Thought Experiment: WordPress.org

[mfields]

The thing that bugs me most of all about the support forums is when I view my support profile, the threads to do not order properly. I would like to see the thread that has been answered last on top... I can't count how many responses that I have missed because of this.

Another idea would be to move the support link from the bottom of the plugin's page to it's own tab. This way when users scan the navigation, they will see a big "Support" tab instead of the small list at the bottom of the sidebar.

Just a couple ideas :)

[Idealien]

- Integration into trac for tickets that I am following, assigned or otherwise involved in.
- A visual design that brings a lot of that deep data others mentioned up to the casual user - take a look at Firefox addons as example (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fir...dpress&cat=all) where majority of info is already tracked for WP plugins.
- Different UI for the codex. Tree-view based on types of tags, alphabetic, version / depreciation. Again, the info is there at a "deep" level with the current site, but it could be made much more accessible. Searchable IRC logs?
-Integrated tools - Firefox add-on search / bookmarklet, Documentation accessible in most common developer tools, etc)
-Some form of visual representation for what actions / hooks / events are fired on what pages (both front-end and admin side). i.e. Using the new 2010 theme, show the file list on one side and the page on the right and as I click through links, step-highlight which files are accessed (and if one wanted to override, where / how they would do it). The admin side of this with custom post types and such too.

[andrea_r]

- Integration into trac for tickets that I am following, assigned or otherwise involved in.

Simplified version:
http://profiles.wordpress.org/users/Idealien

[Ipstenu]

Interesting. Doesn't say if someone followed up to my comment, though.

[andrea_r]

That's why I said it was simplified. :) Not linked from anywhere, as they are working on it.

[JohnM]

Question: What do you think needs to be changed, specifically, about the design of WordPress.org?

What do you mean by design ?

How it looks, or anything including site architecture and features ?

[Otto]

More along the lines of architecture and features.

[Jeffro]

I believe that it's time to consolidate. Time to trim the WordPress tree and remove some branches in order to bring the information and interaction back to the trunk of the project. The more I think about all of the possibilities to solve this problem, the more I think that BuddyPress could serve to be most of the answer. I've heard Matt a number of times share the idea of WordPress.org having an installation of BuddyPress and tying all of the various parts of the projects together into a registered users activity stream. I think now would be a good opportunity to see this realized.

I'd like for WordPress.org to be the ultimate social network/hub for WordPress. I should only need to register one account which will provide me with my typical BuddyPress profile. The WordPress.org forums should be integrated with BuddyPress, as should the Ideas section. If not integrated, just start over from scratch with those two bits of the project integrated right into BuddyPress. IRC should be reserved for power users. Instead, Prologue 2 would be a much better solution. You could schedule chats, have an archive, and overall do a better job organizing the discussions. No more searching for log files published on the Codex. Using BuddyPress, I could have the ability to create mini groups inside of the main project and I could configure how much or how little I want to contribute.

Ultimately inside of this social network, I would like to see a core group created which consists of the core developers or those close to the project with no other members added to the group. You could throw the developer blog in for good measure. I want to see the end of each major developer of WordPress publishing bits and pieces of information and it shows up in the dashboard where in the end, we have a bunch of fragmented information. It would serve the community better if we keep that stuff off of the developers blogs and put into a central repository aka the developers group in this BuddyPress install.

That was taken from an excerpt of what I published within the following forum thread.

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/269201?replies=55

Most of it I still feel is relevant. However, regarding the WordPress.org website itself, the biggest pain in the rear that I would love to see fixed is the decrease in the amount of pages and how deep you have to go to find information. You have to go through so many pages and clicks to get to something it's ridiculous. The entire hierarchy of information needs to be redesigned from the ground up and this time, utilize drop down menus.

I want to see a page dedicated to providing users information on where to go if they have a problem whether it be with the plugin repository, the codex, the forum, etc. A detailed contact page if you will. None of this blank contact page and it gets forward to the right person behind the scenes.

If Matt indeed wants to continue to use ISLANDS for specific areas of the project, then the WordPress.org website needs to somehow make it easy to visit those islands and make users aware of those islands. One of the toughest things I think the site has to achieve is to be a go to place for both users and developers. Not so much information that it drowns everything out and not too little information which we currently have. Actually, the problem currently is probably information that needs to be reorganized and consolidated.

It wouldn't hurt to see another fresh coat of paint as well. If someone could really do a great job of just reorganizing the information that is already present, perhaps updating it as well, and giving each link in the top and bottom part of the site a distinct purpose and reason for being there unlike unrelated links grouped together, I think I'd be pretty happy with that.

To make a long story short, if WordPress.org just copied what this site did http://community.joomla.org/connect.html I think that would work as well.

[JLeuze]

For some reason or another, I strayed onto the Expression Engine website the other day, and it was really refreshing to have a navigation menu with some depth to it.

But what really stood out to me was the JavaScript feature they have on the homepage. It's not flashy or animated or anything, but it does an effective job of putting a good public face on EE from the get go. Wouldn't hurt for new visitors to WordPress.org to be greeted with more than a single screenshot.

A feature like this could be a quick and easy way to really show what the newest version of WordPress can do. Or having 4 or 5 features could be a great way to help highlight those islands that Jeff is talking about and help guide people to the right place.

I think that you're right Jeff about the end user and developer stuff being too mixed together. It'd be nice to see the basics from the codex split away from technical details so that there was a user's guide and developer's documentation. But yeah, just freshening up the site and organizing the content would be a big improvement.

[kaspars]

Have you seen the Symphony CMS website that got redesigned just recently. It has a very nice community feel to it and a very clear and simple architecture.