[wp-hackers] Is WordPress Development Slowing Down?

[Anne Gibson]

On May 15, 2006, at 4:36 AM, Roy Schestowitz wrote:

> Figures seem to indicate that, based on the (admittedly poor
> indicator  which is) number of commits, WordPress changes less and  
> less as
> time  goes on. A decline from half a dozen commits per day to just  
> 1 or  2
> is noticeable.

I look at this as the sign of a fairly mature and stable application.  
If what your customer base needs is a mousetrap, you build a  
mousetrap. It might take quite a few iterations to find a mousetrap  
that reliably traps mice, but once it does trap mice reliably and  
effectively to the general satisfaction of the customer, you don't  
necessarily need to build a better one - just fine-tune the existing  
one. Then it's time to look for the customers who need something  
slightly different - like a web-based mousetrap - and work on  
building their mousetrap instead.

Or, put another way, imagine how much more efficient Microsoft Word  
would be if it was just a word processor, and not a word processor /  
html editor / brochure maker / family medical database creator /  
template dumping bin.

> Could  it be time to radically extend and make WordPress an out-of- 
> the-box
> CMS?  Or maybe produce a separate, standalone package (a  
> derivative)? Many
> people  seek CMS software. They love WordPress for many reasons,  
> but  they
> eventually settle for something like Drupal. In newsgroups, I find  
> it hard
> to  convince people to use WordPress as a CMS. With the number of  
> bloggers
> exceeding  100 million quite soon, I suppose my point of  
> contension  might
> be void.
>

I think you're having trouble convincing folks to use Wordpress as a  
CMS because it isn't a CMS. Since I don't need a CMS for my site, I'd  
personally prefer that Wordpress stay as it is - a very functional  
blogging tool.

If you think there's a significant customer base for a mouse- 
management system instead of just a mousetrap, where the reason for  
use is significantly different than Wordpress as it currently stands,  
I'd think that would be a sufficient reason to branch the code and  
produce Wordpress CMS. I'm usually one who thinks "plugin" before  
"branch" but if you're significantly changing the basic functionality  
of the application then it's not really Wordpress anymore, and the  
code should reflect that.

thanks!
anne gibson
naive just-graduated software engineer and amateur code-wrangler