Future of WordPress

WordPress Lead Developer Mark Jaquith discusses some of the plans for future development in WordPress including the 2.9 and version 3, plus we took listener questions on anything from CMS integration, to caching and using custom taxonomies.

The full transcript is here:

Joost

Hello and good evening and welcome to another Press This. Tonight we have an exciting show coming up with Mark Jaquith lead developer for Word Press or one of the lead developers actually joining me on the show and we’re going to talk about the future of Word Press.

First, I want to congratulate the guys on Gravity Forms on their awesome launch. They seem to have done very well over the last week and I’m very happy they did what they did. I want to remind you that if you are going to buy Gravity Forms you should use the coupon code PRESSTHIS and it’s not even an affiliate thing for me, I don’t get anything out of this but it gets you 20% off.

Now the issue is that we seem to have lost Mark on Skype. Brasco is calling Mark back now; it seems Skype is giving us issues. Mark are you there?

Mark

Hey can you hear me?

Joost

I can hear you fine now. Mark I just introduced you as one of the lead developers of Word Press. Could you explain to people what that actually means?

Mark

It means I am one of the gatekeepers of the code. I’m one; right now we have 5 people who have commit access to actually change the code in Word Press. So when people submit patches, I’m one of the people that can put them in or give it the thumbs down. I get to help decide the general direction of the project.

Joost

So basically only the 3 of you can actually make changes. We can all submit them but only the 4 of you…

Mark

Yes.

Joost

Okay that is a bit different from alto of other projects where there is a lot more people with commit access. Commit means you can actually change stuff. Is there a reason for that?

Mark

It’s moved around and we’ve had as few as one and I think that right now 5 is the most we’ve had. It is just sort of the way we’ve done it to keep the direction, keep us all on the same page. We’re not opposed to adding a few more but we don’t want too many cooks in the kitchen.

Joost

True.

Mark

But we have a lot of people who almost get commit by proxy. Like almost every patch they do is good and we pretty much trust it to go in. So a lot of those people sort of do have commit.

Joost

I noticed that with the patches I do you always got a lot of some great feedback to my patches to improve them quite a bit. There is a solid reason for people to be gate keeping like that.

We’ve got an exciting show and we’ve discussed this before. We’re going to talk about the future of Word Press. There are actually quite a few people in the chat room and if you’re not join us now on WebmasterRadio.FM/chat if you’re listening live. If you’re listening to the podcast no luck.

The first thing in the future of Word Press is Word Press. 2.9 I assume. What is going to be in there that’s important?

Mark

One of the things we want to address in 2.9 was media, especially photos which are probably the most important media type to us. So we want to add a few features and we want to make the interface a lot better. Maybe get away from the model of like with the albums now, they’re essentially tied to a specific post. You want to maybe take those out of the post so that the albums can live on their own and sort of here is my blog and then here is my photo stream and have that sort of separation going on.

Joost

That would mean basically for post type right, we go post and pages now and albums would be number 3?

Mark

Possibly. We already have the attachment to post type which is where uploads live as, so we’re still going over the specifics of that. But you’ll be able to have an album that lives separately.

Joost

Okay and that will mean you will be able to just add photos to that album without having to actually upload them to a post?

Mark

Right because right now the work flow sort of very much fits a specific model.

Joost

Yeah it only fits one model.

Mark

Right yeah so I want like people who have photos to show off but they’re not necessarily like a timely thing that they want to say here is this event and here is a big thing of photos and I’m going to dump it in my blog. Sort of give those people a way to publish them in a sort of different way.

Joost

Cool. That is for media, are there any other new things coming in media? There are always people complaining about the upload and stuff like that, anything changing in that?

Mark

Yeah ideally the whole upload process would be streamlined and simpler. Right now I find it complicated so if I’m finding it complicated I think other people are too.

Joost

Yeah I’m explaining it on a daily basis to users and everyone has problems with it yeah.

Mark

Yeah so ideally we’re going to be giving that a whole UI refresh. We may not and we may be continuing that in 3.0 but I would like to get as much of it refreshed and streamlined as possible for 2.9.

