Just wondering if it’s time to wipe the slate clean on the WordPress Ideas site to start over? The reason being is that the top five most popular ideas are ideas which were submitted over two years ago. If you ask me, this looks bad as it tends to lean towards the WordPress project not really implementing ideas that are obviously wanted by quite a few people using the software. On the flip side, many of the ideas that are still labeled as UNDER CONSIDERATION have since made it to the core in one version or another. Am I wrong or is this simply a case of someone or a group of people not supplying patches to address those issues? Another reason to wipe the slate clean is that all ideas from that day forward should be relevant with how the software is today and not how it was two years ago. So even though the public’s desire for a specific feature two years ago was high, that might not be the case currently and we have no way of knowing.
If the Ideas site is not going to be wiped clean, then there needs to at least be a user driven way to flag a particular idea as IMPLEMENTED with a small explanation of when and how that idea has been implemented into the core of WordPress. This would definitely give the sense that the peoples voices/ideas are heard. As a side benefit, you could probably take a look at all of the implemented ideas and get a good handle on where the project is headed in the near future.
The Ideas part of the WordPress project is another example of something I’ve been noticing as of late and that is, the core WordPress project getting most of the attention which it should, but various branches of the project are dying because of the lack of attention to them. From what I know, Matt is the guy in charge of the ideas section and if this is true, I hope he plans on having a few people in the wings to help him out. WordPress is far more popular today than it was a few years ago and perhaps the Ideas part of the project has lost its precedence. While I would like for all branches of the WordPress tree to be tended too on the same pace as the trunk, I’m guessing that the scope of the project as well as the low amount of Core Developers prevents this from happening. That is why I believe implementing a few different methods to allow the average joe community members to help out would be beneficial to the overall project.
Of course, you’d still need someone taking care of the administration/validation work, but at least the initial load would be taken off their back.
You know, I could have just published this post as an idea to the WordPress Ideas site but why? From the outside looking in, I see ideas that have been voted upon for over two years which to a new person, would seem as though WordPress has not yet added them to the core. However, since I have experience with the software since version 2.3, I know a few ideas which have been implemented that are still labeled as Under Consideration. So why then would I submit an idea if all of the other ideas seemingly have not been addressed or at least, modified to represent the software in its current state?
To top things off, I don’t even know who to contact with regards to the Ideas Section of the WordPress.org site. Do I bring this issue up on the WordPress.org forum? Do I submit this to the WP-Hackers mailing list in fear of publishing something that doesn’t belong their? Do I email Matt and hope that my particular email does not fall victim to the amount of noise his inbox already experiences? One thing that I’ve become increasingly frustrated with regarding the entire WordPress Project is the lack of a WordPress Whitepages. I have no idea on who to contact for what part of the project. If I can’t figure out who to contact, I fall back on just contacting Matt but that isn’t the way it should work. I wish there were some sort of central directory of contact information, most likely a page on the Codex with relatively updated information so that end users knew who to contact and for what purpose.
I started with an idea but ended with a rant. I suppose if I really want a solution to some of these problems, I should get off my ass and do something about it myself. So with that in mind, look forward to a WordPress Contact directory that I’ll publish first on this blog, and then get it implemented onto the Codex where I hope others will contribute.
Well, the Ideas forum started life as a
publicity stuntpublic relations exercise, and as such was never an important part of the project. It was introduced to counter the general impression that WP development was a closed process driven pretty much entirely by Matt. This was around the same time as the Habari pseudo-fork was launched making a big deal out of being a genuinely open and democratic project.So yeah, like kvetches and codex and the multiple other neglected corners of wordpress.org, it’s one of those historical relics which served a purpose at the time but is now left to moulder. It was always kind of at odds with the ‘show us the code’ ethos of wp-hackers, and I would imagine that over the years the feedback of wordpress.com users has proved to be a more reliable indicator of what people really want from the software.