Displaying 1 To 29 Of 29 Comments 500 Plugins To Possibly Be Purged From The Repository @John Bolyard – You should follow http://wpdevel.wordpress.com. It is the core development team’s blog, and is where all official stuff gets posted. » Posted By Jane Wells On February 23, 2012 @ 2:22 PM WordPress Foundation To Foot The Bill For Meetup.com Organizer Dues @Anonymouse – If I “got my way” I’d be running a bakery now and someone else would be the punching bag. The bakery’s website would be on WordPress, of course! :) » Posted By Jane Wells On January 30, 2012 @ 2:53 PM There will be some guidelines, but not as extensive or as stringent as for WordCamps. It will basically boil down to budget transparency, ensuring equal opportunity for members to plan events, and, “Don’t be a scammer or a jerk.” Waiting to see if anything surprising gets reported by current and hopeful organizers in the survey, but so far it looks like those should cover the problems we’ve heard about. Before we get to the point of doing the official opt-in, I’ll publish the expectations/guidelines, but the above are about what I’m expecting. » Posted By Jane Wells On January 28, 2012 @ 1:15 PM Some Orgnizations And WordPress Just Don’t Mix This is ridiculous. I said someone writing nasty emails or launching ddos attacks was lame, that it wasn’t coming from core team, and that I was sorry it was happening. When he posted that people were threatening him, I said if I could get the info I would reach out and see what we could do to help stop those people. Not everyone spends all day on wptavern, so if something needs to be dealt with right away by the core team or project leadership, someone needs to contact us directly. I’m not going to get caught up in the annual trolling competition here. Kevinjohn, if you contact me or Mark directly, we’ll do what we can to help. » Posted By Jane Wells On January 15, 2012 @ 7:09 PM @Andreas Nurbo -Why should he contact me? Because otherwise how would I know there is unacceptable behavior going on and/or that someone is waiting for me to do something about it? We don’t encourage extreme behavior, and Matt has never tried to get someone fired. Your comment is more extreme behavior than anything I’ve ever encouraged or approved. » Posted By Jane Wells On January 15, 2012 @ 5:31 PM @Andreas Nurbo – I agree, but no one has contacted us afaik to give details/ask us to intercede. @Kevinjohn, if you will forward the threats to me, I would be happy to see if there’s anything we can do to turn the crazy people into un-crazy people. » Posted By Jane Wells On January 15, 2012 @ 4:22 PM Every company, if not individual, should use the best tools are their disposal for the job they have to do. I completely agree. Use whatever will make your work easier and your life happier. Turning software preference into a cause for battle is just dumb. I have friends at Acquia, even. :) 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. I wasn’t all those things. I do a bunch of stuff that touches a lot of areas, but when someone asks what I do, I say I am the ux lead and I project manage the open source dev group. Matt is in charge of wp.org and the Foundation, Andrea is in charge of WordCamps (now being covered by Zé since A is on maternity leave), most of those other things don’t really exist as roles. Anytime there’s a job that isn’t covered by the WP team, it’s suddenly “Jane does that”. More like, “Jane will try to find someone to do that,” which sometimes takes a while. Oh, and if this image ( http://t.co/mVdB3i7I ) is an Agile Development project plan, Are you crazy? Of course it’s not! It’s something we came up with at core team meetup that is extremely specific to the wp core team members pairing up for 3.4, their schedules, our past weaknesses, ux bottlenecks, etc. The idea of a set cycle time is about the only thing that’s similar to agile. then Jane’s not a Project Manager. Because I’m considering digging a grave in my back garden just to turn in it. Sadly, yes, I am. It’s just not the most visible part of my job, and the level of PM that happens within WP is nowhere near the level that exists in an agency environment (which I worked in for years). When I started, no one wanted any kind of project management. Even making a rough schedule for a release took a few tries to be accepted by the guys. 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. For the record, Otto is not a member of the core team. Trusted contributor, yes, but not core team. There was no plan in 3.3 to drop support for IE7, so that’s incorrect. Mark said he wanted to, but we said no before the cycle was even scoped. The issue had more to do with some miscommunication around who was testing on what platforms and/or virtual machines, which is something we’ll hopefully be fixing in 3.4 with the introduction of a formal QA plan (post coming to wpdevel once I have time to write it). I’ve also raised this with Nacin and MarkJaquith on Twitter, who both joked that we should just use a different browser. Sometimes we joke instead of repeating conversations that have been had in irc multiple times. Also, yes: IE7 sucks. :) 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. It wasn’t formal UAT. I used to run a usability testing lab in NYC; I’m clear on what constitutes representative testing. This was just lo-fi UI reactions to confirm or reject some of the gut-instinct choices that had been made. I wrote about the difference on my blog at the time, and the whole platform/tools conundrum. The limited scope was highly intentional because it was very limited-scope testing. 