Joost

Okay and in 2.8 there was a new warning about PHP requirements. Is that something that is coming back in 2.9? Are you actually going to increase the requirements for Word Press?

Mark

We are increasing My Sequel requirements to 4.1.2 and 4.1.2 is not a new version. I think it came out in 2004 or something ridiculous like that. So we don’t anticipate that that’s going to be a major source of problems for people. It just gives us a few features and a nice baseline. So that’s a fairly minor bump.

With regard to PHP 5 we’re not ready to say that you need PHP 5. But we’re going to start strongly suggesting to people that they upgrade. I believe we’re planning on doing that during the upgrade process. So after you upgrade if you’re still running PHP 4 we’ll drop you a note to say hey just to let you know this is still going to work but it won’t work forever.

Joost

Yeah cool, myself I’m looking forward to PHP 5 requirement as it would save a lot of hassles with plug ins.

Mark

One thing, plug in developers are free to use PHP 5 only. It is only about 15% of Word Press installs are running PHP 4 so 85% it’s still a lot of people, it’s pretty big market.

Joost

Is there any way to set a plug in to require…so it will only install if PHP 5 is installed?

Mark

Sure you can do one of the plug in activation hooks in Word Press and do the check then and if it’s not you just deactivate the plug in and send the user the message or you can just have it so that it actually activates but all the functionality is hidden.

Joost

Okay but there is no way like the minimum version or something like that to tell you like okay you’re running PHP 4 so this is probably not going to work?

Mark

Right. Yeah we don’t have that built in but you can do it on your own fairly simply.

Joost

Okay any other stuff in 2.9?

Mark

2.9, yeah one feature I wanted to put in so I’ll probably be coding this myself was the ability to have, so a lot of sites have thumbnails attached to a post. They upload a photo but have it in a nice little thumbnail and probably the number one way that people are doing that right now is by creating custom fields with something like post image thumbnail and then pasting in the URL.

So I think that’s a fairly common use case and it’s sort of discouraging that the interface is clunky to do that and that every theme has its own way that they want you to do it. so I would like to just make a standard way where you could click on select a photo from the ones uploaded to that post or from your entire gallery, your entire library and have that associated with that post. It will be a standard function that can be used and relied on and yeah it would be nice.

Joost

Cool so that would come with a set size as well so you can set the size or crop it to that size or fix it to that size?

Mark

That’s actually something we were talking about in general for uploads was allowing plug ins or themes to add customer sizes. A lot of themes require images to be of a certain size to just fit within the framework of the theme and right now it’s sort of a pain. We have just sort of the standard sizes of thumbnails, medium, large and full. You can only set a forced ration to the thumbnail and not any of the bigger sizes. And if you change sizes none of your old images will be resized, they’ll be the old size unless you use a plug in that goes back through and changes them.

So we would like to eventually add the ability possibly in 2.9 to set new sizes that are maybe specific to a theme and then Word Press if that didn’t exist Word Press would make it.

Joost

That would absolutely rock for me and a lot of other people out there I guess. With respect to that as well I was recently was hacking on one of my own plug ins, blog icons, where I’m using the media uploader to upload images. (12:00 – inaudible). Is that something that is going to be easier to do in the future?

Mark

Possibly and we should be starting that conversation about how we want to refactor the uploader pretty soon if we’re going to get it into 2.9 and not make it slip to 3.0. So yeah if there is something like that that you’re not able to do with the current one, and then please get involved with the conversation and we’ll make it happen.

Joost

Oh I will don’t you worry. Yeah the media uploader is such a huge thing that it’s pretty hard to tackle if you’re not deep within it. Usually I’ll try and go in and patch stuff I want patched but it’s too big of a project it seems right now.

Mark

It is fairly complicated.

Joost

Yeah. We’re going to go for a quick commercial break and then come back and talk a bit more about the future of Word Press with Mark Jaquith.

