Tally for remaining ticket assignments:

• Nacin – 6
• Koop – 3 + 2 reviews
• Ryan – 3
• Helen – 1
• Ozz – 1
• Ocean/Sergey – 1

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.)

The main areas that we’ve focused on for this release were improving touch support in the user interface, resolving incompatibilities for our target devices, and enhancing the UI’s methods for adapting to more restrictive screen sizes.

Target Devices

Our target devices for the 3.4 release were the iPad and the Kindle Fire. The iPad stands as an obvious choice, and the Kindle Fire’s steep climb to over 50% of market share amongst Android tablet devices justifies its presence as well.

Improving Touch Support

For touch-supportive devices, we’ve added a fantastic jQuery extension to the core, jQuery UI Touch Punch. This has enabled ‘drag and drop’ support on mobile devices. Whether editing a post, customizing the dashboard, or modifying a Nav Menu, you’re now able to easily reposition items on a touch interface to your heart’s content, just as you would on your desktop browser.

Caveat: Windows Phone Devices

Windows Phone 7/7.5 phones are wonderful devices. Unfortunately, when Microsoft based the phone’s web browser off IE9, they didn’t add in any touch support. As such, there is no way to detect touch events in the browser — `ontouchstart` doesn’t exist. Dragging support does not work on Windows Phone 7/7.5 devices, but should on Windows 8 tablets and phones when released.

Resolving Incompatibilities

This boiled down primarily to the Kindle Fire. The version of WebKit used in the Kindle Fire’s native Silk browser doesn’t support the contentEditable attribute, so TinyMCE wouldn’t work! To accomodate for this, we added an override to test for the version of webkit that the client is using, and just disable the visual editor if the browser doesn’t support it. This patch should also cross-apply to older versions of iOS and Android as well.

UI Enhancements

In Ticket #20015, we migrated the dashboard and write screen columns to use primarily @media queries, rather than the JS that had previously been used. This should provide some performance optimizations in mobile browsers.

The Tableteer team for 3.4 was comprised of Andrew Ozz, Zach Abernathy, and George Stephanis.

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 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.)

In the survey for core contributors, I asked how many reps you thought core should get to ensure that each core contrib constituency would be represented. Choices ranged from 2 to 4, in varying configurations. There was no overwhelming winner for this question. There were many votes for 4, 3, and 2, though some configurations had more votes than others. I removed the votes from people who have not actually contributed to core, but it was still a pretty even split. That said, across each of the configurations, the same people tending to be chosen for the 1 and 2 spots.

Based on the votes, I propose that the core team rep group be made up of Mark Jaquith, Andrew Nacin, Aaron Campbell, and Helen Hou-Sandi, with their backups being Ryan Boren, Daryl Koopersmith, Cristi Burca (scribu), and Mike Schroder (DH-Shredder) respectively.

The primary responsibility of being a rep will be participating in a monthly chat with other contributor group reps starting in May, and communicating things between that group and this one. Backup reps can attend the chat if they wish but are not obligated to do so, unless the primary rep says they can’t make it. Since the core team will have multiple reps, we can work out details later like who’ll post what where and how to get feedback from the people they’re meant to represent.

Thanks to everyone who participated!

• blog post: http://blog.akismet.com/2012/04/26/akismet-wordpress-plugin-2-5-6/
• diff from 2.5.5 to 2.5.6: http://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/changeset?old_path=/akismet/tags/2.5.5&old=&new_path=/akismet/tags/2.5.6&new

summary from the change log:

• Prevent retry scheduling problems on sites where wp_cron is misbehaving
• Preload mshot previews
• Modernize the widget code
• Fix a bug where comments were not held for moderation during an error condition
• Improve the UX and display when comments are temporarily held due to an error
• Make the Check For Spam button force a retry when comments are held due to an error
• Handle errors caused by an invalid key
• Don’t retry comments that are too old
• Improve error messages when verifying an API key

I’ll file a ticket to request updating to the 2.5.6 tag.

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