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. Then someone needs better hires. 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. You talked about that before, but the fact is that there are some heavy contributors that we don’t agree with on a lot of major things who still manage to make it onto the credits page b/c they continue to contribute and improve the product even though they won’t always get their way. 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. That’s not nice. 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. As it happens, the style lead for WP, Matt Thomas, is color blind. That said, there is more than one type of color blindness, not to mention other visual acuity issues that have different contrast requirements. We count on the accessibility volunteers to test the admin for that kind of stuff. Recently I asked Mel (Esmi on the forums) to act as the go-to person for accessibility and take the disparate pieces of advice we get from the accessibility blog into discrete recommendations the devs can act on, and she said yes. So this, too, will hopefully improve. Navigating WP Admin without a mouse is a nightmare, but when I say that people think “iPad”. I don’t, I think keyboard access. As someone who loses the use of her hands/wrists every few days and has to rely on keyboard access about half the time because using a mouse or trackpad is too painful, I couldn’t care less about iPads (which, being basically the same as trackpads, are mostly unusable for me). how confident are you that it was tested on a screen reader? People who tested on screen readers posted their findings to the accessibility blog. If you know of something problematic for readers, making a trac ticket for it will at least get it on the radar. 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. If there’s a list of the specific things that caused that rating and what we can do to fix them, we would love to get a copy of it. 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? No, but again, that testing was not meant to be indicative of the world. It had a specific, small purpose. 436 days to get the bbPress plugin from first commit to release, with a paid Automattic developer. A paid Automattic developer who’s the lead for BuddyPress, a much bigger project with a bigger user base and more immediate needs, and who had a new job at Automattic that had nothing to do with building bbPress or BuddyPress. No harshing on Jtrip, please, he had way more work on his plate last year than anyone probably realized. Remember we had a roadmap for 3.0 > 3.4 at the time of 3.0beta1. Who’s we? We’ve never done a roadmap that far in advance that I can remember. Link? We might all talk about what things we hope we’ll get to next time around, or what we each think should come next, but there’s no roadmap until we scope each release, and we don’t plan further ahead than the current cycle in terms of features. I’ve no idea why people are upset that WE have chosen to no longer use WordPress. You folks can still use it. I’m not upset. I’d much rather see people happily using something else than be frustrated using a product that doesn’t serve their needs. No1 wants u 2 have ur own opinion. That’s lame and ridiculous. It certainly didn’t come from anyone on core team, and I’m sorry that happened to you. I wonder if they have WordPress tattoos… ;) I have tattoos, but have never understood why someone would put a product logo on their body permanently. I’ll stick to putting stickers on my laptop. Good luck with your new CMS! » Posted By Jane Wells On January 12, 2012 @ 11:01 PM Matt Mullenweg To Be In Charge Of The 2012 Default Theme @Kevinjohn Gallagher – For the record, the WordPress tattoos kind of horrify me. I have tattoos myself, but the thought of branding myself with a logo isn’t my cup of tea. If I was Matt or Mike and it was representing my own creation I could maybe see it, but otherwise it does seem a little weird/culty, I’ll give you that. » Posted By Jane Wells On December 23, 2011 @ 8:24 AM @Jeffro – The code editor (under Appearance). It was too buggy. That’s not the best question to ask, though. Removing things because some people don’t like something isn’t good leadership or product management. Making the right decisions about what to include is the goal. » Posted By Jane Wells On December 23, 2011 @ 7:51 AM @Kevinjohn Gallagher -I don’t understand why you keep saying [one of the core team] instead of naming names. Everyone on the core team speaks for him/herself and we all try to be careful about being clear about when we’re speaking from our own point of view vs when we are communicating an official project stance. From your mention of Mike Little, I’m guessing it was Peter Westwood? I’ll ask him to stop by here and comment on this, but here’s my opinion on vocal minority: Who is right is almost always a subjective matter. People being vocal, whether majority or minority, always think they are right. Engaging with the flamers