Adii Rockstar
Meet Adii Rockstar
This is where I share my ideas, inspiration & thoughts. Generally though I'm just the Creator of Rockstar Awesomeness and this tumblog is further proof of that.
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Good topic for this week’s video…
I’ve been developing with WP for a while now, and it does seem that 2.8 has brought on many problems for users this time around. I think it’s mostly related to lack of support to some of the most popular plugins.
Found this site, which lists the compatibility of plugins: http://plugincheck.bravenewcode.com/
As you said – I fully agree that it should be a no-brainer to always backup your files / database before upgrading. Most dev’s know this.
But I think Wordpress should have done a better of job of making this advice BIG and BOLD before you pull the trigger the auto-upgrade process. They’ve done a great job in terms of design and usability since 2.7, but the auto-upgrade area is one piece that could use improvement.
I’m waiting on upgrading my blogs until all of my must-have plugins are supported.
Adii,
Great commentary. I’m still trying to get my first WP site published and have been working on it for months. I was amazed when 2.8 was released, that tons of people were twittering that they had just went ahead and upgraded their production sites, with no mention of testing or having a restore plan.
That being said, I think WP needs to eliminate the banner on the 2.7 dashboard that prompts you to upgrade because I think it would encourage users to just press the button.
I’d really like to see some ability to backup the WP folder and databases to allow for a rollback if the upgrade fails. And the rollback would need the ability to be launched directly from a specific URL in case the admin interface was disabled via a bad upgrade
WordPress definitely needs to make it clearer to users that upgrading doesn’t always only make things better – it can completely screw up the site, aswell!
Not having the upgrade bar on every page would be a start, as it just becomes a nuisance until you click it.
Also, it wouldn’t hurt for WordPress to automatically provide the user with a database backup to download during the upgrade process. I honestly don’t see why it doesn’t do this already.
Adii, an idea for you guys at WooThemes to consider, is implementing your own bar on the Dashboard containing an RSS feed for their theme.
You could include notifications of vital upgrades to their theme straight to their dashboard, and also include warnings when to/not to upgrade to new WordPress versions.
This is something I’m definitely thinking of incorporating into my themes.
I use WordPress on a lot of client sites, and always hit Upgrade Automatically when prompted by WordPress.
I am not concerned about a failure. Should I be? Sure.
But shouldn’t I also trust WordPress enough to think they wouldn’t have that feature unless it, you know, worked?
That said, 2.8 has some nice new features. But from a medium-level developer standpoint, I saw nothing spectacular, but I didn’t expect it with a “.x” update. I am sure, however, that a lot of work went into making it better on the code/app side, and that’s what I’ve come to expect from WordPress.
Actually I think the importance of not just upgrading straight away is very evident with the 2.8 release.
Many themes use an options page, but in the 2.8 release the get_categories() function no longer performs as it should in back-end code (oddly, unless it is ran from inside a function).
Obviously this has caused huge amounts of themes to suddenly break – this doesn’t seem to be the case with WooThemes as they have been coded slightly different.
It was actually quite difficult to get WordPress Support Moderators to acknowledge this as an actual problem – it was repeatedly blamed on theme authors. It’s now been acknowledged as a bug, so hopefully it’s fixed soon!
I said this on Twitter yesterday, but I really don’t understand the mentality some people have to upgrade WordPress immediately after a new release. Unless there’s some major bug or security issue, what’s the big rush?
In my experience, on WordPress sites dependent on a lot of plugins, upgrading tends to cause a lot more problems than it helps. This is why I try to use as few plugins as possible nowadays since for some reason they expect the plugin authors to constantly keep up with new core updates, and that’s not something that always happens.
Another problem is that it seems WordPress forum moderators don’t seem to be that willing to help, brushing the reports off because it’s “a theme you pay for,” even though they’re are probably lots of free themes that have the same issues.
Count me in on the sentiment that people need to definitely slow things down when it comes to upgrading. It is amazing and it speak very well of Wordpress that they have been able to build that level of trust with their users, but it is certainly not a foolproof system – nothing is.
@Nick Kask – i would suggest you wait a little longer after a new release before upgrading your clints sites, especially if you’ve done some extensive modding.
@Leland – i agree with you completely, some ppl just “have to” upgrade to the latest version without giving much thought to compatibility (plugins).
btw Adii, got to watch any footy game at yr place? (if your a football fan that is) hehe.
Intresting stuff im new to these things i’ll keep an eye on your post to hear more.
Upgrading is actually a painful process to say the least and therefor I don’t think we’d ever encourage a user to upgrade his / her theme from WooThemes (unless we’ve fixed a major bug or added some significant new features). Generally though I believe that if something isn’t broken, don’t try fix it.
But I hear you though… Our theme updates aren’t widely publicized at the moment and we’ve been considering how to make that information more publicly available.
There is actually backup / restore plugins available for WP, but I agree that WP needs to include some kind of rollback functionality *if* they’re gonna continue punting this easy, auto-upgrade functionality from within the dashboard.
I wish some of the WooThemes user would’ve waited a little while longer, before upgrading. But hey… That’s just me…
I found it funny (when upgrading my own blog to 2.8 ealier) that the banner within the dashboard actually read “You need to update”, which was linked to the upgrade to WP 2.8. Now this is actually kinda dodgy and not very explanatory at all, which means that end-users won’t think twice before just simply clicking the upgrade button.
Great link for the WP Plugin compatibility. Thanks!
I definitely think 2.8 was more of an “in-between” release, where they were paving the way for some massive new stuff coming in 2.9 (maybe) or 3.0 (more probable). So whilst I’m not wowed by 2.8 either, I do love the widget interface, as it’s a MASSIVE improvement from before.
Hehe… Yeah Foxinni had to fix the WooThemes that were using get_categories() and only he knows how the hell he got it to work…
But it is kinda dodgy that a change to such an important function wasn’t better documented.