[wp-hackers] WordPress Maturity (was)Re: hate

Tue Apr 30 17:51:19 UTC 2013

I solved an issue with HTTP concurrency, Web Services, and curl_multi. I have been to many WP conferences and meetups and Community events and have evangelized this. Hardly anyone else thinks they need it, knows what it means, or cares. So guess what, it isn't in core yet - even though *I needed it* and (I think) *WordPress needs it!!*

If you feel so passionately about these issues, channel that disdain for the status quo into Trac tickets and patches and see them through til they are committed. That is quite literally the only way to affect core.

I am a member of this mailing list too, and 98% of the emails are about something that should be in the support forums or someone whining. For anyone, if you *need* help, probably use Support forums. If you *want* to help, PLEASE come to Trac. 

If WordPress sucks and you have figured it out and everyone else is doing it wrong, I'm sorry, but I can't hear you over your lack of patches in Trac.

On Apr 30, 2013, at 1:44 PM, Harry Metcalfe <harry at dxw.com> wrote:

> Again, this is just the sort of reaction that's quite irritating.
> 
> You may not find staging a big issue. We do.
> 
> You may not need to move content around. We do all the time.
> 
> You might not test with content. We do.
> 
> Of course widget options could be stored differently. There's almost never only one way to do something.
> 
> And we have, as I mentioned, already dealt with the updating issue, and numerous others. We have solved these problems. That doesn't mean that WordPress couldn't be better.
> 
> Your whole post seems like an attempt to prop up the status quo, instead of putting yourself in the position of someone else and thinking about other ways WordPress is used, and ways it could be made better.
> 
> No matter what the suggestion or criticism is, "go write a script" is always a possible solution. So it's a bit pointless to say it. We already did that. If everyone did that all the time, we'd never have any new features!
> 
> 
> 
> On 30/04/13 18:33, Marko Heijnen wrote:
>> That wasn't a response to you but a generalization that does exists.
>> 
>> Staging things is an issue but not a big one. Most content don't need to be moved. You don't do testing with content.
>> 
>> Widgets options can't be stored differently. Look into serialization and you will found out yourself. You just need another script for when you want to change a domain.
>> And what said before moving content should be a rare condition.
>> 
>> Deploying updates is good how it is now. You saying that yourself by that it fits the majority. For a professional environment you turn it off yourself and make the files not writeable by WordPress. That isn't hard at all to do.
>> 
>> Marko
>> 
>> Op 30 apr. 2013, om 19:20 heeft Harry Metcalfe <harry at dxw.com> het volgende geschreven:
>> 
>>> Is this in response to me? If so, that seems like an extreme reaction. I also find all the quoted statements rather annoying, and I don't think I've said those things, nor assumed that the core team should stand to attention when I submit a ticket for my pet bugbear.
>>> 
>>> We use WordPress for lots of large scale sites and we *have* figured out how to handle deployments and database migrations, and numerous other things besides. None of those things is insurmountable. But some of them are needlessly hard.
>>> 
>>> What I'm saying is that as WordPress grows and develops, if it is part of the community's vision for WordPress to be used more by large-scale sites, governments and corporates, then there are some aspects of WordPress that could be improved. Things which are important to those clients, for those projects, but not so important to bloggers et al.
>>> 
>>> Things like being able to stage a complex new bit of content, consisting of numerous posts, pages, menu items and widgets, and to test all those things, without them being visible in public.
>>> 
>>> Or changing the way widget options etc are stored so that moving sites between domains doesn't require error-prone database rewrites.
>>> 
>>> Or actively setting an example in the way we test to try and encourage better code quality in plugins.
>>> 
>>> Or supporting better mechanisms for deploying updates, which is perhaps a good example of what I'm talking about. The current approach of one-click updating in the admin is *totally reasonable* for the majority of users who would otherwise not apply critical updates. But it's also totally *unreasonable* in a professional environment where applying updates is part of a well-resourced process, and where having webserver-writeable code is an unacceptable risk. It's right and good that one-click updating has been done the way it has, but also sensible to consider whether adding support for other approaches might help WordPress's adoption by other sorts of organisations and projects.
>>> 
>>> These are, imo, all perfectly reasonable things to want to do.
>>> 
>>> Harry
>>> 
>>>> I really, really dislike when people use the "wp-hackers" mailing list to complain about WordPress but offer no solutions for fixing it. Here's why:
>>>> 
>>>> "WordPress doesn't do X, so it sucks"
>>>> 
>>>> WordPress is a toolbox, if it doesn't have the kind of hammer you want: go get a new hammer, but you don't have to throw out the toolbox. This is a problem with people being WP developers, then PHP developers, and not the other way around. WP is just a bunch of PHP code. PHP developers can code around its weaknesses while getting the benefit of everything else that comes for free with the framework.
>>>> 
>>>> "I haven't figured out how to do X, so WP sucks"
>>>> 
>>>> I think there are many scenarios where the developer is the problem, not WP. If you are running a website at scale and you don't know how to handle deployments and migrations and DB migrations, maybe you aren't the right person for the job. Or maybe you need to learn how to do those things, learn more WP internals, and learn how to solve problems. Try the Support forums. I know many people who can do those things, they aren't impossible, and in most cases, aren't even difficult, just takes some elbow grease to learn how.
>>>> 
>>>> "There is a bug in WP, you guys haven't fixed it, so let's burn the house down"
>>>> 
>>>> There 3000+ open tickets, many of which do have patches. Because your pet ticket isn't patched yet does not mean that WP is wholly broken and everyone that is working on it is careless. It just means that "your world" is not "THE world." The biggest complainers are almost always the people who are NOT in IRC, do NOT attend dev chats, and do NOT submit patches. Thanks for the help, guys. Come be part of the solution and you will find that you can eradicate more problems along the way.
>>>> 
>>>> 
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