Daniel Jalkut, the proprietor of Red Sweater Software, is the developer of the excellent Mac desktop blog editor MarsEdit. He is also a code contributor to WordPress.
I became acquainted with him about two years ago when he started submitting detailed bug tickets (often with patches!) to WordPress.
I’m the developer of MarsEdit, a Mac desktop blogging application that works with WordPress. When my customers have trouble with the “upload image” functionality, the error responses from WordPress are lackluster. I tracked this down to a simple failure case in xmlrpc.php where the verbose error returned by wp_upload_bits is not being propagated out to the response text.
I’m attaching a proposed diff which addresses this. The diff is against /trunk/ as of today, but I would really love to see this integrated into the 2.1.x branch, because it will have a major impact on my customers’ ability to debug MarsEdit interoperability with their WordPress blog.
Daniel Jalkut
Red Sweater Software
That’s the description of ticket #3981: “Patch: Improve error propagation from newMediaObject failure in xmlrpc.php”.1
Starting with #3981 he has participated in 50+ bug reports and fixes in the XML-RPC and ATOMPub areas. He has literally participating every month for the last two year! He collaborates regularly with Joseph Scott and the other members of the WordPress XML-RPC and AtomPub community.
As I have been navigating around the edges of the Mac development communities lately, I’ve learned what a well regarded, active participant Daniel is the indie Mac developer community. I highly recommend his and Manton Reece‘s podcast Core Intuition if you are interested in Mac development.
Daniel comes across as a pragmatic, thoughtful, eloquent person. As the bug above suggests, it’s in the interest of giving his customers fantastic service that he participates in WordPress development. And WordPress is much better software thanks to his participation!
He also regularly recommends the WordPress.com service or the WordPress.org software depending in his customers’s needs and tech savviness.
Daniel Jalkut is a WordPress developer and advocate. He is a WordPress Hero!
I can’t agree more. I’m a customer and fan of MarsEdit, and the very few times I’ve had to visit the user forums at Red Sweater, I’ve noticed how responsive and genuinely helpful Daniel is.
I’d agree with Todd. I have been a user of MarsEdit after evaluating a host of offline editors. It is good to know a bit more about the person and his thinking. Thanks, Lloyd!
I am an owner of MarsEdit and have run into these bugs with WordPress often (ironically here is one place Typepad is easier to use than WordPress). So I don’t use MarsEdit much.
I was wondering if Daniel ever did anything with all the feedback that I asked our development team at Foliovision gave Daniel when we were still trying to get XMLRPC to work with MarsEdit.
I am glad to hear a lot! Well done, Daniel.
Yes, Lloyd, it would be great if you could get these bugs addressed even in the stable maintenance version.
Alec, to compliment Daniel’s response, if you let me know specific WordPress bugs (even better trac #s), and I can also help.
Also, in my experience as Flock QA Lead from 2005-2006, I reported more bugs to Six Apart than to WordPress. My great experience working with the WordPress product and team was one of my motivations for getting more involved, and eventually joining Automattic.
Alec, I’m surprised you are still running into trouble with MarsEdit and WordPress. Generally speaking it’s very stable and WodPress has one of the best developed APIs available.
I’m not sure which feedback you’re alluding to. If you want to follow up about any unresolved issues, please do get in touch. You can find out how at http://www.red-sweater.com/support/
Daniel
Hello Lloyd and Daniel,
We are running some sites on the older stable 2 tree.
Those are the sites which are having issues. We will be upgrading the rest of the stable this summer.
WordPress 2.7 is a big leap forward in terms of user interface – we’d done a lot of custom interface work for clients to make WordPress an easier posting environment for totally non technical clients and we were waiting to move until a really significant WordPress improvement came. We can’t upgrade right now as we are a bit short-handed this month but it’s on the cards for June. We run quite a few custom plugins and upgrades are not a light matter for commercial sites (they have to work all the time).
Thanks for the history Lloyd. We really have to start submitting WordPress bugs ourselves as we’ve stomped enough of them over the years (although WordPress is a lot less buggy than it used to be). Now that I’m thinking of it, our lead programmer/CTO for a few years was John Godley and I’m quite sure John was regularly submitting formal bug reports.
PS. Daniel, we did follow up with you a few times (Martin was handling the issue) on your support about six months ago but at that time you couldn’t get to the bottom of it. It was great to learn the back story here.
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