___/ On Mon 15 May 2006 13:58:05 BST, [ Anne Gibson ] wrote : \___
On May 15, 2006, at 4:36 AM, Roy Schestowitz wrote:
Figures seem to indicate that, based on the (admittedly poor
indicator which is) number of commits, WordPress changes less and less as
time goes on. A decline from half a dozen commits per day to just 1 or 2
is noticeable.
I look at this as the sign of a fairly mature and stable application.
If what your customer base needs is a mousetrap, you build a
mousetrap. It might take quite a few iterations to find a mousetrap
that reliably traps mice, but once it does trap mice reliably and
effectively to the general satisfaction of the customer, you don't
necessarily need to build a better one - just fine-tune the existing
one. Then it's time to look for the customers who need something
slightly different - like a web-based mousetrap - and work on
building their mousetrap instead.
Well, this mousetrap, being an excellent simplification/exemplary, serves
as defence for one side of the argument. In this case, it could actually
defend the state of development being idle (which it is *not* in the case
of WordPress). They say that your competitor is always up to something,
never sleeping and only scheming to snatch a piece of your pie. Let us
face it: There are other packages out there are they stride forward, as
well.
The key to staying ahead is to innovate rather than add features that
complement and complete the feature set of all your competitors (I dislike
this term in the context of FOSS). Thus, I think that WordPress could seek
to extract new ideas. Widgets, automatic saving, spellchecking, and
WYSIWYG front-end already exist elsewhere (by no means do I intend to
detract from the wonderful implementation). Bug bounty hunt can be
fruitful, but perhaps on par with the fruits of a hunt for ideas, which
require more than various hooks.
Or, put another way, imagine how much more efficient Microsoft Word
would be if it was just a word processor, and not a word processor /
html editor / brochure maker / family medical database creator /
template dumping bin.
Despite my apathy for Word (I am a prolific Linux advocate in fact), I
don't think that feature depletion would have had any merit. It is a
mature product that continues to extend and gives OpenOffice a run for its
money, piracy factors aside.
Could it be time to radically extend and make WordPress an out-of- the-box
CMS? Or maybe produce a separate, standalone package (a derivative)? Many
people seek CMS software. They love WordPress for many reasons, but they
eventually settle for something like Drupal. In newsgroups, I find it hard
to convince people to use WordPress as a CMS. With the number of bloggers
exceeding 100 million quite soon, I suppose my point of contension might
be void.
I think you're having trouble convincing folks to use Wordpress as a
CMS because it isn't a CMS. Since I don't need a CMS for my site, I'd
personally prefer that Wordpress stay as it is - a very functional
blogging tool.
Me too, but it is sometimes difficult to teach an old dog some new tricks
(pardon the phrase, it's a proverb). I would rather let someone use a
package that s/he is already familiar with.
If you think there's a significant customer base for a mouse-
management system instead of just a mousetrap, where the reason for
use is significantly different than Wordpress as it currently stands,
I'd think that would be a sufficient reason to branch the code and
produce Wordpress CMS. I'm usually one who thinks "plugin" before
"branch" but if you're significantly changing the basic functionality
of the application then it's not really Wordpress anymore, and the
code should reflect that.
Yes, I am aware of some packages that integrate a plethora of
sub-packages, WordPress included. They are poorly tested and they suffer
from the same issues of lesser-known Linux distributions -- principally
patching and conflict resolvation. No doubt complexity and bloat can take
any project down the wrong line. However, novelty needn't /necessarily/
carry a penalty.
Best wishes,
Roy
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