wordpress™ wank

I was up late last night following Strikethrough 2007, about which my WP-related thoughts are: a) nice to know sucking at public relations is pretty much endemic in this field, b) it’s always best to screw your community over before they have time to get too attached to you and c) wondering whether these Warriors for Innocence freaks have started pestering Mark yet.

In other news, I have a new avatar, inspired by this:

and a new lolcat, inspired by this:

update: here, have some more colours:

Yawn. I’m really not sold on this new policy of doing three or four new releases a year just for the sake of it. Widgets in core? What, do you think your target audience for widgets is finding it too much of an intellectual challenge to a) download the plugin or b) stick to wordpress.com? And you’re trumpeting the fact that you’re finally deigning to support Atom 1.0 as a new feature? If your reader knows enough about Atom to care, they’re hardly going to be taken in by that one. Ditto that there’s a new Blogger importer (because Google messed with their site and stopped the old one from working).

You’d really make a better impression saying it was a bugfix release. The product is mature enough now that you shouldn’t have to try desperately to invent kewl new features every time you want to bump things up a point. OK, so maybe nobody other than the most dedicated fanboys will bother upgrading without kewl new features, but that’s their decision. You could have just waited till the next security hole and done the version bump then. ‘If you don’t upgrade your blog is at risk’ is a much better selling point than ‘ooh, shiny new features that don’t exist!’

At least sanity prevailed and Matt’s last-minute attempt at implementing tags was junked in favour of doing it properly in some later version. To be fair to Matt, nobody else was going to get started on tags without prior approval, and had he not waded in with his copy-pasted category code it would have been left to drift indefinitely. One wonders why they couldn’t just clean up UTW a bit and stick that in, but then only the Automattic plugin drawer gets raided for kewl new features nowadays. (Expect the stats plugin to be bundled in 2.4 if not earlier. However unenthralled you may be by the prospect of giving Automattic all the data from your self-hosted WP blogs, most newbies are sufficiently obsessed by stats that it will be worth their while.)

Has WordPress slightly lost its Soul? Well, gee, I don’t know. First off, I don’t know whether you can lose souls ’slightly’, or whether they are indivisible entities which can either be lost completely or not at all. Second off, I wasn’t overly enamoured of the ’software by geeks, for geeks’ culture they had going at the start, so while I might whine about newbie-pleasing cruft like widgets and spellchecking it is at least an improvement on the ‘if you can’t code, go back to blogspot’ attitude that infected the forums a few years back. That said, these things are only in .org because they’re in .com, and they want it to look like .com is benefiting the community at large. We don’t see features that are in .org being rolled into .com. The traffic is all one way.

So yes, wordpress.org is being left to wither on the vine, but come on people, what did you think was going to happen? What did you think was going to be the priority, the profit-making site where you can sell the ads and the hosting and the widget deals, or the non-profit .org that generates little but pagerank? (And you can’t even exploit that to the full because it pisses off the fanboys). Most people spend more time on their jobs than their hobbies. I don’t think anyone seriously expects to see an actual developer on any of the forums nowadays; where on earth would they find the time to answer mundane queries like ‘why are my widgets all messed up?’ or ‘what does this error message mean’? It’s a scale thing. It’s what happens when you get bigger.

Free themes by community members are being used here, though it’s rare indeed that the actual designer even gets a hat-tip in the announcement post, let alone being notified of any bug fixes (spirit of open-source, anyone?). Forum regulars are trying to pick up the slack because somebody in their infinite wisdom has decided that official support for nearly a million users can be handled by one person and shut on weekends. Bloggers are posting busily away, blissfully unaware that adspace is being sold on their sites. In short, WordPress are relying on the goodwill of unpaid, unthanked volunteers to keep their business going, every bit as much as they relied on it to keep their original project going. Is that different? Is it trading on the confusion between the commercial enterprise and the open-source project? Probably, yes. Is it avoidable? Probably not. How screwed would they be if drmike decided one day he’d had enough? Very.

Has WordPress lost its soul? Come on people, if we say that now, what will we have left to say when Automattic gets bought out by Yahoo!?