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Joost

Welcome back we’re here with Mark Jaquith and we’re going to talk more about the future of Word Press. Now a while back Mark, Matt announced and I think it was on WordCam San Francisco that Word Press and Word Press MU were going to merge. I’ve seen some stuff go into Word Press that wasn’t there before but when is the merge going to be complete do you think?

Mark

We haven’t really started on it and we haven’t set a firm date. I would say not before the beginning of the year. It is going to be a fairly big project and we haven’t thought through some of it and figured out who is actually going to do it. I would guess somewhere around the 3.0/3.1 timeframe.

Joost

Yeah it does seem to make a lot of sense to me since the difference in code base is pretty small in 3.0. It would free up Donica more and work on Word Press core more and free up other people to fix stuff in MU. So it seems to be a simple thing.

Mark

Yeah I was not in favor of it when this was proposed like 3 years ago and people have been talking about it continuously. I wasn’t supporting it for a while because MU was still fairly green and a lot of the features weren’t flushed out enough. But if you’ve worked with MU recently it is really getting there. Honestly, it feels just like Word Press with here is a new menu. Otherwise, it’s the same. So I think it makes a lot of sense and it is really good from a development standpoint because we have instead of just having Donica and a few people working on MU, we can sort of harness the power of all the people who contribute to Word Press. I think we had over 70 people committing patches to the last release. A lot of the issues are the same so it would make sense to consolidate those resources.

Joost

Yeah absolutely. I do a lot of work with Word Press MU. I even work more with MU right now then with the normal Word Press. Yeah it’s basically it’s become great and Donica is one of my heroes for it.

Mark

And one of the big reasons I’ve also been working on MU a lot more than regular Word Press for clients and one of the big reasons for that is Buddy Press, which right now only supports MU. So I think it has gotten a lot more people interested in MU and inspired them to create these sorts of multi-blog sites. So it’s a good time I think.

Joost

Yeah Buddy Press now that we’re talking about it, it’s basically becoming some sort of a plug in but supported by the Word Press core developers. I think you guys call it a conical plug in.

Mark

Right yeah that’s another concept we were looking to explore was say you want a plug in that does a certain common task and there are probably half a dozen to a dozen plug ins that do it and you can look at their ratings, you can ask a friend but a lot of times there is actually one that stands out above the rest. We want to make it easier to find which one that is.

So we’re not quite sure about the details but it may be that in the Word Press plug in directory there is sort of a featured plug in section that has I want to do this, XYZ and it says okay here is the best plug in to do that. And some of these plug ins may be coded by core developers, some may be coded by other people but they will have had at least some level of review in terms of adherence to the API and coding standards and security and things like that. Right now the directory is nearly a free for all. There are some minimum standards at least in terms of security there can’t be any level of review, it is too much code.

Joost

Yeah well in terms of security and code stability I know from experience that there is a lot to be gained there in some plug ins. Are there any other plans towards plug ins? Can we talk briefly about it?

Mark

Right one of the big headaches for people is upgrades and we’ve made that easier for upgrading the core of Word Press with the built in one click upgrade. We’ve been using it over the summer as you’ve noticed…

Joost

Yeah quite a bit.

Mark

Yeah but most of the headaches that come from upgrades are because of plug in incompatibilities and we’d like to make it easier for people to know whether or not a plug in is going to work with a new version of Word Press. And until now we’ve been relying on information from the plug in author when they would write their Read Me file. There is a field where they can say the minimum version that it supports, which his sort of a set thing. Then they supply which version it has been tested up to. So they say it definitely works from this version to this version. But we have new information about versions beyond that tested version.

For instance, I have plug ins that I haven’t updated in 6 to 24 months cause they still work.

Joost

Subscribe to Comments…

Mark

Yeah I’m working on that but Subscribe to Comments actually works for the most part in 2.8 but I haven’t updated the tested up to, so how are people to know that it still works? It has become clear that we can’t really rely on plug in authors to be updating that for every minor version. So we thought a better solution would sort of be to put that back on users who users are going to know whether it breaks or doesn’t break when they upgrade and sort of crowd source that information. There may be something like, works for me on this version and a little button they click and we capture those ratings and display that in the directory. And then it would say hey these new versions work and the plug ins that support this will off grade those now but hey also these plug ins our users have said do not work with this version. Would you like to deactivate those plug ins right now?