distracts from getting things done. We have sometimes lost a week’s worth of productive time on core b/c the team spent a day responding to the latest community uproar. (Followed by later uproar when the release is late?) As Chip pointed out above, feedback and constructive criticism are welcome (more so if you are actually contributing to the project), but aggressive/name-calling/unprofessional flame wars are not. If this is just a hobby or social outlet for someone, it can be hard to remember that for others it’s their job (either paid or volunteer), and as such we try to keep things professional. If you wouldn’t say something to a co-worker in front of your boss at work, it probably won’t fly with us either. And if 30 people are giving feedback, even if it’s negative feedback, I can tell you that the 25 who are being polite and respectful in tone while they do it will be heard. The 5 who want to start a riot and use unprofessional language? Not so much. » Posted By Jane Wells On December 23, 2011 @ 7:18 AM @Castle – Matt also oversaw the design of Twenty Ten and Twenty Eleven. The default theme is always his baby. Core developers are always able to use “their free speech,” and the core team that met this week has no trouble arguing with each other or with Matt. » Posted By Jane Wells On December 21, 2011 @ 8:06 AM It’s not so much that those things will likely be included as that those are the things the core team said we wanted. All the notes I’m posting from the meetup are just discussion notes, not hard and fast plans. » Posted By Jane Wells On December 20, 2011 @ 9:02 PM I presume that Germany, Denmark, Kenya, all of which are 2011 events, were already being organized by the time this rule was announced and would have had a good argument that it would mess up their existing sponsorship plans. Your presumption is incorrect. We never said there could be no more “WordCamp [Country]” events. What was said was that once more than one person/group wanted to hold an event in that country, then it would need to broken down into city names so people would know which events were which. Some countries still only have one event/set of organizers, so they are still labeled that way. In countries where there are multiple organizing teams for multiple events/locations, it’s not fair to give one team the bigger country designation and make their event seem like it is more important than newer organizer’s events. Of the 2012 events, precisely none have been allowed to use their country name. That’s not true at all. Most of the events in planning for 2012 are still in the “Planned WordCamps” column on the schedule page because they haven’t nailed down dates/venue yet. If you had looked there before commenting, you’d see that Azerbaijan, Norway, and Croatia are all using their country name. » Posted By Jane Wells On September 18, 2011 @ 11:36 AM Community Oriented WordPress Magazine Idea @Jeffro – Actually, I think @ozh was talking about Paul Kim, who’s with Automattic (from Mozilla) to help grow the user base. He’s focused on wordpress.com, but there is some carry over into the .org world, and he and I do have discussions about things we could be doing. » Posted By Jane Wells On March 11, 2010 @ 12:46 PM Help Me Cleanup The Ideas Forum So, since this post went up, a few people have pitched in, which is great. However, some people are leaving a comment and adding ‘modlook’ without actually indicating what the resolution would be. Adding a code snippet or saying something is invalid isn’t as helpful as explicitly identifying that it can be solved with a plugin, was implemented in version x, is controlled by themes, or has been voted down repeatedly by the core contributor group. A little more clarity would be helpful. If you aren’t able to put it in one of those categories, best to leave off modlook, since if I can’t tell the correct resolution from the comment, I still need to go look it up, which will get pushed off until later, and then I’ll have to go back and look at the thread again. Thanks! » Posted By Jane Wells On February 25, 2010 @ 1:12 PM Multi-Site Is Just A Feature Set @Brian Layman – For the record, the assumption you make here: I would almost guarantee that the “I run my 6 sites on WordPress.” commenter was thinking of 6 blogs, and not a single mu install with six mu “sites” each running a single “blog”. …is incorrect. I use the word blog at all only because it is still the common parlance. If you look back through the IRC logs you’ll see me lobbying for changing Blog to Site and Site to Network in the parlance of MU. Since most of my job right now is in making WP core sturdier as a CMS, I can guarantee that I’m not just thinking of online journals, but of full-fledged sites in a network of sites on one WP install. » Posted By Jane Wells On January 21, 2010 @ 2:56 PM Core Plugins Are Just An Experiment @Andreas Nurbo – “From what I can gather it was all discussed and decided on WordCamp NYC in November.” Nope. It was a brainstorming session at WordCamp NYC, not any kind of official decision making. No decisions were made until the last couple of dev chats, and we’re still figuring things out. To Jeffr0′s comment: *everything* in WordPress is an experiement. :) » Posted By Jane Wells On January 12, 2010 @ 5:23 PM @donnacha | WordSkill – Basically, the number of women graduating with degrees in computer science is decreasing. The stat is just a stat though. We all know that *many* people working in web programming don’t have computer science degrees, so stats can only tell a small part of the story. » Posted By Jane Wells On January 11, 2010 @ 11:46 AM WordPress Dev Chat For 1-07-10 “While someone jokingly brought up the idea to do a post editor refresh in light of the recent Movable Type news, Jane mentioned 3.1. So it seems as if that’s a possibility down the road.” I was just continuing the joke, referencing my earlier statement that all other enhancements/feature requests would have to wait until 3.1. “Taking inspiration” from MT5 would be hard to do, given that it looks just like WP 2.7, but we are planning on doing a little menu/header touch-up with the merge (you may remember we announced this back when we had a design challenge around it, that we would wait for 3.0). » Posted By Jane Wells On January 8, 2010 @ 9:15 AM WordCamp NYC Tickets Now Available @Adam W. Warner – I’m getting a group rate discount at the Gershwin Hotel, so rooms will be about $210 (the discount is 15%). Will be announcing it with the coupon code tomorrow on the WordCamp NYC site. » Posted By Jane Wells On October 20, 2009 @ 7:39 PM Yes, the Ideas forum is run on bbPress, but it’s version 0.9.0.4, not bbPress 1.0 (the backend looks like WP 2.5, not 2.7, and doesn’t have some of the functionality that was added by Sam Bauers in the later development stages). Also, the plugins that run it are combination of hacked support forum stuff and original code (ratings, etc). There are a number of issues that need to be fixed. The one that makes it seem broken is that the ratings plugin doesn’t interact correctly with the other plugins, so things show up as most popular even if the thread has been closed, relegated to plugin territory, etc. There are a number of other, smaller fixes that need to happen, and I’d like to clean up the design of the front page and the ‘ideas you haven’t rated’ screen so that there’s more consistency and it’s easier to scan ideas based on category, etc. (Oh, yeah, ‘ideas you haven’t rated’ doesn’t care if the thread has been closed, either.) I have a list of fixes, but no one with time to tackle them yet. If there are any bbPress gurus reading this who’d want to help out and get Ideas into fighting shape, shoot me an email. » Posted By Jane Wells On September 10, 2009 @ 11:20 AM Vote For WordCamp New York Logo @Carl Hancock – If you compare it to San Francisco sponsorship levels, they are in line (for the corporate levels). We’re looking to make NYC comparable to the SF event, but with more of a developer focus. Also, the sponsorship levels were set before we found a venue sponsor. WNET is a platinum sponsor for donating the venue. NYC has a lot of big media companies running WP… some of the biggest installations around, in fact… which is why the levels go up so high. Offering sponsorships at the lower business levels of 1-2K, with 250/500 for consultants and individuals is in the same range as the other WCs you mention, so I’m not sure why you think sponsoring the NYC event would be unaffordable. We put a lot of thought into how much sponsorships should be based on the current economy in our sector (even the descriptions of the levels show this… costs one Starbucks drink per week, etc). If no sponsorships come in above $2000, that’s fine, and we’ll play it close to the belt financially like most WordCamps, and we’ll accept the generosity of speakers paying for their own travel, etc. If we raise more money, though, and can give something to the speakers to help cover costs, can provide better food during the 2-day event, throw an after-party, etc., why would you be opposed to that? The point of sponsorships is to keep ticket prices low for the attendees. And since I’m one of the organizers, you can rest assured that there will be no gratuitous sponsor presentations, etc. Anyone getting up on stage will be talking about something WordPress-related/focused. I’ve been to several WCs that were more like BlogCamps or SocialMediaCamps, including one where a competing CMS that had sponsored the event got up on stage to demo their product to a captive audience, and I was disappointed. Regardless of how much money we wind up with to spend on the event, the content will ALL be WordPress-centric. In any case, this is not a for-profit event. NYC is just crazy expensive when it comes to food, wifi, security, insurance, services, etc., and we would like to have those things (and in some cases, the venue requires us to have those things). If we have enough money to pay for everything we need and then some, we can help pay for travel for speakers and there should be extra-awesome food, shwag, or an open bar at some point. If we don’t, people may have to go out for lunch and drinks on their own dime and visitng speakers will cover their own travel expenses. Basically, if we have it, we’ll spend it, and if we don’t, we’ll go without. We believe in being open about finances, and after the event is over we’ll post a summary on the site of how the costs broke down and how many of each level of sponsorship we had. I think this will be helpful to other WordCamps as well, to help with