Sephy’s Platzish

About a year ago, I was introduced to WordPress as an alternative to Blogger, and it was an attractive alternative - simple to use, and if you needed help, it was straightforward to figure out.

Another thing that was beautiful about WordPress was that it was small - just about 1 meg to download and install on your server.

Something else that I thought they were good at, at least at one point in time, was backwards compatibility - i.e. a new version would come out and the immediately previous one would continue to be maintained (like what just about every other software company - even Microsoft - does).

However, that all changed when it came to version 2.5. Among the little notes they included was that 2.3 would no longer be supported. It’s something I hadn’t mentioned when I blogged about it in the past, but it’s something that is important when you have a large userbase.

What happened to supporting old versions?

Admittedly, 2.6 isn’t very different to 2.5 (well, unless you include the database bloat that is post revisions {Side note - I wonder how long it will be before people are getting warned by their hosts about databases filling up due to all the revisions?}, tons of bugs that didn’t happen until upgrading and the fact that the widgets page is still messed up), but there are people who are satisfied with 2.5 and don’t need to upgrade yet, especially when you have a build that has a ton of unnecessary features and just plain old junk included.

Well, except for the Theme Previews - I like that idea, but that’s really for someone who likes to change themes very frequently, which I don’t recommend doing, unless you’re running a test blog and checking if a certain theme works with a specific version of WP.

Oh, by the way, you can’t turn off any of these new “features” directly through the admin panel. If you want to turn them off, you have to edit the wp-config.php file, which is almost akin to editing the registry in Windows - if you mess something up, you could completely bork your blog. I guess that’s something they must have forgotten about - flexibility in the system.

Anyway, one thing I didn’t notice until now when re-reading the announcement post (which I notice doesn’t have any trackbacks on it…I wonder why that is…) was this line, and I guess you have to pardon the poor English of the writer -

The 2.5 branch will no longer be maintain so everyone is encouraged to upgrade.

Yep, much like when 2.5 was released, the immediately previous version will be dropped like a hot potato. In fact, in looking through the bug tracking site, I notice that as of right now, two milestones - 2.3.4 and 2.5.2 - have disappeared completely off of the roadmap.

While looking at the current Google Cache of the site from July 14th at 1:18AM Central Time (US) (image at right, click for a larger version, because you know that it will change soon), you can see the 2.5.2 and 2.3.4 milestones still there, and still with bugs open. Also, the 2.6 release, which was claimed to have been released a month early, had a due date of the 14th. How does that equate to a month early? Anyone? Bueller? By the way, I find it very disconcerting that, within the space of a single day or so, i.e. 24 hours, 759 active tickets (80% of the total) were dealt with - most of them look like they were shuffled off to another version, as only 204 closed tickets show up on the 2.6 milestone page. Thankfully this major bug was fixed, however. I know that I’ll sleep that much more comfortably now…

That brings me to my question - where did WordPress go so wrong? The first step was paying for something that was unnecessary (the new interface in 2.5), then adding a 200+kb unzipping program, and now adding something that will undoubtedly get people in trouble with their hosts for filling their database up quicker than they ever thought. If you need help, however, you can count on the folks on the WordPress forums to assist you, that is when they’re not demanding information in a way they insist it be (which is really nice when you’re trying to finish an upgrade and the blog is telling you over and over and over and over again that you need to login again, on three separate browsers and after clearing the cookies).

Even when a workaround is suggested, it’s not allowed to be marked as a fix, but a workaround, because it might, on some distant planet, open a security hole.

I gotta say that after one experience of upgrading to 2.6 and finding this bug, I’m not ready to recommend that anyone move to it yet. If you have and it does work without any problems, that’s good news to hear, but if you’re on a blog that’s not on the root directory, you might want to wait, because it seems that these problems occur when in this situation.

Further Reading

If you want some more to read on the situation, check out these posts -

• WTF, WordPress? - Snoskred’s first post about the new version. She also suggests an alternative to WordPress in the post. Definitely worth reading.
• Fix for WordPress 2.6 can’t login - If you’re having issues logging in after upgrading, here’s how to fix it, away from the forums.
• It can scramble the brain - Another 2.6 upgrade gone awry.
• Do Not Upgrade To WordPress 2.6! - A roundup of some of the problems that have been anecdotally reported in the new version, with the recommendation to not upgrade.
• Read this before upgrading to WordPress 2.6 - Not only is the new version breaking logins, it’s killing off entire parts of sites, such as the categories list.
• WordPress 2.6 Nightmare Upgrade - Yet another person with categories getting killed off when upgrading.
• I Hate WordPress 2.6 - It’s not in English, but Romanian, I think; this is what Google thinks it says in English
• WordPress 2.6 is out. Should you upgrade. Yes! - In the interest of some fairness, here’s someone who says you should upgrade. Of course, there are no reasons why you should, and the whole post is just copy-and-paste from the original post.
• Installed WordPress 2.6 - Someone else who doesn’t like the new admin interface. When will WordPress learn that they broke something that wasn’t broken?
• WordPress 2.6 upgrade–fixing a login problem - Another login problem that wasn’t resolved by clearing the cookies…
• WordPress 2.6 Released Officially - From Weblog Tools Collection, this is more for the discussion that’s there
• How To Get Rid Of The Annoying WordPress Update Nag - There’s a new version of WordPress available! Gee, like I didn’t know that by looking at the Dev Blog listings on the dashboard. Here’s how you get rid of that yellow bar.
• Upgraded to WordPress 2.6 - This fella had both the index issue, and then couldn’t log into his blog…
• Permalinks fail in WordPress 2.5 and 2.6 - If you use index.php in the permalink structure of your blog, it might not work if you upgrade to 2.6.
• Wordpress 2.6 - Good or Bad? - A look at the features of the new version, along with some analysis of whether or not you should upgrade
• Spam Karma is GPL - Spam Karma, one of the more popular WordPress anti-spam plugins that aren’t called Akismet, is going GPL, in part, because WordPress is becoming too much of a hassle to support

