[wp-hackers] Wordpress 3.0, can we finally get a LTS version?

[Mike Schinkel]

On Jun 17, 2010, at 5:20 PM, Peter Westwood wrote:
> On 17 Jun 2010, at 22:12, Dan Gayle wrote:
> 
>> In Matt's release notes, he mentioned "We’re going to take a release cycle
>> off to focus on all of the things around WordPress."

First CONGRATS to the team for launching the best WordPress release ever!!!

>> One of those things should be long term support for the huge amount of
>> commercial web properties now using WP that are caught in the never-ending
>> cycle of release-update.
>> 
>> I once again wish that Wordpress would adopt a two-pronged release strategy.
>> Yes, go ahead and release the latest, greatest bleeding edge version as your
>> main release. But please, PLEASE, start a long-term-support (LTS) branch.
>> Backport all the security fixes and keep something stable for at least the
>> previous release version.
>> 
>> As Wordpress gets bigger, more and more companies are using it. Companies
>> that are using it for more than their personal blog. Companies that are
>> using it as a CMS, as their primary website, or for countless other cases.
>> Unlike if your personal blog goes down, having one of these sites go down
>> can create havoc for an entire company's bottom line.
>> 
>> Having to continually update a website because of security enhancements
>> isn't a big deal. Updating a website because of some cool new feature, a
>> feature that can introduce new bugs and security flaws, shouldn't be
>> mandatory.
>> 
>> I'm sorry for bringing this up again, and I'm sorry if you feel it's off
>> topic, but you are the only developers who can make it happen.
>> 
> 
> We tried this in the past with 2.0 and we found the following:
> 
> * Actually very few people used it
> * Alot of the security improvements and fixes we made post 2.0 were not trivial and backporting them would have taken a lot of time and testing

I think experience with v3.0 will be fundamentally different than with v2.9 and before.  Before, the only real usage patterns were blogging and simple brochure websites.  For that, stability was not nearly as important because relatively speaking very little custom development was bring done on the platform.

With 3.0 and custom post type I expect a huge amount of demand for custom development to support vertical market solutions (much like Drupal has benefitted from in the past 2-3 years), and that custom development will need more stable releases.

BTW, as I organize this conference[1] next week in Atlanta around business use of WordPress, pretty much all our presenters are echoing the same opinions (i.e. that businesses will en-masse commission custom functionality built around custom post types.)

> I would happily support and maintain a LTS branch for WordPress if there was a community around that really wanted it.
> 
> This really means that if this is something you want and you have clients that want then please provide patches and help us reach the goal you aspire.
> 
> It needs to be a community effort it is not something we can do on our own - the time would be better spent supporting the millions of people who do upgrade.

OTOH, this might be a huge opportunity for 3rd party (or Automattic) to provide this level of support much like Acquia does for Drupal?

JMTCW.

-Mike
[1] http://www.thebusinessof.net/wordpress/