News: Wordpress 2.5 public release

by Roger Kondrat on March 29, 2008

Wordpress LogoFinally after nearly a month of delay Wordpress 2.5 has been released.  It is my personal opinion although I can not prove it definitively but I think this release was rushed even though it was release nearly one month late.

Nearly a month ago it was due and everyone was foolishly talking about it and how it will be such an improvement, well the latter was correct but the former was entirely false if you took even 30 seconds to review their “build system” Trac where it was plain to see there were over 400+ outstanding issues.  But we bloggers are often short on research so this was hardly surprising.

It is from what I can see, still obviously over ambitions of Matt to release Wordpress at this late date rather than hold out another week or possibly more and this is based on what I saw in Trac just one week ago. A week ago Trac had showed that in nearly three weeks Wordpress developers (good guys everyone of them) had only closed half the tickets and that was in three weeks.  Is Matt trying to pull a fast one?  Are the heads over at Automattic trying to tell us that in one week Wordpress 2.5 was finalised from 200 tickets down to none?

This seems highly unlikely and to prove my point Trac is already showing that 2.5.1 is alive and well already fixing all the pieces of Wordpress software that did not get proper Quality control testing.  All I know is unless Matt himself can explain how this happened I am going to wait a while before I upgrade and probably until 2.5.2 when I know I may go a week or two without a scary announcement telling me “Security Flaw” marked Urgent.

I am, after all, a blogger not a programmer and so for me it is more important to have something work well than to have the latest and greatest.

All that being said I must say something nice about the team of “VOLUNTEER” developers that for no other reason than to support Wordpress offer their time for free all around the world.  They have done something amazing and all the arguements between me and Matt or his team will not change my appreciation for their work.  Rushing out the software has nothing to do with them.  Great work guys/girls!

If you have not been scared off by my opinion you can check out the recent announcement of WordPress or download

Also we have a screencast of the new release.

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Viewing 8 Comments

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    Trac is a tool we use for tracking issues, it's not a todo list for a release. Anyone can put anything on any milestone, and they don't all represent bugs the are also feature requests, enhancements, issues we can't reproduce, etc.

    2.5 had 733 closed tickets, but 2.3 did not have 733 bugs in it.

    There are a number of tickets that float from release to release as well, and when we close a milestone we move all the unresolved tickets over to the next major milestone, so 2.6 now has 703 open issues.

    There is one known bug I would consider significant that was too complex to fix for 2.5 without potentially breaking more things, so we decided to hold it off until 2.5.1 so we didn't have to rush anything in.
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    Hi Matt

    Thanks for dropping by and leaving a comment and sorry for the delay your comment was very late in the night for me (I live in the UK).

    I see you are making my point with

    "one known bug I would consider significant that was too complex to fix for 2.5 without potentially breaking more things, so we decided to hold it off until 2.5.1"

    So essentially you are saying there is only one 'significant' bug which implies there are other bugs in this release. Also that you have started on 2.5.1 immediately following 2.5 which I also said meant another upgrade soon after 2.5.

    I hope that it will take a while for you and the team to finish 2.5.1 and that there are substantial amounts of fixes and additions because it is really annoying to have to upgrade ones sites every couple weeks. At the least you should have a process that unless it is an emergency upgrade for security reasons we should only get offered upgrades after 4-6 weeks from any release minor or major.

    Again Matt thanks for dropping by and remember at the end of the day WP is still the best darn blogging software on the planet so keep up the good work, but take a moment and think about what I am saying because it does not just come from me (I did speak with others you know)

    Cheers
    Roger
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    All bugs aren't equal. The "significant" bug I mention will probably not be noticed by most users of WordPress, but if you use one specific part a few clicks down it displays a filter incorrectly, but the fix for it will touch probably 2-4 different files and change some core APIs. If we put the fix in I'd want at least 5-10 days of testing to make sure the core changes didn't break anything else, and it didn't seem like worth delaying the whole release for.

    30 days after 2.1 we offered an upgrade; 35 days after 2.2; 31 days after 2.3. I think we're right at the low end of your 4-6 weeks schedule. In 2007 there were 3 major releases and 12 minor releases, one of the minor releases was an emergency one.
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    Roger, your findings are quite detailed, I must appreciate the amount of information you have provided here are for the "best" interest of Wordpress community.

    However I agree with Matt that if a bug is stopping a major release, then it makes sense to set aside the bug for next release. WP community has been waiting for 2.5 release for quite a while..
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    Well I guess I will have to yield then... I am out gunned :)

    But to be fair I am not actually disagreeing with Matt and I do not think he is actually disagreeing me in fact either. We just have a different perspective is probably the most accurate way to express our dialogue.
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    Not much to add here, except to say that, when I had my own domain, I used Wordpress. and I loved it and still do.

    Blogger and MT just cannot match up.

    'Nuff Said....
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    oops! forgot my web address....
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    Totally agree, MT (I tried it for a couple months this year) is rubbish on ease of use and well Blogger I used for a year back in the day and I just do not appreciate the way Google runs it.

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