BuddyPress.org

Paul the question of core committers is a thorny issue, but your views run in tandem with my own on the subject and this aspect and many others have been thrashed out in a long winded thread in the moderators group, where I think I have tended, probably, to make myself a little unpopular as I will keep re-iterating what I see as major issues in order that they don’t simply get talked about a lot and then simply fade form everyone’s mind (not that I think they will but…)

At the moment the best the core dev team and members such as yourself who do have the ability to create patches, test patches etc, can do is keep that side of things moving with vigor, I think that the more that can be patched and tested the less work for the committer/s to have to do however I acknowledge one important factor here, one of disillusionment when people jump to it do ‘stuff’ only to see it languish, unattended to; but concerns like this are uppermost in the minds of that core set of devs you reference.

What is positive is that we do now know from the dev chat recently that Boone has the access he needs to be able to start to pull this site together – when he has dusted down his copy of ‘SVN – the Myths and Confusions unraveled’ and managed to create that local working environment? – What is a factor and a factor that we have to keep at the forefront of our minds is the one huge drawback with OS community projects ‘Time’ in this world we can’t expect people to drop their day to day professional work in favour of unpaid voluntary work so we have to be patient- too an extent

I think, personally, getting the site running effectively is a hugely important step ; at the moment I find it a painful and off putting experience and it shouldn’t be, it’s the home of the project and needs to reflect the project in the best possible light. Also mercime has apparently been hard at work re-factoring the codex layout – as also mentioned in last dev chat – which looks impressive and I am eager to see that in place so that further documentation can be started as this is another rather weak aspect of the project at the moment.

@pisanoim 1.2.6 will hopefully be out soon, I think though it will be 1.3 that stands as the revision that sorts a lot of the cruft out and adds enhancements that will mark a defining point for BP? We will need to get behind the patching, testing for that release to help out as much as possible as there – last time I looked – were a lot of tickets to be covered.

I concur with most of what @paulhastings0 has to say (I was thinking the same thing just a few days ago). If only for the safety and security of the project, it needs more than one active core committer.

Additionally, I’d like to see:

– Someone giving clear lead & making decisions on features / future development – is that @johnjamesjacoby or @apeatling or someone else?
– Somewhere clear on the site to make and comment on feature requests

I’m on here everyday, an experienced BuddyPress developer, but still have to ask these questions. That they are not obvious is somewhat concerning.

Some ‘off track’ thoughts on improving the site: 1. make the documentation / guides more obvious to find (so many support questions are asked when people haven’t read the guides – it’s not necessarily their fault). Let’s have the site lead visitors where we want them 2. tidy up all the dead / out of date information and plugins 3. don’t close threads that are still active, or at least give the originator the opportunity to confirm they’ve received a satisfactory response before closing

Quick thoughts from my iPad…

For there to be more core committers, there needs for there to be more outstanding core patchers. There are a handful of great ones already, and they are noticed and recognized for their contributions. The leads are Andy and myself, and ultimately the future of the core project is decided by us. Very similar to WordPress, we keep an eye on developer plugins to look for anything that would make a good core feature.

Feature requests are great when there are people to do create them, but the best place to talk about core development is on the trac. The forums are more for support and discussion than they are for code talk, but part of that is also because currently the forums don’t play nicely with code blocks.

I don’t think we’re closing threads unless the discussion goes severely off topic or is no longer productive. If we are, I would agree that we shouldn’t be locking topics prematurely. Regarding the codex, anyone has the ability to modify it, so if anything is out of date anyone is free to fix it.

I also agree that things will be easier for us and make more sense when buddypress.org is a website worthy of being in its own showcase. Right now it’s a basic install with lots of custom bits to help integrate wp.org plugins.

It hurts to just add committers for the sake of having committers. Commit rights are earned through writing great core patches and showing a comprehension for the direction of the core project. There are plenty of great plugin devs that have written thousands of lines of their own code, but haven’t directly contributed to core.

Ultimately it would be great if we had one developer per core component to focus on it’s future, but so far no one has showed initiative to want to make improvements to anything. Right now we’re in a transition period where the branch and trunk need to be merged before I think a few more people are comfortable writing giant patches, but that time will come.

Paul hit almost every nail on the head in his reply above. It’s great that you see the need, now fill it.

@djpaul – I saw one closed this week, that had been open just a day or so. I think you closed it. The guy was referred to another old thread, which didn’t reach a conclusion on how to solve the problem.

I’ve also seen a user, albeit an irritating user, blocked from using the site for the ‘crime’ of arguing with a core developer. That really isn’t good practice. The user was being abusive, but not overly so; the core developer arguing with him was being equally petty though.

Amend: apology, @djpaul it wasn’t closed by you, but it was closed and pointed to a thread that finished without a working answer

@r-a-y – yes, it was There’s a bit of follow up on my profile about it. I’m worried about the effect it has on the OP.

@rogercoathup Happy to talk privately about why I opted to block the person in question from buddypress.org. Don’t want to air the dirty laundry but rest assured it takes quite a bit to get to that point.

@paulhastings0 Very little ‘risk’ but you’re on the right track. IMO one of the harder things about running such a large project is deciding what belongs in the core and why. It’s something that Andy was really strict about and did a great job of training me on because I was anxious to learn and asked for feedback with every patch I submitted for more than a complete calendar year before asking if he could use more ‘official’ help. You can look back through my commit history and see a few blunders here and there, as they’re fairly easy to make when you’re bouncing between installations. Every one of the guys you mentioned (including @cnorris23 and a few others) are the top of the list of being considered for core commit access. You could say it’s the next step on the ladder for each of these guys and they all deserve the promotion fairly equally.

If/when it comes time, it will be a hard decision to make.