At the end of the first day of this year’s WordCamp Orlando, WordPress lead developers Andrew Nacin and Mark Jaquith discussed the changing trends in WordPress core development. They addressed shifting focuses and shrinking development cycles as well as the major change in development strategy for the current 3.8 development cycle.

Nacin pointed out that each of the recent WordPress releases have had a different focus. While 3.5 focused on media, 3.6 focused on writing experience, 3.7 on automatic updates and the current version under development, 3.8, is focusing on redesigning the WordPress admin. Proving that the goals of a stronger foundation for developers and simpler interface for users are not mutually exclusive remains a constant thread throughout all of these releases.

Both developers were enthusiastic about the new approach to development for 3.8, with developing features as plugins. This new strategy has allowed for the adoption of the philosophy “Iterate quickly. Test securely. Merge only when ready.” Most importantly, if a new feature isn’t ready on schedule it doesn’t throw off an entire release. Nacin did note that with 3.8 there were features like THX38–the redesign of the theme experience–that were dependent on MP6, which could have been an issue if MP6 wasn’t ready in time. Future development cycles should avoid this sort of dependency.

Version 3.6, which was two months late, is considered to by Jaquith and Nacin to be the most solid of recent releases. They attribute this two the two extra months of time spent on it. Despite this, they were both happy to report shrinking development cycles, which have gone from 5 months to 2.5 months, with an aim to stick to 2-4 months in the future.