Comments on: Not Another WordPress Upgrade

By: Josh

Josh — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 16:35:38 +0000

I don’t think that 99% of RC and Beta users wouldn’t speak up – if they go to the effort of downloading the pre-releases, they’re going to be at least a little inclined to help out.

You’d have to agree that WordPress has only improved since early versions too. That ‘quality code’ isn’t going to get scrapped if it is just that – there’s only been one large alteration in the structure that I’ve seen widely talked about (i.e. deprecated codex entries) – and the result was a massive improvement. And unless you’ve got massive issues with haters, waiting for you to slip up and impair your website’s security – the very large majority of WordPress users will never be effected by security issues with the platform.

I guess it takes a little faith – but if you’ve stuck with WordPress as long as I have you realise after a while that Automattic’s pretty damn good at what they do – and they have an authentic interest in their users and community, which is pretty rare.

By: Gary Barber

Gary Barber — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 13:03:23 +0000

@Josh, yes true, but you have assumed that “quality code” of the core will continue into the future. It’s always a good idea to know what the changes are exactly. Nothing stopping a few holes appearing in the future.

Also consider a large RC testing group in most cases is not really a solid user test just a moderate user acceptance test. 99%+ of RC people just don’t respond with the errors that occur.

It is nice to see a professional design being approached logically and with vigor in version 2.7 dashboard compared to version 2.5.

By: Josh

Josh — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 12:33:48 +0000

The best way to avoid manually upgrading WordPress would be to bite the ‘drag and drop into Filezilla and wait 10 seconds’ bullet – upgrade to 2.7, then use the automatic upgrade feature that is now implemented, and was widely known about long before the release… This shouldn’t cause a problem unless for some strange reason you’ve edited the WP core files, which can always be avoided if you know what you’re doing.

And to that end, WP 2.7 also went through a few beta and RC releases, using that massive and supportive market share of developers to iron out any bugs or security holes and unless Automattic are making big changes, there usually isn’t any threat of holes developing anyway. Messing with the core files yourself is far more likely to cause security issues.

I’d also far prefer a framework that stays on top of technology, with 2.7 implementing many new features in both the back and front ends to make things easier and neater – and this upgrade also demonstrates why WordPress is a far better platform to stick with; Automattic have said that they started from scratch with the dashboard because of the negative reaction to 2.5, and they’ve delivered something that feels solid and thought out.

By: Mountain/\Ash

Mountain/\Ash — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 00:08:28 +0000

Hay Gary, just to clarify what Ben’s getting at; you don’t get FTP access to the blogger servers, you give them FTP access to yours and they will upload static files to yours (based on the content you enter though their hosted control panel).

Also just wanted to add another way to keep WordPress updated a little bit easier is to use “fantastico” which is a package manager for cPanel.

By: Gary Barber

Gary Barber — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 12:30:22 +0000

@ben okay thats neat you get FTP control of the file space. That would be very handy. You’re right wordpress.com is more of a noob solution.

By: Ben Buchanan

Ben Buchanan — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 12:17:47 +0000

Unless wordpress.com has changed since I looked at it a while back, they’re not precisely the same. With Blogger the app is hosted but your content doesn’t have to be. You can have it FTP static files onto your own server.

By: Gary Barber

Gary Barber — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 12:12:10 +0000

Well to be fair Blogger is a hosted solution like wordpress.com.

By: Ben Buchanan

Ben Buchanan — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 12:09:28 +0000

This is basically why I use Blogger