And we’re hoping that can sort of take some of the headaches out of upgrading. And that is sort of the same conversation as making the upgrade process easier. Right now you have the core upgrade and then you have individual plug in and theme upgrades that you have to do one at a time. We’ve been talking about actually rolling that into one single upgrade process where we say new version of Word Press plus updates to these plug ins, plus an update to your theme are all available, update all and just do it in one shot.

Joost

Yeah that would rock but I would also fear for the compatibility or the stability of all that. I’ve seen plug ins updates go wrong every now and then because of unzipping issues and stuff like that.

Mark

Yeah I think we need to be just a lot more careful about capturing those errors and sort of sand boxing those.

Joost

Yeah one of the things I find a lot with my Sociable plug in people with bad connections would get a lot of issues because it actually has to unpack like 60 or 70 images and that goes wrong a lot of times. I get reports about that like once or twice a month and it’s always like maybe you should re-upload the complete plug in and it works like miraculously.

Mark

Right.

Joost

The problem is you can never pin stuff like that written down easily.

Mark

Yeah it’s hard to test for.

Joost

You’ve talked a bit about the (24:28 – inaudible) feature that you’re going to add yourself to 2.9. Is there any other stuff you would like to see fixed in Word Press?

Mark

This doesn’t really fall under fixes but it’s a simplification that would, it’s good for performance and reducing headaches and that’s our role system. We have this system of roles and capabilities that we’ve had since I think 2005 or 2006. And it turns out that it was sort of too big for its britches, too ambitious and there is a whole bunch of it that we’re not actually using. In fact, some things that no one is using and some things that less then a 10th of a percent are using but we’re still constrained by them and it limits our scaling abilities.

For instance, if you have a bunch of users you are going to run into memory limits on the user’s page somewhere around 20 or 30,000 users. You’re going to have problems just because of the way we’re doing it. So the simplifications we’re going to be doing are, a lot of these things I’m going to say and you’re going to say I didn’t know Word Press supported that which is exactly the point.

We’re going to enforce one role per user, so right now actually in Word Press you can assign multiple roles to users so they can be an editor and a subscriber.

Joost

Yeah I’ve noticed that in the data.

Mark

Yeah and we’re going to get rid of the idea of free standing capabilities. So like you’re an editor plus a capability and that’s used by very, very few people. And we’re going to get rid of the idea of negative capabilities which is a way of saying okay you’re an editor but you can’t moderate comments. So we’re just going to make it real simple that every user has one role and that role is a bucket of things they can do. It will make it a whole lot simpler instead of having this big serialized array of capabilities and roles, we can just have a simple role name and that is going to enable us to do things like, hey how many administrators are there on this blog? And you can do that without actually loading all the roles or all those users’ roles up into memory and counting them which is where those memory issues come from.

Joost

Cool it seems like a simple change. I always thought for the role manager it made Word Press seem more like (27:19 – inaudible) where it’s not…

Mark

Yeah right.

Joost

So cool. We’re going to take another quick break and come back and answer some questions from the chat room because there is an awful lot of them.

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Joost

We’re back and so Mark I’ve got a load of questions for you. I’m going to pick the ones I like most and work them off one by one. Tony (last name) who is actually a Dutch guy in the chat room asked if there is any chance of seeing more support for custom taxonomies any time soon? We want to use them on pages or at least I do.

Mark

Yeah that’s supported taxonomies are actually not tied….

Joost

Yeah they’re post type independent right.

Mark

They’re not just post type independent they’re not even tied to the post table at all. You can apply the taxonomy to links which are not in the post table. So yeah you can, in fact that was one of our reasons for adding this was people if they wanted to categorize or tag pages they fairly easily could.

We’ve been in terms of more taxonomy for posts we’ve been adding more support in terms of automatically generating the UI to, so like if you want to tag people like Matt on his photo blog, tags people. So sort of supporting that sort of thing where you want to add a new taxonomy to posts and have the UI be at least partially automatically generated.

