First, to simplify, you have to give up.
Let’s accept that the efforts provided do not guarantee success. Instinct and experience are the allies of simplicity. To achieve it, one must forget oneself, start again as if it was the first time, innocent of ego and desire to please everyone.
In the case of collaborative development, everything is intertwined, everything depends on something else. If we don’t know everything, the fear of getting it wrong sets in. And, the wall of the building where you wanted to bring your stone seems to touch the sky.
In my quest to contribute, I found myself at the foot of this wall to install a local version of learn.wordpress.org.
It’s homebrew, git, yarn, node/npm (ah no, in truth nvm) because you have to install an old version… Docker, composer, etc.
Thanks to the clarity of Johnathan’s explanations (who made the excellent explanation you’ll find here on the repo page). He calmly explains all the steps. But, despite this, you’re probably going to encounter all kinds of problems.
Of course, experienced developers will have no problem with this process.
But, it’s not great, it’s long, it’s complicated and not user-friendly. And there, we haven’t even tried to submit comments, let alone modification requests!
In short, I got there, now, let’s see what we can do with it!
On the download page, in the arguments at the bottom of the page, “simple” is mentioned first. But, WordPress is not simple.
Creating a default site is simple until you want to add small features or you have to choose a plugin. It becomes downright complicated when adding multilingual. The new interface, although on a good path, is not yet at the level of other tools that surround us.
Simplicity is a state of mind. It’s not enough to put text on a white background in a “Less is more” way and claim a certain “minimal design” trend to serve simplicity. Simplicity is also one of the tools that serves accessibility, which must be done without dogmatic design constraint.
This simplicity mindset must open doors to the widest possible audience. It must guide the thoughts at all levels of the chain. We must dare to rethink, renounce and destroy what took us years to build so that it is simple for future generations.