jimisaacs

Been running the alpha for about a month now. Been observing more than contributing at this point. Have a lot of personal things going on before I can get serious. The main feature to note, register_post_type(). Which is utilized by a few plugins out there. The main bit to note with this in the WordPress admin itself is the merging of the Post and Page editing pages (they are now actually ran by the same code). This makes the functionality I am talking about within these plugins much more easily obtained. This all goes for custom taxonomies too. One plugin of note that I am tracking along with 3.x is CMS Press. It is the only one I’ve tracked to contain both custom post types and custom taxonomies, as well as handling the permalinks quite nicely for both.

If the contributors of that plugin can correct me if I’m wrong, but I am pretty sure it has compatibility to the 2.9.x branch, but is really meant to be used with all the new calls available in 3.x

@giordanomedia

I have noticed an increase in spam in the past 5 months give or take. I have 2 methods of blockage. First never go without Akismet. Second become a member of Project Honey Pot, and after setting up your site as a honey pot, install the plugin for blocking honey pot flagged spammers.

As I’ve said I have seen a noticeable spam increase in the past 5 months in comparison to the last 2.5 years. After very little research, I can only assume this a new method of spamming that hasn’t been easy to track or figure out for blockers. After reading the honey pot reports, they even say there has been a recent increase of comment spamming that is actually out gaining email spam tremendously.

We can only hope that browsers actually open their security features to be a little more friendly for developers. The problem with security is when it is open for everyone, this always includes spammers. Project Honey Pot is a great cause though, even without a WordPress blog to control.

t31os_,

Thanks for that link. I particularly like the part about missing “bozos” in the list of sub communities.

It’s funny when people disregard the whole of the thread, and point their fingers at a single post or line, and say something like “…That’s what he’s saying!!…” ??

It’s an age old art of forum debate, and it is used truly as a way to stop or divert criticism, without actually addressing any of it.

So just wanted to say thanks to everyone that actually “got” the things I was talking about, whether you disagreed or not, you still addressed something in your reply with your own points and views on the same subject.

For the people who say they don’t know where the thread is going, I ask why are you asking yourself this question? Is it intriguing? Why? Lets here it…

For those of you who think this is about something other than a genuine criticism of the design of the platform, and as a result of that platform’s design the many breakdowns in communication occurring at many levels (and vice versa); then I am reassuring you that it isn’t. If you ignore this reassurance and point to something I’ve said that may sound less relevant than it should. Then just notice that it was most likely it was a response.

Can you elaborate a little on this?

mrmist,

From you…

… First your arguments seemed to be against “core” as a concept, now it seems to have drifted to the “community” as a whole. It’s an entertaining read for sure but I do wonder where we will end up.

From me…

… When I visualize the communities of both WordPress and Drupal, each of them take on the organic visual representation of their respective platforms’ design …

They are inherent of each other.

Sorry, just thought I could lighten the mood in this thread a little…
clientsfromhell

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.

jeffr0,

Thanks for the links, and you are not poison ??

Jane,

Wow, sounds like more than one cord was struck there. You are not poison either. I do see how clean the ideas section is as of late, and I do not take you closing ideas personally.

Just know in the end, nothing is taken personally.

I don’t have the experience to manage a project of this size, but does that make me poison? My anger is toward the community, not individuals. It is just hard to make that claim when people then say I am generalizing. I guess the better avenue is just to be quiet and code? Seriously? No thank you, I already have a boss, and he actually pays me to do that. If I really do have to submit a patch before making criticisms such as this, then at least that fact is finally out there in plain sight. One step closer to a development centric mission statement.

Why shouldn’t WordPress put a priority on proven talent, good communication skills, and the ability to set aside personal agendas for the good of the project?

What exactly is, “the good of the project”? (genuine question here)

In the professional world, people don’t walk into a business and get handed the job of prophet, making pronouncements about how to fix things, without proving it will work.

I will say, and won’t be the first, that the professional world is far from the meaning of the word “professional”. It is who you know, how you can take advantage of a situation, and how you can beat the competition. What you just described, is almost exactly what happens, in the professional world. I guess my personal agenda was searching in the hope of finding something different. I admitted I was looking for a fight before, but with roots in genuine frustration. I also apologized if I offended anyone, but it still doesn’t relieve my frustration. Who knows, this is most likely just the overall mentality of New York City under my skin. I am in the midst of a life change, and moving to the West coast holding a dream that people in general might hold a little higher moral standard. Don’t ask me why, but I guess I might have been trying to find it in this community in the mean time. I do have to give a big thank you to Jane here for making me realize this with her comment.

For the record I never mentioned anything about myself in a leadership role. If we don’t like how our government is running this country, does it deny our right to make criticisms toward it without actually running for office?

