Mrs. Mecomber's Scrapbook Talking technology, computers, and the Internet… for the average computer user

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had WordPress-Update-Disease. I’m tired of updating WordPress all the time! :-p

Each new version is an improvement, so that’s a plus…. but I don’t want my WP to be a Swiss Army knife of blogging platforms. Unless there’s a necessary security update, I’m really happy with what I have and don’t want any new, complicated features.

In case you haven’t heard, WordPress 3.0 is slated for an April release.

Highlights

* The merge with MU (but not the extra domain stuff, which will remain plugin territory for this version)
* Better support for custom post types
* Better support for hierarchical (category-style) taxonomies
* New default theme “Twenty Ten”
* Better menu management

New Features

* Multisite capabilities (#11644)

User Features

* Custom Navigation (#11817)
* Custom Backgrounds (#12186)
* Upgrade plugins in bulk from the plugins page (#11542)
* Active plugins can no longer be edited; you must first deactivate
* Choose username for the first account, rather than using ‘admin’

Development, Themes, Plugins

* Admin support for custom post types (#9674)
* New template files for custom post types (#12105)
* Admin support for hierarchical taxonomies (#10122)
* Author specific templates (#12064)
* get_generic_template function to include generic files (other than header, sidebar, footer) (#13146)
* Standardized comment form with comment_form() (#10910)
* jQuery updated to 1.4.2 (#12305)
* get_taxonomies() function to get a list of all registered taxonomies (#12516)
* Settings API now supports automatic error display for validation problems with add_settings_error() (#11474)
* the_shortlink() template tag (#10640)

Advanced Features

* Customizable death (wp_die is now pluggable) (#11892)

“Customizable death,” LOL?! Now I KNOW that WordPress is getting too big for its britches.

It’s unfortunate that WordPress couples security updates with software updates. They should be separate. I would like to update ONLY security releases. Why must we be forced to clutter our databases with more and more updates, throw our themes and plugins out of whack, and more, for a fancy new machine? I dislike it.