As far as code goes, I’ve usually been a do-it-yourself kind of guy. However, I’ve been so impressed with Wordpress I’ve actually used it to implement four of my sites in the last couple months. Wordpress is an easy to use, smart piece of blogging software. It really seems to have just the right set of features in its default installation to be useful for most cases out of the box.

However, there comes a time when what’s given just isn’t enough. Thankfully, its got an extensive collection of plugins! Everything from blog aggregation to voting to forms to photo galleries. Not all plugins are great, but usually if you check out a few you can find one that will do what you want.

That is .. until you want something different! I might be hosting the 10th Ludum Dare compo. For that I needed some special features for collecting ratings of contestants entries, showing screenshot grids, and giving trophies to entrants.

Wordpress comes with a fairly nice themes and plugins system which made it possible to add all those features to my blog without modifying the core-code of Wordpress. Frequently I would implement a feature, and after learning more about WP internals, I was able to refactor it to be simpler by using more of the existing WP framework.

It wasn’t all fun and games, though, the learning curve was a bit painful for some features. A couple Wordpress features (like table deltas) seemed a bit too clever (not to mention broken) for their own good. Fortunately, I was able to get away with not using those features.

The other challenge I had was when I came across a bug in Wordpress. I did my best to figure out the bug, but it appears to be some strange javascripty thing which was beyond me. So I’ve reported the bug, and according to their schedule, it probably won’t be fixed for about six months. Ah well, at least it’s pretty minor.

All that said, it has been a fairly enjoyable process. I’ve been able to develop more site in less time by working with the Wordpress plugin system. I have *considerably* less code to maintain, since I’m only responsible for the plugins I’ve made. Had I created this from scratch, I wouldn’t have gotten even half as far given the amount of time I invested.

This just in, the Wordpress spell checker chokes on the word “with” .. weirdness!

I’ve been using open source software for well over 10 years. Here are some stories of times when I’ve had brief interactions with communities regarding “bugs”.

Back in 2001, I tried to submit a “bug report” to the php project - I had discovered that in certain cases a function worked slightly different than advertised. My report was dismissed with an RTFM and flagged as “Bogus”. I was a bit put-off by their response, as I had RTFM (and demonstrated that clearly in my report.) The problem with my report is that I was complaining about an edge case that wasn’t really a bug. It just wasn’t worth their time to really understand what I was getting at.

In 2003, I submitted a bug report to the dosbox project - I discovered several games that I wanted to work with the software that didn’t. I offered my help in fixing the bug. My report was greeted with open arms, my offer to help fix the bug lead the maintainers to give me tips on how to troubleshoot the issue. Not being an accomplished ASM debugger I wasn’t able to get very far in my work. They saw that I had given it “the ol’ college try” and were happy to fix it for me. (I decided to sweeten the deal for them with a small donation to the project.)

Earlier this year, I had some trouble with rsync. I was losing connections part way through the backups. I realized that it probably wasn’t an issue with rsync but with my connections. I read over all the help information and found nothing addressing my issue on the rsync website. After talking with a few of my sysadmin contacts, they were able to help me track the issue down to a problem with my ssh setup (which was using default settings.) I was then able to write up an informative message to the rsync mailing list suggesting an addition to their FAQ which I felt would save people in similar situations hours of research. They updated the FAQ with the information I provided.

A bit later in this year, I submitted a small patch to rsync fixing a trivial problem with building in a certain hosting environment. This message went ignored. Since it was a one line fix for a problem which likely only happens to me, it seems that may have been the right response on their part. (Especially since, thinking over it, my patch may very well be the wrong thing to do for most environments.)

All that to say, from my experience it really seems that the more I put into reports and patches the more likely I am to see results and a positive response.*

*read this if you haven’t: How to Report Bugs Effectively