Just getting round to upgrading from 2.3.3...the latest version is now 2.6.? and we have had no end of problems tried on two sites and it's buggy as hell, skip this upgrade, it's a total time sink.
Nowt wrong with 2.6.3 - in fact, it's way ahead of 2.3! Of course there are some bugs around, what software is entirely bug free?
Anyway, yes - upgrade if you can, because 2.3 has some holes in it which, if you haven't hardened your install, could leave you open to hacks and abuse.
One thing worth noting is that many themes need upgrading for post 2.3 compatibility as certain key changes were made. If you have a custom theme there's a cost there - but that's life. If you have a GPL theme and it's not been updated you can update it yourself and put the change back in the community, or even pay someone else to do it (like us).
Most of the problems are probably down to not following upgrade procedures correctly and/or ropey plugins, in my experience.
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A full re-install shouldn't ever be necessary unless a ropey plugin has fritzed the database.
Basically, as I've learned through pain and experience, there are good ways to store data in the WP database, and bad ways. Adding fields to tables is a bad way, for example, adding your own table is ok, but it should be named in a way that makes it 'safe'. Same goes for themes. Our latest adds the concept of sections to the WP taxonomy but the names are all prefixed so there should never be a clash should the core developers ever decide to add such a feature.
Shame you had such trouble
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Yup thanks to Dave's(?) comments I have started the upgrades.
A big leap though as so much stuff is not supported or does not fully work with 2.6. One thing that has surprised me is how many projects have just been abandoned, whilst I have no idea how much work is involved in upgrading templates and plugins to the latest spec it strikes me that there are certainly many developers who could make a business out of upgrading their offerings rather than abandon them.
Most of those projects were university course projects, or ones to solve particular problems suffered by that person in particular. But people's lives change, they get more challenging jobs and so on. Being GPL others can pick up the project, but they don't always choose to. WordPress itself was a branch of b2, for example, by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little (who now does some work for us).
Designing a GPL theme or plugin may get you lots of thanks and downloads, but unless it's part of some other strategy (as it is for us) then it's unlikely to help pay the rent. Same goes for other stuff you give away - our WordPress User Guide has had thousands of downloads, but we only do it because it brings us credibility and work...
The worst thing is that it's not entirely unknown for a user to complain and whinge when something goes wrong with that free software or design.
In terms of work... from scratch it takes about a week to write a nice theme, if you understand WordPress, PHP, CSS and HTML well. A theme like Caribou is about 200hrs work.
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If you thought theme updating for 2.6 was bad, wait until you see the changes needed to your themes to implement threaded comments in 2.7 ...! There's more detail here.
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Last edited by malcolmcoles; 11th November 2008 at 21:20.
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