What is the answer? The ultimate answer of life, the universe and everything to do with WordPress? Right now it seems the answer is Jane, because, not content with the massive redesign, Jane Wells is now looking to improve communication within the WordPress community.
Jane rightly points out in her post that the existing methods for the community to express their opinion about, or suggest, new features just don’t work. I long gave up trying to influence the people who do the work on WordPress because it just got me frustrated. Even when I submitted actual code to trac (surely the most likely method of success) that a significant number of people were behind, that got looked at, amended, and tested quickly, it went nowhere. My code just languished on trac for several versions before someone else decided to pick it up who clearly had more oomph than me.
My semi-facetious answer to the communication question is for the key people to read my blog. Clearly they can’t read everyone’s blog but in this development environment if we can’t find a way to utilise the work that people are doing on their own blogs then perhaps we need to rethink the whole concept of community.
In the forum post I have suggest that we find a way for us WordPress bloggers to include polls on our sites that deliver the results back to WordPress central. I don’t think this is too difficult a prospect technically, but I think it would help to get the wider community engaged, people who don’t necessarily visit official channels, and help the bloggers generate discussion because when the visitors respond their response actually has some impact on matters.
Take my last post for example (What WordPress Workflow Needs) If you could vote for one or more of the ideas in this post, knowing that your vote would be registered somewhere the WordPress folks could see and that you would therefore be making a difference, would it encourage you to click through from your feed reader and actually come and vote?
Some other ideas occurred to me but I think this has some potential as one among many methods.
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I’m afraid I haven’t seen any alternatives.
The reason I stopped supporting it was because I didn’t have the time to keep it up to date, make sure it didn’t conflict with other plugins, and to answer queries when it did. It may or may not work with 2.7+ but you might find that dissecting it gives you some ideas anyway.
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I don’t mean to clutter up your comments, so feel free to delete, but I couldn’t find an email for you listed here (maybe I’m just not seeing it for some reason). I wanted to ask you about including custom fields in my comment forms. I’m a relative newcomer to WP and I see that you had a plugin for Wp2.5 that is no longer supported, so I wondered if you had some pointers on accomplishing extra fields in WP2.7 and above? Is that a built in feature now, or why did you quit developing the plugin? Do you know of another good one you would suggest? etc. etc. Thanks!