Got a Great Idea for WordPress 3.8? Have Your Say

If you’ve got a feature idea for WordPress, get ready to pitch it this week.

Co-founder Matt Mullenweg will host the first planning meeting for WordPress 3.8 on UTC Thursday, 8 August 2013 at 6pm in #wordpress-dev on Freenode.

Mullenweg himself is leading development on version 3.8, which is planned for release in early December.

In his State of the Word address at WordPress San Francisco, he said the release would be “experimental” and would likely feature the MP6 admin UI plugin and the 2014 theme.

WordPress 3.7 and 3.8 are being developed simultaneously.

Lead core developer Andrew Nacin is leading development on 3.7 along with core contributor Jon Cave. WordPress 3.7 is expected to be released in October.

In two posts at Make WordPress Core, Nacin said he would also host a planning meeting for WordPress 3.7, with the first one planned for UTC Wednesday, 7 August 2013 at 8pm in #wordpress-dev on Freenode.

“Thursday’s meeting is a great time to propose features that you’re interested in working on, keeping in mind they may or may not make it into WordPress 3.8,” Nacin said.

“The major goal of 3.7 is to offer a bit of a ‘reset’.”

“But keep in mind an early December timeline sets up WordPress 3.9 to kick off no later than January. Bring your ideas and thoughts as 3.8 development begins!”

WordPress 3.7 will be a quick “platform-focused” released focusing on stability and security, Nacin said, which will focus on language packs, auto-updates for minor releases and improvements to help strengthen user passwords.

“Beyond that, though, the major goal of 3.7 is to offer a bit of a “reset” — which includes a huge cleanup of Trac,” he said.

“We’re currently at 3,800 open tickets, and we’d like to whittle that down as well as make things more manageable for the future.

“That includes reorganizing our Trac components, making it easier to contribute to certain areas of core (rather than, say, drinking from a single Trac firehose), and trying to organize teams around these components.”

For the next two development cycles of WordPress, the core team is moving to a new method of developing core features as plugins first after the ongoing success of MP6, as outlined by Mullenweg in San Francisco.

“This ‘features as plugins’ method will allow teams to conceptualize, design and fully develop features before landing them in core,” Nacin said.

“This removes a lot of the risk of a particular feature introducing uncertainty into a release (see also 3.6, 3.5, 3.4…) and provides ample room for experimentation, testing, and failure.

“As we’ve seen with MP6, the autonomy given to a feature team can also allow for more rapid development. And in a way, 3.7 provides a bit of a buffer while we get this new process off the ground.”

Outside of core, there will also be work on developer.wordpress.org, which Nacin said would include a hosted code reference and developer handbooks.

What are your ideas for WordPress 3.7 and 3.8 features? Tell us in the comments below.

Image credits: Julián Santacruz, JohnONolan.

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