In my last major post in this thread I was simply asking for simple answers. I didn’t get them, why? Should I just google for answers, as with everyone else? Why can’t simple answers to simple questions be in plain sight? Search “WordPress PHP5” in google, this is the first result, from 2004. Here is the next.

Soon, WordPress will not support PHP 4, transitioning to PHP 5 and future versions. This article is to answer questions about making the move from PHP 4.x to PHP 5.x on your web hosting platform.

Soon,…
Am I asking for too much, really?

People get so religious about the platform, but it’s not like we’re curing world hunger here. It’s code, it’s publishing on the web, and in the grand scheme of things, WordPress is doing more every day to make it easier for people to contribute and get involved. That doesn’t mean it’s perfect, nor is it the right platform for everyone.

Amen ??

Here is my overall suggestion… I will also post this in that thread Jane started that jeffr0 sent my way.

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.

Well, I made the age old mistake of using the textarea rather than an actual document for a formal well written reply. Just finished, posted, and lost… NOOOO.

Anyway, I will try to get it back together at a later time.

This would be a really great discussion, as I’m looking for this thing myself. Want to split it off into a different thread?

Go for it.

t31os_,

First of all thank you very much for a well thought out and genuine response!
Pardon my “copy” of your comment style, it does suite the discussion so here goes.

If anyone could submit theme’s and plugin’s we’d have no end of unsafe and poorly written code floating about the repository, there’s some bad examples there as it is, i can’t say i agree with this at all. There are plenty of places to host code, googlecode is one of many examples, i’d prefer the repository to be managed how it currently is… it works well as is, in my personal opinion.

This is a great opinion, and one I’d love to hear even more of your thoughts on. I personally think the central repository structure is too constricting to single and/or groups of developers who already have servers, datacenters, or just plain development environments setup. Forcing a single location has a negative impression to many good developers out there. It also allows the contribution of many bad developers. I say bad but I realize these are either novices or just lazy people, I do know the difference. I am not saying LOSE the repository, I am saying allow for more repositories, or just allow, within the platform itself the choice. This gives advanced developers the chance to flex their muscles rather than passively turning them away for others who would rather be content with what is already done for them.

Why not bring it up? Seems you passed judgement on responses you never received, or are you only wanting to have discussions where people agree? (genuine question, not just being sarcastic) If you want to debate something, disagreement or criticism is a natural part of that process.

Yes, I admitted I made an assumption back then, but I also said I held a different impression back then. One that was more supportive of the concept than against. That changed, and I am bringing it up now ;). I have not been a part of very many IRC’s myself. That comment was actually referencing to an actual room, at a WordCamp.

People who? You? Me? … or are you generalising?

I knew you or someone one would catch me on that, I am really not good with names, and I couldn’t remember off hand. The first instance was a seminar of friend of mine attended a while back of a professor from Parsons. Others instances were Ted conference presentations. I’ll have to see if I can find some references if you would like.

drawing a line is all very well but what if everyone has a different interpretation about where that line is, should we just sit and debate the line, getting nothing done? … (it’s an open ended question).

The line is up to the community. Like you said, it is an open ended question, but one that can be concluded. This line is really about responsibilities, and support. Something that I find lacking in WordPress. How many times have you heard about the current support of PHP 4 and that this will change at an undetermined date? What is wrong with just saying something as simple as “PHP 4 Support will end on xx/xx/xxxx”. This is the first relevant example I could think of, but there are other more specific ones like TinyMCE auto-formatting, entry ordering, etc.. The information one can get on these kinds of topics is found currently by frantically searching for it within a very extensive trac of tickets, or the very sparse RoadMap. If you can show me some specifics of real support deadlines, I will stand corrected.

Also, where is a real WordPress mission statement? I’ve looked for it but can’t find it. The closest thing I could find is this, simply speaking of legalities of the GPL and distribution. Here is some more. Nothing of development structure and goals, which is what I am talking about. Without some sort of “line”, yes this kind of confusion can go on forever… kind of why I’m bringing it up now. The “line” can be as simple as a mission statement, or as complex as one of those links put as a “Bill of Rights”. But pointing to the GPL in terms of development structure, practice, and motivation, is well… impractical. Example 1, Example 2, Example 3

I thought of this analogy the other day and wanted to actually make visuals for it, but I thought never mind, I’ll just explain it. When I visualize the communities of both WordPress and Drupal, each of them take on the organic visual representation of their respective platforms’ design. WordPress can be thought of as a Uranium atom. It has a very dense core, but overall unstable structure over time. It is massive in the middle surrounded by little electrons circling at different levels of orbit. On the other hand you have Drupal which can be thought of as a Borax molecule. It is a combination of many different parts that each have an importance to the whole of the structure. The connections between the parts also have as much significance of the part itself. It can, and is, meant to be used as the base for many different creative products, but to accomplish this requires a lot of know-how.