Joost

Can you do that same UI thing with pages any time soon? It seems to me like an easy fix to add it to pages too.

Mark

I don’t see any reason why not.

Joost

Yeah I’ve dived into code a bit in the past and thought it was a bit hard but I’ll dive back in. The other thing right now is we’ve only got custom taxonomies in the same structure as tags, so basically no structure at all. Any chance of seeing category like custom taxonomies that you can use in the same way as the custom taxonomies that were added in 2.8 or at least the interface? The stuff was there since like 2.5 I think.

Mark

You mean to automatically generate interface for a hierarchal taxonomy?

Joost

Yeah.

Mark

Yeah possibly.

Joost

I see people using that a bit more especially the people who are using Word Press for non-blog sites, I see them using stuff like that more and more. Another question by Tony is whether you saw anything like the pods plug in? I don’t know if you’ve seen that that adds new content and allows you to add new content types. If you see anything like that coming to Word Press any time soon or do you think that is really plug in territory?

Mark

This is sort of like one of those CMS plug ins where you can…

Joost

Yeah as far as I know at least it’s the biggest one where it basically builds a complete new table structure next to Word Press and basically builds the CMS on top of it.

Mark

We’ve been talking about this maybe not quite to this level of complication but maybe more of a simpler thing where people have types of posts that they need to be posting like a photo post or video post or link post or review post or something like that where the interface needs to be a little different, like they have some custom fields that they want to fill in and they don’t want to be using the custom fields things to do the drop down every time. And actually have an interface that is designed for that post type.

Yeah we’ve been talking about it and that is something we may support if we do as always we’re going to support it, you know put it in, in the least with the least amount of code possible and least amount of complication. You have to obey that 80/20 rule. But it could maybe be the sort of thing that these more complicated plug ins could build on top of.

Joost

Yeah absolutely. One of the things I would love to see is to have to force people to choose a post type instead of forcing them to choose a page template, which is always a bit hard to explain. In my opinion that would be a UI improvement actually because right now I have to explain to people if I’ve made different types of templates for them, hey you have to use a different template for a different type of post, which is weird to them.

Mark

Right.

Joost

What do you think is the best plug in you’ve ever seen? You can’t say Kismet because that would be cheating.

Mark

I know I always say Kismet because it’s probably the plug in that saved me the most amount of time.

Joost

Yeah absolutely.

Mark

I’m a bad person to ask, any of the core developers are bad people to ask about what plug ins they like because those have a way of finding their way into the core.

Joost

Well Subscribe to Comments never has.

Mark

It never has because I keep shooting it down honestly. There are reasons that I don’t want Word Press to be running like a newsletter sort of list. You get into trouble with hosts when you’re sending out a whole bunch of email and I sort of don’t’ want that falling back on Word Press.

Joost

Yeah you see people checking the box by default. And if people are listening who are doing that don’t do it, you’re breaking spam regulations in like 20 something countries.

Mark

Yes. Actually I actually removed that feature. Like you used to be able to set a preference where you could set it to be checked by default and now you can’t for that reason. Also in the new version I’m going to have the double opt in which is required in Germany and several countries.

Joost

Yeah most of Europe and it’s required here in Holland as well.

Mark

Yeah but that is sort of diverging but I don’t know.

Joost

It’s good to say because one of the plug ins I used to push in the past myself was Common (36:38- inaudible) which would actually email people if they came for the first time on your blog. Which seems like a really cool idea until you get that first letter from a lawyer because you’re breaking spam regulations. So don’t use that.

Mark

Yeah I just thought that was a whole can of worms that I didn’t want to heap onto Word Press.

Joost

Yeah you’re absolutely right and one of the things I keep telling people is you shouldn’t combine your email server with your CMS server.

Mark

Right. Okay let’s see gun to the head I would say right now Bat Cache which is sort of an alternative to WP Cache or WP Super Cache. So it stores the HTML output of your pages and caches them for a certain amount of time.