This is one of those long-time bugs that I’ve experienced with a piece of software that I truly love because of what it can do with your phone budget if you have folks overseas (or just if you have a curiosity about free telephone numbers over there as well), Skype.

This particular bug involves trying to send a text message to a friend who is offline at the time. For some reason, whenever they send me a message and I’m offline, the message comes to me when I get online, but when I try to do it, I get the almost dreaded "Message not sent yet" note on the screen, even after they sign in.

The really annoying thing is that when I am fairly certain that person is online and I send a message with some unsent messages still there (because they didn’t get sent when they came online in the first place), those new messages get stuck!

It’s really fucking annoying and there is no reason that my messages can’t be delivered when both the sender and receiver are online. Thankfully there is one way to solve the problem, but it is quite annoying - calling the person usually gets the messages to go through, unless they are truly offline in which case I get sent to voicemail.

To be honest, as much as I love Skype, this problem is quite infuriating and should be something quite simple to fix, if you ask me. Of course I’m not a software engineer, so there ya go.

While the tone of this week is predominantly sad, there have been a couple of occasions for me to laugh, generally at other people’s stupidity (or just silly things that had been said). So, here are 3 scenarios which I faced just in the course of this day (Tuesday, not Wednesday when this is being published ). However, one really isn’t totally funny, but involves me having a bit of a saving grace.

They Speak THAT there?

I was alerted to the fact that an episode of the PBS travel show Rick Steves’ Europe featuring London was on the Create channel today. During the show, he was explaining how the Tube works, and he actually uttered this line -

Lost? Don’t worry because most of the locals speak English.

Really? I always thought they spoke Swahili or Mandarin in Tube stations…this was a shocking revelation that I would have never expected. That being said, however, Rick Steves is really the best (American) authority there is when it comes to travelling in Europe. Normally he has rock-solid information, and if you look at it in this context, you don’t get much more rock solid than that.

Gee…I wonder why he got stopped?

After work tonight, I went out to the south from my place of work in search of some less-expensive gas for my car (details of that in my next snippet). When you go to the south, you have to cross the freeway, and that involves a series of three stoplights (one is for a service road that leads to a hotel and restaurant complex, along with some banks and other services, the other two are for the freeway).

At the first of the freeway stoplights, traffic going south was stopped for the red light, and then, as they work, the light for traffic coming off of the freeway from the east was green. The first car in the line was a police car, marked and in black. Apparently the bright spark in the left lane didn’t notice this minor fact.

So what does he do? Go. While the light is still red. He didn’t even make it halfway across the freeway bridge before the cop had his lights on and getting ready to stop him, which he did just after the other stoplights. Wouldn’t you have loved to have been a fly on the wall for that conversation? By the way, the fine for failing to obey a traffic signal is somewhere in the region of $150 and 3 points on your license.

Always pay attention to road signs, ok?

Yeah, I kinda didn’t… :blush:

As I was driving into the city that is past the gas station that I usually stop at (which was only 1 cent per gallon cheaper) in my search for cheap gas, I got to a point where I decided to turn around. This particular city is renowned for having confusing streets and you can get lost easily. I guess the good news is that I didn’t get lost, but the bad news could have been me either in a heap of trouble with the police or in a hospital.

That is, if it wasn’t for a guy in a truck yelling at me about the street. You see, I had gone to the end of what was a split set of one-way streets, and I had assumed that because it was a one-way street intersecting the other half of the one-way pair, that this street was also one-way. It didn’t click in my head that there were lights going both ways on the street, meaning that it is a 2-way street. And I wondered why there weren’t signs talking about left turns on red…

Anyway, the light turns green, and I do what I thought was right (and what would have been right if this were a one-way street) and turned into the lane closest to me. The guy behind me turns into the correct lane, which I thought was about 3 lanes too far over. He goes and passes me, yelling to me "This isn’t a one-way!" I promptly swerve into the correct lane behind him and his truck, and when we get to the next intersection that has lights, I went into the right lane and thanked him for letting me know. He said that he did it so that I didn’t get hurt. It goes to prove that there are good folks out there.

In fact, if it were one of those Miller commercials, he’d probably have been given a bottle of the product they’re selling because he was genuine.

Oh, and the gas? I wound up getting it at the station I went past in the first place after all - it was $4.169 per gallon (or $1.102 per liter) there - the highest I’ve paid so far. Sadly, I don’t think it’s going to come down appreciably at all, thanks to the speculators playing their games.