[wp-design] Re: Shuttle Way Forward

[Joen Asmussen]

I'm pretty bummed out.

The Shuttle team is, without being too arrogant, a superstar team of 
bloggers/designers with a huge deal of knowledge about usability, not to 
mention Wordpress and the core Wordpress community.

We've spent quite a lot of time, sweat and energy in Shuttle, and more 
than once we've bent like the straw to accomodate "executive decisions". 
The logo, the colors, we've all had to roll with the punches.

My personal drive in this has been that this was a genuine shot at 
improving the admin interface of Wordpress, a CMS which I have come to 
love so much that I've even released an open-source theme. Even when 
some of the choices I considered to be good moves were shot down, I 
still wanted to be part of this, because I knew that Wordpress with 
Shuttle was going to be parsecs better than the current MESS that is the 
WP 2 UI.

Now we're at the end of the road. The mockups are as final as they'll 
ever be, and the end result is surprisingly great (I mean, wow, great!) 
considering the decisions we've had to struggle with.

If these mockups do not become part of the official Wordpress release at 
some point (no matter when, 2.5, 3), then what the hell has this 
year-and-a-half of work been good for? This is FREE work by people who 
do it for the love of it! Is it being scrapped, or picked at like some 
cold christmas dinner?

Why is this happening? And why hasn't anyone said anything before?

If this was a paying client, I'd be fairly bummed, but I'd still get 
paid. This is not a paying client, so I'm not only bummed out, I'm 
pretty angry.

Essentially, I've seen some bad decisions before, but this one takes the 
cake. I have better things to spend my time on.

I genuinely hope that I'm overreacting, and that Shuttle WILL at some 
point be implemented to the T into the official WP release. If not, 
please let me know now so I can go read the entire Sweet Valley High, 
which would be time better spent.

Joen

P.S. I hope everyone understands this is not a jab at anyone on the 
Shuttle team, you're all fantastic.

Khaled Abou Alfa wrote:
> Well I'm glad for your honesty Matt, truly it's good to know where it 
> all stands. A great deal of work has been carried out in creating 
> these mockups. I'm not saying that they're perfect, however a great 
> deal of thought has been put into making everything (in most cases) 
> look and function in a consistent manner.
>
> Talking with you in December you were concerned about confusing people 
> if we released a plugin, however I think that the work we've done 
> deserves better. I've been thinking and talking about it with several 
> people and *I don't think* opening it out to the entire community is a 
> good idea. So if everyone else agrees I was thinking of putting a call 
> out to those programmers that have some time and would like to jump 
> onboard to create a *plugin* that will implement the design.
>
> The only problem is that certain elements of the design won't be 
> feasible as shown on the mockups since that would involve playing with 
> the core code.
>
> I know this makes us go a few steps back (really, really sorry about 
> that Joshua, honestly I am) however with any luck we should be 
> striving forward and having concrete results in the not too distant 
> future.
>
> Matt this is me trying to make my (hopefully our, can't really talk on 
> anyone else's behalf) intentions clear to you. What does everyone 
> think? Good idea? Bad idea?
>
>


-- 

Joen Asmussen

CPH DENMARK

AIM: workjoen
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