With our sponsor WP Ninjas soon to be releasing Ninja Forms 3.0 we wanted to share this NinjaForms preview video.  Check out what you can expect in the upcoming release of Ninja Forms 3.0.

Today we welcome Drew Jaynes to the show.  Drew recently led the launch of WordPress 4.2, and we’re excited to get his insights into that process.

Before we get into the show, we want to take a moment honor the memory of Alex King, who we recently lost after a battle with cancer.  Pippin’s fondest memory was a dinner they shared together a few years ago, and was struck at how humble he was, despite his experience.  Drew shares this sentiment, and his memory is from a panel discussion at WordCamp a few years ago in which Alex was the moderator.  Brad remembers meeting Alex at Pressnomics, and remembers how genuine and caring he was about everyone’s individual contributions to WordPress.  In the past weeks there have been several very good articles remembering Alex.  We particularly liked:

Drew Jaynes is a Platform Engineer at 10up, giving him the sole responsibility of managing all things WordPress core and community within the company.  This includes revamping and continuing to build out the Developer Portal.  

Drew just completed the successful launch of WordPress 4.2.  Making the transition from a contributor to a release to being Release Lead means being more of a project manager than digging into the details of the code. In fact, Drew just passed 1,000 commits to WP core.

WP 4.2 development started in January and was released in April of this year.  The major updates in this release include:

Press This revamp

Customizer theme switching

AJAX plugin updates

utf8mb4

Shared term splitting

Beyond the nuts and bolts of Drew’s experience in this most recent release, we dig into his experience as a core contributor within WordPress.  These include:

What’s it like leading development of community built software as far reaching as WordPress

The Best and Worst parts of being WP core Release Lead

What are bug scrubs and were the implemented successfully in 4.2?

Thoughts on language packs for plugins to aid translation

What role do custom tables have in plugin development?

Term Meta

GlotPress as a plugin

If you like skiing, snowboarding, talking software, and business then you should check out Big Snow Tiny Conf.  This year it will be January 25-28 in Sugarbush, VT.

If you’re enjoying the show we sure would appreciate a Review in iTunes.  Thanks!

 

Transcript

INTRO: Welcome to Apply Filters, the podcast all about WordPress development. Now here’s your hosts, Pippin Williamson and Brad Touesnard.

BRAD: Welcome to Episode 49. Today, Pippin and I welcome Drew Jaynes, who led the release of WordPress 4.2 earlier this year. Drew, welcome to the show.

DREW: Thanks for having me.

PIPPIN: It’s awesome to have you on.

BRAD: Yeah. Before we dig into the challenges of leading the 4.2 release, I was thinking I’d like to take a few minutes to raise a glass to Alex King, who we lost to cancer last week. Alex was a huge influence in the WordPress community and a very successful entrepreneur as well. But, rather than list his achievements, I thought we could just share our stories of Alex. Pippin, how did you know Alex?

PIPPIN: I actually had the opportunity to meet him a couple of times, several times just kind of in passing at different WordCamps, and had always been impressed with him. I had been familiar with some of his work or a lot of his work, really. He was very, very prevalent throughout the WordPress community and outside.

But, I also had the opportunity to sit down and have dinner with him once, I think at either PressNomics or WordCamp Phoenix. It was one of those times when you — have you ever been in a place where you sit down or are in a close space with somebody who you’ve looked up to for years and years and years? It’s a really cool experience, and so I got to sit down and have dinner with Alex. I