EllisLab Responds & Other Thoughts

After the community reaction to Kenny Meyer’s Plea to EllisLab, Leslie Camacho (EllisLab President) posted a quick blog post to the company blog letting everyone know they are definitely listening. In fact, a lot of what Kenny raised is already known to them.

Historically its no secret that we’ve been bad at communicating with the Community during times of growth and the stress that goes with it. That’s precisely why I hired Leslie Doherty.

Additionally, Leslie has requested that a few people from their team come on to the EE Podcast and answer questions from the community.

Instead, we’re going to ask Dan, Lea, & Ryan to bring us on the EE Podcast so we can actually talk about what’s going on with EllisLab. Anybody who has talked with me in person knows that I’m very open about the state of EllisLab and I think an interview will bring that out in a way that a blog post simply can’t.

We wanted to have them on for Episode 32, but as Leslie mentioned in the blog post he had to travel for family matters. Right now we are scheduled to have them on the show on Friday, Oct 22 at 12:30 PM Eastern. I’ll post more details here on EE Insider early next week.

The Plea

I was traveling when the Kenny’s blog post hit the interwebs and spread through Twitter so I didn’t have time to do a proper write-up about my thoughts and reactions.

First, there aren’t many things in Kenny’s post (from the seven items) with which I disagree. I have a few quibbles here and there (I disagree that EE 2 didn’t solve problems from EE 1. It didn’t solve every problem but it did solve some), but I understand the need to brush with broad strokes when writing an article like that . The goal Kenny had was a good one: get EllisLab to listen, react and hopefully change things. He succeeded at the first two. We’ll see about the last one.

Kenny wrote what a lot of us have been thinking for a while. I know I expected a much more aggressive build release schedule, especially since EE 2.1 was not at all a clean release. Slow release cycles are perfect for a mature, critical bug-free product, but EE 2.1 isn’t that. I taught a 3-day training in September and was fighting against a lot of 2.1 bugs and issues. The weird publish tabs bug was the most annoying.

The Reaction

Kenny’s article triggered a tsunami of feedback across Twitter and in the comment thread. 156 comments and many more tweets. It was quickly obvious: nearly everyone agreed with the article.

It is important to note that never was the reaction unproductive, extremely negative or hateful. EllisLab should feel fortunate to have fostered and help build such a caring community. Almost everyone that posted genuinely cared about the state of EE 2 and wanted to express their “+1” to Kenny’s article. Even former EllisLab CTO Paul Burdick chimed in with his take on the situation, which included a blunt take on the company’s leadership and management.

Some of the commenters decided to mix questions about communication and bug fixes with feature requests. I think we should keep them separate. Whether or not certain third party add-ons should be built into EE isn’t the issue here. In fact, it’s not even important. What is important is whether we can continue to put our own reputations behind EE 2 and sell it to our clients and customers.

Also in reaction, Veerle Pieters, who designed the original concept for the EE 2 control panel interface, posted an explanation of her involvement in EE 2 and the constraints under which she was working. She wrote that she wanted to clear the air about her involvement, the challenges and the surprisingly short timeline (about a month) she had to deliver the design. Veerle also only designed the major screens, leaving EllisLab to create the rest of the Control Panel from those designs.

Another important thing I should bring up is that I designed only a few of the major pages of the Control Panel. Those who know EE2, will also quickly realize that there are a bunch of pages. EE2 isn’t what I would refer to as small. Considering the limited timing I only got to help the team, it’s impossible to design them all.

The Questions

There are still a lot of unanswered questions, but we did get some information in a recent blog post by Derek Jones.

As I mentioned earlier, we will be doing an episode of the EE Podcast where EllisLab will answer our questions. We will announce more information about submitting your questions early next week.

I brought this up in episode 31 of the podcast, but I would like to see the control panel get refined and toned down. Less jQuery wizardry and more attention to small details like usability and form design (the category checkboxes in the publish are an abomination).

Get your questions and concerns ready. We will be fielding them all and asking them directly to the EllisLab team.