Prêt à utiliser

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.

We work hard to make sure that every release is in keeping with this philosophy. We ask for as few technical details as possible during the setup process as well as providing full explanations of anything we do ask.

Conçu pour la majorité

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.

Des décisions plutôt que des 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.

We are able to do this because we have a very capable theme and plugin system and a fantastic developer community. Different people have different needs, and having the sheer number of quality WordPress plugins and themes allows users to customize their installations to their taste. That should allow all users to find the remaining 20% and make all WordPress features those they appreciate and use.

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.

We love to challenge ourselves and simplify tasks in ways that are positive for the overall WordPress user experience. Every version of WordPress should be easier and more enjoyable to use than the last.

Les échéances ne sont pas arbitraires

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.

La minorité agissante

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”.

So while we consider it really important to listen and respond to those who post feedback and voice their opinions on forums, they only represent a tiny fraction of our end users. When making decisions on how to move forward with future versions of WordPress, we look to engage more of those users who are not so vocal online. We do this by meeting and talking to users at WordCamps across the globe, this gives us a better balance of understanding and ultimately allows us to make better decisions for everyone moving forward.

Notre Déclaration des Droits

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

• La liberté d’exécuter le programme, pour n’importe quel but.
• La liberté d’étudier comment fonctionne le programme, et de le changer pour qu’il fasse ce que vous souhaitez.
• La liberté de redistribuer.
• La liberté de distribuer à d’autres des copies de vos versions modifiées.

Une partie de ces exigences de licence inclut la licence d’œuvres dérivées ou de choses liées aux fonctions du cœur de WordPress (comme les thèmes, les extension, etc.) sous la GPL également, transférant ainsi la liberté d’utilisation à celles-ci également.

Évidemment, il y a celles et ceux qui tenteront de contourner ces idéaux et de restreindre la liberté de leurs utilisateurs en essayant de trouver des failles ou de contourner l’intention de la licence WordPress, qui est d’assurer la liberté d’utilisation. Nous croyons que la communauté dans son ensemble récompensera ceux qui se concentrent sur le soutien de ces libertés de licences plutôt que celles et ceux qui ne le font pas.

The WordPress community should emphasize that the freedoms in the GPL help provide high quality software.