I’m noticing a recurring event in the WordPress community that has happened before back when WordPress version 2.7 was in development. However this time, I’m on the other side of the fence.

Late 2008, WordPress version 2.7 was in development and the backend interface was to receive a new facelift based on the usability testing conducted–code name Crazy Horse. This was a major change to the interface and it didn’t come welcomed when the community first saw the base UI-sans design in trunk. I was even a bit frustrated as it looked horrible. Despite knowing that WordPress was still in development, the community started throwing negative criticism thinking that the barebones UI was the final look. However little did we know that the actual “design” was being actively worked on by Matt Thomas and the community was basing their negative criticism off of alpha software. Low and behold, the design was finally committed to trunk and everyone loved it!

Now in version 3.0, we’re getting a new menu management system. This is going to be a highly used feature so there’s been a lot of critiquing and concern about it’s current state. Days after the original feature freeze (Feb 15th), WooThemes navigation system was contributed into WordPress. The community was grateful of WooThemes, but also concerned about the feature freeze deadline and getting the system integrated into core from a UI and coding perspective. So in addition to a several other developers, I stepped in and we all started reworking the codebase and making the UI more inline with WP’s UI conventions.

Long story short, after one of my patches got committed, Jane Wells posted her thoughts on it’s current in-development state along with comments pretty much +1′ing her concerns. The gist of her post was summed up to WP needing “a *basic* menu feature that plugins can build on.”

And the irony being that that’s exactly what my patches were doing. I cleaned up the interface and I reworked the codebase to make it easier for plugin authors to add their own menu item types. So now with the menu super nova patch in, the underlying code to support any post type and taxonomy is there which is pretty much what plugin authors will want to extend in Menus. Before this patch, it wasn’t possible. And because that patch was already huge, I moved everything over to the next patch sprint which was to limit the UI’s menu item types to just pages and categories with the additional post types and taxonomies being disabled from the screen. To enable them would just be a checkbox away in the screen options tab. But before that could even happen, the menus system is being criticized—just like crazy horse—as if everything was final when we haven’t even hit beta yet.

My point is, hold off on any negative criticism regarding the development of alpha software. Features are still being actively fine-tuned and bugs are still being ironed out. So hold your horses, it’s alpha software.