Voting System

I would change the one through five start system to a +1/-1 system. It would show the total votes for and against the idea. The total number of votes made and the percentages for and against it. This would be an improvement, because it shows quantitative results, not qualitative. The current 5-start system fails to show at a glance who is really for, against, or natural to the idea and it what quantity. Does 120 votes and 3 stars mean people are really for or really against the idea equally? Does it mean that most people are kinda for it, but a few people are really against? Or does is it some odd mix that just happens to work out to be 3 out of 5 starts. The +1/-1 system would do away with the middle ground. It’s now a go/no-go type situation. No more were going to kinda-sorta lunch the rocket. Or better yet, were not going to stall at the 10 second mark for two years.

Time-frame

The second change would be to limit the time-frame of ideas. Ideas should last no longer than two development cycles. In other words, the idea is induced in the current development cycle. It is voted on in the next development cycle. Then it is either put in the Go, No-go, or Retry At A Later Date list. The Ideas Forum should direct where development is going in the next couple of releases.

Representation

The third change would be to allow representatives. Basically you would have the power to vote toward any idea, but if you selected someone to represent you, then your vote would automatically copy theirs, unless you went and manually changed it. Meaning, if 99 people selected me as their representative, then any time I voted for something I would add 100 votes my way (99 votes on their behalf and 1 vote on my own behalf). The problem with this third change, however, is the fact that spam accounts or bogus accounts could multiple an individual’s authority. To undermine this cheating, I would suggest their be a minimum amount of account activity before they can elect a representative and that they must either remain active or continually re-elect the representative. The benefit of having representatives is that it should reduce the amount of repeat noise and help focus were development should happen. Not everyone has enough time to vote on every idea in every project their a community of, but they are smart enough to tell who has the same values and goals as their own.

Conclusion

I don’t think every idea I have is the perfect idea that everyone should follow, rather just some food for thought. Maybe this is a preview of things to come!?! WordPress is an Open Source Project and everyone is free to contribute if they wish. One thing I should mention about dreaming of changes is that it isn’t going to happen if we depend on the core developers to do it. They have their hands full and it’s not like it can just magically get done. If you want something done, your going to have to do it yourself. Depending how my schedule unfolds, I may submit some code to improve the WordPress Ideas Forum. What are three things you would change about the Ideas Forum?

The data took something like three hours to mine and about 5 minutes to extract and graph. (Graphed in Open Office Calc. for this preview.)

WordPress hooks solve a fundamental problem with dynamic function calls in PHP: How do you insert 3rd party functions with a static function call? But also, how do you use one single call to include an unknown number of functions?

What are functions and function calls?

Looking into this more, PHP has two segments of code that deal with functions: the definition and the call.  Here is an example of the two in the respective order:

<?php
function my_new_code($name) {
  echo "Hello " . $name;
}

my_new_code('World');
?>

In that example, I, as a single author, defined the name in the definition and the call.  That example was also a case of one definition and one call.

What are WordPress Hooks?

In order to include multiple functions with a single function call, which doesn’t know the names of the functions, we need to use an indirect method and this is where the “WordPress Hook” method comes into play. For this case were going to use a predefined call and definition to do the work for us. First were going to call the fetching function.

<?php
do_action('the_location', 'World');
?>

This function call, named do_action, is going to load a function in the same manner as the first example and send it the value “the_location”. The function definition, named do_action, will then call all the 3rd party functions that are in the group “the_location” and insert them into this location in the code.

How does the do_action function find out about 3rd party functions?

The do_action function finds out about the functions it should include by a sibling function named add_action, which creates a list of all functions. You can thing of add_action as the boss and do_action as the worker. This function, like its sibling, is a predefined function in WordPress, so you only need to call it. This function call is often included next to the function definition its mentioning. The following is an example of defining my_new_code and asks WordPress to hook it on:

<?php

function my_new_code($name) {

echo “Hello ” . $name;

}

add_action(’the_location’, ‘my_new_code’);

?>

To rap it up, you define a function, add it to the list with a given location, then when the location gets called, your function is included. Here is another nice point about WordPess Hooks, the do_action could be written by someone else, such as a theme developer or WordPress its self (Have you heard of wp_head & wp_footer anyone?). The following is the code put all together so you can clearly see what is required:

<?php

function my_new_code($name) {

  echo "Hello " . $name;

}

add_action('the_location', 'my_new_code');

do_action('the_location', 'World');
?>

Both examples out put the same thing: “Hello World”, but here is an example of how the second one could be expanded:

<?php

function my_hello_code($name) { echo "Hello " . $name; }
add_action('the_location', 'my_hello_code');
function my_what_is_up_code($name) { echo " What's up " . $name; }
add_action('the_location', 'my_what_is_up_code');
function my_bye_code($name) { echo " Bye " . $name; }
add_action('the_location', 'my_bye_code');
do_action('the_location', 'World');
?>

This will output: “Hello World What’s up World Bye World”.

