Credits page for WordPress 3.3

The WordPress 3.3 credits page was updated today, for likely the final time. In five months, there were nearly 1,200 individual changes to WordPress (and counting).

The credits page lists every individual who contributed to the latest release. A few stood out for their contributions, not just of high quantity, but of tremendous quality: Dominik Schilling (ocean90), Cristi Burcă (scribu), and Sergey Biryukov. The three are listed as contributing developers to 3.3. The core team — including guest committers Jon Cave (duck_) and Daryl Koopersmith — worked with these three daily, and they had a collective hand in nearly every major task this release.*

There were also three individuals added to the ‘Recent Rockstars’ group for their recent contributions to core development. This release we chose Chelsea Otakan (chexee), Helen Hou-Sandi, and John Blackbourn (johnbillion). All together, the six contributing  developers and rockstars we’ve recognized contributed more than a fourth of all Trac comments and two-fifths of all props.

If you want to see the full list, click the WordPress icon in the 3.3 toolbar and head on over to the credits page, or wait for the release post (coming soon!). Maybe I’ll also experiment with a word cloud again as I’ve done in the past.

In WordPress 3.4, we plan to recognize first-time contributors on the page, so if want to see your name in lights on the credits page, contribute to WordPress.

* Fun fact: Average age of the five mentioned in this paragraph: 23.

WordPress 3.3 Field Guide for Developers

Last night, WordPress 3.3 Release Candidate 2 was released. As written in the release post, I think we’re really close to a final release.

In preparation for that, I went on a tear yesterday and contributed to six posts for developers on our main development blog. The posts were a mixture of tutorials and API documentation what’s new and what’s changed in 3.3:

  • Admin Bar API changes in 3.3. An overview of what changes might break your plugin, how we’ve tweaked the terminology and APIs for 3.3, the new Groups concept, and how to move and modify menu items.
  • What to watch for: Javascript and Editor changes. There were quite a bit of changes here. jQuery was updated to 1.7.1, the current version. The full jQuery UI is now included, and was updated to 1.8.16, also the current version. And then there’s an example for wp_editor(). The QuickTags API (the HTML editor toolbar buttons) was rewritten, and we’ve improved both wp_localize_script() and wp_enqueue_script().
  • New API: is_main_query(). I introduced this function and WP_Query method during my ‘You Don’t Know Query’ talk in WordCamp Portland in September.
  • Do not include wp-admin/includes/template.php to get add_meta_box(). I’m not even sure where to start with this one. When developing 3.3, we found that some plugins were doing something wrong when trying to call add_meta_box(). (Really, really wrong.) So consider this post a protip.
  • The admin_user_info_links filter is gone. This needed to happen since we combined the admin bar with the admin header. Not too many plugins were using it. This comes after we dropped favorite actions in 3.2 as the UI continues to be refined.
  • Help and screen API changes. This post goes through the process of adding new help tabs, as well as how to use the screen object to determine the context of the current page. I spent a lot of time fleshing out WP_Screen in 3.3, so it was nice to see it all summed up in just a few hundred words.

WordPress 3.3 — coming soon to a site near you.

“College Newspapers: Still Teaching Obsolescence”

College Newspapers: Still Teaching Obsolescence. “Why the hell are college newspapers still being printed on paper?” Aaron Hockley asks. In the comments, I suggest that while some journalism programs are behind the times, others are excelling, and that hyperlocal news backed by local deals and advertising keeps print revenues up and makes it worthwhile for college newspapers. (In case you don’t know my background, I was the online director at an award-winning college paper for three years.)

Via Andrew Spittle.

“Case Study on How WordPress Won the Crown”

Case Study on How WordPress Won The Crown from WPTavern. I think the good (and long) read here is the comment thread, rather than the case study. (Links not endorsements?) In response to another comment, I pointed out a number of high quality plugins that bring a lot of power to WordPress, including document management and editing workflow tools.