Tag: essay

GPL – Oh Dear God
I come to code from a strange direction. I was a fangirl and I learned all about webpages because of that. Perhaps it’s because of that humble begining that I look at the GPL arguments much as I look at ‘shipping’ arguments in fandom. Shipping is when fans believe a relationship to exist between two characters, regardless of anything being scripted. A great example of this is Xena: Warrior Princess. Some people thought Xena and Gabrielle were a couple. Some people didn’t. When the two argued, there were fireworks. Now, with shipping, sometimes a miracle occurs and the couple do get together (see Mulder/Scully in The X-Files and Grissom/Sara in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation), but most of the time the arguments go on for eternity.

That’s pretty much how GPL arguments make me feel. Ad nasuem. I hate them, and I was sorely tempted to post this with comments turned off. But various people asked me my opinion and that they’d like to see this posted, so… you’re masochists. This all started with Rarst asking me what I thought about a GPLv2 vs GPLv3 in a trac ticket in WordPress to fix plugins about page license requirement. I should note that he and I don’t see eye to eye about GPL, and we’re still pretty friendly.

Here’s the thing. I don’t have a horse in this race. GPLv2, GPLv3, MIT, Apache, whatever. I don’t have a license I love beyond measure. You see, I work for The Man, and having done so for 13 years, I have an acceptance of things I can’t change. One of those things is ‘This is how we do things.’ You accept that, even if things aren’t the most efficient, or even if they’re not the way you’d do them if you could choose, this is what they are.

I view the GPL issue in WordPress with the same antipathy. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s that I accept the rules for what they are and I have no reason to rock the boat. WordPress says ‘If you want to be in our repositories, and you want to be supporting our official stuff, you have to play by our rules.’ This is good business sense, it’s good branding, and it’s self-protection. With that in mind, I recently changed a plugin of mine to use code that was MIT licensed.

Expat License (#Expat)

This is a simple, permissive non-copyleft free software license, compatible with the GNU GPL. It is sometimes ambiguously referred to as the MIT License. (MIT License compatibility with GPLv2)

That’s easy enough. But I’m sure you’ve heard people argue that GPLv3 and GPLv2 are incompatible, or Apache is, and those are true statements. Because they’re incompatible, however, does not mean you can’t use them together, it means you can’t incorporate them!

Let me explain. No. Let’s let Richard Stallman explain:

When we say that GPLv2 and GPLv3 are incompatible, it means there is no legal way to combine code under GPLv2 with code under GPLv3 in a single program. This is because both GPLv2 and GPLv3 are copyleft licenses: each of them says, “If you include code under this license in a larger program, the larger program must be under this license too.” There is no way to make them compatible. We could add a GPLv2-compatibility clause to GPLv3, but it wouldn’t do the job, because GPLv2 would need a similar clause.

Fortunately, license incompatibility only matters when you want to link, merge or combine code from two different programs into a single program. There is no problem in having GPLv3-covered and GPLv2-covered programs side by side in an operating system. For instance, the TeX license and the Apache license are incompatible with GPLv2, but that doesn’t stop us from running TeX and Apache in the same system with Linux, Bash and GCC. This is because they are all separate programs. Likewise, if Bash and GCC move to GPLv3, while Linux remains under GPLv2, there is no conflict.

What does that mean? It means I could write a plugin in GPLv3 and use it with the GPLv2 (or later) WordPress and not have any issues. However what I cannot do is take that code, put it into WordPress, and distribute it as a new version of WP Core. And that’s (most of) why we shouldn’t have the GPLv3 plugins in the WordPress repository. The fact is that often new core features get their start as plugins, and if we allow GPLv3 in there, we run the risk of breaking licensing.

Worse, if we get our ideas from a GPLv3 plugin and rewrite it to GPLv2, we still are at risk for violation. This is the same reason, to bring it back to fandom, why authors can’t read fanfiction. If they use your ideas, you can sue them. We have enough headaches with Hello Dolly, let’s not add to them. And before someone thinks I’m overreacting about that, I wish I was. I’ve watched copyright wars before, seen friends lose their websites over it, and I can’t imagine that a TV show would be less agressive than a software company when they feel their rights have been infringed. It’s terrible, but it’s the reality of the litigious society in which we live.

