DISQUS

I really like the idea. You should consider making "plugin" an abstract class.

Occasionally I go back to WP 1.5 to check out the backwards compatibility of something, and I'm always amazed at how much faster the admin for 1.5 is.

I sometimes think that WP would be better as a stripped-down core package, with much of the popular stuff---TinyMCE, Widgets, Auto-upgrade, etc.---as bundled plugins. There would be a number of benefits for speed, security, and flexibility.

Hi Andrew,

Sorry that you had problems with my plugin, WP-DB-Backup. If you have a chance to investigate it a bit, I'd appreciate any suggestions you might have about what could have caused the problem.

The truncation of the backup file Cubesteak mentions is usually a result of someone's using the wrong client to unzip the file--typically the backed-up file is just fine. But I am eager to stamp out all existing bugs that I can, so if someone can reproduce a problem, I would love to know. My email is if.website at gmail.com, and I have a support forum dedicated to the plugin: http://www.ilfilosofo.com/forum/forum/2

I always test plugin upgrades on a development site before pushing them live, but I don't think the sites I manage are typical of the kind of people who use the automatic update anyways.

What I mean is that the people who automatically upgrade without checking the code are not likely to have checked the code even without the automatic update, so probably the only thing that has changed with 2.5 is the likelihood that users will upgrade, not their degree of caution.

But to answer your question, if breaking upon upgrade were unavoidable, I think I would check for the existence of the earlier version and then disable the main functionality, with a prominent admin area warning (like Akismet's "you don't have an API key" message). Then the user could opt in to the breakage, or (by following a link) re-install the previous version.

That's an interesting idea, but I wonder if it will dilute SEO. I see that if I google "Andrew Rickmann" the home page is in the top results, but what will happen once every time Google crawls your name, it ends up on a different page?

You should look into using Subversion to manage your WordPress sites. Basically with a three-word command you can update your install. I use it to update dozens of sites in a matter of seconds.

Thanks for linking to Snook's article. I think you're right to point to unit testing as a good way to avoid many coding problems, and it's something I hope to see become a part of core WordPress development.

Another thing that really makes a difference to me is just touched on by the NASA article: getting a full night's sleep. It's amazing how the simplest problems seem unnecessarily mind-boggling when I'm propped up by a few cups of coffee.

Unfortunately, unit testing and sleep are among the first things abandoned with looming deadlines.