Posted 6 months ago #
This forum thread is for discussion of how to improve the feedback loop and communication among the WordPress open source community so that people who contribute can feel confident that their suggestions are being heard and considered. More about the subject is in this dev blog post.
Please post your suggestions here for how we can improve communication.
When threads are posed on the wp-forums and wp-docs email lists, and those threads relate to problems that volunteers (non-Automattic personnel) cannot address, please consider asking Automattic employees to at least respond that the issue is either being addressed or will NOT be addressed.
Thanks for this topic.
I should also note that the "Report a Site Bug" appears to be a black-hole.
Now it probably isn't a black-hole, but lack of feedback makes it appear that way.
Posted 6 months ago #
I think there is a lot of great work going on in blogs that gets missed. A lot of it from people who feel as though they have been ignored for some time.
Perhaps if mechanisms existed for blog authors to use polls on their own blogs that would feedback to wp.org and rank there it might be possible to capture the much wider community instead of just those people that want to visit WordPress itself.
Posted 6 months ago #
@arickmann Can you give an example of what you mean?
Posted 6 months ago #
Well, I, and many others often write "where next" posts. My last post (link at the bottom in case you want to remove it) was a discussion of Workflow matters that I hope get created by someone during the WLTC plugin competition. Of course it could just as easily be a suggestion to include that content within the core.
My general idea is that these sorts of posts could be accompanied by polls asking "do you think this is a good idea?" or perhaps some more complex questions. Registering the URL, or ID of that poll (I am assuming PollDaddy) with wp.org means the results can be gathered and displayed centrally irrespective of the blog it was originally on.
It would allow bloggers to engage their readers for the benefit of the community as a whole without asking people to visit other places and helps to identify topics where there is already some discussion around them. Developers who wanted to pick that up could find the list of popular ideas on wp.org and visit the original blog for the detail.
This was the only way I could really think of to keep the WordPress bloggers involved in the process as they do a lot of work promoting WordPress and ideas but it is that involvement that I think is important more than the poll concept itself.
Andrew
http://www.wp-fun.co.uk/2009/05/09/what-wordpress-workflow-needs/
Posted 6 months ago #
The Ideas section could be a lot more productive and useful if it were patrolled more often to remove spam and weed out ideas that have been implemented and ones for which there already is a plugin. Additionally, it might be better to make clear that it is not the place for just any plugin request.
In short, give some good people moderator powers so that Ideas becomes a productive place again.
Posted 6 months ago #
I imagine you saw this coming, but I would love to see some sophisticated syndication options built into WP/WPMu which would allow people to easily integrate a wide range of feeds of their various online work from numerous sources that are RSS ready into their blog. In many ways completing the circle of the blog as aggregation point. FeedWordPress does this quite well now, but having it as part of the core and regularly developed would make a lot of sense given where WordPress is headed.
From the other end of the process here's what I would like to consider.
Things I really don't want to see:
BTW Jane, when do we get the lycra cat suits?
Posted 6 months ago #
Building on what codeispoetry said, have a way that the community can vote on the outstanding ideas to indicate what they want prioritized. From a release management point of view, those ideas that are ranked at the top could be assessed from a standard set of criteria to help explain why certain features are / are not happening: complexity, scope, resources (time, money, people, technology, etc), dependencies, etc. I'm sure a portion of this happens internal to trac, but it could be useful information to understand the interests of the different user groups of WOrdpress: developers, wp users, automattic, etc.
The more active use of the dev blog that Jane has been using is a great thing in this capacity.
Posted 6 months ago #
Two quick ideas that I think would help:
1. Integrate the WP documentation (both for users & developers) into wordpress & trac. I don't necessarily mean that you have to literally include all of the documentation in the distribution (that's a separate issue), but conceptually the documentation should be treated as part of the code. Then integrate trac for the documentation with the forums. When people find bugs, push the bug into trac and close the thread with a link to the bug in trac. If the documentation is outdated or unclear, a bug report should be filed and patches should be submitted. When users have questions that are answered in the documentation, make it easier for people who respond to link to the relevant section in the documentation.The documentation is just an extension of the code. Make the interaction between the forums & trac really, really obvious: big buttons, special indicators in the subject line for posts merged with trac bug reports or pointing to wp documentation, etc.
