Technically, our cycle started today. Really though, a few of us have been hammering away at a pre-cycle cycle for the past week or so. What we’ve been doing is focusing on bugs and enhancements, some of them quite old, that will provide more targeted control to translators.

Since Dion is back in action starting next week, we’re back-dating our current cycle, if you will, to have started on January 23, and end on Feb 6. Soon thereafter a new cycle will begin, and that cycle will focus on the development of language pack installation. This cycle will continue to lay the groundwork for that to happen.

Things that have happened so far:

• Created a document for translators, Important Changes for WordPress 3.4, which outlines all of the changes (audience: translators) what I’m about to outline for you (audience: developers).
• Worked with Gardener Boren on splitting up the pot files and only loading admin strings in the admin. This required some work on GlotPress, WP.org, the i18n repo, and core. #19852
• RTL locales are now automatically detected. #19600 and #19924
• wp_salt() now falls back to the database for all keys and salts, and is much smarter about when it should fall back. The way we handle default secret keys is now improved and will prevent plugin errors when running a localized version of core. #19599 #14024
• wptexturize() now has better locale support for all kinds of curly quotes/apostrophes/primes. This means that a localization like Hebrew can actually turn off curly quote replacement, without needing to resort to weird hacks in their he_IL.php file. #19602
• RSS feeds now properly reflect the language of the blog. The rss_language option is gone. #13440
• Locales can now specify a default timezone and start of week through translated strings (rather than PHP). Also, default links can be localized, #19601
• setup-config.php nows use a regex to replace wp-config-sample.php placeholders, preventing translators from needing to keep the placeholders sync’d. #18180
• The non-gettexted WP_I18N_ strings are all gone. Core now leverages wp_load_translations_early(), which is carefully designed to work in the particular situations we need it. (Not for plugins, yo.) #18180
• setup-config.php is now fully internationalized and uses wp_load_translations_early() to ensure the local package’s mo file is loaded. Between this and the secret key changes, there is no longer a file in wp-admin or wp-includes that translators need to modify in their distribution. #18180
• Like the gardening team, we have been using Future Release and Awaiting Review as a potential gold mine, picking through all of the i18n tickets to find the good enhancements and missed bugs. So far, this has resulted in fixes for #19364, #11270, #18770, #19698, #19788, and a few other tickets now slated for 3.4.

Things that will probably happen in the next week:

• Some decision on support for RTL in feeds. #6425
• Word count work. #8759
• Comma fun. #7897
• Finishing off locale-specific modifications in core. #19603 #19601
• Themes gaining header translation abilities, and translating page template names. Sergey is going to work on this and I’ll follow up with the makepot.php changes. #15858 #6007
• And other things on this report, as well as other aspects of laying the groundwork for language packs.

Office Hours: Daily. We will likely set formal office hours for the second cycle as that will include me, Dion, and Sergey, and we’re evenly spaced around the world (UTC -5, +4, +10).

You can test with the latest version of the Essence Theme on Github or see comment 48 on the ticket for information on how to add support to your own theme.

http://core.trac.wordpress.org/attachment/ticket/19810/19810.5.patch

Next up is making it work in the add-user-to-blog interface in the Network Admin.

Current Cycle Focus: Themes Screen Infinite Scrolling (#19815)

• helenyhou: Created initial patch for hiding default theme details and displaying author on #19853.  Ported changes made on themes-list-table to theme-install-list-table.
• DH-Shredder: Enabled fetch-list for class-wp-themes-list-table.  Currently porting wp-includes/js/wplink.dev.js, which handles infinite scrolling for internal linking, to wp-themes.dev.js for use in the Themes screen.  Initial patch (work in progress) posted on #19815.

Office Hours:  22:00-24:00 UTC (2:00p-4:00p PST) on Fridays

“Focused” on security, performance, and cache improvements with particular attention to i18n, rewrite, and query. We’re writing lots of unit tests as we go.

• Worked with the lang pack team on splitting up the pot files and loading only the necessary strings for frontend, admin, and network admin page loads. This greatly reduces the number of strings loaded for front page loads, yielding better performance. #19852
• duck_ is improving rewrite. This includes adding API, unit tests, and phpdoc and speeding up performance. #19897 #19871 #16092 #19876 #19875 #19636 and others
• scribu is looking at WP_Query performance #18536
• Hunting down cache bugs such as #19690
• Security hardening such as #19797
• Improved cron locking: fewer race conditions, better performance on busy sites #19700
• Various cleanup, refactoring, warning removal. #16302 r19684 #19249 #15327 #19552 #12307
• General gardening. Mining trac for gold, clearing old tickets that are already fixed or have become irrelevant, triage, etc.

