[wp-testers] Center

[Matt Mullenweg]

Doug Stewart wrote:
> No, it's nothing like that.  I swear, the sooner our media culture
> breaks their Iraq Tourette's, the sooner we can stop seeing reductio
> ad Iraqum arguments crop up in the most inappropriate places.

Actually if you look at the exchange, it was:

"Interfaces in OS tend to suck. Here are reasons X, Y, and Z."

"Wow, the guy who brags everywhere how he's doing an open source product 
and is therefore so much better than the others who don't do open source 
finally admits that he doesn't care for open source."

That was completely out of line and an ad hominem attack. Talk about the 
ideas, not the person. If you can't do that, find another mailing list.

> I think people are reacting harshly /because/ this particular
> development effort hasn't been particularly Open Source in its
> incarnation.

This has been in core in a public repository for 3 months now. There 
have been over 50k downloads of a non-release version, and thousands of 
people have sent in feedback. The feedback, especially those who took 
the time to provide it earlier in the process, has resulted in 
assumptions being retested, designs redone, and even *gasp* the 
introduction of an option (for colors), and those of you around for a 
while know I am usually religiously opposed to options.

> It's still in the
> development stages, but I do think it's a direct piece of evidence as
> to Benevolent Design Dictatorships being perhaps a better way to
> handle things when aesthetics are on the line.

And aesthetics has been one of the areas most people have agreed is 
weakest in the WP dashboard. Not being afraid of trying a new process to 
address that persistent problem I think is indicative of why its been 
able to remain popular in a vastly changing web landcsape where many 
other products have come and gone.

> But Matt, here's the problem: you have a whole slew of faithful users
> that bring nothing BUT preconceived notions to the table when
> approaching a new release and when you flippantly dismiss their input
> because a whole bunch of n00bs like paper mock-ups, well...

That is false. The new admin would be a LOT different if existing users 
were not an concern. In development we take a fairly conservative stance 
against leaving existing users out in the cold, and frankly it's 
interesting to see some of the same people fairly radical about pushing 
people into a new language requirement (PHP4 to PHP5), which would have 
prevented hundreds of thousands of people from upgrading, be so 
reactionary about the moving of a category box, where the worst case 
scenario seems to be that someone forgets to put in a category.

Let me repeat that, even if the category placement is worse, which I 
believe it is not, the worst thing that happens is that people have to 
scroll down a bit to edit a category, or that they forget (once? twice?) 
and need to re-edit the entry.

>>  The plural of anecdote is not data.
> 
> Properly collated and plunked into a database, it sure is.

Many faulty measurements doesn't add up to a single good measurement, or 
even average out to a good measurement.

> Matt, I think a lot of this comes down to: major changes like this
> whole rework could be handled MUCH better on an organizational/project
> level next time anything similar is undertaken.  I think a lot of
> frustration folks are exhibiting is due to the like-it-or-lump-it aura
> that you, in particular, have given off about the whole affair.

You said it yourself, some people feel disenfranchised when their ideas 
don't make it into core. This seems to bear no relation to the amount of 
discussion about various ideas. People are still pissed off about the 
removal of skippy's DB backup plugin, the decision to support PHP4, the 
fact that we're not 100% OO, and yes this new design even though each of 
these things has been discussed over hundreds and hundreds of emails 
over the course of many months. The closer we get to a release, the more 
likely things are to degenerate into ad hominem attacks or 
dissatisfaction with the entire process or project in general.

I myself have had tons of things not make it into core, and the thing 
I'd suggest is to look at the process not as a personal thing but as a 
Darwinian process where not every idea survives but the end-result has 
been very successful over a long period of time.

-- 
Matt Mullenweg
http://ma.tt | http://automattic.com