wordpress™ wank

Two days ago, someone uploaded a templatemonster theme to themes.wordpress.net. Complete with watermarked images. They didn’t even bother giving it a name.

I’m not hugely bothered by the fact it’s stolen, since I’m still a little bitter that templatemonster can get away with charging $57 for the thing and get plugged on the official site when I was made to feel like a criminal for insisting on a bloody link (which wasn’t even sponsored, it was to my own site). But then, I suppose I didn’t have any affiliate dollars to throw Matt’s way. I’m more irritated by the lazy way it was done. It took me less than two minutes to find the images without watermarks.

If you’re going to do something, do it properly.

I think it’s apparent by now that themes.wordpress.net isn’t being done properly. Days since request for access to update my theme and maybe, just maybe, upload a couple of others: 45. Comments left on blog: 5, including the one on the theme itself directing people to download the widgetised version from my own site. Responses from admin: 0.

This site is obviously far too much work for one person, and it is insane to expect one person to run it properly whilst also making a living and keeping their own projects on the go. It was always going to be much work for one person. I don’t entirely understand why the solo approach was even attempted. Unwillingness to relinquish or share the linkage, I suppose (there’s a link to his domains from every page, and links all over a PR7 site are handy things to have around). Still, I think Shadow could be forgiven for experiencing some schadenfreude round about now.

Nice going WordPress. There has to be some kind of test you can give to your moderators to make sure the character glass is at least half full.

Well, I’m sure the policy of handing out moderator badges like sweeties to anyone who manages to stand the atmosphere in the .org forums longer than a week is now being rethought. It’s kind of sad that being a misogynist troll is in itself perfectly acceptable, and rambling badly-formatted emails boasting about your criminal record on the wp-forums list are also ok, and it’s only when you start hassling people who have come to the forums seeking help (and, incidentally, conspicuously failing to get any) that people finally twig that maybe giving you mod powers wasn’t such a fantastic idea after all. But it doesn’t surprise me, and it also helps to explain why it’s so hard to get people to stick around the .org forums longer than a week.

I am not for a moment arguing that people should be disqualified from helping on the forums because their personal sites are offensive and their social skills leave much to be desired (there’d be three people left, at most), just that maybe in future they shouldn’t be bribed with an official role. Even though in theory moderators should be held to a higher standard of behaviour, in practice some of the rudest and most unhelpful replies I’ve seen have been from mods. I’ve been saying for years that this sets the tone, and is why it’s so hard to get fresh volunteers; and this latest deterioration may or may not have something to do with the fact that the devs have abandoned free support like a sinking ship (Matt hasn’t posted in the .org forums for over two months, Ryan for nearly four).

If Codex ever gets some official love, maybe the next step should be getting someone to deal with the forums. And no, I don’t mean to faff about with bbPress making it look more like a shiny investor-impressing project than something Matt threw together in a weekend because his ego wouldn’t allow him to use someone else’s forum software. I mean making it look and act a bit more like a welcoming community resource and less like a hangout for maladjusted geeks.

Announcing the Friend Surfer.

bit like an LJ friends page. but private. and with feeds..

It’s not finished yet, of course; a system where you subscribe to usernames isn’t a great solution when you can have multiple blogs under one username and there isn’t any indication on secondary blogs of what username they’re under. Nor have they integrated the flist with the blogroll yet. And I still don’t know what’s up with the ghastly 1990s terminology.Have you ever felt any desire to surf your friends? It sounds like it might be painful for them. But yeah, another move in an LJ-ward direction which should comfort those who have fled the original.

This is one of those posts that started off as a comment and grew out of control, so for context, go here and come back when you’re done.

I did a bit of codex-related ranting on livejournal, I should probably import those posts The fundamental problem is that documentation is far less suited to a collaborative open-source approach than code. To write decent documentation (which is more like a book than a piece of software) you need an editor/manager with a clear roadmap of what you’re trying to do and how it’s going to be accomplished; but as soon as someone steps up to the plate and starts laying down the law everyone else starts grumbling about how authoritarian they’re being, disagreeing with their ideas, and generally focusing more on internal politics than getting the job done. Result? Bruised egos and chaotic docs.

If Matt genuinely cared about documentation, he’d have appointed a decent technical writer at the outset to oversee the project and get things organised. People are much more willing to accept the authority of official leaders than self-appointed ones. In the early days of the Codex I got tired of my contributions being mangled by fellow contributors who couldn’t even spell right and were obviously just desperate to get their fingerprints on every page they could (you could say that’s the nature of wikis, but that’s why wikis need managing by people who know what they’re doing). Later on, it became pretty clear that newcomers weren’t welcome and the whole thing had degenerated into an egofest. Meanwhile, if I want up-to-date information on a template function my best bet remains to go directly to the code, just as I had to in the days of 0.72. There’s no way codex can keep pace with development when there’s zero communication between developers and documentors and the devs have abandoned it in order to focus on sexier, more lucrative projects.

Best thing to do? Freeze contributions from the general public. Hire someone to sift through what we have. Keep the useful stuff (by this I mean actual documentation that people can access from their admin pages, not half-baked tutorials which would be better off on a subdomain of wordpress.net). Go through the useful stuff and ensure it’s still useful. Rewrite. Restructure. Tag stuff. (I put that suggestion in there in the hope of getting Matt interested, rather than any great belief in its codex-saving powers. But it may be useful, and should be done). Re-open the wiki with a call for volunteers and a set of rules for them to abide by. Focus on documenting everything in 2.5. Then the wordpresstutorials.com groupies we met in the last post and its surrounding wank will have less compelling arguments for the necessity of their illustrious sponsor, and wordpress will look a fair bit more professional.

It will not be quick, and it will not be easy, and the temptation must be to junk it like the original wiki and start again on yet another subdomain. If any part of wordpress needed a benevolent dictator, it was the docs. It’s a shame it never had one.