Displaying 1 To 30 Of 40 Comments WordPress News Sites And The Bermuda Triangle I think one of the issue you’ve faced, and possibly are still facing, is that you’ve never “marketed” this site as a news site. From the writing style, tone of voice and content; to the design and rules around posting – this has always appeared to me to be a personal site in which you encouraged and gained a great number of people coming for a chat. Personally, I never looked at WPtavern as a news site, I looked at it as a blog that I enjoyed. I think there is also a bit of difficulty around the time that you were “bought out”, as some questioned whether you would be able to openly comment upon things where your opinion might differ from that of your *mysterious owner* – who ever that might be. I always appreciated your viewpoint as the layman, and I appreciated the conversations contained on your site. If you want WPtavern to be a news site, then you have to separate it from Jeff – but to do so would be to rob you of your USP. Be well. » Posted By Kevinjohn Gallagher On January 21, 2013 @ 11:00 AM Some Orgnizations And WordPress Just Don’t Mix Jet lag has wiped me out this week, I’m afraid, and I’ve been unable to reply. What I will say is this, there are more posts on WordPress community sites discussing my CV and dyslexia than the actual content of my post. Worse of all though, is that the rhetoric of “there’s a plugin for that” is now so deeply imbedded in the WP community psyche that they constantly spout it without actually knowing if its true or not. And for the most part, it’s not true. Andrew Nacin and I had a wonderful discussion on that very point on this website last month: Me: http://www.wptavern.com/case-study-on-how-wordpress-won-the-crown#comment-16740 For me though it comes down to this:
at the 2 Drupal camps I attended last year people debated my content; at the Joomla meet-ups they asked questions; but at the 3 WordPress meetings they debated whether they liked me as a person- http://kevinjohngallagher.com/2012/01/listening-the-core-skill-learning/
In the end though, it comes down to this: Sadly in the last 7 days I’ve had 3 ddos attacks, 14 threats (4 “credible”) against myself or my family, multiple requests to have me removed from speaking at WordPress events to which I’m already signed up and personally sponsor, and 31 people roll-back their purchase for Open Source Scotland because I’m involved. All because my staff, not me, but the good folks I work with every day, don’t want want to use WordPress anymore. I’m being punished by this community, for doing the right thing: listening to my colleagues and my clients. Congratulations, you’re now the bullying jocks you never got to be in high school. Frankly, I think many of you should be ashamed. » Posted By Kevinjohn Gallagher On January 14, 2012 @ 2:08 PM I didn’t really want to respond to this, but there’s quite a few inaccuracies flying around, and I wanted to clear them up. As always, i’m available on e-mail if anyone wants to talk to me, rather than about me.
The days of KevinJohn Gallagher and his company using WordPress are over
Ok, so the opening sentence is wrong. I, personally, will continue to use WordPress. My company won’t. Every company, if not individual, should use the best tools are their disposal for the job they have to do. WordPress just doesn’t meet that criteria for OUR clients anymore. It’s changed, we’ve changed, our clients have changed. The folks I worked with, just really didn’t like working with WordPress anymore, and neither did many of our clients.
I’d think about turning each one of his 15 points into an awesome plugin that excels with that particular functionality and then charging for it.
Jeff, I love your optimism. The reality is though, as I’ve said in my post, that some of these are so fundamental that they NEED to be driven by the core in order to be sustainable. Far too many of the issues I raised are architectural rather than features. “There’s an app for that” mentality isn’t going to cut it. And in fairness, WordPress the blogging platform, or WordPress the “blogging+” platform, doesn’t need many or these features to survive and grow. And thats cool. I’m sure Distraction Free Writing is very important in a CMS. Personally, I use Word ;) @Lindsey - All said and done I still love WordPress and use it every chance I can – when it’s appropriate. Otherwise, until they fix all or most of the points mentioned (and then some!) I can’t promote it to certain business and other users. Bingo. I love WordPress too. I’m not being down on it. It’s great at what it does. @Andrea_R - Some of the items in his post simply are not true. “0 project managers” – that would be Jane. “They didn’t test the beta in IE” – also not true. Ok, so I’m calling Kool-Aid drinking or BullSh*t here. Lets talk specifics. Jane is awesome, but last year Jane was Head of UX, Head of Project Management, Head of Release Management, Head of Community Management, Head of WP.org, Head of WordCamps, Head of the WP Foundation, Head of User Engagement, Head of Charity, Head of Money in WPF, Head of WCCentral, Head of… etc. Anytime there’s a job that isn’t covered by the WP team, it’s suddenly “Jane does that”. Oh, and if this image ( http://t.co/mVdB3i7I ) is an Agile Development project plan, then Jane’s not a Project Manager. Because I’m considering digging a grave in my back garden just to turn in it. And Andrea, we’ve had Core Team members, and people paid for by Matt on this very website tell us that the beta WAS NOT tested on IE7 because the plan was to drop support for IE7, but then they changed their minds; but never went back to test it. So I’m only repeating what we’re told by Otto. I’ve also raised this with Nacin and MarkJaquith on Twitter, who both joked that we should just use a different browser. Additionally, Jane blogged about the UAT that she did before the BETA was considered ready. Everyone used a Mac, Everyone used FireFox/Chrome. Every person. I’m only quoting what the core team say. The part for having a user moderate comments? Role Management plugin. No No No. Role Management plug-ins dont make any difference because IN THE CORE, without a filter to overwrite, in order to mark a comment as spam you need to ALSO have the capability to edit posts. It’s hard coded. Yes, with a plug-in I can give someone the capability to moderate comments, but the WordPress core ignores the action taken if the user doesn’t also have the capability to edit posts. It’s shit like this that causes issues. Things like that don’t cause issues if you’re blogging or a small company. We’ve been consulting with 1 company that receives roughly 2000 non-spam comments a day, and about 5-600 comments that it deems inappropriate. 3-5 volunteers work on it, and I live in fear of one of them having a bad day and changing the homepage – I have a horror story about that if you want to hear it offline (just e-mail me, it’s funny, and I promise you’ll laugh). If anything, it’s a great example of how WordPress doesn’t really scale. Can you make it scale technically? Sure. But People and Process wise? It gets very difficult once you get past 10 people. It is kinda sad to see all the enterprise-usage type people not help out n core and get involved with the direction. Respectfully, I’ve been talking about how to change this for years. I’ve offered my help countless times, spoken about the pain points, and offered solutions. I’ve been saying these things and giving PoCs for years, on sites like this, on my website, and at WordCamps and WordUps. But again, when Core Team members stand infront of a WordPress gathering and say “Don’t listen to the Vocal Minority, even if they’re right” it’s hard for us to help. The attitude is, You’re with us or against us. Other viewpoints are not welcome. Jeff and I have been over this for a long time. @ DarrinB 2098 Blog Posts Ah, so you run a small website then. One of Education Installs has about 8k pages. (and for the record, the permalink updates by Otto in 3.3 make life a hell of a lot easier on this site; thanks Otto). And this isn’t a P*nis measuring contest. There’s plenty of people with bigger, larger and more popular sites that what we deal with. But I do think it plays into the misconception of the pain points I’m talking about. That website you described, we consider that tiny. @ PeteMall Holy crap. I didn’t think you actually existed. How are you enjoying bbPress Pete? @ Jake Goldman I still do almost all of my work on Windows (never an issue), and WordPress has made the choice (in my view, correctly) to prioritize pace and modernity over infinite backwards compatibility. I’m not against fast Updates. I’m FOR THEM. WP3.3 Menu is inaccessible It can’t be used by Color Blind people, the same with the grey on grey buttons of the HTML editor. Navigating WP Admin without a mouse is a nightmare, but when I say that people think “iPad”. I don’t, I think, disabled person. We didn’t test the menu in IE7 before release, how confident are you that it was tested on a screen reader? How confident are you that it was tested for accessibility and usability for those not fully abled? For one one of our clients, and government based charity, we have to provide a