You may have noticed that I moved all of the WordPress plugins over to the RedAlt site. I have just completed the installation of MicroWiki 2.0 over there, which will be used to maintain additional content on that site.
I’m going to move all of the WordPress-related wiki stuff from here over to that site, and might even erect a simple Trac-like bug tracking system for plugins so I can stop getting all that stuff in email, which is hard to keep account of.
I have a few additional plans for RedAlt in the future, even though this “future” may be very distant. One thing I was mulling today had to do with getting the RedAlt site more community-involved.
Over at the WordPress forums, there are teeming masses trying to get answers or problems solved. The response is good for people getting help, but the likelihood is slim for a common user reading many other posts besides what might provide an immediate answer to his question.
The WordPress dashboard is an odd invention, allowing certain folks to broadcast to a very wide installed base of WordPress users. I appreciate my part in Planet WordPress, which is where these posts feed through. Still, I wonder if there is a voice of the common user that isn’t being heard.
I’m considering adding a MetaFilter-like news engine over at RedAlt. It would specifically (for now) target WordPress issues, and allow anyone to creat new short posts.
I’m not sure exactly how it would work. I would need some good software. I think that the site itself could be open to registered users for posting, and would display anything anyone posted, but I think that the feed should be moderated. I should consider how the moderation would happen, whether it’s automated by user votes or by appointing individuals to release submitted posts. Perhaps there should be both a raw feed and a moderated feed. Hmm.
It might be cool if there was a special ping URL that could be used by WordPress authors to automatically submit posts from their own sites (via a Creative Commons license) for inclusion in the main feed. The site could periodically (for a preset amount of time) poll the originating site for comments, too, and perhaps share comments via XMLRPC or a feed of some kind.
That’s my current thought zygote. Do you have thoughts on this? I would be interested to know if there are people out there who are using WordPress, writing interesting things about it, or creating new things for it who aren’t getting exposure.
Leave your ideas in the comments.
