WordPress Dev Chat For 7-30-09

Shane had: “I think we should talk about getting WordPress 3.0 into PHP 5.3.0+ min. PHP 4 is not supported anymore and we need to think about getting the code into a object based for speed and security.”

According to Mark Jaquith, there is about 15% of the WordPress userbase running on PHP4. 0.05% of people are running PHP 5.3. 5.3 does not appear to be an option. Mark also states that supporting 4 isn’t that much of a burden. They are slowly introducing PHP5-only features, which should help reduce that PHP4 percentage. When asked by Jane Wells if he had spoken to any other core developers, Mark said the team did not want to completely abandon 15% of the user base. Perhaps a better approach is seeing how we can reduce that number without forcing anyone’s hand. One way to reduce that percentage is to do outreach to webhosts while also getting some major plugin authors to switch to PHP5 code.

The plan is to add a nag page that only administrators of a WordPress blog can see starting with WordPress 2.9. This nag will feature a link to an article in the Codex that explains why WordPress is dropping PHP4 support and moving to PHP5 only. The Codex page will then be updated with host specific information.

The next topic was the Ideas Forum. Jane Wells: I’ve been cleaning it out, want to get rid of everything outdated etc before we start upgrading it with some better organization. for the stuff that is very technical, I can’t judge if the suggestions are outdated, still good, or valid but dumb. could use some help with people going through and leaving comments so i can close ones that shouldn’t still be there.

Over the coming days, weeks, Jane is going to be going through the Ideas forum and tag certain items she is unsure about that the other core developers can review. Andrew Ozz will also be closing ideas down that deal with TinyMCE being an Rich Text Editor and not an HTML Creation tool. According to Jane, not that many new ideas are being submitted. The ideas forum is a side project and won’t be taken down for work until everything is in order for Sam Bauers to hack away. The ideas forum will be upgraded to bbPress 1.0. One of the ideas proposed by Jane is to create categories for suggestions so people can see what is already there easier, perhaps mapping them to Trac categories. The ideas are not being deleted, but rather closed.

The decision was also made that the team will not be using Uservoice what so ever to do the ideas forum. They will use bbPress 1.0. According to Jane, the plugins on the ideas forum are over two years old. Once the ideas forum gets to the point where it’s ready to be reorganized, the topic will be placed on the agenda for people to weigh in.

Also, there will be a few changes to the status choices for ideas. Among some of the proposed changes: “You can do this with a plugin” -> This is plugin material. As is “good idea! we’re working on it” and “sorry, not right now” and “this is not a core suggestion”.

The next topic was about about committers, workflow and bugs. However, I can’t summarize it because it makes no sense to me. All I can say is that this topic seems to be discussed at every development meeting so it must be pretty important or pretty complicated. If you’re interested in reading the discussion on this topic, I suggest you read through the log file for the meeting. The topic begins at Jul 30, 21:54:34.

One thing I wanted to mention which is not directly related to the meeting is something I read later on in the evening regarding the WordPress Planet feed. Someone brought up a website that was part of the feed that had not been updated in over two years. Jane said she MIGHT put up a vote on the dev blog for people to nominate sites to be included on planet feed and/or sites to take off. Again, she said MIGHT, so it’s no guarantee. However, I was wondering out of curiosity, how many of you would nominate WordPress Tavern to be added to that feed? If not, let me know your reasons why.