WordPress 3.9, "Smith" | Hacker News Reader

WordPress 3.9, "Smith"

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49 pointskrogsgard31 comments

I don't have words for how obnoxious the little flying "Quote" box that appears when highlighting text is.

Indeed, especially since I have a habit of selecting and deselecting text while reading it.

Thanks for the feedback. I've considered disabling it for a while, though some folks have really enjoyed it.

I'm not sure why the parent doesn't like it, but I can explain why I don't like it. I think there's a certain group of users who have developed the habit of highlighting while reading to keep their place in scrolling media. At least, that's why I highlight text a lot. For me, the quote box is annoying, but I can see how it might be useful for people who don't highlight text while reading.

> though some folks have really enjoyed it

Some folks really enjoyed <blink>, <marquee>, and auto-playing MIDI songs.

I'm not saying those opinions are unimportant, but maybe features that resemble <marquee> would be unpopular for reasons similar to why <marquee> became unpopular? ;)

I am also one of those who highlights while they read and find this quiet annoying. There seems to be no real reason for the button to start at your mouse pointer and move over to it’s final resting position. Just showing it in its final resting position would decrease the obnoxiousness of it ten fold.

The page looks great with noscript.

If you are unfortunate enough to work on a WordPress plugin, one of the nice features of this release is the ability to symlink plugins.

http://make.wordpress.org/core/2014/04/14/symlinked-plugins-...

This will make iterating on changes to a plugin much easier.

yes - this is a great update. I used to try and keep a separate folder for projects and my wordpress install and as I recall I had to come up with a Makefile to copy files into the WP plugins directory for testing... symlink is definitely a big win.

sorry but can someone ELI5? what does symlinking plugins mean actually?

thanks

From the link:

One of the great advantages to this is that plugin developers can keep their plugin separate from their WordPress installation. This is a boon for developers with multiple installs who want to test compatibility; keep in mind that you can symlink the entire plugins directory if you're testing multiple!

Basically, if you're a plugin dev, you no longer have to update your files across multiple local installs; you can simply keep your plugin files in one place, and symlink that plugin to any local install you're testing on.

Another alternative to this is to develop in a local multisite install. Not suitable for every scenario, but good enough for 90% of sites in my experience.

Can somebody explain like I'm 5 what ELI5 means?

I LOVE the fact that you can now drag & drop images from your desktop directly the post, skipping the annoying "Add Media" step.

Yes, but do you still get the same options you have on add media (title, alt, caption etc)?

I haven't had a chance to try it yet.

It gives you all of the same options, as well as the ability to select a different images before inserting.

I built this functionality into a few apps that never made it past proof of concept, but a good library to get your feet wet with is dropzone: http://www.dropzonejs.com/

And yet, there still isn't a version that works with Postgres.

Cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.p...

should be back up now

Official Wordpress blog: http://wordpress.org/news/2014/04/smith/

Really glad they got rid of paste from Word (even though just a tinyMCE update) I would see people do this and it would look just fine, but it would add each paragraph as its own div sometimes and all other crazy formatting that would mess up the responsiveness of the site.

Love seeing a lot of these other features as well, really excited for 4.0 :)

Could anyone point me some stats on wordpress version usage? For developing themes and a plugin, should I simply target and test on the latest version?

Here's the stats page on wordpress.org: http://wordpress.org/about/stats/

In short, depending on the purpose & features of your plugin, you may want to consider testing on older versions as well. With themes, it shouldn't be too big of an issue to ensure compatibility for a couple of versions back, at least.

Edit: Probably not entirely accurate, see this tweet by a core dev: https://twitter.com/nacin/status/456516848763146240

It's pretty acceptable for themes and plugins to expect people to be on the latest version of WordPress, or at worst maybe one version behind. The more complicated support metric is PHP version. Unfortunately, widely used plugins probably still need to support PHP 5.2, because so many hosts won't upgrade their client's PHP versions.

403- forbidden. Is there some unlawful (carnal) knowledge in this release?! :)

Was literally listening to "Walk on the Wild Side" when I clicked this.

What are the odds?

Why the downvotes? Anyone have a clue?

Nope, not sure.

In general, I believe comments such as this are downvoted on HN because they are interpreted as adding little or no value to the conversation while attempting to shift focus away from the topic at hand. I'm not saying that was your intention, but it might be perceived that way by people with the power to downvote (a power I don't have or care about much). This kind of policing is generally done here with the intention of keeping the site from turning into just another subreddit.

I'm not disagreeing with you, but there's very little consistency in this behaviour. The large amount of bikeshedding over trivial matters (a project name, a license version, etc...) shows people share their opinion regardless of whether it adds depth or is strictly relevant to the conversation.

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