First, the results. The first question, and the only one that was mandatory, asked what single media feature you would choose to include in version 2.9. The top vote-getter was standalone editable photo albums (as opposed to the current per-post gallery) at 17.5%, followed closely by easier embeds for videos and other third-party content at 16.5%. Next came basic image editing (such as rotating, cropping and resizing) at 13.7%, and post thumbnails (image teasers for posts featured on the home page) at 12.9%. The rest of the features each took less than ten percent of the vote. The full list came in like this:

The second question was optional (3406 people answered it), and asked you to rate each feature on a scale going from top priority down to definitely not for implementation priority. Results here were in line with the results from the first question, with most features rated as nice to have more often than anything else. The features that scored the highest in question 1 were more likely to have earned higher votes in the Top Priority column, but no feature was ranked as a Top Priority more often than it was ranked as a Nice to Have (though Media Albums, Easier Embeds and Post Thumbnails came close). The complete tabulations are shown in the chart below.

Question three was getting at the same thing, but in a more granular fashion, asking you to rank the eleven features in order of priority to you. As only one feature could be assigned to each position, this prevented people from assigning the same priority to multiple features, and we wondered if it would alter the results. Though some features got more recognition in this question, the overall rankings were still in line with the results from question 1. Here are the exact votes per feature/per position:

The fourth question asked for your preferences regarding including new media features in core, bundling them as plugins with the core download, or developing them as plugins but not bundling them with the core download. This vote was more interesting to watch. As the notice for the voting went first to the development community, then to the user community, it was possible to see a shift in the voting. Earlier in the voting cycle, there were more votes for bundling ‘core plugins’ for the advanced media features, while later votes skewed heavily toward just putting the features in core. This vote shows, I think, one of the differences between developer and user perspectives. While developers are heavily interested in keeping the core code lean and relying on plugins for advanced functionality, many users would prefer features they want to be included in core rather than being a separate plugin. The final tally on this question was 56.2% for including features in core, 38.1% for bundled plugins, and 5.7% for non-bundled plugins. The actual numbers:

Clearly this issue deserves more discussion, and the concept of how we move toward a system of canonical plugins and/or core “packages” intended for different use cases (CMS, photoblog, portfolio, etc) will be a big topic in the months ahead.

So where does that leave us regarding features coming down the road? When the vote closed, the results were discussed in the #wordpress-dev IRC chat to divvy up feature development.

The top-voted feature, standalone photo albums, is being worked on as a Google Summer of Code project by Rudolf Lai, under the mentorship of WordPress Lead Developer Mark Jaquith. The “pencils down” date for GSOC is in less than two weeks, at which point we’ll be assessing the state of Rudolf’s project. Hopefully, we’ll be able to incorporate it with 2.9 development, do some testing, amend the code and/or UI as needed, and have this launch with the 2.9 release (in core or as plugin TBD). Undoubtedly, additional functionality will be contributed by core contributors who have also been working on media plugins.

Easier embeds, the second most popular feature, is being looked at in a couple of ways. One, more shortcodes for third-party services. Work on this has already begun. In addition, Viper007Bond, of Viper’s Video Quicktags plugin fame, has taken on the task of working on a way to improve the embed experience in core. We’re not sure quite how this will work yet, but stay tuned.

Adding some basic editing functions like 90-degree rotation, cropping and resizing was considered an obvious winner in the dev chat, and as several plugins handle this functionality, we’re hopeful it will be included soon.

Post thumbnails are being handled by Mark Jaquith, who has created this functionality before, with an assist from Scribu, who has a similar plugin in the repository.

Lower ranked features aren’t off the radar, but may take lower priority than some other (non-media) features we have in the works. One of my favorite 2.9 features is in trunk now, and changes the way we delete content. Goodbye, annoying popup asking me if I’m sure I want to delete a comment/post/etc. Hello, fast and quiet removal into a trash can, from which the content can be retrieved if it was deleted by accident. Think Gmail style. We’re also hoping to work on improving page management, though that has a number of technical issues that may cause it to be a 3.0 feature instead.

As always, you can keep track of development progress in a number of ways:
1. Keep track of Trac. Contribute a patch, test a patch, just read through tickets if you have some time to kill, whatever. There are over 500 tickets against the 2.9 milestone currently. Patches and testing can help us get that number down.

2. Follow Trac commits on Twitter. Don’t want to get involved in the nitty gritty, just want to see what’s getting committed? Follow wpdevel on Twitter and you’ll get core commit updates in your stream.

3. See what’s on the dev agenda. Each week for the IRC dev chat, there’s an agenda, created based on developer suggestions posted at wpdevel.wordpress.com. This blog also contains discussions about specific development issues.

4. Join the dev chat. The day changed this week, to accommodate European schedules. Chats are now held for one hour each week on Thursday at 21:00 UTC. That’s 5pm NYC, 2pm in California, etc. Chats are in the #wordpress-dev room at irc.freenode.com.

