everything from the wordpress.org site to growing local developer and user communities. There may be a picture of Koop and/or Nacin wearing a child’s birthday hat. Mark Jaquith has the footage.

Thursday

Breakfast: Miscellaneous breakfast stuff at the house. Pretty sure there was a bunch of bacon involved.

Morning session: Plugins, plugins, plugins. You name it, we talked about it. Findability in the directory, improving the repo and developer experience, plugin review, encouraging collaboration, 3rd party repos, communication with authors, and more.

Both breakout sessions were plugin-centric. In addition to general recommendations, each subteam was required to identify two discrete action items to help us move forward in their assigned area. One subteam (Me, Westi, Jon Cave, Andrew Ozz) was focused on planning upcoming wordpress.org sites in the Make and Learn areas, while the other (Matt, Nacin, Koop, Dion, Mark) focused on improving the directory.

This day we did an actual fun outing to get us out of our chairs and away from the laptops for a bit, and went out on a boat for an hour so the guys could get a tour of the river/marsh and hit the ocean as we looped past the Cockspur Lighthouse.

Core team, on a boat

Dion (dd32) and Matt

Koop

Matt and Cockspur Lighthouse, Tybee Island

After the boat, we went to lunch at North Beach Grill. There were conversations about infrastructure, performance, automated testing, and crawfish poppers. Before going back to the house, we did a 5-minute walk down to the water.

Westi on the beach

In the afternoon, rather than doing another block of heavy discussions, everyone worked on their computers. Some of you may have had some issues accessing svn etc last night, and so did we. So that took a while. After that it was general hackery and miscellaneous discussions about functions, bugs, and the usual things wp devs talk about when they are together. This lasted into the evening, so instead of going out to dinner we ordered pizza from Huc-a-Poo’s and kept working.

Friday

Today we’re having a modified schedule because Westi leaves to go home this evening, so we’re trying to get certain things finished before he leaves. We’ll be working this afternoon from a coworking space in downtown Savannah, and will be recording video responses to some of the questions on the forum thread I posted last week. If bandwidth supports it, we’ll livestream this while we record, and could possibly take more questions from people in #wordpress-dev. If we do it, we’ll use the Ustream “WordPress” user channel, and it will be mid-afternoon eastern time (maybe around 3pm?). Once we get there after lunch and can tell if the livestreaming will work, I’ll post on this blog with the verdict.

Off to Friday’s sessions! We’ll start posting the session writeups as time allows, but will get them all up there no later than the end of next week (there are a lot of notes).

As the WordPress core team is in the middle of an in-person meetup, we’ll be skipping the IRC dev chat this week. We’ll be collecting our notes throughout each day of the meetup and posting a summary the following day.

Use wp_enqueue_scripts, not wp_print_styles, to enqueue scripts and styles for the frontend

If you are enqueueing scripts and styles, you will want to use one of these three hooks:

1. wp_enqueue_scripts (for the frontend)
2. login_enqueue_scripts (for the login screen)
3. admin_enqueue_scripts (for the admin dashboard)

Don’t let the names fool you — they are for both scripts and styles. We’ll probably add equivalent *_enqueue_styles hooks in 3.4 just to make it more obvious, but these hooks have all existed for some time now.

A possible incompatibility with WordPress 3.3 could arise if you are using the wp_print_styles hook to enqueue styles — your styles may end up in the admin.

The fix: Use wp_enqueue_scripts instead. Yes, it’s that easy.

Edit: Yes, the same goes for registering styles. Registering or enqueueing (styles or scripts) should occur on *_enqueue_scripts.

(Background: #19510)