WP needs to get its S**T together!

Just fresh install and avoid those upgrade woes. Although even with a fresh install, i got the permalinks issue, which is bad.

But cut them some slack. I’m sure they know already that their upgrade process needs alot of work.

My only gripe with WP is the codex is either populated by articles for previous releases (therefore not relevant) or the codex architecture lacks the ability to find the required info. I’m now using external sites simply to understand template tag functions.

I’d never need to use the forum if the codex was logical and up to date.

I had no issues at all with my upgrade.

As far as your other complaints – this is a very, very popular software. The community is meant to provide the support. I too wish that the forums were more responsive, but I’m not sure why you think that because they make a profit by other means, they are obligated to provide professional customer service for free along with the software. That is kind of unrealistic, don’t you agree?

Also, you have to realize that some people, who worked very hard to learn this software, get tired of seeing the same questions over and over – questions that could have easily been solved by a simple search – and they overreact. If you can look beyond that and search out and read some of the posts made by the person you referenced, you will see that she has very valuable knowledge and information to share.

Ohgobugger: One of the single most frustrating thing for me has been coming to this board and after a while realizing that the support board wasn’t “product” support but at best a sort of horrible peer to peer network of the slightly less uninformed helping the uninformed. So you get a weird disconnect between the product people (who seem to rarely be around here, I certainly can’t tell them apart) and the people who might use their product.

It’s sort of like a mental institution where the least mental gets to hand out the pills to the other patients ??

Hopefully the true wordpress people will bless us all, come down here, and say “we are the developers” and discuss the issue and try to resolve them, rather than hiding in their TRAC systems and mailing lists.

some people do seem like douches though, I agree. I hate people who know a little bit about something and think it makes them better than those who are just starting out. People need a bit of respect for the people who taught them what they know, and need to learn to follow in their footsteps and pass the knowledge on in the same way.

So you know about php/apache etc, you aren’t special, its not some secret society, get of your high horse and help others to learn, like others helped you.
And don’t forget, even if you are ‘self-taught’ from books or websites… some kind person chose to share their knowledge with you by writing those sites/books.

The number one reason I believe some of the mods and WP-savvy site admins get a little angsty in the forums? They see the same question(s) asked over and over again every day, sometimes by people who are demanding an answer/resolve rather than kindly requesting assistance.

I realize the WordPress Forums offer search functionality as well as keyword tagging, and genuinely appreciate both… but honestly, there has got to be a better solution to organizing the chaos, not only to make it easier to isolate issues & location solutions, but also to let the mods/WP-savvy admins keep their sanity and not be scared off by mobs of frustrated neophytes.

Perhaps the WordPress forums need to be revised to mandate that all trouble-shooting tickets use tags from a static list, as well as contain WP/PHP/MySQL version info and a CSV list of installed plugins, as to better organize & correlate issues as they arise.

Hopefully others will have some ideas as to how troubleshooting WP issues and logging solutions could be better – It would honestly make the WP community much stronger, and lessen the number of frustrated newcomers and the number of times solutions have to be re-posted for them.

Just my own $0.02 – and hey, I could be totally off in left field on this one…

I think Otto42 is spot on. You’re not expected to know everything or be a brilliant webmaster. What you are expected to do is look around for an answer before you ask the question (which I have to be honest I have done before as well, but have learned from). Quite often for the 200th time. This gets people annoyed, which is understandable. If you think you don’t need to learn some basics when you want to set up a website, then you either have to pay someone to do that or get an account with wordpress.com.

Don’t forget you’re getting a kick-ass application for nothing. Searching around a bit to get your answer (there’s always google as well) and waiting a bit to get support is the least you can do. You can only expect 24/7 support from a product you’re paying for. Truth is that if you ask nicely, you’ll get a nice response. If you get all worked up about it and write angry hate posts, then how does that affect your future support questions? Just chill out, dude…

This forum is a lot better in terms of the support that you can get than some others that I’ve seen.

You’ll get people rubbing folk up the wrong way on any forum. Quite often, though, those same people also give out a heck of a lot of useful advice. It’s a fine line that a moderator has to tread to know when to step in and when not to.

Also remember that people who are giving answers here are not being paid to, they are giving up their own free time to try to help other people out. It can grate on you as a volunteer to see other people slagging you off because they haven’t got an answer to their question within 2 minutes of posting. Unfortunately I think that that sometimes comes out as people venting in other threads. That could probably be cut short by a mod, but there only seems to be a few mods here and quite often they are busy answering their own threads, because they are contributing as well as moderating. Also if you are not careful with a forum you can kill it by over-moderating.

