“Patches Welcome”

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Occasionally you may have seen or heard myself or one of the other members of the core WordPress team saying “Patches Welcome” and wondered what this was all about.

Basically we are just trying to emphasise that in an open source project like WordPress, where direction is driven by the community with responsibility gained through the mechanisms of meritocracy, the best way to improve things is to write a patch.  This doesn’t have to be a patch for the PHP code it could also be a patch for the CSS or an update to the documentation on the codex or helping out people on the support forums.

On the way back from WordCamp UK last weekend I had the idea for a new site where we could collect together information around how to get involved and so I have set up a new site called “Patches Welcome” and have started writing over there too.  The aim for the site is to collect together tutorials, a question and answer list, contributor interviews and other things as the site develops.

I posted the first of the contributor interviews yesterday and have already got some questions coming in and ideas for tutorials for the coming weeks.

Please let me know if you have any ideas or questions using the contact form on the site.

Introducing menu_page_url()

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We’ve just added a new api into WordPress 3.0 to make plugin writing that bit easier – #13829

It is now really easy to get the url for a plugin page that you have registered to make it easy to link between different plugin pages. You use the new function like this:

add_options_page('Best Evar Menu', 'Best Evar Menu', 'manage_options', 'best_evar_menu', 'best_evar_options_page');

menu_page_url( 'best_evar_menu' );

The function will by default echo the url out but if you want you can get it returned for processing by setting the second argument to false.

Themes and WordPress 3.0 some important changes

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During the development of WordPress 3.0 we have made a number of changes under the hood which will be of interest to the developers and users of themes.  Some of these changes are about making themes easier to develop and some of them are about making it easier to support the override of parts of themes.

1) get_template_part – [13146], #12371

The first change which should make it easier for extensible flexible theme development is the introduction of get_template_part() which has been introduced as a generic way of modularising themes a step beyond the basic footer/body/header files.  This new function makes it very easy for a theme to reuse blocks of code implementing theme areas such as the WordPress loop in a way which makes it easy for a child theme to override the implementation in a context sensitive way.

This function is really easy to use – You create a file within your theme containing the code you want to re-use and then you pull it in as follows:

get_template_part( 'loop', 'author' ); // Pull in the loop for the author archives

This will look for the files loop-author.php and loop.php searching first in the current themes folder before looking in the parent themes folder (if one if defined).  The new TwentyTen theme in WordPress 3.0 uses this for every call to it’s loop.php to make it easy to override in a single instance from a child theme.

2) Deprecating overly minimal themes [14365], #12425

The next change is to deprecate the support for overly minimal themes.  Prior to WordPress 3.0 any theme which was using the relevant template tag but missing any of the following template files – header.php, footer.php, sidebar.php, comments.php, comments-popup.php – would effectively behave as if it has a parent theme defined as ‘default’ using the relevant files from the old default theme.

Now that we are moving to a new default theme we didn’t want to have to support this very old behaviour indefinitely or make it such that the files from the TwentyTen theme were used as they have a different visual layout and would like change peoples existing sites.

Going forward a WordPress theme using the relevant template tags is expected to contain all these files itself, or have them provided by a parent theme, and the theme compatibility files included in WordPress 3.0 will be removed in a future version.

If you are using a theme which is affected by this change then you just need to make sure that you have the default theme installed – it will not be in new installs but will be preserved on upgrades. Then add the following to the comment at the top of the style.css of your theme to make it such that the default theme is used as its parent theme:

Template: default

More information on the process of indicating a parent theme in a child themes style.css is available in the codex.

Giving your WordPress a check up

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Every now and then someone finds something wrong with a WordPress install which, rather than be caused by a bug in WordPress itself, is caused by a server configuration error, an interaction between WordPress and something else installed on the server or is just a recommend optimisation for better site performance.

Everyone has a different set of pitfalls that they have come across and I would like to collect together all these little things into a comprehensive community developed plugin which can hopefully become one of the first “canonical” plugins that we have talked about.