report of any UI changes against the RNIB Disability Discrimination Act, and the WRIA’s AA and AAA standard. WordPress 3.3′s admin area was considered to be HARMFUL. Not “OK”, not “poor”, not “bad”, but HARMFUL. But thats ok, we tested it on Chrome on a MacBook Pro, with able bodied people all of whom speak English on a small website. Because thats indicative of the world, right? @ Norcorss But do the vast majority of WP users (or devs, for that matter) want that? Doubtful. Should it be part of core? Absolutely not. I absolutely agree. I don’t want a huge core with these features added. And I never once said that. But not having ACCESS to these type of features is a large issue. We have our own custom Document Repository. Frankly Doc Control is far better that what we were using (cos I built ours). Same with Edit Flow. But once you move past bloggings 1-to-1 architecture to complete a feature, then you need to have the ability in the core to write the plug-ins to solve the pain points. We don’t have that. The core is too singularly focussed for that. Hence why we’ve no good/scalable e-commerce solution, or a forum solution; y’know, simple stuff every other CMS has very easily. And thats ok, as WordPress is a “blogging+” platform. I don’t want these all to be core offerings. But I’d like the core to be open enough to allow us to code them without hacking it constantly. Thats what pissed my work colleagues off. Simply put, the architecture is not in a malleable enough state in comparison to other CMSs. There are positives to this, and there are negatives. 436 days to get the bbPress plugin from first commit to release, with a paid Automattic developer. It’s also lambasted in the latest Dev4Press posts about overhead. There’s a reason why; and it ain’t down to the developer, who’s brilliant at this stuff. Konstantin Kovshenin I had developer folks whine about WordPress too some time ago, but seriously, tell me which CMS has got a better Visual editor. DAY for one. @ JJJ The only thing that fixes any of these issues is committed labor. “They” are us, let’s not forget that. Dude, I’ve been a big fan of yours since bbpress0.9; but “They are us” only counts when we agree with the core team. I didn’t see you rolling out the “They are us” line when the core team went after Justin Tadlock for daring to be unhappy about Capital_P_Dangit. And if I’m really honest with you bro, commited labor isn’t something I’d struggle to rustle up. But its very hard for people to get engaged when WP’s focus changes so frequently. Remember we had a roadmap for 3.0 > 3.4 at the time of 3.0beta1. None of the planned features or architectural changes in 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 were made; instead we moved the menu twice, and added distraction free writing. Heck, we’ve not even nailed the MVC stuff. Plugins can’t activate bits of code on PCTs because the theme is meant to do that. Plugins can’t output code without writing their own mammoth workarounds for get_template_part. etc etc. I truly think you did a great job with the code on bbPress2.0. Yes it pained me that it took over a year and that we had almost 2 full years between a standalone release and the plugin release; but looking through your code you have so many workarounds built in to deal with functions/architecture that tied down to being 1-to-1 or “blog like”. Get template part is a great example. @ Kurt Maybe it’s all just for publicity. Any time WP is criticized there’s a big backlash from the community. Isn’t that sad? And truly, if you’d see the hate mail I’m getting for MY company choosing which software ITs going to use, you’d be amazed. Bluntly, I dont really get why people care. @ Ted Clayton You’ve missed quite a few off the top of the list there bud:
Business Transformation and Service Design Authority: BP @ Ted Clayton Kevinjohn, it appears, rides herd on a crew of developers. I do actually code myself though. @ Ted Clayton Again, KJG gets a bit more wound up with his message (reflecting/matching those he critiques for the same over-indulgence) Heh, not really. Its more the celtic tone. If you listen to my chat with Jeff, you’ll hear the tone of voice I use and speak in. We Irish swear a lot, and speak in a certain way that many in… non-European countries have a tendency to misjudge the tone and inclination when reading on the web. People read in a perceived tone of voice. I’m blunt, sure, but I can’t remember the last time I wrote something on the internet in anger. @ Andreas People seem to react on their emotional reaction to what he writes than to what he actually wrote though. And the winner is… Andreas. I’m human. @ Emil Seriously, you just made things worse. Jobs that lasted 1-2 months! Thanks mate, this made me laugh. If the platform no longer meets his needs and he wants to improve “roll up your sleeves and get to work” Yeah, but I’ve forced my staff to do that for years. They spoke loud and clear, they don’t want to do it anymore. I could force them, but why would I? We have the opportunity with no web builds this month to look at how we work, and in doing so WordPress is no longer our go-to-option. I’ve no idea why people are upset that WE have chosen to no longer use WordPress. You folks can still use it. In essence, this is what I won’t miss about the WordPress community. So many see things only in black and white. To not use WordPress is to hate it. To say that it doesn’t do somethings that other CMSs do, is to hate it. To no longer use WordPress means no-one ever tried to “roll up their sleeves and make it work”. I’ve said, quite openly, that we’ve changed, our clients have changed, and WordPress has changed. Which I think is ok, we’re all allowed to change. Again, maybe I’m missing the point, but I’ve no idea why so many people are upset that WordPress has 1 less agency promoting it. ====================== For the record, my site was down twice in the last 24 hours. Once because it couldn’t handle the almost 30,000 hits in the space of an hour (it was down for about 25 minutes)> The other time was for hours, and was a ddos attack. I received an e-mail taking credit, in it, it said:
No1 wants u 2 have ur own opinion. I wonder if they have WordPress tattoos… ;) » Posted By Kevinjohn Gallagher On January 12, 2012 @ 4:24 PM WordPress Ink Does Not Equal WordPress Cult I really want to start with this: I think that tattoo looks beautiful and I’m in no way against people putting whatever art they want on their body. I’ve used the increase of WordPress tattoos as an example of the “cult-like” mentality that’s been creeping into the community over the last 2 years. In my experience whenever there is a point of contention or a discussion taking place, people are less willing to hear different points of view and then make their own mind up than they were in the past. In my personal experience, people who have such a love for something that they have it’s logo tattoo’d on their body for life, are rarely objective. A lesson I learned a long time ago from going to meet-ups (such as DrupalCon and WordCamp) was to not talk to anyone wearing clothing with the subject matter on it. For me, tattoo’s fall into that camp. @Ted Clayton - I couldn’t agree more. Obviously I love WordPress, but you’d be amazed at how often smaller agencies and development houses come to pitches with WordPress as their CMS of choice, regardless of that the job is, or if WordPress is capable of the task. WordPress is awesome at what it does, but lets be blunt, it doesn’t do a lot. Heck, even the WordPress store that was built this year by WordPress Core Devs runs on JOOMLA!! And that’s ok! We need to start looking at WordPress objectively, promote it’s good points and acknowledge the bad points. For me, the “cult-like” attitude is when we start taking guidelines and making them into doctrine. When we change “you should” to “Thou Shalt”, then I think we’ve hit a problem. Have a wonderful New Year » Posted By Kevinjohn Gallagher On December 31, 2011 @ 12:28 PM Matt Mullenweg To Be In Charge Of The 2012 Default Theme Hi Peter, Apologies for the slow reply, I’ve been enjoying Christmas with the family. I hope it was as good for you as it was for me :) At the risk of arguing semantics, I never once stated that “Never listen to the Vocal Minority – even if they’re right” was in your slides. I’ve stated that you did in fact say it. Was it a slip of the tongue, an ad-lib? A Freudian slip? I have no doubt it could have been, and certainly wouldn’t hold it against you if it was. But that is what you said. You also said:
“The vocal minority should be ignored”
I Tweeted this: https://twitter.com/#!/kevinjohng/status/133545924894015489
Apparently I am “the vocal minority that should be ignored”. Ha! Thinking of getting a T-shirt printed for the next event #WordUpWhitehall
And you Re-Tweeted it Peter! Though I imagined you had a wry smile on your face while doing so, and that made me smile too. I didn’t want to make this a “He said / She said” scenario. I didn’t call you out on this, and nor did I use your name in my original post, as it has a tendency for people to feel like its a personal attack; which my original comment wasn’t – and hopefully neither will this be perceived in that way.
