September WordPress Development Plans

Posted by Jacob Santos on September 6, 2008

Inline Documentation

I have switched my focus to the wp-includes directory files, because there is a lot more support for documenting those files. Peter Westwood helped document general-template.php and Scott H helped with formatting.php. There are only 13 remaining files that need to be documented and I plan on finishing the remaining ones before next week is over.

I hope that those who have contributed will contribute some more. It is a great feeling to be down to such a small number, as opposed to the 26 files from several months ago. It is nice and I hope to have a few more files done today.

It is beginning to get to the point where the functions I’m trying to document aren’t within my ability to correctly do so. I’ll try my best, but I’ll hate to leave the functions without any type of documentation. If it comes to it, I might have to use the functions to understand what they are supposed to be used for. Doing so would take a lot more time, so I hope there aren’t a lot of functions that need this method.

Plugins

I still want to develop several plugins from my previous list. It would be nice to grow my list of plugins. There are some enhancements I’ve been waiting to do for a couple of my plugins. Alternative Mailer needs to support attachments, but I’m actually unsure how to go about doing that. It needs other enhancements.

WordPress Acceptance Tests

Finally, if I can get to it this month, I want to start writing some acceptance test cases using Selenium. WordPress 2.7 is a little too buggy for my tastes and I want to offer better QA, so that users won’t take up arms for the lack of proper testing.

It should go fairly quickly. I’m going to focus on the Administration Panels first and go through each page. There should be upwards to about a 1000 total tests. I think I’m also going to plan it out a bit more, so that it can be known when all of the tests are complete.

Given how much time I’ll need to devote to my plugins, I’m not sure I’ll be able to finish this month. However, starting it and then finishing it in October might give better reason to releasing WordPress 2.7 in November instead of a month early. Well, depends on I think it will take a full week to do everything I need to finish up the plugins and create the new ones. That will give me a week to finish this project.

Given my future plans I’m not sure I’ll be available to create any patches for the administration. It isn’t my area that I usually write patches for. Also, I’ll be moving on to other projects that use the WordPress library, but I don’t really want to support the Administration, unless I have to. Regardless, the tests and bug reports should help the community and core team fix the bugs on their own.

I’m not going to use the Automattic WordPress Tests repository. I’m going to create my own for this project. It is going to require more work than the WordPress Tests, so I’m unsure how many will actually participate with using it.

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2 Comments.

  1. Adam September 12, 2008 at 9:30 pm

    Hi,

    I am very interested in helping with inline documentation for WordPress. If there is any more help that is needed, please let me know. Thanks!

  2. Jacob Santos September 13, 2008 at 6:30 pm

    @Adam

    http://codex.wordpress.org/Inline_Documentation The page has inline documentation format standard and lines to open tickets that need to be worked on.

    Hey, thanks for wanting to help, it is getting down to a shorter list of files to complete, but don’t worry about stepping on anyone toes. If you complete one function or 100, it will go a long way to completing the inline documentation sooner rather than the time I can spend on it.

    Good luck.