Is bp dying a slow death?
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Part of my routine each morning is to go through and check the wp and bp trac to see what changes have been made that I need to be aware of. With wp 3.0, this has become very important for me, and has actually taught me a lot about wp. It also helps to know when major changes are made between beta’s and rc’s that will affect what I am building. (I hope to one day get my coding ability to the point where I can actually contribute instead of just leaching)
I’ve just noticed over the past number of weeks that there is really no activity going on with the bp trac. Yeah, there are a few minor changesets, but that’s about it. It seems to me that Andy has completely fallen off the planet. None of us in the regular community have heard anything from him in what seems forever. Even the bpdev site is very quiet, and I didn’t see much of anything mentioned for the dev chats. (I wish I could attend, but for me at least, they fall at the worst possible time each week)
This thread is in no way meant to be a rant, and I don’t want it to go that direction. I’m simply asking if bp is pretty much being abandoned by automatic. At the very least, after watching the furious action over the past few months on wp 3.0 in the trac, it has become very apparent that bp does not carry anywhere near the weight with automatic. Of course that is to be expected. It’s just after watching so many video’s of Matt talking about bp, one would think that automatic would at least assign some resources to bp.
Am I way off base with this observation?
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We recently tested and (we think…) have settled with WP3+BP for a site. Our only thoughts are that BP should be much simpler, and as others have said, have more clearly defined objectives and uses. And of course, be optimised for speed and reliability. Not asking much from a freely available Open Source project, eh..?
Thanks to all who put in so much time and hard work.Paul, I don’t think it’s ever been in question how much is owed by so many to so few (that’s a hacked famous quote :wink:) and I think we’ve all expressed thanks and acknowledgement to that small band of brothers at one time or another; as for the thread turning into a ” Roast or disagreement session” why would it, I don’t think it’s showed signs of that thus far? has it? Threads such as this are extremely important to the health of projects/forums/communities – As long as they do not simply devolve into meaningless off topic rants.
Are you actually invoking the “Nazis” or “Hitler” rule on this thread?
(Godwins Law if one were wondering)@hnla Godwin’s Law was a new one for me. I looked it up on the Wikipedia. I’ll need to remember that one.
(sorry, I digress from the topic of this thread)
Just a note to say you don’t have to be a coder to participate in dev chats.
Want a say? hop into the dev chat, that’s the place to hammer out things like where the development is headed.And the main devs need a break too. Often, they were plowing through trac & dev and the forums here faster and more often than the main dev of wordpress. Slowing down does not mean dying.
It means they get tired. Tired devs make mistakes. they also have a big job – half the users want faster dev, the other half doesn’t. Vocal people want this change, two months later, more vocal people want the last change ripped out. See the problem there?Do you want the devs to dev or just get pulled all over by lots of forum threads?
So. Without trying to speak for Andy or JJ or channel Jane too much, grabbing a shovel means get dirty. And like I said at the start, there’s more to do than just code. Want to influence development? Show up at the dev chat. Hammer out the details for what’s next (baby steps). Roll up your sleeves. Give them a chance to breathe and think long term beyond putting out fires.
non-code ways to help:
– post tutorials in the main blog or your own
– help new users
– if you’re answering the same things all the time here in the forum, write it up in a codex page. Point people to that.
– test plugins
– submit trac ticket or comment on exisiting ones, even to say “yeah it broke for me too” or “I can’t reproduce this”
– say thanksAlso, it’s nice outside. Play a round of golf, cuddle a puppy. There is actually more to life than code.
(and yes, I make living from this code – my mortage depends on it. )Much love for all,
meAndrea is correct. The grab a shovel phrase is only meant as an analogy to say that the best way to get what you want done is to do it. If you can’t, that’s okay too, and try not to be upset if someone else isn’t doing it either.
There’s no rush to push the next version out because that’s how mistakes are made, and pushing out a new point release means telling 300,000 people it’s safe to move on based on 4 peoples wandering eyes in the trac. If more people want more results then more people need to be involved.
1.2.5 is due very soon. There are less than ten tickets in that milestone and I’m loosely aiming for Sunday. Don’t throw tomatoes if it isn’t until Monday.
There are mentions through out the trac, various forum topics, and IRC that drop when we’d like to push 1.2.5 out, but it isn’t something that we can just “do” because no one is testing the branch and no one is reporting back how various fixes have affected them.
Lastly, I’ll say that I want 1.2.5 out just as badly, because I want to focus on building cool new stuff for 1.3 instead of bug creator/exterminator for 1.2.x
“Slowing down does not mean dying.
It means they get tired. Tired devs make mistakes. they also have a big job – half the users want faster dev, the other half doesn’t. Vocal people want this change, two months later, more vocal people want the last change ripped out. See the problem there?”Very understandable. Solution: Stop listening to all the feature requests and all the questions about forums/bbpress, event management, galleries, etc. Focus on the core: users, posts, comments. Make those solid and flexible, standardized as much as possible on what is already in WordPress, but with the member management and privacy/security you need for a social network. What are the minimum requirements to run a social network on top of WordPress? Boil it down. All the rest is for theme and plugin developers. Activity stream etc. is just one way to display data. Without a solid, coherent core it will only become a bigger mess as everybody piles on their hacks and ideas.
@hnla When there’s no tickets in the trac for that milestone, it’s a safe bet that the community at large feels it’s safe to proceed. So, we did it that way with 1.2.4 and the activity feed on the front page broke. The branch was there to test for months and lots of people worked hard to patch what they found, which is the reason 1.2.4 happened. I forget the numbers exactly, but 1.2.4 fixed something like 70 known issues, but it created 2 other annoying bugs at the same time that WP3.0 was launched. I typically have 5 or 6 different local test installations that I work from, with varying amounts of data between WordPress/MS/subdomain/subdirectory/Windows/Linux/English/Spanish. I do my best to run code through as many different variations as I can, but sometimes random bugs just slide through. The activity on the front page was one of them.
@andrea_r My puppies are snuggle thieves. They just take snuggles whenever they want them. Blame any lack of BuddyPress progress on my pups.
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