Wordpress 2.2 Upgrade Fun

ITF just got some Wordpress 2.2 “love”, and reacted badly.

Initially I couldn’t log in, and when I finally resolved that little problem all my sidebar widget content had disappeared. Which is, frankly, bloody annoying.

It’s great that Automattic released the Widget functionality way back when. It’s great that the Wordpress community decided to run with that, and create their own plugins. What’s not great, is that the latest Wordpress release essentially ignored all the Widget work I’d done, broke the key Widget plugin I used, and left me having to rebuild everything.

With 2.2, Wordpress bundles the Widget functionality in its “core”, which in itself isn’t a bad thing. But if a fundamental change like that is going to be made, you expect a slightly better upgrade path. Particularly as Automattic created the original Widget plugin themselves!

The 2.3 release promises to pull tagging into the Wordpress core. Which almost certainly means it will introduce a whole raft of similar upgrade problems. Has the time come to move ITF away from Wordpress? Maybe…