[wp-hackers] Making it better

[de villamil frederic]

On 4/21/05, Matthew Mullenweg <m at mullenweg.com> wrote:
> I'm curious how the list thinks the community could be improved to avoid
> the concerns voiced in comments like this:
> 
> http://www.plasticbag.org/archives/2005/04/links_for_20050421.shtml


Hi matt, hi list,

as I'm quite in the theme part, I'll just  deal with that one.
The way themes are done now is quite good because we now have user
defined themes since 1.5. However, theme designers still have to know
PHP to use it.
Changing to smarty (http://smarty.php.net would improve it a lot but
it would also require a heavy work to set up.
Maybe a real well designed doc about themes and functionnalities, not
spread amongst many wiki pages would really be a plus I guess, even if
people who can't read php will still have problem.
An example: I have recently discovered the 'li_title=' in some
functions because I had to have a llok at the code. End users who want
to change their themes may not have to do it.

For the plugin part, I guess wordpress is moving really quick, and
plugin developpers may not have the time to adapt their work so their
plugin way not work anymore, without a single alarm on wp-plugins.net.
The lack of documentation is also a real and well known problem as
developpers susually don't like to write them down and can't think as
end users to guess what would be needed.
And most end users don't read docs. I know that too.

As wordpress is becoming more and more known and used, it will also
need to become more and more 'click and play'. It means activating
things like comments, linkroll, archives and so from the admin pannel
and not by commenting a PHP function. This will also cause some
trouble for developpers.
As an example, SPIP is an incredibly user friendlyh CMS, but
incredibly heavy to use too. Even my wife can install and manage one,
but it needs a lot of things to be done to work the way you want.
Wordpress is a little more tricky to tune, but its use is incredibly
simple. I guess we need to get the balance between those 2.

Well as a conclusion, I think we shhould ask totally
developping-unaware end users to see the most common encountered
problems and focus on them as a way to improuve our beloved CMS.
My 2 cents, and sorry for my crappy English.
Frederic / neuro


-- 
Frédéric de Villamil
"Quand vous chassez une belle fille parfois c'est mieux de regarder
une fille moins belle d'abord" - Motoki
http://www.eretzvaju.org