So why don’t we just move WordPress to GPLv3?

If it helps to think of software in a different way, pretend you have two versions of server software, Server 2.0 and Server 3.0. You can use the files from Server 2.0 on the box with Server 3.0, but you can’t use Server 2.0 files on Server 3.0. They’re not backwards compatible. That’s the first problem with GPLv3, we’d have to make sure every single bit of code in WordPress is able to be moved to GPLv3.

This is clarified in the GPLv3 FAQ: (GPLv3 FAQ Update – Converting GPLv2 to GPLv3)
I have a copy of a program that is currently licensed as “GPLv2, or (at your option) any later version.” Can I combine this work with code released under a license that’s only compatible with GPLv3, such as ASL 2.0?
Once GPLv3 has been released, you may do this. When multiple licenses are available to you like this, you can choose which one you use. In this case, you would choose GPLv3.

If you do this, you may also want to update the license notices. You have a number of options:
- You may leave them as they are, so the work is still licensed under “GPLv2, or (at your option) any later version.” If you do, people who receive the work from you may remove the combination with parts that are only compatible with GPLv3, and use the resulting work under GPLv2 again.
  If you do this, we suggest you include copies of both versions of the GPL. Then, in a file like COPYING, explain that the software is available under “GPLv2, or (at your option) any later version,” and provide references to both the included versions. If you have any additional restrictions, per section 7 of GPLv3, you should list those there as well.
- You may update them to say “GPLv3, or (at your option) any later version.” At this point, any versions of the work based on yours can only be licensed under GPLv3 or later versions. Include a copy of GPLv3 with the software.
- You may also update them to say “GPLv3” only, with no upgrade option, but we recommend against this. Include a copy of GPLv3 with the software.
That doesn’t sound terrible, does it? You can go from GPLv3 to GPLv2, so long as you remove all the GPLv3-and-up code. Backwards compatibility is complicated, and forward isn’t much better. The second problem is the bigger one. From the GPLv3 FAQ: (GPLv3 FAQ Update – permission to change release)

Consider this situation: 1. X releases V1 of a project under the GPL. 2. Y contributes to the development of V2 with changes and new code based on V1. 3. X wants to convert V2 to a non-GPL license. Does X need Y’s permission?
Yes. Y was required to release its version under the GNU GPL, as a consequence of basing it on X’s version V1. nothing required Y to agree to any other license for its code. Therefore, X must get Y’s permission before releasing that code under another license.

And why would WordPress want to switch to GPLv3 anyway? Other than having more licenses compatible with GPLv3 than GPLv2, the other main differences didn’t strike me as anything WordPress needs. You can read ifrOSS’s document and come up with your own opinion, of course. Basically in order to get WordPress moved to GPLv3, every single person who ever submitted code to WordPress has to be contacted and sign off on the change. Now, unless a clever lawyer type can argue that the act of submitted code to core reliquieshes your ‘ownership’ thereof, and the code becomes community

code maintained and manged by WordPress, and as such WordPress does not need to gain consent from all contributors, then maybe this can be done. But that’s a long, mess, legal conversation.

Finally, the real question is who are we protecting here? Remember, GPL is not about the developer but the user. The extra ‘freedoms’ that come in GPLv3 don’t really strike me as being about the user, and that worries me a little. Patent protection, permitting code to be kept from the end user, and tivoization are all great things for a developer who puts out the code, but as the person who wants to adapt it later, that sure feels pretty restrictive to me.

Will I use GPLv3 ever? Sure. But not in my WordPress code.
28 February, 2012
“This Needs Support” vs “This Needs Patching”
Writing code is rarely an act of support.

Most of the time when someone needs support (i.e. help with a problem) what they need is to understand what they’re doing, where they’re coming from, and what they want. Once they have that, they can apply their knowledge and define their goals and achieve them. I know, I know, that sounds all new age of me, but that’s really what’s going on.

Patching is ‘This code is broken, I should fix it.’ However patching is not support! This sounds weird to the unfamiliar, but there is a big difference between fixing the broken and helping people.

