August 24, 2008

Jeffro has published an interesting post over at Weblog Tools Collections about the blame for plugin problems being laid at the door of the WordPress core team, and I think he has a point, but as a minor plugin author I also see things from a slightly different perspective.

In my book there are two different aspects to the releases. Security releases should happen when they happen and if things break then so be it. Feature releases are slightly different.

When a feature release comes out plugins are changed for that and people start developing against the new feature set. It might be necessary to revise, or do away with a plugin or it may open up lots of potential. Either way there can be a lot of work and for part-timers it can be very difficult to find the time. Six months really isn’t a lot of time when you are developing and fixing a plugin, only for a new release to come out and it all need doing again. Two months is even less. Not an excuse, but a frustration none the less.

One of the hardest things about plugin development is that when a plugin does anything unexpected the author is subject to a hell of a lot of queries and support requests from users. I have lost count of how many updates I intended to make that never got to code stage because the evening I planned to do it coincided with a user having problems and asking for help. Most end users don’t know enough about the technology to even begin to investigate what it is about their own setup that may cause issues.

The number of users that use my plugins are trivial compared to things like Ajax Edit Comments and I still find the support requests hard to deal with, so much so that I am thinking of retiring my most popular plugin.

The point of WordPress is to make it easy to use without any knowledge so plugin authors need to be prepared to provide a lot of help to people, but a community of part-timers like me means they won’t always get that support and changing WordPress too often makes it less likely.

What all this means is that each WordPress release could trigger weeks of queries and they may not actually be anything to do with the release itself. With new releases users start to tweak things again the requests all need to be investigated.

I do think that the WordPress team should be aware of the major plugins, but I don’t think they should develop to ensure compatibility or even test them. That is the problem that Microsoft has and it weights them down a lot. It is no bad thing that development of the product is seperate from the plugins that run on it. On the flip side though everyone needs to understand (even assume) that this is the case and that upgrade will break things. They need to assume they will need to get stuck in or discard plugins regularly.

I guess my conclusion would be to ask the question: why do features need to be rushed out? 2.6 was ahead of schedule and while it did add some good things really what is the rush? Is the competition really there to necessitate feature releases more than once a year? are there any features in 2.6 that were essential to get out two (ish) months after the last major update? I really think it could have waited until November. Security updates are essential and can’t wait but there is a lot to be said for stability.

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