Now after that analogy, you might say, “Why am I not involved with Drupal?” First, I will say that I am. Second, I am not as much as I used to be because it has its problems too, and unfortunately they have grown to become far greater than that of the WordPress community. Modularity and freedom are core ideals which is great, but they disregard something of equal importance; usability, which seems like they have lost all concept of, and something WordPress holds in high regard.

What I, and a lot of developers dream of, is something in between. The usability of WordPress combined with the freedom and modularity of Drupal. It sounds like a long shot when you just come out and say it like that, but I don’t believe it is too far off. I would love to start a discussion with you, or anyone else open to the idea based around that principal. My problem is getting passed the endless comments of reluctancy, which is where this thread and my current attitude is derived. If you want to really start discussing something like this, then lets do it! I’m not a genius, more minds are better than one, and my problem has been getting people to join in such a discussion, on the web, or in person. Who knows, it might just be my faulty conversational skills. But my question remains, why wouldn’t someone want something like this sooner rather than later, other than just plain’ol stubbornness?

I believe actually brainstorming in this area would stop many of the other existing discussions. An example might be, “how to implement a new feature into ‘The Core’?”. Would if the core didn’t even exist as it did now? It resembled something a lot more like a Linux Kernel which is there to support functionalities, not to provide them. In my mind, it would stop so many discussions in their tracks about whether something should or shouldn’t be a part of the core. Instead these discussions would be taken to their respective “areas” or development groups, where it is analyzed and implemented similarly to how it is now, but on a much smaller, faster, and miniaturized scale.

On the other hand, how can I even begin to discuss things on this sort of level, when I don’t even know a date when PHP 4 support will end? Also… I am a professional developer. Why do I have “prove” myself to the community by providing
“free stuff” when this is what I do for a living? It is my living therefore it takes up most if not all my time that I would use otherwise to provide said “free stuff” happily. Instead why can’t I just discuss without the need of “proving” anything, because isn’t having a knowledgeable discussion proof in itself?

Your profile indicates you’ve been part of the community roughly the same amount of time as me, so clearly you’ve come to different conclusions then i have, so i am genuinely curious how your experience has differed to mine.

My only comment to that is yes, it does sound like it has differed, but I don’t think I have to explain much more based on the many comments I’ve made within this thread already.

You are right though, a lot of this was me looking for a fight, but understand that my attitude was rooted out of genuine frustration.

If you or anyone can answer these real questions, I’m all ears:
When will PHP 4 support end?
When PHP 5 support is explicit, how will minor versions be taken into account?
Will their ever be support for installable shared libraries?
When will pre 2.8 support end?
When will pre 3.0 support end?
When will IE6 support end?
When will IE7 support end?
When will HTML 5 support start?
Can we start a discussion, and who would be involved in it, about an all out re-structuring of the core and overall platform?
Can this discussion include modularity all the way down to the MVC pattern, the sharing of libraries and/or packages, an open source API for hosting themes and/or plugins, changing the code writing practice to resemble more of the overall PHP development world?

If you would like suggestions, I’m all mouth ?? (Within new threads of course).

This project has been completely replaced by my ongoing project of Extensible Widgets.

Forgot to mention. There may be a release that is better than others for CMS Press. They are trying to make it backwards compatible with the 2.9 branch. This may or may not be a lost cause but I am following the progress as much as I can.

I have tested it with 3.0 and it works exactly as expected because there are a lot less hacks required to make something like this possible in previous branches. This is the reason I would wait a little bit if you can’t just get the alpha code yourself.

If you absolutely can’t wait, then get in touch with the appropriate people to see what the upgrade support plans are from 2.9.* to 3.0 when it happens. I have taken a quick look at the code myself and I am still unsure, so I guess this is where my advice ends ??

Not in a user interface sense, you must still rely on Plugins for that. Which is what I believe is the right way to do this. I am actually very happy in that this was decided upon.

What 3.0 makes available is registering and unregistering post types dynamically. That should be enough, because this functionality is so open-ended there shouldn’t be a default way to implement this in the user interface… yet…

CMS Press in my opinion looks promising in how it has implemented an interface. The author(s) have done a very good job in taking permalinks into account, and uses the WordPress CSS classes available for that interface.

Sorry in a bad mood for moderators deleting related posts, and then just saying it is unrelated. The price you pay for using someone else’s forum to try to discuss things.

What you need to do is wait a little longer for 3.0 or use the alpha code if you can.

Then use the plugin CMS Press for custom post types

If you are questioning how, probably should use something other than WordPress.