Eric Andrew Lewis started a new topic this morning on the Make WordPress Core blog to introduce a new core plugin team. The Post Meta team’s goal will be to improve the “developer’s experience from the back-end – creating input elements for meta fields in a programatic method.” As he notes in the post, there are a ton of plugins (like Pods and Advanced Custom Fields) and libraries (like CMB and many more) that do this sort of thing, but there has been a significant call for a core solution for some time.
Most of us that do client work understand many of the issues facing a project like this. I really look forward to seeing how these discussions evolve. I personally believe this is one of the most important areas where WordPress needs to improve at a core level, so a better methodology for handling meta data input would be great. However, we shouldn’t put the cart before the horse. This is just another plugin team, and this project may never be blessed to get into core; and even if it does it’s likely a few major versions of WordPress away.
The team’s first meeting is tomorrow at 16:00 UTC-6 in #wordpress-core-plugins on IRC.
There seems to be a large amount of interested from different areas. I was surprised (I shouldn’t have been) how much plugin developers who have a similar plugin are prepared to help.