Health Care Website and Blog

Waiting patiently for a bug hunt to be announced before you get involved as a WordPress development contributor? Pshaw! Don’t be shy!

2.8 currently has about 500 active tickets that need to be resolved. The core devs are largely working on the bigger feature additions, such as the embedded theme browser/installer, the new widgets management, improving performance, etc. so a lot of tickets that are of lesser priority are still just sitting there. Aren’t they calling to you, just like puppies at the pound? “Adopt me! Please!”

Before we have a bug hunt and see the addition of dozens of new tickets, we need to clear out some of these old ones. Not being the kind of shelter that euthanizes its bugs after a certain amount of time (seriously, there’s one ticket that goes all the way back to version 1.5), we are hoping people will step up and bring home a bug today.

To keep things moving, we’re announcing a new kind of event, related to bug hunts, but with a different slant. We need a sprint to clear out these tickets. Thursday is the day (and Friday for those over the date line). Core devs will spend 24 hours going through all the tickets tagged with has-patch, and committing those that have been tested and work. So how can you get in on the Super-Awesome WordPress 24-Hour Has-Patch Marathon?

Write a patch. There are dozens of tickets for discrete little pieces of correction (change … to actual ellipses in admin interface, change the ‘go back’ link to a ‘view page’ link, etc.), dozens that are browser-specific bugs, dozens that might be more challenging. Pick the one you want to work on, add a comment to the thread so other marathon contributors know someone is working on it, and get the patch submitted before the marathon ends. If you start coding now, your patch could be in by the weekend!

Test a patch. There are, as of right now, 177 tickets marked with has-patch. Patches can’t be committed until they’ve been thoroughly tested. If you’re already running the nightly build start testing out these patches in as many operating system/browser combinations as you have. Only have one? Hey, it’s probably more than has been tested already! If you’re not already running the nightly build, you can download it here to set up a test blog. Don’t forget to add what you found to the comment thread for each ticket. If it doesn’t work, be specific about what is not working so that others can jump in and fix it.

24 hours of patching, 24 hours of testing, 24 hours of committing. Don’t miss the excitement; get started now!

The Super-Awesome WordPress 24-Hour Has-Patch Marathon begins Thursday, April 16 at 8am Pacific time (that’s Thursday, 4pm UTC) and will end, as you might have guessed, 24 hours later. No reason to wait, though… start early and get patching/testing. The more patches that have been tested by Thursday morning, the more that will be committed during the marathon.

Go WordPress!