5. Watch this blog. If you’re not a developer and prefer to stick to major announcements, the occasional survey to help decide a feature, and security notices, just keep doing what you’re doing. Reading this blog will get you all of these things.

Thanks again for your help in prioritizing features for version 2.9, hopefully coming toward the end of the year to a server near you!

These are the features that we’re asking people to vote on (in alphabetical, not prioritized, order):

Additional Media Filters: In the uploader, you can currently upload an image from your hard drive, link to an image from a URL, or select an image from the Media Library. This proposed feature would add links in the Media Library pane that would allow you to filter images to those that had been used most recently, used most often, and/or marked as a favorite. These filters would be available on the Media Library screen as well.

Basic Image Editing: Enable cropping, resizing and 90-degree rotation of uploaded images.

Better Media Settings: Enable the creation of more default media settings controlled in the Settings section, and allow settings to be overridden  during the individual media upload process as needed.

Bulk Media Import API: Develop an API to allow for bulk media importing by plugins or importers.

Custom Image Sizes: Instead of hardcoded thumbnail, medium, large, etc. image sizes, custom image sizes would allow you to configure the maximum dimensions for each of the sizes.

Easier Embeds: Make it easier to embed third-party content such as YouTube videos, etc. Similar to Viper’s Video Quicktags plugin.

Media Albums: Ability to create and edit photo albums that can stand alone (as opposed to galleries being tied only to a post), including photostream functionality.

Media Metadata: Enable the use of categories and tags on media files.

Photostream: Create a Flickr-style photostream that simply displays images in a chronological stream (as opposed to grouping in galleries).

Post thumbnails: Choose an image to appear as a thumbnail with your post/article/excerpt.

Revised Media UI: Redesign the uploader UI to make uploading and editing media files a simpler, more user-friendly process.

These descriptions are repeated in the beginning of the voting survey, so if you forget what something means you’ll be able to scroll up to remind yourself. Only the first question (pick your top choice) is mandatory. This survey isn’t very long. Question two lets you assign a general high/low priority to each of the 11 feature suggestions, while question 3 asks you to rank the 11 features in order of priority from 1-11. A text box or two allow you to make additional suggestions, and that’s it. The survey is anonymous, and will be open all week, until Friday, July 10, 2009 at 11:59 PM UTC.

No JavaScript? Take the survey here.

Results of the survey will be used to help developers decide which features to focus on for version 2.9. The 2.9 anticipated feature list will be posted here later in July, after the priority has been determined. How many contributing developers are available to code various features will play a large part in the decision-making process, so if you’ve ever thought of contributing code to WordPress development, now’s a great time to get involved. Developer chats are held each Wednesday in the IRC channel (irc.freenode.com #wordpress-dev) at 9 PM UTC (5pm Eastern, 2pm Pacific).

* – Other non-media features that were discussed either were determined to be better held for a future version for technical reasons, or were so widely desired that they were accepted for the 2.9 roadmap without requiring a vote.

“Why won’t they put feature y into core? It’s rated really high in the Ideas forum!”

“It doesn’t matter what I think, all the decisions get made by an elite crime-fighting squad funded by an anonymous millionaire. Er, I mean the four core devs.”

These sentiments, and others like them, are the focus of today’s post. Setting aside the similarities between Ryan, Andrew, Mark and Peter to Charlie’s Angels for a moment, the question of how decisions about features are made needs to be addressed. There are a number of mechanisms in place for communication between the community and the core team, but with so many different channels, it’s hard to keep up with them all and still focus on production. Here’s where we are now…

#wordpress-dev IRC channel: The IRC channel used to be more active. These days there’s rarely more than a dozen or two people online at any given time, and hours go by with no activity. When a question pops up, it’s often a tech question from a less experienced developer or site manager looking for help, as opposed to ongoing discussions about the best way to approach core code and features. When core-focused discussions do occur, they tend to fade out as time zone variances cause people to log off before a core dev enters the room.

wp-hackers list: The hackers mailing list reaches thousands of contributing developers, plugin developers, and lurking interested parties. Discussions range from how to use hooks to whether or not something in core should be changed to troubleshooting for other list members. Conversations on this list sometimes can get heated and occasionally stray into rudeness, which makes some people hesitate to utilize this communication channel.

This dev blog: This blog is used mostly for “official” announcements, and more recently, for surveys and polls intended to give the core devs an idea of community opinion on things being considered for future versions. Posting is irregular, sometimes with new content every other day, sometimes with nothing for a couple of weeks.

wpdevel.wordpress.com: Another blog, also an “official” outlet, in which the core team posts about any big code changes they’re working on. This gives plugin authors and contributing developers a heads-up, and provides a place for community discussion around specific issues like the new widgets API.

