Jane wrote a post about the upcoming schedule of how the WordPress merge should take place.

I am shocked at how quickly they want to get WordPress 3.0 out the door. But, after talking to some of the devs, they reminded me that this is just a rough schedule and it’s a goal, it’s not the definite and final schedule by any means.

If I haven’t emphasized this enough already, I’m super excited about the WordPress 3.0 release

WP and WPMU are merging.

This announcement took place in May 2009 at WordCamp SF. It was and still is, a huge announcement (and process).

Yesterday while watching #wordpress-dev (where all/most of the core developers meet to talk about WordPress), there was a lot of chatter about WordPress 3.0, which is when WP and WPMU will be merged.

Today, we can see tickets being closed where there is the introduction of WPMU’s slight code changes into the normal WP.

Something to note, it’s not WPMU being merged into WP, but the other way around. WP is being merged into WPMU. The key to the success of this merge is to keep WP as efficient as possible so that it doesn’t get too bloated.

Here is an example of something we’ll see along the way of how WordPress is changing.

[sourcecode lang="php"]if( !is_site_admin() )
unset( $submenu['plugins.php'][10] ); // always remove the plugin installer for regular users
unset( $submenu['plugins.php'][15] ); // always remove the plugin editor
unset( $submenu['themes.php'][10] ); // always remove the themes editor[/sourcecode]

The new updated and merged code base is going to have to take into account there will be an overall admin along side of normal blog administrators. Changes along these lines are what we will be seeing throughout the next year for what WordPress is becoming.

I’m really excited to see where WordPress is going. It’s been a wild ride for the past 6 years and I’m ready for another 50 years on WordPress

Update: The WPMU options, such as multiple blogs within a single installation, will be opt-in only. You will have to enable them in the wp-config.php file before they are available. This is good for the average user so there’s no confusion as to how the blog should be administered.

There were two highlight points of discussion for this week’s meetup.

• WordPress Mailing List (security updates)
• Dynamic Image Resizing

WordPress Mailing List

As it stands right now, somewhere upwards of 25% of all WordPress blogs are not logged into regularly, which can cause security issues. If users are not staying up to date, it can begin to give WordPress a bad rap as being easy to hack, which is not the case at all. I’ve been using WordPress since 2003 (now 6 years) and I’ve never had any of my personal sites hacked.

So what the proposal idea is to just use a separate mailing list that people can subscribe to. No core modifications will be made to WordPress for this particular item.

Dynamic Image Resizing

WordPress Dynamic Image Resizing is something I’m very excited about as a possible feature of WordPress 3.0. I ran into a problem not too long ago where I changed my site’s theme and the content area shifted from 640px to 520px which created a problem for me. The solution I ended up using was by using CSS, but it’s not a great solution, in my opinion.

It’s not finalized yet, but there is a Trac ticket about it where the core developers are discussing the best approach. WordPress developers still need to discuss this further as to what functionality is actually desired for the whole WordPress community.

But, one thing is for sure, I really hope that we will see dynamic image resizing within WordPress with the release of WordPress 3.0. One item I’m really pushing for is easy image management with dynamic image resizing while utilizing a CDN (Content Delivery Network), as I’m starting to move more and more sites’ media images and files to a CDN.

That’s it for this week’s meetup, stay tuned for next week!

View the Transcript

The primary point I think is worth mentioning is that PHP4 is still being supported. Around 14:22 (PST) of the meeting, it was confirmed that PHP4 is still slightly under 13% usage world wide for WordPress sites. PHP4 will stop being supported when usage gets below 10%.

There was a little discussion about how to stop developers from inflating their download numbers, but it was dismissed as already talked about and it’s not a huge problem yet.

Other than that, it was a relatively un-eventful weekly meetup. This was largely due to the Automattic annual meetup in Quebec, so most the developers were busy and it wasn’t as planned out. Next week we should see more activity on the topic list.

Stay tuned!

View the Transcript