Hurrey..!! Process, Schedule (tentative) and Scope has been fixed for WordPress’s new release 3.1. Today they posted below list for upcoming release 3.1 on their WP Development Updates Blog.
Features:
- Polishing features introduced in 3.0 can be one umbrella task. BUT — this means spit and polish ONLY, not adding features to features.
- New feature: Mark Jaquith is committed to getting in some advanced taxonomy queries stuff, which already has some movement in trac via scribu.
- New feature: Internal linking. This is my pet user feature for this release. It has been requested from users for years, got the most +1s on the wpdevel post last week, and is a missing piece of true CMS functionality. Since we likely won’t have Andrew Ozz for this release, Daryl Koopersmith is going to take a stab at this, with backup from Austin Matzko if needed.
- New feature: The ajaxified admin screens that scribu did for GSoC, with some UI cleanup applied. There was also a GSoC project by Matt H on comment moderation that needs to be reviewed for inclusion.
- New feature: Admin Bar. Connect the back end to the front end. Most useful for people on multisite installs, but still useful for single-site users in providing 1-click access to dashboard, new post form, etc. We’ll be looking at both the original Viper007Bond admin bar plugin and the wordpress.com revised admin bar recently done by Andy Peatling. Note: there was some resistance to this being in core rather than a plugin. A compromise of making it optional was discussed.
- Cleanup: UX/UI cleanup across the application, including multisite. This could turn into a ton of new dev, so we need to restrain ourselves. The UI group will do a review and come up with a list. Jane Wells and John O’Nolan will manage UI contributions from the group so that approved UI makes it into tickets.
- Ongoing maintenance: Bug fixes. Peter Westwood is all over bug fixes. Anyone and everyone invited to submit patches for known bugs.
- New feature: Separate network dashboard from the site dashboards (in multisite). Ryan started on this over the summer, and all agreed it would be great. Needs some UI love. Ryan also looked at doing a personal dashboard to replace the wonky global dashboard you get in multisite when someone has an account but no site. This might be a better 3.2 candidate, but we’ll see if we can get it to a reasonable place in time for 3.1.
- There are some small fixes to the custom post types API that ought to be made, while staying within the ‘no big API things’ guideline. Nacin is taking charge of this.
- New feature: Post templates/post styles. Ryan will be handling this one.
- New feature: Making QuickPress a template tag, so it can be used for front-end posting. Aaron Jorbin will be handling this.
Schedule:
Mid-December, preferably no later than December 15, so that the holidays won’t interfere with the release. To that end, here is the current plan:
- September 9 – Confirm planned scope.
- October 15 – Feature freeze; no new features added after this point, so that testing can begin on a stable-ish product (including usabilty testing of new features).
- November 1 – Primary code freeze; any last adjustments based on testing after feature freeze should be finished by now and the focus shifts to fixing bugs to get to a stable beta.
- November 15 – Beta period beings; from this point on, no more enhancements, only bug fixes.
- December 1 – String freeze; translators rejoice.
- December 15 – Release WordPress 3.1