kevinjohngallagher

Hi Eric,

Here’s my issues with that:

I suppose the thing that gets me, and possibly something that people don’t like about me, is that I’m not big on the unintentional hypocrisy in Software Development (not just in WP by a long shot).

e.g. I’m all for worrying about processing costs, but then lets not make 32Mb a minimum for a WP install 😉

I’m the same when we talk about putting users first (hello: capital_p) and making WordPress accessible to all (hello: WP3.3’s hover-only-menu means it falls foul of UK & EU accessibility and discrimination laws).

It’s kind of why 80/20 doesn’t work. We know that 80% are a combination of “WP.com” and “bloggers”. So everyone else is always going to be in the 20%. And that 20% is a mighty large number!

I mean really, who remembers the core-team proposed roadmap where user management (roles, capabilities etc) was next on the hit list after 3.0?

• In 3.1 it got bumped for Tumblr-esque post formats.
• In 3.2 it got bumped for Distraction Free Writing.
• In 3.3 it got bumped for a new flash-free media manager.
• In 3.4 it got bumped for a new default theme (that itself got bumped to 3.5)

Bluntly:

1. What’s the point of a roadmap?
2. How are ANY of those helpful to the 20% that aren’t “.com” or “blogging”? (Distraction Free Writing? Isn’t it fracking Notepad?)

Andrea once asked me why Enterprise folks don’t hang around long in WP and I think this is a good example why.

Clearly the folks on here are talented, dedicated, and incredibly knowledgable; and I genuinely love shooting the breeze with you all… but WP has a tendency to make short term decisions under the proviso that “it’s Agile and things can change later” (First rule of Agile: Chaos is also agile. Second rule of Agile: The WPtybee plan is about the most un-agile plan I’ve ever seen).

May I offer exhibit A:
http://kevinjohngallagher.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/wp_decision_making.png

The issue is we’re either left with things that can’t be changed (Matt blaming a decision in 2002 by B2 for hardcoding everything in 2011), or things that change every release because we didn’t think them through (hello Admin Bar).

Given that we have a myriad of plugins, and weekly (if not daily) support requests on moving, migrating, setup dev/sandbox environments on the forums and mailing lists; maybe this is the sort of thing that would be a great kick-starter for a different type of conversation. A conversation that starts with “Maybe we got this wrong…”

I realise I talk less about code, and more about processes and audience segmentation and decision making than all you developer-whizz-kids. I’m hoping this resonates, but if it doesn’t, you have my thanks for listening.

Kev
“failed developer”

cbj4074,

Genuinely no offence was meant, and I’m almost fine with your tone (for the most part). But on a support forum, especially with lovely volunteers such as Ipstenu, manners and tone go a really long way to smoothing the waters. This wasn’t very nice though:

at the risk of sounding like a prick, I don’t really care what Otto’s credentials might be.

Its funny, I was introduced as “The Most Hated man in WordPress” (trademark) at this year’s WP Scotland event because my tone is about as harsh as the WP community can take. More than any other community I’ve ever been involved with, the WP community is “sensitive”, and it’s very important to end your sentences here with smiley faces or emoticons if you’re going to say something thats not 100% inline with the status quo 🙂

Ipstenu, Andrea, Andrew Nacin, Eric Mann and Otto are all people who i’ve strongly disagreed with over the years about one thing or another (heck Ipstenu and I used to go at it about bbPress back when that was a real thing and not a figment of the WP plug-in directories imagination); and they’re all people I respect the heck out of even when we don’t agree.

I think we all agree that WP isn’t perfect, but there’s a very specific tone that these good folks respond to, and a particular phrasing that gets a good deep-dive response. It’ll take some time to nail it, and while folks like me cant help but bring up f*** ups like Capital P Dangit making every arabic wordpress site blasphemous because some crazy Texan only thinks in a limited viewpoint, you can join me on the naughty step 😉

Fun thing to do: Try migrating a site that uses relative URLs when the directory it is installed in changes — or better, when the directory depth actually changes. (For maximum points, move a root install into a directory.)

