When people speak of the WordPress Community in high regard it is for good reason. The WordPress community holds within its group some of the brightest, talented, educated, and motivated members. It isn’t all hugs, but you have problems within any community open sourced group. However, what I see is some of the best discussions and involvement from the members.

When I joined the WordPress community August of 2007, I entered with very low expectations. As a developer, I’ve heard many terrible things about the code base, so I partially blamed the community, since I figured it would be up to them to ensure code quality. How wrong I was, from the beginnings of partial debates about the merits of Swift Mailer and HTML Purifier to accusations that those debates were really about converting WordPress over to PHP5 (hint: they weren’t).

I hold that no argument is worthless, if it doesn’t degrade to a flame war. Hey, not everyone is correct all the time and unless someone brings up facts that pull you to the truth then you’re not going to change your stance. This is partially why those outside the WordPress community, who look only at the code think poorly of WordPress.

It is interesting, but you can see who the best members are from their discussions, viewpoints, and understanding of not only WordPress, but also of programming and other fields which complement it. I’ve learned more during the 8 months while on the WordPress Hackers mailing list, than I have during 2 years of self motivated development.

It is interesting however, you get more out of WordPress becoming a member of the community, whether on the forums, blogosphere, or on one of the mailing lists. I can see why Lorelle holds each member in such high regards. These people are a small percentage of what makes WordPress what it is, but they do a lot more to gain the trust of others. By focusing on the interactions of these members, it might be enough to move someone who otherwise wouldn’t be motivated to get involve with WordPress to do something.

However, I take each and every discussion I’ve had in the past and will have in the future with those on the mailing list with appreciation and respect. I might not always have a tone that shows it, but it is difficult to say, “I love you guys” online and sound sincere.

I would say that all WordPress has to do is pull its head out of its ass and start coding in a fashion which ensures quality, but they’ve already been doing so. It may take a while, but WordPress already has the community, high adoption rate, and all it needs is a good reputation of professional programmers who know what they are doing. One day, it will be nonsense to say that the code base of WordPress is crap and I’m going to be happy when that day comes.

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