Everyone knows by now that WordPress 2.7 is packed with new features. Now that it’s available (almost 600,000 downloads as I write this!), it’s time to start working on 2.8. There were dozens of things that got tabled during 2.7 due to time constraints, and there are a lot of high-rated features in the Ideas forum, so there are a lot of potential features under consideration.

Right now, the lead developers are thinking the top priorities for 2.8 will be widget management, theme browser/installer and performance upgrades. The rest of the development time will be taken up with bug tickets and additional features/enhancements from a prioritized list. To that end, we’ve posted a new survey for you to help us prioritize features for 2.8. The list pulls from the developers’ “2.7 leftovers” list as well as the most popular features from the Ideas forum. Just rank each feature and tell us your top pick (up to three). You also have the option of adding comments or additional suggestions, but this is not mandatory. For your response to count, you must rank all of the features in the list. The survey has only one page.

Note that media features are not included in this list as we will be posting a separate survey for media-specific features soon.

Cast your votes any time this week, but as always the sooner the better. This survey will close at noon on December 31, 2008 UTC.

In the new year, we will be reviving scheduled IRC developer chats, where the lead developers will discuss the week’s progress on feature development, providing opportunities for people to ask questions or make suggestions. These will be held early in the day on Wednesdays (U.S. Wednesday), and the specific time will be posted here on the development blog once it’s been finalized.

As a related aside, we spent a significant amount of time during 2.7 development sifting through Trac tickets that really shouldn’t have been there. Feature ideas and requests do not belong in Trac, they belong in the Ideas forum. Please reserve Trac for reporting bugs and things that need fixing (typos, code enhancements, etc.). If you are asking for a new UI, a new feature, or a new approach to coding something, that’s not an enhancement, it’s a new feature. New features will be entered into Trac by developers once it has been determined that the feature should be included in core. To help speed up development, moving forward we will close Trac tickets that are actually feature requests, with the comment that they should be posted in the Ideas forum instead. Please help the developers maximize their time by following this guideline.

Thanks for your help!

The first thing you’ll notice about 2.7 is its new interface. From the top down, we’ve listened to your feedback and thought deeply about the design and the result is a WordPress that’s just plain faster. Nearly every task you do on your blog will take fewer clicks and be faster in 2.7 than it did in a previous version. (Download it now, or read on for more.)

Next you’ll begin to notice the new features subtly sprinkled through the new interface: the new dashboard that you can arrange with drag and drop to put the things most important to you on top, QuickPress, comment threading, paging, and the ability to reply to comments from your dashboard, the ability to install any plugin directly from WordPress.org with a single click, and sticky posts.

Digging in further you might notice that every screen is customizable. Let’s say you never care about author on your post listings — just click “Screen Options” and uncheck it and it’s instantly gone from the page. The same for any module on the dashboard or write screen. If your screen is narrow and the menu is taking up too much horizontal room, click the arrow to minimize it to be icon-only, and then go to the write page and drag and drop everything from the right column into the main one, so your posting area is full-screen. (For example I like hiding everything except categories, tags, and publish. I put categories and tags on the right, and publish under the post box.)

For a visual introduction to what 2.7 is, check out this video (available in HD, and full screen):

It’s all about you. It’s the next generation of WordPress, which is why we’ve bestowed it with the honor of being named for John Coltrane. And you can download it today.

Last, but certainly not least, this may be the last time you ever have to manually upgrade WordPress again. We heard how tired you were of doing upgrades for yourself and your friends, so now WordPress includes a built-in upgrade that will automatically notify you of new releases, and when you’re ready it will download them, install them, and upgrade your blog with a single click.

(As with any interface change it may take a little bit of time to acclimate yourself but soon you’ll find yourself whizzing through the screens. Even people who have hated it at first tell us after a few days they wonder how they got by before.)

The Story Behind 2.7

The real reason Coltrane is such a huge leap forward is because the community was so involved with every step of the process. Over 150 people contributed code directly to the release, our highest ever, with many tens of thousands more participating in the polls, surveys, tests, mailing lists, and other feedback mechanisms the WordPress dev team used in putting this release together.

For some of the back story in the development of 2.7, check out these blog posts (thanks to WeblogToolsCollection for the list):

• Usability Testing Report: 2.5 and CrazyHorse
• The New 2.7 Dashboard
• The Visual Design of 2.7
• WordPress 2.7 wireframes
• Comprehensive Codex Article on WordPress 2.7
• WordPress Development Updates from Jane Wells
• WordPress Usability Testing in New York
• WordPress 2.7 UI Configurability from Ryan Boren
• Customizable Post Editing Screen from Mark Jaquith
• WordPress 2.7 Navigation Survey from Jane Wells
• Shortcuts/Favorites Menu from Jane Wells
• CrazyHorse Presentation at WordCamp SF
• WordPress 2.7 Walkthrough by Matt
• WordPress 2.7 and beyond from Matt at WordCamp Utah

This was interesting to us, a blogging software release we actually blogged about, but the process was hugely informative. Prior to its release today Crazyhorse and 2.7 had been tested by tens of thousands of people on their blogs, hundreds of thousands of you count .com. The volume of feedback was so high that we decided to push back the release date a month to take time to incorporate it all and do more revisions based on what you guys said.