Actually, I think this is wrong and a little old fashioned. We recently moved 2 different CMS’ (on different platforms) with a mixture of relative and referenced links and it was smooth as silk.

You see, there is a 3rd option: Absolute, Relative and “referenced”.

We already have the site_url as a reference point that we can refer to at any point on the loading of a WordPress page (even prior to initialising the DB is people define it in the WP_config which they should always do); so the questions remains as to WHY we would hardcode ABSOLUTE URLs when we could just reference the URL at any given moment?

I’m not advocating a change, it just seems to me that rather that take the ‘extendable’ solution, the core team took the lead from a decision made by B2 in 2001/2002, and continued with a solution that only worked in 1 situation.

More importantly, I think it’s a little (unintentionally) disingenuous to be pointing out the 10 year old decision, when the MAJOR culprit of the absolute url issues are:

1) Local links to posts in the content editor (added in 3.1)
2) Local links to media in the content editor via Media manager (added in 3.3)

90% of the Absolute vs. Relative vs. Referenced URL issues could have been cleared up in the last 18 months with 2 quick fixes.

The bigger issue is not about absolute URLs, but about hardcoded URLS in multiple places with multiple dependancies. Why not have URLs reference a single place (site_url)?

In the nicest way, I think everyone needs to take a step back here.

I disagree with Otto quite often, but I hold both him and his opinion in the highest regard. While I find Ipstenu’s quote accurate, I think this can also be applied to the OP:

he can be a hard-headed jerk sometimes, and he’s not what I’d call the most eloquent fellow, but that doesn’t make him wrong.

With that in mind, if we’re going to cut people some slack, lets also cut the people we dont’ know some slack too 😉

The OP has some really good points. Absolute URLS in WP are a nightmare. Which is not to say that Absolute URLS are wrong, but our implementation of them is a royal pain in the behind.

I’ve talked often and loudly in the last 2 years that WordPress currently doesn’t scale well, a phrase that send people into fits of hysterics. I do not mean in terms of Servers/PHP/hits, i mean in terms the number of decisions that are locked down on the basis that “they work for .com/bloggers”.

Moving WP installs, having master/slave or dev/live installs and all the rest of it causes real issues. Which is fine, or acceptable, if we were to admit that and write a codex article on it. Instead we valiantly defend WP instead of being able to do anything, and just hope that everyone has the same level of knowledge and experience as we have.

Lets be honest, we get a request/moan about this at least once a week on the wp dev / hackers mailing lists. Maybe we should consider nipping this in the bud rather than just telling people that a) the decision was made in 2002 and it’s not going to change and 2) it works for millions therefore nothing is going to change (unless we want it to).

TBH, we can’t keep making the ‘millions of users’/’scared of change’ comments and roll out Capital_P_Dangit / inaccessible-menu. (not to open those can of worms)

I agree Ipstenu, but that kind of misses the point I was raising (apologies if I wasn’t clear bro).

• What we have now, is the same functionality on desktop & non-desktop systems, which works the same way for people using a mouse and not using a mouse.
• What we are moving to is functionality that works differently on desktop & non-desktop systems, and which works differently for people using a mouse and not using a mouse.

My point, which I now realise I was being a bit too specific about when trying to give an example, is that while I can absolutely see the existing menu (y’know the one only added in the last release!) not being 100% ideal for every user, it was at least consistent in it’s functionality. What we’re moving to is the opposite.

Folks, in case this looks like concern trolling I apologise, but go try the 3.3 back-end on a Blackberry, or navigating without your mouse, or an iPad1, or an iPhone 4/3G/3 or a Windows7phone, or on IE 7, or with JavaScript turned off. Jane, someone that does stellar unheralded work, was very open that her first 20 Usability tests were done on a very specific subset of users:

12 were on mac, 8 on PC. All used either ff or chrome as their default browser.

I don’t know about you folks, but thats not indicative of the world I live in.

