[wp-hackers] Future of wp-hackers

[Andy Staines]

As someone on the fringe of all this - I use this list (and a feed  
from Trac) simply to watch what's going into releases. And that's  
because 'official' documentation is virtually non-existent.

But, as we are repeatedly told that the core should be light and the  
'frills' should be catered for by plugins, which is fine, it would be  
useful to have a dedicated 'plugin authors' forum where people can  
ask the more difficult techie questions they get stuck on and the  
more knowledgeable could assist the newbies. Doing that on this list  
sometimes works but just as often get's lost in the noise. I see  
other projects doing this successfully.

But you're right about this list. Far, far too many posts from a  
community who believe they can 'make' decisions that have already  
been made or influence change.

My 2 pennies worth.


On 09:35  AM |  Wed 26 Sep 07, at 09:35  AM |  26 Sep 07, Matt  
Mullenweg wrote:

> 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
> http://automattic.com | http://akismet.com
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