I?ve noticed that a few people aren?t installing WordPress 2.0. Rather, some folks have tried to install it and decided that it wasn?t ready for them yet. Still other people have decided that 2.0 doesn?t offer them anything beyond what they were getting in the 1.5 code beyond an upgrade headache.
– here’s your chance to give feedback if upgrading isn’t on the cards.
I do note he really does actually answer his own question. Effectively, wordpress 2.0 right now, with the issues that can and are experienced, just doesn’t live up to the hype and really doesn’t have that much to offer.
“It’s not so much why aren’t I upgrading but why should I upgrade?”
And it’s a good point.. For my money — sure, it sports a better user system, has a nifty WYSIWYG editor, has better theme (and associated theme plug-in) support and, well, looks nicer, but it just doesn’t deliver on a number of fronts. We still have the old categories and links (rather than folksonomy or taxonomy friendly tags), no decent archive management, no real improvements in theming (I don’t recall seeing too many template_tag commits to the SVN) and that’s lead to folks creating massive theme and template engines (like K2, for example) where a heck of a lot of features have to be brought in.
What about Ajax? There’s masses of it in the admin interface - yet no sign of any template tags or code to make use of it in themes. Why? Again, folks are often improvising — K2 and Squible come to mind. Now, again before you all blast me for speaking ill of wordpress - understand that I use it, daily, I cut code for it and think it’s fucking awesome. It’s definitely going places and has every chance of becoming even better. But, one of the first rules in software, is the fact one needs to differentiate oneself from the competition or risk being left behind.
Ajax and ruby on rails are two web technologies that are going places - and fast. Adding template tags to recycle and reuse theme Ajax is a great way to improve the product.. So is adding taxonomy, additional template tags, archive management, etc. Indeed when 1.5 released, it sported a massive improvement in template tags and introduced a raft of improved functions.
Wordpress 2.0 and it’s inevitable updates do risk becoming just a ‘prettier’ version of 1.5.x if, really, it’s just cosmetic changes and better user management.
≡ This is a journal entry relating to the topics of wordpress.
Brendan Borlase is a Systems and Network Administrator living in Adelaide, Australia, having lived, worked and breathed Information Technology for over 12 years. Learn more.
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