pacificpelican.us posts

Podpress is a plugin (or add-on) for WordPress that allows users to turn their blog into a podcast. For a while now it has been one of the the most popular ways to create a podcast–and Dan Kuykendall, the plugin’s author, was even invited to speak at Wordcamp 2007.

But now that thousands of podcasters rely on it, Podpress has been broken by the latest version of WordPress.

A new feature of WordPress 2.6 called “post revisioning,” which is basically a wiki feature, appears to conflict with the Podpress plugin’s function. This problem can be overcome by disabling post revisioning, but many people simply upgraded and expected it to work, and have had a lot of problems in keeping their podcasts online.

This episode is a good illustration of a few problems with WordPress and the relationship between the CMS and its plugins. First, Automattic, the company that manages WordPress development, the core WordPress.org developers (who overlap to some extent with the employees of Automattic), is are extremely overzealous in pushing new versions on users at the expense of previous features working. Second, the lack of professionalism of plugin developers is a serious danger to the continued functioning of blogs for a wide range of WordPress users, from casual podcasters to large enterprises.

The problem with pushing new versions and features on users is a fairly nuanced one. Let me explain: I do not mean to say that new versions and new features, even at the pace at which they come out, is a problem. Rather, the problem is the assumption by Automattic and the core WordPress developers that all users are ready for major upgrades every three months and have the time to install new versions and find updated plugins. Because the last few new major releases (WordPress 2.5 and 2.6) have included some fairly major changes, they broke the functionality of many plugins that were designed for older versions. That really is okay–I don’t want to stand in the way of progress here–but what I don’t understand is why they can’t maintain the older versions for a little longer while people scramble for new plugins. (And by maintain, I just mean come out with an occasional new version with security fixes, like 2.5.1.) Instead, WordPress users read draconian announcements like this:

“2.6 is pretty much identical to 2.5 from a plugin and theme compatibility point of view, so upgrades from 2.5 should be pretty painless. The 2.5 branch will no longer be maintain so everyone is encouraged to upgrade.”

So the 2.5 branch, which came out only a few months ago, is having support dropped and everyone should upgrade, according to Matt Mullenweg. Because, as he claims, it should be “painless.” But even before he wrote that, people were already describing the problem with Podpress, based on testing with beta versions of WordPress 2.6.

Automattic and the core WordPress developers should work with major plugin developers more closely and maintain older branches for longer, or at least do more research before they make claims about whether there “should” be plugin compatibility.

As for plugin developers, if they are going to promote third-party products through their plugins and also ask for donations, as Mr. Kuykendall does, perhaps they should provide a bit more customer service and actively maintain their product so it can be useful to users for more than a few months

Though a new version was promised to be released by now, users are still waiting.