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alex Peter, I think part of the problem here is that it’s easy to get lost in the details without considering the larger reality. When you focus too closely, you tend not to be able to put it all together. With all respect to the core devs, I think they have gotten a little too close to parts of WP, and are having a failure at looking at the bigger picture. It’s a common problem of OSS, people are too worried about painting their seat in the row boat to care about the massive water leak happening next to them. In my mind, WP has a couple of very basic problems that relate to how things operate on development level. One of them is the lack of stable, secure, supported versions outside of the current version. Everything is forced to the current version no matter what. Plug in and theme creators are pretty much forced to upgrade at every turn, meaning that (as an example) if you have a site that works perfectly on 3.7, and you don’t need the new “features”, you still have to upgrade. There is no stable release to work with – and even if you think you have a stable and secure version, you can’t stay there because any update to fix a plug in or theme will cause problems, as they are keyed to the current version and not your stable version. The second issue to me is one of how many more things are being included into core. One of the great things about plugins is that they allow people to have a WP installation that matches their needs. It also allows for development of alternatives to plug ins that can advance the whole WP experience. When things get added to core (such as Emojis), two things happen: Everyone’s install has it no matter what (even if they don’t need it) and you discourage others from creating a better solution, because they would have to not only have a better plug in, but overcome the momentum of something that is in core. It’s why to me a Yoast SEO plug in is a million times better than having it merged into core. Tomorrow someone named Yoffee may come along with a superior SEO product. Since we haven’t selected and integrated a “best of breed” into core, the marketplace and not the core developers will choose the winner – and there may be more than one winner. A core inclusion basically sets one winner and all but locks out everyone else. For what it’s worth, I think of plugins (and themes) as church, and core as State. The separation between the two is very important, giving space to developers to do what they do, while the core team provides the solid, secure platform to allow it to happen. When you mix the two, you tend to get more and more security issues common to all wordpress installs, which in turn makes the product weaker and riskier to use.
alex
Peter, I think part of the problem here is that it’s easy to get lost in the details without considering the larger reality. When you focus too closely, you tend not to be able to put it all together. With all respect to the core devs, I think they have gotten a little too close to parts of WP, and are having a failure at looking at the bigger picture. It’s a common problem of OSS, people are too worried about painting their seat in the row boat to care about the massive water leak happening next to them.
In my mind, WP has a couple of very basic problems that relate to how things operate on development level. One of them is the lack of stable, secure, supported versions outside of the current version. Everything is forced to the current version no matter what. Plug in and theme creators are pretty much forced to upgrade at every turn, meaning that (as an example) if you have a site that works perfectly on 3.7, and you don’t need the new “features”, you still have to upgrade. There is no stable release to work with – and even if you think you have a stable and secure version, you can’t stay there because any update to fix a plug in or theme will cause problems, as they are keyed to the current version and not your stable version.
The second issue to me is one of how many more things are being included into core. One of the great things about plugins is that they allow people to have a WP installation that matches their needs. It also allows for development of alternatives to plug ins that can advance the whole WP experience. When things get added to core (such as Emojis), two things happen: Everyone’s install has it no matter what (even if they don’t need it) and you discourage others from creating a better solution, because they would have to not only have a better plug in, but overcome the momentum of something that is in core.
It’s why to me a Yoast SEO plug in is a million times better than having it merged into core. Tomorrow someone named Yoffee may come along with a superior SEO product. Since we haven’t selected and integrated a “best of breed” into core, the marketplace and not the core developers will choose the winner – and there may be more than one winner. A core inclusion basically sets one winner and all but locks out everyone else.
For what it’s worth, I think of plugins (and themes) as church, and core as State. The separation between the two is very important, giving space to developers to do what they do, while the core team provides the solid, secure platform to allow it to happen. When you mix the two, you tend to get more and more security issues common to all wordpress installs, which in turn makes the product weaker and riskier to use.
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