iPhone typing game: The Quick Brown Fox.

Comps for the header/nav design tweaks are in, and the results are mixed. Some people just moved a few things around, while others proposed a new style altogether. We won’t make any major changes to style in 2.8, but if the vote leans toward a submission that proposes it, we’ll do some user testing and make a decision for early 2.9 (which, now that we think of it, is probably the right thing to do anyway. )

Below are the links to the screenshots that were submitted. Please review each one (I’d open them all in tabs so I could look back and forth while they are all large size, because the voting poll just uses thumbnails), then choose the one you think looks the best/is the most usable.

This poll was supposed to close at 8pm NY time on Tuesday (today), but we’re going to leave it open for an extra day. The voting poll will now be closed at 8pm NY time on Wednesday (that’s 2am Thursday, UTC). If you want to discuss the entries’ pros/cons, this thread would be a good place.

Current: The existing interface, for reference

KM: Current nav, header elements moved

AN: Current nav, file folder style header

KD: Current nav, modified header style

JJ: Swap blog title and favorites menu

DR1: Fluency style, dark

DR2: Fluency style, medium

DR3: Fluency style, light

IK: Nav layered over dark background

GB: Modified nav/header intersection

MT: Modified nav and header

Results will be posted the day after the polls close.

ACT I

Jane: It is a thorn in my side that the blog name header is above the “dashboard” nav section in the admin, since in MU installations and with plugins (like stats), things in the Dashboard section span multiple blogs. Makes more sense for the header to head only the per-blog content area.

Mark: I agree about the header. “This is the menu, this is the content.”

All: Yep.

Five minutes later…

Mark: What do you guys this of this quick mockup I just did, playing with the admin header?

Jane: I like it that the nav is not under the header. Might need some styling help. I was also thinking maybe the favorites menu should drop down into the white h2 area by screen options/help tabs.

Ryan: Menu color to the top with blog title pushed over and favorites next to screen options sounds quite nice.

Jane: I’ll ask Matt Thomas if he could style it [ed. note: Matt Thomas created the visual style for 2.7], and we can see what people think, maybe post on wpdevel for feedback.

Ryan: If it’s quick, maybe we could even get it into 2.8.

ACT II

Matt T: Here are some comps based on what you told me.

Jane: Cool, but where are Screen Options and Help tabs?

Matt T: Still working on that.

Jane: Hm. Wonder if there’s time to open this up to community designers? I know we’re in freeze, and it’s no notice, but you didn’t get any notice either when we dropped this styling request on your lap a few hours ago. That’s the way open software development works: sometimes the best ideas come at the last minute!

Matt T: I’m all for letting the community take a stab at it. Especially if they come up with something brilliant to do with the Screen Options and Help tabs.

Jane: I’ll ask Ryan about release date and see if there’s time. I know they wanted your style recommendations today.

Act III

Ryan: Tuesday is probably doable, no later than that for final delivery of style and any gradient graphics, etc.

Jane: Awesome! People will hate me for the short notice after the has-patch marathon, but since it’s a small project and over the weekend, and wasn’t even something anyone was planning until a few hours ago, I’m *really hoping* people will take this for what it is, an attempt to give more people input into an upcoming visual change in the interface, even if it’s not a huge one.

Ryan: Would have the benefit of warning people that header and menu will be changed a bit.

Jane: And we can have a vote. If I can get all the materials together and post in the morning, that would give 2 days of design time for submissions on Monday, and if we do a day of voting Tuesday, that’s 3 days notice for the vote. I’ll make sure to post to all the lists, etc.

Ryan: Will we announce with comps from Matt T as examples of what we’re thinking?

Jane: I’ll write up the UX reasons for considering the change, and Matt T can provide some style guidelines and his original comps so no one will have to waste time mocking up the basic screen layout.

Ryan: That would help set the scope. We just want tweaks here and there, given the timing.

Jane: Woot!

On Your Mark, Get Set…
Okay, so here’s the deal. Modifying the nav/header to be a little nicer is was a last-minute design idea, and if it can’t be worked out in the time we have left before 2.8 (which is very little), we’ll just wait until 2.9 to work on it. But! If someone comes up with something the community really likes and it doesn’t break any of the design guidelines for the rest of WordPress, we could sneak it in.

UX and design guidelines for this mini-project are posted here (so as not to clog up anyone’s feed reader with big graphics). Read through the UX stuff, check out the comps Matt Thomas mocked up last night (with absolutely no notice, for the record). Use the .psd as your base, and when it’s time to submit your ideas, make a .jpg or .png and post a link to it in the comments on this post. (Note: Only comments containing a link to a design submission using this format will be approved. For general discussion about this design challenge or any of the submissions, please head into the #wordpress-dev IRC channel.)

Submit the link to your comps by 1am Tuesday, April 28 UTC (7pm Monday, April 27, New York time). If you have questions or want early feedback, we’ll be in and out of the #wordpress-dev IRC channel between now and then.

Once we’ve received the submissions, we’ll post a voting survey (much simpler than the icon survey; this one will be more of poll, just choose the one you like best) as soon as possible, and will post the link to it here as soon as it’s online. We’ll only keep voting open for one day because of the 2.8 deadline, so put it on your calendar if you think you’ll forget. Voting will close at 2am Wednesday, April 29 UTC (8pm Tuesday, April 28, New York time). Results will be announced the following day.

Go!

* Chats above are a conglomeration of actual chats.

