A year ago I wrote this – How the WordPress Update Works – and, the update tool has changed, but the crazy expectations have not.
Before We Begin…
I want to reiterate this, since apparently I can’t say it enough, the auto upgrade tool will never be 100% perfect.
Part of me seriously wonders why people expect things to work perfectly all the time. The other part of me knows that if it wasn’t for WordPress getting it right so often, they wouldn’t have such violent reactions when it wasn’t. Skewered on their own swords, I guess. By making WordPress easier to install, use and upgrade, I do feel we might have lowered the bar too much, or at least beyond the current ability of servers and applications.
I feel there’s a practical limit to how ‘simple’ you can make things. It’s sort of why I hate writing ‘troubleshooting’ documents that consist of ‘If you see this error, do this.’ It stops people from thinking and troubleshooting on their own, and instead ties them to a script. You’ve been there, I’m sure, telling the guy on the phone that you already rebooted your system.
On the other hand, the vast number of people who just don’t do that is why I started writing up the Master TroubleShooting Lists for WordPress releases (this is now my third). Before 3.3 came out, I monitored the Alpha/Beta forums, the email lists, and pinged people I knew were testing the pre-release on Twitter and Google. Then I grabbed the other support geeks on the wp-forums list, asked them for advice and suggestions, and drafted up the post you see up there now. Well, except not. That post has been edited by anyone with moderator access on the forums (something I encourage and support, by the way).
What does all that have to do with how the upgrade works? It’s simple. If you don’t want to take the time to understand how a process works, what it entails, how it’s tested before release, and what goes into installing it for you, I don’t want to help you. Actually, no one does. One of the last things anyone in support wants to hear is ‘You don’t understand…’ (First place goes to anyone who says ‘It doesn’t work.’ and won’t tell you what ‘it’ is, what the error is, or anything useful.)
How Does The Upgrade Work?
Many things are still the same. WordPress downloads the files, replaces them, runs the ‘deprecated file list’ and deletes only those files. What’s new is that, as of WordPress 3.2, we only upgrade the newer files!
Faster Upgrades — The update system now support incremental upgrades so after 3.2 you’ll find upgrading faster than ever
This made the 3.2.1 upgrade really fast for everyone. If you look at the release notes for 3.2.1, you’ll see a list of files at the bottom. Those were the only files that got updated when you ran an automatic upgrade, which is really cool. And when you look at the notes for version 3.3, you don’t see those files. Why not? The first reason is there are a lot more files. In fact, I’m willing to bet most files are touched in an update from 3.2 to 3.3 (those are major releases, by the way). So listing the files would be crazy. The second reason is that a major release isn’t viewed the same way as a minor release. We’re supposed to expect big changes.
I started working my way through the code before I gave up and asked Nacin if the 3.2.1 to 3.3 used the incremental or the full upgrade? My gut feeling was, based on how long it took, it was a full upgrade. Nacin was quick to confirm that, elaborating by saying those are only done for partial releases, though the update was smaller than before, since it omitted the wp-content folder. This isn’t new, by the way.
So basically the upgrade hasn’t changed. Which begs the question…
Is WordPress 3.3 ‘Worse’ Than 3.2?
This goes back to my Master List posts. The whole reason I started them was that 2.9 to 3.0 was insane. It was huge. It was crazy big, with lots of changes, and lots of visceral reactions. “I hate this, I hate that, I hate you.” I’m currently ignoring (most of) the people who are doing that. I get that you’re unhappy things aren’t perfect, but I’m going to put this out there: You’re being irrational.
Now, it’s okay that you’re angry. I mean, your site is ‘broken’ and you’re upset. It’s justified. But from our end of helping you, it’s like trying to negotiate with a truculent five year old. You won’t listen to reason, you just want us to fix it, now, and by the way it’s totally our fault that everything broke. I don’t mollycoddle people when they start loosing their blob like that. I walk away and wait for them to comprehend reality.
No, 3.3 isn’t ‘worse’ than 3.2. And it’s not, generally, WordPress’s fault your site broke. It’s not anyone’s fault, actually.
Just like everyone waiting (or delaying) filing their taxes until the last day, plugin and theme developers also sometimes put off the seemingly minor task of checking their plugin or theme with the new version of WordPress. In fact, a shockingly high number wait for the release candidate. I said this before, if you make your living on WordPress, you damn well better test earlier. Sure, it makes sense that people like me (who actually don’t WordPress for a living) don’t always test in time. On the other hand, if you’re a professional, you’re remiss in your responsibility by not doing that.
And even then, you can still miss something. My best WordPress Friends missed a bug in their plugin. They do this for a living. How did that happen? It happened to be a feature you don’t often go and change. They had tested ‘does this still work when I upgrade?’ and that was hunky dory. But this one thing that only gets used when you’re doing one specific thing, that people only use once, that wasn’t working. Oops. You can see how that got missed. They just didn’t test it. It happens, they worked out a fix, and it’ll be out soon. Those are understandable misses because you can’t test everything. Maybe they’ll make a checklist of things they must test on a major upgrade, but then again, this plugin had survived multiple other major upgrades. It’s hard to say.
But what about when it’s your plugin plus someone else’s theme plus the new version of WordPress? Now it’s harder, because you get an IDIC epidemic(That is possibly my favorite Star Trek novel, by the way.) with WordPress. IDIC is a Star Trek concept. The Vulcans believed in “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations” which I think is a perfect way to explain the problem.
It’s because of both the myriad complications thrown in by the incalculable customized installations that, when people say the upgrade broke them, I have to do the thing I despise and ask them “Did you read the Master List and try everything?” I actually do wince every time I paste that link in. It is with a resigned sigh that I hit enter. I don’t want to have to say that, but when I see people posting ‘It doesn’t work’ or ‘Help! My site is broken!’ without any information as to what they’ve already tried, I look at the volume of posts and assume they did nothing.
