Doug Stewart wrote:
No, it's nothing like that. I swear, the sooner our media culture
breaks their Iraq Tourette's, the sooner we can stop seeing reductio
ad Iraqum arguments crop up in the most inappropriate places.
Actually if you look at the exchange, it was:
"Interfaces in OS tend to suck. Here are reasons X, Y, and Z."
"Wow, the guy who brags everywhere how he's doing an open source product
and is therefore so much better than the others who don't do open source
finally admits that he doesn't care for open source."
That was completely out of line and an ad hominem attack. Talk about the
ideas, not the person. If you can't do that, find another mailing list.
I think people are reacting harshly /because/ this particular
development effort hasn't been particularly Open Source in its
incarnation.
This has been in core in a public repository for 3 months now. There
have been over 50k downloads of a non-release version, and thousands of
people have sent in feedback. The feedback, especially those who took
the time to provide it earlier in the process, has resulted in
assumptions being retested, designs redone, and even *gasp* the
introduction of an option (for colors), and those of you around for a
while know I am usually religiously opposed to options.
It's still in the
development stages, but I do think it's a direct piece of evidence as
to Benevolent Design Dictatorships being perhaps a better way to
handle things when aesthetics are on the line.
And aesthetics has been one of the areas most people have agreed is
weakest in the WP dashboard. Not being afraid of trying a new process to
address that persistent problem I think is indicative of why its been
able to remain popular in a vastly changing web landcsape where many
other products have come and gone.
But Matt, here's the problem: you have a whole slew of faithful users
that bring nothing BUT preconceived notions to the table when
approaching a new release and when you flippantly dismiss their input
because a whole bunch of n00bs like paper mock-ups, well...
That is false. The new admin would be a LOT different if existing users
were not an concern. In development we take a fairly conservative stance
against leaving existing users out in the cold, and frankly it's
interesting to see some of the same people fairly radical about pushing
people into a new language requirement (PHP4 to PHP5), which would have
prevented hundreds of thousands of people from upgrading, be so
reactionary about the moving of a category box, where the worst case
scenario seems to be that someone forgets to put in a category.
Let me repeat that, even if the category placement is worse, which I
believe it is not, the worst thing that happens is that people have to
scroll down a bit to edit a category, or that they forget (once? twice?)
and need to re-edit the entry.
The plural of anecdote is not data.
Properly collated and plunked into a database, it sure is.
Many faulty measurements doesn't add up to a single good measurement, or
even average out to a good measurement.
Matt, I think a lot of this comes down to: major changes like this
whole rework could be handled MUCH better on an organizational/project
level next time anything similar is undertaken. I think a lot of
frustration folks are exhibiting is due to the like-it-or-lump-it aura
that you, in particular, have given off about the whole affair.
You said it yourself, some people feel disenfranchised when their ideas
don't make it into core. This seems to bear no relation to the amount of
discussion about various ideas. People are still pissed off about the
removal of skippy's DB backup plugin, the decision to support PHP4, the
fact that we're not 100% OO, and yes this new design even though each of
these things has been discussed over hundreds and hundreds of emails
over the course of many months. The closer we get to a release, the more
likely things are to degenerate into ad hominem attacks or
dissatisfaction with the entire process or project in general.
I myself have had tons of things not make it into core, and the thing
I'd suggest is to look at the process not as a personal thing but as a
Darwinian process where not every idea survives but the end-result has
been very successful over a long period of time.
--
Matt Mullenweg
http://ma.tt | http://automattic.com
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