The XML-RPC team is working on the implementation of an wp namespaced api for XML-RPC to allow the Creation, Read, Update and Delete of Posts/Pages or any CPT. We are focusing on a tight integration in naming and behaviour with the core WordPress apis and avoiding strict one to one backwards compatibility with the older MetaWeblog/Blogger post creation apis so as to create a simpler more consistent api.

Relevant Tickets: #18419, #18430, #18431, #18432, #18433

Some of the tickets have existing patches we are happy with and some we are reworking, our primary focus for the first week has been implementing wp.newPost (#18429) and reviewing the other tickets. Once the implementation for wp.newPost is complete the other APIs should come together quickly.

Office Hours: TBD – I will post these once we have them

We’ve set our outline for this cycle

Blog post on: Friday (this counts for an update on Friday!)

Current cycle description: The Max Cutler Hunt
Max took the time to go through xml-rpc related tickets and post details about them. Eric and I will be going through his bugfix category of tickets this cycle.

Most of these tickets have already had some review and are likely ready to go. A few may need a bit more polish before they are commit ready.

Relevant Tickets: #19027 #18126 #18683 #13917 #10933 #17132 #17109 #17981

Current cycle start: 1/27

Current cycle end: 2/9

Previous cycles: N/A

Office Hours: 14:30-15:30 UTC (6:30a-7:30a PST) on Tuesdays and Thursdays

• First we’ll review past meeting to-dos and make sure everything is done that is supposed to be (or see if there’s anything that is supposed to be done by now but isn’t).
• Look at draft project schedule, edit as needed and approve. http://wpdevel.wordpress.com/version-3-4-project-schedule/
• Check in with each team to ID state (just finished scoping, already developing, or tested and commit-ready patch posted) and plug into schedule based on state + ux needs
• Review each team’s planned scope/timing for 1st cycle
• Assign days to each team for putting up weekly status posts on this blog (and add authors to site if needed)
• Choose ‘office hours’ for each team to be in this channel and meet to chat re progress and/or chat with community members who are working on related tickets and have questions or need patch review
• See if there are any new sub-teams we can form to get cracking on more feature dev
• ID to-dos for each team member for next week
• Ticket discussion: people not on an assigned team who have posted a patch on a ticket can ask for core team to check it and give feedback
• Ongoing discussions re feature dev

Diff of 2.5.4 to 2.5.5

Two items:

• Nonce checks for removing comment author URL
• Link to configuration page fixes

“The ‘Customize Your Site’ Release (a.k.a. the one that helps you make things look the way you want them to look)

Features: a ‘configure and activate’ wizard (Code Name: Gandalf), new default theme, individual improvements within Appearance and/or that show up on the front end

Core Team: Ryan Mark Westi Ozz Nacin Dion Koop Cave

54 possible volunteers”
========================================

Feature Possibilities:

Twenty Twelve theme – Matt, Lance

Framework for configure and activate (theme + associated custom header, background, menus, widgets) – Koop, Ocean

• live preview of theme changes
• activate without configure
• drag and drop sidebars/widget areas from old theme to new theme
• configure a new theme, with preview, and then push that theme live
• easier static front page process

Better multisite support – Mark, Pete

• improve UI
• network enable v activate (parity with plugins)
• subdirectory installs
• get rid of ms-files.php (performance win)
• autocomplete usernames or site names for network admin – Drew, japheth

Language Packs (can we find some language that makes this more understandable to the average user?) – Nacin, Dion, Sergey

Project: PinkPonyPress

• MVC
• Database abstraction
• Smarty templating

Better theme finding – Helen, Mike S

• infinite scroll on themes screen
• multiple screenshots per theme

Better widgets – unassigned

• widget area locations
• widget preview, explicit save
• clean up widgets screen, make it more streamlined

Better headers – Aaron and sabreuse

• variable height
• choose from media library

Better backgrounds

• choose from media library

Settings

• title tag as a setting instead of owned by theme – Cave, Boren
• meta description tag in general settings – Cave, Boren

Media

• links in captions azaozz
• imgmagick color profiles?
• gallery wysiwyg if someone works on it

Editor

• TMCE improvements – azaozz, stas

Mobile

• Work well in iPad/Fire (responsive CSS) Azaozz, georgestephanis
• XML-RPC Westi, Max Cutler, Marko (API focus)
• XML-RPC Joseph, Eric Mann (Bugs/features focus)

Master Gardening – Ryan, Jon Cave