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Making up about 12% of the topics in our licensed support forums, the Feature Request forum is one of the busiest on the site.  And a perusal of the over 600 features added in ExpressionEngine’s lifetime compared to the topics in the Feature Request forum reveals that we are quite responsive to user requests.

But ExpressionEngine is not a raft floating on the sea of the masses, so to speak, with its course and heading dictated by user-submitted feature requests.  It’s a vast seaworthy ship, a galleon, and most features and improvements come out of things that the experienced captain (Rick) and his crew (we, the dev team) recognize as being useful or filling a need that we see, without a user having to ask us for it.  So what user suggestions makes the cut?  What, besides the potential benefits of a feature, increases its chances of being included down the road?  Well, I’ll tell you.

Continue reading…

All I can say is that was a fantastic read. All of it made perfect sense and I for one will try my best to apply those thought processes before asking for anything in the future.

Best wishes,

Mark

Very enlightening, yes, excellent article.

+1 for the article

😉

+1 for the article

😉

Now that’s just naughty 😊

An alternate view - Thin skinned developers should just stay out of the feature request forums, leave that to the business/marketing side. They could take a proactive initiative and probe the possibilities of a feature request instead as a form of market research. Why leave it all up to us?

How’s that for raining on a parade 😊

Heeee Heeeee Heeeee, Just couldn’t help myself, he says jokingly.

Randy, I don’t see that any of the points I bring out have anything to do with having thin skin.  Interpersonal communication skills have as much to do with knowing when words might cause negative reactions in others as much as it does about not reacting negatively to someone’s words.  It’s a two way street.  And your suggestion doesn’t negate the issue of dealing with the mind of a developer, you’ve just shuffled it to marketing/sales, and severed the beneficial direct connection between developers and the users.  Middle men would hurt, not help, this interesting dynamic.

I don’t see that any of the points I bring out have anything to do with having thin skin

—————
Existing Feature Y is too hard to use
it needs to be used with care.  By making this statement, you’ve immediately put us on the defensive…“you did a bad job implementing this feature”
—————

Ya, I shifted to business/marketing as in general they are less personally involved in the code or actual implementation. Not to say the whole of EL isn’t.

Is this what you call “Managing Expectations”? Maybe EE 2.0 is closer than we think…

:cheese:  :zip:  :coolsmile:

I don’t see that any of the points I bring out have anything to do with having thin skin

—————
Existing Feature Y is too hard to use
it needs to be used with care.  By making this statement, you’ve immediately put us on the defensive…“you did a bad job implementing this feature”
—————

I guess we just differ in view there, Randy. :🤷:  That’s a normal human reaction to me, and not an example of someone being overly sensitive.  An expected outcome of criticism, good or bad, that would affect anyone associated with the thing being criticized, not just developers.

I guess we just differ in view there, Randy. :🤷:  That’s a normal human reaction to me, and not an example of someone being overly sensitive.  An expected outcome of criticism, good or bad, that would affect anyone associated with the thing being criticized, not just developers.

Derek, I used to participate quite a bit a few years ago in the Opera forums, right at the time they were getting rid of their (to some) patently offensive ad-supported version by making it all free.

You’re right, it’s perfectly acceptable for a programmer to have a “You don’t think I’m brilliant” response.

BUT, as a programmer, it should also be realized that customers will find odd, new, unexpected and sometimes useful ways of expressing a frustration that may be credible.

I don’t like to be criticized. Nobody does. Even off-handedly… 😊

Here’s the kicker, though: It doesn’t help to express that frustration to the customer. I had bad days where I was trying to wrap my head around someone’s problem and it just wasn’t working. I could get frustrated about my “help” not being effective, or I could be frustrated but look for the metadata, the kernel of the idea that the person was getting at. That’s growth.

Indiscriminate carping is a waste and we all hate fanboys (even fanboys hate fanboys, although I hear they love fangirls, although no one has spotted one in the wild).

Maybe PXlated has a point that your point may boomerang. And like you say, both valid responses.

But how to increase valuable communication? Parse the content, look for the fundamentals, recreate the issue with a new, open perspective, and find the root cause, which can then be precisely dealt with. In a lot of ways, I think EllisLabs does this extremely well.

So maybe it just seems odd to see you actually put that frustration in print, although perfectly understandable. Big deal.

Patience is a virtue.  😊

Wow this post is starting to get very deep. I had to get a dictionary out for a few words 😉

Still a great read though. Nice to see the developers perspective on things as we are all humans and like to be heard at some point or another. We can’t just listen all our lives, sometimes we have to speak out to, that’s just us humans I suppose.

Anyway this is all WAY too deep for me so I’m off to lurk for a bit in the shadows! 😊

Best wishes,

Mark

@Derek,

I noticed that Forum and Blog posts by EL team members show a new feature.
There is a double space between sentences, created by adding a non breaking space after the period (or question mark), and I think it looks beautiful!

Is this a plugin, or a new feature?
Looks like it is done automatically because in the thread it messes up one of your smileys 😉

::shrug::& n b s p ;

I apologize for being off topic but this thread was a nice example.

Cheers,
Elwin

@Elwin - two spaces following a period, exclamation mark, question mark, or colon produces the  , and has been a feature of Auto-XHTML as long as I can remember.  As for smileys, it’s not messed up, as I disable those from most of my posts. 😉

I see, so you all agreed to manually enter 2 spaces :lol:

Thanks for your clarification!