[wp-hackers] WordPress Maturity (was)Re: hate

[Harry Metcalfe]

> Some of these are growing pains and to be expected, but in part these are
> issues with a community that, while fundamentally impressive in what it has
> accomplished, nonetheless seems to lack a certain maturity of software
> experience. I have been shocked to be told right here, by leaders, that the
> problem with updating a database when moving from development to a live URL
> is not a problem with WordPress. Search and replace in a database is a
> fundamentally unsafe operation, and to recommend third party tools for this
> absolutely necessary function suggests a real lack of experience with real
> world large-scale (i.e. corporate) sites.
>
> As one final example of what I see as a "teenage growth period" rather than
> "selling out", I fully expect to have a  couple of suspects here explain to
> me in glorious detail why and how I'm wrong. At least, that's the response
> I have gotten, not from lurkers or noobs, but from some of the luminaries
> of WordPress when I have raised issues that affect many of my clients'
> adoptions before. Rather than wanting to learn from the on the ground
> cases, people who raise these issues are often told we're doing it wrong or
> we should buck up and be a real programmer and write a script, or...

A lot of that resonates with me, too. Particularly about lack of 
experience in large scale environments. We build and host WordPress 
websites for the UK government and the following problems top my list:

  * Ease of deployment and switching between environments
  * Content staging (other than post/page previews)
  * Poor test coverage
  * Dreadful code quality in plugins

Like Shasta, I'm confident that these are growth problems rather than 
"selling out" (I'm not even sure what the latter means, really...)

But I am also often pretty irritated by stuff posted here, and by 
infantile features like this one:

https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress/blob/master/wp-includes/formatting.php#L3301

After my experience trying to push back on that, and on a few other 
things, I think twice before raising tickets or submitting patches. For 
fear that they'll just be rejected out of hand. Or that, without hours 
of tedious discussion, nothing will happen.

In that example, Matt more or less decided that scratching his own itch 
was more important than the autonomy of WordPress' users, and then 
suggested we write a plugin.

Sigh.

Harry