The WordPress Upgrade Schedule
Though I know the theory is that everyone loves new shiny things, this insane upgrade schedule that WordPress has set is nuts. Plugins are breaking all over the place (despite the assurances on the 2.5 announcement post that that wouldn’t happen) and people need to know their site is going to WORK. Especially now that WordPress has hit the mainstream and is used for BUSINESS sites.
Some of the plugins my clients depend on haven’t yet caught up to two versions ago. And it isn’t the plugin people’s fault. There have been twelve versions of WordPress released in the last twelve months. We all have other stuff we DO. I’m sure, if the plugin people do this stuff in their spare time, that they are not happy with this situation any more than my clients are. And clients who are luddites and have trouble uploading a file via ftp cannot do these upgrades, and resent that it’s upgrade time again (”Didn’t we just DO this???” they say to me, complaining about that notice in their admin area.) And I’d rather be designing. I hate doing upgrades. Everyone does.
The 2.5 release looks like it’s addressed issues we’ve been yelling about for a long time, and I’m not complaining about what’s been done, it actually looks pretty cool. I hope that once the shakeout happens (WP never seems to be released in TRUE final form, always in what they refuse to call beta even if it is, another gripe I have) that they sit back and work on other stuff for awhile. Like BBPress or something. Or maybe WikiPress. Or AdPress. Or something. Anything other than yet another new version of WordPress which leads to another round of broken plugins and stripped down functionality just to get a site working after the supposedly necessary upgrade.
And someday I might actually get around to upgrading my own installations . . . after I finish a couple hundred client upgrades. Hopefully I’ll be done with this round before the next damn release.
April 11th, 2008 at 9:56 pm
Indeed this new version has many problems. I am seeing many pessas complain that their layouts are breaking and which had to disable plugins … It is regrettable.
April 14th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
Agreed 12 updates in 12 month is just ridiculous. Roll out quartlery updates or something, and quit bowing to community pressure to “hurry up” and publish the next bell or whistle while overlooking the fallout from some such changes.
April 14th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
It isn’t necessarily community pressure. I have a friend who used to be one of the committers on the dev team. She told me that this pressure comes from the very top, from one person, and that the rest of the dev team CONSTANTLY urges caution, more security, more vetting of code, etc. It’s one of the things that makes me glad that Drupal has a WordPress Importer.