[wp-hackers] Dashboard "focus"

[Matthew Mullenweg]

Mark E.Payne wrote:
> However, it might just be that this is still very rough (likely) and I 
> am not privy to the big picture of what else will be included in the 
> dashboard (infinitely more likely). Additionally, it's also 4am.

There are a couple of ideas behind this, the main goal with this rev is 
update notification and increased exposure for the incredible range of 
secondary resources available for WP. People who don't have time to 
follow the forums and the lists and the blogs should have a way follow 
everything.

Right now it's just the dev blog, and it's hard-coded in, very much on 
purpose. There will probably be one additional feed, like a new 
plugin/theme/etc feed similar to the way the WordPress Planet is set up 
right now.

Where is it going from here? Well the hard part is pretty much done. 
We've got Magpie RSS/Atom parsing included in the core, I set it up to 
cache to the DB instead of the filesystem, and there are some basic 
functions for people to interact withthe functionality.

The line between reading and blogging is obviously a very fine one, and 
some of the directions this is going are fairly obvious. There needs to 
a one click interaction between reading something and blogging about it 
with proper cite attribution and everything. The link manager has had an 
RSS field for a few versions now, so the link/subscription management 
stuff is all already there. We have the KSES libraries that we're going 
to run everything through, because allowing third party content directly 
into the admin could be a major security problem if done badly. We have 
OPML import/export for synchronization at a basic level of 
subscriptions, and there's no reason we can't replicate the Bloglines 
and Newsgator API stuff. But all that is really for the version after 
the next one. Right now the idea is just to give people a taste, see 
what they ask for, see how it scales, find bugs, and gauge better how 
people are going to interact with this functionality.

-- 
Matt Mullenweg
  http://photomatt.net | http://wordpress.org
http://pingomatic.com | http://cnet.com