2. Build a script into wordpress that checks, on activation, plugins & themes for deprecated/removed functions, hooks, etc. If there are any, notify the author (at least for plugins/themes in the WP directories, this should be possible). Additionally, as soon as you know what functions, hooks, etc. will be deprecated/removed in upcoming releases, notify those developers as well.
I'm pretty new to WP overall and a relative novice, but this dev blog post really illustrates the single most frustrating thing to me: there's so many places to go for information and unless you follow all of it, it can be really hard to find good information. I think both of these might help.
Hi there.
First, let me say this is a wonderful project being started.
Second, before this discussion goes to be tens (if not hundreds) of comments long, is there a way to either move this discussion into a P2 style discussion forum (where comments can be threaded), and/or add a wiki page designated for this discussion, so part of the way, some people could concentrate the discussion on the wiki page - so people having a look at the thread would be able to get a quick glance-and-understand look at things ?
Thanks !
Tal
What about a regular vote on say, 3 much requested features, the one getting the most votes being implemented immediately?
Maybe there's a clever way to do this using Twitter.... A wee bit like http://strawpollnow.com/?
Posted 6 months ago #
The fact that this thread has been posted in Support rather than Ideas serves to illustrate that the Ideas forum has reached the end of its natural life. It might have worked if it had been actively read and maintained, but basically it's the same problem as with Codex: a couple of releases down the line much of the initial content is no longer relevant, but it hangs around regardless. There wasn't any official feedback or reponse to most of the ideas so I have to doubt whether anyone important bothered reading them. I don't think many people seriously believed the Ideas forum had any influence over the direction of the software, but Automattic could probably have done a better job of pretending it did.
Trying to tempt people back into the IRC channel is a dead end; like trac, it's really offputting for non-geeks, and if people used to frequent it but stopped, there are obviously good reasons (I'd guess a lack of moderators, again). You'd be better off with Twitter, at least it's trendy. Or another P2 install on wordpress.com, which would be easier to keep under control.
Your big problem here is that even though you're trying to present this as opening up the development process and making it easier for people to suggest things, any attempt to consolidate your communication channels is going to look like you're doing the opposite and closing things down. The existing lists and forums may serve no useful purpose, but scrapping them is worse from a public relations point of view than having them and ignoring them.
Posted 6 months ago #
Thanks for bringing this up !
I think the main problem is like smajda said, there's so many places to go for information. This is very confusing for new developers and users. I would like to see the informations more centralized, like one big forum. In IRC you have the problem with differnet timezones, forums are much more appropriate in my opinion. These forums must be moderated to give feedback and to group obsolete and duplicate content to gain clarity.
Within these forums there should be the possibility to start polls on wanted features or core changes.
At last, it would be a great idea to access the forums via the wp dashboard, e.g. a list of subscribed discussions.
Posted 6 months ago #
I agree with 3stripe - something where we can regularly vote on the most wanted features would be perfect - tie this into the dashboard (which I always skim through every morning to see if there's anything relevant to me there) and you have a winner.
The only WP change that I would like to see, and I know I'm not the only one, is better handling of media content and uploading - videos, pictures, audio... I have used WP for around 7 years now, and this is always been my big frustration. I like to put media where *I* want to put them - e.g. my current format is content/media/2009/05/10/image.jpg corresponding to the post I used the image in. This makes life incredibly simple when I want to move media to different folders or the 'where did I put that image?' question. I know people organise things differently, but that's not hard to do... if ImageManager (http://www.soderlind.no/archives/2006/01/03/imagemanager-20/) can do it... why can't Wordpress?
PS, WP, and all those that create it... I love you
Posted 6 months ago #
Only ONE important thing to me : multilingual support !!! and simplification of translation - admin, theme, plugins - process (using poedit is contraignante : an inline editor include in WP would be really great !)
And, less important : possibility to easily edit titles & descriptions of each generated page (post(-id) page, category(-id) page, archives, home, etc.)
Thanks !
