Concerns around the Ideation process. How are new requests handled in the Idea Board tool for Bricks Builder?

d19dotca · February 15, 2023, 6:26am

Hi all! I’d like to have a friendly discussion on some concerns I have with the current Ideation process for Bricks Builder as I have some concerns with it that I wanted to raise. Open to others thoughts on this though too in case I’m overlooking or overthinking this.

It would seem to me there are some concerns that need to be addressed with the whole Ideation process for Bricks Builder, and wanted to bring this up for a friendly discussion. People have made comments on these in various points in time on various unrelated threads or in the FB group as well, and after encountering some of these concerns myself I wanted to highlight this more officially. The concerns seem to generally be the following…

Ideas seem to take far too long to be approved or never appear at all after users submit them in the Ideas area. In my case, the most recent two I filed were about 10 days ago and were in relation to these two posts (you’ll see one of them has a lot of votes already in the forum too): Automatically regenerate CSS when updating Bricks versions & NO BUG: Global Styles & CSS Classes are not exported when using WordPress Tools > Export function - #4 by d19dotca – I know I’ve submitted more in the past but don’t think many if any have been made public and that was several months ago now. To be fair, I’ve forgotten what those ones even were now since it’s been so long.
In the event that an Idea is (presumably) rejected, the user submitting the request never seems to be notified of such, leading to a loss of status on the request by the submitter.
There is no real follow-up in the Ideas Board in terms of updates from the originally submitters or for those who upvote it so that they can “track” it in the process as it moves from being voted on to planned and up next, etc. Email updates would be ideal at least for the OP but perhaps people who have voted on it too so that can be made aware when the feature request is in progress. This is something that the Breakdance Builders tool actually does quite well I noticed recently, may be good to look into what tool they are using for that process.
Even with the moderation, there are still duplicates that get released for public voting which then splits the votes. I have found two recently which I’ve noted here: Ideas – Bricks is essentially a duplicate of Ideas – Bricks which has far more votes and the new one should be merged with the original one IMO.
Some people are filing feature requests in the Forum only instead of the Ideas Board page. Admittedly this is confusing for some if the forum category definition isn’t read beforehand. The forum states that the Feature Requests category is for discussing feature requests but that requests themselves should still be filed at the Ideas Board page. Maybe this needs a warning or clarification bar at the top of the Feature Requests category page in the Forum so it’s more clearly understood? Many of the feature requests in the forum are not in the Ideas Board that I can find, so we’re currently losing track of these for voting purposes IMO.

Examples of just a few random feature requests voted in the forum here which I cannot find in the actual Ideas Board (apologies if I missed these from the Ideas board though):

So as you can see above, there appear to be some rather large inefficiencies when it comes to the Ideas process and I hope that these concerns can be further discussed amongst the talented Bricks Builder team for some improvements to that process. Thank you for taking the time to read this!

d19dotca · February 24, 2023, 4:01pm

Now that 1.7 is out, I was wondering if this could be addressed by @thomas by any chance? I hope the original post is understandable.

d19dotca · March 14, 2023, 3:08am

Hi @Thomas, just wanted to raise this again. Don’t mean to be pinging you directly as I am certain you’re very busy with many other priority topics, I just feel you’d be in the best position to speak to these concerns. It seems that at least from the “hearts” on the original post here that others share these concerns too. Hoping this can be a productive conversation or at least feedback to be acknowledged regarding the concerns raised around the ideation process. Thank you in advance.

d19dotca · March 24, 2023, 5:10am

I think it’s be good to perhaps follow Cwicly’s forum example for the idea process / feature requests voting: Feature Requests - Cwicly

They’ve effectively built it into the Forum itself (which I notice is the same forum software Bricks is using here), and would likely encourage more people to register and visit the forums as well.

@Thomas - I’ve seen several feature requests added over the last few weeks to be voted on, however none of mine have been published which is surprising to me, especially when it’s been asked that I create the request from other support posts in the forum. This seemingly random assortment of feature requests is very discouraging sometimes.

I appreciate there needs to be some level of moderation, but the ability to regenerate CSS automatically when updating Bricks seems like a valid suggestion (or at least nobody has said why it would be rejected in the associated forum post), as well as the ability to export Global Styles & CSS classes as part of Wordpress Export function for example. Further, I think the fact that I’ve pasted a thoughtful and detailed post about a concern that others share as well but have back on February 14th is also just overall very discouraging.

I love using Bricks, I think it’s amazing software, I just hope that we as a community can continue to work on improving the communication for example and other items which have been lacking lately (I suspect as Bricks has grown so quickly). We’re all here to help Bricks succeed.