For a long time I have admired the WordPress project, for developing such a robust blogging platform that is ultimately open, and free, and anybody can contribute improvements to it. I encourage many of my customers to use WordPress with MarsEdit, because it seems like a “safe bet” going forward.

My admiration has diminished a bit in the past 7 months because … I haven’t succeeded in contributing to it.

For a long time, I heard reports from my customers that dates were being set wrong in posts to WordPress. The issue in summary is that if you have a draft post on WordPress, changing its status to “Published” doesn’t update the publish date from the time the draft was originally saved.

I didn’t really get a handle on this problem until it started affecting me. Sometimes I write the show notes for my podcast, Core Intuition, ahead of the time the podcast actually goes public. In these situations, the blog post has a published date corresponding to the time I first starting writing the post, and when we finally go to publish the podcast, the date remains the same.

I did the hard work of not only diagnosing the problem in WordPress’s source code, but also writing a fix, and writing unit tests to confirm the fix. I filed a bug with a patch that will fix the problem for my customers, and any other clients of the WordPress API:

#45322: Editing a draft post with wp.editPost causes its published date to be set

Shortly after filing the bug, I went to the WordPress Slack to see what I could do about having my fixes integrated. I was lucky to have a positive response from a couple members of the WordPress team, and my bug fix seemed slated for integration.

Time passed. I wondered. I didn’t want to nag the hard-working members of the team, but I also didn’t want my hard work to have been for naught. Also, my customers, as well as other clients of the WordPress API, would benefit from this.

It’s been on my TODO list for 7 months now to “check in” with the WordPress team about this. Unfortunately, every time I do, the only thing I’ve noticed is that nobody substantially responds to my inquiries. I’m in the dead zone.

I don’t think the WordPress team is bad, by any means, but I think this reflects a problem in their process. When somebody comes to your project with a well-thought-out, unit-tested fix, and is met by radio silence? The chances are high that they will never come back again. I have submitted WordPress patches in the past, but after this experience I don’t know if I will bother submitting them again. That’s a big change in my perspective on how the WordPress team works, and on how it should work.

This post is about WordPress, but I think there are lessons for every open source project. Obviously, you can’t coddle every contributor. Some submissions will be bogus, some will be contrary to the aims of the project. But mine was a clear fix to a defect that affects multiple clients of the API. If it’s not a clear fix, I’m at least owed an explanation for why it hasn’t been committed after 7 months. In. My. Humble. Opinion.