planning their event. One thing to note is that I know a number of WordCamps that have come up short financially because they didn’t get enough sponsors, and they wound up paying for things out of their own pockets. That kind of thing doesn’t get publicity, but it’s the reason I wanted us to shoot for a wide range of sponsor levels, including high ones, to avoid getting into that situation. » Posted By Jane Wells On September 8, 2009 @ 1:14 PM Am I the only person who finds it confusing that the podcast has the same name as a WP feature? I totally thought this was going to have the Mashable CTO talking about the Press This bookmarklet that is part of the core distribution (and which we’ll be working on improving in the nearish future). Not the first time I’ve been fooled by a headline referring to the podcast! :) » Posted By Jane Wells On August 26, 2009 @ 9:27 AM Taking Out The WordPress Trash @Dgold – Usability is the reason for using “Trash” instead of “Delete” as a label. Delete implies that it will be deleted from the system, and irretrievable. Trash (or Recycle Bin) implies throwing it away but not taking can to the curb yet, so to speak. It’s a standard differentiation in use by operating systems, Gmail and other web apps. Consistency here requires us to use a label other than Delete so that it’s clear it’s a different initial function than what is called Delete pre-2.9, to differentiate between the initial Trash function and the Delete Permanently function, and to be in line with existing metaphors around this functionality so that new users won’t be confused by what it means. » Posted By Jane Wells On August 6, 2009 @ 9:39 AM Westi took on page management. » Posted By Jane Wells On July 8, 2009 @ 6:12 PM First Look At New Widget Interface The Inactive Widgets area is so that if you remove a widget from a sidebar but don’t add it to a different one, you can save it with the settings in the Inactive area. Since the widgets are all multi-use, it wouldn’t have worked to just drop the settings back into the main list instance, b/c if you had, for example, 3 text widgets that you were temporarily pulling out of sidebars and you wanted to save the settings for all of them, it would be confusing. So the main list at top left is default widget settings, and Inactive is to save widgets you’re giving a time-out. And no, we haven’t done any of the styling yet. It will come. :) » Posted By Jane Wells On April 20, 2009 @ 1:50 PM Joomla Against Drupal Against WordPress I was in the audience at the SxSW panel, and when I saw the video of the testing session (Marybeth, told to test all three in a row with the instruction that she couldn’t eat lunch until she finished), I almost had a heart attack. It’s no wonder that Marybeth was confused. The video of their testing session showed that she was logged in to WordPress as a subscriber, rather than as an author, editor or admin. So, the dashboard was completely non-utilitarian in terms of creating content and almost all navigation was hidden, since subscribers can pretty much only edit their profile. I would very much like to see a comparison of the sites with all of them being tested with the same access levels. The first time I logged into a site as a Contributor, I freaked out, too, since almost the entire application is invisible. The lines of code for WordPress included a custom installer, b/c the WordPress team thought the test subject would be installing the software on a shared host, not testing a pre-installed version. I think Matt said that accounted for about a thousand lines of code. The representative from Joomla also mentioned that there was code not included in that number for them b/c some code was pre-written. It sounded like how lines of code were counted was not standardized. I thought the idea of the panel was interesting, but wondered about the impartiality of it all. The spec for the site everyone created a version of was created by someone affiliated with Drupal, and may have unintentionally favored “out of the box” Drupal functionality. I think they’re talking about doing another round of testing, addressing some of the issues with the process that was used for the panel test. I’ll be very interested to see results on a new round of testing. » Posted By Jane Wells On March 19, 2009 @ 1:29 PM Cliff Note Version Of WordCamp Germany @Jeffro – Yes, the news modules on the dashboard can be hidden (screen options) or changed to different RSS feeds (configure). » Posted By jane wells On March 10, 2009 @ 12:53 PM @that girl again -I wasn’t around when the Ideas forum started, but I do know that when I was working up feature lists for 2.7 and 2.8, we went through the Ideas forum. It was also the basis for the survey on the dev blog about which features people felt were highest priority. The Ideas forum as it currently exists isn’t the best guide, because unless people are voting on all the potential features, rankings are deceptive. We’ll be working on how to fix the idea submission/ranking process in the next couple of months while we build out the opportunities for community involvement other than contributing code patches. » Posted By jane wells On March 10, 2009 @ 12:57 PMComments Posted By jane wells
“In Matt we trust.”
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