Displaying 1 To 5 Of 5 Comments OpenCamp – Randy Hoyt – Images In WordPress Here’s a link to the slides (with contact information more relevant to the web than to a local conference), for anyone interested in following along: It was great to meet you in person finally; thanks for posting these audio files! » Posted By Randy Hoyt On September 9, 2010 @ 12:34 PM Supported Legacy Branches For WordPress.org? @Ryan – I have heard this claim a number of times — that only sloppy plugins and themes will break in an upgrade — but I strongly disagree with it. The simple fact of the matter is that the WordPress development team cannot test every use of the API or other customizations to WordPress. It is up to plugin authors and theme developers and technical users to test that and make fixes; it gets wearisome having to re-test all these things on many live sites every three or four months. Here are just a few examples that I don’t think are the result of sloppy coding: * WordPress provides $wpdb for executing queries. Sometimes the data needed is not available in supported API call, so the database must be queried directly. Many category-related plugins broke from 2.2 to 2.3. I don’t think plugin authors are sloppy if they use $wpdb to retrieve data that is not available any other way. * I wrote some CSS in a theme that styled one of the default widgets. After the upgrade from 2.7 to 2.8 with the overhaul of widgets, the HTML for the widget had changed enough that my CSS no longer styled the widget at all. * I wrote a custom plugin that generated multiple shortcodes together, one after the other: [shortcode][shortcode][shortcode]. In WordPress 2.7, this worked fine; after my upgrade to WordPress 2.8, only every other shortcode was processed. Trying to fix it, I added spaces in between the shortcodes … and then everything worked fine. I don’t think this was sloppy on my part; there’s nowhere in any shortcode or plugin documentation that I could find that clearly states that shortcodes have to be separated by a space. Every time I upgrade a site, I find issues like these. I don’t think that they can all be blamed on sloppy coding, but — even if they could — I think it would be a mistake simply to dismiss them. These issues keep people from upgrading, regardless of whose to blame for them. » Posted By Randy Hoyt On September 27, 2009 @ 2:59 PM @Viper007Bond – I want this post to generate a discussion about whether or not a legacy supported branch would benefit the WordPress community as a whole. I think it would, but some commenters disagree. I hope that discussion continues, here and elsewhere. I’m a member of the WordPress community, starting a discussion with other community members about what release strategy would benefit the community: I think it’s a bit harsh to call that selfish and asking too much WordPress is a community-driven product, and I believe the WordPress project team is open to hearing feature requests and other feedback on the software from that community. I think quite a lot of users are experiencing upgrade fatigue and considering abandoning WordPress: many such users would much rather have a supported legacy branch than (for example) the ability to rotate and crop their images. If the WordPress blog ran a poll asking users if they wanted to upgrade less often, I imagine a majority of users would say yes. » Posted By Randy Hoyt On September 24, 2009 @ 12:36 AM @Ryan – I think a supported legacy branch — with upgrades to new versions every eighteen months or so — would be useful to a LOT more than 0.1% of WordPress users. In the earlier days of the project, most of the users actively followed it and were eager for the new features. As the WordPress community grows, many of the new users are less technically savvy and less interested in the software for its own sake — they just want to write about their passions or update information about their businesses. Even as a somewhat technically-savvy user, I get tired of upgrading all my web sites every three or four months. Something inevitably breaks in a plugin or in the theme. Spending an hour or two upgrading and repairing each web site adds up to quite a bit of time I spend messing with software instead of writing. I would much prefer to have to do this once every eighteen months and not every four months. One other important question related to your 99.9% number: how many more people would become WordPress users if a particular branch were supported for a longer period of time? I have talked with web developers and designers in my local area (Dallas) who have stayed away from WordPress because of its bad reputation for upgrade fatigue. » Posted By Randy Hoyt On September 24, 2009 @ 12:13 AM @Chris – I’m not sure this is true. I think many users realize that upgrading from 2.6.4 to 2.6.5 or from 2.7 to 2.7.1 is a lot less risky than upgrading from 2.7.1 to 2.8. I have seen many users upgrade to 2.6.5 but then stop because they hear the transition to 2.7 was not smooth for all users. » Posted By Randy Hoyt On September 23, 2009 @ 11:56 PMComments Posted By Randy Hoyt
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