WordPress 3.0 Development on Track
By Lorelle VanFossen, posted Jan 20 2010 at 7:01 pm | 1 Comment ยป
The WordPress Development Blog is beginning to offer previews of the next version of WordPress.
Scribu gives a preview of the Menu Management UI with a screenshot and video. The new Menu Management panel in the WordPress Adminstration Panels give the user control over a new area in a WordPress Theme called the “Menus.”
A WordPress Theme has typically had Menus in the header area, listing the Home and Pages, sometimes even Categories, of the blog, though most Themes just listed these items in the sidebar. Breaking them away from the sidebar adds more customization features to a WordPress Theme so users have more control over how these lists of links appear, and hopefully where.
Currently, the Menu Widgets include Pages, Categories, Home (link), and Link (any link), with the ability to control the order and change the names.
WordPress developers are also started to get more organized on how and when they meet virtually, a much needed improvement as there are many more bodies involved and dedicated to the next version of WordPress. They are having regularly scheduled live chats to cover the news and issues with development.
In the last dev chat on January 14, the team covered the timeline for WordPress 3.0 and the merger of WordPressMU and WordPress, turning WordPress into a multiple blog network with a few clicks as an option, with the final code merge complete this week.
Work continues on the new “default” WordPress Theme and the feature request list keeps growing with custom backgrounds and CSS dropdown menus…a lot of people would love to see the new Theme be totally modular with drag and drop containers, which is a doable but huge request.
Custom Post Types are a long time work-in-progress, giving authors the ability to customize the “type” of post they are publishing, changing the look and feel of the post based upon its content.
This year could be the year of the “Customizable” WordPress Theme and administration, giving the user more and more control over where features appear within a Theme and how a blog looks.
The next WordPress developers chat is scheduled for January 21 to discuss updates on these topics and private post behavior, coding standards, jQuery, and issues with the Plugin and Theme repositories, as of the last agenda update.
[...] is also working on improving documentation and tracking of WordPress Plugins as mentioned in the WordCast report on WordPress 3.0 development, and WordPress 2.9 has made it easier to update WordPress Plugins individualy or all at once, [...]