Note: This post is a rant! Proceed at your own risk!
When Joomla 3.6 was released, most of those who updated their websites started complaining: I added a new article, but I can’t find it anywhere on my website. What is the problem?
The problem is that someone (you know yourself if you’re reading this!), who suddenly decided to become a Joomla core developer (that someone has never developed anything on Joomla before), enhanced the adding of new Joomla articles by giving newly added articles the last possible ordering. In other words, let’s say that you have 100 articles, all in the same category. When you add a new article to your website, the article ordering of the new article is 101.
Now, that someone (we will not refer to him as a developer and we will explain later why), thought that he made a breakthrough in the science of Joomla: by using very little code he made the process of adding new articles much faster on large Joomla websites. How is that? Well, in Joomla versions 3.5.1 and prior, when a new article was added, it was given the ordering “0”, and all the other articles’ orderings were shifted by 1. The shifting part is an expensive process in MySQL, especially if the website has many articles. By avoiding the shifting process, the adding of new articles became immensely faster.
But, what is the problem?
Well, the problem is that this enhancement breaks the default ordering functionality in Joomla. So, if an administrator adds an article to his Joomla website and is using the Article Ordering sorting feature for ordering his Joomla articles, he won’t be able to see that article neither in the frontend nor in the backend unless he browses to the last page.
This has caused a huge issue in the Joomla community, with many people complaining that they can’t find their new articles in Joomla 3.6.+ (or that they can’t add new articles in Joomla 3.6.+), while in reality, their articles were there, but they’re just ordered last. Unfortunately, that someone who broke the ordering functionality refused to admit that it was a mistake – claiming that (and we’re quoting his exact words) “it is wrong to use the field ordering to get content sorted by a date”. Which brings us to the next question:
Why do we refuse to call that “someone” a programmer?
Well, he is not a programmer for the following reasons:
- He failed to understand that the code to shift all the articles when a new article was inserted was there for a reason. He happily erased many lines of codes and just added a few lines without even analyzing the original code. Any programmer should thoroughly examine the code he’s replacing before doing anything.
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He didn’t test his code on a real large website. How did we know that? Because if he tested his code on a real large website he must have noticed the issue. But he didn’t (notice this issue), and so we are assuming good faith here that he didn’t test his super enhancement. The irony in this whole thing is that his code was meant for large websites. Small websites don’t suffer from any performance issues because of the shifting process.
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Even after seeing the reports that his new enhancement broke many Joomla websites out there, he stuck to his code change claiming that all these Joomla administrators were using the wrong ordering, which is, in fact, a wrong statement for 2 reasons: 1) there is no such thing as wrong ordering in Joomla (those administrators were just using an existing sorting option in the backend), and 2) even if that’s the case, he shouldn’t develop something that breaks websites. In fact, he only yielded when some heavyweight contributors in the Joomla core were involved in this issue, while still claiming that reverting back was the wrong thing to do.
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He wasn’t quick in cleaning up his own mess. A programmer, a real programmer will immediately revert his changes if they negatively affect the product. The Joomla community has to wait until Joomla 3.6.3 in order to see this issue fixed (though, in all fairness, we cannot blame this delay totally on him).
The reason why we have strong feelings about this is that the actions of this “someone” caused many people using Joomla to lose some of their trust in the product. His actions were immature at best, and destructive at worst. There are people who are born to be developers, and there are people who are born to be core developers, and this person is in neither group.
In our opinion, he shouldn’t have been allowed to touch the Joomla core, and this brings us to a few existential Joomla questions: Who authorizes work on the core? Who authorizes who should work on the core? And who approves core changes? If that kind of extremely weak code was let through, then this means that the answers to these 3 questions must be all revised.
We are always trying to make Joomla better, hence the rant. If you are reading this and you are a core Joomla developer, then please understand our true motives – we are not against you, we are against bad code especially in the core. We respect the work of all of those who are involved in Joomla, and who are considered, by programming standards, to be programmers.
Now, we turn to you, our dear readers. If by any chance you are reading this post because you updated to Joomla 3.6.+ and you can’t see your new articles, then fear not, we are here to help! Just contact us and we’ll fix the problem for you in no time and for a very affordable fee. We will also make sure that our fix is update proof!