Posted 6 months ago #
@arickmann: The idea of distributed polls is interesting, though I'd probably suggest a slightly different version. Where you suggest independent polls that feed results to main site without being posted there, I'd argue that any poll to be taken as representative needs to be posted on the official site, so that results wouldn't be skewed by a particular readership's bias. That said, having a mechanism for people to embed polls from .org on their own sites would be good, as would a way to submit polls for consideration to post on .org.
@talgalili: I agree, a non-threaded forum isn't the easiest format. Once we've gotten some initial feedback/ideas and are ready to start the work of actually putting something together, we can see what format would be the most useful and start an official project page or something.
@notthatugly: Actually, I posted this thread here rather than in the Ideas forum because this isn't an idea for a core feature, it's a general discussion. Until we have specific suggestions on the table, there's nothing to rate, so I didn't think this first discussion, which would include multiple suggestions, would be appropriate in the Ideas forum. For the record, I'm not sure who counts as "anybody important," but the core devs and I do skim the Ideas forum on a regular basis. I tend to agree with you, though, that IRC is a tough sell for a lot of people, and something asynchronous like a P2 might be easier to for people to keep up with. To you last point, I'm not shutting anything down or necessarily trying to consolidate. I'm trying to get a sense from the community about what would work better so that we can make it happen. If that turns out to be even more channels, that's okay with me, as long as it works for the most people possible.
@twoworlds: True, timezones make keeping up with IRC hard on some people, especially if they log out and would have to read logs somewhere else to catch up (which I know a lot of people don't bother to do). I like your idea of being able to subscribe to certain discussions or threads in the dashboard.
@Sproke: Once 2.8 is out the door (soon), we'll be getting started on 2.9, which is when we begin tackling a media overhaul. We don't have a feature list yet, and you can expect some surveys about it to show up on the dev blog, but we'll be streamlining the uploading process, improving galleries, and adding additional media features that have been frequently requested by users.
Posted 6 months ago #
I think the hardest part is that the community is very large. One thing that I find is a huge problem is old and duplicate content.
Example 1
I do a search for a plug-in and find a lot that have not been updated in well over a year. (It would be great if I could search for a plug-in based on year of last developed or if old out dated plug-ins got taken out)
Example 2
I check the forums and a lot of the posts are duplicate or old with no answers (Could some one merge the posts or delete the ones that don't add anything)
Example 3
The ideas section has not changed in a long time. The ideas section should be cleaned out. The ideas section should be broken into versions of Wordpress (ideas for 2.7 2.8 2.9 3.0 and a section for janric suggestions like make it faster)
Is their another large Open Source project that Wordpress could learn form (Linux, Debian, Ubuntu)
The biggest thing we need is a police man to clean and sort out the different sections of Wordpress. We keep adding to all these sections without taking out the old stuff. It gets harder and harder as their is more stuff to sort through.
Less is more!
This new announcement completely misses the point, I think. The “communication channels” and the “feedback loop” are not a problem.
As I see it, the real problems that need to be solved are two:
1. Governance. (Contributing to something in which you don’t have at least some say is never an attractive proposition. Now WP governance not only excludes the “community” but it is also completely opaque.)
2. Sense of direction and purpose. (I mean for WP as an independent publishing platform, not as part of a bundle of services.)
The second is partly a result of the first, as are many ills of WordPress. To give but one example, if the “community” around WP as an independent tool and publishing platform had some say in the governance of the project, there is NO WAY ON EARTH this forum would use bbPress.
Of course, this is a sizeable subject and it would take a long article to expand on it, but I believe these points should be obvious to anyone familiar with software projects and open-source development.
PS. About the inappropriate tickets opened in the bug tracker: I think that their amount is manageable and a small price to pay for the benefits of an open tracker.
Posted 6 months ago #
The points demetris makes are valid, as a user/developer not knowing where WP wants to go I'm hesitant to release plugins or contribute code.
As to the communication part I think a single place for registering bugs, change requests and ideas would help. These items form the input for a new release. Bugs get the highest priority since you shouldn't start coding new features if the current code has known bugs.
A process should be in place to decide which changes are made. It would help if there is a roadmap for WP which sets out future plans.
Changes and new features that do not fit the roadmap are rejected. The rest are ranked by voting to decide what will be included.
