Philosophy

Out of the box

Great software should work with little configuration and setup. WordPress is designed to get you up and running and fully functional in no longer than five minutes. You shouldn’t have to battle to use the standard functionality of WordPress.

Me jobbar hardt for å syta for at alle utgjevingane våre held seg til denne tankegangen. Me spør etter så få tekniske detaljar me kan under installasjonen, og gjev utfyllande forklaringar til alt me faktisk spør etter.

Design for the majority

Many end users of WordPress are non-technically minded. They don’t know what AJAX is, nor do they care about which version of PHP they are using. The average WordPress user simply wants to be able to write without problems or interruption. These are the users that we design the software for as they are ultimately the ones who are going to spend the most time using it for what it was built for.

Decisions, not options

When making decisions these are the users we consider first. A great example of this consideration is software options. Every time you give a user an option, you are asking them to make a decision. When a user doesn’t care or understand the option this ultimately leads to frustration. As developers we sometimes feel that providing options for everything is a good thing, you can never have too many choices, right? Ultimately these choices end up being technical ones, choices that the average end user has no interest in. It’s our duty as developers to make smart design decisions and avoid putting the weight of technical choices on our end users.

Clean, lean, and mean

The core of WordPress will always provide a solid array of basic features. It’s designed to be lean and fast and will always stay that way. We are constantly asked “when will X feature be built” or “why isn’t X plugin integrated into the core”. The rule of thumb is that the core should provide features that 80% or more of end users will actually appreciate and use. If the next version of WordPress comes with a feature that the majority of users immediately want to turn off, or think they’ll never use, then we’ve blown it. If we stick to the 80% principle then this should never happen.

Me kan gjera dette fordi me har eit funksjonsrikt system for bunader og programtillegg, og eit fantastisk utviklarmiljø. Folk treng forskjellige ting, og det høge talet på bunader og tillegg i WordPress gjer at brukarane kan tilpassa installasjonen sin slik dei vil. På den måten bør alle brukarar kunna finna dei attverande 20 prosenta, og få dei WordPress-funksjonane dei likar.

Striving for simplicity

We’re never done with simplicity. We want to make WordPress easier to use with every single release. We’ve got a good track record of this, if you don’t believe us then just take a look back at some older versions of WordPress!

In past releases we’ve taken major steps to improve ease of use and ultimately make things simpler to understand. One great example of this is core software updates. Updating used to be a painful manual task that was too tricky for a lot of our users. We decided to focus on this and simplified it down to a single click. Now anyone with a WordPress installation can perform one click upgrades on both the core of WordPress and plugins and themes.

Me likar å utfordra oss sjølve og forenkla oppgåver på ein måte som er positiv for korleis brukarane opplever WordPress. Kvar nye WordPress-utgåve bør vera enklare og finare å bruka enn førre utgåva.

Deadlines are not arbitrary

Deadlines are not arbitrary, they’re a promise we make to ourselves and our users that helps us rein in the endless possibilities of things that could be a part of every release. We aspire to release three major versions a year because through trial and error we’ve found that to be a good balance between getting cool stuff in each release and not so much that we end up breaking more than we add.

Good deadlines almost always make you trim something from a release. This is not a bad thing, it’s what they’re supposed to do.

The route of delaying a release for that one-more-feature is a rabbit hole. We did that for over a year once, and it wasn’t pleasant for anybody.

The more frequent and regular releases are, the less important it is for any particular feature to be in this release. If it doesn’t make it for this one, it’ll just be a few months before the next one. When releases become unpredictable or few and far between, there’s more pressure to try and squeeze in that one more thing because it’s going to be so long before the next one. Delay begets delay.

The vocal minority

There’s a good rule of thumb within internet culture called the 1% rule. It states that “the number of people who create content on the internet represents approximately 1% (or less) of the people actually viewing that content”.

På same tid som me synest det er viktig å lytta til dei som gjev oss tilbakemelding, prøver me å hugsa på at dei berre utgjer ein liten del av brukarane våre. Når me avgjer korleis me skal utvikla WordPress i framtida, prøver me å få svar frå dei som ikkje er så synlege på nett. Det gjer me ved å laga Wordcamps rundt i verda. Det gjev oss betre balanse, og set oss betre i stand til å ta avgjerder som er betre for alle.

Our bill of rights

WordPress is licensed under the General Public License (GPLv2 or later) which provides four core freedoms, consider this as the WordPress “bill of rights”:

• Retten til å køyra programmet til eit kvart føremål.
• Retten til å studera korleis programmet verkar, og endra det til å gjera det du ynskjer.
• Retten til å spreia vidare.
• Retten til å spreia kopiar av den endra programvara di til andre.

Nokre av desse lisenskrava inneber å bruka GPL-lisensen på avleidde verk eller ting som lenkar til kjernefunksjonar i WordPress (slik som bunader eller programtillegg). På den måten blir fridomen til å bruka programmet ført vidare til slike verk.

Sjølvsagt finst det folk som prøver å unngå desse ideala og avgrensa fridomen til brukarane sine. Det gjer dei ved å finna smutthol eller omgå meininga med WordPress-lisensane, som er å tryggja fri bruk. Me trur at brukarsamfunnet heller vil løna dei som freistar å støtta fridomen i lisensane enn dei som prøver å omgå han.

Wordpress-brukarsamfunnet bør understreka at fridomane i GPL-lisensen gjer det mogleg å laga programvare av høg kvalitet.