The conflict comes up when someone using software has a problem. When a user has a problem, most of the time they feel it’s a bug. Trying to explain the difference between a bug and a missing feature is complicated, but to boil it down I say ‘If it’s a bug, it’s supposed to work an it doesn’t. If it’s a missing feature, it’s documented as working differently.’ (We often say ‘it’s not a bug unless it’s documented, but that’s used to mean that if someone didn’t report the error, it’s not real. Schrodinger’s bug reports, as it were.) When it’s a missing feature you have a ‘feature request’ or an ‘enhancement.’

Thus I’m not surprised at all when someone makes a complaint ‘This enhancement is a bug, fix it now!’ and then ‘Why can’t I get support on this?’

Your’e asking the wrong people. Support doesn’t go out and fix everything. Support sits down with you, sorts out what really happened, how to fix it, how to work around it, and is trained to think. A good support person makes a note every time a weird error pops up, who has it, how they fixed it, and when there’s a pattern, reports it up the chain. “You’re right, sir, that’s a problem.” If they know it’s a problem, they give you a ticket number to follow, or some way for you to know what the over all status is.

So if the support people are being good and reporting things as they should, why don’t the bugs get fixed right away? Well, if they were that easy, they wouldn’t be bugs in the first place. Okay, that’s not true all the time. Sometimes it’s just that it’s a small bug and no one cares enough to fix it. Other times it’s waiting on other fixes, and finally the devs may just have more important things to do.

The thing you don’t do in these situations is say “I don’t know how to code, but this must be simple!”

That Dilbert will send the developers into a frothing fit of ‘You idiot…’

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. It’s okay not to know something. Look, I barely know SQL. I don’t know AJAX at all. But what I do know is how to think and how to ask for help. And I know how not to ask for help too. The point is, I know my abilities and I know how to network and research. And I know when I don’t know something. Do not for the love of anything ask me to help you with Excel and pivot tables.

The point of that is if you start a sentence with “I know nothing about code but…” you better be very, very thoughtful about things. I recently suggested to someone “I don’t know this code, but here’s what I did on this other one… Would it be possible to leverage X to do something similar?” I don’t presume that I’m right, but having some related experience, I shared what we did in the hopes it will help or inspire someone.

And inspiration is the magic that fixes code.

Code is part art. You are creating something that has never been seen before, never conceived of, and never written. If that’s not art, I don’t know what it. And art, like all creative things, requires inspiration. We do not just pluck ideas out of the air, that were left there by the idea fairy. We see something in a puddle that makes us think ‘What if uploading images was as easy as a droplet of water…’ We have to invent, create and imagine. We have to dream. (Sidebar, this is exactly why my office’s draconian laws upset me. They stifle our creativeness and we make worse products.)

When you tell someone that something is ‘wrong’ there’s a reason you may get push-back like ‘Well what would you like it to do?’ or even ‘Why do you want to do that?’ It’s clear you have had that moment of clairvoyance where you can see a perfect future, and we want to see it too! That will help us either follow your vision and make it happen, or tell you that’s not going to happen right now. Your ‘bug report’ helps create better things.

At the same end, we have to remember that just because something isn’t working right, doesn’t mean it’s broken.

‘Right’ is surprisingly suggestive, and has a lot to do with use-cases. No two people use a product the same way. I open Skype when I want to talk to someone, my friends keep it open all day. I keep a word processing app open all day, others don’t. And consider email applications. My coworker has his open on schedule every 2 hours, and never alerts him to new email. I have a metric ton of filters that alert me when important emails are in, or when I haven’t checked in 90 minutes. We all push tools to fit our use.

Why, then, is it surprising that when something doesn’t work the way I want it to, this might be because of me, and not the tool? I’ve been telling people a lot that using WP Optimize (a very cool DB optimization tool) on a large site (or a Multisite Network) is akin to using a hammer to drive in a screw. You know you should use a screwdriver, but the hammer’s right there. Now, the plugin has some features that are annoying to have to roll on your own (removing post revisions and auto-drafts, and some scheduling), but the reality is that when a site is large, you’re using an inefficient tool for the job. PhpMyAdmin is a far better tool, though it’s more complicated and requires more knowledge, so people use this plugin. For a time, that’s fine, but when you grow and change, you have to learn and adapt.

