WordPress trunk news #4

Compared to last week’s changesets, this week has seen a little more exciting action throughout the trunk. Moreover, a 20000-commit milestone has been reached this week.

WordPress Trunk News 4

Project Gandalf

(for information on the different projects, teams and statuses related to WordPress 3.4 refer to this page)

Key updates have occurred inside Project Gandalf set to revolutionize the way users interact with the Theme selection and customization screens. The two are set to be combined into one interface.

WordPress Theme Customization 3.4

jQuery postMessage 0.2

changeset 19992

jQuery postMessage allows for cross-domain communication and quite effortless message passing between iframes. The library is introduced to address some of the needs in Project Gandalf.

Twenty Twelve

If you’re looking to see the Twenty Twelve theme in WordPress 3.4, you and I will have to wait, unfortunately. According to this report, updated on the 29th of February, the theme has been rushed and isn’t complete enough for WordPress 3.4.

Development has not ceased, many improvements have been done this week.

search_theme_directories

changeset 20020

search_theme_directories has been completely rewritten and should result in a “solid” performance increase, complete with database-based persistent caching.

WP_Theme API

changeset 20029

One of the glittery features of that this changeset further improves is the ability for themes to have multiple screenshots attached to them. However, more importantly is the introduction of the WP_Theme API, which encapsulates a lot of the functionality for parsing theme headers, validation, etc. A WP_Theme instance will be wrapped around a theme directory and expose a large number of methods.

get_current_theme() no more

changeset 20040

This changeset deprecates the get_current_theme function. wp_get_themes would be used instead. Get acquainted with the function here.

Widget filters

changeset 20047

widget_comments_args and widget_post_args filters for the default Recent Posts and Recent Comments widgets shall be available. No more hacking.