In light of the results of the recent WordPress Has-Patch Marathon I thought I’d write a little bit about my experiences with the WordPress community. I’ve been using WP for quite a while now – this blog is obviously powered by it – and I have to say, I’m a big fan. Like any software out there, it was its weaknesses but it accomplishes its goals very well and is (almost) always a pleasure to work with. I appreciate the time and effort that everyone has put into making it such a great blogging platform (and more!), and I have contributed some of my time and code to the project in the past.
A few years ago I joined the wp-hackers mailing list in an effort to learn more about the system and to see if I could help out in any way. I’ve contributed several patches (some of which were committed, most were not) and done some testing. By no means am I a top contributor, and I definitely feel like I could probably do a bit more, especially because I use WordPress so much.
Unfortunately one of the first things I noticed about this community that I was trying to participate in was that there didn’t seem to be any leadership or representation from the commercial entity behind WordPress (a company called Automattic). Throughout my professional career in software development I’ve come to realize that any project, no matter the size or distribution, needs good leadership in order to be successful. I’m not saying WordPress isn’t successful, because it clearly is, but when it comes to tapping the potential power of an open source community, it is lacking.
The problem became apparent to me after a few occasions where I asked some questions (either before or after submitting a patch) on their Trac system or on the mailing list and didn’t receive any responses, even after multiple attempts. In several cases these questions were related to work I’d done that had been rejected, which is fine, but when my appeals for advice/suggestion on how to improve it are ignored it gets a little frustrating. I obviously don’t think that my contributions deserve any sort of special attention or priority, but if you’re depending on people who volunteer their time you should at least try to make it as easy as possible for them to do so. My posts to lists were ignored, my comments on Trac were ignored, my messages on IRC fell on idling ears. This wasn’t just on one occasion, and I’m not the only one to experience this either. On top of that, any time I said “Hey, what is the deal with this, why does nobody care?”, certain people (who were probably just as frustrated as me) would inexplicably jump down my throat. My opinion of the WordPress community was instantly tarnished by stuff like this.
Over time, I really started to resent the attitudes of the people running the project from up in their ivory tower. Where was the discussion, the appreciation, the participation? From my experience, none of that ever happened. The wp-hackers list itself is nothing more than a waste of time; a forum for flamewars and people who like the sounds of their own voices more than actually getting anything done. The last straw for me was this has-patch marathon. I had a few patches stagnating (for reasons given above) and would’ve loved to participate in a combined effort to clean up Trac and get code tested and committed for 2.8, but there was so little notice that I wasn’t able to do so. Obviously this event went off fine without me (hehe), but it just seemed like another example of Automattic’s lousy relationship with the (rather large) WordPress community. And instead of saying “Hey you know what, you’re right, we could’ve given a little bit more notice, we’ll do that next time, thanks!”, the only response was a snide little quip: “Granted, there were people who complained that two days wasn’t enough notice to clear their schedules, but let’s be honest blah blah blah…” after the fact. I didn’t want notice just for my sake, I wanted notice so that, you know, more people would find out and have time to participate and therefore make WordPress better. Oh well.
All that being said I’m going to continue using WordPress, and contributing when I have time, just because I think it’s great software and if I can improve it in any small way then it’ll be better for everyone, but my notion of being part of any sort of WordPress “community” has long since gone out the window and the sad part is that I’m not alone in this.
