[wp-hackers] Codex and old versions of WordPress

[Demetris]

On Sat, Jun 19, 2010 at 2:02 PM, Simon Blackbourn <piemanek at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm not too sure if the hackers list is the right place for this, but
> following on from the latest discussions about LTS, not supporting old
> versions of WordPress, encouraging people to upgrade, etc, plus the
> announcement that the core team are now planning to spend some time on
> wp.org, documentation, etc, maybe it's time to remove all the sections from
> the Codex referring to old versions of WordPress?
>
> Sections such as these appear all over the place:
>
> http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/get_posts#Parameters:_WordPress_2.5_And_Older
>
> http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/wp_list_pages#List_Sub-Pages (that
> even has a section for versions prior to 2.0.1!)
>
> The Codex is seen as official and therefore authoritative, so these give the
> impression it's fine to still be running these old versions. Surely one way
> of encouraging people to stay up to date is to remove such outdated content?
>
A thought:

Sometimes it might be useful, instead of completely deleting
instructions and howtos for older versions, to make a very short
synopsis and put in an Historical Notes section at the bottom of the
article.

EXAMPLE

Historical Note

Function foo_bar() [the function documented in the article] got the
blah blah functionality in WordPress v2.9.  Before that people used
elaborate hacks to achieve the same result.  You don’t need to use
such hacks anymore and it is recommended to avoid them.

END OF EXAMPLE

In this way, people that have used or read about the obsolete way of
doing things will know where things stand at present and where things
stood in the past, and, for example, will not think that they
themselves, or the advice they have been following up to now, are just
stupid. :-D

Demetris
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