WordPress 2.9 too quick?

If you have not upgraded yet my advice is to stick with 2.8.x for now and wait for 2.9.1 as there are a few bugs in 2.9 affecting feeds and future posting.

WordPress 2.9 was released last weekend. Yesterday, I was notified that 2.9.1 is most likely around the corner due to some issues that arose because of a last-minute addition to the core of WordPress. The issues revolve around scheduled posts not firing because the cron scheduler ends up broken. The patch can be found here which is already a part of 2.9.1.

While reading the support thread, I became concerned with some of the responses that were published. For example, “How could you release an upgrade that is obviously this problem-filled?” or “WordPress should have tested 2.9 before releasing it!“. I’m not sure how many times this has to be preached to the choir but each version of WordPress is tested before it’s release to the public. That is what the Beta releases are for as well as the Release Candidates. WordPress 2.9 went through one release candidate version and two beta releases. In fact, before RC1 hit the public, all of the tickets assigned for that version were closed. Each version was tested by anyone who volunteered. There seems to be this notion that there are thousands of WordPress developers and they should iron out every bug before releasing software to the public. While there are hundreds of WordPress developers submitting patches here and there as well as squashing bugs, not every hosting setup can be tested. This is where the end users come in.

Dion Hulse who has been a long time contributor to the WordPress project illustrates this problem quite well in a blog post entitled WordPress, A Call To Arms. I think Dion says it best in the first paragraph which illustrates the lack of testing problem quite well.

WordPress 2.9 was just released, And several users have run into a bug. Surprising? Not really. There’s one simple reason for this, While thousands of people Test each and every WordPress release, These users are not You.

While hundreds or thousands download the betas to perform testing, the real crux of the testing comes when the “Stable” release is shipped. The stable version is installed by everyone because it’s considered to be stable only since you now have hundreds of thousands of blogs running the software which translates into more testing environments, you’re going to run into bugs the testers simply didn’t find. This gives the perception that the Stable release was not stable at all and therefor, should have never been released. But, if the software were never released, the bug would most likely would not have been found.

10 Comments

  1. Dave C. on 4th January 2010 at 7:05 pm

    Simon,
    Is your excellent Garland theme incompatible with 2.9? I just tried activating it on a fresh WP 2.9 install, it the theme will not load.
    Cheers!

  2. Simon on 4th January 2010 at 8:28 pm

    Thats odd, I tested it locally with 2.9 and on the server. I will check again tomorrow!

    • Dave C. on 4th January 2010 at 8:34 pm

      Actually, I just wiped my install and reloaded WP 2.8.6 and I get the same problem. When I install the theme with the built in uploaded in the dashboard, it installs just fine. But when I try to use the preview, it hangs on loading. When I activate it and go to view the blog home page, it hangs on loading the page, and only shoes plain text and links on a white page, as if it is unable to load images and css.

      • Simon on 5th January 2010 at 4:55 pm

        Very strang, i just upgraded to 2.9.1 and installed garland latest with the theme installer and it works fine!
        There must be something misconfigured your end maybe?

        • Dave C. on 5th January 2010 at 5:57 pm

          You can see it in action here at my blog site:
          http://naturallyengineered.com/blog/

          It loads the text for the page, but the css and images never load, it just sits on page loading forever. I ideas on what might cause that?

  3. Simon on 5th January 2010 at 7:25 pm

    Looks like your server cant handle gzip with php .. I will make a new version with an option to disable all caching.

    • Dave C. on 6th January 2010 at 1:57 am

      Ahh, so that is it? FYI – the site is hosted through Hostek.com

      Thank you for the correspondence, you really have done an excellent job with the theme. My plan is to use it on WP in conjunction with Drupal as well, so having a theme that exists for both CMS’s will be nice.

      • Simon on 8th January 2010 at 7:20 pm

        Dave, here is an updated version. There is an option in the theme settings to disable css zipping, please test it for me.

        Thx

        download it here

        • Dave C. on 8th January 2010 at 9:12 pm

          Excellent, I will reply with my results on the new thread you started with the download.

  4. Bitplanet on 31st March 2010 at 9:15 pm

    Мне так же все подходит, хотя было и получше.

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