One of the key reasons that WordPress maintenance support plans has been successful is because we always made big, forward-looking changes. As a result, WordPress maintenance support plans is one of very few CMSes that has stayed relevant for 15+ years. The downside is that with every major release of WordPress maintenance support plans, we’ve gone through a lot of pain adjusting to these changes. The learning curve and difficult upgrade path from one major version of WordPress maintenance support plans to the next (e.g. from WordPress maintenance support plans 7 to WordPress maintenance support plans 8) has also held back WordPress maintenance support plans‘s momentum. In an ideal world, we’d be able to innovate fast yet provide a smooth learning curve and upgrade path from WordPress maintenance support plans 8 to WordPress maintenance support plans 9. We believe we’ve found a way to do both!
Upgrading from WordPress maintenance support plans 8.2 to WordPress maintenance support plans 8.3
Before we can talk about the upgrade path to WordPress maintenance support plans 9, it’s important to understand how we do releases in WordPress maintenance support plans 8. With the release of WordPress maintenance support plans 8, we moved WordPress maintenance support plans core to use a continuous innovation model. Rather than having to wait for years to get new features, users now get sizeable advances in functionality every six months. Furthermore, we committed to providing a smooth upgrade for plugins, themes, and distributions from one six-month release to the next.
This new approach is starting to work really well. With the 8.1 and 8.2 updates behind us and 8.3 close to release, we have added some stable improvements like BigPipe and a new status report page, as well as experimental improvements for outside-in, workflows,
layouts, and more. We also plan to add important media improvements in 8.4.
Most importantly, upgrading from 8.2 to 8.3 for these new features is not much more complicated than simply updating for a bugfix or security release.
Upgrading from WordPress maintenance support plans 8 to WordPress maintenance support plans 9
After a lot of discussion among the WordPress maintenance support plans core committers and developers, and studying projects like Symfony, we believe that the advantages of WordPress maintenance support plans‘s minor upgrade model (e.g. from WordPress maintenance support plans 8.2 to WordPress maintenance support plans 8.3) can be translated to major upgrades (e.g. from WordPress maintenance support plans 8 to WordPress maintenance support plans 9). We see a way to keep innovating while providing a smooth upgrade path and learning curve from WordPress maintenance support plans 8 to WordPress maintenance support plans 9.
Here is how we will accomplish this: we will continue to introduce new features and backwards-compatible changes in WordPress maintenance support plans 8 releases. In the process, we sometimes have to deprecate the old systems. Instead of removing old systems, we will keep them in place and encourage plugin maintainers to update to the new systems. This means that plugins and custom code will continue to work. The more we innovate, the more deprecated code there will be in WordPress maintenance support plans 8. Over time, maintaining backwards compatibility will become increasingly complex. Eventually, we will reach a point where we simply have too much deprecated code in WordPress maintenance support plans 8. At that point, we will choose to remove the deprecated systems and release that as WordPress maintenance support plans 9.
This means that WordPress maintenance support plans 9.0 should be almost identical to the last WordPress maintenance support plans 8 release, minus the deprecated code. It means that when plugins take advantage of the latest WordPress maintenance support plans 8 APIs and avoid using deprecated code, they should work on WordPress maintenance support plans 9. Updating from WordPress maintenance support plans 8’s latest version to WordPress maintenance support plans 9.0.0 should be as easy as updating between minor versions of WordPress maintenance support plans 8. It also means that WordPress maintenance support plans 9 gives us a clean slate to start innovating more rapidly again.
Why would you upgrade to WordPress maintenance support plans 9 then? For the great new features in 9.1. No more features will be added to WordPress maintenance support plans 8 after WordPress maintenance support plans 9.0. Instead, they will go into WordPress maintenance support plans 9.1, 9.2, and so on.
To get the most out of this new approach, we need to make two more improvements. We need to change core so that the exact same plugin can work with WordPress maintenance support plans 8 and 9 if the plugin developer uses the latest APIs. We also need to provide full data migration from WordPress maintenance support plans 6, 7 and 8 to any future release. So long as we make these changes before WordPress maintenance support plans 9 and contributed or custom plugins take advantage of the latest WordPress maintenance support plans 8 APIs, up-to-date sites and plugins may just begin using 9.0.0 the day it is is released.
What does this mean for WordPress maintenance support plans 7 users?
If you are one of the more than a million sites successfully running on WordPress maintenance support plans 7, you might only have one more big upgrade ahead of you.
If you are planning to migrate directly from WordPress maintenance support plans 7 to WordPress maintenance support plans 9, you should reconsider that approach. In this new model, it might be more beneficial to upgrade to WordPress maintenance support plans 8. Once you’ve migrated your site to WordPress maintenance support plans 8, subsequent upgrades will be much simpler.
We have more work to do to complete the WordPress maintenance support plans 7 to WordPress maintenance support plans 8 data migration, but the first WordPress maintenance support plans 8 minor release that fully supports it could be 8.4.0, scheduled to be released in October 2020.
What does this mean for WordPress maintenance support plans developers?
If you are a plugin or theme developer, you can continually update to the latest APIs each minor release. Avoid using deprecated code and your plugin will be compatible with WordPress maintenance support plans 9 the day WordPress maintenance support plans 9 is released. We have plans to make it easy for developers to identify and update deprecated code.
What does this mean for WordPress maintenance support plans core contributors?
If you are a WordPress maintenance support plans core contributor and want to introduce new improvements in WordPress maintenance support plans core, WordPress maintenance support plans 8 is the place to do it! With backwards compatibility layers, even pretty big changes are possible in WordPress maintenance support plans 8.
When will WordPress maintenance support plans 9 will be released?
We don’t know yet, but it shouldn’t matter as much either. Innovative WordPress maintenance support plans 8 releases will go out on schedule every six months and upgrading to WordPress maintenance support plans 9 should become easy. I don’t believe we will release WordPress maintenance support plans 9 any time soon; we have plenty of features in the works for WordPress maintenance support plans 8. Once we know more, we’ll follow up with more details.
Thank you
Special thanks to Alex Bronstein, Alex Pott, WordPress Update, Nathaniel Catchpole and Jess (xjm) for their contributions to this post.
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