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”.

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!

Now, I’m taking another look. Why? Because of the WordPress Prologue Theme.

If you haven’t heard about Prologue, it’s WordPress theme that people are calling a twitter for groups, created by the Automattic team: Matt, Joseph, and MT. It is available on WordPress.com or you can download it for your own WordPress install.

I’ll admit I thought it was a lot of excitement over nothing, but my nay saying didn’t diminish Matt’s enthusiasm. Then he announced Prologue, and everyone was really excited about it! The titles of the articles are quite telling, here are a few:

• Twitter – Public Timeline = Prologue
• WordPress’s Prologue: part Twitter, part Basecamp, all business
• Prologue: Twitter for WordPress for Groups
• Will Prologue bring the Twitters back?
• Prologue/WordPress–Private Twitter II

Still I didn’t get it, until I really started to use it. Now, after using it these last couple of months did, I couldn’t live without our private Prologue for sharing with the Automattic team and even more important keeping up with what they are working on and ideas they are playing with. As MT describes it:

Prologue was designed for something different—easily setting up and sharing a dialogue within a fixed group. It puts aside the standard “behind the scenes” method of blogging and makes the act of posting part of the experience. It creates a kind of archived and searchable conversation, like an IM window that’s archived, taggable, and accessible from any web browser.

Every team or group needs a prologue to share tidbits of what you are working on, without the pressure. Is there a similar tool you use?

This is why I’m now turning to Twitter and family to see what use I can make of them.