[wp-hackers] Making it better

[David Chait]

To start, I want to respond to lokjah directly:

Part of the problem is having someone try to describe something textually. 
It just doesn't work.  Being unable to provide a URL makes it 
nigh-impossible for people to >easily< help.  That's just my 2c.  I 
 >couldn't< grasp what was going on.  And I'm one of the people who has 
offered up becoming a 'shadow admin' for a few days, to help people work out 
theme problems, plugin issues, simple php code, etc.  Sometimes it only 
makes sense when you see the site, sometimes it doesn't make sense until you 
see the CODE. ;)

Also, I agree with your notes about bbPress to some extent.  It's not just 
bbPress, it might also be 'categorization', having more sections to put 
questions into.  But it's missing the 'watch a thread' feature many other 
bb's have (PLEASE, don't tell me again to subscribe to an rss feed...), and 
while it 'looks nicer' than most bb's, it also fits fewer total thread 
titles on screen at once.  And yes, there's the 'bump' tendency because of a 
number of the preceding topics.

To the main topic:

I think that adding a 'templating language' is BS.  That's people thinking 
that they aren't programming, but they still are.  It just goes to slow 
things down more.

HOWEVER, the idea we've discussed previously of 'meta templates' that can 
have some sort of 'blocks' for 'what goes where', you pick a 'module', say 
where it goes (main content, left sidebar, right sidebar, header, footer, 
whatever) via a web interface and not PHP, and that'll handle a lot of 
complete non-coder issues.

Another thing to remember is that while people are running from the paid 
blog tools, they are running TO an unpaid, open-source tool.  I for one have 
put in a ton of time on plugin development and support, trying to be a 
'second hand' in the forums, but it's not my 'job'.  I don't get paid. 
There's not a staffed company running things.  Community work can get to the 
level where it can be MORE effective than a full company (i.e., linux), but 
wait, even those community projects many times have paid corporation 
employees working on modules, or committing patches, etc.  Just a different 
world.

This all comes back around to a question I asked a year ago: What does WP 
want to BE?  If it wants to be the be all end all of CSS and semantic 
publishing, it's not necessarily going to be the blog tool for the masses 
(not that one prevents the other, but...).  What is the goal?  If the goal 
IS to become a premiere blog tool, then maybe there needs to be some thought 
into what that means.  What functionality is easy in MT/et.al. that in WP is 
difficult?  What things would make WP >easy< for the non-coder?  What 
'levels' of users are there, and how do you do a good job of supporting each 
group?

Just brainstorming,

-d

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "cFA" <cfanyc at gmail.com>

....

For me its threads like this one
http://wordpress.org/support/topic.php?id=29916

that have completely discouraged me in looking to the forums for
help...in that thread I had a need, did the best job I could to
explain the problem and then in 9 more posts proceeded to talk myself
thru the problem, with only 2 responses, I later found out EXACTLY
what I needed doing a ton of searching and finding two plugins by
rboren and kafkaesqui, it was so exciting to find the answer for an
issue I've had that stopped my project development since mingus days,
only this week have I been able to continue the project.

....

Second,  I think alot of the difficult things about the wp forum are
caused by bbpress' infancy  I'm all for a standards based geeked out
forum, but it just isnt user friendly.  I applaud  the recent strong
links for unanswered posts, thats a step in the right direction.  What
I notice now, is that once a post has been replied to it frequently
drops back into the loop of forgottens.