Monthly Archives: December 2014

2014

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Reflecting on 2014, a couple of themes:

  • Reclaim. In the past, I’ve written about taking back technologies from corporate entities. This year, I’ve found myself embarking on what I consider to be the natural extension of Project Reclaim: taking back my attention from technologies. In April I ditched my smartphone, and in September I stopped using Twitter. Each decision arose from a desire to devote more of my limited mental and emotional energies on things that matter most to me, like my family and my work. In each case, the pull of inertia was strong – the natural thing was to continue using the tools, just like everyone else around me was doing – but in each case, the rewards of letting go have been significant.
  • Ease. My wife and I decided over dinner tonight that 2014 felt easy. We didn’t move this year. We enjoyed satisfying jobs and financial stability. Our son transitioned from a toddler to a very nice little boy. In contrast, our family has a number of very large changes coming in 2015, changes that will be hard in many ways. So the relative and welcome easiness of 2014 is worth a moment’s pause.
  • Shipping. During 2014, BuddyPress shipped a number of major versions. I put a huge amount of time into BP 2.0, as both a developer and a release manager, and I think it paid off – IMHO it’s one of the most important releases in BuddyPress history. BuddyPress 2.2 will come in the first weeks of 2015, and it too promises to be a really important release. In addition, I was invited to join the WordPress core team for the 4.1 release, an experience that’s been fulfilling in its own way. Considered alongside a number of successful client project launches, I’ve been involved in a happily large number of solid software releases this year.

A big year ahead, but for now, за ваше здоровье!

Blogging heroes, 2014 edition

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The best bloggers publish so regularly that it’s easy to take their work for granted. So, as 2014 winds down, I thought I’d take a moment to salute my favorite blogs of the year.

The main quality that earns a blogger my respect is fearlessness. In order to blog frequently, you’ve got to be willing to write on a broad range of topics, and to publish what might sometimes less-than-fully-formed work. Most authors (myself included) are too chicken to do these things. The writers listed here are not.

  • Samir Chopra – Philosophy, cricket, politics, parenthood, New York, literature, you get the idea.
  • Alan Levine – Alan is fond of saying that his tireless chronicling makes his blog a supplement to his memory: he can easily look back to see what he was doing and thinking just about any day in the last decade. We should all be so bold.
  • Audrey Watters – Independent journalist covering education and technology. Support her work.
  • Alan Jacobs – I follow Alan’s blog and tumblr in part to remember that there’s a way to engage in public intellectualism without being pandering or smarmy.

Thanks to all for your work in 2014!

WordPress 4.1 and me

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WordPress 4.1 “Dinah” was just released. In September, I was asked to do a stint as a committer. It was a blast. Here’s what I worked on:

Query improvements

My primary goal for 4.1 was to rework the WP_Meta_Query, WP_Tax_Query, and WP_Date_Query classes so that they supported nested query syntax. In the process, I worked through much of the backlog of Trac tickets related to these three classes, fixing some longtime annoyances and adding a few nice features. I published an in-depth write-up on these improvements in October.

Taxonomy

I decided to use my new position to stir up trouble related to the taxonomy roadmap. My goal was to make some progress on Trac’s Worst Ticket. I wrote a couple boatloads of unit tests for functions related to term editing and creation, helped shepherd through fixes to a few edge cases related to duplicate term creation, and pulled the trigger on changing the wp_terms database schema. In #21950 we stopped creating new shared taxonomy terms, and we came very close to splitting existing shared terms in this release, but pulled it out at the last minute so we’d have a bit more time for developer education. I look forward to continuing my unofficial role as Taxonomy Gadfly in future releases.

Unit tests

I contributed hundreds of automated tests to WP during the 4.1 cycle, and so the slowness of the phpunit suite was a particular pain point for me. Based in part on some ideas of nacin’s at WCSF, I took a few steps toward reorganizing and refactoring a couple parts of the phpunit suite, with the end result that running $ phpunit on WordPress takes less than half the time today as what it took in 4.0, despite the addition of many, many tests. I’m equally proud that I was able to help a few contributors to include unit tests in their WP patches for the first time.

Comments

I spent some time in 4.1 improving comment queries. I reworked comments_template() (the function used by WP to display comments on a blog post in most themes) to use the internal comments API, resolving a ticket that has bugged me for a long time. I also helped to add some additional query params to WP_Comment_Query, and worked with a number of contributor to pave the way for a better system for custom comment types in the future.

Miscellaneous

I took advantage of what may be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to address a couple personal peeves, like better support for apostrophes in email addresses. It was also a pleasure to do a bit of developer outreach, in the form of helping a few folks to get their first WordPress props, as well as clearing out some old has-patch tickets.

Working on a huge project like WordPress has been a lot of fun. 4.1 FTW!

wp-cli-git-helper: Git commands for wp-cli

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At this year’s WordPress Community Summit there was an interesting session about the many uses of the delightful wp-cli. One idea was that wp-cli could handle some simple git commands intelligently, so that, for instance, updating a plugin would automatically generate a changeset for the update with a descriptive message. After some back and forth with the wp-cli team, I decided to build this as a community package. It’s available here: wp-cli-git-helper.

This will be a huge time saver for me as I manage client sites. If it helps you, that’s super too. Pull requests welcome for Kewl New Features.