Drew Jaynes to Lead WordPress 4.2

photo credit: 10up

WordPress 4.2 development officially kicked off today at the regularly scheduled core development meeting. Andrew Nacin announced that 10up engineer Drew Jaynes will be leading the release.

Jaynes, who has contributed to every major release since 3.3, recently led the initiative to create inline documentation for every hook in WordPress. He will be accompanied by Scott Taylor, who will help guide core feature plugin development for the media and image efforts that will be in motion throughout 2015.

The WordPress core team is planning three releases this year. “At the moment, that looks like one in April, one in August, and one in early December,” Nacin said. He anticipates that the WP REST API will see the light of day in 4.3 or 4.4, due later this year.

Jaynes opened the meeting with discussion on possible candidates for features in 4.2, which are likely to include Press This, Theme Switcher, and Shiny Updates (smoother installation and updating of plugins and themes). The merge deadline for feature plugins is approximately two weeks away.

“In addition to feature plugins, I’d like the general focus to be on polishing up some of our existing UIs in terms of mobile and accessibility wherever we can,” Jaynes said. “Seems like there’s tickets hanging out there we could get some wins on.”

A 4.1.1 maintenance release is on its way this week or possibly early next week. The 4.2 project schedule is now updated with tentative dates for the release. The team is targeting April 8th for the official release, with the first beta planned for the week of February 25th.