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It appears that Josepha, the Executive Director of the WordPress project, has resigned. https://x.com/jeffr0/status/1841679115419553825 https://x.com/jeffr0/st

by tock 2y ago

It appears that Josepha, the Executive Director of the WordPress project, has resigned. https://x.com/jeffr0/status/1841679115419553825 https://x.com/jeffr0/status/1841679115419553825

safety1st 2y ago
Hot take incoming: she wasn't very effective in this job. WPorg cargo culted and went the way of a bunch of open source foundations which have appointed non technical people to their top roles. WP Core has particularly poor technical and architectural direction, this arises when an organization stops valuing the tech and the tech people. Someone with technical vision should hold the top post and fix that.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- stephenr 2y ago
  > WP Core has particularly poor technical and architectural direction, this arises when an organization stops valuing the tech and the tech people You make it sound like Wordpress had particularly good technical and architectural direction until this person was appointed, which is honestly just laughable. In my ~20 year career I've seen exactly one PHP codebase that was more shocking than Wordpress for the way that mistakes are not just made, but embraced and defended. Yes all projects in all languages make mistakes. Most don't look at a litany of feedback/suggestions/bugs about a poor mans solution they've invented themselves and say "fuck it our way is better". For anyone who's curious about an example of this: lookup how Wordpress does parameterised SQL statements. They refer to it as "preparing" a statement, but it's not preparing a statement for multiple executions the way native prepared statements do, it's doing home-grown parameterisation and then they send a string to mysql. Now consider that PHP has had built-in support for prepared statements (including parameterised queries) since 5.0 was released.... 20 years ago, and about 6 months after WP's v1.0 release.
  - chippiewill 2y ago
    Yeah, I agree. While Wordpress itself is impressively functional software it would surprise many people just how shaky the foundations its built on are. The PHP ecosystem has never had a strong reputation for quality engineering, and Wordpress originates from a time when quality in that ecosystem was at its lowest. Ironically Wordpress's failure to modernise is actually key to its success - not making changes has allowed its plugin system to be very stable and maintain a lot of momentum. By comparison Drupal, which has done its level best to drastically improve its code base over time, picking up best practices like composer and using Symphony, has completely fallen to the wayside because its module ecosystem couldn't keep up.
    - stephenr 2y ago
      > allowed its plugin system to be very stable I have to assume by stable you mean "maintain an unchanging 'api' for plugins" as opposed to meaning that the plugin system is reliable.
  - francisofascii 2y ago
    For how popular and successful WordPress has been, maybe its architectural flaws don't really matter as much as you would expect.
    - stephenr 2y ago
      I disagree with the idea that they don't matter, but that isn't the point of my reply. Whether those flaws matter or not is irrelevant to the point the parent comment made, suggesting that a prior standard of architecture has been lost apparently due to the hiring of someone non technical for a leadership role. It's like if someone claimed that McDonalds food is barely food, and doesn't meat the standards of fine dining because the Chairman and President are a lawyer and an MBA rather than trained chefs.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
Brian_K_White 2y ago
jeffr0 appears to be someone completely else. https://profiles.wordpress.org/chanthaboune/ https://profiles.wordpress.org/chanthaboune/ does not seem to indicate any resignation. nor https://josepha.blog/ https://josepha.blog/
- greyface- 2y ago
  https://twitter.com/JosephaHaden/status/1841793834931397070 https://twitter.com/JosephaHaden/status/1841793834931397070
  - Brian_K_White 2y ago
    Links to https://x.com/jeffr0/status/1841679115419553825 https://x.com/jeffr0/status/1841679115419553825 which does not exist (for me) I can see the jeffr0 profile but not that post. (I don't have a twitter account)

by tock 2y ago

It appears that Josepha, the Executive Director of the WordPress project, has resigned. https://x.com/jeffr0/status/1841679115419553825 https://x.com/jeffr0/status/1841679115419553825

safety1st 2y ago

Hot take incoming: she wasn't very effective in this job. WPorg cargo culted and went the way of a bunch of open source foundations which have appointed non technical people to their top roles. WP Core has particularly poor technical and architectural direction, this arises when an organization stops valuing the tech and the tech people. Someone with technical vision should hold the top post and fix that.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
stephenr 2y ago
> WP Core has particularly poor technical and architectural direction, this arises when an organization stops valuing the tech and the tech people You make it sound like Wordpress had particularly good technical and architectural direction until this person was appointed, which is honestly just laughable. In my ~20 year career I've seen exactly one PHP codebase that was more shocking than Wordpress for the way that mistakes are not just made, but embraced and defended. Yes all projects in all languages make mistakes. Most don't look at a litany of feedback/suggestions/bugs about a poor mans solution they've invented themselves and say "fuck it our way is better". For anyone who's curious about an example of this: lookup how Wordpress does parameterised SQL statements. They refer to it as "preparing" a statement, but it's not preparing a statement for multiple executions the way native prepared statements do, it's doing home-grown parameterisation and then they send a string to mysql. Now consider that PHP has had built-in support for prepared statements (including parameterised queries) since 5.0 was released.... 20 years ago, and about 6 months after WP's v1.0 release.
- chippiewill 2y ago
  Yeah, I agree. While Wordpress itself is impressively functional software it would surprise many people just how shaky the foundations its built on are. The PHP ecosystem has never had a strong reputation for quality engineering, and Wordpress originates from a time when quality in that ecosystem was at its lowest. Ironically Wordpress's failure to modernise is actually key to its success - not making changes has allowed its plugin system to be very stable and maintain a lot of momentum. By comparison Drupal, which has done its level best to drastically improve its code base over time, picking up best practices like composer and using Symphony, has completely fallen to the wayside because its module ecosystem couldn't keep up.
  - stephenr 2y ago
    > allowed its plugin system to be very stable I have to assume by stable you mean "maintain an unchanging 'api' for plugins" as opposed to meaning that the plugin system is reliable.
- francisofascii 2y ago
  For how popular and successful WordPress has been, maybe its architectural flaws don't really matter as much as you would expect.
  - stephenr 2y ago
    I disagree with the idea that they don't matter, but that isn't the point of my reply. Whether those flaws matter or not is irrelevant to the point the parent comment made, suggesting that a prior standard of architecture has been lost apparently due to the hiring of someone non technical for a leadership role. It's like if someone claimed that McDonalds food is barely food, and doesn't meat the standards of fine dining because the Chairman and President are a lawyer and an MBA rather than trained chefs.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

Brian_K_White 2y ago

jeffr0 appears to be someone completely else. https://profiles.wordpress.org/chanthaboune/ https://profiles.wordpress.org/chanthaboune/ does not seem to indicate any resignation. nor https://josepha.blog/ https://josepha.blog/

greyface- 2y ago
https://twitter.com/JosephaHaden/status/1841793834931397070 https://twitter.com/JosephaHaden/status/1841793834931397070
- Brian_K_White 2y ago
  Links to https://x.com/jeffr0/status/1841679115419553825 https://x.com/jeffr0/status/1841679115419553825 which does not exist (for me) I can see the jeffr0 profile but not that post. (I don't have a twitter account)