As mentioned on several other blogs already, we are skipping the WordPress 2.4 release and moving on to WordPress 2.5 in March. We enjoyed the holidays a little too much and just didn’t have the time to finish the big features we are working on. We are considering building this extra time over the holidays into our roadmap. This would mean one less release per year. We’d release in Spring, Summer, and Fall, and then again in Spring of the following year. With six months of development time, the Spring release would contain the bigger features that don’t fit into the shorter Summer and Fall release windows. We’d also have some buffer so developers could be a little lazy over the winter holidays without having to scramble to release after the New Year.
So, look for WordPress 2.5 in March with some big new features.
Its funny, it tends to work the exact opposite for me – I get a lot more done at Christmas, simply because I have all the time off work!
One of the benefits of being unmarried with no kids I guess… :o)
I hope this update won’t result in malfunctioning plugins too much.
Looking forward to see the new Admin Panel.
Gracias al equipo de WordPress. Que mas podemos pedir de un sistema tan bueno y gratis? saludos,
looking forward to the new wordpress release mate!
Your roadmap sounds like a sound / sane plan.
Its always pretty amazing how much work it is relaxing over the holidays 😉
Does that mean 2.4 is not being released? I may be a little slow but what’s the difference if it’s released as 2.4 or 2.5?
I guess it only is a sign of maturity the WordPress represents now.
I wish some plug-in authors stopped delivering nightly releases as production releases too 😉
PS: There is never enough thanks for you guys. Worpress is an excellent product.
2.5!
ok enjoy the winter
Hey… go right ahead. We can’t complain about something that’s free, especially when it’s an excellent product. A break is very well deserved. Heck, I’d still be happy with only two releases a year if you folks wanted to take a break in the summertime too!
Mh, maybe you should update the roadmap too? 🙂
Yeah yeah, software developers love enjoying holidays, I know 😀
OMG! A practical, realistic and pragmatic development team!
Looking forward to WordPress 2.5! Keep up the great work. 🙂
good things need time! 🙂
Enjoyed the holidays a little too much?! Dude, you had a baby!
Sounds good to me.
This is so much better than the 1.5 days, when releases came on a whim. I checked my dashboard daily—even if I wasn’t posting—just to see what was happening in the release department.
Thanks. (That word does a terrible disservice compared to what you guys actually deserve)
Lame. Just lame. call it 2.4.
As long as it doesn’t break the DB schema just one month before release (like 2.3 did), it should be fine.
Awesomeness. If enough new features warrants skipping a version, then why not. Sounds good.
You’re doing the March (spring) thing because it’s my birthday month, right?
@Ryan: Why have roadmaps at all? Just decide what you’re going to do at the concerned version and release after that’s done and tested.
@Chris: I agree. There’s nothing like being childless (I used to babysit as a teenager, so I know what a pain kids are) to allow you to get work done on your time off.
@Sam: Que? I think it’s something to do with apples but I’m not sure.
@TacoBiter: My sentiments exactly.
The number of releases are not an issue for me. Instead the issue for me is from a user perspective that the release does not add more work for me (i.e. more clicks to do the same thing) nor does it make installing the release more complex. For me from a from a quality standpoint regarding the release that the release as been tested, any significant errors have been corrected (e.g. security issues) before the release is made available for download, and any known issues including compatibility issues are made known at the time of making the release available for download.
Keith, the roadmap exists for several reasons. Firstly, there was a lot of demand for it: WordPress is now a very big player, and there are big companies and institutions relying on it. A roadmap means people don’t have to follow development closely to have a decent idea when the next major release will be. Secondly, it makes development cycles faster and hopefully more effective: deadlines give a release focus, and hopefully ensures a bit of realism: with a set period of time in which to complete each release, only a certain amount of stuff can make it in, which means important decisions about feature priority are actually taken, and releases mostly happen on schedule rather than taking months and months (and sometimes even years) because all the stuff the developers would love to pack into the next version still isn’t finished. At the end of the day the roadmap is about making the developers’ lives easier and allowing WordPress users more insight into the development cycle without forcing them to read every Trac ticket.
@Keith, re: Sam
Thanks to the WordPress team. What more could we request of such a great, free system? Regards,
@My Parents
Thanks for trying to make me bilingual. It didn’t quite work, but at least I can dispense with Babelfish for reading Spanish (and some Portuguese and a little Italian and French, thanks to the Romans). 😉
@Ryan and Keith
Hey, if you are gonna do date-based releases (like Ubuntu, GNOME, etc.), the trick is to know your workflow and set dates accordingly. Sounds to me like that is what this is.
@TacoBiter
What’s in a name? A release by any other number would contain the same code.
Seriously, though, It’s probably easier to just move work (tickets) from 2.4 to 2.5, rather than moving 2.5 to 2.4, 2.6 to 2.5, not confusing those moves (2.6 to 2.5 to 2.4, or leaving 2.5 tickets in place), and then explaining to any random onlooker than no, feature X or bugfix Y didn’t get moved up 3 months. Ryan (or anyone else from Automatic) is free to correct me, but at least in my job if we decide to skip a release and already have subsequent releases on the roadmap we don’t renumber everything up by one precisely so that conversations don’t get confused.