For those of you wondering why we didn’t call this release 3.0, it’s because we abhor version number inflation. 3.0 will just be the next release after 2.9. The major features in new point releases approach also works well for products like OS X, with huge changes between a 10.3 and 10.4.

The Future

Those of you following along at home might have noticed this was our second major redesign of WordPress this year. Whoa nelly! While that wasn’t ideal, and I especially sympathize with those of you creating books or tutorials around WordPress, there’s good news. The changes to WordPress in 2.5 and 2.7 were necessary for us to break free of much of the legacy cruft and interface bloat that had built up over the years (gradually) and more importantly provide us with a UI framework and interface language we can use at the foundation to build tomorrow’s WordPress on, to express ideas we haven’t been able to before. So at the end of 2009 I expect, interface-wise, WordPress to look largely the same as it does now.

That said, we couldn’t be more excited about the future with regards to features. Now that we’ve cleared out more basic things, we are looking forward in the coming year to really tackling media handling including audio and video, better tools for plugin and theme developers, widgets, theme updates, more integrated and contextual help, and easier integration with projects like BuddyPress and bbPress.

Thank Yous

We would like to take a moment to thank the following WordPress.org users for being a part of 2.7: Verena Segert, Ben Dunkle, 082net, _ck_, Aaron Brazell, Aaron Campbell, Aaron Harp, aaron_guitar, abackstrom, Alex Rabe, Alex Shiels, anderswc, andr, Andrew Ozz, andy, Andy Peatling, Austin Matzko, axelseaa, bendalton, Benedict Eastaugh, Betsy Kimak, Björn Wijers, bobrik, brianwhite, bubel, Byrne Reese, caesarsgrunt, capripot, Casey Bisson, Charles E. Frees-Melvin, Chris Johnston, codestyling, corischlegel, count_0, Daniel Jalkut, Daniel Torreblanca, David McFarlane, dbuser123, Demetris Kikizas, Dion Hulse, docwhat, Donncha O Caoimh, Doug Stewart, Dougal Campbell, dsader, dtsn, dwc, g30rg3x, guillep2k, Hailin Wu, Hans Engel, Jacob Santos, Jamie Rumbelow, Jan Brasna, Jane Wells, Jean-LucfromBrussels, Jennifer Hodgdon, Jeremy Clarke, Jérémie Bresson, jick, Joe Taiabjee, John Blackbourn, John Conners, John Lamansky, johnhennmacc, Joost de Valk, Joseph Scott, kashani, Kim Parsell, Lloyd Budd, Lutz Schröer, Malaiac, Mark Jaquith, Mark Steel, Matt Freedman, Matt Mullenweg, Matt Thomas, matthewh84, mattyrob, mcs_trekkie, Michael Adams, Michael Hampton, MichaelH, mictasm, Mike Schinkel, msi08, msw0418, mtekk, Nick Momrik, Nikolay Bachiyski, Noel Jackson, Otto, Ozh, paddya, paul, pedrop, pishmishy, Po0ky, RanYanivHartstein, raychampagne, rdworth, reinkim, rickoman, rm53, rnt, Robert Accettura, roganty, Ryan Boren, Ryan McCue, Sam Bauers, Sam_a, schiller, Scott Houst, sekundek, Shane, Simek, Simon Wheatley, sivel, st_falcon, stefano, strider72, tai, takayukister, techcookies, Terragg, thinlight, tott, Trevor Fitzgerald, tschai, Txanny, Valiallah (Mani) Monajjemi, Viper007Bond, Vladimir Kolesnikov, wasp, wet, wfrantz, x11tech, xknown, xorax, ydekproductions, yoavf, yonosoytu, yoshi, zedlander

There comes a time in every WordPress release when it’s ready for the world , to come out of its cocoon and feel the light of the world on its wings for the first time.

It’s not quite that time yet, but we’re as close as we’ve ever been, hence the immediate availability of 2.7 Release Candidate 2, or RC2 for short.

Of course if you were already testing 2.7, you can just use the built-in core updater (Tools > Upgrade) to download and install RC2 for you (and later upgrade you to the final release when it’s available) but if not you can use the download link above.

We feel this release is pretty much exactly what we’re going to ship as 2.7, barring any final bugs or polish tweaks that you report or we find.

With the release of RC1, we’re in the final leg of development before the release of 2.7.  280 commits since beta 3 have polished the new admin UI (including new menu icons created by the winners of our icon design contest) and fixed all known blocker bugs.

We think RC1 is ready for everyone to try out.  Please download RC1 and help us make the final release the best it can be.  As always, back up your blog before upgrading.

Get RC1.

WordPress 2.6.5 is immediately available and fixes one security problem and three bugs. We recommend everyone upgrade to this release.

