Ideas Forum/Communication Channels

Here is what I’d like to see… batch/bulk editing of password protected posts from within the ‘quickedit’ mode.

As it is now we can change an individual password protected post form within the ‘quickedit’ mode. Wouldn’t it be great if we could choose which posts we want to password protect with the same password and then do it in quickedit bilk edit mode. This would allow for very easy and convenient protection of groups/categories of posts.

thanks for listening

I am not a developer but I do work with developers and I do a lot of searching for answers to specific questions in the various WP venues.

The challenge is that there are tens of thousands of WP publishers and at least many hundreds of people actively writing code against the WP engines (themes, plugins and some unique stuff that falls in neither or both like Carrington).

In that world, a “regular” or even intermediate publisher frequently does not know if an issue they bump into is a bug, third-party code problem or plain inexperience on their own part. Distinguishing what content addresses their need and does not is a major communications challenge, that, without being trite, comes down to search results.

When I use wordpress local searches I rarely if ever get as good results as if I search from Google or Yahoo. What is really odd is that the most useful results are often in one of the wordpress venues, just not returned by wordpresses own search.

There are a number of small things that might help with this challenge and it seems to be vaguely described in a number of previous posts to varying degrees. Really I think people are trying to get at yet-another-taxonomy. There is an attempt to address this with the idea of “Resolved” markers or the explanation, I believe Jane provided, for “-under consideration, -addressed by a plugin, or -it has been implemented.”

But for a great many needs, these tags do not go far enough. Might there be some sense in a post, in whatever venue is finally settled on, to include markers that identify it as one of the broad categories of Bugs, Feature Requests, Publisher Support and, if Publisher Support REQUIRE a flag that the post is Question, Answer, Comment; if a Feature Request, then include the under consideration, -addressed by a plugin, -has been implemented and if a Bug Report, similar tags as ticketing systems.

What use would this be? For me, I could then search the venues for posts for Questions with Answers and exclude all the Comments, Feature Requests and Bug Reports for my initial effort at getting an answer. For me and many others this would make sense because often our issue is not really about a bug at all but some aspect of usage.

As maligned as the Codex has been, it has been my primary source for answers, but frequently has left me in a position of knowing what the correct syntax should be, but not quite understanding how to implement that syntax to solve whatever problem I have. So I struggle with trial and error for days and frequently discover much later that somewhere else in the WP universe the exact scripting example I needed was hiding from me the whole time.

I think people have to have reasonable expectations about exactly how much something as immense as the wordpress universe can be made to function as a predictable, tidy organization. The use of the word “community” is well taken in this context. A community is not going to magically fall into line with a systematic, hierarchical communications, education, evaluation and implementation system. “Governance” per se is an elusive proposition.

But there are some things that can be done, and some, like the fairly passionate plea to empower more committers, should relieve some burden from the current crew while significantly improving the entire development process.

At the same time, I believe that Automatic or whoever is going to lead this process, should appropriately challenge those of us who have complaints or needs to become part of a documentation effort. What I mean by this is not the ebb and flow of responding to questions and bug reports, but a structured effort with volunteers to build up the codex or some other version of a living documentation system. Many forum posts could and should be cleaned up and inserted into an appropriate spot in a table of contents with indexed entries. maybe a wiki, I don’t know.

But it seems to me that an enormous amount of effort and thousands of person-years are contained in all the various forums and mailing lists and so on. This information represents an asset to the community that privately valued would be in the many millions of dollars. Perhaps those of us who cannot code could become copy editors and technical writers?

@jane: Glad to see your post on the subject. Yes, the state of WordPress is rather abysmal WRT direction and community communcation.

There is no forum for first discussing what should be done and how it should be done. The regulars on wp-hackers seem to be online simply to challenge the validity of any use-cases discussed by anyone who hasn’t been contributing for 5+ years. They all say “submit a patch to Trac” expecting people to go off in a vaccuum, create a patch, and then submit it to Trac where the active devs play Whack-a-mole rather than addressing the use-case or issue that precipitated the patch. So progress is rarely except for what the four (4) main devs are working on only one of which occassionally participates in the discussion.

How to solve it? Minially we need a list or forum whose goal is to discuss use-cases and how best to solve them with an eye towards updating the core if need be. This list or forum needs a moderator that can step in when people who have been involved for years bully the newcomers otherwise it will become like the wp-hackers list where most people realize it’s just not worth the pain to post anything.

I for one would like to see the WordPress community get rid of the “not invented here” mindset and get proper forum software such as phpBB or even Google Groups. I know there is BBPress, but it is nowhere near as good for facilitating discussion as some of these others.

A good example of how messed up the communications channels are exists right in this forum thread. Just following the comments is hard when there are off-topic posts and spam amongst some very worthwhile feedback.

The barriers to contributing here are huge. The core team may know what they want to do and what they are working on next, but for anyone trying to find that information its like asking how long is a piece of string. There appears to be no reasoning given as to why some tickets on trac languish for years, and again no reasoning behind new functionality that gets thrown in without use cases or any discussion that end-users can contribute to. If any actual planning goes into development its certainly not obvious.

It is not practical for anyone wanting to contribute to have to watch trac, the development blog, the official wpdevel blog, mailing lists and the forum just to try to work out what is happening.