Joost

Have you seen Frederick Townes who is the CEO of Mashable and he was on the show 2 weeks ago and he’s working on this awesome new plug in called WP 3 Total Cache.

Mark

Yeah actually someone just told me about that just this week. I took a look at it and I haven’t gotten a chance to use it. It looks incredibly ambitious and if it does half of what it says it does it’s going to be awesome. So yeah I’m watching that for sure.

Joost

Frederick is a genius and you are too in your own right. But Frederick is one of a few people who can actually squeeze more performance out of (38:14 – inaudible) optimize everything out of it and he squeezed like we went from a 5 to 2.5 seconds when he was working on it, page load. I was like okay shit that’s really, really cool. When it reaches 1.0 and I’m actually running it on Yoast.com which Frederick is working on right now, we’re going to probably do a show around it because it’s really cool. We’ll probably replace WP Super Cache on a lot of sites. Yeah really looking forward to that.

Some people are asking if you think Word Press is a CMS or just a blog system as it originally started.

Mark

I don’t think it’s just a blog obviously but I don’t quite like the CMS term. I think that has a lot of baggage, a lot of expectation that people maybe are used to Droupal or something that is a full featured CMS and they’re going to be expecting Word Press to do the things a certain way.

I refer to Word Press as a web publishing platform. So yes it will do your blog and I think it’s always going to be sort of featured on a blog or news feeds feature. But I think the reality is that I would say at least half of the new Word Press installs are not using Word Press primarily for the blog. They may have a blog section but they’re using it for its ability to actually lay out an entire site.

So it may just be an issue of semantics there.

Joost

Yeah sort of. I know that I sell it as a CMS to my clients all the time. So yeah in my opinion it is a CMS but just not as bloated as a lot of other CMS’s out there, which is a good thing. You guys actually taking stuff out like the role management stuff, simplifying that is actually a good thing in my opinion. And the conical plugs in is also a good thing to not have to put everything into the core. And the thing I fear most is we’ll keep adding features with each new release and not removing any.

Mark

Right yeah and the thing is features are easier to add then remove. It is important that you sort of keep trimming the fat because the unavoidable thing is bloat. So you need to actually be proactive about reducing that.

Joost

Yeah and one of the things if you use Word Press as a CMS one of the things a lot of people tend to do and Roy is asking about it in the chat room as well, you stop using posts or only use it for some news items and use pages more. Is there any easy way to switch around posts and pages so you’re making pages like the default thing?

Mark

The default thing in what way?

Joost

If you press new, the default thing in the back end if you can basically move everything around right now but I don’t think even most people know how to switch the menu around.

Mark

Yeah there could be a fairly simple plug in that just sort of says get rid of posts I don’t use. I could probably write that while we’re talking.

Joost

I dare you to do that and still answer the questions. I know it is pretty easy because I know I’ve been looking into how the menu is built up and that actually pretty easy to do it seems. So that would mean that you could just throw away the pages and just use the posts and nothing will break right?

Mark

Yeah if you don’t use them you don’t use them. There is no reason why the menu has to exist there and you can’t just pretend the functionality doesn’t exist behind it.

Joost

One of the things that would be cool is if you could have a user role that could just create posts or just create pages. I think that’s possible right now but I don’t know whether that’s still possible with the new role system you guys have in mind.

Mark

Yeah it will still be possible. They’re different capabilities and in fact we’ve been thinking about the idea of having simple Word Press role management for a while but because the role system has been so complicated it just hasn’t been an option. You’ve seen what the role manager plug in is like.

Joost

Yeah it’s gigantic.

Mark

So as part of this role simplification this sort of enables us to consider the idea of simple role management so yeah that could be sort of the thing that finds its way, in fact maybe sooner rather than later to allow people to sort of tweak their roles like that.

Joost

Yeah with a decent UI in the back end.

Mark

Right.

Joost

Because the role management system right now is like completely hidden. It is one of the things I always notice when you guys put something in the UI people actually start noticing the features that have been there for a while, myself included because the custom taxonomy stuff was there for like 90% I think?

Mark

Yeah for a couple of versions yeah.

