Sunday, 17 July 2011 23:26
Lately, I'm starting to think the PLT is actively trying to kill the Joomla project. I'm really hoping that they have good intentions and that I'm missing something here, but all the actions that I see from the outside are aimed at pushing away extension developers, pushing away project contributors, disgruntle users and demotivate support personell.
Let me explain why I fear this happening:
The development strategy for Joomla 1.7 announced by the PLT has been "Build it, offer it to us, beg us to use it and maybe we will come". There is no feature plan no commitment to implement or change a certain thing. The result are some rather "exotic" features like the command line interface, which I doubt that more than 1% of the Joomla users would ever need. Instead of implementing improved routing, improving the core components code, pushing forward abstraction in the core classes or finally giving the user interface a polishing to make it look less like a 1999 web-app.
This pushes away Joomla core contributors. If they don't know what to do, they wont keep on contributing (or even start for that matter)
Just recently it was announced that JRequest will be replaced by JInput. That effectively means, that all of the 7975 extensions currently in the JED will be broken in a not-so-future version of Joomla. I first tweeted that that would be 1.8, but I was corrected that the compatibility will be broken in some other platform release, which makes it Joomla 1.11? Why should I invest time as an extension developer into a project that promised me when 1.5 was released "We are not going to break your code this hard again in the future" and didn't really keep that promise for 1.6. And then made that promise again for the time after 1.6 was released. And seems to be breaking that promise again.
This pushes away extension developers.
Not so long ago it was clear, that Joomla was going to release 1.6.x, then 1.7.x, then 1.8.x. If I wanted to write an extension for Joomla, I only had to care for those version numbers and the time between 1.5 and 1.6 was quite long, so I could count on getting my investment in development time back in the time between two releases. But also as a users, I pretty much knew that the software that I was using would be supported for quite some more time and that future versions didn't mean redoing my site.
Now I not only have to care for the Joomla version, but also about the platform version, which might force me to use a newer PHP version, since the platform requires PHP 5.3, while the CMS actually only needs 5.2 and the developer of the extension that I'm using didn't notice that this feature of the platform only works on PHP 5.3 and then there are versioning numbers that are in the known 1.7/1.8/1.9 scheme and others that unexpectedly start of with 11.1 and soon we will have 12.2, etc.
Get your f---ing story straight!! Either use one versioning scheme or the other, not two. I already wrote what I think about splitting of the "platform". Stop confusing people, users and developers alike, and make it simpler for them to follow along. Not everybody is monitoring all mailinglists, blogs, twitter channels and github repositories.
This again pushes away extension developers, it confuses users and it demotivates support personell, because they have a hard time guessing what the users system actually is.
Others have said it before, so I'm trying to keep this short: The bread-and-butter business of Joomla are the simple Joe Users out there and they don't need no stinking CLI. They want a "Create Menu Item for this Article" feature in their article editing screen or an ajaxed publish/unpublish feature. Or an easy to find trash feature in their core components. They don't see this and ask themselfs, why they should stick with this CMS and not use that one over there, that is quite a bit easier to use.
All this seems pretty stupid to me. I've regarded the people in the PLT as competent people and while I might be disagreeing with them in some parts, I thought we all had the well-being of the project on our minds. Maybe I'm missing something here. Maybe I'm to stupid to see it, so I ask you to please explain this to me! I really hope for an answer in the comments.