The security issue is an XSS exploit discovered by Jeremias Reith that fortunately only affects IP-based virtual servers running on Apache 2.x. If you are interested only in the security fix, copy wp-includes/feed.php and wp-includes/version.php from the 2.6.5 release package.

2.6.5 contains three other small fixes in addition to the XSS fix. The first prevents accidentally saving post meta information to a revision. The second prevents XML-RPC from fetching incorrect post types. The third adds some user ID sanitization during bulk delete requests. For a list of changed files, consult the full changeset between 2.6.3 and 2.6.5.

Note that we are skipping version 2.6.4 and jumping from 2.6.3 to 2.6.5 to avoid confusion with a fake 2.6.4 release that made the rounds. There is not and never will be a version 2.6.4.

Get WordPress 2.6.5.

The community has voted, and the votes have been tallied. The winner of Project Icon, with 35% of the votes, is Entry ID “BD,” otherwise known as Ben Dunkle. Congratulations, Ben! The runner-up was VS, otherwise known as Verena Segert, so we’ll be attaching that set to the alternate color palette that is selectable from the profile screen. As we prepare for RC1, Ben and Verena will be revising a couple of their icons so that both sets will use the same metaphors, creating the colored “on” states, and creating the larger size of each icon for use in the h2 screen headers. We are very grateful to have had the opportunity to select from so many great options, and would like to express again our appreciation for all the designers who participated in the contest. Thanks also to the more than 3700 people who completed the voting survey and took the time to weigh on on the individual icon sets.

Q.18 Which one of the sets do you think we should use as a basis for the 2.7 icons? Icon Set # of votes % of votes BD 1285 35% VS 1080 29% GB2 424 11% OSD 376 10% LS 300 8% GB1 235 6%

The wide lead of BD and VS made it clear that voters had a clear preference for these sets.

Q.20 If you could choose a runner-up, which would you choose? Icon Set # of votes % of votes VS 916 27% BD 647 19% LS 522 16% OSD 488 14% GB2 462 14% GB1 331 10%

Question 20 was not mandatory, so a few hundred people skipped it, but the responses we did get (3366 of them) reinforced the fact that the two most popular sets were also the most popular 2nd choices, which made the decision of the judges to go with the popular vote an easy one (take that, electoral college!).

A few of the individual icon metaphors also had a significant lead over the other choices.
Dashboard: 1333 voters (40%) chose a house as the best metaphor. We agree, so both Ben and Verena will be replacing their Dashboard icons.

Media: 2097 voters (65%) chose the combination camera + musical note icon, which was part of Ben’s set. We also really loved it, and Verena will amend her media icon to incorporate this idea.

Plugins: 1682 voters (53%) selected the outlet plug metaphor, which both Ben and Verena used in their sets.

Tools: 1581 voters (49%) liked the combination of two tools better than anything else, so Ben and Verena will try this approach.

So those are the results, and soon you’ll see the new icons coming to a 2.7 installation near you.

Need another look at the entries to remember which one you liked best? Here are some reminder images, as well as the identity of each set’s creator.

BD was Ben Dunkle, a designer, professor and artist from upstate/western New York State. In case you’ve already forgotten, Ben’s icon set is the winner of Project Icon and will become the default icon set after a few minor changes. VS was Verena Segert, our runner-up, a designer from Germany who presented sets in both grayscale and blue. Her blue icons received more specific voter comments than the gray ones, so we’re planning the second color palette to be in shades of blue so that we can use the blue icon set. GB was Guillaume Berry, a designer from France who submitted two sets in the same style in order to propose a couple of different metaphors. One of his sets came in third while the other came in last, but whether you only look at the higher scoring set or you combine their votes, Guillaume had the next highest percentage of votes, and many people liked the metaphors he used for various icons. In fact, given the enthusiasm of the community for Guillaume’s icons, we think a great plugin would be one that would allow the user to upload the icon set of their choice. Any volunteers? OSD was the Open Source Design class at Parson’s in New york City, taught by Mushon Zer-Aviv and consisting of students Alexandra Zsigmond, Ed Nacional, Karen Messing, Khurram Bajwa, Leonie Leibenfrost. Teacher and students worked together to determine their metaphors and visual style. LS was Luke Smith, a designer from Iowa who specializes in icons among his other design pursuits.

If you need to hire an icon designer any time soon, we highly recommend our Project Icon contestants, who all delivered great work in a very short timeframe. It was great to work with all of them, even for such a short assignment.

So, to sum up:

1. The winning icon sets by Ben Dunkle and Verena Segert will be incorporated into WordPress 2.7 RC1.
2. Someone should write a plugin that would allow anyone to upload a custom icon set (I bet the other contestants could be convinced to release their icon sets for such a purpose).
3. 2.7 is still trucking away, but we can always use help with patches, especially for IE6! (I know, that wasn’t in the main post, but it’s true, so hmph)

Thanks again to everyone who participated in this experiment, and we hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. And congratulations again to Ben and Verena!

