[wp-hackers] Two new, long-overdue plugins to make your wordpress life a little easier...

[Marcus Pope]

If done properly, which is possible, the experience from a user's perspective is transparent.  There is no difference to regular users what happens in the markup generated by wordpress or the type of urls (specifically when it's a distinction between root-relative and absolute.)  I'm with you that the conversion process will probably generate support issues, but there are solutions to that too.  But those solutions will never be discussed with the current mindset of the wordpress core development community.  

.NET & J2EE are not fringe frameworks.  They drove 75% of websites at their prime and root-relative urls are a core concept.  That is far more than the market share Wordpress has ever had.  

Absolute url usage is a niche problem in the wordpress community, I completely agree with that too.  But it is an artificial problem created by the community that as a result has prevented the platform from garnishing mass adoption outside of what are typically blogging/content delivery uses.  They are venturing into CMS with recent innovations, and that is a great step. 

I don't have a problem with let's see how the plugin does.  I have a problem with the prolific notion that root relative urls are not feasible in the wordpress core, or that they cause massive problems that cannot be overcome technically with simple and elegant solutions.  That you must search & replace your absolute urls because it's the right way.  Preaching lies to people makes the problem systemic and even more difficult to uproot.

Anecdotal remarks of experience does not change cold hard facts that are readily available in books, college curriculum, development communities other than wordpress, and two decades of real world industry-wide usage of software online.



-----Original Message-----
From: wp-hackers-bounces at lists.automattic.com [mailto:wp-hackers-bounces at lists.automattic.com] On Behalf Of Mika A Epstein
Sent: Friday, October 28, 2011 3:51 PM
To: wp-hackers at lists.automattic.com
Subject: Re: [wp-hackers] Two new, long-overdue plugins to make your wordpress life a little easier...

Now that is just not true, no matter what you are, otherwise we'd never need the support forums.

You could possibly argue that "regular users" could use this with a modicum of technical support, but that's unproven today since you don't have a large enough user base to measure your assumptions on.  Otto, for all his dickishness, does.

There are enterprise use-cases for just about everything, but for the most part, my experience working for an enterprise has been that the enterprise is the FRINGE use-case of any product, and not the intended/common.  I support enough weird programs at my office and am better at "weird shit" than the vendors specifically because I'm familiar with the weird, and they assume the norm.

This does not mean that the enterprise is wrong, just that the enterprise is different, and while they might like something changed in CORE code, they often need to accept that they are, indeed, the weirdos in this case.

When you make suggestions about changing WP core, you have to consider the needs of the many [tm Star Trek].  Until your plugin garners enough action, we can't know how many people will find it useful.  Maybe Otto is wrong!  Maybe this plugin will become more popular than Akismet and everyone will want to use it.  But it's far more likely that you did exactly what Open Source is supposed to do: You solved a niche problem and shared your solution.

Which fucking rocks :)

On Oct 28, 2011, at 3:08 PM, Marcus Pope <Marcus.Pope at springbox.com> wrote:

> My point is we should take out that flaw in wordpress.  It does not change the behavior of regular users, and makes enterprise uses possible. Regular Users CAN USE THIS WITHOUT ANY TECHNICAL SUPPORT.
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