It wasn’t my intention to make anyone upset, but to just get to the heart of the matter, watershed.  You and Benoît both have slightly misrepresented our documentation and communication with the public to bolster your request.  I’m saying that it’s not necessary to do that, as it clouds the issue: just call an apple and apple.  You want a roadmap and feel that it would solve the frustrations you are experiencing in discovering what’s new and what’s coming.  That opinion is valid and doesn’t need exaggeration or sensationalism to convey that it’s important to you.

Derek, I thought we were having a friendly discussion in which I was increasingly seeing your point of view but you just turned it into a rant.

Where, precisely, did I misrepresent your docs or comms in a way that I haven’t subsequently qualified or retracted or met you half way on?

If you mean this…

Now, about the docs navigation and usability

I put a on it to show it was meant as a tongue in cheek comment and I didn’t qualify it for that reason.

Assuming that is the bit that stuck in your craw, I will now qualify it with one example… If I as a customer find it frustrating that the only way to navigate the docs is via a breadcrumb that most of the time is not in the browser view, I think that’s a pretty valid point. And in making that point I am not “misrepresenting” your docs, I am making a constructive criticism.

If that was not the remark of mine that you had in mind, then what was?

And please don’t conflate me and Benoit as the same person.

My apologies, watershed.  It was the friendly nature of our discussion that led me to feel comfortable using candor particularly as your last post continued to suggest that the docs should make specific note of when something has not changed.  Seriously, I meant no personal offense - it just sounded like you were trying to come up with alternatives to a roadmap when what you really want is a roadmap.

Where, precisely, did I misrepresent your docs or comms in a way that I haven’t subsequently qualified or retracted or met you half way on?

In your case, I was just referring to comments about having to read between lines and/or having to hunt for information, and assumptions about what we have and haven’t shared with (or in response to) third parties.  It’s inaccurate since we publish all changes in one place, and don’t play coy with users and hint at things, or ask people to infer anything beyond our written words.  Anything beyond that is self-imposed, we haven’t ourselves set expectations upon users beyond anything we’ve said, for sure.

And please don’t conflate me and Benoit as the same person.

Sorry, I should have broken that post into two replies.

Derek Jones - 08 December 2009 06:59 PM

Never ever did anyone from EllisLab indicate that commerce was going to be a part of 2.0.

I don’t have the time to search in the forum but there were posts from Ellis explaining that the module was nearly completed and that a difficult decision had been made to delay it the next major release. That’s from several year ago.

Besides, the commerce module does not matter. I was just using that as illustration.

Can we just agree that you are both upset that certain changes you were hoping for didn’t make it into 2.0

You could not be more wrong. I am in no way upset with 2.0. I understood a few months ago that there would be no significant feature changes, so I had no hopes whatsoever in that respect. Anything that came is a bonus to me.

and that you both would like a roadmap, and don’t like our documentation?

I can agree to this, although it’s not so much that I dislike what is out there but rather what is missing.

Derek Jones - 08 December 2009 07:25 PM

You and Benoît both have slightly misrepresented our documentation and communication with the public to bolster your request.

I ressent this as I honestly don’t think I misrepresented anything or if I did it was a mistake, no an attempt to bolster a request.
I ressent it even more because more a year ago you told me that you needed detailled, actual, clear examples to understand customers needs.

I assume you’re referring to the commerce module example I gave. I accept that I may have misunderstood the post from Ellis when I originally read it. That was more than a year ago and, at the time, I knew much less about EE and the company supporting it than I know today so I was absorbing a LOT of information in a very short span of time.

But what was published in the forum is a just a footnote for the example. The interesting part of the example is that we, as a business, were freed to move forward when we go a minimal amount of roadmap information (namely, Commerce module is not in 2.0).

For us, the lack of one clear, up-to-date, centralized roadmap (and more generally, the lack of technical documentation) has been and remains the main difficulty in working with EE. That’s a fact, not a misrepresentation.
I had assume, like watershed, that this was just an honest decision between a customer and a supplier to highlight the difficulties we face in using your product. I accept that you need to balance all the needs and allocate your ressources where you think it delivers the most value but I don’t accept that, on the one hand, you ask for specific, actual examples and, on the other hand, you suggest I’m misrepresenting information when I try to comply.

Ben you used an example as stated fact that isn’t true, implying that we said one thing and then did another.  You didn’t word it as a hypothetical, and it formed the foundation of your argument.  Mistake or no, am I not allowed to defend that?