Is it the plugins fault that it can run out of memory while working on a large DB? Of course not. It’s not even a bug, and the plugin isn’t broken. What the plugin is, is limited. And limitations aren’t bad. You have to limit software (otherwise it runs forever, and that, children, is what we call an endless loop), you have to give it an end point. Marking these and saying ‘Yes, today that’s a limitation’ doesn’t mean it’ll never get fixed, but just that today you can’t do everything.

Some takeaways for you.
- Make thoughtful suggestions and recommendations.
- Remember your needs may not be the same as everyone else’s.
- Reflect on if you’re using the right tool for the job.
- Try to understand the problem from as many angles as possible.
- Never, ever, ever say ‘This is easy code to fix!’ unless you’ve written it, and it was.
- Remember that genius is born of innovation and perspiration.
What do you think helps keep that balance between support and new code?
13 February, 2012
Large Files Don’t Move Well

The internet is great for small files. Email, Twitter, Tumblr. When we make webpages, we push to make them lean and mean. So what happens when you have a 200 meg video you need to send out to local news outlets?

The best way is to toss it on a USB drive. I have two in my purse at most times (one’s a novelty R2-D2 my friend sent as a thank you, I keep all my PDFs for software on it). But wait, you say, it’s 2012. Why can’t I use something else?

The problem is that the methods by which we can transfer large files aren’t, generally, user friendly. I mean, that comic there on the left is pretty much why it sucks. Click on the picture to see it bigger. The only think Randall didn’t list was Torrent, which I love for how it handles files, but it’s really not ‘non-nerd’ friendly to set up. To use, it’s easy, but making a torrent, distributing it, and seeding it, takes time.

A friend of mine suggested HFS which stands for HTTP File Server. It lets you treat HTTP as FTP. Just as secure as FTP too. But again, it’s a pain to set up.

So what happens when two simple guys want to share a movie they’re working on? They drive over with an external hard drive and share the data. Because that’s the fastest, safest, best way to do it.

We’re missing something here, aren’t we?

I got to thinking about this when MegaUpload, a filesharing site (mentioned in the comic) was shut down on the 19th for violating copyright. See, some people were uploading material they didn’t have the copyright for to MegaUpload. Why? Because anyone could sign up and upload anything. Of course.

https://twitter.com/EricMann/status/160110405090414592

I meant MEGAUPLOAD in that tweet, but Eric’s reply got me thinking more.

How much illegal material goes through the US postal service? I mean, let’s say I download illegal software, put it on a USB drive, and mail it across state lines to my friends in Texas. How many laws did I break? A lot! The US Postal Service sends a lot of really weird mail but they do have rules. The trick is getting caught. They don’t check DVDs, books, or USB drives because there’s no need to.

Going back to MegaUpload, they were shut down because someone used them to transport illegal items. If we apply that mentality to physical mail, then we’re talking about shutting down the entire postal service because Bobby Dumbass mailed his brother a video of himself jerking off. Oh yes, that’s illegal.

This isn’t unnecessary hyperbole.

The reason MegaUpload is so popular is that it made it fairly easy for the laymen of the world to upload large files. The problem with it is that it’s filled with distractionary popups and the like. I’m using ‘is’ since I think it’ll be back. Still, MegaUpload filled a niche that is desperately needed. How do the tech-newbies upload large files? I’m capable of making and seeding a Torrent, but those aren’t easy and rely on other people seeding to speed it up, plus a level of tech-savvy from the receivingt end where someone knows how to use a torrent file and pull the data back down.

On the other hand, when I download something from Apple, say a 300meg update for my iPhone, I’m downloading … a 300meg update. Apple has a gazillion severs in the US. Why not use Torrent technology to let me pull down the file in chunks, instead of in order? Is this because of how Torrents work, or are they just scared because of what happened to other Torrent sites?

Torrents (bittorrents) are amazingly impressive to me. In regular file downloads, you pull a file down ‘in order’, essentially, like a printer. One line at a time is sent, downloaded, rendered and output. Torrents spin that around, and work by downloading small bits of files from many different web sources at the same time. It’s like watching the movie Memento. The story is told out of order, but in the end it makes sense. That means if I’m downloading one bit from Joe in Arizona and another from Dan in Nebraska, I still get the same file, and I get it faster because if I lose connection to Dan, my Torrent app finds Barbara in Iowa who’s also seeding the file and I keep downloading.

