In reply to dnavarrojr.

Hi @dnavarrojr,

For those complaining about the effort on themes, where are your contributions?

Your logical fallacy is tu quoque.

But I will still bite even though your question was meant as an attempt to shame the questioner in order to deflect focus from the actual question.

What are my contributions? Very few in core, but not for lack of trying.

There is a claim in the WP community that "patches are wanted" but the reality is they are only accepted from people who are part of clique that the core team has become (much like we remember from high school.) Good work gets ignored when it comes from the wrong people, and bad work routinely gets included because the right people did it.

That said my most recent contribution of hundreds of hours of time I could have otherwise spent billing clients was as API lead on the WP Metadata Feature-as-a-Plugin. There was someone good at bridging the political divides in WordPress (and I think the world of him) who brought me into the process.

But after spending a significant amount of time on the code I had one core committer decide we needed to go a very different direction, one that I felt strongly will paint WordPress into some pretty nasty corners because of all the prior experience I have had building forms and fields for WordPress apps. Yet when I asked to speak with that one person so I could explain my concerns with the new approach she was not even willing to talk to me about it. And I gave up rather than work on something that I knew would add serious issues to WordPress, issues similar in magnitude to the issues that a poorly architected menu system has caused over the years.

But that was not the first time I've tried to contribute core. Each prior time was rebuked as well, in large part because I was trying to address needs of business sites and the core team is clearly only interested in the needs of end-user blogger's sites. My criticism of the theme is not a criticism of the theme itself -- of that I could care less -- but instead criticism of what the core team chooses to focus on. And that is consistent with all the effort I have put into WordPress and makes your tu quoque criticism moot.

If you feel there are problems that need to be addresses in core, then get off your butt, participate in the core discussions and start coding solutions.

Since we've already established here that participating in the core discussions and coding solutions is not sufficient to get one's work included in core let us instead look where I have invested time coding and providing other forms of support:

1. Thousands of hours in answering almost 400 questions on WordPress Development on StackExchange, most with detailed and pre-tested code-based answer. And I constantly get thanked for that work in email and in person.

2. Hundreds of hours as co-organizer of The Atlanta WordPress Coder's Guild meetup where we've held WordPress development workshops every month this year starting in February.

3. Hundreds of hours of time to prepare and speak at five (5) WordCamps.

4. Hundreds of hours on developing an open-source library WPLib and a command line scaffolding tool to provide both the rigor of models and views to site development and the structure for auto-loaded class libraries to WordPress (the latter of which WPLib calls "modules.") Now I would love to see this effort added to core to support business site developers, but given the core team's apparent disdain for business use-cases, I am not holding my breath.

5. And there are tens if not hundreds of other hours since 2009 that I have put forth to support others 1-on-1 who develop with WordPress.

Given your tu quoque offense-is-the-best-defense attack I think my works speak for itself. So now I will turn around your fallacy back around on you: What have YOU done that gives you the moral authority to criticize the criticizers?

-Mike
P.S. For those who have had similar experiences with trying to contribute and being rebuffed, I'd really like to know who you are. Maybe we can start our own Slack to work on extensions to WordPress that the core team actively ignores?