If you do take the time to search (just search for ‘commerce’ and Leslie Camacho), you’ll find the line very consistent.

For us, the lack of one clear, up-to-date, centralized roadmap (and more generally, the lack of technical documentation) has been and remains the main difficulty in working with EE. That’s a fact, not a misrepresentation.

Thank you - that’s exactly what I mean about calling an apple an apple.  That metric is just as valid as any other when choosing what software to use, and ultimately, you will weigh its importance and how much it factors in to your decisions, and we’ll have to live with that.

Derek Jones - 08 December 2009 09:53 PM

Ben you used an example as stated fact that isn’t true, implying that we said one thing and then did another.  You didn’t word it as a hypothetical, and it formed the foundation of your argument.

If you’re under the impression that it was the foundation to the argument then I did not expressed myself with clarity.

So in an attempt to clarify, what I want to convey is that at one point I received a minimalistic piece of roadmap in the forum. Namely that “commerce module is not in 2.0.” To me, that tiny little bit of roadmap information was incredibly useful, and definitively sits in my top 3 of the most useful posts from this forum.
All the rest is just background information to this story (so yes, I did not put a lot of care in writing the background story, sorry if I ended up writing something that offended you there).

I’m not interested in what you seem to consider negative bits (either EE team delayed software or I misread a post, who cares, mistakes happen), I’m focused on the positive bits: I once received increadibly useful information… and I’d like the positive to happen more often

It wasn’t offensive, Ben, thank you for expressing your point of view and sharing your story.

Ingmar Greil - 08 December 2009 04:48 PM

And just to manage your expectations accordingly, I don’t see that changing any time soon, sorry.

See I think that’s where my problem is, as I mentioned on Page 1 I don’t think expectations are managed as well as they potentially could be. For example right now I have no idea/expectations around when bugs in EE2 will be fixed or what will be in 2.1 — so now I’m wondering if I should use 2.0 in January for a project as it has features that I want but other aspects are rough around the edges.

As I said in my previous post I’m not sure what the solution is, but knowing what Ellis Lab is working to improve or add functionality wise in 2010 would make me and my business a lot more comfortable in using it as our tool of choice.

Ben Lilley - 09 December 2009 12:45 AM

As I said in my previous post I’m not sure what the solution is, but knowing what Ellis Lab is working to improve or add functionality wise in 2010 would make me and my business a lot more comfortable in using it as our tool of choice.

While it may makes sense to you, I certainly don’t agree with you. When I’m looking at purchasing anything, I never think, “man, I should buy this because of what they SAY they will providing”. If the current incarnation of anything meets your current and future needs, buy it. If not, don’t. I really do think it is that simple.

Derek Jones - 08 December 2009 06:59 PM

[
Show me a software company that the documentation for each feature says “unchanged since…”

I *believe* Javadocs do that, but if I am wrong, I apologize.

Erin Dalzell - 09 December 2009 01:13 AM

Derek Jones - 08 December 2009 06:59 PM

[
Show me a software company that the documentation for each feature says “unchanged since…”

I *believe* Javadocs do that, but if I am wrong, I apologize.

Do you mean the “Since x.x” (@since)?  I believe that just documents when a class etc. was added, not the last time a related bug was fixed or a modification was made, similar to the PHP docs.  Not to mention, those are programming languages, not applications.  I’m thinking more of like Adobe saying “Color Selector: unchanged since foo”

Erin Dalzell - 09 December 2009 01:12 AM

Ben Lilley - 09 December 2009 12:45 AM

As I said in my previous post I’m not sure what the solution is, but knowing what Ellis Lab is working to improve or add functionality wise in 2010 would make me and my business a lot more comfortable in using it as our tool of choice.

While it may makes sense to you, I certainly don’t agree with you. When I’m looking at purchasing anything, I never think, “man, I should buy this because of what they SAY they will providing”. If the current incarnation of anything meets your current and future needs, buy it. If not, don’t. I really do think it is that simple.

Oh I agree with that too, use the best tool for the job, however I would like to know if something is planned in the future. It can just provide piece of mind for evaluating other tools.

For example I really don’t like the way Pages are currently handled in EE and would hope that’s going to be improved because I have projects that would benefit from EE but Pages support is just not that usable for clients. So in that respect it would make me feel better even just to hear “We know Pages can be improved and will be working on this during Q1 - Q2 2010. It would be mean that yes right now I need to find another tool, but in the future I know that I can use EE for those projects which is great as this is where we invest most of our time.