Today, if I lose connection in an FTP download, I have to start over. A torrent I can stop and start all I want. I know, that sounds totally awesome, right? So why aren’t we using it more?

I don’t know. I think because it’s seen as ‘dangerous’ by the copyright moguls. It makes it too hard to track infringement, and makes everyone culpable. Which it really doesn’t. I mean, I guess they’re just afraid and don’t understand that this power is already there, and that it’s always been there. These are the same people who wanted the VCR to die an ugly death because it would ‘hurt sales.’ Protip: It didn’t. Neither will this.

So let’s push our tech companies to come up with a better way to share large files, a way the non-tech people can use. Make it easy to set up on your computer, make it easy to understand, like email and the basics of the web. Make it fast to upload, faster to download, and easy to link to. Make it easy to keep private if we want, or public if we don’t. Make it simple to report copy infringement too, and use it as a legal way to send large files, like movies, so the Hollywood people can give us a viable, workable, alternative to theft.

We have the tools, let’s do it!

20 January, 2012
Why You Shouldn’t Use Plugins
These are words I never like hearing: “I want to change WordPress functionality, without a plugin.”

At first, when I started using WordPress, I would say that myself sometimes. WordPress should have everything! Why do I have to use a plugin to use footnotes? Why do I need a plugin for fighting spam!? Why can’t I have everything I want and need all in one!

Flash forward many years and my answer is “Because the world’s largest Swiss Army Knife is unusable.”

85 options and when I look at it, I can’t fathom how I’d use it to do the things I need a Swiss Army Knife for. I do own one (two actually) and they’re both the perfect, simple, classic models. Heck, the one I pulled a picture of here has more gizmos! Mine has two knife blades, two screwdrivers, a toothpick and tweezers. That’s it. No extra bells and whistles, and I don’t need them. That little tool is 100% what I need for the moments I need a Swiss Army Knife, and has gotten me into locked buildings, fixed a car, pulled a thorn from my dog’s paw, and a hundred other little things.

So when I hear people say “I want to do XYZ without a plugin…” I can’t help but think they’re looking at the whole process wrong, and I ask them “Why?” People have some pretty amazing excuses for why they can’t use a plugin, but I stick with my beliefs that no tool is all-in-one, and the more I hard code customizations, the harder it will be for me to upgrade them later.

A plugin isn’t ‘core’ so it’s less reliable.

People have this odd idea that ‘core’ makes something better. It’s actually not true. A good part of the design in WordPress was done so people could hook and action into it, making changes and tweaking things. So if you trust that core is ‘reliable’ then you trust those hooks are as well. And if you’re trusting the hook, you’re trusting the plugin. I think what the real fear is, is this:

A plugin author might vanish.

There are a lot of WordPress devs who vanish. Some even work on core. But yes, a plugin author could take a walk and you’d never see them again. This is ‘dangerous’ if you think of WordPress plugins like you think of, say, software vendors. You shouldn’t. Let’s look at HP’s tablets. No one has any idea what’s going to happen with them, if there will be more software, hardware or any support at all in the future. But HP is a proven, reliable company! And what about the Zune? Every vendor makes mistakes with products, and a freelance plugin dev is no better or worse than a major company at the end of the day. A real company might close it’s doors without warning, too! Maybe what people are saying is this:

There’s no one to sue.

Why this is a sticking point… The non corporate version of this is actually “For my protection!” But much like the point above, having someone to sue isn’t a magic solution. It’s not a promise that your vendor won’t wander off into Chapter 11, and leave you hanging. Go ask around, everyone’s had that problem with a pay-for program, and worse, one that left you with no one to sue. People are too sue-happy in my opinion, but I can’t fight that one. I do ask why they think they’d need to sue, and I get told this:

A plugin is less secure.

I’d like to know when the last time was you did a security audit on WordPress. Look, I’m not saying plugins don’t have the potential to be insecure, but if you’re performing your own due-diligence, and security is your bugaboo, then you should be testing WordPress core, your theme and all plugins with equal scrutiny! We perform audits on all vended software. Every year we have ‘hack it day!’ where we actively try to break into our products (in a non-live environment) to verify it’s as secure as we can make it.

