[wp-hackers] WordPress 3

[Doug Stewart]

On 5/17/07, Mark Jaquith <mark.wordpress at txfx.net> wrote:
> On May 17, 2007, at 1:13 PM, Lloyd Budd wrote:
>
> > It is a while off, but I thought I would plant the seed now for
> > WordPress 2.3 to be branded as WordPress 3.
>
>   It's only 4 months away.  I'm not sure we can do enough of a
> radical rewrite in 3 months (remember, last month is locked down for
> bugs) to justify such a huge jump.
>
> There is one nice solution for the "marketing problem" that I keep
> throwing out there every couple months:  WordPress 2008.  Do it like
> a sports video game franchise does it.  For multiple releases within
> a year, we can do WordPress 2007.2 or WordPress 2007b.   This works
> well with our new 4-month cycle.  And people will be made aware of
> exactly how long it has been since they've upgraded.
>

Gentoo and Ubuntu have been doing that for a while and, well, I don't
like it.  I'd have a hard time putting a finger on it, but it just
seems, well, weird.  While the releases tied to a year (or, as in
Madden's case, tied to the NEXT year) make sense for a product
released once-yearly, it somehow just comes off as a bit geeky for
twice- or thrice-yearly.  (Feisty Fawn being 2007.4, for instance.)

The nice thing about a release numbering scheme not tied to chronology
is that it leaves you free to indicate to users the relative "weight"
you give a release.  Since we've been talking about what would
constitute a 2.x->3 jump, I think we're keyed in on this notion fairly
well.

People have been using X.Y numbering schemes since almost the
beginning of computer science and there's a certain expectation built
into that at this point.  People look at a 3.0 product and figure
"Hey, must be some big changes from 2.x" whereas there's no way to
evoke that reaction when they say "Well, 2006.10 was okay, but 2007.4
is where it's REALLY at!"

Hope I'm making some modicum of sense -- it's early and I've not yet
had any caffeine.
-- 
-Doug

http://literalbarrage.org/blog/