The point I wanted to make was that we should be thinking about the majority group of end users who make up our user base
I agree. I’m ok with being in the minority mate, thats fine. But Automattician’s have a tendency to say this, and then release a BETA without loading it on a Windows Machine; or release a function like capital_p_dangit(), or do something stupid like BackPress, or make a browser detect that doesn’t correctly detect browsers on Windows, or make a hover menu that requires a mouse to use because, fuck it, it’s only disabled people. From a personal viewpoint, I’ve never once argued FOR a particular feature or functionality to be added to WordPress. But I do think I’m in the minority because I call people on their crap, as I’m happy for people to do to me. Here’s an example from a recent WordPress event I attended:
- Person X: I saw your discussion on [.org] regarding the hover menus in 3.3. You made some good points, but, y’know, I see both sides of the argument. This “Person X”, currently writes for a rather well known WordPress website. Sometimes Peter mate, it’s not that the Vocal Minority are intentionally shouting loudest just to make a point. It’s that we’re shouting louder to try and be heard over the sycophantic rabble from the masses of unquestioning followers that WordPress has amassed. Since I’m already going to be bombarded with hate e-mails for disagreeing with a Core Dev (which does happen btw, to disagree with a Core Dev is considered sacrilege to some of WordPress’ devout followers) I figure now’s a good time to let you in on this little nugget. In our Office we no longer refer to Matt as Matt or the Community as the Community. Rather they go by Dune based names Matt’Dib (from Muad’Dib, a man who meant well, but who’s every word is taken as Gospel an it is heresy to question), and the Community is referred to “Freemen” (from Freman, a people who consider themselves free willed, as long as they unquestioningly do everything Matt’Dib commands them). Personally, I thought that was a little harsh when the names were used last year after the bbPress debacle. Right now mate, they seem very very fitting. I’ll say now, what I’ve been saying for the last 3 years. What originally brought me to WordPress originally was the humility shown by the Core Team/Matt. I look back at Capital_P_Dangit, bbPress2.0, backPress, etc and I ask myself, where did the humility go? When was the last time someone said “Sorry, we got that wrong”? I’m ok with being labelled a Jerk and thought of badly. But when people debate me on this stuff, I always ask, tell me where I’m wrong. I’m a human, i’m wrong all the time in life. But if you’re simply not wanting to listen to what I have to say because you don’t like me, then it’s not a community, it’s not Open, it’s just a bunch of people talking with people who they know agree with them (or won’t say anything if they don’t). “The vocal minority should be ignored” and “Never listen to the Vocal Minority – even if they’re right” are both very scary statements, outside of an Orwellian Novel that is. » Posted By Kevinjohn Gallagher On December 30, 2011 @ 12:01 PM @Jane Wells - Hi Jane, Always a pleasure to hear from you. The comments made were that if you were part of and wanted to stay part of “the community” then you should ignore the “vocal minority” even if you think they’re right. I received a text from a member of a Government department during the presentation that said “Apparently I’m not allowed to talk to you anymore ;)”. With all due respect, as someone I genuinely like, I think it’s all too easy to suggest that many of us are at the aggressive/name-calling stage when simply stating out point of view. It’s been the go to defence for about 2 years now, regardless of any objectivity. Lets not forget that according to 1 core team member this link is the worst Flame War [they] have ever seen on the internet: http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/whats-happening-with-bbpress/page/5#post-64410 Personally, I think it’s possibly the politest flame war ever on the internet. It’s the Hello Kitty of flame wars, and man I loves me some Hello Kitty. Jane, I don’t think I’m right all the time, heck i know I physically can’t be. But I’m also not automatically wrong every time my opinion differs from that of a core team member. It is inherently unfair and inaccurate to dismiss a statement to be 100% wrong or unhelpful simply due the source being part of what the core team describe as “the vocal minority”. Every community needs it’s Bill Hicks, it’s Johnny Cash, it’s Gordon Ramsey; otherwise we fall into the trap of only listening to the feedback we want to hear. I may not be liked, and I’m happy to admit I’m wrong some of, if not most of, the time. But the idea that I’m wrong 100% of the time because my opinion is different is a scary scary prospect. » Posted By Kevinjohn Gallagher On December 23, 2011 @ 8:44 AM @Jeffro - Morning Jeff, Indeed it was. I wasn’t trying to be obscure, its more that when using People’s names in posts some folks think it’s a personal attack (which this isn’t). Its the abstract point I was raising. When we spoke in early October, I said on your podcast that the biggest draw to WordPress has the humility of Matt/Core-Team, and its willingness to engage with it’s community. It was a young community, that was eager to help yet quick to point out issues. It wasn’t a conformist community of “yes men” (and/or ‘yes women’), and I truly felt that we bottomed out a greater number of issues because of this. It’s hard to believe the objectivity exists at the same level in a community that is getting WordPress tattoo’s. » Posted By Kevinjohn Gallagher On December 23, 2011 @ 8:04 AM @Chip Bennett -
I would love to hear the context for that statement
At a WordPress un-conference in the second half of this year, [one of the Core Team] opened their presentation with a slide on who they were, and their second slide was on what makes the WordPress community great. That second slide had 4 boxes in it, one of the boxes was “Vocal Minority”, and the quote was:
“Never listen to the Vocal Minority – even if they’re right.”
For me the whole conversation was a real eye opener. Sitting next to Mike Little (WordPress co-creator from Stockport, England) and one of the someone wearing a “WordPress: Made in Texas” T-Shirt (so not cool it’s unreal), as this core team member dismissed any issues from the last year as simply people looking for things to moan about (capital P, bbpress, backpress); it finally sunk in. We’re not a community of people with different opinions anymore, we’re very much in an us and them mentality.The funny thing, the lack of that mentality is what attracted me to WordPress in the first place. » Posted By Kevinjohn Gallagher On December 23, 2011 @ 6:58 AM @Chip Bennett -
Fear not; there are plenty of people who are willing to be critical when necessary.
True, but we’ve a tendency to be vilified for it. [One of the Core Team] recently gave a presentation and his opening slide was “Never listen to the Vocal Minority – even if they’re right”. » Posted By Kevinjohn Gallagher On December 22, 2011 @ 10:36 AM Removing The Browser Nag Bar In WordPress @Alhadis - Yes, it’s not a pleasant era to live in where non-computer-savvy people are forced to click past warning dialogues, but if people don’t put their foot down sooner or later, it’s never going to end. This is where I really disagree. I’m 100% ok with dropping support for anything that you don’t want to support. If WordPress doesn’t want to support IE7, then thats cool. But to nag and moan and more importantly, stop people using the software, because we don’t happen to like the browser or OS you’re using… it’s close to childish. It also completely ruins the User Experience for “non-computer-savvy people”, which is funny given that the WordPress core now has a UX person on the core team (it’s ok, she only tests on Mac’s anyway, it’s how the WP3.3 beta was released with a menu that didn’t work on IE, oh obviously there’s no testers in the core team either). I’m not saying you have to support anything you don’t want to, but obey Wheaton’s law: https://twitter.com/#!/wilw/status/5966220832, and honestly, that HUGE browser nag thing really breaks it. Especially with all the false positives, and the fact that the browser detect, y’know, can’t accurately detect browsers… /facepalm Seeing a warning message – as well as an unsightly mess of a website, should be enough to get the point across to the user. It does, it says “don’t use this website”. It doesn’t say ” wow dear, this website is right, I had better upgrade my browser, i should listen to websites and banenr ads more often, whats this? vi*gra? I’ll click that, oh what now? you want my password – ofc – i mean, all people belive banner ads, especially because its in Red. Wow, I’ve won first prize, I’ll click everything I see…….” We’ve spent 10 years teaching people to ignore big bright things that tell them to upgrade. especially if they look like banner ads. it is, frankly, muppetry to believe that they’ll magically trust this annoying banner ad because it’s near the WordPress logo! » Posted By Kevinjohn Gallagher On December 9, 2011 @ 2:15 PM @Otto - Otto, You hopefully know how much I respect you, and I think we’re both fully aware that we’ll never see eye to eye on everything ;) but I think this is a really great microcosm for the disparage between us :) 1) R U SRS Bro? “problems with browser detection and so on are well-taken” I really appreciate your openness about this, as always, but come on. Given that most of the time this functionality fails with people using IE, and that the target audience is for… people using IE; doesn’t make this piece of functionality Not Fit for Purpose? It’s a browser detect that can’t accurately detect browsers. But we’re not making any attempt to fix it because, well it can’t target people on Macs, so who cares… 2) Upgrading and the Veil of Ignorance I realize that you don’t like the whole idea of upgrading, but it’s a fundamental fact in computing that isn’t going to go away just because you and your clients don’t like doing it. I apologise if I’ve given you the idea that I don’t like upgrading, or being on the latest version appropriate of whatever software I’m using, I’m personally a bit of a beta bunny. But the rest of the world is not. If it was would we have to do all of this? Um… I’m being vague here to stay within NDA: One of my current clients received close to the same number of hits as Amazon and eBay last year (outside of Christmas and some holiday y’all have in November), and will probably do similar this year (maybe a little less). 