WordPress 2.7 Beta 3 has been released for your testing pleasure. Here are some of the changes since Beta 2 (over 160 changes in total):

• Numerous style improvements and refinements.
• All admin notices now go under the page title.
• PHP Notice fixes.
• Dashboard widget options now properly save.
• Menu fixes.
• New design for Quick Edit.
• Canonical feed URL fixes.
• Walker fixes.
• An update for Hello Dolly.
• Plugin installer updates.
• Numerous font updates.
• Updated login logo.
• Switch position of “Save Draft” and “Preview” buttons in publish module.
• File upload support for MS Office 2007+ file formats.
• Media upload buttons won’t show if the user doesn’t have the upload capability.
• Canonical redirects only do yes-www or no-www redirection for domains.
• Shift-click checkbox range selection improvement.
• Add New User page now separate.
• Tag suggest only suggests tags (not other taxonomy terms).
• QuickPress shows “Submit for Review” if user cannot publish.
• Private posts/pages, and password-protected posts/pages are rolled into new “Visibility” section of publish module.

If you have already installed Beta 1 or Beta 2, you can update to Beta 3 via the Tools -> Update menu. If you have problems, or if this is your first time in the 2.7 beta ring, you can download and upgrade the old fashioned way.

Get 2.7 Beta 3.

Earlier in the beta period, we put out a call here on the development blog for designers in the WordPress community who might be interested in designing custom icons for the 2.7 admin interface. Over a dozen icon designers from around the world responded, so rather than choose just one, we decided to turn the icon design assignment into a contest so that more people could participate and the community could have a vote in what the new icons should look like.

Once we decided to go with a contest format instead of a single-designer gig, about half the original volunteers changed their minds. The remaining designers each submitted two icons (Posts, Links) in their proposed style. At this stage a couple of designers were thanked for their submissions but eliminated from the competition because their icons were considered too far afield from the WordPress visual style. The remaining designers were given feedback on the icons they had submitted and given about a week to complete the icon set for the menu as well as the list/excerpt icons that are shown on the Edit Posts screen. All but one of these designers finished a complete set, giving us five sets in total.

So now we need to choose a direction. For each of the icon sets, we’ll show you the set itself, the designer’s introduction, and some feedback from the lead developers. After you’ve reviewed all five, place your vote for the set you think has the visual style that is the most suitable for WordPress 2.7. This will be followed by additional votes on specific icons, so if you like the specific image used in one set but like the style of another, you can vote to change the metaphor for a given icon. You’ll also be able to leave general feedback throughout the voting process. When voting has concluded, we’ll review the comments and the votes, and will declare a winner.

Things to bear in mind when making your selections:
A week is not a long time to create 13 icons. The winning set will undergo a revision to be refined, and some icons may be substituted. We asked for all icons in grayscale for the contest. An “on” state and a larger size for screen headers will be designed by the winner. It seemed like too much work to have everyone do multiple states for so many icons.

Ready? Go and take the icon survey. (The survey has now been closed.) Voting will remain open for 48 hours from the time of this post to allow people from all time zones a chance to participate before we close the survey and make a decision (since we’d like to include the new icons in Beta 3).

A Note Regarding the 2.7 Release Date:
As we approach Beta 3, bug tickets continue to be added to Trac, the pain of making things look good in IE6 continues to be felt, and the need to improve accessibility looms. If you love WordPress, are a decent coder, and want to contribute like these icon designers contributed, please consider contributing a patch to help with one of these efforts. Jump right in on current Trac tickets, or pop into the #wordpress-dev IRC channel to ask what to do.

WordPress 2.7 Beta 2 is ready.  Here is a quick rundown of changes since beta 1.

• The Upload button didn’t always show. Fixed.
• JS on the Dashboard broke for blogs with no comments, causing several UI elements to “freeze”. Fixed.
• Recent Drafts Dashboard module didn’t show correct times. Fixed.
• Various Autosave fixes.
• Redirect after deleting a page from the editor went back to the deleted page. Fixed.
• Fixed loading of translations for default TinyMCE plugins.
• Added avatars to the edit users list.
• Added some missing translations.
• Fixed some validation errors.
• Fixed some PHP warnings and notices.
• Handle inconsistent file permissions during auto upgrade
• Change Publish box layout to better accommodate internationalized text
• Fix quick editing of the last page in the Edit Pages list
• Fix Screen Options for IE
• Fixes for choose tag from tag cloud
• Rewrite rules fixes for certain hosts
• Don’t check for updates on every page load
• Easier post box dropping
• Preview fixes
• RTL fixes
• Fixed broken wp-mail
• Plugin update and install fixes
• First draft of contextual help tab

If you have already installed beta 1, you can update to beta 2 via the Tools -> Update menu.  Beta 1 does have a bug in the automatic upgrade that breaks certain setups, so be prepared to download and install Beta 2 manually if you experience problems.

Get 2.7 Beta 2.

There have been a lot of posts and twitter announcements by people checking out the WordPress 2.7 Beta since it was announced yesterday. What’s your favorite thing about 2.7 so far? Or if you haven’t made the leap yet, to which feature are you most looking forward? Tell us in the poll below.