Trac: The ticket system used for active development has gotten out of control. Hundreds of tickets are already lined up for future versions because they were punted from current releases; many aren’t even relevant anymore. Trac has wound being a place where people report bugs, suggest code changes, request features and debate methodologies; some of these conversations are years old. This broad use of the system makes it harder to power through tickets and get bugs fixed.

Ideas forum: The Ideas forum is a place where anyone can suggest a new feature, rate features suggested by others, leave comments, and generally discuss the future of the WordPress application. However, like Trac, some of the items here are years old. Because of the way the rating system works, older items remain at the top of the list. Some threads are simply he said/she said preference arguments, as opposed to contructive discussions about the value of implementing certain features or changes. There’s no direct connection between the Ideas forum and Trac.

WordPress is an open source project, successful because of the community that both develops and uses it. At the same time, some people find it difficult to become involved in the project, and are unsure of how to engage with the core team and community at large. The channels listed above can be overwhleming to someone just joining the community, and/or frustrating to longtime community members who feel like they used to have more influence. We need to fix this. The WordPress project needs to be welcoming, easy to navigate as a contributor, and provide useful feedback to help grow the expertise of its community members.

I think we should figure this out together. You, members of this community, know how you feel about the communication channels available to you. You probably have ideas about how to make it better. Some of you may even have sketched out digrams of systems that you think would work better.  Link Ideas to Trac? Change the Ideas rating algorithm? Close Trac tickets that don’t get resolved within a certain period of time? Just do everything through Trac? What do you think? What would make it easier for you to keep up with development progress and get involved with the varius contribution opportunities? I *know* you have an opinion.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be gathering your input about how we can improve communication and participation, and then we’ll embark on a project to fix/create a system for collecting ideas, opinions and feedback that will allow WordPress to grow as an inclusive community. Here’s the plan: Gather ideas from people via IRC, forums, live chats, surveys, etc. Assemble a small group of interested parties to help figure out possible approaches, put suggested approaches to a community vote. If redesigning something (like the Ideas forum) is deemed necessary, utilize community designers to create layouts. Beta test it to see if it does work as hoped. Launch and make everyone happy with the new, improved communication/ideas/feedback system!

Up First

Use this forum thread to post your suggestions about this. What do you think needs to be changed or improved? How would you structure it? How do the existing channels fit into your suggestion?

On Tuesday, May 12 at 21:00 UTC (5pm New York time), hop into the #wordpress-dev IRC channel (irc.freenode.com) and talk about your suggestions for how to improve communication. I’ll be there, taking notes and answering questions, and asking follow-up questions when someone pitches a good idea. An hour later, I’ll be joining the WordCast Podcast to talk about this issue. They’re trying to set up a call-in format; if that pans out, we’ll post the call-in info in the dev channel. Otherwise, A call-in number has been set up through TalkShoe.

1-724-444-7444
Meeting ID: 50127
Pin (if you don’t have a TalkShoe account): enter 1#

We’ll also read off suggestions being made in the dev channel and discuss them.

More opportunities to weigh in on this issue to come. Also, further investigation into the similarities between the core devs and Charlie’s Angels.

Right now, the lead developers are thinking the top priorities for 2.8 will be widget management, theme browser/installer and performance upgrades. The rest of the development time will be taken up with bug tickets and additional features/enhancements from a prioritized list. To that end, we’ve posted a new survey for you to help us prioritize features for 2.8. The list pulls from the developers’ “2.7 leftovers” list as well as the most popular features from the Ideas forum. Just rank each feature and tell us your top pick (up to three). You also have the option of adding comments or additional suggestions, but this is not mandatory. For your response to count, you must rank all of the features in the list. The survey has only one page.

Note that media features are not included in this list as we will be posting a separate survey for media-specific features soon.

Cast your votes any time this week, but as always the sooner the better. This survey will close at noon on December 31, 2008 UTC.

In the new year, we will be reviving scheduled IRC developer chats, where the lead developers will discuss the week’s progress on feature development, providing opportunities for people to ask questions or make suggestions. These will be held early in the day on Wednesdays (U.S. Wednesday), and the specific time will be posted here on the development blog once it’s been finalized.

As a related aside, we spent a significant amount of time during 2.7 development sifting through Trac tickets that really shouldn’t have been there. Feature ideas and requests do not belong in Trac, they belong in the Ideas forum. Please reserve Trac for reporting bugs and things that need fixing (typos, code enhancements, etc.). If you are asking for a new UI, a new feature, or a new approach to coding something, that’s not an enhancement, it’s a new feature. New features will be entered into Trac by developers once it has been determined that the feature should be included in core. To help speed up development, moving forward we will close Trac tickets that are actually feature requests, with the comment that they should be posted in the Ideas forum instead. Please help the developers maximize their time by following this guideline.

Thanks for your help!

If you have a extra minute or two, we’ve also put together a survey that lists all the new features and allows you to rate them, as well as give additional feedback if you’re so inclined. If you want to participate, take the 2.7 Beta Favorite Features survey.