41% of their traffic in the last 12 months came from people in WindowsXP. IE6 and 7 made up more than 30% of the browser share. I absolutely understand that’s just one website, but when comparing those numbers to the 500+ other websites in the company, the percentage of WindowsXP and IE6/7 didn’t drop below 40 and 20% respectfully. I fully understand that this is somewhat anecdotal, and it’s just one website, I do get that; but when those of us out in “the real world” are looking at that sort of statistic over and over, from site to site, from company to company, from country to country, it’s hard to get behind this idea that it’s just me or my clients that don’t like doing it. 3) OS upgrading Windows XP is 10 years old, and will be at its end-of-life in a bit over 2 years from now. It’s time to upgrade your OS too. So I agree with the premise, but that argument isn’t really what people hear. To start with, end-of-life means nothing to the man on the street. What they hear is this: Windows XP is 10 years old, and Microsoft will no longer support it in a bit over 2 years from now. That’s what people like my Mum hear. When we techies hear 10 years old we think “holy crap I need to upgrade” but non-techies think “wow, that’s really stable, I’ll stick with that”. When we techies hear 2 years until end-of-life we think “holy crap I need to upgrade” but non-techies think “wow, that’s far away, I’ll save my money and maybe get something closer to the time”. 4) The bubble So this is where we’ll disagree the most I think. We have 20,000 people who make a living from WordPress (according to your boss) – that’s an awesome number. But it gets harder to really sell WordPress to both individuals and companies who are resistant to change. I understand “Adapt. Or Die”. I’m a certified and practicing Scrum Master, Product Owner and Practitioner – I understand the premise of Agility from Darwin to XP programming. But it’s really hard to go into a company – of any size – and see people using IE or Windows XP/Vista, or have disabled people, or blind people, or know they current have an IIS server or any of the other types of people we’ve moved to edge cases we don’t really like; and attempt to say hand on heart, WordPress is the right software for you for the next 2 years. And I think thats the bit that you’re missing bro. If you/the-core-team/matt/Automattic/WordPress all don’t want to support IE6, IE7, WindowsXP or anything else – I’m ok with it. I may not agree with it, it may result in me using WordPress less, but it’s not my call. But how many users of WordPress, or any software, like being told off and having something added to the software they’re using that reduces the User Experience. It doesn’t come across as attempting to be helpful, it comes across to the end user as being an arrogant superior techie jerk. It’s hard to want to use software that constantly moans at you for something you may not be able to change. 5) Finally If I may, another Anacdotal reference… My mother, a woman who used to code Pascal and Cobol, but really never liked computers (yeah, I know) recently asked me to uninstall that “web thing, that kept p*ssing her off by telling her to upgrade constantly when [she] only upgraded last week”. So Firefox 7.0 was removed from the computer, and she’s back using IE8. Efforts to move her to Chrome or IE9 were met with: “But doesn’t [ie8] do everything I want it to do?”. I had many arguments for IE9, but you know what, IE8 does what she needs it to do, and it already is on her machine, and it works. Sometimes, we techies focus on the cool new things a bit too much. » Posted By Kevinjohn Gallagher On December 9, 2011 @ 2:01 PM The problem with Browse Crappy is that it moans even if you’re on the latest version of your browser of choice for your OS. e.g. IE8 is the latest browser for Windows XP It also moans at you if you are using IE9 under certain circumstances. I actually wrote about this 6 months ago: » Posted By Kevinjohn Gallagher On December 6, 2011 @ 2:03 PM Case Study On How WordPress Won The Crown @Andrew Nacin – Hello Nacin mate, Sorry my earlier reply to Jeff and Dave got caught in the comment spam queue so it appears after you, but doesn’t address your kind reply. Sorry about that bro. === The Reply === First off, I agree with the premise that no Open Source eco-system should be judged independently of it’s addons, and that both Drupal and Joomla are as reliant as WordPress is on these. 1. Ben’s plug-in is great. Truly, it replaced a custom one of mine that did similar, and I love it. But it’s somewhat simplistic in nature. I truly don’t mean to be disrespectful of it when I say that, as it nails everything it set out to do, but in comparison to the equivalents in Drupal or Joomla or EZpublish or Umbraco or even Squiz (all open source) it’s not quite there. From a practical example, it also suffers from the security model for a large number of clients, as it brilliantly combines with Active Directory Integration plugin and Simple LDAP login plugin – both of which don’t work with WordPress 3.1, 3.2, 3.3… Additionally using it on websites/intranets for the type of clients who need this sort of thing, means that we can’t upgrade WordPress, and we all know what the community thinks of people making their own mind up on when to upgrade (they don’t like it). 2. EditFlow. A truly awesome bit of functionality, but again, it’s not really complete. It works brilliantly if you’re handling a single post type: posts. For the newsrooms (and equivalents) that I’ve seen using it, it’s a game changer. If you’re not talking about a website that’s focused on a single continuous post type differentiated by taxonomies, then EditFlow’s not there yet. Will it be a silver bullet in 2012? I have no doubt. Is it 2012 yet? Nope. 6. ESI Caching / CDN ability W3 Total Cache (and Donnacha’s new 1.0 of WP Super Cache) both handle CDN type stuff very well, but ESI isn’t on the radar. Both effectively work on the idea that is someone is signed in that they want “live” content, which is rarely the truth, other than maybe their name (e.g. welcome Nacin), the removal of the login option, and their details pre-populated on the comment form. I’m all for dynamic content over static HTML, but with the other OSS solutions out there starting to support solutions like ESI and “enterprise level CDNs” (e.g. Akami) WordPress is really starting to fall behind. The premise from Matt that “servers are cheaper now than ever before” isn’t a great one, though true, in that we’re proposing hardware to cover for a software failing. At some stage the RoI on that plummets. (I’ve some real world war stories on this I’m happy to share offline mate, just e-mail) 7. This one is my bad, sorry. Tiny MCE is grand (bad rep and all, I think it does what it says on the tin) apart from one thing. It’s not What You See Is What You Get. It’s not. It’s a plain representative of text on your website. That’s not what I meant. I meant editing content with the actual page template styles so that What you See Is ACTUALLY What You Get. In the WordPress WYSIWYG editor H5 and H6 are smaller than normal Paragraph text, yet loading any default WordPress theme for the last 3 years and the opposite is true. I’m not being obtuse here, this is what more and more of my clients are after. Because so many proprietary systems have it. In the UK we have a crap hosting company called 1&1 who sell a SaaS to make your website for $200, and on the TV advert it shows people dragging and dropping content, and editing inline with real styles – this is what the “man on the street” thinks a CMS can do now. Look at this: http://www.day.com/day/en/resources/video/webcontent-incontext-editing.html I know it’s an enterprise level CMS, so it’s unfair to think WordPress can match it, but THAT is WYSIWYG. A plain box with bold and italic text that has no correlation between the content and the chosen template isn’t WYSIWYG. In that regard, we’re Cavemen bro. Look at Carrington Build (http://crowdfavorite.com/wordpress/carrington-build/), which is on the right lines in terms of dynamic templates that are self service, but it’s still not actually WYSIWYG. 8. Single Sign-on — With what? There’s plugins to do this with social networks, specialized authentication systems, and the like, and building a plugin for a system that isn’t covered is easy. We’ve not had a working LDAP plugin for months. We’ve not had a working Active Directory plugin for months. These are not small systems no-ones ever heard of. I was one of the idiots who tried to make bbPress work with WordPress for 2 years – even with the help of Sam, Matt and MDwaffe we couldn’t make that work for months with bbPress0.9 and WP2.6-2.9. MediaWiki can’t interact with it. We don’t have a single-sign-on API that doesn’t change on a per release basis. 2.7 was a rewrite, 3.0 caused problem, 3.2 causedproblems. The other OSS software I mentioned doesn’t have these issues as they have a defined API. 9. I’m happy to agree to strongly disagree on this, and discuss it another time :) 10. I kind of think that proves my point. Take 2 separate plugins, developed independently years apart, add some development of custom code, pray any WordPress upgrade doesn’t break any of the 3, and you have something close to what the alternatives have out of the box. /facepalm More and more my clients want to show different PARTS of content on pages to people with different criteria. Given that WordPress treats a page/post of content as a single entity (1-to-1 issue), this isn’t possible from a UI perspective. It also makes previewing based on user, role, country, hair-colour etc almost impossible. Could I architect a way to do with between two established plugins and a large chunk of custom code? I think so yeah. Would I be confident that I wouldn’t need to rebuild it every WP release? Nope. Would I be confident of debugging based on dependencies of 2 separate software projects, especially as Members has had 1 upgrade in 2.3 years? Nope. With the meteoric rise in sensitive and insanely accurate Analytics and A/B testing these days, the inability to do this is a large issue, that’s often overlooked (its not needed on a blog). 