What is your favorite feature in WordPress 2.7?
( polls)

If you have a extra minute or two, we’ve also put together a survey that lists all the new features and allows you to rate them, as well as give additional feedback if you’re so inclined. If you want to participate, take the 2.7 Beta Favorite Features survey.

The first public beta of WordPress 2.7 is here at last.  Join the thousands of people already testing 2.7 by downloading 2.7 Beta 1.  As previously mentioned on this blog, 2.7 is bringing a new visual design.  This design is almost completely implemented, but there are still a few areas that aren’t quite finished in Beta 1.  There are also several glitches in certain browsers.  Beta 1 provides the best experience in Firefox and Safari. Don’t worry, we are working on IE and Opera and will have those looking good in time for the final release.

Speaking of the final release, it will not be available on November 10th as originally scheduled.  We are two weeks behind schedule at the moment.  We need a little more time to finish the visual design, do a round of user testing against that finished design, and do a proper round of public beta testing. Our plan is to keep working as if Nov. 10 is still the release date.  However, instead of releasing the final 2.7 on the 10th, we will make a release candidate available instead.  The release candidate is intended to be a high-quality, almost-finished release that we are comfortable recommending for broad use.  After Nov. 10, the focus will be on fixing high impact bugs turned up by those of you testing the release candidate. I suspect 2.7 will be ready for final release by the end of November.  A specific date will be set as we progress through the public beta cycle and get a feel for how solid the release is.

Get WordPress 2.7 Beta 1.

Today we launched the WordPress Showcase, a display of some of the best and brightest WordPress users, who are using it to do a whole lot more than blog.

Pick your flavor and check out the possibilities available through WordPress MU, WordPress.com, WordPress.com VIP and WordPress.org.

Site screenshots are constantly updated, so what you see is a realtime look at what’s going on with our hottest users.

Don’t see something there that should be? Suggest an addition! We’ll check it out and add it to the bunch if we think it makes the cut.

A question I hear pretty frequently is, “Why a redesign of the admin panel so soon after 2.5?” Those who have attended WordCamps in the past few months have already heard the answer, but for the people who haven’t had that opportunity, this post is for you.

When the community response to the 2.5 admin redesign was mixed, it seemed like a good idea to do usability testing to find out which issues were based on actual interface problems vs. which complaints were just a result of not liking change. To prevent bias, a third party was contracted to conduct usability testing, Ball State University’s Center for Media Design, Insight and Research division. Try saying that three times fast with a mouth full of peanut butter. Or fitting it on a business card. To save time, we’ll just call that third party CMD, since that’s what they call themselves.

The plan that was developed involved multiple rounds of testing, as well as the creation of two prototypes, hardcore! The first phase involved a usability review of 2.5 by CMD, the results of which were discussed with lead developers. A quick prototype was created that addressed some of the lightweight issues, so that the test participants could use both 2.5 on their own blogs and the prototype on a test site. Results would be analyzed and compared, leading to a second round of suggestions. A second prototype would be developed over a week or two, which would then be tested with the same participants, and a final report delivered. But you know what they say… the best laid plans of designers and developers often go awry.

After the first round of testing, it was clear that a prototype delivering the kind of fixes that could be coded in a week or two wouldn’t make much of a difference overall. We all decided a more ambitious prototype was in order, one that would experiment with a new approach to screen real estate and attempt to address as many of the issues from 2.5 as was possible with a few extra weeks of time. A rapid design process was followed by an even more rapid development cycle. The second prototype is what you know as Crazyhorse.

The second round of testing blew everyone away. The research team had never seen such consistent results. Tasks were completed faster, participant opinions rated it higher, understanding of how interface elements worked was greater, and it wasn’t even a fully functional application. Of the test participants, every single one said they would choose the prototype over their current administrative interface, and it wasn’t even pretty (those of you who remember the original Crazyhorse will vouch for this).

A presentation on the process from start to finish was part of the schedule at WordCamp 2008 in San Francisco, and the slides are available online, but as always the slides only tell you so much without the videos, live demo and verbal narration that went with it. (Use Google and you can see audience videos of the presentation.)

Here, then, is a PDF of reasonable size that you can download and peruse at your leisure that outlines the usability testing project in some detail. I wanted to include some eye tracking videos, but the file was so huge it would have been ridiculous for anyone to download it, so I stuck with eye tracking outputs called gaze trails to illustrate the findings. I also tried to pare down the text to the more salient points, since more than 50 hours of test video really does reveal an insane amount of data. I also cut out the section about designing Crazyhorse in the interest of staying under 25 pages. Hopefully you’ll think it’s a good balance. I’ll try to put together a separate document on the design process of 2.7 in a couple of weeks that will include the early Crazyhorse material.

So, if you want to know what we learned from the usability testing this summer that caused us to create what is now 2.7, go ahead and read the report.

