WordPress 4.2: what you need to know going into the development phase
WordPress 4.2 kicked off last week with the announcement of Drew Jaynes as release lead. Drew works at 10up, and is a prolific Docs committer for WordPress.
The tentative project schedule for 4.2 is up and some key dates are as follows:
- February 18 — Feature Plugin merge freeze
- March 4 — Beta 1 (and feature freeze)
- March 25 — Release Candidate 1
- April 8 — Target release
The feature plugins slated for 4.2 are as follows:
- Press This revamp (get caught up here)
- Customizer theme switcher (see a couple screenshots here)
- Menu customizer (the plugin has the best description)
- “Shiny Updates” — Based mostly around a Trac ticket, a project to improve the plugin and theme update process.
Of these, I personally think Shiny Updates has the most potential for positive impact. That experience hasn’t changed in WordPress in ages, if ever. The other items are neat, but are less frequent interaction points for most users. We’re all updating plugins all the time. We’re not as often updating menus and switching themes.
Drew described it to me like this:
- Ability to update plugins or themes inline in the list tables. So instead of clicking the update link and going to the update screen and waiting for it to load and clicking to go back to the list table, you can fire off the update via AJAX right in place.
- Improvements to the installed plugins screen for updating in place
In addition to the feature plugins, and the regular iterative improvements that happen in WordPress core development every release, Scott Taylor is also going to drive some pretty significant media updates. This will be welcome news to those that have tried to navigate media in a post WordPress 3.5 world. For starters, check out his case for Javascript modules.
Also, Mike Schroder is coming back with the Week in Core series, so keep an eye out for weekly updates through that channel.