To that end I have developed a framework for this plugin, in the style of a unit test framework, to make it really easy to write tests and I am hoping that some of you will have ideas for tests and also that you will want to get involved.

For a while I have tagged tickets in the main WordPress trac where there are is possible inspiration for tests – http://bit.ly/healthchecktickets.

The following is an example of the code required to carry out one of these tests which recommends users of PHP4 upgrade to PHP5.


/**
 * Check that we are running at least PHP 5
 *
 * @todo Provide a link to a codex article
 * @link http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/9751
 * @author peterwestwood
 */
class HealthCheck_PHP_Version extends HealthCheckTest {
    function run_test() {
        $this->assertTrue(    version_compare('5.0.0', PHP_VERSION, '<'),
        sprintf( __( 'Your Webserver is running PHP version %s, which is no longer receiving security updates and will no longer be supported by a future version of WordPress.', 'health-check' ), PHP_VERSION ),
        HEALTH_CHECK_RECOMMENDATION );
    }
}
HealthCheck::register_test('HealthCheck_PHP_Version');

If you would like to get involved in the development of the plugin then you can check the source code out from the WordPress plugins subversion repository here: http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/health-check/branches/alpha/ and you can follow the development progress using the WordPress plugins trac here: http://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/log/health-check/branches/alpha.

As the plugin is not yet ready for its first release we will be doing the development in this alpha branch and then move to trunk once we make the first release.

I am actively looking for fellow developers for this project as a community team we can make this a success.

So if you would like commit access to write some tests then drop me a note using the contact form with a bit about yourself and I will give you access.

What should go into a WordPress maintenance release?

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Now that WordPress 2.9 has hit the streets there are inevitably going to be a number of bugs which slipped through testing which people will identify and we need a good process for deciding which of these bugs should be included in an upcoming 2.9.1 release and which of them can wait until 3.0 to be fixed.

In the past I think we have included to many changes into the maintenance releases.  This has partly been due to the lack of end-user testing which has taken place during the beta phase and partly based on a drive to fix bugs sooner rather than later.  This has had the unfortunate downside of diverting the time of the core contributors, that they could have been spending on working on features for the next major release, and has meant that the release cycle has been extended to longer than we would have liked.  This means that you don’t get the cool new features like Trash as soon as you would have done.

This post is an effort to summarise my thoughts on this subject and I would welcome discussion in the comments below – hopefully we can come up with a succinct set of criteria which will may it clear to everyone what the community thinks should be included in a maintenance release and what should not.

First of all I think it is important to understand the purpose of a maintenance or point release.  To me these releases are about fixing critical bugs which affect a large percentage of end-users and disrupt their ability to use the software. They need to have a small number of changes so as to make them easy to test, lightweight to develop and to reduce the impact on the next major release. This also means that they will be easy to upgrade too and are less likely to break plugins / themes in the process so making the upgrade to them even easier and more worry free.

If we let the content of these release grow too large then we will never have the time to work on the new features for the next major release which will then mean that release takes longer to arrive and may end up with less features.  We also need to remember that every change has the risk of introducing a new bug and this is another reason we should limit the number of changes in a maintenance release.

Now we need to identify what sort of bugs fit into the category of critical bugs.  The most obvious and easiest to identify are the security bugs – fixes for these need to be available as soon as possible. Once we get beyond security bugs it can get more difficult to quantify the affect of the issue and therefore how soon a fix needs to be in the hands of the users.

The following list of criteria are my straw man proposal on this subject:

  • The issue is easily reproducible and testable.
  • The issue is severe – e.g. it makes a whole feature unusable and therefore the fix cannot wait for the next major release.
  • The issue is a regression from a previous major release – for example if an unintentional/incompatible change to an API or UI was made.
  • The issue is not just that warnings or notices appear when WP_DEBUG is enabled the area of code in question must also fail to work correctly.

What do you think?