WordPress Dev Chat For 10-15-09

Admin templating – filosofo – I’d like to propose that we abstract a lot of the admin markup, in particular the stuff that’s repeated a lot, such as form elements and things like tables of posts, comments. Much of the core stuff is hard-coded, and plugin authors still have to manually create form elements for option pages.

The basic idea is that too much code was copy and paste material when instead, the code should be written in a way that can be re-used. Alot of the discussion revolves around the creation of option pages, something that will be overhauled in WordPress 3.0.

filosofo – 1) is there interest
westi – we should try and make it easy for plugins to add things _and_ remove our C&P code
junsuijin – if done right it should save plugin and theme authors a lot of work on creating options pages
filosofo – 2) does anybody have any great implementations of something like this that they’d suggest
westi – I think we should make the first focus of this Options pages re-work for 3.0
filosofo – 3) how about I create a ticket and put some code up for people to look at?
westi – ticket++
junsuijin – filosofo++ i’ll add my code as well just to get another take on it if necessary
AaronCampbell – I think there’s interest…a ticket seems a good next step
westi – filosofo: my requirements – lightweight, easy to review, easy to maintain, reduces code size, reduces plugin code size
azaozz – perhaps that has to start with fixing/redoing most of the admin css
junsuijinit- seems that 3.0 options overhaul will necessitate a redesign in anything we ultimately end up using anyway
junsuijin – or at least there’s a good chance
azaozz – there’s a lot in there accumulated over the years

The line of thinking is that for now, PHP4 works. but PHP5 gets you better stuff. Mark Jaquith updated the statistic to say that now 13% of WordPress users are running on PHP4.

jeffr0 – Sorry to interrupt but who do we complain to about the IRC logfile site not working since October 1st?

I’m happy to say that Peter Westwood helped get the IRC logfile site back up and running. I use this site to compile these notes after the meeting and I’m sure there are plenty of others who dive into the logs to see what was discussed.

In the “hopefully simple patches for 2.9″ category: Internal support for conditional scripts (same as existing conditional style support), #10891

The team discussed this and they are not sure if this is the best way to achieve the requirement here and also about how this would interact with the script concatenation so they don’t think it is right for 2.9 due to the feature freeze. Its been moved out to future for now.

http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/10958 Some plugins have unnatural peaks of 20.000 downloads pr day, making the stats unreliable as a measure of a plugins trust within the community. Should be acted upon.

Ever notice in the popular plugins pane in the administration panel of WordPress and see a porn related plugin or some other goofy thing linked to in their? This is most likely the result of plugins taking advantage of the lax way of tracking downloads for plugins.

The team already knows they need something better than what they have but sometimes, the increase in downloads are legitimate. For example, SexyBookmarks was featured on the NYTimes. So in the end, if something seems fishy, we are supposed to report it to plugins at wordpress.org and have them take a look into it.

demetris1 – I started a page in the Codex, as we agreed last week. http://codex.wordpress.org/User:Demetris/Features

Last week, Demetris proposed updating the features page on WordPress.org. He has now created a Codex page so we can collaborate on the effort and provide feedback.

Jane Wells also announced during the meeting that registration for WordCamp New York had opened up. Late in the chat:

Jane_ – jeffr0: you were officially the first ticket purchase

Bragging Rights!