[wp-hackers] Future of wp-hackers

[Matt Mullenweg]

Austin Matzko wrote:
> I realized a while ago that many of the most important discussions
> about the future of WP were happening elsewhere, because fairly
> important changes would show up in trac without any prior wp-hackers
> discussion (with the major exception of the new terms taxonomy).

What's the cause and what's the effect?

I would say most serious movement happens in the bug tracker. That's not 
a bad thing, in fact it's great, and it became more pronounced after 
wp-hackers jumped the shark.

Trac is not best for discussion though -- there's no threading, it 
doesn't scale well (numbers wise), and it suffers from *some* of the 
same problems as wp-hackers, though not nearly as pronounced.

August and July were busy months on Trac, particularly August.

Still, if you look at the posts by devs to wp-hackers in July and 
August, the slow months, they propose serious topics or answer highly 
technical questions.

> I
> could be wrong, but I don't believe there was any hackers discussion
> about jQuery, PHPMailer, and canonical url redirection, for example,
> prior to their appearing in trac.

http://groups.google.com/group/wp-hackers/browse_thread/thread/8eece3988c2788c/96b42fc599205903?lnk=gst&rnum=18
(also http://photomatt.net/2006/12/28/critical-prototype/ )
http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/3862
http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/4554

What would you have liked to have seen discussed on wp-hackers, and what 
would you have contributed?

> And a few weeks ago, I learned from
> an aside somewhere on trac that Happy Cog is redesigning the admin.

This was also mentioned in at least two presentations at WordCamp, 
including the keynote, and I posted screenshots from one of their 
markups in June, which got a single response:

http://groups.google.com/group/wp-hackers/browse_thread/thread/53441d7fbdb2809c/b2adecb658c3a0f5?lnk=gst

Perhaps the misunderstanding is that you can contribute to WordPress 
development by posting to wp-hackers but not following the WP codebase 
(wp-svn), bugs and enhancements (trac), or any of the major news around 
the project (planet, WordCamp). It may be possible for one-offs, but not 
core functionality.

-- 
Matt Mullenweg
  http://photomatt.net | http://wordpress.org
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