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Comments Posted By Jess Planck

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To Merge Or Not To Merge?

It makes perfect sense and I’m pretty happy about it.

In the earlier days of WordPress MU it was a complicated installation followed by complicated management. WPMU has proven much easier to install and manage over the years and some of the bug fixes to WPMU went directly the WordPress Core.

Basically the code that makes WPMU work has been getting smaller and more compartmentalized, so I could imagine that the effort to maintain a WordPress Fork for Multi-blog functionality starts to become a huge complicated waste of time. With a merge you can have Donnacha and the WPMU community working with WordPress Core. So instead of reporting a WPMU bug or feature and finding out it needs to be reported to WordPress Core you just report the bug in one place. Nice!

» Posted By Jess Planck On June 4, 2009 @ 9:17 AM

Demise Of WordPress And Its Saving Grace

Having an interview of the current architect for the visual editor would be interesting for sure. I’m pretty sure Andrew Ozz has been handling the tinymce integration for at least a year or so. Other than Ryan Boren and Matt M. I don’t know who else has worked on it.

There are a few third party things like phpmailer in WordPress, but I would point to TinyMCE as the most complicated to integrate since it involves php, javascript, and html. Along with dealing with a third party developer (Moxiecode) it has to make coding interesting.

» Posted By Jess Planck On February 10, 2009 @ 1:53 PM

I haven’t looked at WordPress Ideas for a while. That area really needs a cleanup. Looking at the top 5 shows frustration that was prevalent two years ago, but may not be a good measure of current situations.

No. 1 and the One you’re focused on is a case in point that has had modest improvements. They might rocket back to the top if deleted or cleaned up, but I don’t know if they would be as popular now.

If you really dig through the idea “Choose a better WYSIWYG editor” you will find quite a few questionable entries that seem almost like shills for some of the replacement ideas.

the visual editor is such a complex idea that completely goes contrary to the purpose of HTML. “Let’s edit HTML with… HTML” Anyone taking on that challenge has to be respected or needs medication.

If you actually go out and work with the javascript HTML editors out there, you will find they all have issues. Some won’t be as easy to modify as TinyMCE, some are easier but lack a community. Others have so-so licensing that require sums of money before they even look at you. You think it sucks reporting a bug for WordPress, try some of those projects.

I reported one or two bugs to TinyMCE years ago. The response was decent with either a fix or “gohd, idiot, do it this way”. There are only a couple others that I would name worth including in WordPress.

The real solution would be at the source… Get the W3C to do a form content type HTML and a form textarea type HTML editor. Then we can blame them for the problems.

Now “Trust me when I edit HTML” from ideas is also complex and part of the over all problem you mentioned. The old double-line to paragraph and single-line to line break mixed with attempts force compliant HTML in WordPress caused that issue.

Believe it not it’s caused both in the PHP and in javascript. The javascript is wpautop and near impossible to override at this point without writing a customized WordPress TinyMCE plugin.

To top both of those “ideas”, You sprinkle in some out of date or really badly coded WordPress Plugins to the mix and boom. There are few comments in Extend Ideas for both of those that are obviously support questions related to this type of issue.

God, I finished a whole cup of coffee. I’ve been personally involved in these issues, so I thought I would offer some historical perspective. Andrew Ozz has really improved things immeasurably. It’s not perfect, but much better than WordPress 2.0 for sure.

My take on the Demise of WordPress. Just follow the history of ActiveCollab and ProjectPier for a look at a Free GPL’ish project going commercial. That would be my fear, having more sort of commercial things like Akismet and Gravatar creep in.

» Posted By Jess Planck On February 8, 2009 @ 12:54 PM

WP Weekly Episode 41 – Interview With Scott Wallick

Darn it! Forgot the check box, and had to take caidy to work!

A framework style theme in WP core would be cool. Sandbox with some nice default typography, or even with some light ideas from other frameworks. Probably wouldn’t go as far as Carrington or Thematic or even Theme Hybrid. And of course some light documentation to explain the purpose.

» Posted By Jess Planck On February 7, 2009 @ 11:15 AM

It’s so ironic that Scott put his sites up for sale.

I’ve hacked at Sandbox for years since it was a decent GPL theme to start from. I never felt comfortable modifying heavily stylized themes for clients and sites I work on, so Sandbox was a fantastic and guiltless starting point.

I started reworking my “personal fork” last month after noticing the need for upgrades to Sandbox for WordPress 2.7. I shopped other “theme frameworks” and mostly decided to mix some DNA for the GPL frameworks I’ve liked. The work of Scott and other “open” theme developers is greatly appreciated.

Putting it in WordPress core is a strange issue. But I would love to see at least sandbox_body_class move to core like the comment_class and post_class that were introduced in WP 2.7.

A framework in WP core might need some styling, and sandbox has none. It might also need a child theme, but that might be confusing. It’s an interesting proposition. I wish your poll had a couple more answers to choose from.

» Posted By Jess Planck On February 7, 2009 @ 9:38 AM

WordPress Needs To Revise Post Revisions

Poor post revisions could use an interface in the core. Yea it’s a trivial configuration change, but I see why the mid-technical users get freaked out when revisions get numerous. This really gets noticeable on sites with decent amount of users.

For me the downturn in the economy means no new hardware for a while, so I won’t be expanding my database servers. I’m limiting to 5 revisions for now to see how much data will expand. File sizes and time to backup databases will part of that benchmark test before I increase revisions.

BUT… Big coolness for having a revision trail. Digging in the code also reveals there might be some interesting uses and may also lead to a way to save and authorize editing changes. It’s on my plugin wish list.

» Posted By Jess Planck On January 23, 2009 @ 11:04 PM