Javaguidelines.com

You still have a full month left to finish up your 2007 New Year’s Resolutions. Stop slacking.

While looking through my contact list today, I realized that many of those contacts were initially made on the WordPress bug tracker. Regular contributors to WordPress hang out there to perform the daily chores of testing, fixing, and designing. It’s a good place to get a feel for someone’s skills and style. Unlike other forums open source projects use to communicate, the noise is low and the work really stands out. The folks who consistently contribute to the bug tracker keep popping up in my feed reader and reminding me of the great work they do. When we have dollars to spend on people, these folks are on my mind. The tracker is probably my most valuable resource when it comes to professional networking with the people who do the work that matters to me.

Contributing to open source as a means of showing off your skills and making a name for yourself is nothing new, of course. My realization here is the central role the bug tracker plays in how I make and develop professional relationships within the WP community. Mailing lists, forums, and IRC channels are useful venues, but the bug tracker is where the folks who do the grunt work and get things done go.

What’s the professional water cooler for your project? Anyone else gather around the bug tracker?

With the holidays upon us, a new baby Boren coming next month, and a new admin design to implement, we’ve decided to push the release of WordPress 2.4 out to January 24th of next year.  I updated the roadmap with the new date.

As with my Subaru, my wife’s 2004 G35 doesn’t have an auxiliary input for hooking up an mp3 player. After finally getting fed up with not being able to hook up my tunes when in her car, I ordered a PAC AAI-NIS2 and did a little dashboard surgery. Pulling the stereo out of the G35 is more involved than with my Subaru, but these directions guided me through the process without incident. All told it took a couple hours to pull the dash apart, remove the stereo, install the PAC, run the cables where I wanted them, and button everything back up. I also installed a ProClip angled mount along with the padded swivel holder for the iPhone while I was at it. Now the iPhone is securely mounted and piping tunes into the G35’s factory deck via the SAT input. Hopefully I will never have to this again. Auto makers seem to have finally caught on.

If you’ve been following Peter’s weekly digest posts, you can see we’re working hard on the next release of WordPress. One of the main efforts in 2.4 is improving performance. I’ve been busy with xdebug and kcachegrind finding places where we can speed things up. If you have a theme that uses widgets or custom header images, 2.4 should be a good bit faster for you. We found a couple of time-wasting bottlenecks in those areas that are now gone. One scenario was burning up 10% of the total page load time. We reduced that to a fraction of a percent. That’s a nice savings. We’ve also been tweaking the filter/action system to make it as fast as possible. The filter and action hooks are fired off many times per page load so even little savings add up.

Caching is also getting attention in 2.4. We’ve had the object cache for awhile now, but there were some areas of WP where it wasn’t being used. The object cache now caches quite a bit more stuff. If you are using the APC, XCache, or memcached backends for the WP object cache, you will notice a few less database queries in 2.4. We also have an Advanced Caching plugin in the works that caches even more stuff. On many page loads you will see zero queries. If you have a fast cache and want to ease DB load as much as possible, this plugin might be for you.

The next Silicon Valley WordPress Meetup is on the 8th. It’s once again being held on the Google campus. This time it’s in the evening instead of during lunch, making it easier for those of you who can’t get away from work during the day to attend. I’m trying to get a fresh order of schwag to bring, but it might not arrive in time. The agenda is the usual chit chat and maybe a couple of presentations. I might do a little spiel about what’s happening in 2.4 development.

Update:  I’ll have t-shirts, stickers, and maybe some Moleskines embossed with the WordPress logo.  We’ll have to fight over the Moleskines as there won’t be enough for all.  Perhaps we’ll have a little WP trivia challenge to see who gets them.  Quick, which Jazz musician was the 2.0 release named after?