WordPress 2.5/Crazyhorse Usability Testing Report (PDF)

Have you seen the getting-prettier-all-the-time menus in 2.7-almost-beta? They really are. Getting prettier all the time, I mean. Once we drop in the fonts and do a little brushing up of edges and colors, the menu system is going to be smooth. The last thing we’ll need to do to is replace the icons we’ve been using as placeholders. Currently, the menus are using icons from Crystal Project, which is perfect because they’re released under LGPL (yay for open source!), but less perfect in that they don’t quite fit with the new visual style of 2.7, so we’re thinking custom icons.

I’m always meeting people at WordCamps or via email who say they wish they could give back to WordPress, but that since they aren’t PHP developers, they feel like there isn’t any opportunity for them to be a part of the open source project. Well, here’s a golden opportunity. Want to design the new WordPress icons?

The icons:
We’ll need icons for each of the main navigation sections, plus a matching pair of list/excerpt view icons for the table screens like Edit Posts. That’s a total of 13, and for the navigation icons we’ll also need a larger size for use in the screen headers. Some of the sections have natural iconography, while others may be more challenging. The sections are: Dashboard, Posts, Media, Links, Pages, Comments, Appearance, Settings, Users, Plugins, Tools.

The style:
Icons should be subtle, with a classic/designed look, nothing cartoonish. Thin lines. Maybe a little old-fashioned looking. They’ll be grayscale by default, possibly with a color version for active menu items.

The timing:
Fast, fast, fast. 2.7 is due to release on November 10. That means icons need to be ready within two weeks, give or take.

The required experience:
To be taken seriously, you’ll need to show a background in icon design. It’s a different skill than web site or application design, and given that there’s not much time before the 2.7 launch, someone with experience (and possibly existing work they can leverage) is going to be the best candidate.

Interested? Send us an email and tell us why you want to design the icons, and include a link to your portfolio. How we wind up choosing an icon designer will depend on how many people respond, but we’ll keep you posted on the process. For now, send in portfolio links by Saturday night, October 25, 2008. We’ll review them over the weekend and get in touch with people on Monday. Hopefully we can be designing by early next week.

A vulnerability in the Snoopy library was announced today.  WordPress uses Snoopy to fetch the feeds shown in the Dashboard.   Although this seems to be a low risk vulnerability for WordPress users, we wanted to get an update out immediately.  2.6.3 is available for download right now.  If you don’t want to download the whole release to get the security fix, you can download the following two files and copy them over your 2.6.2 installation.

1. wp-includes/class-snoopy.php
2. wp-includes/version.php

First, I’d like to say that I’m glad the majority response to the screenshots we posted last week was so positive. With a community as vocal as this one, it’s always a little nerve-wracking to introduce change, but this time it seems like the change was welcomed, which has been great. I’m hopeful that as we introduce the new features of 2.7 over the coming weeks, the good feelings will continue. As promised, here’s a rundown of what’s going to happen to the Dashboard over the next couple of weeks before launch.

Menus
I described the menu functions last week, but I forgot to mention something. By default, when you arrive at your Dashboard the first time, two sections of the navigation will be expanded: the Dashboard section (because it is active, so it will have the color highlight) and the Posts section (because it has often-accessed screens in it, and will serve as a cue that you can view other section menus without loading new screens). Once you start clicking menus open and closed, your browser will cookie you, and will remember your menu state. So if you open Posts and Comments, when you come back the next time, Posts and Comments will be open. If you click into your Settings, Posts and Comments will still be open. You’ll need to manually close nav sections. We went back and forth on this, and there was community discussion about perhaps only allowing two sections to be open at a time, but ultimately those approaches would have removed control from the user. And since the mantra of 2.7 is to give the user control over his/her admin interface, we chose to keeps things open if the user had opened them.

Contextual Access Tabs
In the upper right, drop-tabs provide access to contextual features displayed in a layer that appears between the header and the main working area. Screen Options will allow you to choose which modules to display on the current screen. Don’t like seeing the Incoming Links module because no one links to you? A simple checkbox in the Options tab will remove the module from your Dashboard until you decide to reinstate it. Help will highlight some of the changes since the previous version, and provide links to help resources such as FAQ/Forums/Contact Support for .com and Documentation/Support Forums for .org.

Module Layout
In addition to using the Options tab to decide which modules to display on the Dashboard, all the modules on the Dashboard may be moved up or down or between columns using drag and drop. Modules also may be collapsed or expanded by clicking the title bar, allowing another level of screen customization. In 2.8, we also hope to make every single module configurable in terms of what content it displays… we ran out of time for this in 2.7, so for now only the newsfeed modules will be configurable. When you hover over the module, a link will appear in the module header allowing access to the configuration view.

Right Now
The Right Now module contains the same data as before, but it’s been rearranged to provide a clearer display. This list style, as opposed to the previous sentence style, will also make translation for non-English sites easier. Color cues help to highlight things that are not good (red), things that are pending (yellow/orange), and things that are good to go (green).