Joost

Yeah and I’d never seen it. one of the features that didn’t make it into 2.8 and this is a question from Carl is the possibility to add Geo Data to media and posts, etc. is that something that is coming in 2.9 or is that stuff you’re going to move to plug ins?

Mark

I haven’t heard about that one where the other my initial response would be that it sounds like a plug in.

Joost

Yeah it does to me as well. I know a lot of people wanted to tag photos.

Mark

We always say when there is a feature like that we always say it’s a plug in that also comes with the sort of encouragement to them that to like plug in authors if you need more hooks or you need something to change to enable the writing of this plug in then let us know and we’ll change that so you can write it. We don’t want to say figure out a way. We want to help you with that.

Joost

Yeah I’ve done 10 patches or so to the core I think and 6 of them were about adding hooks. You sometimes need to be able to do that to add the plug in you want to do. Carl says it is mentioned on the 2.8 page on the list of features that didn’t make it into version 2.8 and it’s not going to make it at all if it’s not already scheduled.

Mark

Yeah this is obviously a wiki, the code is a wiki and anyone can edit it. sometimes for the version pages we just sort of throw up like we’ll have an IRC meeting and anyone can join the room and anyone can suggest any feature and we put it up on the page and then we all sort of talk about them and vote things up and down.

So sometimes you’ll get features on those pages that one crazy person in one place suggested and would never ever appear in Word Press. So it is more of a brainstorming tool.

Joost

Yeah there is some other stuff in that list; by the way, that I would think is way more important to Word Press in the future like O Off Support and other stuff like that. Is that the stuff that is coming any time soon?

Mark

O Off I think yes. I would say more than 90% certainty that it will make it at some point probably in the next 2 or 3 versions.

Joost

Yeah that would really rock. There are loads more questions but we’re probably not going to be reaching all of them. A good question is when will 2.9 come out? Is there any date set at the moment on what the release schedule is going to be like?

Mark

The tentative date right now is I believe either October 30th or 31st. in fact, it might be 31st because I think I joked about releasing it in costume.

Joost

That’s Halloween right?

Mark

Yeah.

Joost

I’m in Europe and we don’t do that stuff.

Mark

Oh no?

Joost

Okay so October 31st and that would be pretty funny and probably with some gigantic funny thing in the background of Word Press.

Mark

Yeah we keep talking about putting in like a funny Easter egg and having it delivered. Actually there is one, if you actually go to a post revision you can Wikipedia style you can select 2 revisions to compare and it will show you differences between, set it to the same revision and try to compare the difference. I believe that’s still an Easter egg that still exists.

Joost

I think I have it disabled to be honest, the post revisions. That is one of these things that I loved you guys from adding the feature and then I looked at my database and thought okay I don’t need it that much.

Mark

I believe there is a (inaudible) where you can set how many revisions are kept, so you can say only keep the last two or something.

Joost

Yeah there is for that and I still need to look into that because that would actually make sense. And to not do the auto save and instead just keep the last 3 revisions you’ve saved. It makes a lot more sense.

Okay Mark we’re not going to get through all the questions. I’m just going to ask you to come back in a couple of months and we’ll do this again.

Mark

I would love too.

Joost

Cool. Thanks a lot for being here. People can go to MarkJaquith.com right?

Mark

That’s right.

Joost

I’ll spell that for everyone because Mark’s last name is kind of hard to spell. It is Mark Jaquith. That is a hard last name Mark.

Mark

Yes it is the spelling pronounced.

Joost

Thanks a lot for being here and let’s talk soon. Okay everyone this was Press This for this week, please don’t forget to subscribe and make sure you don’t miss it next week. We record each week at 2:00p.m. Pacific and 5:00 p.m. Eastern so be there next week in the chat room and ask your questions and we’ll have a lot of fun.

Next week on Yoast.com/pressthis you can see next week we’ll have my buddy Brent Csutoras on who is a social media expert. The week after that we’ll have Avinash Kaushik the guru analytics evangelist talking about how to measure your blog performance. So make sure you follow all this and see you next time. Bye.