A Fool’s Wisdom

And the community is priceless!

I recently ran David A. Wheeler’s SLOCCount to find out that WordPress has ~ 29,853 lines of PHP (SLOCCount does not recognize JavaScript). Part of the output is

Total Estimated Cost to Develop = $ 955,826
(average salary = $56,286/year, overhead = 2.40)

I find estimates like this more fun than useful, but I am not joking that the WordPress developer and other participants are priceless!

Time has continued to march forward and we are now a couple weeks after the release of WordPress 2.2, and the team is well into a 2.2.1 bug fix release and doing the new feature development for 2.3, specifically tagging.

Ryan led us in the development of WordPress 2.2 including three bug hunts. March had a double feature hunting. His attitude and work inspires me! He does it all while lovingly fathering a baby boy, Ronan Izrail Boren.

The other member of the team that greatly inspired me this release is Robin Adrianse. In these four months, Robin updated more than 300 WordPress bug tickets, much of the time providing fixes to annoying problems that have sat there for many months. That likely contributed to him being granted commit access — joining Matt, Ryan, and Mark.

With Robin’s no bug left alive, WordPress code is getting a cleaning, as is our bug tracker.

Matt, as usual, regularly corrected the course of the ship!

WordPress 2.2 is a required upgrade for WordPress 2.1 including important security fixes.During development of this release I was excited by two feature areas:

• All the ATOM feeding, ATOM API and WordPress xml-rpc goodnesses. Dougal Campbell lead the work on the WordPress implementation of the ATOM API with help from Elias Torres¹ . Joseph Scott joined Automattic in April and got some fixes into improving WordPress xml-rpc — with much more promised. It will be awesome to see how people take advantage of these!
• Tagging didn’t make it. I have been waiting for tagging since I started using WordPress two years ago, and will have to wait a little longer.
  With 59 updates the tagging ticket was the most discussed ever. Matt tried to make his code do the talking, but it was too late in the development cycle and it only triggered more talking. The community did not generally like the design which was done too late in the schedule (no fault of Matt).
  Chris “MellerTime” has provided an importer from Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW) which has been added to WordPress. I seldom see MellerTime commenting in bug tickets, but I see him everyday helping numerous people in the WordPress IRC channel.
• So instead of tagging we got Automattic Widgets which I was not very excited about because I already use them. Then through Ryan and Robin’s work on integrating it in core, I saw how much was fixed and improved. Widgets in themes will likely soon become universal — which is awesome, because hand customizing a sidebar sucks.

I am also much happier with how post preview works. Much smoother than the iframe based style in previous versions, but WordPress is incredibly flexible if you liked the old behavior.

Robert Deaton (masquerade) and Bas Bosman (nazgul)² have contributed a lot to this release, always mopping up, as they have in previous releases.

Jeremy Visser and John Blackbourn also continue to be regulars . Of course, Viper007Bond, Sewar, and Nikolay Bachiyski continue to hack away. As did Mark, who found time while buying a house and getting married!

Jennifer Hodgdon has provided some beautiful detailed bug reports and fixes, and helped a great deal with developer documentation in the codex.

Otto42 has also emerged as a very regular participant in the bug tracker, joining Austin Matzk (filosofo). Computer Guru is a very helpful constant presence on wp-hackers — he also keeps the Microsoft on the server dream alive spencerp is the most regular contributor to wp-testers.

And Peter Westwood (westi) continues to earn the most consistent contributor award.

Andy, Donncha and Mike continue to bring over good bits from WordPress.com and bug fixes that Mark Riley; Mike, raincoaster, Trent Adams, timethief, and many community contributors help customers uncover. I would like to thank Engtech, Adam Freetly and that girl again for many greatly appreciated observations.

Michael E. Hancock (and Codex scribe), Chris Kasten, Cherie, Jeremy Visser, and István Horváth and many, many more continued to make WordPress support forums the one stop for support of WordPress core and plugins!

Charles Stricklin and David Peralty continue to share their voices with the community in the WordPress Podcast.

Lorelle VanFossen continued to complement her WordPress insights with WordPress Wednesdays on BlogHearld and collaborate on the wp-docs mailing list.

Aaron Brazell gave us his WordPress FAQs and 10 Things You Should Know About WordPress 2.2. Aaron also contributes a great deal to the wp-hackers lists. He finds bugs, describes good enhancements, and provides fixes.

Brian Layman continues his helpful presence on wp-hackers, developing EasyWPUpdate, volunteering as a mentors of a GSoC student, helping Delphi for PHP and Borland CodeGear see the light, and finally is working on WordPress full time for b5media from home!

Carthik Sharma has maintained his presence on wp-docs, but it gets better with him re-pressing WordLog.com.

Laughing Squid Primary Tentacle Scott Beale provides timely invitation and insights into “art, culture and technology from San Francisco and beyond” including WordPress. Also, he runs a grass roots hosting company who’s specialties include WordPress. He promotes WordPress in some communities (real people) that are do not get the attention from others that they deserve He is a thoughtful and generous contributor and a good friend to myself and WordPress.

I know I have missed many, many people! Share with me what or who makes WordPress special for you?

On to WordPress’ Google Summer of Code, WordCamp, and WordPress 2.3!

How are you making your mark in WordPress development? Support? Or another WordPress related project?

1. Elias, a participant of the Atom APP working group at the IETF promises us further improvements to the WordPress implimentation [↩]
2. Bas continues to be in my heart by closing stale bug reports [↩]