Stats
I’d like to apologize for having a non-core piece of functionality on the Dashboard comp. It’s my fault… when we were working on the comps, we used my wireframes and my live 2.7 Dashboard to assemble our elements, and I forgot that I had the WordPress.com stats plugin installed and a module on my Dashboard. So even though it’s not in core and it turns out the WordPress.com stats plugin is undergoing some reworking of its own, we made the Dashboard stats module easier to scan than the one I currently see when I log in. For those of you on .org who got excited when you saw the Dashboard comp with stats, again, I apologize for the oversight on my part. If you want the candy-like stats goodness we comped up you’d need to install the plugin (or another stats plugin with candy-like elements). There should be a fine-looking Dashboard module as part of the update they release.

QuickPress
QuickPress is a new feature that provides the ability to start (or publish) a simple post from the Dashboard when you don’t need the full feature set of the Add New Post screen. Currently, these posts can contain title, text, media and tags. In 2.8 we hope to make the module configurable, so that each user can decide which few fields make the most sense to display. If you Save as Draft, you will see the new draft appear in the Recent Drafts module right away. Clicking Cancel will clear the form. Publish publishes the post. Posts made using QuickPress are the same as other posts and may be editing by going to Posts > Edit and selecting the post in question. One last thing: both in this module and on the Add New post screen, we’ve put as much space as possible between the Save Draft and Publish buttons, so for all of you who’ve asked at WordCamps or emailed or posted somewhere to request this, ta da! Hopefully this will reduce accidental publications.

Recent Drafts
During the summer testing, one thing we heard over and over was the desire to access recent drafts more easily, preferably with one click from the Dashboard (as opposed to clicking on Drafts from the Right Now module, waiting for page to load, then clicking on a specific draft title and waiting for a second page load). The Recent Drafts module is meant to address that need, displaying the five most recent drafts with the date they were created. In a future version, this module will be configurable as well. In the meantime, if you’re a crosswords-in-pen kind of person and you don’t write drafts, just use the Options tab at the top to hide the Drafts module, and it won’t take up space on your Dashboard.

Feeds
News feeds of WordPress-related news will function largely the same as they did in 2.6 in terms of configurability, and will simply have a new look. You can still specify the URL of the feed, how many items to display, whether to show headline vs excerpt, author, date, etc.

Incoming Links
Just getting a face lift. Or maybe not a face lift, more like a visit to the Clinique counter.

Hooks
Plugins can still add modules to the Dashboard. They also still can add top-level menu items if necessary (as opposed to having them in Tools, Plugins, Settings or wherever…like Posts if it’s post-specific). Because we’ll be using iconography in the collapsed menu state, plugins that create top-level menus can create an icon for use in the menu system. When there’s no icon associated with the plugin, a default will be used (kind of the way some blogs show default avatars when no Gravatar is associated with a commenter on your blog). Hopefully, though, most plugins will fit within existing section headers, since our “top level” is not actually made up of menu items, but section headers that open to reveal the real menu items that have screens associated with them. Plugins can also put themselves into the Shortcuts/Favorites menu in the header.

Recent Comments
This module, as in 2.6, displays the most recent comments. However, you now can moderate comments directly from this Dashboard module, including the new Comment Reply feature. For now it will show only the last x number of comments, as it does currently, though in 2.8 we hope to add more configurability to this, or roll it into the Inbox concept.

Bye-Bye Inbox
For those who were at WordCamp SF or who were using the nightly builds while there was still an Inbox placeholder, sorry, no Inbox in 2.7. It turned out to be far more complex than anticipated, and rather than including something rushed and clunky, we’re holding off until a later version. We added the comment moderation to the Comments module to make up for it, so you don’t have to wait for that, at least.

So that’s the new Dashboard. A little more usable, a little prettier, a little more you, a little cooler. Or maybe a lot of all those things. We’ll let you be the judge.

It’s finally here, the moment you’ve all been waiting for! The long months of your tolerance and forbearance as you suffered through the inelegance of our hacked-together, leftover Crazyhorse interface are almost at an end. (Was it really that painful?)

The visuals you have been craving are finally finished enough to show, and have been approved by the lead developers. We hope you like them. Mad props to Matt Thomas and Andy Peatling for their visual talents. You can expect these designs to be extended to the rest of the 2.7 screens and implemented over the coming weeks.

So now that we finally nailed down the look, how’s it going to work? The menu system in particular has been the topic of discussion on the hackers and testers lists, so I thought I would take this opportunity to explain how we plan for it to work. As you know, one of the goals of 2.7 was to reduce the necessity to load new screens just to access sub-navigation menus; we wanted the most-used screens to be within a click or two at most. If you’ve been using the nightly builds, you got used to the arrow controls that allowed you to expand and contract the menus. Then you got used to the box-style with icons that not only opened and closed vertically, but could be minimized horizontally as well, leaving a remnant of icons to provide a kind of “advanced mode,” though you don’t need to be particularly advanced to use it. Now that we have real button styles (the icons are still placeholders, and we hope to have some new ones soonish), we’ve nailed down the menu functionality.

