WPMu, WP Codex, WordPress, blogging
The open-source community rocks
Open source software is only as good as its user community. This is likely no revelation. It has probably been expressed by others, more eloquent than I, elsewhere. However, my recent participation in the WordPress Mu community and in particular tracking down a really sneaky bug yesterday has prompted me to dwell on the subject.
Of course, a user community is composed of individuals and having some great ones at the core makes a huge difference. This is definitely the case with WordPress Mu. There are really helpful people tirelessly monitoring the forums, answering questions, re-categorizing posts and topics and eventually submitting tickets for the truly worthwhile problems. I wish that I could list those people by name but I’m afraid of leaving some out. I’ll just say that I’ve had help from Dr. Mike in the past and ask for readers (of which I have two, Hi Mom and Dad!) to submit their own favorites.
I think that a community is also impacted by the platform for discussion. In virtual communities, this is usually software and the bbPress forum has some great features for this. Of course, it also has its faults but I won’t dwell on those. For open source-development though, my all-time favorite is Trac. I spent two hours yesterday tracking down a problem caused by Paul’s post, How do you deliver 100 40GB imagery files? This was the only post causing the bug and I couldn’t for the life of me determine what was different about this post than others. It should have been obvious: the post ends with the word, “files”. Duh!
I eventually determined that a rewrite rule was at fault, and in perusing the versions of .htaccess on Trac, I found a Ticket and fix by orvar, describing exactly the problem that I was having. My thanks you orvar and to the awesome WordPress Mu community.
31 Aug 2007 dandye 0 comments