13. Multi-lingual — This is definitely a sore spot. Most of the plugins that try to do this, do it really poorly. Not much different than the e-commerce offerings, currently. I love that you said this. Because I think THIS is something that should be lead by the Core. It needs to be thought through, well architected and aligned, and deep down has to have the blessing of the Core Team or whoever builds this system is going to run into constant upgrade / custom build issues. If you don’t mind me saying Andrew, people like me respect the heck out of the work the Core Team does, even if people think we have a weird way of showing it. I also get that my clientele are not the norm for most WordPress agencies. But maybe we should stop making AdminUI changes every release, stop focussing on blogging for just one release, and have a good long look at our architecture. I’m no-longer qualified to say anything unpleasant about it give all the hard work that so many have put into it; but to me no good multi-lingual support, no good e-commerce solution, no good forum solution, no link management, no good/real hierarchal support, and no n-to-n content support suggests that something isn’t right. 436 days with a paid developer to convert bbPress1.0 (which was already running on BackPress/WP3.0) into the bbPress2.0 plugin, that’s slower out of the box than any of its predecessors (even with full WP integration) that only works with 3 of the top 20 themes on the WP repository without custom coding screams “something’s not right there”. I mean, We’re still in a position where someone with the capability to Moderate a comment is REQUIRED to be able to edit any piece of content on the entire website or network??? WTFudge! moderate_comments I promise that it’s not sarcastic when I say that maybe we should all chat more about that sort of thing than make full-screen editing, or Clippy style hover menus, or revamp the Admin UI every other release or… As always, I’m very appreciative of the time you give up to read and reply to the communities thoughts. Yours, » Posted By Kevinjohn Gallagher On December 6, 2011 @ 9:07 PM @Jeffro - I knew someone was going to play THAT card against me, might as well be you :) :D I think we can all agree that WordPress is awesome. I’m also cool with the idea that WordPress is a CMS in that it helps Jeff manage the content on this blog. It’s not that I don’t think it’s a CMS, it’s just not a CMS in the same way that the others on the list are. It’s like… comparing a Harley Davidson bike to a Greyhound bus. The Harley looks awesome, and can do some simple things well. The Greyhound bus does more things for more people than the Harley, but requires more work to get the licence. It’s wrong to say that one is better than the other at every thing simply because more people in a specific subset have Harleys. If all you’re wanting from a vehicle is to go to and from your mates house, a Harley is awesome. If you want to take 60 people cross country, with multiple drivers, and go shopping, then the Greyhound bus is the better option. Is it accurate then to say that the Harley is either the best or most successful mode of transport? The stats in the article are based on the top million websites. The Key stat I think is that there are more blogs in the top 1 million sites than any other type of website. Jeff this website has 1 blog page, and 2 static pages. If you were my client I’d recommend WordPress, and I’m so glad that its working for you. But above a certain size or functionality, using WordPress becomes counter productive (hello e-commerce, hello forums). how does WordPress maintain the strengths it has today in terms of why it’s so popular with users all across the board in terms of skill levels but also implement most of what Kevin thinks WordPress needs to be considered a true CMS? I’ve given a slightly wrong impression there, sorry. I do think WordPress manages content, it just doesn’t manage as much content as the other CMS’ listed. WordPress is like Duplo. Comparing it to Mechano or Space Lego when all you want to do is build a house is unfair. Take forums as an example. Forums are awesome, exceptionally simple, and have been around since before the first website (as Bulletin Boards), but we don’t have an honest-to-goodness genuine forum that works well with WordPress. I’m not suggesting that WordPress should suddenly attempt to morph into something it’s not, such as Drupal or Joomla, but I am suggesting that growth of popularity due to ease of use and ease of installation over functionality are things to be wary of. It’s alot easier to fix the UI than it is to fix the underlying data structure. Just because something is either a) popular or b) widely used or c) simple – doesn’t mean that it’s either sustainable (hello IE6, IE&, IE8). Facebook, Google+, Twitter have all made huge in roads to “blogging” sphere in the last 6 months. More and more of the blogs/news sources are moving to using these services rather than be reliant on plugins that are not tied to the latest version of the software (e.g. Robert Scoble and WordPress’ reliance on community created social media plug-ins). If it starts eating into the that market, what does WordPress have to fall back on? ===Finally found it…=== here’s an image from Dougal Gunter’s website from last year that appeared on the planet.wordpress.org news feed. http://maxcdn.gunters.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/WordPress-vs-Drupal.png The idea that it’s as easy to change the underlying Architecture and API of any system, as it is to make it look better is not even close to accurate. Sometimes we WordPress fans need to look outside of our own bubble. ==== REF ==== Duplo: http://www.comparestoreprices.co.uk/images/le/lego-duplo-creative-bucket-5538-.jpg » Posted By Kevinjohn Gallagher On December 6, 2011 @ 12:02 PM @Jeffro – To say, then, that WordPress is just blogging software is naive. Likewise, to say that WordPress is not blogging software is a bit disingenuous. The reality is that WordPress is a very successful blogging platform, as well as the world’s most successful CMS. This is far more accurate. e.g. IE7 and IE8 were supremely successful. » Posted By Kevinjohn Gallagher On December 5, 2011 @ 3:39 PM [WordPress]’s current spot of being the best in breed within the content management space Respectfully Jeff, thats not even close to true. WordPress excels at a number of things, and it’s done brilliantly to capture that market (blogging, and small & simple websites), but the idea that because it’s had more installs than Joomla and Drupal (which are going after a different market) that it’s suddenly the “best in breed within the content management space” is ridiculous bro. Simply, and utterly ridiculous. WordPress has either no, or severely limited: And thats ok, because you don’t need those for blogging. Heck you don’t need them for simple websites, which is what WordPress is aiming at… read: http://ma.tt/2011/09/amazon-silk-on-wp-com/ I’m guessing they just wanted a quick and easy way to make a functional and beautiful website, which is kind of the whole idea of WordPress. – Matt Quick, Functional and Beautiful. btw: That amazing website by Amazon to show off the power of WordPress is just 1 logo, no menu, 1 blog post – never updated. Oh and the link on the page doesn’t work. ====== I love WordPress, with all it’s good stuff and bad stuff, but as someone who spends a large section of his working life running RFP and/or evaluation processes for CMS I can assure you, that WordPress is so far from “best in breed within the content management space” its unreal. It’s simply not at the races with some of the bigger players, unlike Drupal which is. I don’t know how many websites you run bro, or how many different CMSs you use, but lets celebrate the things WordPress does well and leave the fanboy tub-thumping to Matt ;) » Posted By Kevinjohn Gallagher On December 5, 2011 @ 2:01 PM Upgrading And Backwards Compatibility For Plugins Yo Otto, Mate, that’s a totally fair view point. I absolutely get it. Monolithic and archaic IT systems that take months and years to implement anything are a nightmare, and you’re lucky to be able to avoid them. My hats off to you. But my point is this: “we” are moving those people/companies into an “edge case” that we’re not looking to support or cater for. That’s fine, but that’s a large percentage of companies. if you users need “training material” to use WordPress, then it is my considered opinion that they shouldn’t be doing things like “touching computers” or “looking at screens” in the first place. I get the point you’re making here bro, and don’t think you’re being glib. I do though think you’re being short sighted. How does a blind person know how to use WordPress without training? Thats my issue. somewhere along the line we’ve decided that WordPress is really only going for the able-bodied, tech-literate in small and agile companies. Thats just not the real world. » Posted By Kevinjohn Gallagher On December 2, 2011 @ 7:01 AM We need to find ways to make people upgrade Isn’t that a diametrically opposite paradigm to “Free as in Speech” ? Thats some scary stuff right there. The large issue is that no software supplier in the world has successfully forced it’s users to continually upgrade to the latest version as and when it want it to. We’ve 25+ years of data to support this in software, and about 1000 years to support it in Tech. * Telling people to upgrade doesn’t work. To get people to upgrade anything, and I mean from a spork to WordPress to IE to their phone to their car – we have to make it a positive Return on Investment for them. Right now we’re not doing that, because we don’t consider: We shouldn’t be making people do anything. If people aren’t upgrading, we should find out why, so we can manage that better. But we’re not. As an aside: As of Monday our offices, and our clients, enter a 2 month code freeze. Its normal for us over the Christmas and New Year period to make sure we don’t release any non-critical code that we’d end up having to support at the worst possible moment. WordPress 3.4 is scheduled for release the first week in March, just 4 weeks after our Code Freeze is lifted. As a company, a WordPress orientated company, we have no reason to upgrade any of our clients to 3.3, only to have to upgrade them to 3.4 just 4 weeks later. If only there was a Project Manager on the core team, but then the project manager would probably want at least 1 tester, and we don’t want that now would we. P.S. Hope your surgery went ok dude! I’m wishing you a speedy recovery. » Posted By Kevinjohn Gallagher On November 30, 2011 @ 8:58 PM IMO, stability is overrated So real world example: one of my current clients has a legal requirement to have their website up, and accurate to under 15 minutes