Those options should get out of the way and let you do what you’re entering the site to do – write.

As we move to WordPress being used less and less (percentage wise) primarily as a blogging platform, the sole / singular / main purpose of it’s user-base purely to “write” under the posts section diminishes. Custom Post Type went a long way to kick starting that.

… if you’re a developer or power user (most of us in this thread are one of the two), then you’re not in that “majority of users” category

I totally agree. We’re not the majority, we’re the minority at the high end, but more and more that number is growing. Outside of “WordPress.com” users, the number of multiple install users is growing rapidly.

The majority of the community uses WordPress to write … not to hunt for settings on different admin pages and tweak options.

Again, totally agreed.
But this change doesn’t make it easier to write blog posts, it makes it the same amount of work; but increases the amount of time to us power users. As well as moving those on a non-ideal system setup to being edge cases.

We “power users” not being the target of an update i can totally understand; but making life more difficult for disabled people who don’t use a mouse, I dunno man. Sometimes aiming to please the majority needs to be weight up against how much it makes life more difficult for the minority. Over the last few releases, I’ve felt we forgotten that sometimes (even if we don’t mean to).

@jaredatch,

Thats a possibility of course, but it’s the use of the word “many”, what percentage of WordPress users have never use enough of the internet to work out the up/down arrow clickable state? (i’m not doubting there are some of course).

The issue for many of us is that the option to keep menu items ‘of our choosing’ open indefinitely (or until we choose otherwise) has been taken from us.

Who knows how “many” people used the feature as intended against the “many” who couldn’t click the close button. Yet instead a real positive usability feature has been removed in favour of an exceptionally unusable/in-accessible feature hastily added to the WordPress core.

For me, as someone who doesn’t use a mouse due to a long standing disability, hover menus are quite frankly – horrific.

But it’s ok, Jane Wells and her team (who do a power of work behind the scenes) ran UX testing the other day… all on able bodied people using FireFox and Chrome (12 on mac, 8 on PC). Does anyone think this is indicative of the real world? Zero IE users? Zero non-mouse users?

Not to mention the fact that we got rid of hover menu’s for a good reason after 10 years of HCI studies showed that people don’t use them well. Users like to decide where they are going first, THEN move their mouse. Hover menus force users to do the opposite. It actually takes longer than a click/open procedure. Not to mention it causes large amounts of hassle for people on non-mouse inputs.

If you’re using a tablet device, or phone, or keyboard etc. you’re going to have to do MORE work, not less, to get the hover function working.

I totally understand that many of the good folks commenting here (including personal favourites Jeffro and Ipstenu) like the change. It’s cool they do, and I’m sure they’re not alone. But I worry when we rush ahead with these type of changes without knowing the impact on all of our users. We can’t continue to keep calling anyone who’s not using Chrome on a MacBookPro an edge case. We can’t continue to build and test our backend on the basis that everyone has or uses a mouse.

More importantly though, wasn’t there more important stuff to fix? With all due respect to the amazing work the core devs do, we have hundred of bugs in the Trac system; so who decided to ignore them and remake the Admin UI for the 3rd time in 5 releases??

Oh also, the feature really blows big time with JavaScript turned off.

But then again everyone in the world has JavaScript turned on right? everyone? 100%. Sure.

There have been plenty of promises over the last year but it more often than not turns into a big flame war on their discussion forum.

I think flame war is a little harsh, infact the thread Matt reffered to in his KeyNote speech (called a “flame war” by WPtavern) can be found here: http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/whats-happening-with-bbpress/page/5

The world’s politest flame war ever?? It appears to me to be really a civilised conversation including 2 moderators and the lead developer who can’t get any information out of the project lead.

Look at all those people using such bad language like “please”, “thank you”, and “appreciate”. Scary stuff. It’s amazing what people write behind the anonymity of the internet.

I would love to hear from anyone inside wordpress about some concrete info surrounding bbpress including release dates, beta testing, new features, etc.

So would the bbPress team 😉