The WordPress Weekend Roundup

Yikes. It’s been a busy Saturday and I’m finally getting around to compiling our weekly review of content that we didn’t get to cover explicitly over the last 7 days.

In a good way I’m glad as I spent most of my time today with family. Soccer games, a date with one of my daughters, and then the park with my other one has left me spent.

I hope your weekend has been as eventful as mine already as well!

1. The Future of the Admin Panel

The big news that’s been circulating is the future of the admin panel and what that might look like for 3.6 and beyond. WPMU has their take and WPRealm has already shared theirs as well.

Matt has begun to tease this out with the MP6 plugin, which we covered when it first hit the repo.

I can’t wait to see where all of this goes!

The plugin description is as follows:

This plugin is a secret; don’t tell anybody about it.

Simplifying the wp-admin UI is a challenging task, as flattening the icons showed us when you improve one thing it just makes all of the other out of date elements stand out more.

Trunk isn’t terribly well-suited for UI iteration, so this plugin is a chance for us to rapidly iterate in a way people can use and test some new ideas for how to visually tie together the aesthetics of our current wp-admin UI.

Existence of this plugin will be officially denied, but discussion will happen at http://make.wordpress.org/ui/if you’d like to participate. All comments and contributions are welcome, though we’re leaving the final call on decisions to MT.

(MP6 doesn’t stand for anything.)

Oh boy.

2. WordPress Under Siege

Ankur Sethi takes WordPress optimization personally and takes a look under the hood:

I was dismayed to discover that WordPress has terrible performance out of the box, even if you disable all installed plugins. The WordPress dashboard served by my Ubuntu VM would easily take 4-5 seconds to load, and individual posts would take at least 2-3 seconds to load. I found this unacceptable.

3. Aaron Jorbin and More Meetup Guidelines

I previously had posted my intent to form a committee to draft guidelines for Meetups. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize the timeline we had with Meetup.com and thus the need for us to get these done very quickly in order to get more Meetups under the umbrella. Therefore, I’ve prepared these guidelines as a draft for you, the WordPress events community to comment on.

4. Workflow Changes to Handbooks

If you’re already involved with the handbook development then you already know about the changes but it’s good to know for the rest of us. Looking forward to the handbooks – they are going to be awesome.