WordPress 2.2 has been delayed probably until June, this news come not as a big surprise, even when just 4 months ago, the exact date of 23rd of April was announced.
I confess, that i have had some extremely high hopes, when WordPress 2.1 came out, but the truth is, the more functionality is to be implemented, the bigger the delay will be, that the reality of the software design and software programming.
Software development is a creative process, which is not easy, and there are always so many things beyond developer’s imagination, so it is really hard to predict an exact date for its end, every developer knows exactly what i am talking about. Every time we push ourself into creating something new, we basically are discovering the unknown, which may take quite a lot of time, even when the developer is very experienced and has a lot of knowledge, there is no guarantee, that he won’t face something, he is incapable to solve in the short period of time.
The new functionalities which are to be introduced in WordPress 2.2 these are those, which i consider to be the most important and the most interesting:
- PhpMailer – it will surely improve the performance, especially on those sites, where a lot of emails been sent (new comments, new users, polls, backups, as well as moderations in general)
- Permalink Redirection – goodbye my beloved redirection plugin ? this functionality is extremely important to me, as if i decide to alter the name of the post, all the links pointing to it, won’t vanish in vain, and no penalty will be cast by the search engines
- Multiple format comment feeds, including Atom 1.0 – a natural development and support of the current standards, which is important
- Improved comment editing – this is something interesting to look for, especially for those sites, which have a lot of comments
- MySQL 4.1 – this is not a new functionality, but those sites, whose providers are still using MySQL versions below 4.1 will face a big problem with upgrade to WordPress 2.2, but luckily even WordPress 2.0 will be supported for 2.5 more years.
- Tagging support – this is one more functionality which may obsolete some of the very popular plugins, but that’s life, and since a lot of people really using and needing this functionality, there is no surprise that it has found its way into the new version of WordPress
- Widgets – whole world is so crazy about them – OS X, Windows Vista, Yahoo have them already, the most of the programs are implementing, and now we will have a blogging software widgets. =O)
I think that WordPress developers has done what is right – delaying publishing online an unfinished software. This way people won’t scream about the bugs, won’t claim that what was promised was never delivered and so on. Take your time guys, do what is necessary, you as well as Apple with its OS X delay are well supported by your users. We have enough time to wait for a good, finalized software.
Pingback: As good as Wordpress “Getz”