The WordPress development team had a very successful meeting last Thursday, where they solidified their plans for WordPress 3.1.
The finalized goals for WordPress 3.1 are “to have a very short dev cycle, a decent amount of testing time, and a release in mid-December. Low on new features, heavy on ui and code cleanup, and avoidance of schema changes. Save the big ideas for 3.2 where we’ll have the liberty to implement those ideas in PHP5. No schema changes and no big new APIs.”
Besides bug fixes and code cleanup, users can look forward to a new wordpress.com inspired admin bar and theme browser, as well as post templates and styles, and a separate network dashboard.
The team plans to halt new feature submissions on October 15th, followed by a primary code freeze on November 1st, and a string freeze on December 1st. The beta period will begin November 15th until the estimated final release date of December 15th.
Keep in mind that this will be the last major release to support PHP and MySQL 4. If your hosting provider has not yet switched to PHP 5.2 or higher and MySQL 5.0.15 or higher, it’s time to start bugging them.
Personally, I’m really looking forward to seeing what will come of the development team’s focus on bug fixes and code cleanup with this release. What are you looking forward to in WordPress 3.1?
The post styles sound great; however, no mention of the thing i want most in WP…. Plugin filtering. It drives me balmy that when looking for a plugin I can’t limit results to particular WP versions. Or even at the least, add an extra column that shows what version the plugin is compatible to.
I believe they’re planning to improve this in 3.2, but don’t quote me on that. The problem with the current system is that it’s up to the developer to provide the official compatibility information, and there are many abandoned plugins that still function perfectly in WP 3.x, yet only claim to be compatible up to 2.9.x or even lower.
The last I heard about this, the plan was to start work on incorporating the results from each plugin’s Broken/Works user compatibility poll after the plugin directory overhaul was complete.