I am in agreement with Denis, Demetris and MikeSchinkel so won’t bother repeating their comments. However, I want to emphasise two – a roadmap so that everyone knows where development is heading and what new features are planned, and a slower development cycle.

Thanks for initiating this discussion. I hope it doesn’t end up like development discussions or trac tickets – going nowhere and wasting people’s time.

Having read this, there are 2 points that I would like to agree with and chime in on…

1. Development Cycles
It does seem that the next version of WordPress comes out way too quickly after that last one. Its one thing if you find a major security issue, but for those of use that make some changes to the core, this gets frustrating. I know, core changes are highly discouraged, but in many cases needed. I am looking for beefed up security as well as a real CMS powered by WP. This leads me to point #2.
2. Direction of WP
You mentioned that the direction is clear but obviously not communicated… and still not communicated within the response! Not a dig, but just something that should be noted.
In my humble opinion, WP has matured well beyond just a blogging platform and is just a few real tweaks from being a major player in the CMS world. Sure the WP.com side is focused on blogs, but us .org users tend to lean towards more of the CMS side and I for one would love to see this direction embraced. But all I have read and found on my own indicates a major resistance to the idea of WP as a CMS at its core.

So how do we change the communication? That is a great question… one I do not have a real solution for. However, I would ask that whatever is used would allow a user to quickly identify what version of WP the information applies to. Maybe even allow us to search based on the WP version we are using… this could even apply to the Plugins section, where some of the plugins are no longer supported but you have to weed through so many to find ones that work for a specific version.

Regardless of all this, WP is my first choice for any website I am developing. Second choice would also be WordPress, so little chance of my leaving to another! I love you guys and this program.

@enailor – so true on the issue of core mods. Could WP release patch files alongside updates, so if after 2.8 we have 2.8.1 like with 2.7 then the security updates could be release as patches. Also, I agree that there seems to be some sort of rush – as soon as 2.7 came out there was word of 2.8, and dare I say it, 3.0. If we get to the end of 2009 and 3.0 is on it’s way then something is seriously wrong – updates either need to be grouped or they need to be illustrated as patches – so 2.7.1 would have come out as 2.7.0.1. Maybe the patches could become a system whereby a patch is released on the 1st of every month but never more often.

Secondly, continuing @elpie’s point, what is the roadmap for WordPress, bbPress and buddyPress? With WP we are seeing a stream of updates, on bbPress we’re still waiting for 1.0. How about Automattic publishes a roadmap (like Apple do with iPhone) to show devs what will and won’t happen by this time next year, and then have a concerted effort to bring the Press family to the same level (common admin UIs, similar/common functions, same levels of support & documentation)? That way, I wouldn’t be jumping from slightly bloated WP with funky admin UI to slimline bbPress and having to reinvent the wheel when I want to make things look similar. At the same time, I don’t have a resource for checking bbPress functions like the WP codex and nor do they follow the same naming logic or parameter logic.

This isn’t to say that I don’t love WordPress. I agree that it’s the best platform out there. But I do feel like I don’t know what’s happening with the development, which means I question wether or not I should develop my installations if that might just get deprecated. Further, for open-source, Automattic seem to try and keep things quite quiet. I know it’s a competitive industry, but that’s the choice the Press family faces. From an industry where a new release will earn the firm a few million we don’t keep it all secret even though our competitors are there. We quite happily jump up and down telling customers about what’s coming next month, next year and down the pipeline.

What would be nice? Well, let’s see a Wave style presentation of what’s going to happen to the entire Press family with the advent of 3.0 – whenever that may come.

Wow how time flies. This thread has reached an age of 8 months. I think it’s time to provide some updates as to how far any of the ideas discussed have progressed.

Organize this site into “Publishing” and “Contributing” bubbles. I believe it would solve many of the hurdles in communication. It would make a clear distinction between the platform’s usability issues, and the platform’s development structure. If there was a question where a development mission statement would go, this would answer it. People who use WordPress versus develop for it both have valid contributions to make to the whole of the project. What they don’t have is a coherent place to live in the same forum. It would solve many issues in the organization of current pages and content. It would also allow content to be targeted, and hence more easily found by curious prowlers.

Interactive direction and the development of those functionalities of course have a lot to do with each other. Unfortunately, they should not influence each other in an open medium, otherwise one is always trying to appease the other.

Hi, this is Kerry and I’m glad to be here. I agree with UserVoice, because it works really well for a forum where users can post feature requests and bugs/problems with app. Using the UserVoice’s free plan will might be a good idea for testing then if it did well it’s the time to upgrade to paid plan. UserVoice offers the single sign-on feature in their $89/month plan.
The one really big feature that’s missing from the free plan is the single sign-on feature. This enables a user that is logged into webapp to remain logged in after they click on the Feedback tab and go to the UserVoice support forum. The problem I am seeing is that users click on the Feedback tab, go to UserVoice, and post feature requests as Anonymous. This is problematic because there is no way for you to tell which user posted the feature request, and there is no way for that user to see your reply (unless they go back to the UV forum to check, which they probably will not do). If you know who posted the feature request, you’ll also have the option to contact that person via email and have a back-and-forth conversation about his/her feature request.
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