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

[Harry Metcalfe]

Is this in response to me? If so, that seems like an extreme reaction. I 
also find all the quoted statements rather annoying, and I don't think 
I've said those things, nor assumed that the core team should stand to 
attention when I submit a ticket for my pet bugbear.

We use WordPress for lots of large scale sites and we *have* figured out 
how to handle deployments and database migrations, and numerous other 
things besides. None of those things is insurmountable. But some of them 
are needlessly hard.

What I'm saying is that as WordPress grows and develops, if it is part 
of the community's vision for WordPress to be used more by large-scale 
sites, governments and corporates, then there are some aspects of 
WordPress that could be improved. Things which are important to those 
clients, for those projects, but not so important to bloggers et al.

Things like being able to stage a complex new bit of content, consisting 
of numerous posts, pages, menu items and widgets, and to test all those 
things, without them being visible in public.

Or changing the way widget options etc are stored so that moving sites 
between domains doesn't require error-prone database rewrites.

Or actively setting an example in the way we test to try and encourage 
better code quality in plugins.

Or supporting better mechanisms for deploying updates, which is perhaps 
a good example of what I'm talking about. The current approach of 
one-click updating in the admin is *totally reasonable* for the majority 
of users who would otherwise not apply critical updates. But it's also 
totally *unreasonable* in a professional environment where applying 
updates is part of a well-resourced process, and where having 
webserver-writeable code is an unacceptable risk. It's right and good 
that one-click updating has been done the way it has, but also sensible 
to consider whether adding support for other approaches might help 
WordPress's adoption by other sorts of organisations and projects.

These are, imo, all perfectly reasonable things to want to do.

Harry

> I really, really dislike when people use the "wp-hackers" mailing list to complain about WordPress but offer no solutions for fixing it. Here's why:
>
> "WordPress doesn't do X, so it sucks"
>
> WordPress is a toolbox, if it doesn't have the kind of hammer you want: go get a new hammer, but you don't have to throw out the toolbox. This is a problem with people being WP developers, then PHP developers, and not the other way around. WP is just a bunch of PHP code. PHP developers can code around its weaknesses while getting the benefit of everything else that comes for free with the framework.
>
> "I haven't figured out how to do X, so WP sucks"
>
> I think there are many scenarios where the developer is the problem, not WP. If you are running a website at scale and you don't know how to handle deployments and migrations and DB migrations, maybe you aren't the right person for the job. Or maybe you need to learn how to do those things, learn more WP internals, and learn how to solve problems. Try the Support forums. I know many people who can do those things, they aren't impossible, and in most cases, aren't even difficult, just takes some elbow grease to learn how.
>
> "There is a bug in WP, you guys haven't fixed it, so let's burn the house down"
>
> There 3000+ open tickets, many of which do have patches. Because your pet ticket isn't patched yet does not mean that WP is wholly broken and everyone that is working on it is careless. It just means that "your world" is not "THE world." The biggest complainers are almost always the people who are NOT in IRC, do NOT attend dev chats, and do NOT submit patches. Thanks for the help, guys. Come be part of the solution and you will find that you can eradicate more problems along the way.
>
>
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