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

[lawrence at krubner.com]

> 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.

If I recall correctly, Shelley Powers said something similar on her  
blog, and a bunch of people jumped into the comment thread to agree  
with her. Don't open source projects typically commit to a road map,  
long before they reach the widespread use of WordPress?


-- lawrence krubner




> Quoting Mike Purvis <mike at uwmike.com>:
>
> 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?
>
> --
> http://uwmike.com // http://googlemapsbook.com
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