I guess the core team also should have something to say in this, as they can estimate the required resources to implement the changes.
I agree with demetris. Without transparency in both governance and direction, it's hard to know where contributions will be appreciated and what kind of contribution will even be accepted. The leads to frustration and eventually to unwillingness to participate.
I'd also like core team to consider that there is a large body of WP users who are not developers and have no desire to be developers - or even testers. But they do, in many cases, have a lot of experience as users and have great ideas for features that could be added to WP or modified. Other than Ideas, and maybe these forums, there is no place for these users to contribute. They're not going to be out on IRC or sign up for dev blog feeds or report bugs in trac. It would be awesome to provide some way to let these users get their ideas in front of developers who could help to realize them.
I would love to see the irrelevant entries cleared out of Trac and Ideas.
For Trac, how about separating bug fixes and new release features? As new bugs roll in, someone (the core team?) could decide if they need fixing now (and priority) or should be rolled into the next release. At the end of the release, if a feature or bug is not implemented then dump it to an archive where the info will be available if needed, but don't simply roll it forward into the next release. Each release should start fresh deciding which features will be implemented. And certainly each release generates its own bugs.
Ideas... there are many good ideas in there but also a lot of junk. It needs to be weeded out. I wouldn't mind seeing some sort of automated weed-whacker, but release-based rather than date-based. For example, if an idea hasn't been included in two or three releases, it's probably either no longer relevant or just won't be implemented and should be removed.
Posted 6 months ago #
Transforming the current Ideas section into something like UserVoice seems like it would work well. This could probably be integrated and released as a plugin for bbPress which would be very beneficial to the open-source community. The biggest problem with the current Ideas forum is that there's no way to tell the status of an idea, whether it's being considered, already implemented, not being considered, etc.
As pointed out in the blog post, There are way too many methods of communication currently. I think there should be Trac and then one other channel (a beefed up Ideas section). And, most importantly, the developers have to actively participate in the conversation so we don't feel like we're talking to a wall.
Posted 6 months ago #
Definitely too many channels. I HATE track! I've listed bugs more than once there and not only was it confusing to use in the first place but none of my posts...to my knowledge anyways...ever got addressed. So for my two sense I would use less channels and either make trac more user friendly or scrap it and use something else.
Posted 6 months ago #
Since you're asking, if I had one criticism, it would be that everything is information overload without any real indication of what is relevant to a specific task or topic.
Categories, tags, forums, blogs, mailing lists, irc chats, all about wp.com.org.mu.bbpress.buddypress.talkpress 1.0/2.8/1.0alpha/2.7.1. It's a lot to keep up with, as I'm sure you can agree with.
Even though I have one unified login through-out the platforms, I check 7 websites, am logged into 4 IRC chat rooms, get 3 emails a day, all to stay on the edge of what is going on with development, and I don't even get paid from automattic to keep up with it all.
My wish, would be for automattic to pull all of the platforms together, and have a central place for me to collect and view the information that's relevant to me.
I'm willing to help in whatever way(s) I can. :)
Posted 6 months ago #
Jane, you're asking the right question which is a great encouragement.
Some feedback:
PS - I disagree with the concerns about governance expressed above. There is some correct concern about the direction of WP (which is sometimes led by Wordpress.com needs), but I've always found the core devs willing to listen to the community. On balance though, I'm quite sure the community benefits significantly by Automattic's leadership. If we didn't, there'd be a fork. Now if we were talking about BBPress, that's a different scenario...
First off, I'm really glad to see someone step up to the plate to finally help make sense of the WordPress Spaghetti project. I've been waiting for this day for awhile now and am pleased to have the opportunity to voice my suggestions. This is a complex problem given the size and scope of the WordPress community. As others have already mentioned, I strongly believe that there are TOO MANY channels of communication. Mailing Lists, IRC, Forum, Ideas, Trac, Blogs, WordPress Dashboard, my head is already starting to spin.
I believe that it's time to consolidate. Time to trim the WordPress tree and remove some branches in order to bring the information and interaction back to the trunk of the project. The more I think about all of the possibilities to solve this problem, the more I think that BuddyPress could serve to be most of the answer. I've heard Matt a number of times share the idea of WordPress.org having an installation of BuddyPress and tying all of the various parts of the projects together into a registered users activity stream. I think now would be a good opportunity to see this realized.
