Current Improvements

• Added the roadmap code to the admin backend and generated data for each link in the primary and secondary nav structure of the admin view.
• The long full file paths have been removed. In some instances (where it would be obvious that the path was scrubbed), the ABSPATH portion of the path has been completely removed. In other instances, the ABSPATH portion was replaced with the literal string ‘ABSPATH’.
• The line numbering is now accurate. In my previous version of code, some insertions added additional newlines which resulted in modified line numbering in select files. This flaw is no longer present.
• Optimized the database configuration and table structures to make the large page views load much more quickly.
• Added zebra striping to the table output so that it is much easier to follow all the data from a specific row.
• Added simple links to the base functions to either PHP or WordPress references.

Needs Improvement

• Need a good theme for the data side of things. I hope to have a better one for you guys soon. I dug around over the weekend for a nice theme with varaible width, but I could not find one. I’ll try to hit up some people I know to see if we can’t get a streamlined theme with variable width.
• The overall presentation of the data leaves much to be desired.

Short-Term Plans

• Links for specific actions, filters, etc that go directly to the Codex. I considered having this information internal to the tool, but why create yet another repository of that information when the Codex is here now? If we all work on cleaning up the Codex, adding pages, and adding compatibility notes on how certain internals of WordPress have changed over time, everyone will be helped.
• Code views. This will allow you to quickly see where each point along the Roadmap resides in code.
• Add more page views, versions, and descriptive information.

Long-Term Plans

• Tree-view of the data in an image. I’m playing around with the code on this, but it still requires a lot of work.
• Roadmap folding. Just as you fold a regular map to focus in on a specific area of interest and to make it easier to handle, I want to do the same with WP Roadmap. Imagine being able to expand out just specific areas of the map that stem from a specific execution branch.

  Not only will this feature make browsing the data easier/faster, it will also give everyone a much better understanding of how all the parts connect and work together.

• Include all function calls in the Roadmap. This will be a tall order as there are a great number of them. If I improve the loading of the Roadmap with some smart AJAX calls, I could reduce the load to on-request data, so that this would be possible. If I can improve the interface sufficiently, I’ll definitely be itching to take on this challenge.
• Compare versions and pages against one another.

The code currently tracks actions, filters, includes, and requires. WP Roadmap can track the order of these calls from different page views and different versions of WordPress. If anyone has other items that they would like me to add in, please let me know.

You can see a very rough version of WP Roadmap running here. The data set is very limited, but it will give you an idea of what WP Roadmap aims to be.

The currently planned features for WP Roadmap are as follows:

• A full list of all page includes (include, require, etc) combined with other relevant function calls in their order of execution.
• Provide detailed information at each roadmap entry. This information includes the source file containing the call, the line number, the arguments passed to the function, and a full backtrace on each call.
• Be able to select an entry in the roadmap to pull up the full source-code listing that automatically scrolls down to the specific line of code and highlights it. This would be invaluable to quickly figure out how the WP core coding team did it.
• Provide this information on any WordPress version with a large selection of specific page views. The execution stack changes from version to version and page view to page view. Providing information about the specific differences of the execution stack can quickly provide needed information on why a certain hook doesn’t work properly on a specific page view or version.
• Be able to produce roadmaps of newly released versions within the hour of a new version being released. Hopefully development versions can be included in this.

Some possible future (version 2?) features for WP Roadmap are:

• A backtrace source view. This would be similar to the source view mentioned before except that it would pull out complete functions from the source of each backtrace step in order to give a quick code view from start to finish for specific points of execution. Each point along the backtrace execution path will be highlighted for quickly tracking the calls.
• Producing a number of different quick-reference cards from this data could be beneficial for many developers.
• A version compare ability. This would allow you to quickly see the differences of the execution stacks between two versions. Out of all the ideas, this will be the most difficult to implement.

Please let me know what you think about the scope of the project.