This is a post that I wanted to write for a few months now and it’s hard to find the right words without hurting the community I truly love. Like I really don’t want to call out people in the community but sometimes things go always in the way against you. And since the end of WordPress 3.5 there have been quite a few of those moments where I didn’t felt the response that I should have gotten. I felt that some people had to do one step less to get recognition for what they did. I’m not saying that would be the case but it’s really frustrating that it seems you need to do more.
San Francisco 2014
Last year I had a great time back in SF where I always have the change to meet a lot of my friends and even met new ones. The only sad part was the way people used the safe space. I have been publicly attacked by multiple core people, there was a 1 minute decision where it was decided that I would not be a community lead for the polyglots team. The comment that I didn’t make bridges hurt the most since that is the reason I travel to WordCamps and helping out in Serbia. This are things that should be unacceptable from within our community but it seems that different standards have been set. And I can go on with the private conversations I had which where not constructive. I’m easy to talk with but a one direction conversation doesn’t create solution but only frustrations.
Core
As most have seen, I have not been so active in the last few releases. I did decided that I would stop working on issue that are not mine. I still like WordPress and want to use it for my projects. But if things don’t change in how the core team works then there is nothing for me to gain. I have spent a lot of my own free time in making WordPress better. It all started with the XML-RPC in 3.4 and rewrote the media processing code in 3.5 where I spent around 15 hours a week for a few months. This are parts where I never used the additional functionality I created. This is the year that I will work on the things I care about and if I find a bug then I will try to fix that.
Polyglots
Last week I announced on Twitter that the above reasons are the reasons why I stop helping out the Polyglots team. After all the great work done by Zé things suddenly changed a lot. They decided without the polyglots community involved how the new structure should look like. From there they selected the community leads from a few people who where lucky to be in San Francisco and in a even smaller group they set the responsibilities. As a result they pushed me away, from the help I tried to do and from the things I worked on. Like behind my back deciding that technical leads should have commit access for GlotPress. It was made clear by the actions that this team doesn’t want to work with me anymore. The new community leads already have more permissions then me. I just gave up because there is no other way to do. The core team has spoken.
GlotPress
I still would love to think that I’m one of the lead developers of GlotPress but seeing people popping up with commit access I doubt if that is truly the case. I do want to make clear here those people do a good job. The problem here is the communication that doesn’t happen towards me.
I still will do my best to make GlotPress the best collaborative translation tool out there. I have seen great process since I starting working on it and the amount of people with props have been grown a lot. From here I do want to thank those people and specifically the guys from Yoast. They have been a huge help to me where I can discuss ideas and implementation with. There is nothing worse to work on a project alone.
The focus on the goals for WordPress are tricky here because out of the blue there was a roadmap announced at WordCamp San Francisco where they want to include all plugins and themes this year on translate.wordpress.org. Knowing the amount of work that needs to be done in GlotPress and the people working on it, this gives a lot of pressure on me. At least 50 locale teams depend on my work to make GlotPress more usable to make this even happen.
Conclusion
I will still be around while I take some time off. Enjoy the things I truly like and hopefully come back when some time has past. So in general fully focussed on my own projects but still will make time to travel to WordCamps. I do want to say that I did try to discuss these topics in private but we all know now what the outcome of that is. Do know that I do hate the need to write this because in the end the community comes first for me. They are the people who depend on the promise we made to build the best CMS.
Hopefully see you guys soon to drink a beer and talk about all the cool things of WordPress.