Today was the launch of WordPress 4.0, led by my friend, Helen Hou-Sandí. Helen was a great lead and easy to collaborate with. She had her hands in everything – I was hiding in the shadows dealing with tickets and architecture.

Way to go @wonderboymusic for having just shy of 40% of the commits made to WordPress 4.0. WordPress is #blessed to have you.

— Aaron Jorbin (@aaronjorbin) September 4, 2014

It seems like just 4.5 months ago I was celebrating the release of WordPress 3.9, probably because I was … “Some people, when they ship code, this is how they celebrate”:

[OLD INSTAGRAM POST]

WordPress 4.0 has an ominous-sounding name, but it was really just like any other release. I had one secret ambition: sweep out as many cobwebs as I could from the codebase and make some changes for the future. LOTS of people contribute to WordPress, so me committing changes to WordPress isn’t a solo tour, but there were a few things I was singularly focused on architecturally. I also contributed to 2 of the banner features in the release.

Cleanup from 3.9

• Fixed RTL for playlists
• Fixed <track>s when used as the body of a video shortcode
• You can now upload .dfxp and .srt files
• Added code to allow the loop attribute to work when MediaElement is playing your audio/video with Flash
• MediaElement players now have the flat aesthetic and new offical colors
  You can now overide all MediaElement instance settings instead of just pluginPath
• Bring the list of upload_filetypes for multisite into modernity based on .com upgrades and supported extensions for audio and video.
• In the media modal, you can now set artist and album for your audio files inline
• Gallery JS defaults are easier to override now: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/29284

Scrutinizer

Scrutinizer CI is a tool that analyzes your codebase for mistakes, sloppiness, complexity, duplication, and test coverage. If you work at a big fancy company that employs continous delivery methodologies, you may already have tools and instrumentation running on your code each time you commit, or scheduled throughout the day. I set up Scrutinizer to run everytime I updated my fork of WordPress on GitHub.

Scrutinizer is especially great at identifying unused/dead code cruft. My first tornado of commits in 4.0 were removing dead code all over WordPress core. Start here: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/28263

A good example of dead code: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/28292

extract()

extract() sucks. Here is a post about it: https://josephscott.org/archives/2009/02/i-dont-like-phps-extract-function/

Long story short: I eliminated all* of them in core. A good example: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/28469

* There is one left: here

Hack and HHVM

Facebook has done a lot of work to make PHP magically fast through HipHop, Hack, and HHVM. HHVM ships with a tool called hackificator that will convert your .php files to .hh files, unless you have some code that doesn’t jive with Hack’s stricter requirements.

While I see no path forward to be 100% compatible with the requirements for .hh files, we can get close. So I combed the hackificator output for things we COULD change and did.

Access Modifiers

WordPress has always dipped its toes in the OOP waters, but for a long time didn’t go all the way, because for a long time it had to support aspects of PHP4. There are still some files that need to be PHP4-compatible for install. For a lot of the classes in WordPress, now was a great time to upgrade them to PHP5 and use proper access modifiers (Hack also requires them).

I broke list tables several times along the way, but we cleaned them up and eventually got there.

wp_insert_post()/wp_insert_attachment() are now one

These two functions were very similar, but it was hard to see where they diverged, ESPECIALLY because of extract(). Once I removed the extract() code from them, it was easier to annotate their differences, however esoteric.

Funny timeline:

• Done here: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/28579
• Reverted because I blew up wordpress.com here: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/28601
• Made whole again here: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/28788

wp_handle_upload() and wp_handle_sideload() are now one

Similar to the above, these functions were almost identical. They diverged in esoteric ways. A new function exists, _wp_handle_upload(), that they both now wrap.

Done here: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/29209

wp_script_is() now recurses properly

Dependencies are a tree, not flat, so checking if a script is enqueued should recurse its tree and its tree dependencies. This previously only checked its immediate dependencies and didn’t recurse. I added a new method, recurse_deps(), to WP_Dependencies.

https://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/29252
And oops: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/29253

ORDER BY

Commit: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/29027
Make/Core post about it: A more powerful ORDER BY in WordPress 4.0

LIKE escape sanity

I helped @miqrogroove shepherd this: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/28711 and https://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/28712

Make/Core post: like_escape() is Deprecated in WordPress 4.0

wptexturize() overhaul

This was all @miqrogroove, I just supported him. He crushed a lot of tickets and made the function a whole lot faster. We need people like him to dig deep in areas like this.

Taxonomy Roadmap

Potential roadmap for taxonomy meta and post relationships: there is one
We cleared one of the major tickets: #17689. Here: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/28733

Variable variables

Variable variables are weird and are disallowed by Hack. Allows you to do this:

$woo = 'hoo';
$$woo = 'yeah';
echo $hoo;
// yeah!

I removed all(?) of these from core … some 3rd-party libraries might still contain them.

Started that tornado here: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/28734
One of my favorite commits: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/28743

Unit Tests

I did a lot of cleanup to Unit Tests along the way. Unit tests are our only way to stay sane while committing mountains of new code to WordPress.

Some highlights:

• Fixed spillage across Testcase instances based on rewrite: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/28964 and https://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/28966
• This took me 3-4 hours late one Friday night: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/29120

Embeds

In 3.9, I worked with Gregory Cornelius and Andrew Ozz to implement TinyMCE previews for audio, video, playlists, and galleries. We didn’t get to previews for 3rd-party embeds (like YouTube) in time, so I threw them into my Audio/Video Bonus Pack plugin as an extra feature. Once 4.0 started, Janneke Van Dorpe suggested we throw that code into core, so we did. From there, she and Andrew Ozz did many iterations of making embed previews of YouTube, Twitter, and the like possible.

Other improvements I worked on:

• When using Insert From URL in the media modal, your embeds will appear as a preview inline.
• Added oEmbed support for Issuu, Mixcloud, Animoto, and YouTube Playlist URLs.
• You can use a src attribute for embed shortcodes now, instead of using the shortcode’s body (still works, but you can’t use both at the same time)
• I added an embed handler for YouTube URLs like: http://youtube.com/embed/acb1233 (the YouTube iframe embed URLs) – those are now converted into proper urls like: http://youtube.com/watch?v=abc1233
• This is fucking insane, I forgot I did this – if you select a poster image for a video shortcode in the media modal, and the video is confirmed to be an attachment that doesn’t have a poster image (videos are URLs so that external URLs don’t have to be attachments), the association will be made in the background via AJAX: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/29029

While we were working on embeds, we/I decided to COMPLETELY CHANGE MCE VIEWS FOR AUDIO/VIDEO:

https://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/29178
Wins: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/29179

In 3.9, we were checking the browser to see what audio/video files could be played natively and only showed those in the TinyMCE previews. Now we show all of them. This is due to the great work that @avryl and @azaozz did with implementing iframe sandboxes for embeds. I took their work and ran with it – completely changed the way audio/video/playlists render in the editor. The advantage is that the code that generates the shortcode only has to be in PHP, needs no JS equivalent.

Media Grid

@ericandrewlewis drove this train for most of the release. I came in towards beta to make sure all of the code-churn was up to Koop-like standards and dealt with some esoteric issues as they arose. It was great having my co-worker dive so deep into media, another asset to the core team who greatly needs people what knowledge of that domain.

As an example of the things I worked on – I stayed up til 6am one night chatting with Koop to figure out how to attack media-models.js. Once I filled my brain, I got to places like:
https://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/29490

So many contributors

There are too many people, features, and commits to mention in one blog post. This is just a journal of my time spent. You all rocked. Let’s keep going.

WordPress 4.0 “Benny”