WordPress 4.2 and Core Development in 2015

I sat in on the Making WordPress #core Slack channel the other day for the weekly dev chat – the first proper one of 2015.

Andrew Nacin kicked off the chat by announcing Drew Jaynes as the 4.2 release lead developer.

He also indicated that the WordPress release cycle for 2015 will see 3 releases; April, August and December.

New Stuff for 2015

There are some exciting new features planned for inclusion into core this year and Andrew hinted at some.

• WP REST API due for late this year; maybe 4.3 or 4.4
• image flow work
• customizer plugins (some poss. 4.2)
• mobile improvements
• accessibility improvements
• updates improvements

Over to Drew

With that, Drew took the reigns to discuss what needed to be done for WordPress 4.2.

4.2 has a target drop date of April 8th but also has ~150 trac tickets against the milestone.

At the moment the release schedule is tentative but it’s a good indication of what you can expect to come.

Feature plugins for 4.2

Continuing the successful core development pattern of “Feature Plugins”, focus for 4.2 inclusions will be:

• Press This
• Theme Switcher
• Shiny Updates

As well as the above plugins, in general the WordPress UI will get a “polish” in the areas of accessibility & mobility.

Other Stuff

There was also chat about including a feature to allow admins to generate and email new password to users (trac ticket) as well as incorporating a random password generator UI on the user profile.  That would certainly be a welcome addition.

A 4.1.1 maintenance release is almost ready to ship as we speak. Expect it sometime in the coming week.