Technocrank

I suppose this is really a subset of a larger question: does it make sense to get involved with open source software projects in general?  Seeing Jane Wells’ recent posting about contributing to WordPress stoked an old ember deep inside me and I thought this is actually a question worth asking out in the open (not moderated by, um, moderators with a vested interest).

By their very nature, open source projects are pet projects.  They have people who are very interested in their success.  And, of course, this is a good thing (no, I’m not going to capitalize those last two words).  Also, there is a need to have some degree of management and control over what gets dumped into the repository.  This is sensible – that there should be some level of review and direction that keeps the project on track (even if that track is the Oregon Trail).

Within the WordPress development system, everyone is encouraged to contribute.  Everyone has read (a.k.a. checkout) permission to the SVN repository.  However, only a handful of people have “submit” access to the repository.  That is, only a few (key personnel) can write to the code base directly.  If you’re not one of those few, you can still grab a bug or whatever out of their Trac, work away on it and then submit a patch back to the Trac whereupon somebody needs to recognize the patch has been submitted, test it, and then approve it.

Reality kicks in, though, when you realize that the core developers who have direct write access to the repository also grab bugs from the Trac and also work away on them (feverishly, even).  However, they don’t always check to see that somebody else has claimed the bug (or if they do, they don’t care).  So it’s a bit of a slap when you discover that after going through the motions of following their procedures, claiming responsibility for the bug, the thing you’d spent hours, days working on has been been superseded and already patched by either Matt, Ryan, Mark or whoever – while it’s still marked as YOUR BUG IN THE TRAC.  Either that, or you submit the patch and nobody notices.  I mean, hell, the system flags it (assuming you submit the tags properly), so somebody should notice, no?

God bless them.  They work hard and there’s a lot of stuff to crank through and they do a great job.  Yeah – but if you want to get involved and help out with squashing bugs in the core?  Forget it.  It’s really not worth your time.  There are theoretically better things to do, like work on the documentation, offer help in the support forums, write a plugin or a theme – basically anything that doesn’t require direct approval or suffer from intervention-itis.  I guess what I’m saying is only work on stuff that’s useful and that matters.   And by that I mean, if it doesn’t matter to the developers if you are spending or have spent your time, then your time has been wasted.

And while a lot of open source projects suffer from the same deficiencies (or benefits, as some call them), not all do.  You could also just start your own pet project.

Note: this has been written intentionally rhetorical, but not untruthful.  I am a crankietech, after all (and I have voiced this concern in the appropriate places prior to this).  If you feel that I’m way off base, please feel free to comment and also give me write access to your repository.  Whatever your project is. 🙂  I would love to hear from people whose experiences contradict mine.

A little discussion over at Slashdot about this daft blog posting which claims that Dreamweaver is dying.  While the claims of the changing nature of the web (2.0, AJAX, RSS) are valid, they don’t negate the usefulness of a tool like Dreamweaver.

I haven’t used Dreamweaver in years which is testament to absolutely nothing.  But the claim that a CMS like Drupal or CMS-cum-blogware, WordPress, are killing Dreamweaver ignores the fact that if you’re not a coder or simply want to hack a page together quickly Dreamweaver is quite a decent WYSIWYG tool.  It’s clunky at times but it has made improvements over the years.  Will it be able to keep up to the web?  Well…does it have to in order to be useful?  In fact, both Drupal and WordPress have been designed to allow their front ends to be templated/skinned/themed – whatever you want to call it – and the basis of that is initially going to be HTML & CSS.  If you’re a bona fide designer, layout and typography are going to be on top of your list.  Even if you’re not a designer, you’ll just want to see how things will look.  I’m not saying Dreamweaver is the perfect or only tool for this, but it’s one of them.

In my experience, designers will typically fire up Photoshop or Illustrator and start their mock-ups in the graphics program they’re most comfortable with instead of Dreamweaver.  However, the integration that Adobe has been building in over the years with Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver and (shudder) Flash has been getting tighter and more and more useful.  You can do a good 80% of a page in Photoshop and export it in slices to HTML in a format that Dreamweaver can handily import and start adding bells & whistles if you want (or if you prefer, just clean up code and add a bit of CSS).  Of course, one hilarious commenter at Slashdot jokingly (or not) says that Gimp, Vim and Firebug are a great combo and then, “How do Dreamweaver compare to Vim? Is it advanced enough to not fool users to use css styled text for strong expressions?”

Well, at least one person on Slashdot gets it:

“…Dreamweaver is a website design tool, Drupal is a website management tool. A smart person would use both…”

I’m running a development version of Firefox on an Intel Mac.  The new Google Earth browser plugin doesn’t recognize it as Firefox 3.0+ so I installed the User Agent Switcher plugin and added an agent that the plugin would recognize:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; nb-NO; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008092414 Firefox/3.0.3

You also need the Nightly Tester Tools plugin to get the User Agent plugin to override the compatibility check too.