Comments
How much work do you put into keeping templates and plugins updated?
Written By ionfish on Aug. 15, 2007.
2 Comments
Report Note
+ Clip This
Plenty of people round here produce free extensions to applications like WordPress: themes, templates, plugins and so on. Sometimes these are simple hacks, other times they're involved projects that become almost a framework in and of themselves. I'm often amazed by just how many of these things some people make, pumping out (for example) new WordPress themes at a rate of several every month. Other people, like myself, just have one or two projects which they diligently persevere with, forever tinkering: improving, updating, fixing bugs and adding features.
What's the general balance between these tendencies? Do you keep making new things, or improving your old ones? What responsibility do people have (if any) for keeping their old projects alive and releasing (at a minimum) fixes for show-stopping bugs and security flaws?
Tyme
Written Aug. 15, 2007 / Report /
As a user I expect those that release something to keep them updated. I think most people expect that by default. The problem is once the theme is downloaded (or whatever) there isn't a way (that I know of) to mass contact all those people currently using it (not those that downloaded it) to let them know there is an update.
I like your style - tweaking and making it better.
ionfish
Written Aug. 15, 2007 / Report /
Ah well, that's why Tarski has a little notification system built into it. If you enable it, it'll let you know when a new version is released by putting a little note on the WordPress Dashboard and on the theme's options page.
There have also been various discussions of late on the wp-hackers mailing list (for example, this one) about building in some kind of plugin update system.
(The Tarski update notification is off by default, because we didn't want to worry users by automatically pinging tarskitheme.com every time they viewed the Dashboard or theme options page, but you can turn it on by clicking the option at the top of the Tarski Options page.)