Tag Archives: wordpress community

Why I’m not ready to leave the WordPress Community

Posted by Jacob Santos on August 23, 2008 1 comments

This is in reply to Ozh’s comment from my contributors shouldn’t care about recognition. I have the tendency to write a great deal in comments, but 600+ words is kind of long for a comment.

Nah, I sort of can’t now. The reason I allude to leaving the community often is that I have a history of working on a project and then leaving after I become bored with it. My history with joining the WordPress Community is the exact opposite of Mark Ghosh, in that I entered the community after many years of programming and many failed projects, therefore thought I knew more than the members of the community. I was very wrong and I apologize for my arrogance.

It doesn’t help that the project I was working before WordPress had strict guidelines with Unit Tests (test cases actually run in the unit test environment), strict everything must have inline documentation, and must have DocBook manual explaining how to use the code. It is funny that I became very bored with it on that project very quickly, but I’ve been focused on it with WordPress since after several months of complaining about it when I joined the community.

WordPress is far to interesting to just leave and I can’t exactly leave until the inline documentation is complete, which it has taken almost a full year in order to do so. I’ve had help along the way, which is great.

With the WordPress PHP extension, I’m going to have something to focus on that will keep me within the community for a long time or at least until I get bored with that project, which as fascinating as it is, I doubt it will be soon.

I’ve decided to use WordPress as the base of all of my browser game projects, so I’ll be continuing to enhance and fix bugs that I find.

Also, since I’m going to have strict test case requirements, I’m going to need to focus some more on the WordPress test case code coverage and that will take up to a year or more to complete.

I know that eventually, WordPress will no longer have something to teach me and when that happens I’ll no longer have a purpose staying in the community. Right now, WordPress has too much that I can learn and people to learn from. I could learn from other projects, but there are enough masters in WordPress that I’ll do fine here. I think I can do more being in the WordPress community than I would be able to in other project communities.

Quality assurance is still lacking within WordPress and while there are people working on the field within Automattic and in the community, there needs to be even more people. I have a few projects that I want to work on in this field for WordPress that will be totally kick ass. Unit tests, functional testing, and acceptance testing test cases are a few.

Basically:

  • Inline Documentation
  • Codex Documentation (User and Developer manuals)
  • Unit test cases (running test cases separately from WordPress execution)
  • Functional test cases (running test cases with WordPress)
  • Acceptance test cases (Selenium + PHPUnit)

Along the way BackPress is going to be engineered into WordPress and while I don’t agree with the direction it is going, I don’t know enough to help. I think it would be a great experience to learn more about Class Design Patterns and put in practice what I’ve learned in that field. When BackPress is merged into WordPress, I’ll know enough to improve upon the code.

Along the way, it should prove to be a great learning experience for Object Oriented programming. Something that I’m lacking full knowledge and experience. Even though, I’ll be developing using objects for more than two years now.

Leave now? And miss all of the great opportunities that are going to come up with learning, development, and supporting others? I think not. I think there should be enough to keep me interested in this shiny object called “WordPress”!

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WordPress Contributors Shouldn’t Care About Recognition

Posted by Jacob Santos on August 10, 2008 10 comments

Trying to think back to the previous contributors of WordPress core and plugins, it is difficult to remember any of them. I only remember Robin, because that core developer left after I joined the WordPress community. There are many other WordPress developers that contributed a lot that are probably forgotten by those who joined after they left.

It is interesting, not all of the work that went into WordPress were by the core developers, therefore that means that many of the bugs that has increased the stability of WordPress were made by those heros without names. I suppose we can give them our respect to whoever they are. Perhaps they only fixed one bug or fixed 100 or 500 or added a grand new feature, such as the Plugin API. Those unsung heros, who gave so much only to be forgotten with time.

Thinking back, it is hard to comprehend why some members of the WordPress community left to create Habari. It would make a good story, since hardly anyone really knows why they left. They probably have good reasons and there have been many times I thought it wasn’t worth the time and effort I put into WordPress. Thankfully, no one needs me to be in the WordPress community.

I went to the WordCamp Dallas and only a few people recognized my name from the WordPress mailing list. Although, back in those days I sort of bought up many heated arguments, unintentionally of course. It is difficult to know exactly what is going to push people in argument or action.

However, I seriously doubt that after I’ve left the WordPress community people will remember my name. Sure my name is in the WordPress core and on the WordPress codex, but the significance will be lost over time as better contributors join the WordPress community and fill the open slots in the community.

Doesn’t exactly mean that more people couldn’t help in several areas. There are almost a 1000 open tickets on the WordPress Trac that needs a developer to show it some love and care. There are many areas of WordPress, both user and developer that could be written about on the WordPress codex. There are probably many other areas that I don’t know about that needs someone out there to feel compelled enough to do something about it.

However, while it is fun for the short term to have your name out in the world, it is mostly just 15 minutes of fame. That is all you’re going to get, unless you stay in the community for the long haul. Not that you shouldn’t do it, there are many people in the community I respect and will continue to respect. The drive to join the community should be to fix a problem as you see fit. Fix enough problems and you’ll gain respect. Do it long enough and maybe one or two people remember your name.

Seems good enough for me! It is nice to know that even if I left others will join and be there to fix issues I can’t or won’t fix. It is humbling.

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