Therefore, the inline documentation and playing around with the Codex has been interesting. When you are building projects from the ground up with no previous foundation, then you sort of lose sight of the small things. Also when you are working alone or with a few people, documentation often takes goes to lower priority verses coding.

However, if my open source projects get to the point where people are submitting patches, I plan on making the point to look over them and apply them as fast as possible.

You are a valuable part of the WordPress Community and your contributions have been very welcome. Keep the postive attitude and creative energies flowing and keep up the great work, no matter where your path leads.

I was impressed. If I hadn’t joined WordPress, then I’ll had expected a quicker response. But you know, when you have a project that doesn’t get a lot of tickets and patches, you can do stuff like answer them in quick enough time.

My problem is that I have difficulty with the legitimacy of my own argument. I understand, sort of, the difficulty when you have many tickets a day created, but I mean, there aren’t that many patches created. A simple query for has-patch pulls up no more than 100. I have difficulty understanding how it would take more than a week going through them all.

I’ve thought about doing just that, going through all of the patches, cleaning them up, resubmitting them, then I think, “Yeah, I just created a lot of work for Ryan and Westi, which is going to take a while for them to go through my patches.”

You know, Ryan has his stuff, Peter has his stuff, so it is great that they take the time to even commit patches as they do. That is great, which is why I don’t want to burden them with the responsibility. I guess that is why I feel like an asshole, is because I feel like I’m betraying them. Here they are doing a great thing and every time I mention this topic I feel like I’m stabbing them in the back and pushing the dagger in deeper, (“Are we not doing enough for you?” they’ll ask. “Yes.” I’ll reply.)

Open source is difficult to meet expectations and WordPress should not be any exception. When you have a community effort, every community effort, no matter the priority of the ticket should be addressed, hopefully in a timely matter. I have a higher level of fortitude, I just hate for someone with less to go through my same experience.

“Warning: If your patch for a ticket has not been addressed after a week, then join IRC and talk to Peter (westi) or Ryan (rboren). Then like, shit, it will be committed within a day or two (psst, if you catch them at the right time, within several minutes). So not fret, because WordPress developers do care, they just need to know that your patch exists. No guarantee they won’t reject your patch.” <—- Needs to be on Trac front page (without the sarcasm and cursing).

If it was, it would go a long way with cutting the crap. If you expect something, then it goes a long way to improving the amount of bullshit you’re going to receive. If I knew back then, that hey, I had to join IRC to get patches committed, then by damn I would have. No, I went from wp-hackers to IRC, after I realized wp-hackers was getting my no where.

Plus, I see it much like complaining, “Why (the hell!) hasn’t my patch been committed (inaudible screaming out of frustration)” or begging, “Please, master, commit my patch, I’ll love you forever (but like a brother, since neither of us are ‘that way’).”

Posting a ticket is just one part of the multi-modal communication that happens with all people involved with WordPress, including myself. A ticket without context isn’t useful, and there is enough noise to make good things get lost, as you’ve experienced.

But I think you’ll find being multi-channel enjoyable. All of the developers have direct IMs, talk to them! Keep doing IRC and the mailing lists. Write on your blog, or on wpdevel. (Want an account there?) Champion an idea. It’s part of the process which separates ideas with conviction behind them from ones tossed like bottles in the ocean.