So if you have a plugin you really want, you should be reviewing the source code. And that’s where open-source code takes the prize. I can open up a plugin, and if I see base64(), or get() calls to things I don’t recognize, I know the plugin’s possibly insecure. I may even email plugins@wordpress.org and let them know about the bad behavior (base64() isn’t allowed at all). But none of that gives me a feeling, like so many other people, of this:

A plugin is less reliable.

Than… what? Seriously, I’ve heard this a hundred times. You’re saying “Someone else’s code isn’t as reliable!” but I’ve never had anyone explain how the code total strangers wrote in core is more or less reliable than the code in a plugin. And what about the plugins written by core devs? Are they incapable of problems? Tell that to the bugs that slipped into Jetpack. Nothing is perfect.

Now, there are checks and balances on core that don’t exist on a plugin. Core changes are tested by hundreds of people (you’re testing it right now, visiting this site, which runs on the latest bleeding edge). With all those testers, it’s still possible for major bugs to slip through (like json conflicts, sorry, Nacin). Which is probably why people say things like this:

If I edit my site myself, the code will be there forever.

That one amuses me a lot, actually. A friend of mine blogged about this recently and pointed out that life ‘without a plugin’ is dangerous. If you edit your site yourself, you have two places to do this.
1. You edit core
2. You edit your functions.php
If you edit core, after you’ve killed a kitten, you’ve locked yourself into manually updating WordPress forever and ever. You can’t use the auto-upgrade, you have to read and re-read every code change to make sure it’s not on your file, and you have to pray nothing else was changed to make your hack invalid. How is that different from a plugin? Even a deprecated function used in a plugin will still work.

As for your functions.php … maybe you don’t know this, but the difference between a functions.php change and a plugin is where you put it. Put it in functions.php and now you’re locked into that theme. Which is actually a problem I have with Custom Post-Types right now. If I want to switch themes, there are things I have to remember to bring with me. Hassle. There are plugins, thankfully, that can cover that for me, and I’m glad for them.

Just use the damn plugin!

Well okay, then. Are there reasons when a plugin’s a bad idea? Sure! Brian nailed it in one:

@Ipstenu I think a plugin is a bad idea when it doesn't solve a problem. Many blogs have needless plugins that distract from blog content.

— Brian Crawford (@briancrawford) January 2, 2012

If the plugin is making it snow on your site, I’d consider it unneeded. But I don’t advocate the use of fewer plugins just to use fewer. I do it because I think everything should have a purpose. If there’s no good reason to use a plugin, don’t use it. If it’s redundant, don’t use it.

What else? Oh, Joey says:

@Ipstenu my own reason *sometimes* is "I'd rather code it myself"

— Joey Kudish 🇺🇦🏳‍🌈 (@jkudish) January 2, 2012

And that’s another excellent reason. If you want to learn to code, you don’t use a plugin. Or if you’re like me, you ‘fix’ it.

Excuses, excuses

What are the best ‘worst’ reasons you’ve heard for why a plugin shouldn’t be used? Here’s what my tweeple said (and my slightly sarcastic replies):

@Ipstenu 'too much extra code – what can i put in functions.php instead?'

— quiltingshed.bsky.social (@andrea_r) January 2, 2012

Clearly they’re unclear on the concept. Functions are great for small, quick changes, but they’re tied to your theme! A plugin is forever.

https://twitter.com/#!/TJList/status/153654497380540416

So will adding the code manually.

https://twitter.com/#!/sabreuse/status/153664752810336256

I couldn’t even dignify that with an answer.

http://twitter.com/sabreuse/status/153664914278453248

If everything was ‘in core’ it would be 600megs and no one would use it.

Let’s hear your best ones!
1 January, 2012
“Without a plugin” considered dangerous | sabreuse

There’s just one problem with this. Plugins exist for a very good reason: to add non-core functionality 1 to your site without hosing up the whole lot.

Via “Without a plugin” considered dangerous | sabreuse

31 December, 2011
WordPress Upgrades and You

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.

19 December, 2011