Software becomes obsolete almost overnight
David March 20th, 2008
… just when you think that life is finally stable… :-)
I’m sure that we have all have memories of either purchasing or downloading software only to find that it is already outdated and either needs a security patch or that there is either a newer version soon to be released or that a competitor has a package with features that may better fit our needs. <sigh> Just a few weeks ago I installed and configured this blog site with the latest and greatest WordPress software, but I just found that there is a completely new version coming out soon. From Jerrey Zeldman quoting Wired magazine,
“Although WordPress 2.5 includes some nice new features like better plugin management, full-text feeds, and built-in photo galleries, the most immediately obvious change is the sleek new look, which comes courtesy of Jeffery [sic] Zeldman and the Happy Cog design team.”
This sounds like a must-have upgrade. Yes, it is still not a final release, but I’ll have to check it out to see how it compares to my current site design. Hopefully it won’t require another redesign. Oh well, the cycle continues!
The goal is to get new WordPress releases out once every 3 or 4 months, with the occasional minor releases made as needed in between. Here’s the current Roadmap.
2.5 has slipped a some, but will hopefully be wrapping up soon. I’ve been running the bleeding edge code on a few blogs and haven’t had any problems with the themes so far.
Interesting. If there really are updates coming that often, it makes me wonder how many people will actually keep up with the updates. I suppose that it all comes down to whether or not there are important security fixes or if there are important features (like the new 2.5 user interface) to justify the effort. Of course, there will always be those people who will keep up just because they have the time and interest in doing so.
One of the features that has been worked on for 2.5 is a more automated mechanism for updating WordPress installs. I personally pull my WordPress installs directly from the Subversion repository, which makes updating extremely easy. Usually one ’svn up’ and I’m done.
Well now that the stable release for WordPress 2.5 is available, I downloaded and installed it. I had to be a bit careful not to overwrite my customizations, but more the most part it was a fairly painless installation, taking about 20 minutes. This mostly consisted of FTPing the files to my web host and double checking which files needed to be preserved.