You could always try MovableType. You can buy the product and have access to paid support. You may find that that suits your style more. Personally though I stick with WordPress because I think that “nothing” is a pretty good price to pay to get the WordPress software and a stack of volunteers who will help out when there are problems.

If you want to help improve things, then dive in to the Codex and fix/improve bits of it, and instead of starting provocative threads purely designed to get folk annoyed, try helping some other folk out.

Personally I am doing support for my own plugins for at least 3 years and I am the only one doing it.

It pissed me off when people ask stupid questions before searching or RTFM. Most of the questions normally have been asked more than once. They just need to freaking search for it.

If I am not wrong the moderators here are NOT PAID, they are doing it out of their own free time which is the same as me.

I find it more productive to report bugs and technical issues on the WP trac. One of the issues I put on there was solved straight away.

One thing to remember is that running your own install on a server does require technical expertise. Some people using WP would be better off on wordpress.com or should hire a pro to run their site. Anyone who has been creating websites for the past 10 years will understand there are always a few problems when upgrading, especially when relying on 3rd part plugins. In my opinion WP handles this better than most and is moving at an excellent pace. But in this instance this upgrade was too fast and not tested enough.

In future I recommend people wait at least 72 hours before upgrading, just to see if anyone else has problems. If you rush into it expect a few minor issues (by web dev standards).

I do think wordpress releases are too frequent, perhaps something could be done to make the release cycle 3 / 6 monthly or something.
But to complain and start postings like this one is just plain ungrateful.

Wp is FREE – its not something anyone is paying for – no one is forcing you (Ohgobugger) to use it – if you dont like it, then use something else. People who help answering questions are doing it for free.
Dont complain by being offensive and rude.

Most of the upgrade problems with 2.6 are due to either people not copying the files properly and overwriting EVERYTHING with the new stuff or plugin problems (well if you deactivate them then you can figure out which ones are not going to work with new version).

No one is asking you to grovel, if you search the forum before posting you can readily find answers even before asking (it might be an idea to stick wording to this affect at the top of the page in bold red letters).

I happen to agree that while Otto’s response might have been a little harsh, it is spot on, factually. Its been said over and over again, that there is a base level of knowledge that is necessary to use WP successfully. The codex has been expanded in the last year and 1/2, to accommodate some of that info: how to use an FTP client, permissions, etc…

Those of us that have been active on here the longest have seen the upswing in the use — what has come with that upswing is less knowledgeable users, and in large part, users that are unwilling, or unable to properly use the documentation, OR search.

I urge anyone who feels the need to complain to forgo working on **their** own permalink or login problems and instead answer a few thousand posts. Have at it! Step up!!

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And honestly, if you cant see the attempt at satire in the first paragraph above that you quoted of mine, you really need to lighten up. The OP, in that case, *didnt* do this, but many many people do come here with relatively minor issues, tack an “URGENT!!!!” onto the topic title and then post as if the world is crashing down around them. It’s blog software, NOT the end of the world, folks.

2.6 did seem to go from RC to prod version pretty quickly. I wonder if having any longer between those stages would have helped, or not. Impossible to say for sure. Sometimes if you have a testing group that is very used to testing a certain product, they might do things without even thinking about them (e.g. delete old cookies, refresh cache) so that doesn’t even get flagged as an issue.

Of course, there is a question of whether or not having to delete old cookies etc. is a program bug or not. I expect that the refreshed version could have been coded such as it is not necessary, but at the same time you have to ponder over whether someone running a blog should be tech-savvy enough to know what to try doing before having to get help. I even slightly modified the codex to suggest flushing cookies if an upgrade causes issues, but that would only help if people bother to read it and act on it.

I do feel that the search functionality on the www.remarpro.com site could be improved. What I am referring to is a search of the documentation, using an exact piece of wordpress code (e.g. the_title() or wp_get_archives etc.) does not result in the page directly relating to that coming up first on the results page – in fact, more often than not does not come up on the first page of the results at all.

I would have though it be useful that if someone put in the exact wordpress code into the search for it to be returned high up on the search results – this in itself could result in fewer of the initial kind of queries along the lines of “what does this do” and “how do I use this”.

People see this code in templates, and want to know what it does so they can learn for themselves – the wordpress site is difficult to find information like this. If you don’t try the search, then you end up going through a whole load of pages trying to get to what you’re looking for.

mojorob: try using google to search instead. I used that often.