Countdown to WordPress 2.8.1: 7 steps for watching WordPress evolve

(Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes)

Are you wondering whether to upgrade to WordPress 2.8 right away? Or whether you should wait until the next release?

How would you decide to upgrade to 2.8.1, anyway?

Making a smart upgrade decision is like making any other smart decision: the more you know, the more intelligent your decision. Fortunately, it’s easy to learn everything you need to know about WordPress to make such decisions. The entire project is open source. The development process is open to public scrutiny…

…and I’m just about to show you how you can scrutinize WordPress for yourself.

First, I need to spin some tunes… taking a bunch of screenshots isn’t very difficult, but it is tedious, and I want some music to liven up the process a bit. Let’s see… iTunes has the DJ feature, let’s randomize it a few times and see what strikes my fancy… Gatecrasher… haven’t heard that one in a while… let’s do it!

Awright, getting on with it…

This post uses the specific example of the WordPress 2.8.1 minor release, which is in active development. Later, you can use these steps to follow every single aspect of the WordPress project.

1. First, go to the WordPress Trac website and click View Tickets, shown by the blue arrow pointing to the red box in the screenshot. This will take you to a Trac page listing out all the different types of reports created by the WordPress developers to keep… track… of WordPress development.
2. Next, choose report {3} “Next Minor Release” from the Available Reports page, as shown by the red box in the next screenshot.

   Each of these numbered reports shows a different facet of WordPress development.

   Clicking on the Next Minor Release Report takes us to a page showing the open issues for an upcoming WordPress 2.8.1 release. The closed, that is, fixed issues are not listed. Trac is very powerful, allowing you create your own custom reports, which we’re going to do next so that we can see which issues have been fixed.

3. Creating a custom database query in the Trac project management system is easy. First, click on the “Custom Query” link as shown in the screenshot:

   

   Next, create a new filter for Milestone and check the “Closed” checkbox. Both are circled in the screenshot below:
   

4. Use the Milestone pull down filter and choose “2.8.1″ as shown in the screenshot. Make sure you have the “Closed” status checked too:
   
5. Find and click the “Update” button in the lower right corner.
6. Now you have a page with all 34 (at the time of writing) issues pending for the 2.8.1 release, of which 2 issues shown in the green boxes are closed. Click on the picture to open the screenshot in a new window to see everything in proper resolution.

   

7. BONUS! See the red box at the bottom of the previous screenshot? That’s the RSS feed for this query. Copy that RSS link and paste it into your feed reader, you will get updates on the 2.8.1 status as changes occur in the development.

These steps are simple. Once you get the hang of it, you can watch all of WordPress develop, or just a very small part of WordPress that interests you the most.

Was this too technical? Should I make a screencast? Let me know.

Tagged as: Systems