{"id":2116,"date":"2017-04-01T13:25:12","date_gmt":"2017-04-01T08:25:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ahmadawais.com\/?p=2116"},"modified":"2017-07-07T06:28:18","modified_gmt":"2017-07-07T01:28:18","slug":"new-wordpress-plugin-repository","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ahmadawais.com\/new-wordpress-plugin-repository\/","title":{"rendered":"New WordPress Plugin Repo Surprised Me!"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am a WordPress plugin developer<\/a>. While I have written many plugins for WordPress and shared them on GitHub<\/a>, I also host 12 plugins on the WordPress.org\/Plugins<\/a>\u00a0repository \u2014 with more than\u00a0400k<\/code>\u00a0total downloads.<\/p>\n

A few days ago the new WordPress plugin repo went live, and I along with many other developers got surprised<\/a> by that. I was very public with the feedback, I wrote about it on the Facebook’s Advanced WordPress group, wrote a post about it on WPLift<\/a>, and in the form of comments on Make blog post<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But I feel like the feedback was either ignored, or the decision to make this new repo live was rushed with a few resources at hand, which could have addressed the feedback.<\/p>\n

I Want To Like It!#<\/a><\/h2>\n

Don’t get me wrong. I want to really like the new\u00a0repo. The screenshots slider, the clean\u00a0and minimal design part of which functions very well, is more than welcomed.<\/p>\n

Maybe, we can have the description, screenshots, videos and all that on one page and then have other stuff like the changelog, FAQs, etc. in the form of tabs. Who knows!?<\/p>\n

Sadly, there are issues, which we all knew about, from the beta. Those issues, are still there in the live version.<\/p>\n

The Confusion#<\/a><\/h2>\n

With due respect (to the meta team), there seems to be a confusion here of some sorts. On one side, developers are being considered not the right audience for several categories of our feedback, and then there is this expectation of having the feedback reported back as\u00a0Trac tickets. Not sure how regular users would do that.<\/p>\n

And WordPress doesn’t seem to have a good way of collecting feedback from 80% of its user’s base that we are calling users<\/code> . Surveys only report back a fraction of that user base.<\/p>\n

Morten’s suggestions about telemetry<\/a> are on point here. This is the right time to start thinking in the form of data. Collecting data is important for each and every one of us. It\u00a0could help devs, decision makers, writers, and in general be our guide for a better future of WordPress.<\/p>\n

Honestly, I have nothing but appreciation for all the work done by the meta team to help the WordPress community. It’s commendable. That’s not what my complaint is about. It’s about how things got handled and what can we do about it, the next time.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What I Think!#<\/a><\/h3>\n

The facts below do not make a lot of sense to me:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Developers’ feedback is sometimes considered less important (as mentioned here<\/a> the 80\/20 rule being used or misused to quote Matt Mullenweg).<\/li>\n
  2. No WP Telemetry, no A\/B testing is being done to get feedback from the ever growing WordPress userbase.<\/li>\n
  3. Trac should not be the ONLY place where tickets get qualified as feedback. Comments on the Make blog posts are valuable as well. And there were many.<\/li>\n
  4. If there were limited resources, then meta team could have waited a bit to weed out the feedback against the Read More<\/code> links and one-page design.<\/li>\n
  5. Making the beta live by not considering all those comments devs left \u2014 makes me think that our feedback was just right off ignored. My initial perception was that the meta team would eventually write a post about what is being considered for the next iteration (the one which was supposed to go live)<\/li>\n
  6. IMHO, there was no announcement. When the new plugins repo went live \u2014 it was a surprise to many of us. I believe I have an excellent handle on WordPress news \u2014what’s happening and when is it happening \u2014 that kind of stuff. But I along with many others got what I would call a surprise when I saw the new repo was live. (I could be wrong, I am only human)<\/li>\n
  7. Complaints of pixelated images are the by-product of this surprise (see #6) as I think many devs were not using the Retina version of the banner image that is \u2014 banner-1544x500.png<\/code>\u00a0and hence they were not prepared for the new repo.<\/li>\n
  8. Yes, it’s a good thing that the new backend is something meta team is comfortable with. And that there will be new iterations, more often. But that doesn’t justify why the UI looks the way it does now, why the feedback was not considered, and why the repo went live without a notification of what’s going to happen.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Not a Pleasant Surprise#<\/a><\/h3>\n

    For me it was not a pleasant surprise, I had to stop everything I was doing and take a look at my plugins, to check if I need to update my free plugins since the new layout was live. Had I knew that the design was going live on a particular date, I would have prepped for it.<\/p>\n

    IMHO#<\/a><\/h2>\n

    I feel like my feedback was similar to many many other developers like John Brown, Kevin, Matt, Joe, etc. Along with them, (if I be as bold to say that)\u00a0I feel that my feedback didn’t change a thing.<\/p>\n

    I am looking forward to the new iterations ahead.<\/p>\n

    P.S. If there was an announcement before the new layout was live, then it’s my bad, I completely missed it, though, IMHO there was no announcement even after the design went live for a good 30 minutes or so. Since, I searched for one on the Make blog, before sharing the news inside AWP group. It almost felt like someone would have accidently pushed the new repo into live mode.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

    UPDATES!#<\/a><\/h2>\n