I tweeted at one point “I’ll stop posting stock replies when you stop posting it didn’t work.”
It’s a give and take. You have to give a little information if you expect people to help. And not one of us thinks this install is 100% rock solid perfect. 3.3.1 is already on the docket with a couple things, including putting support for people with no DB prefix.
Invariably we’ll all find something new and horrible to add to the master list. Like this time, I had to put ‘flush all your caches’ because, when WP changed the jQuery to 1.7.1, some browsers decided they weren’t going to update the local cache like they’re supposed to. The amount that pissed me off is huge. Also, as Nacin groused, the core devs yet again missed a JSON issue. One bitten, twice WTF? as he put it.
For the most part, the real issues people have with 3.3 aren’t technical issues, they’re user issues. People love/hate the flyout menus, the toolbar (oh dear god the tool bar) and the uploader. They hate that not all their plugins work, they hate hate hate. It’s wearing, you know. And we, the happy Half-Elf volunteers out there want to help you fix things. But if you’re not going to accept that problems are usually bigger than just WordPress, we can’t help you.
Like the Database needing repair, okay? Some people had to repair their DB. Guess what? This isn’t just a WordPress issue. I ran a major upgrade on a webapp for work last month, and the damn thing did the same thing! I had to repair the DB to get it to work. This is because, as I know, I’m making some major changes to a database, and if there’s any sneeze on the sturdy tubes of the Intarwebz, then I may have a weird glitch. This is why, again, I tell people to manually upgrade. These problems are cause by the upgrade, but they aren’t WordPress‘s fault. They just happen. A thousand times you add a post, and one time it causes your database to crash. That’s uncommon, but not impossible, and that is what people fail to grasp.
You’re experiencing uncommon problems.
Don’t Lower Your Expectations, Raise Your Understanding
Sometimes I think people get the wrong idea when I talk about this sort of thing. You think I want you to give support people more of a break, and while I do, it’s for the same reason I want you to give your coffee barrista a break(Best coffee I’ve ever had, no lie, was when I told the overworked barrista “Take your time, if the jerk is in a rush, I’ll wait.” It cost me ten minutes, and they gave me the best coffee ever. One size larger.), or the chasier at the DMV. Treat people like people, because that’s the right thing to do.
Instead, you should learn more. Understand more. Take the time to go “I hate this. Why did they do it?” and then, instead of making that angry shit-distributing, post, learn something. With very little effort, a person can scroll down to the Alpha/Beta forums on WordPress and see if this problem was reported before. A slightly more experienced person knows about the blogs the devs use, and one step up from that, you know trac. Trac’s a little scary when you’re new, and search it is complicated, don’t get me wrong.
But see, the ‘geniuses’ who are helping you at all your problems? We’re just people like you. And we just have an idea of the lingo and what we’re really looking for on Google. And we would really like it if you could treat us like people before you lose your mind.
We’d also like it if you read, and thought, before you said ‘this is broken.’ Mind you, I think that of the guys I teach to solve problems. Listen to what people say, pay attention and try to draw better explanations from them, and solve the real problem. The number of times I’ve watched people just throw a rote answer at the wrong problem drives me nuts. But so do ‘web developers’ who don’t understand what FTP is.
If you’re going to run a website, even though apps make it easy on you, there’s no excuse for not learning what you’re doing. I don’t mean you need to learn how to write code, but just as I feel everyone needs to know how to jumpstart their car and change a tire (or patch one, if you ride a bike), it’s in your best interest to have at least a basic understanding of the magic that is the internet. And if the website is your life (as so many people on the forums short), well, then so is learning that. A chef knows how to use the fridge and sharpen knives because it’s expected of them. While a fashion designer may not be the best at sewing, they know how clothes are put together.
See the theme here? Know what you’re doing. Understand what’s behind your art.
Otherwise? Well, WordPress.com has fantastic hosting options and I send many people to them.
People who follow me on twitter know my frustration with my day job. It’s not that I hate my job, it’s that I hate when the rules get in the way of things. Over the last three years, we’ve grown from a simple ‘do this please’ directive to a behemoth of monitoring and oversight.
The problem is that the oversight machine gets in the way of our ability to be productive. This mechanism grew from the ‘old days’ when we would submit a request to make a change, and if I didn’t know that the server was being worked on from 1pm to 2pm, I’d just run the ticket whenever. The timeslots were general guidelines, not set in stone. Then we grew, and people realized they needed to coordinate a server change with a code push (my job) with a db upgrade and then with some other totally separate install. And since no one could possibly be expected to memorize every single moving part in the company, we have a new ticket system to manage it for us.
I know that the purpose of all this is to make sure that every change we make is one we needed to make, and that it’s done with the right amount of forethought and understanding. What it’s done was make everyone annoyed, and annoyed people don’t do work efficiently. Also it’s asking technical people to write explanations to non-techs, something a number of them aren’t good at and that’s okay! We can’t be expected to be Renaissance Geeks, good at all things.
A lot of the time, we complain “Don’t people look in the forums before they ask a question?” Sometimes we kvetch that these people are ignorant or lazy, and many times they are. But while a lot of questions are repeated, it’s really not as cut and dried as it may seem.
Okay, maybe it’s a hair splitting, but when you say “I want my code to do THIS and instead it does THAT.” you will often see yourself using very non-technical terms. First and foremost, that’s okay. In fact, I encourage people to use the terms they’re familiar with, that will make it easier to get help. But you need to know what you’re asking for, and that’s a problem.