Hopefully that makes sense.

Erin Dalzell - 09 December 2009 01:12 AM

While it may makes sense to you, I certainly don’t agree with you. When I’m looking at purchasing anything, I never think, “man, I should buy this because of what they SAY they will providing”. If the current incarnation of anything meets your current and future needs, buy it. If not, don’t. I really do think it is that simple.

I assume you have never subscribed to a magazine, a newspaper, a healthclub or any such thing then…

Let’s just take magazines as an example of subscriptions. When you subscribe, it’s not really the current issue that you are buying (in fact, it is not always included in the subscription) but the purchase is based on expectations for the next issues.

Last time I checked, EE was sold in what is essentially a subscription model under another name. EE is not a dishwasher (or maybe dishwashing is the new super-secret module in 2.1 ).

Benoît Marchal - 09 December 2009 09:45 AM

Last time I checked, EE was sold in what is essentially a subscription model under another name.

Not really. Yes, you get support and upgrades, but essentially you’re buying the current issue (to go with your slightly far-fetched magazine analogy): you’re buying EE because it fits your needs now. At least, that’s what we’ve always been recommending and what you should be doing.

EE is not a dishwasher

Truer words were never spoken.

(Well, so much for my “last words” and sorry to come back to this thread after it has clearly moved on.)

Derek, I thank you for your apology but there are some things I still need to get off my chest.

You use words like “respect” and say…

It wasn’t my intention to make anyone upset

Really? Well try not using pejorative words like “silly” and “untruthful” to customers who are trying to make constructive criticism and then, after saying their comments are “full of assumptions”, compound the insult by going on to make assumptions of your own with “bolster your request”, “exaggeration” and “sensationalism”.

I can see that maybe my suggestion about “unchanged since” was “silly” but, there are better ways of telling me that, and the underlying problem I am trying to address with that suggestion is not silly.

It is telling that you say…

“Mistake or no, am I not allowed to defend that?”

The key word here is “defend”. Please have a sense of context and empathy. Defence would be appropriate if you were under attack BUT YOU WEREN’T! I understood perfectly well the intent of Benoit’s example before he felt compelled to clarify it (it’s a shame he had to). Ask yourself why Erin feels obliged to use a phrase like “if I am wrong, I apologize” in her first post in this thread. Is it because there’s a perception that EllisLab have a tendency to be defensive? I’ll let her answer that if she chooses to.

As to my own intent…

You “assume” I want a roadmap. Well, actually, no, I don’t think I do and that was not the motivation of this thread in the first place.

I will attempt to spell it out again.

1. I wanted to understand with greater clarity what was and was not different in EE2 and whether certain feature requests close to my heart were in any way addressed.

2. I looked at the change log and docs in some detail and didn’t feel able to draw firm conclusions (more on that below).

3. So I asked specific questions in the EE2 PB FAQ forum.

4. I got direct answers. I was not upset. To use Benoit’s phrase, the answers were “incredibly liberating” despite them being given in a slightly curt manner that was short on empathy.

5. From this experience, I had a gut feeling that there may be ways in which the customer tasks of steps 1 to 4 could be improved or handled in other ways to the benefit of both EllisLab and their customers.

6. I started this thread and used some specific feature examples (for which I already had answers) to illustrate my thought process. I gave of my own time to do this in an altruistic spirit, not one of mud slinging at EllisLab.

My objective of steps 1 to 4 (others will have their own variant of them) was not to seek a “roadmap” but to get a better grasp on the scope of a major product release that has been a long time in gestation and around which there is huge pent up demand and expectation.

Which brings me to…

DON’T MAKE ME THINK!

Assumption: you will be familiar with Steve Krug’s book in which he points out things like:

A. We don’t read pages. We scan them.
B. We don’t make optimal choices. We satisfice.
C. We don’t figure out how things work. We muddle through.

Though they may like to think otherwise, this is true even of people such as coders who pride themselves on their rationality and logic: people like me!

A change log is indeed a well-worn convention but, in the absence of other guidance, it does force me to think in the way that EllisLab do. It forced me to infer from what you don’t say the answers I was seeking. And I didn’t feel like I had found them (illogical though that may be with hindsight).

You might say that the forums are the only practical way to provide such answers (step 3 above). I remain unconvinced and think there is an over-reliance on the forums in general.

And the fact is that, though I know it isn’t your intent, the experience of this thread means I now feel less like a happy customer (which I was) than before I began it.