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

[Andrew Nacin]

On Tue, Apr 30, 2013 at 2:10 PM, Mike Little <wordpress at zed1.com> wrote:

> All this (and other contributions to this thread) seems to ignore the fact
> that many, many contributions *are* accepted, and people's suggestions
> *are* incorporated. For example, 260 people individually named as
> contributors (http://wordpress.org/news/2012/12/elvin/) or the 950 track
> tickets resolved (
>
> http://core.trac.wordpress.org/query?milestone=3.5&group=status&page=10&order=priority
> )
> in version 3.5
>
> That's hardly hostile or not accepting of changes.
>
> Yes, there are things that the core team are reluctant to change, but that
> doesn't include everything. And it doesn't mean that things will never
> change, but maybe that a viable solution with enough advantages hasn't yet
> been proposed *and proven*.


Yep. We're absolutely reluctant to change a lot of things. Sometimes it
takes years for there to be enough traction and buy-in for something. But
that isn't necessarily a negative. In fact, it is often a positive. We may
sometimes move slowly, and sometimes too slowly for some tastes (including
my own), but we do move in the right direction.

I don't think it is a stretch to say WordPress has *not* gotten worse over
time, and that the things that bother you the most are most likely
long-standing issues. (And some of them run up against design decisions
that may or may not evolve over time.)


> As for those implying that the WordPress (core) developers have no
> experience of deploying at scale, please take a look at
> http://vip.wordpress.com/clients/


Footnote: Obviously, not all WordPress core developers work at Automattic.
A majority of committers do not, a majority of patches come from those who
do not, those leading WordPress 3.6 do not, and many of our top
contributors do not. But, an awful lot of those who do not work at
Automattic have worked on major WordPress projects and deployments,
including many, many WordPress.com VIP clients. And, of course, the folks
at Automattic and WordPress.com have a particularly unique and important
perspective when it comes to scaling and deployment.

In my case: I don't do client work, but I do happen to maintain both the
jquery.com and wordpress.org networks, in a development role and
occasionally an operations role, and I have previously done consulting for
well-known media organizations.


> As hard a fact as it is to swallow, everyone on this list is part of a
> minority of WordPress users. Some of the things that affect you and a dozen
> other people on this list are really edge cases.
>

And sometimes they are not edge cases, but we just disagree with you. It
happens. Not everything can or should be in core. The project's
philosophies guide us to build opinionated software. Please understand that
if we don't agree with you or your idea, it isn't hostility. We sometimes
make decisions that no, we don't want to add X to core, or no, we don't
want to be responsible for maintaining Y after it lands, or no, we don't
consider Z to be a priority. (Or to put it more bluntly: we respect that
you care about Z, but we simply don't.) Bottom line — some tickets are
stalled for good reasons. (Obviously, there are a lot of stalled tickets
that have gotten lost — we're working on making that better, I promise.)

In the case of post relationships, based on discussions at the Community
Summit in October, it's on a long-term roadmap (subject to change). There
are a lot of things we identified that need to happen first. We can dive in
after 3.6. In the meantime, *you can use a plugin* (scribu's posts-to-posts
is awesome) and I fail to see why that is not an adequate answer. I'm sorry
you care so much about Z, but I have A through W on my mind right now.

Also, others are right in stating that plugin code quality is bad. Help us
make it better by contributing to the documentation efforts at
http://make.wordpress.org/docs/ and in #wordpress-sfd on freenode.

Nacin