On Saturday, Matt posted to the WordPress Blog that the plugin directory has been refreshed.

Also also posted to our new P2 at make.wordpress.org/plugins: what this means for developers. @otto42, @coffee2code, and I go through the changes in detail. They include:

• The new Developers and Support tabs for plugins
• Subscribing to commit emails (Hint: see the Developers tab)
• Following and managing support threads
• How the new support statics are calculated

(Sidebar: We hope to use make.wordpress.org/plugins for announcements and resources for plugin developers. This blog will also move to make.wordpress.org soon. More to come.)

A change to api.wordpress.org temporarily broke the API that powers the plugin install screens in your WordPress dashboard. If you saw “An unknown error occurred during the API request” when going to Plugins → Add New, it was us, not you.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

I’ve created a bug report to improve the error message shown to users, in the very rare event that something goes wrong on wordpress.org. That should be included in WordPress 3.4 (and is hopefully an error message you will never have to see).

The plugin directory’s licensing guidelines have been updated. The guidelines will now allow code that is licensed under (or compatible with) version 3 of the GPL.

The guidelines still encourage use of “GPLv2 or later,” the same license as WordPress. However, we understand that many open source libraries use other licenses that are nonetheless compatible, such as GPLv2 only, GPLv3, and Apache 2.0.

Now may be a good time for plugin authors to review their plugins to ensure a license is specified. You can add License and License URI headers to readme.txt and the plugin’s headers. (You may also wish to include a copying permission statement.) For example:

License: GPLv2 or later
License URI: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html

You can see this used in the sample readme.txt.

This change brings the guidelines in line with the themes directory, which has for some time accepted GPLv3-compatible code. (Probably a good time to note that Creative Commons licenses are still incompatible with the GPL, and the theme and plugin directories.)

We’re seeing increased reports in readme.txt files not updating for plugins. Likely related to the migration to nginx from earlier this week, as in the process a number of configurations were updated (also PHP 5.2 to 5.3), and now signs point to memcached caching algorithms (riveting). @bazza is looking into the problem; @otto42 and I are also looking into some wider issues.

Thanks to @bazza and @stankea, WordPress.org has been fully migrated to nginx from Litespeed and Apache. Please let me know if you find things wonky with anything on wordpress.org, api.wordpress.org, bbpress.org, buddypress.org, etc. (Beyond the usual wonkiness, of course.)

The only known issue is that query strings were temporarily broken on translate.wordpress.org. The rewrite rule has been fixed.

Phishing attempts for WordPress.org credentials

Recently there was a “phishing” email sent to several plugin authors designed to steal their login credentials. If you receive or have received any emails claiming to be from the plugin repository, please make sure to double check them. Emails regarding the repository are always sent from a wordpress.org email address. If in doubt please reply to the email asking for confirmation.

Please always check the URL you are logging into, for any site. Be sure you are logging into “wordpress.org”, not “wordpress.some-evil-domain.info”.

Here’s what many plugin authors have reported receiving:

Example phishing email. That link doesn't go to wordpress.org, though! (And we don't have a my-plugins-status page.)

If you have received a suspicious email and followed any links, please visit the real WordPress.org and change your password. If not, as a plugin author it’s a good idea to change your password regularly.

As Twenty Twelve is punted to 3.5, it is being removed from core. It can be found here for now, and will be brought back in for 3.5.

r20212 introduced new methods for registering custom headers and custom backgrounds. Everything now wraps add_theme_support(), and the various HEADER_ and BACKGROUND_ constants are gone.

This is ideally backwards compatible (I am cautiously optimistic), but because of the many factors at play here — child theme inheritance, constants, and theme support — it is very difficult to test.

I am going to come up with some sort of a testing protocol in the hope that we can crowd-source testing the WP.com themes that implement custom headers or backgrounds. For now at least, if you are running a theme with custom header or background support, please test and make sure functionality did not change.

Starting next week, the dev chat is moving to 20:00 UTC to follow the schedule of daylight saving in the U.S. Since we forgot about daylight savings, and every person on the core team is either traveling or busy at some point over the next two hours, we’re going to be in a working session (see earlier post) — triaging teams, tasks, and tickets on the road to 3.4 Beta 1. See y’all in IRC.

I’ve updated the sidebar to reflect the new time starting next week.

Results of 2/15 Dev Meeting

The teams and status document has been updated to reflect current cycles. Yesterday’s dev meeting focused on identifying issues pertaining to blockers and resources, and whether any adjustments or corrections needed to be made, across all teams. As I didn’t keep a general summary, you may find the log is here.

I did take notes on who needs resources from whom:

• @PeteMall and @MarkJaquith will be discussing #19796 and #19235 with @ryan and @nacin
• @westi and @maxcutler will be discussing capabilities in XML-RPC and APP with @ryan, @nacin, @kurtpayne
• @getsource and @helenyhou need @azaozz and @dkoopersmith to go over the scrolling JS
• @jane and @helenyhou: screenshots review
• @jane and @petemall: autocomplete UI review
• Also @jane: Review HTML in captions UI (if necessary) and header changes

And there may be a few others I didn’t catch. Ideally this will all happen before our meeting next Wednesday.

Two teams were added: @georgestephanis and Zach Abernathy (thezman84) working on tablets, and @aaronjorbin working with Tom Auger (tomauger) on favicons. I have been communicating with both teams to help get things off the ground.

If you want to get involved, there are 198 open tickets on report 5, many of which fall under no team. If they do, find the team during office hours or contribute directly to the ticket, as many have done.

Next meeting is 2/22 at 2100 UTC.