2.7 New Post Screen, Unfinished

Each section header has three parts: the icon on the left, the blue link text, and the area to the right where an expansion arrow appears on hover or in expanded state. You can see that the arrow is contained in a small segment of the header, similar to the way the favorites menu is structured. If you click on this segment, the menu will expand to show the choices in that section. Click again to close the menu. Click on the blue link text and you will go directly to the screen for the first choice in that section, where the section menu will be opened to show you the other section choices. Double-click on the section icon and the menu will close horizontally, leaving the icon list visible. In this state, hovering over the icons will display the menus for each section, so you’re still only a click away from most screens. Double-click on an icon when the menu is closed this way and it will take you to the first screen in that section. The small arrows attached to the dividing lines between menu groups will also act as open/close toggles for using the horizontal collapse/expand function.

This variety of ways of using the menu system aims to accommodate both power user and novice alike. Clicking on blue link text like normal will bring the expected result for the novice, while the advanced user has more options for navigation that allow a more customized experience. We hope you like this result as much as we do, and you can expect to see it implemented in Trunk soon.

The image below is the new Dashboard style, for which I’ll save the explanations until early next week, but hopefully the preview will get you excited for the new design.

2.7 Dashboard

For those of you who have been downloading the nightly builds or contributing code to 2.7, you’ve noticed how quickly features are being added, small layout changes are gradually being implemented, and the application is morphing before your very eyes. For the most part, the response has been extremely positive, but even the people who love 2.7 have been wondering what it’s going to end up looking like. Though 2.7 is still a work in progress, we’ve put together a set of wireframes to illustrate how we think it will all turn out, so you can take a look under the hood of the design process, so to speak.

The PDF attached to this post outlines the navigation model, header elements, and important screens such as the dashboard, the new post screen, and list screens for posts, comments, and media.

Some things to bear in mind if you’re not used to looking at wireframes:

1. These are a guide, not a dictate. Changes may be made by developers and designers as needed for technical, aesthetic and/or usability reasons. When you have a team of superfast developers like we do, sometimes wireframes can become out of date quickly. In the two hours since these wireframes were approved, for example, already there are a few things that have moved and a menu change or two. Tweaks will continue to be made over the next week or two before freeze. This is Alpha software, not Beta, and it’s not static. That’s part of what makes it exciting, that every time it’s updated there’s something new.

2. These are all black/grey/white. That’s because we have a designer hard at work on visual styles for the new admin panel, including color palette, fonts, graphic elements, etc. When we have a new look to show off, we will. For now, the wireframes are “lookless” on purpose.

3. Not every screen is wireframed. We focused on creating wireframes for those screens that are undergoing the most change. For screens retaining largely the same functionality and layout, we have not included wireframes. In some cases, we’ll be updating screens but haven’t decided how to do it yet, so those aren’t included either.

4. Some elements apply directly to wordpress.com or wordpress.org, so don’t be alarmed if you see something that doesn’t seem to apply (like multiple dashboards).

One of the things I love best about WordPress is the vibrant community full of talented developers and designers who care about the application and want it to be the best it can be. Despite the overwhelmingly positive response we’ve gotten when showing 2.7 at WordCamps and from the majority of the community, there will always be people who would prefer it to be structured another way, which is why we love plugins! The decisions that went into 2.7 were based on a combination of usability testing results from 2.5 and Crazyhorse (both including laser eye tracking, official report to be released soon, but slides from WordCamp SF available in meantime), community feedback, personal and professional opinions, and some thinking about where the next couple of versions will be going in terms of new features, so that we will have a design that scales to accommodate some the features we hope to incorporate in the future.

So, I hope you enjoy getting an inside look at how we’ve been organizing our thoughts around 2.7, and that when the community feedback starts flowing everyone remembers that we all want the same thing: the best WordPress possible.

October 1, 2008 Update: The survey is now closed. Thanks to all those who participated.

Another round of mini-mockups and multiple choice questions awaits the first 5000 respondents. WordPress 2.7 UI Survey #2 is now available to take your opinions regarding:

• Where to put the search box
• Where to put the Add New Post button/favorites menu
• How to label the Future Publish/Edit Timestamp function

The survey (hosted by the good guys over at PollDaddy.com) will automatically close after receiving 5000 responses, which only took about two days for the navigation survey, so hurry over and cast your votes.

Note: when the survey has closed, these links will be disabled and this post will be updated.

Note: Survey is closed as of 9/18/08. Thanks for the feedback!

WordPress 2.7 is currently in development and as some people already know, it features a revised layout with a left-hand navigation column that was designed in response to user feedback regarding the use of screen real estate. Because the navigation came straight from the Crazyhorse prototype that was developed quickly for usability testing, it is still a work in progress.

Navigation sections and labels are being decided now, and as usual there are lots of good ideas floating around. As part of the mission to increase user involvement in design decisions, we’ve created a survey intended to give WordPress users the ability to play a part in deciding how the navigation options should be grouped and labeled. If you use WordPress and want to add your opinion, take the survey.

WordPress 2.7 Navigation Options Survey