Dropping Editorial Flow
I’ve decided to drop the Editorial Flow feature from the 3.6 roster. A few things happened. We looked into what the main feature (“forking” a published post and allowing it to be edited then reintegrated) would involve, and found that there were some really fundamental hurdles that were unlikely to be resolved in the time given. A lot of time was spent on the planning stage, and we just kept surfacing more questions. Moreover, because the hurdles were so low-level, they would have required a significant amount of time from a core lead like me, @nacin, or @ryan — time that we just didn’t have to give this cycle due to other responsibilities. What that left was #12706 — a somewhat related ticket with a long-running monster patch. This similarly needed (and still needs) a core lead to dedicate a lot of time to planning, reviewing, and committing it. That might happen, or might not. It didn’t seem fair to keep @danielbachhuber and @kovshenin responsible for something that might or might not make it, subject to other people’s availability.
Though disappointing, this effort wasn’t wasted. We learned a lot about the challenges involved, and we’re better positioned to tackle it in the future with more advance planning and a better understanding of the core team resources that need time dedicated to it.
Alison Foxall 4:49 pm on February 19, 2013 Permalink
Understandable. I had been loosely following what was going on and it just seemed like a huge task to undertake. Looking forward to getting more involved in the future.
Marko Heijnen 4:58 pm on February 19, 2013 Permalink
I guess for 12706 it makes sense to develop it on Github. Like what happend with WP_Image_Editor. You still get an monster patch in the end but the changes can be better maintained. If I would make a change on the code now literally no one would find out precisely what I changed.
Nikolay Bachiyski 10:39 am on February 20, 2013 Permalink
This or we actually start using branches.
scribu 5:18 pm on February 19, 2013 Permalink
Is there some place where the lessons learned from the planning stage are summarized?
At the very least, links to some IRC logs would be good.
Robert Lilly 8:45 pm on February 19, 2013 Permalink
Sorry to hear this won’t make it into the next release, but glad to realize that the issues involved are being thought through and that this will be addressed in the near future. I think this is a feature that is really needed whenever there is more than one person involved in creating/editing/maintaining posts.
In my fantasy I’m imagining something like the Review feature of Microsoft Word, specifically the Track Changes and Add Comments functions.