Developer’s Blog irrelevant?

Can improve, yes.
Being so noticeable does put some people off from posting on it. The thought that whatever it is that they want to post may not be important might be the reason behind this.
A regular weekly update would be nice, I agree.

No offence, but I don’t buy the idea that people might be put off posting on the Developer’s Blog. That’s what it’s there for.
And as for the importance (or not) of what they might want to post…
the very reason I’ve been paying attention to WordPress is that it has been appearing all over my radar for the last few months. Which is great news for WordPress and the community that supports it. So I’m guessing that outside of the relatively small core community of WordPress “insiders”, there is a huge (and growing) community of newcomers and relative newcomers. All of whom would be delighted to read regular (yes, weekly would be great) updates on the progress of 1.3.
It doesn’t matter whether the developer(s) think a post is important, what matters is having a regular update to keep the growing community happy. Transparency is what makes open source projects work – the more transparent the project, the more you’ll find people become willing to contribute their time and skills, thus accelerating and/or improving the quality of the project.
So IMHO a weekly or fortnightly update on the Developer’s Blog would be a huge hit. Particularly if it’s about WordPress development.

As for the reluctance to post, I must say I was not merely stating an opinion.
I wish to assure you that WordPress will always remain transparent and every effort will be made to see that views and news are properly communicated.
There is a CVS commit mailing list that sends out mail each time there is a change in the source, but you are right about the importance of the ordinary user and the world-at-large being updated about what’s going on.
A difficulty would be that most of the ideas are not completely implemented till a few days/weeks after they are proposed, and by the time they are, they are news no longer.
Please don’t think that I am trying to justify what is essentially something that needs fixing. I am trying to see why things might be the way they are, so it may benefit someone ??
Thank you for your comment, and watch the devblog for updates. I hope there will be a regular update from now on.

Quote:
“A difficulty would be that most of the ideas are not completely implemented till a few days/weeks after they are proposed, and by the time they are, they are news no longer.”
Thanks for your prompt reply, but I still feel you’re missing the point with your comment above. It might no longer be news to the core development team, but little things like that are noteworthy to the larger community (and to outsiders like me who are beginning to take an interest in WordPress).
Thanks again for your input. Now I’ll sit back for a while to watch the Developer’s Blog with renewed interest…

I for one would prefer for the developers to actually develop rather than spend their time posting to the developers blog! Most of them have blogs of their own to maintain, as well as jobs to hold down. Heck, one or two of them might even have social lives!
But even though it might be asking a bit much to have a weekly update (is the pace of development really that fast anyway?) it should really be possible to post a monthly one. Maybe they could share the load by delegating each month to a different person?

In the past three months there has three posts. Announcement of Firefox, a Meetup and just one regarding WP. And that one was a maintenance upgrade. So a new comer might have the impression that development has stalled. There was not even a mention of Matt’s recent move. I think that should have been on there.
You don’t need to update every day, and you don’t need to give an update on every little feature that in the works. Even a note or two a month would let the masses know you there. (Not everybody reads through the support forum or digs through CVS.) And if its just a page for announcements then change the name to Announcements rather than develovers’ blog.

The other issue is that if the devblog commented on the progress of 1.3, more people may be tempted to use a nightly – even if it is in alpha.
Imagine if this were posted :
“The core files are now stable after we introduced feature#1, feature#2 and feature#3 so the next stage is adding in target#1 etc”
There may be people who would just see ‘stable’ and the feature they want, so they download and install it notwithstanding the fact that the development cycle was far from complete.
That leads to people wondering why their code might break, and people asking here for support on a product that hasn’t been released. Even with the sticky about Nightlies, those posts still happen.

‘Even a don’t worry, we’re not dead’ post would be fine.

Sounds like someone needs a patience pill. We’re all eagerly awaiting the release of 1.3, but let’s not whine about the lack of updates to the Developer’s Blog. If you want more regular status updates, take the advice above and subscribe to the commit list.

If you want to write for the dev blog, by all means let me know and I’ll set up access.

What a bunch of whiney ass-hat comments. Let the developers do their thing and quit acting like the sky is going to fall if you don’t hear something about the next big thing.

Thanks for the input, anonymous ass-hat. In the future we’ll try and remember the important thing is for everyone to avoid providing critical feedback and just keep our mouths shut. Like you just…oh, nevermind.

I don’t think it’s a bunch of ass-hat comments. It’s just the last time 1.3 was mentioned on the dev blog was back in July. Ouch. Would be nice for the developers to take 2 minutes out of their time to let people know about the progress. I don’t think it’s that unreasonable to ask after they’ve put thousands of hours into WP in the meantime. I’ve been using nightlies and 1.3 is progressing nicely with some wonderful new features. The thing is, you can’t find out about them unless you religiously download nightlies.

I agree with podz that posting too much about 1.3 might encourage people to use it before it’s even out of beta, and before you all say ‘no, no, 1.3 is perfectly stable’ how do you know there won’t be a new version tomorrow that’ll break stuff? Alpha testing should really be kept to techies and I imagine they’re all subscribed to the mailing list anyway.
But it still wouldn’t hurt to give the rest of us a monthly update on how things are going, long as they didn’t mention the word ‘stable’. I also think the developers are better placed to make those kind of posts than anyone else.

A post in in the pipe and should be out soon. I hope there’ll be regular updates from now on.