previous. The repercussions of not doing so are so severe on a moite by minute basis I wouldn’t scare you all by typing them out here. My viewpoint is very different to people who develop for fun. I think thats why I come across like “a bit of jerk” (to quote Jeff). I love WordPress. But I’ve been very open and honest that 2011 is the first year in 4 years where [my company] have moved more clients OFF WordPress than ON to WordPress; and their number one complaint: Stability. Not one our Government or Financial Services clients have had positive comments about WordPress3.3 (we hosted our bi-monthly “demo,show and tell”) and each and every one of them have “opted out” of our upgrade when our code freeze lifts in January, as have 2 of our Additionally, all of those clients apart from one opted out of 3.2 as well due to the Browse Crappy, sorry, Browse Happy ;) » Posted By Kevinjohn Gallagher On November 30, 2011 @ 4:50 PM @David Gwyer - I can’t see us ever even contemplating providing a guarantee of backwards compatibility. It is time consuming enough just keeping up with the latest version! Thats why having 3 versions a year is an issue. It provides a huge “barrier to entry” for many plugin developers, and we have thousands of abandoned plugins that don’t work with the latest release. This in turn stops people from upgrading because the plugin they use doesn’t work. It’s a Chicken and Egg scenario. people should ‘always’ upgrade to the latest version for the latest bug/security fixes alone, No, no, no, no, no. You should evaluate the pro’s and con’s of upgrading ANY software before you do it, and not just upgrade on blind faith. We lost the trust-us/blind-faith argument with Capital_P_Dangit. (adding code a few hours before packaging for release, after the testing procedure was complete and without opening a Trac ticket so people could see it). There needs to be a business case to support upgrading. We’ve stopped trying to educate people as to the positives of upgrading, and instead have moved into tub-thumping “ZOMG THE SECOND A NEW VERSION COMES THE OLD VERSION IS SUDDENLY UNSECURE. UPGRADE OF THE EVIL PEOPLE WILL GET YOU. Forward this warning to 10 people in the next 5 minutes or you’ll morph into a drupal install“. 3.2.1 has no known security bugs, that won’t change the day 3.3 comes out. We need to accentuate the GOOD reasons to upgrade rather than the BAD reasons. By packaging Security, Functionality and UI changes into the one release, many of our/my clients live in fear of a security hole being found in WordPress because their AdminUI will change – again. If your company uses WindowsXP and IE7, or uses bbPress, or has colour blind people, or people that don’t use a mouse (hover menus suck), then upgrading to WordPress3.3 will give them a negative RoI. We’ve stopped trying to solve WHY people don’t upgrade, and are moving to try and FORCE them to upgrade because WE want them to. I don’t know about you, but how’s that worked out for Microsoft on IE6 and XP? Yeah, thats what I thought. It’s great to be leading edge, but when you’re bleeding edge, you start to push more and more people into a category with no realistic upgrade path. * Using IE6? can’t upgrade Outside of North America, sorry some of us are, IE6 & 7 have a combined market share greater than Opera, Safari and Mobile Browsers combined. This number grows substantially once you move to larger corporations, who are less agile. We have to stop thinking that we can bend the IT world to our will. We have to stop living in this bubble. Look at the stats in question. 50% of people still on a version 2 releases old. Something in the “THOU SHALT DO WHAT WE SAY” model isn’t working, y’know, like it’s not worked for any tech company since, well, since we had tech slightly more advanced than then catapult!! We need to stop thinking like developers and people who knows the system. We need to start thinking like it’s our parents who have a WordPress install, and you’ll see that people stick with what works until it doesn’t work anymore. People don’t want the latest and greatest, people want what works. We also need to stop taking stats from WordPress.com. It’s a self hosted blogging platform, that while awesome, is not indicative of the rest of the internet. We’re skewing data from 1 source with 1 purpose and making generalisations about multiple sources with multiple purposes from it. It’s just a stupid thing to do; and each of you here are better than that (I’m probably the dumbest person in this conversation). Put down the Kool-Aid, stop building blogs, start looking at the market that WordPress doesn’t appeal to but could easily dominate, think like your parent and not a wordpress fan. » Posted By Kevinjohn Gallagher On November 30, 2011 @ 9:53 AM Remember we’ve changed a considerable amount of dependencies and minimums in the last 9 months. If your browser is IE6, IE7, if you’re on Windows XP, If your server or database aren’t at our new minimum or if you used bbPress then upgrading past 3.0 is not an automatic “no brainer”. There comes a time when we have got to realize that we have to wait for technology and the people using said technology to catch up with us. The more we go shooting off, the more likely we are to move a higher percentage of people to “edge cases” and only focus on those who we deem part of the “in-crowd”. Can we also dismiss the myth that every single WordPress install becomes insecure the very second a new release comes out? It isn’t true. I know this isn’t the most popular opinion, but we have a very high barrier for entry with WordPress once you’re past the initial learning curve (which is nice and simple). With a 4 month development cycle (3 months coding and 1 month testing), that’s not alot of time to stay up to date if you’re not a full time WordPress developer. @Andrea @Andrea_R - I really don’t even know why the question is being asked – should people still support WordPress 2.0 because some people use it? That’s not the question being raised though. WordPress 3.0 came out last year. We’re not discussing backward comparability for 12 versions, but 2 versions. Seriously, 2 versions. And each of those versions have had a UI change with it. The next version has a UI change as well. @Otto - The Simple Google Connect plugin I released today also requires 3.3 Wait, so you’re releasing code that won’t work with the CURRENT version of WordPress? And you’re doing it intentionally to force people who are happy with THEIR platform to use a system YOU want them to use? May I remind you of Wheaton’s Law: If your users really want to use your plugin/theme, then find out that they must upgrade, they will. The problem with this mate is that you presume that every user has the capability to do so, without ever considering the risk. A great many small companies do not see the RoI on a website as we technical people do, and the risk of upgrading is just too much. We never talk about why users don’t upgrade in their terms, only in terms of why we think they should. How can we address the needs of others, if our solution is for them to just think like us? » Posted By Kevinjohn Gallagher On November 29, 2011 @ 9:22 AM Please Don’t Use The Post Title As A Hyperlink RSS, rightly or wrongly, is being removed by a greater number of blogs and websites, who have found it’s use dropping at a scary rate in the past 18 months. Thanks to Twitter (140 chars including link) and Facebook (500 chars max including link, but only 140 chars shown), people are no longer interested in consuming information in the way we did 5 years ago or actually 12 years ago with RSS was defined. This approach violates all the experience we have become familiar with in blogs and especially RSS feeds Can’t the same be said for Twitter? the iPhone? Just because something is familiar, doesn’t in any way make it the correct or modern way to do things. themers PLEASE do not implement themes that break the standard UX for blog There isn’t any Standards. There are no hard and fast rules. Don’t get me wrong, I love my RSS reader, but like any technology, it’s only useful when a certain percentage of people use it. That’s no longer the case. And that’s probably not a bad thing. » Posted By Kevinjohn Gallagher On November 4, 2011 @ 10:10 AM DevPress Plans To Launch Plugin/Theme Review Service While I don’t have any information as to how much Mark charges for his time $350 per hour, according to Mark’s website. » Posted By Kevinjohn Gallagher On November 3, 2011 @ 3:47 AM WordPress Not The Choice For Multinational Search Really appreciate the reply :) and loved your link, i can see myself linking to it myself on a few occasions. » Posted By Kevinjohn Gallagher On October 14, 2011 @ 6:34 AM It’s not that testing is bad, it’s that you’re starting to test it too late. Oh I agree, but the OP, and many here who lament “big business” are aghast that there is use of, god forbid, an actual test plan (test plan 9 from outer space, presumably). I realise that sometimes people think that I’m a bit brash, or loud (almost 20 years in Scotland – I can’t help it, this is just how I talk haha) or opinionated. I probably am all of those things. But in the last 3 years, watching WordPress’s explosion, it pains/worries me that so many take stock from their singular viewpoint. What started out as Guidelines, suddenly became Standards, before morphing into Evangelism, and now close to Rhetoric (e.g. Thou shalt upgrade the very second a new WordPress version is release without question or business case); and those who still view and act upon these things as Guidelines, as after all it’s open source software, are viewed upon with distain and distrust. 1-click-upgrade is wonderful, truly bloody awesome, but it’s also had a negative effect, where a greater number of people put their faith in the testing thats already been done by the community, and just click-it-and-see. There is always a balance between making it easy for someone, and making them lazy. Which has added another problem. The original thought process was that there were people out there who didn’t know how to upgrade, and now they can. Well now we have people who know how to upgrade, but are fed up of doing so. People choosing not to upgrade simply because “meh, there’ll be another one in a week or so anyway”. Security wise (just to bring it back to Jeffro’s post), we’re making people very numb to updates, something that is not good at all. If you wait until a “release” before you begin testing, then of course you’re going to have problems. Realistically, you should be under a continuous cycle of testing and development at the same time. why is your “dev” site not running trunk? You’d get at least a month or two head start on any testing and new development for upcoming changes, and by the time release rolled around, you’d be already tested and up and running. At the risk of pouring salt into old wounds, I have a simple answer to that: Capital_P_Dangit() Faith in the Alpha > Beta > RC > release system no longer presides in my company, or my clients. When the core team (hi Matt) are able to add in features after the RC to rewrite file paths on a marketing whim, then what’s the point of Beta’s for people like us? When did “feature freeze” mean “feature freeze, unless we want to add some” I mean, the current Beta, not alpha or nightly but Beta for 3.3′s admin section cant be navigated in IE7. Not a small feature, but the Admin doesn’t work, at all, in IE7. How in the blazes of all that is Joss Whedon did that hit Beta? If only there was a test plan (9 from outer space). Just to clarify, every single person on the core team and who works on the releases for Automattic and the dev team, every single one of them didn’t test it on IE7, or even IE8 and hit compatible mode. To quote Wikipedia here:
Beta… It generally begins when the software is feature complete. The focus of beta testing is reducing impacts to users, often incorporating usability testing. The process of delivering a beta version to the users is called beta release and this is typically the first time that the software is available outside of the organization that developed it.
And yet we’ve got a Beta version in 3.3 that NO features work ing IE7, and no-one tested it. Not in-depth testing btw, but no-one even loaded it once or they would have seen the menu not working. Bluntly, with Beta’s like this, and releases with the likes of Capital_P_Dangit(), running trunk on our dev site sometimes feels like farting against thunder – something must smell terrible for us to even take notice! Put frankly, and with all due respect to someone who I’ve admired for a long time Otto, the state of WordPress beta’s over the last year (and 4 releases) have been so far from what I’d call a beta, that we only use it to give us a heads up of anything truly huge thats changed. I’ve been saying it for years now, and people really ridicule me for it, but maybe we need a slightly better ratio of Project Managers to Happyness Gardeners, cos right now for the WP core it’s 6 developers, 0 Project Managers and 1 community manager employed by WP.org (who tested the Beta with 12 people on macs & 8 on PCs, but everyone used FF or Chrome). Frankly, if thats a good test plan, then can the last person here switch off the lights please? » Posted By Kevinjohn Gallagher On October 13, 2011 @ 3:26 PM larger companies often have a culture of extensively testing each update. Wait, are you saying that we shouldn’t test software updates to mission critical systems now? Why wouldn’t we test it? Is this what happens after a year of 1-click-update, that we start to forego testing? They have dev, test and production servers and promote changes through these, following through an extensive test plan. Oh and they can’t just do this, they have to take the change to the Change Advisory Board for approval (which may take a couple of weeks), create the test plan, the roll back plan, let all the stakeholders know of the work and the potential outage, co-ordinate the update so there is zero chance of the site going down when something major is happening on the website, etc.
One of my clients has a legal requirement to have the share price on the front-page correct to under 15 minutes previous. Their website can not go down and cannot be akamai-type cached. Thorough testing of any update to any of their systems is not done because of their old-fashioned IT strategy, it’s because without it, they are royally fornicated to the tune of millions of dollars. And yeah, they need to do all this for a 1 click, 10 second update. So they love a stable product that doesn’t change much. Um, no mention of training/support/documentation/translation the thousands of staff members on the UI and Workflow changes that WordPress pushes out every release. Obviously, that’s just 1 click and 10 seconds to update too, right? Thankfully a lot of these companies are realising that they need to change, but that’s the traditional enterprise IT mindset.
There’s a very funny dicotimy going on with WordPress. On one hand we get upset when people say that WordPress doesn’t tick the box for every solution; yet on the other hand we play the David and Goliath card when talking about Enterprise level IT systems. Pick one :) Even clients who have embraced the business transformation required to move to agile development and deployment still need to actually test software before releasing it live. EVERYONE should test each update for each of their sites. Why should Enterprise level clients be any different? » Posted By Kevinjohn Gallagher On October 13, 2011 @ 12:04 PM At the risk of following on other conversations… In my opinion the reason that you have seemed to misinterpret this is due to the level of CMS’ness you use WordPress for. Chris, like many of us, is ecstatic that security vulnerabilities are fixed and released ASAP. It’s the additional releases as well as security ones that really start to cause hassle. Chris also headed the last section “Security & Support Concerns”. Obviously we all love WordPress, but realistically it’s very “CMSlite” – especially compared to the alternatives (Drupal, Joomla, Umbraco, Typo3 etc). The ability to knock out a micro-site or community site in English quickly is wonderful in WordPress. As soon as you want stability or extensibility of data, it’s ability to match the competitors on this front drops quickly. If I may give another example close to home: CMS’s aimed at non-bloggers/small-websites simply don’t work well acting the way WordPress does. And that’s ok, its clearly not the market it’s aiming for, but lets not get defensive of WordPress every-time someone points out it’s faults :) » Posted By Kevinjohn Gallagher On October 13, 2011 @ 11:26 AM Some Not Happy With Flyout Menus @Andrew Nacin - Andrew mate, I totally get that. I’m sure as heck not expecting a finished product in beta, but really, no-one loaded the website in IE7 to even look. Isn’t there some form of tick box for the core team that says “yes, we loaded [the release] in all of these browsers”? What did the test plan (9 from outer space) say? Who was the release manager? (These are rhetorical, i don’t think the core team has to answer to me in any way, shape-or-form. I’m a poor developer, but a not bad process-geek, ) Y’know, Bugs are fine bro, truly we all expect bugs in beta (especially in IE7!), but to not even load it in a browser with a bigger market share than Safari and IE9 is kinda poor form, cos you just know someone loaded it in their iPhone ;) Maybe it’s just me, and heck if it is, that’s awesome… but I don’t think something is ready for Beta if it actually doesn’t work at all. And this Beta couldn’t even be navigated in a supported browser. 3 simple CSS fixes later, we’re back in the game. Woot!!! More WordPress awesomeness… but with just a smidgen less faith in the beta releases, test plan, or release management. Happy to discuss it over a whisky in April mate :) » Posted By Kevinjohn Gallagher On October 17, 2011 @ 5:51 PM @Otto - To be fair, there was consideration for removing IE7 support entirely, but I think that got pushed back a release or two. Q. Ok, but when IE7 wasn’t dropped, who loaded up the 3.3 nightly to check to see if it worked before saying “hey, I think this is ready for Beta”? A. No-one Q. Ok, but when IE7 wasn’t dropped, who loaded up test and release plan and made sure that all the boxes were tickets, such as to check to see if it worked before saying “hey, I think this is ready for Beta”? A. No-one Q. Ok, but when IE7 wasn’t dropped, Who was the Product owner or Project Manager who put the line in the sand and said, hey it’s ready for beta. A. No-one According to http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php and http://gs.statcounter.com/ IE7 still had a higher percentage of users than IE9 and Safari (all versions including iOS), yet no-one thought to even load the AdminUI to see if it worked??? You know guys like me, the folks who aren’t well liked because we openly criticise 436 days of paid development time for a plug-in to not-quite replace bbPress, truly can accept UI changes we don’t like. We know that there are going to be compromises to be made, especially in Open Source Software; we don’t moan for the sake of it. But seriously, how do people expect us to “have faith” when no-one on the core/dev/automattic team can even be bothered to load their own software release in a browser with close to a 10% market share?? As I said on the thread that Jeffro references on WP.org, we’re moving more and more people into the “edge case” category. Moving 10% of internet users into it simply because we thought about not supporting their browser but changed our mind, is a very very scary proposition. » Posted By Kevinjohn Gallagher On October 13, 2011 @ 3:49 PM With all due respect Jeffro, This is not a review of the WooCommerce plug-in as a review of your first time using a Custom Post Type (a feature made public on 17th June last year). You’ve given us a review of an e-commerce application , without reviewing the actual e-commerce bit. - Did it use PayPal? What other providers were given? What about googleCheckout or Authorize.net? Could you order from a Credit / Debit card ? How about the Non-US options? It feels to me that this review really lacks the end-to-end nature of an actual e-commerce transaction. P.S. “View Post” means they didn’t change “Post” to “Product” in the view button name option for registering custom post types. It’s a quick typo to change. » Posted By Kevinjohn Gallagher On September 30, 2011 @ 7:40 AMComments Posted By Kevinjohn Gallagher
Andrew: http://www.wptavern.com/case-study-on-how-wordpress-won-the-crown#comment-16756
Me: http://www.wptavern.com/case-study-on-how-wordpress-won-the-crown#comment-16776
http://kevinjohngallagher.com/2012/01/the-butterfly-effect/
184 Pages
2322 User-submitted Posts
6044 User-submitted Galleries (not images, galleries of images)
1090 User-submitted Videos
32,167 Comments
35,689 Users
One of our blogs (just a blog) that we consult with has over 5million approved (non-spam) comments. 32,000 comments, dude, we call that December.
