A community is an investment, if you create one and they feel disempowered it can get ugly and sad. With WordPress we don’t have the resources to address all of the community requests, but we do try hard and make progress every week and I think people appreciate that.
And appreciate it we (or at least I :p ) do – great software, great support and always very fast to fix the few security problems that arise.
And the support forum is manned with people that really know their stuff. I have had nothing but a good experience with WP thus far. 😀
Matt, I don’t think there is any comparison. You and your team not only keep your various weblogs updated and hot with current discussion but the wordpress site is getting better all the time (the new themes repository is fantastic).
As a Mac user I’m not a great fan of firefox as it’s quite ugly compared with safari (in my opinion of course) and at least the Mac version of it does not seem to be updated regularly enough to fix problems that are constantly being reported. For every one upgrade of Firefox WordPress get 10.
You have built a wonderful community and you have a lot to be proud of. I don’t think the fact that both projects are open source reflects badly on you at all, in fact, it makes you look great.
It always amazes me that people get so angry over free things.
The self destruction of SpreadFirefox has always been pretty likely. On paper it’s a good idea, encouraging people into marketing for free and so forth. However, from an early age Firefox has attracted the worst kind of people – fanatical moron fanboys. People like that are not healthy to evangelising a product with any dignity.
SpreadFirefox has, for all its good ideas, encouraged them. 100,000 members of SF, but how many of them are actually valuable contributors? Far less. A mechanism for those with skills and ideas to contribute to a project is great, but SpredFirefox has drowned those people out in a ‘quantity over quality’ accident.
WordPress is lucky. It will always have less users than a piece of desktop software like Firefox. Not to mention that it’s more difficult to get hot and bothered about content management. There’s no “Internet Explorer CMS” to enrage and provoke people. There’s nothing to fuel blind, fanboy idiocy like there is in the Firefox world. The world of CMS development is able to be constructive; projects are supportive of each other and there’s an ongoing feeling of mutual encouragement. If anyone ever tried to ignite some sort of hate campaign against Movable Type, TextPattern or B2Evolution on behalf of WordPress they’d get nothing but bemused looks and a public denouncement of their actions from people like you, Matt.
What SpreadFirefox have done wrong, is that rather than denounce the idiot behaviour of their fanboys, they’ve created a community that breeds them.
Long may the ‘quieter life’ of web development live on, eh?
I love the wordpress community. I haven’t made requests, or asked for help, or really gotten much. I haven’t been active in it at all, but it feels so widespread and friendly. I was and still am frightened by many of the more technical aspects of wp, but I rest in the comfort knowing that there’s an all-encompassing codex and a huge userbase out there. I think this blog and all the updates we get in the Dashboard is really helpful as well – it keeps us informed and involved, even if we’re not really that involved, every time we login to our admin panels.
Keep h4x0rin’ and generally pwnin’
Matt,
I get what you’re saying. Incremental improvement is definitely the way to go, whether it is community, software, hardware or wetware. Still there are some parts of the support structure that needs help. I find the forums a little frustrating to navigate and generally disorganised. Example: I was helping a friend out with her RSS feeds and there were lots of seemingly helpful answers, but no definitive answer.
I want to help, but not sure how. I’m an Information Architect so I feel I can help make improvements. And this is the big point, I am very grateful so I _want_ to pay back to the community. But I can’t so I guess in a way I feel disempowered.
Ian, if you wanted to change how the forums work you should join the bbPress mailing list and send your thoughts there. The software that runs the forums is built from the ground up so it’s very flexible for whatever we decide to do.
Matt,
Sorry I haven’t checked back sooner but yes I will join the bbPress mailing list and try to contribute. I must say that even since I left that comment the amount of progress regarding the documentation (the codex) has been phenomenal. Great job everyone!