[wp-hackers] Wordpress minor versions changing things for no reason, why?

[Mike Purvis]

On 10/12/07, John Blackbourn <johnbillion+wp at gmail.com> wrote:
> Back to the subject at hand, Mike, have you identified the particular
> changes in 2.3 that have caused these breakages? I'd like to know what
> they are. Are you sure they're trivial?

No, I'm not sure at all that they're trivial. But one thing that broke
between 2.1 and 2.2 had to do with a css class name going from
"the-list-x" to "the-list", an obviously wanton change. (And indeed,
the next version after that change eliminated the dependency on it, by
instead inserting a piece of markup via filter that I could rely on
and hook into.)

There was another breakage between 2.1 and 2.2 that had to do with
slight changes in the behaviour of wp_set_post_cats.

Jacob: I appreciate your willingness to help, but I haven't really got
the time or inclination at the moment to debug this. Nonetheless, your
post highlights the fact that it would be awfully nice to have a
best-practices resource for plugin authors, which lists functions from
most- to least-stable, and indicates the best way to do things like
initialization.

Jared: I don't have time to religiously follow the WP trunk. My point
is that for such a mature project, the Wordpress code seems to
experience an awful lot of churn, and it makes the overall experience
for casual plugin authors extremely intimidating and frustrating. Is
there a release-cycle policy? What about restricting new versions with
significant code change to a 6- or 8-month cycle, and only dropping
bugfixes and security patches in the intervening time? Maybe even a
special low-volume mailing list to announce new beta releases?

DD32: Where would I find a list of stable API functions? All I've ever
been able to locate are off-site lists for hooks and filters and this
page of zero-level beginner introduction
<http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API>. Is there a canonical list
somewhere of "safe" functions that can be used by plugins and are
guaranteed to still exist in the next point release?

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