I thought you were like the bogeyman, a story to scare kids. Be careful, or Pete Mall will kick start a project to replace your forum, and then run off when there’s work to be done.
But they shouldn’t bring UI changes as well.
It craps on everything out there from a great height.
Why does the WP community need to mutually assure themselves that everything’s ok?
If WP is working for you, awesome!
Why should there be a backlash if it’s not working for us?
Executive Director: Open Source Scotland
Non-Executive Director: Pure Web Brilliant
I’m wrong all the time.
But there’s a large subset of this community that’s decided that I’m wrong before they read what I’ve written. Which in fairness is on MY blog, on MY website. If people don’t like it, they don’t have to read it. I didn’t cross post it anywhere!
You know thats how contracting and consulting work though, right?
Some gigs are long, some are short.
“In Matt we trust.”
- Me: Well, I’d actually love to know what your thoughts on that were.
- Person X: Well you made some good points about usability, accessibility, and specifically about less-than-fully-abled people, but on the other hand there’s what the Core Devs think. I think its fairly balanced
- Me: Well what do they think, what bit of their viewpoint do you agree with?
- Person X: Well, they’re the core devs. I just agree with them.
I fully appreciate that that anyone expressing an opinion does so because they think that they are correct. I’m no different. The difference is that the tone coming from individuals employed by Matt (both at Automattic and Audrey) has changed quite considerably in the last 2 years.
We have a singular functionality, with a sole purpose to detect a user’s browser and tell them if it’s not the latest version, and… it doesn’t work.
It’ll still work in the same way it does now, and the way it has done for 10 years, but it won’t be “officially supported”.
You therefore have a bit over 2 years to pay to upgrade to the latest version of your Operating System, which will cost you about $100 – but if you pay for it now, note that you’ll not be on the latest version of the operating system next year when Windows 8 comes out.
http://kevinjohngallagher.com/2011/06/browse-crappy/
It also stores documents in an MD5 hash, which means we can’t use it on Government websites in certain countries (namely America, Canada, Germany, France etc) as well as many fussy clients.
Since 2.0
Allows users to moderate comments from the Comments SubPanel (although a user needs the edit_posts Capability in order to access this)
Kevinjohn
Space Lego: http://www.flushthefashion.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/space_lego.jpg
Meccano: http://www.kerrisontoys.co.uk/images/838540.jpg.pagespeed.ce.OWgAQK9HNK.jpg@David Gwyer -
Just because something is successful does not mean it’s the best.
1. Document management
2. Workflow management
3. Digital asset management
4. Link management
5. User management
6. ESI Caching / CDN ability.
7. WYSIWYG editing
8. Single Sign-on
9. Multi-side Admin
10. Publishing options
11. Access Management
12. Application
13. Multi-lingual
14. n-to-n content sharing
15. Reporting
Thats what WordPress does well, as long as you want that “functional”-ity to be little and specific. Man, even you blogged that the WordPress shop this year is on Joomla. Sadly, advanced functionality that requires multiple n-to-n nodes simply doesn’t fit into how WordPress works. (/wave bbPress)
How does a person with disabilities know how best to use WordPress without training?
* Making it easy to upgrade doesn’t work.
* Making it cost effective to upgrade doesn’t work.
* Making it more secure to upgrade doesn’t work.
* Attempting to make people upgrade doesn’t work.
1) Time it takes to upgrade
2) Time it takes to test after WP has been released (can’t do it in beta anymore, thanks Capital_P_Dangit)
3) Time it takes to programatically change all of the “decisions not options”
4) Time it takes to update the training material
5) Time it takes to train staff on whatever UI changes have been made this release
6) Time it takes to upgrade dependancies (plugins, themes, applications etc)
University clients.
Thats a simply terrible idea, thats become some form of Rhetoric around the WordPress community over the 18 months.
* Using IE7? probably can’t upgrade (definitely shouldn’t)
* Using a PHP version less than 5.2? can’t upgrade
* Using a MySQL version less than5? can’t upgrade
* Using a MySQL equivalent? can’t upgrade
* Using WindowsXP? probably can’t upgrade (definitely shouldn’t)
* Don’t use a mouse? can’t upgrade to 3.3
* Colour blindness? Can’t upgrade
* Using bbPress? Can’t upgrade
* Using a plugin thats been abandoned? can’t Upgrade
* Using a theme thats been abandoned? can’t Upgrade
http://toomanyposts.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/wheatons-law.png
UX is about user experience, and that’s ever evolving.
What users “expect” from today’s blogs is massively different from 5 years ago. Massively.
(plus the clusterf**k that was 2 years of bbPress and BackPress of-course).
Testing before you update the core of your Content Management System should be done by, surprisingly, you.
At a mid-to-enterprise level, having 5 individual releases release’s in 16 months (not including security / bug fix upgrades) is simply way too much – especially given how much changes in each one.
In the 7 months & 20 days since 3.1 was released, we’ve had 8 releases of WordPress. 8!!! That’s a release once every 29 days so far this year.
That’s not sustainable past a certain point, and that point is different for many clients/businesses (purely anecdotal evidence: 2 of my big clients, and 2 medium clients this year have asked to be migrated away from WordPress to avoid just this).
It’s not just security. Each time there is a WordPress update to the backend UI (/wave flyout menus – 2 changes to workflow of Admin UI in 2 releases – mental) all training documents and manuals need to re-edited to match the new UI and workflow. Non-tech savvy people then need to go through some for of training (even if it’s just an e-mail update) to inform them about all the changes. That’s not a small amount of work, and something that people forget when talking about upgrading – it’s not just clicking a button and magically everyone knows where everything is and how everything works.
e.g. We’ve had Custom Post Types in WordPress since 2.8 – June 11, 2009 – and a UI for them since WordPress 3.0 – June 17, 2010 – but in your last 2 plug-in review you’ve raved about how they use Custom Post Types because its so new/unexpected/rarely-used. And you’re not wrong !! Right now, the data isn’t that extensible – or if it was the Custom Post Formats that were part of 3.1 would have been an Akismet-esque included plug-in as originally discussed.
«« Back To Stats Page
- What was the error handling like?
- What sort of notification did the shop owner receive?
- What sort of notification did the purchaser receive?
- Did a user have to be registered to order?
- Was there an option for registered users to save some of their data (shipping address)?
- Is there an option for users to track their order? And therefore for the store owner to update its status?
- Can users see previous completed orders?
