agm

Responding to “Should we be open about discussing WordPress?”

I wanted to share a quick response to Should we be open about discussing WordPress? Yes, yes, yes, yes. We all should. That’s the beauty of open source.

Please criticize, engage, share feedback, ask others hard questions, ask a simple “why”, show specifically why something is painful, show something you love, share what would be most compelling and exciting for you to see ship, etc. To underscore two things: please be as specific as possible in your feedback and please chime in even if the same feedback has already been shared. A GitHub issue with 5 comments asking for something vs a GitHub issue with 100 comments asking for something can carry different weight and act as an input (not the only input) for prioritizing work.

A few follow up offers:

  • Happy to come on and talk directly to you all to demystify some of what was said. There was a lot of nuance and direct information missing and that’s okay! I don’t expect folks to know all of the inside baseball that happens in an open source project but it sounds like you all are keen to have more insights and to be more connected. Let’s do it.
  • I invite you all to join the next (and any future) Uniting WordPress YouTuber calls. The next one is going to talk about feedback at 4pm UTC on August 20th, 2024. Comment on this post or contact me and I’ll add you to the invite.
  • Please send me a list of anything you are wondering about why it’s not done or why it was done XYZ way and I will share or track down the answers to publish publicly.
  • I’d love to help upskill and empower folks to contribute back to the project as you might want/have capacity/have desire/etc. I respect and understand why not everyone will want to but want to help those who do. We can talk through specific ways to get into the flow of feedback, how to test PRs, how release cycles work, etc.

Let’s see how far we can go together in gathering feedback, synthesizing it, and impacting future solutions for a better WordPress for all.

P.S. For now, I’ve started us off by pulling out the most actionable thing I could: persisting selected ToolsPanel options. Feel free to chime in. I’m listening.

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3 responses

  1. BobWP aka Bob Dunn Avatar
    BobWP aka Bob Dunn

    This is exactly why I love WordPress, love the community and love people like you.

    Reply
  2. Edward Beck Avatar
    Edward Beck

    You know, part of what this group was talking about made me a little wistful for the FSE Outreach program. There were things that they said that I agree with and things I definitely don’t.

    I don’t agree with what one of the presenters was saying, about not joining slack, not commenting on github. I think that participating in the ecosystem is so important.

    On the other hand, I get their intimidation factor of getting involved in GitHub issues. The Gutenberg github is a labyrinth compared to other open source projects I am more comfortable opening an issue on. Where is the work actually happen, which are exploratory conversation, where are the issues where feedback is welcome vs the issues where a direction has been decided elsewhere and it has gotten to implementation?

    The program you ran was so wonderful, because you highlighted areas that were currently under discussion, and asked real users to try things and offer feedback. When we talked about a problem, you were able to say, I hear your feedback, and this is where you should put that experience in and gave me that issue in github to comment on.

    It also makes me wonder how organizations like WPCampus can participate in structured feedback programs.

    Reply
    1. Psmeg Avatar
      Psmeg

      Hey Edward,

      Great to hear your perspective on our recent live stream and the topic we covered.

      To expand on your comment: I don’t agree with what one of the presenters was saying, about not joining slack, not commenting on github. I think that participating in the ecosystem is so important.”

      I think it’s worth bearing in mind that the time it takes to wade through the sheer number of requests, feedback, information, conversations, etc., on Slack or Github for WordPress is already overwhelming for anyone who isn’t in there regularly.

      Plus, there is a feeling of ‘why bother’ when there appears to be an overwhelming sense that the project is going to forge it’s own path and not listen to those that are not on the same path.

      For example, if you’re not interested in FSE or Gutenberg, there really doesn’t appear to be much point in commenting on features or changes when they are going to effectively get ignored in favour of FSE or G features.

      Sometimes, it’s worth looking at the opposite side of the argument for reasons why Mark (who you’re referring to) feels the way he does.

      Reply

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