Mark Jaquith made a very tough decision today and announced that the new Post Formats UI everyone’s been talking about for the upcoming release of WordPress 3.6, will be taken out of core and moved to a plugin.
One of the flagship features for the 3.6 release was to be a new UI for post formats on the post edit screen. Post formats would be enabled by default and this new UI would put a big focus on their usage. Even the new default theme, Twenty Thirteen, is geared to continue the focus on post formats on the front end.
The implementation of this new feature has held up the release of 3.6, which was originally scheduled for late April. According to Mark, it’s just not ready for core yet.
the result just isn’t compelling, or obvious, or any of the things that it should be. It’s not just a matter of polish, it seems to be a fundamental issue with the concept.
Instead, this functionality will be taken out of core and moved to a plugin, in a similar fashion to the MP 6.0 plugin, with the hopes of reintegrating it back into core when it’s matured.
Mark then goes on to outline the plan for separating the code out between core and the new plugin. Including no longer enabling all post formats by default in core. He also appeals to other devs to comment on his plan for moving forward from here, and as you can imagine, there’s already much discussion happening there.
The new Twenty Thirteen theme that is also to be released with WordPress 3.6 will need some minor tweaks to cater for this, but by and large shouldn’t be adversely affected. The theme has a fairly big focus on the display of post formats, so will still work well for whatever post formats are enabled on any given WordPress site, as post formats have been in WordPress since version 3.1.
So, what do you think of this decision? Should the core developers have pushed on and held 3.6 back until the feature was ready, or does it make more sense to cut their losses and proceed as Mark suggests?
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