Apparently we’re not the only ones who’ve noticed that WordPress’s development schedule and updates are doing more harm than good.
Mika Epstein, who voluntarily reviews and approves plugins for the WordPress plugin directory, voiced the concerns shared by developers who are struggling to keep up.
Breaking people’s vehicles on purpose or be negligence didn’t work so well for Detroit’s automakers so why would Matt Mullenweg want to bring planned obsolescence to writers and small publishers and small businesses’s websites? Detroit is still struggling to win marketshare back from Toyota and Honda.
Here’s the WordPress user’s comment which prompted WPtavern to break silence on the forbidden updates issue (a ban awaits anyone who posts twice):
As the pace of WordPress releases grows, plugin and theme developers have to constantly update their products. This is leading to a real and growing problem among WordPress site owners and companies like mine that handle website maintenance and updating.
This pace is leading to an almost daily need to fix problems, caused by these updates. Plugin updates tend to break things, even though we primarily use professional, paid plugins for the idea of support and generally better quality products.
I get that it’s important to patch security issues, but we’re also seeing a lot of new functionality, moving plugins into core, and other changes. These cause theme developers to push out updates with great frequency and they make mistakes.
I’m worried that the pace of core updates is driving the larger ecosystem toward failure. Everyone is scrambling to keep things patched, then new conflicts arise and things break down. The person on the end ‘companies maintaining their sites, responsibly, or services like mine’ face a constant flow of updates, then testing, then trying to fix things that have broken.
Mullenweg dismisses users’ concerns with a wave:
Mullenweg answered the question by saying improvements can be made to the plugin directory so that users can share the burden in the testing process. He also said that the speed of WordPress development will increase instead of decrease. Meanwhile, the development team will continue to release three major versions per year.
WPtavern as an Audrey Capital (Matt Mullenweg’s personal venture capital fund) vehicle admonishes its readers to just get with the program (giving themselves a nice pat on the back while they are at it): [Read more…]