A Disappearing Community
One of the things that has bugged me over the past year or so with WordPress is that the community seems to be disappearing. Some of the developers have left to create other software and some have just left. It seems the passionate group of volunteers that helped support WordPress have moved on as well. The WordPress IRC channel was once a place I enjoyed hanging out in and helping whenever I could. Now, I never speak in there. I hardly look at what’s being said in there at all. Some of the volunteers that helped out in the forums have even been asked to leave by Matt and company. Matt seems to be doing a great job at driving a wedge in the community. His way, or leave. Or as he once put it, you don’t like it, fork it.
Themes.wordpress.net is pretty much a graveyard. I used to go there several times a week to check out all the nice new designs that people were making. Even if I wasn’t ever going to download the themes it was nice to see what was being produced. Now the only place that publishes new WordPress themes on a regular basis seems Weblogtoolscollection.com, and that has even seemed to slow down a bit. I don’t know if that’s because passionate theme developers aren’t producing themes anymore or what. Now your choice is to use Google and hope you don’t find a site that puts malicious links and/or code into the theme you download.
The latest thing that Wank pointed out is that the Plugins page on the Codex no longer exists. It was a fairly complete list of plugins for WordPress. It’s no longer there. So if Matt chooses to tell you your plugin isn’t good enough for the official repository, there’s no place to notify users that your plugin exists. That page on the Codex was a great page. Also absent from Extend is the link for themes. It was there before 2.5 came out. So, Matt takes away the theme repository, has the plugins page deleted, drives away developers and volunteers and this is supposed to be a community? Yeah, right.
The thing is, more probably, *you* have disappeared from the community and don’t know where it is. There are dozens of sites with 1000+ readers that publish about new themes or new plugins on a regular basis. There has always been http://wp-plugins.net/ to host your plugins (which is, btw, syndicated hourly on planetwordpress.planetozh.com, another 1000+ readers site)
Clearly, the community of WP users and WP makers (plugin & theme coders) is simply bigger and more active than ever.
more people doesn’t necessarily equal a community. There are thousands of WP users who don’t participate. Just because they use the product doesn’t mean they are active in the community. WP has gone from a place where the community was the deciding factor to a place where business and Matt’s personal beliefs make the decisions, no matter what the community thinks. That has become quite obvious over the past year or so.
They were only asked in Matt’s mind. Most of us found access to the forums blocked and our accounts turned off and marked as inactive. Please kindly do not give weight to Matt’s view on the problem. It only exists in his mind. Problems with Akismet with key no longer working and being marked as spam are well known for these folks. He’s also fallen to using racist and bigoted comments against some of the former forum volunteers.
Don’t forget that he continues to say that you can email him if there’s an issue but he refuses to have any sort of discussion on the way he treats his volunteers. he’ll tell the public and media that he is open and reachable but this is far from the truth. There exists example after example where he goes running off and calling folks “rats” instead of responding to complaints. Toni is the same way and refuses to respond to complaints about Matt and other employees.
I’m just wondering why you’re all still using WP and, even more, why you’re still bitching about this, then :)
the product, even with it’s many flaws, is still the best to fulfill my needs. i have absolutely no brand loyalty though and i think people who blindly follow a brand to be, well, stupid. Trust me, as soon as something that can meet those needs comes along, i’m off of WP and won’t ever look back.
Oh my God, what a stunningly original counter-argument! I’ve never heard that one before.
While I’m waiting for Habari to go 1.0, I think that dissenting voices are an essential part of a healthy community. Not of course that I am arguing that WP is a healthy community. That’s sort of why it needs the dissenting voices ;)