My contributions to WordPress 3.5

During the past weeks, I have been submitting requests and contributed a few tweaks to WordPress Core, mostly regarding the admin UI. Some of those improvements should make it into the 3.5 release scheduled for December.

Here is a shortlist of my contributions so far:

Ticket #18832: wp_get_archives should allow for Ascending and Descending ordering

This was my very first modification to the core: a little tweak that allows to define Descending (from the newest to the oldest) vs. Ascending (from oldest to newest) ordering for the wp_get_archives function. Until now, only Descending ordering was possible. Status: fixed.

Ticket #21754: Replace QuickPress labels with gray prompt texts

This request was motivated by the poor rendering of the QuickPress interface in German and French locale, where the labels are much wider than in English, and require a ridiculous amount of padding. By placing the labels as placeholder text inside the fields, we have a much cleaner interface. Even for people who don’t use the QuickPress widget, I think it’s nice to have a better looking dashboard.

Ticket #21752: Dropdown for “Show all dates” should have a flexible width

Another admin interface issue that affects some locales with longer translation strings than English (in this case, French). Status: fixed.

Ticket #21906: Right border of editor textarea is hidden when browser is resized

A little bug in the post editor interface that was bothering me, and was easily fixed by a little CSS tweak. Status: fixed.

Ticket #19956: Upload Image button still too subtle in Editor

This is another thing that always perplexed me: the media upload button should be much more visible! This improvement has been requested 6 months ago (the requester even wrote an article about it), but didn’t get much traction. I reopened the ticket, and I really hope that action will be taken to restyle the Media upload button into a proper button. Update: during the UI team chat of September 18th, lead developer Nacin confirmed that “it will happen“. Status: fixed

Ticket #15925: Improving the admin UI for Hierarchical Taxonomies

Another improvement that had been requested about two years ago, but has been forgotten. I managed to re-animate it with a strategic tweet, and it has been patched by core developer Sergey Biryukov. Status: fixed.

Ticket #22298: Permalink box line-wrap covers the media button

In 3.5 beta, when the permalink box underneath the title box wraped on a second line, it was covered by the new media upload button. Status: fixed (by Sergey Biryukov).

Still on my roadmap:

Get the UI team to improve the default odering of uploaded media

I did open a request for this, which is closed for now, but I hope that with the advancements of the new Media Upload UI this topic will be discussed further… Update: In the recent UI team chat, Koopersmith confirmed that the issue will be taken care of after 3.5 hits the beta mark. “I can tell you that we’ll probably do something with the exif data. Whether or not we deal with raw order changes will probably end up being the debate here.”