I'd like for WordPress.org to be the ultimate social network/hub for WordPress. I should only need to register one account which will provide me with my typical BuddyPress profile. The WordPress.org forums should be integrated with BuddyPress, as should the Ideas section. If not integrated, just start over from scratch with those two bits of the project integrated right into BuddyPress. IRC should be reserved for power users. Instead, Prologue 2 would be a much better solution. You could schedule chats, have an archive, and overall do a better job organizing the discussions. No more searching for log files published on the Codex. Using BuddyPress, I could have the ability to create mini groups inside of the main project and I could configure how much or how little I want to contribute.
Ultimately inside of this social network, I would like to see a core group created which consists of the core developers or those close to the project with no other members added to the group. You could throw the developer blog in for good measure. I want to see the end of each major developer of WordPress publishing bits and pieces of information and it shows up in the dashboard where in the end, we have a bunch of fragmented information. It would serve the community better if we keep that stuff off of the developers blogs and put into a central repository aka the developers group in this BuddyPress install.
With regards to the Codex, I'm not sure of the best way to get more people contributing to this evolving manual. As it stands, I hate everything about the Codex except the information that is their. The Codex would be so much better if it contained HALF of the information which is presented on a weekly basis on blogs that are part of the WordPress community. Again, a problem of fragmented information. Their either needs to be an incentive for people to publish that information to the Codex, or the Codex needs to somehow link to these in depth blog posts sometimes providing better information than what is found in the Codex. Again, not sure how to fit this into the social network/hub of WordPress but their has to be a way.
I think WordPress should create an official hashtag to utilize Twitter. Perhaps #wpideas or #wpfeedback or things like that and then aggregate that Twitter information into BuddyPress where I could choose to follow or ignore that information. Maybe taking into account some other social means of participating would be cool as well.
I think this is getting a little long in the tooth so I'll just end it by saying I think BuddyPress could serve as an awesome platform to help reform the way people contribute to the project and provide a means of Two-Way communication that many people would be able to partake in without a PHd in Coding.
But, if there are not enough people to manage things which apparently has been the case for the forum, the ideas section, and other channels of communication, it doesn't matter what WordPress does, it will fail.
Posted 6 months ago #
How about everything apart from the forums dies? Then, with a brand spanking new version of bbPress (okay, so I'm aiming this at bbPress too) you get a forum with a few new mods and emailability: once I write a post or reply I get emails with it's progression. That way I get the best of wp-hackers and the forum.
Management of the forum has to be developed: you needs mods dedicated to answering questions 24/7 in a support forum (subforums: installation, themes, css etc) and then mods working in an ideas forum (subforums: bugs, wibnis). When a post is submitted to the ideas forum a mod reviews it (and marks it as reviewed [flagging without getting it sticky]) then, where suitable it get's added to a WordPress bug tracking system. Only mods get to add bugs but anybody can leave comments on the bug report. That way there should be no duplicates (as the mods are trusted to search before adding) and the mods can give each entry a priority rating that is fair (otherwise everyone's going to hit 1).
PS. @demetris I love bbPress!
Posted 6 months ago #
Id just like to second jeffr0s thoughts about using BuddyPress. Atm its very hard to collaborate together with others to make WordPress better.
There should be Automattic moderated and initiated workshops to work on specific issues where people might contribute. I`d also like so see a such workgroup for plugins, themes, hacks and graphics.
BuddyPress should be the colloberation environment.
There`s a nice article on Alistapart this week by Derek Powazek - The wisdom of community:
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/the-wisdom-of-community/
I guess it might be the article that initiated this discussion ? ;)
John Myrstad
Posted 6 months ago #
I think WordPress should use UserVoice as a method of input. It is free for Open Source so price isn't an issue.
You receive voting on issues that the community thinks is important and they can be open and closed like bugs. So if there is an irrelevant conversation admins can close them, but still getting a feel for the issues that are important to the community.
Currently Stack Overflow uses this as their sole bug tracking system.
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