[wp-hackers] Making it better

[John Sinteur]

On Apr 22, 2005, at 4:59, Ryan Boren wrote:

> Just a bit of perspective.  Average joe bloggers use prepackaged themes
> (usually the default).  Average joe wouldn't know what to do with a
> drag-and-drop UI tweaker any more than he would know how to rearrange
> tags.
>


The more I read the discussion, the more I feel it's simply a 
"growth-pain" moment for WordPress. Matt, don't change anything, keep 
doing what we're doing.

It's all in the users expectation. Somehow, people now expect having a 
rich weblog with lots of features and a unique design on top of that to 
be easy. I think that, should we magically be able to make php and css 
ridiculously easy today, people will start complaining about the design 
and how *photoshop* is too difficult (1). Or how spelling and grammar 
are too hard.

I've been weblogging since before there was a name for it and I had to 
handcode each page in html (2).

A well designed site with rich content is hard work. It is slowly 
getting easier, and the fact that people are complaining about 
wordpress is a compliment: it means wordpress is being seen as the next 
logical step. Weblogging will get easier still, but it takes hard work 
by developers.

The "complaints" about plugins I have seen in the discussion are valid 
- perhaps we need  a system to 'validate' plugins to help that.

The "complaints" about the support forum are valid as well - perhaps we 
need a system that makes it easier to respond. If the main forum had an 
rss feed (as opposed to each individual thread) I might read it more, 
but that's just me.

The "complaints" about php and css being hard are valid, but sorry, 
there's nothing we can do about that right now. Either stick with the 
themes available, or wait for wordpress 3.0

But the overall picture that Matt and this group here is doing things 
"wrong" is not valid.

-John

(1) the "muppets tonight" show had andy and randy pig, but that's not 
the view I have of our users. But sometimes....
(2) cue the monty python "what? you had it easy!" sketch here.