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Automattic / jetpack

Security, performance, marketing, and design tools — Jetpack is made by WordPress experts to make WP sites safer and faster, and help you grow your traffic.
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Jetpack vs WordPress core #1263

Closed nvartolomei closed 8 years ago

nvartolomei commented 10 years ago

Hello, First of all I really hope I'm not first who asks this question, but I couldn't find answers to it anywhere.

My questions is, why do Automattic strive to develop Jetpack standalone and does not contribute this beautiful product into WordPress Core?

It was not a concern for me until now because many features were not belonging to WordPress Core, but today I saw Site Logo, you (Jetpack) encourage developers to use it and to display logo using function from Jetpack. This is cool in many ways, first of all this feature is reinvented in each theme and theme framework out there in so many wrong ways, even I do! Let me say for example that I will remove this feature from my themes and I'll use one from Jetpack and I will encourage users further to use Jetpack on every site, how can I be sure about Jetpack future?

Why this isn't shipped with WordPress? It does belong to WordPress for sure, right in general settings near Site Title, this feature is critical almost for every website.

PS. this question is not only about site logo, but this way it was shorter and clearer to explain.

More to come! Nicolae.

georgestephanis commented 10 years ago

Howdy, Nicolae!

Well, in short, as Jetpack is just a plugin, we have a lot more freedom to test and iterate on features and get them out to users. Then, if it's something folks like a lot, we'd be delighted to contribute development time to migrate any of our popular features into feature plugins for rolling in to Core. For example, there's been some interest in turning Widget Visibility into a core feature, and I ran a Feature Plugin initiative last year to turn Omnisearch -- later called Global Admin Search -- into a core feature. That wound up not making it in, but it still may at some point in the future.

We've got a number of folks (like myself and @MichaelArestad) on the Jetpack team that are very active in core development, and our goal with Jetpack is to improve the WordPress ecosystem as a whole to make it better capable for users that need functionality that Core either can't provide (in the case of bits that need external servers and api tokens) or hasn't dabbled in yet (in the case of contact forms, widget visibility, and others).

I tend to ramble, but in short, consider Jetpack a testing ground -- it's a lot easier and lower risk for Jetpack to ship a feature than to ship it in Core. And anything that succeeds in Jetpack, Core is 100% able to pull from -- yay GPL! :)

Does that answer your question?

nvartolomei commented 10 years ago

@georgestephanis everything you said does make sense, I share your position about Jetpack being a testing group, this is great because Jetpack iterations are faster than WP Core and Plugin Updates are faster to deliver for developers and faster to get for end users.

This very feature, Site Logo for sure should end up in WordPress as fast as it can, before JetPack's one wide adoption.

I don't want to imagine what would happen in near future if this one ends in WordPress too, part of developers will use this one, another part one from WordPress, because of function prefixes this will turn likely into a mess and 10 if statements.

I think it is easier for both parts from the start to put a little effort for bringing this into core.

georgestephanis commented 10 years ago

For more on that, please check out @kwight's post on the Site Logo feature and implementation here -- http://themeshaper.com/2014/10/25/making-features-available-to-themes/

nvartolomei commented 10 years ago

@georgestephanis this doesn't solve anything actually.

kraftbj commented 10 years ago

Another way of saying it, is that possible Core integration and how to make everything work together nicely is on the radar.

If this does eventually get into Core with a the_site_logo function instead of jetpack_the_site_logo, Jetpack would most likely change jetpack_the_site_logo to use the new core function with a version conditional check, defaulting back to the Jetpack one if running an older version of Jetpack until the minimum version of Jetpack has that in core.

The audio shortcode is another example of this. It was present on wp.com and Jetpack before being added to core. Jetpack added a conditional to defer to the Core version if the site had the proper version of WP while including the older JP/WP.com version for those that didn't.

jeherve commented 10 years ago

Jetpack would most likely change jetpack_the_site_logo to use the new core function

That's also what we do with Featured Content, that was originally only present in Jetpack but that we proposed to core last year. It ended up in Twenty Fourteen, and we've updated Jetpack to make sure there would be no conflicts when you used both Jetpack and Twenty Fourteen.

melchoyce commented 10 years ago

As people have said, things in Jetpack don't have to stay Jetpack-only. :) I personally thing we should push for site logo inclusion in 4.2.

beaulebens commented 10 years ago

It's also worth mentioning that a lot of stuff in Jetpack is not appropriate for core, and so it makes sense for it to exist in Jetpack instead. That determination can shift and change over time though, and in that case it would be totally reasonable that if something in Jetpack made sense to go into core, it could, and then Jetpack would most likely defer to the core version.

nvartolomei commented 10 years ago

@beaulebens, I mentioned that this issue is related only to things that should belong to core, like site logo.

That happens now in Jetpack I think is bad for WP ecosystem, but as far as i see things won't change because Automattic does this to promote Jetpack and to get a slice of .org market. :)

jeherve commented 10 years ago

as far as i see things won't change because Automattic does this to promote Jetpack and to get a slice of .org market. :)

As we've mentioned above, and as proven by the examples we mentioned (Omnisearch, Featured Content), we're more than happy to help bringing Jetpack features to core, when appropriate. We've done it in the past, and we'll continue to do it.

Some of us (see @melchoyce above) already agree with you and would be happy to see Site Logo in core in 4.2. If you're particularly interested, feel free to open a ticket on core.trac, propose your idea, and see if others are interested too. You can look at the existing code here. On our end, if the feature proves popular on WordPress.com and in Jetpack, I'm sure we'll end up opening a ticket and proposing the feature for core, if you don't beat us to it. :)

jeherve commented 8 years ago

On our end, if the feature proves popular on WordPress.com and in Jetpack, I'm sure we'll end up opening a ticket and proposing the feature for core, if you don't beat us to it. :)

Closing this issue as Site Logo has now been proposed to Core: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/33755