Why not Wordpress 2?
18th of January, 2006 (Last modified: 10th of March, 2006) WWW , Thoughts ,
I've read some blogs online about why people haven't made the upgrade from Wordpress 1.5 to 1.6. In general it seems like people don't think it's worth it, and to a large extent I agree. It's now 19 days since Wordpress 2 was released and a quick look around tells me that upgrading is lagging behind. But why?
Upgrading software seldom goes right, I think it's fair to say that more often that not it goes wrong. A blog with a couple of hundred posts and a steady flow of visitors is not something you want to start messing with. However if you're not planning on making any changes as long as it is working you're looking at keeping the same software for quite some time and might miss out on a few goodies that might even improve your site.
For my part I won't upgrade my blogs anytime soon. Mostly because it's not worth it when considering the amount of work and the time it takes to upgrade. Moreover Wordpress 2 didn't really come with any new features that I need or want. Some of the beauty of Wordpress 1.5 is the simplicity of it. A neat and clean administration interface that loads fast and a structure that suits me just perfectly. I'm not looking for a large-scale CMS. If I wanted a site with advanced features and bucked-loads of options, chances are that I would have used something a bit more powerful than Wordpress, such as eZ publish.
I feel that the Wordpress team has moved, ever so slightly, away from their simplicity-mantra and fallen for the temptation of adding a whole lot of features that serve no purpose other than developer-candy. Just because you can doesn't mean that you should, maybe even the other way around. When you know what you're doing you should know what is needed and what's not. Matt wrote a good essay about how he would be reluctant to add new features just for the fun of it. Why?
«Small things add up — if there is an option in the interface that people have to think about for only 2 seconds (which is probably low) across a million users that’s 23 days (555 hours) of time lost to the world!»
-- Matt Mullenweg ( http://photomatt.net/2005/11/25/hidden-costs/ )
Many people came with the same old «If it ain't broken don't fix it». Fair enough, but that's not saying you shoudn't upgrade. Upgrade when the time is right and you have time to spare fixing your site when upgrading doesn't work.
4 Responses to “Why not Wordpress 2?”
I sunn Narvik-bonjvelstil kommenterer jeg på norsk selv om dette er en engelsk side.
1Jeg har heller ikke oppgradert til den nye 2.0 akkurat pga dette med at det ikker er noen nye funksjoner jeg ønsker eller trenger. I tillegg var ikke den nye versonen min helt enig med mitt design (som du allerede har påpekt er full av feil)
I upgraded to WP2 early january, after testing the beta for a while. Sadly enough I discovered that trackbacks does not work, but I am creating a small hack solving the problem, as I do not want to wait until there is an update. For your information, the same bug getting effective in WP2 is also present in WP 1.5.X.
If I had known that the trackback bug was there, I would not have upgraded. For all other matters, I would, concidering the new functions as WYSIWYG preview (which I have really missed).
Besides this, I agree on your post. I liked the old WP admin interface better than the new one. The blogosphere has also given the proper feedback regarding this topic, so my guess is that the will release a version cleaning up the UI.
2There are already some nice hacks / plugins to clean up the admin interface to look more like the 1.5 version. You can find this plugin at http://redalt.com/downloads/
3I haven’t tested it yet, I’ll rather wait until the Wordpress team hack something nice together.