Feedback
After the release of SimpleMail I immediately experienced a problem that I imagine is shared by many developers: lack of feedback. Though I greatly appreciate all of the comments, suggestions, and bug reports (especially the bug reports) I know that for every one person that experienced a problem and reported it, five people experienced a problem, uninstalled the plugin and never thought about it again.
I found myself constantly worried about the bug reports I was not receiving, and in fact there were bugs that had existed since the original version that went unreported until recently. This was a learning experience of course and I have since taken steps to ensure that any application I release in the future is more robust. In addition to this I think that having experienced all of this I am must more likely to report issues I am having with any piece of software. I strongly encourage anyone reading this to do the same.
As I mentioned this was a learning experience, so I’ll offer some tips to developers so they don’t make the same mistakes I did:
- Test your applications in multiple environments
- Maintain portability in your code
- Read the documentation for whatever feature, function or library you are using to ensure that it will work on whatever platform you expect it to
- Don’t use language features that are not necessarily enabled or available to all users (ie PHP short tags)
- Make providing feedback easy
- Add a link, button, or form to your application that either directs the user somewhere where they can provide feedback or allows them to send feedback from the application itself
