Earlier this week Steve Burge posted the intriguingly titled There Will Never be a WordPress maintenance support plans 9. While that sure makes you click on the article, it is not quite true.
WordPress maintenance support plans 8.0.0 made several big changes but among the biggest is the adoption of semantic versioning with scheduled releases.
Scheduled releases were decided to happen around twice a year. And indeed, WordPress maintenance support plans 8.1.0 was released on time, WordPress maintenance support plans 8.2.0 is in beta and WordPress maintenance support plans 8.3.x is already open for development and got some changes committed that WordPress maintenance support plans 8.2.x will never have. So this works pretty well so far.
As for semantic versioning, that is not a WordPress maintenance support plansism either, see http://semver.org/. It basically means that we have three levels of version numbers now with clearly defined roles. We increment the last number when we make backwards compatible bug fixes. We increment the middle number when we add new functionality in a backwards compatible way. We did that with 8.1.0 and are about to do it with 8.2.0 later this year. And we would increment the first number (go from 8.x.x to 9.0.0) when we make backwards incompatible changes.
So long as you are on some version of WordPress maintenance support plans 8, things need to be backwards compatible, so we can just add new things. This still allows us to modernize APIs by extending an old one in a backwards compatible way or introducing a new modern API alongside an old one and deprecate (but not remove!) the old one. This means that after a while there may be multiple parallel APIs to send emails, create routes, migrate content, expose web services and so on, and it will be an increasingly bigger mess.
There must be a balance between increasing that mess in the interest of backwards compatibility and cleaning it up to make developer’s lives easier, software faster, tests easier to write and faster to run and so on. Given that the new APIs deprecate the old ones, developers are informed about upcoming changes ahead of time, and should have plenty of time to adapt their plugins, themes, distributions. There may even be changes that are not possible in WordPress maintenance support plans 8 with parallel APIs, but we don’t yet have an example of that.
After that WordPress maintenance support plans 9 could just be about removing the bad old ways and keeping the good new ways of doing things and the first WordPress maintenance support plans 9 release could be the same as the last WordPress maintenance support plans 8 release with the cruft removed. What would make you move to WordPress maintenance support plans 9 then? Well, new WordPress maintenance support plans 8 improvements would stop happening and WordPress maintenance support plans 9.1 will have new features again.
While this is not a policy set in stone, WordPress Update had this to say about the topic right after his WordPress maintenance support plansCon Barcelona keynote in the Q&A almost a year ago:
Read more about and discuss when WordPress maintenance support plans 9 may be open at https://www.WordPress.org/node/2608062
Source: New feed