WordPress 1.5 Coming - I Won't Upgrade
The German WordPress site announces the release of WordPress 1.5 for February 15th, based on a somehow cryptic upgrade party invitation by WordPress developer Matt Mullenweg.
WordPress is a very good application, and the new features in 1.5 look promising. But will I upgrade? No. Maybe after version 1.5.1 was released, but not now. Why?
- Too much last-minute bugfixing: Around 160 bugs have been fixed today or yesterday - out of around 800 bugs in total (as you can see from the bug database). However, there are still more than 60 bugs open.
- No transparency: What are the criteria for a release? How do they test a release candidate? Do they test, actually? In the past, WordPress releases had some serious problems, and fixes took a long time. Remember the missing xmlrpc.php in WP 1.2.1, just to name one? It took them two months to make a new install, which actually was release 1.2.2. Let's face it: WordPress has become a very popular application, and the hacking days are over. Now it's time to set up some quality management.
- Last, not least: What's about PHP 4.1.2 and Debian Woody? 4.1.2 still is the second most spread PHP version. However, if you browse the bug database, you will notice that it usually takes at least a month until bugs related to PHP 4.1.2 are detected (see this one, for example: the buggy code was introduced on December 16th and detected on January 15th). Since WordPress claims supporting 4.1.2, one should think it itself is developed using 4.1.2, but it isn't, as this bug shows. I myself published a patch related to WordPress running on Debian, but it hasn't been applied to version 1.5 yet (Update: The patch was applied on February 14th, one day before release). I was and am still facing troubles with WordPress 1.2.2 on Debian , and I'm not willing to go through this again. Not to forget the WordPress support is - well - poor.
I appreciate the work the WordPress developers have done, and maybe I'm biased, but I suspect WordPress 1.5. to be rather buggy, and that's why I won't upgrade but wait for the next bugfix release.
Update, February 15th: There's some discussion about this post on the WordPress forum. I replied to comments there, also.
Update, February 16th: For some reason, this WordPress forum entry can not be found anymore. Maybe it has been deleted.
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Comment by Joshua Hudosn
February 15, 2005 - 17:18
I've been using nightlies for a couple months, some bugs, but mostly great software. They did work hard on this one. You will enjoy it when you come around for 1.5.1 though. It's the beauty of chioce, you choose when you want to use software... :)