I’m attending Joomla World Conference in Boston this weekend. Wait, what?
WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg is giving a keynote address on Sunday. I’m really glad we’re here, as engagement across communities is vital. Too many web communities are isolated, and I suspect there is a lot the WordPress and Joomla communities can learn from one another.
The two projects have a lot of similarities: we love open source and the GPL, love-hate PHP, and have sprawling communities and ecosystems. We’re also both forks of other software (b2 and Mambo), and we are both trying to advance and evolve quickly, as well as better define what exactly we are (blog/CMS/platform/framework). Of course, there are many differences. I especially want to talk about and compare development philosophies. I quote from and reference our philosophies document often, and we practice them as much as we preach them. Among them: making decisions instead of adding UI options, designing for the majority of users, stressing the importance of deadlines, and building something that is lean, fast, and works out of the box.
We receive a lot of praise for our user interface, and we strongly believe that the user experience comes first. But for us, that includes making sure we’re always backwards compatible, even across major versions. While we shoulder more technical debt this way, we’ve found it is better than passing that pain off onto our users and the other developers in our ecosystem. The UI is awesome, but our commitment to BC may be the most understated reason why WordPress has grown to power 20 percent of the web.
One section on that philosophies page actually needs to be updated: in “Striving for Simplicity,” we talk about how we worked to ensure WordPress can be updated in a single click. But in WordPress 3.7, released last month, maintenance and security releases now occur automatically. Zero clicks given! A self-updating web application? Without breaking anything? Yes and yes. The technical challenge was immense, but so was communicating it to our users and developers. If anything ever fails on them, they won’t be inclined to trust us again — whether that’s an update or the simple act of trying to save a post. (That’s also why we focused on stronger autosaves the previous release, WordPress 3.6, which was released only two months prior.)
I’ve gotten a warm welcome so far. Want to talk about development philosophies? How releases are run? How our projects are organized? How decisions and features are made? How to evolve our complicated platforms? Want to chat about lowest common denominators, old versions of PHP, crappy servers, and the crazy things we all see in the wild? Why do we do X? Why on earth don’t we do X? Great. Come find me. I’ll be walking around wearing a WordPress shirt, or you can hail me on Twitter (@nacin).
I have some stickers as well, if you want one.
I’d love to compare project notes sometime. Shoot me a mail.
Andrew, it was a pleasure to meet you, and to have Matt give a keynote at the Joomla! World Conference. I’m glad that you were able to spend the weekend with the Joomla community; building bridges is what brings both sides together. I will make it a point to attend the next WordPress event here in Boston. Thank you again for joining us!
Thanks for spending the weekend with us Andrew and for the great conversation about strategies as lead devs in our projects. I had a great time talking with you and getting to know the inner workings of WordPress straight from one of the guys leading the charge. I’m looking forwards to more talks like this between our projects.