[wp-hackers] [GSoC] Document Management

[Jacob Gillespie]

Mike,

First-off, let me say thank you for your contributions by sharing your
WordPress knowledge with the community on StackExchange - we need more
people who are willing like you to provide your knowledge of WordPress for
free to those of us who can benefit.

Second, I just wanted to let you know that, from my point of view, I don't
see Jane's comments as in any way insinuating that you have diabolical
intent or possess an anti-WordPress agenda.  On the contrary, you seem to
have a genuine desire to see this project in core "done right."  After all,
as you have said, you have seen a real life need for this kind of thing in
your client work.

However, what it seems that Jane is trying to say is that in GSoC, while the
code quality is important, the learning process is the goal.  GSoC provides
students the opportunity to present a project idea, be mentored while
completing that project, and in the process learning much about project
management, coding, and in general working in the open source ecosystem.

True - design and code are important, but hey, the students get to work with
some of the core devs.  So then, the core goal of GSoC is learning.  That's
what I got from what Jane said.

It looks like you both agree that building the complete perfected
document/revision manager is probably outside the scope of what can be done
over a summer (or maybe Benjamin's a guy who codes gold 24/7, awake and
asleep), but this is open source, so the beauty of it is that others will
come along and contribute.

I'm sure that Benjamin would love to hear any specific challenges that you
have faced attempting to implement this feature for your client sites.

But, this is all just my opinion... just mainly wanted to let you know that
I don't view Jane's comments as personal attacks on yourself at all, but
only trying to clarify GSoC's purpose.


Benjamin, this sounds like a pretty sweet idea!  If I was going to pick one
of the items on the list to see done, I'd probably pick the first one
(extending
WP's revisions and attachment functionality to handle revisions to attachments)
- it would be really nice to see the whole post/attachment revisions model
become unified.  That's just me, though.


Jacob

On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 10:18 PM, Mike Schinkel <mikeschinkel at newclarity.net
> wrote:

> On Mar 30, 2011, at 10:51 PM, Jane Wells wrote:
> >> So my concern with his proposal was that it would be incredibly
> valuable, probably the best I've seen, but only if done right.
> > The core developers of WordPress, the people who make up the mentorship
> group, are the people best able to judge if something is done "right"
> according to our coding standards.
> >
> >> Frankly, I have clients who want some of the exact things his proposal
> specified.
> > Then you should built it yourself or hire someone to do it, not try to
> get a student who's hoping to take advantage of a mentorship opportunity
> with completely different goals to do it for you. Come on, man. This is
> going too far and crossing a line.
> >
> >> Further my belief is that no one single mentor, myself included, could
> offer him enough experience to do a good job on the entirety of his
> proposal; its scope is just too large.
> > All projects will have two mentors plus additional backup mentors. Please
> try not to insult the experience of a lot of people who are volunteering
> their time, many of whom you don't even know, in pursuit of your own agenda.
> >
> >> I guess my point of asking for experience is to shine a light on the
> need for lots of experience for a project of that magnitude.
> > It just isn't really the place of this list to grill students about their
> experience. They will include their experience in their application, where
> it will be reviewed by the mentors. The purpose of posting to this list is
> to get feedback on the ideas and code approaches. Posting to wp-hackers is
> not a job interview.
>
>
> Jane, it's amazing how you take what I say, envision diabolical intent and
> then twist it to sounds like nothing I intended. It's as if you look for
> opportunities to do so.  The only "agenda" I have is to see the CMS use-case
> improve. Your assertions are insulting and if you've seen the work I've done
> for clients that rarely uses anyone else's code other than core you'd know
> your assertions are baseless. It is you that crosses the line by insinuating
> these things without a shred of actual evidence. Clearly you discount all
> the things I have do for free[1] to help those who use WordPress
> professionally, and you damage me by insinuating that I'm pursuing an
> anti-WordPress agenda.
>
> I don't know what I specifically did to you or when I did it such that you
> come out attacking every time I tried to contribute here but whatever it is
> I apologize. Life's too short.
>
> -Mike
> [1] http://bit.ly/b8ONQf
>
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