This was about action hooks, what about filter hooks?

The difference between actions and filters, is that actions do not return anything, while filters will often return a variable that was passed to them, e.g. return $value;. Filter are also less likely to have print and echo within the functions they include.

Did you know that add_action calls add_filter? Which means they use the same code and create a single list of functions to include. Check it out for your self in Trac.

Related post by other authors: An Introduction to WordPress Action Hooks, Using Action Hooks in WordPress Child-Themes, Using Filter Hooks in WordPess Child-Themes.

To test out this tip, I setup a quick test to see how long each method took. Being a developer, I actually new quite a few ways PHP could be mixed in with HTML, so I setup the four most common methods. They are: only static HTML, echo-ing static HTML, PHP only where needed, and echo-ing everything (static and PHP parts). The results were how it first seamed, static HTML is faster… 200 times faster to be honest. So… I thought it would be faster, it turn out to be faster, and yet I still questioned the tip.

Here’s why I questioned it. A page loading time is made up of a few factors, one of them is the server processing the PHP, but the code is going to be processed at a rate of billions of commands per second. Although one PHP command never equals one command in the CPU, that’s besides the point. Removing these suggested lines of code is not going to change the speed up your website at all, because it’s only a couple of commands.

The truth is, while it may be 200 times faster to use static HTML instead of PHP, the total time of the slowest one is 1/10,000^th of one second. If you are worried about that amount of time, I’d like to point out that the human reaction time is 1/10^th of one second. But I will not stop there, here is the biggest factor that kills this tip… caching. If you have any caching turned on, such as in Apache or a WordPress Plugin, then it doesn’t matter if your page is a HTML document or generated through PHP, because a static copy is going to be saved in memory and the actual line of code you changed is never going to be processed. Using caching is one of a dozen ways to really speed up your site and doesn’t require hunting through a WordPress Theme.

Nothing against Pro Blog Design, just against that one bad tip that I’ve seen around the web. Sometimes it’s a matter of calling out tips and seeing if they hold up to what they clame.

Now I know I’m going to get some feedback on the technical aspects of the chart… The data is from W3Schools and is of their April 2009 visitors. In other words, it’s skewed by the fact that the visitors are mainly made up of web developers, rather than  the average internet user.

These hooks that are being added in by theme developers should be standardized. Everyone using them has a similar naming convention and it would make it easier and more universal for the people that actually attach snippets of code to these hooks.

It’s going to take some work though. Theme developers need to agree on the names and locations. Then it needs to be made known to people making themes and popularized with the poeople that are going to use it. I think this will help bring theme options out of the theme and into plugins, which should be good.

WordPress themes use to be a collection of files that were created by a theme developers, then modified by others without the consideration of upgrades. Some people are still left in this mind set that modify core theme files is okay, only to find upgrades to be a pain. However, innovations have been made and problems changed, not solved.

This new way came as pair of ideas. The first being child-themes, which build off of and modify other themes without changing any of that themes code. The second is of course theme frameworks. These were two separate ideas, because they help two different groups of people, although, they did in part with the same tool, child-themes. The first idea was a way for anyone to modify their theme in a clean way. They second ideas was a way to speed up the development time of themes by providing a base. I my view, only one of these ideas was a good one. The other one was over kill and could lead to problems down the road.

The good idea was theme frameworks. While a basic theme can be build in minutes, a complete theme that is efficient and effective takes years to prefect. A lot of people forget about the non-essential pieces of a theme, such as internal SEO, microformats, and coding standards. The one overly inflated piece of a theme that no one forgets is design. Developers and designs should make design the only priority. Besides that fact that frameworks lead to better themes, they also speed up development time.

Now for the bad idea… modifying the design of a site with a child-theme. First off, you’re technically selecting another theme. It’s not a local modification, but effects the entire parent theme. It also groups all your modifications into one package, which does have some advantages, but also disadvantages. Most people make all their changes in one file, so once they want to remove one customization or change some values , it becomes tricky. It’s not hard put most modification in a theme, but then what happens to page templates. Well… they don’t need to be in a theme folder. PHP developers can either make page templates virtual or they can call them from other locations.

It’s not nice to shoot down ideas without suggesting better ones, so here’s mine. I think by that creating a plugin or having themes that allows the ability to customize a theme is the best bet for personal customizations to a site. This would allow for the manage of page templates outside of theme, whether through a database or some other folder location. Individual modifications would have their own file or could be kept in a Database, allowing for an easy way to remove or modify code.

Luckily WordPress is Open Source and the best solution, what ever that one is, will eventually win. I just hope that I don’t go down the wrong path, some what wasting my time.