Reminder: Only comments containing a link to a design submission will be published here. All other comments will be deleted.

If you want to leave a public comment about this contest, the design, etc., I’ve created a thread in the forums that you can use. Please discuss these things there. If you leave a regular comment here on this blog, no one will be able to reply to you, because only actual links to design submissions will be posted in the comments here.

Google has announced the successful applicants for the 2009 Google Summer of Code, and WordPress is lucky enough to have eight students allotted to our open source project. It was a tough choice, since we had almost 60 applications to choose from. We’d like to thank all the students who applied, and we’re sorry we couldn’t take on more of you.

Developers, if you see these bright young things in the dev channel, please be your usual friendly, helpful selves. Everyone else, wish our students luck with their projects this summer, which promise to be challenging but awesome. Without further ado, I’m pleased to introduce the GSoC projects (in no particular order) and the students tackling them.

Justin Shreve, Extended WordPress Search Engine. Justin will be mentored by Andy Skelton. One of the complaints I hear over and over again is about the search engine, so this could have great benefit to WordPress core.

Rudolf Cheuk Sang Lai, Adding Photo Grouping by Album Functionality. This project will wind up being a piece of a larger media redux project for 2.9/3.0. Mark Jaquith is mentoring, and Noel Jackson will be a backup mentor.

Daryl Koopersmith, WYSIWYG theme editor/generator. This will allow users to create and edit themes without touching any code. Beau Lebens is the mentor on this project.

Michael Benedict Arul will be working on a similar project. Michael will be mentored by Andrew Ozz, since this project will be using jQuery. It’s our hope that having two students working on this idea separately will foster competition and allow us to compare approaches.

Daniel Larkin, Modified Preorder Tree Traversal (MPTT). Lead Developer Ryan Boren will be his mentor. This is Daniel’s second GSoC working on WordPress.

Diego Caro, a student from Chile, will also work on an MPTT project. Diego will be mentored by Thorsten Ott.

César Rodas, social and text processing algorithms for BuddyPress and MU as related to recommendation engines. Alex Shiels and Andy Peatling will co-mentor this project.

Anthony Cole, Event management with WordPress. Co-organizer of WordCamp Australia and New Zealand, Anthony will be working on a suite of plugins (or maybe just one or two out of a planned set, scope TBD) for event management/attendee networking that will be built on BuddyPress/MU/bbPress. We’ll use wordcamp.org as a test case, and release the final product to the community. Jake Spurlock will be mentoring, with Andy Peatling as backup.

Congratulations, guys*!

*Seriously, we didn’t get more than a couple of applications from female student developers. Where are all the geek girls?

As promised, here are the results of the 24-hour has-patch marathon that was announced, begun and completed over the course of a few days last week (more on timing after the results). Results include activity from 8am Pacific time on Thursday, April 16, 2009 to 9am Pacific time on Friday, April 17, 2009.

Total number of patches committed to core: 44

Contributors whose old patches were committed: 9

Marathon contributors whose patches were committed: 13

Tickets closed: 102 (breakdown below)

• Fixed – 45
• Dupe – 16
• Wontfix – 10
• Invalid – 19
• Worksforme – 12

Tickets created: 20 [I guess not everyone got the memo that we were trying to close tickets. ]

Tickets reopened: 4

Number of testers who left comments in ticket threads: 10

Number of testing-specific comments: 18

These numbers are based on opening each ticket that registered activity during the marathon hours and counting the actual comments that indicated some testing of a patch. Contributions to philosophical discussions without a patch, while important, weren’t counted for this purpose. Nor were Trac notices that simply noted a ticket was being closed because it was a dupe, invalid, etc.

Top five contributors (committed patches): Denis-de-Bernardy, filosofo, nbachiyski, scohoust, simonwheatley

Top five testing feedback providers: shanef, Nicholas91, Denis-de-Bernardy, sivel, williamsba, mrmist (tie)

Given the short notice/last-minute nature of the marathon, I think we did pretty well. Granted, there were people who complained that two days wasn’t enough notice to clear their schedules, but let’s be honest, the 24-hour has-patch marathon was more of a rallying cry to help clean out Trac than a deadline based on anything specific. Patches are always welcome/encouraged, and now that the big features for 2.8 are mostly done, the lead devs will be able to spend more time reviewing Trac tickets and patches. Still, not too many people tested existing patches (or if they did, they failed to leave the requisite comment in the ticket threads). Testing patches is one of the easiest things you can do to help further development, since patches won’t be committed or rejected until they’ve been tested by several people.

As we get closer to the 2.8 release, jump into Trac any time and test a few patches (don’t forget to leave the feedback!) if you have time. If there’s a ticket you’re sick of seeing there, write a patch and ask your fellow contributors to test it and comment on the ticket thread. We’ll announce an official bug hunt soon (and yes, there will be more than two days’ notice), but the fact remains that addressing new bugs is easier if Trac isn’t clogged with old tickets. If you spot duplicate tickets, mark it a dupe, note the other ticket number in the comments and close the ticket. If you see one that is no longer relevant because the current code base fixes a problem reported several versions ago, mark it invalid, leave a comment and close the ticket. These simple housekeeping tasks may not seem like much, but they do help. Special props to Denis-de-Bernardy, who in addition to writing a couple of patches during the marathon and testing a few others, did a bunch of ticket maintenance like this, and cleared out a number of tickets.

Thank you to everyone who participated, and until the next marathon, happy patching and testing!