[wp-hackers] Making it better

[Stefano]

Il Thu, 21 Apr 2005 09:58:49 -0700, Matthew Mullenweg
<m at mullenweg.com> scrive:

>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

Community and software cn be improved in several ways, but i think
that comment was unfair, yes you have to manage PHP if you really want
make tricky things but i think that 90% of tasks already can be done
by people that are able to manage theyr webhosting, FTP, and know
HTML. Plugins are a lot and cover almost everything (some better than
other but they does and doensn't require so much PHP coding).

Having a template language would help? I don't think it would, why to
learn a template language and not use the standards? I think the 2 way
to improve user expirience are about the SW and the community, with
this one intended as support community and plugin and theme developper
too.

Sw:

1) we have recentrly started a therad about iadmin interface usability
and there there is some good thing that can be done
2) adding pages maybe should have added a tab menu in the default
theme too, menus are the first request people ask
3)adding some "essential" plugin part of the core of WP would improve
the sw a lot. I'm thinking about photo gallery, statistics etc. I
think that for the 1.6 or 2.0 version an end user survey about what
features end user would like to see in future realese would be
helpfull.

About Community:

I don't agree that support forum is so unusefull as that article says,
i find lot of answer, for tech people and people used to old forum
methods the actual limit of bbpress are not blocking them, but thre is
a lot of works to give "normal" user a nice expirience using it.

a) Make the forum improved in usalbility and strss about the fact that
a forum is based on volonteers so any answr can come in 2 minutes, 2
hours or 2 weeks... to many people ask for immediate solutions, but i
don't thinks other  blog sw have a better support.
b) stress a lot about other source for info (codex for fist), i follow
th codex development cause i manage a WP Wiki in italian and we take a
lot from it to translate in italian, same for the forum. Having people
getting help in theyr own language help a lot non speaking and not
techy people.
c) Ask theme and plugin developper to adere to some standard in
various field, like readme file, docs, comments in the code etc, to
make easy for people dig inside. I would stress about making themes
and plugins easy to install, no PHPadmin task and minimum core code
modification, and ,aking them I18N would help make the locale teams
give more and more info, doc and stuff in mother tongue language to
end user. i.e. one of my translator for it_IT locale are making
gallery plugin and i insisted with him to realease it fully I18N, the
worst part it to get a .POT file with windows, i did it for him having
cygwin on my PC and i'm palnning to give that little but fundamental
help to everyone that lack a unix machine and doens't care to installa
that stuff. Would be nice having a sort of "WP approved logo" for
theme and plugin that meets a series of features (as the one i
exposed). In this i can give a contribution about the testing and
checking ofr localization and stuff like this.
d) soliciting all the time people to give a little putting a brick to
help to build the whole "wall". Cause i'm not a mother tongue english
speaker i didn't feel i could contribute to codex, so i decided to
start the WP Italy prokect, givin people the help they want in italian
hoping to take out soem works to english side of the community, the
same i think iare doing the german people etc.

just my 2 cents.

Greetings
--

Stefano Aglietti - StallonIt on IRCnet - ICQ#: 2078431
Email: steagl at people.it - steagl at 40annibuttati.it
BlogPage: http://www.40annibuttati.it/
Wordpress Italy Project: http://www.wordpress-it.it