WP 3.0 development vs. production

Paul Whitener Jr.
(@pwhitene)

14 years, 1 month ago

Hello WordPress community. A colleague and I are starting work on a WordPress project that is scheduled to go live in mid-late April. We’ve been keeping a close eye on 3.0 features, there are at least two (WPMU merge and “custom content types”) that will impact this site.

I’m hesitant to deliver a WPMU 2.9.x build to a client (using custom plugins to accommodate custom content types such as events) in April with 3.0 scheduled to be released in May. As such, we’d like to develop in 3.0 alpha/beta to ensure that their site has the longest possible shelf-life and does not rely on custom coding that becomes redundant or incompatible.

Does anyone have any advice or pointers? Is it unreasonable to launch a production site using a late alpha/early beta codebase? Is that even possible, can one launch a production site running 3.0 through the beta program plugin?

We’d rather deal with bumps going in than things breaking as 3.0 matures.

Thanks!

Paul

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

Joe Hall
(@redbmedia)

14 years, 1 month ago

Paul, I don’t work as a WP developer or speak from official compacity. But, as a developer that handles LOTS of WP installs for clients, I would say that you should be safe developing your client’s site on alpha as long as you do lots of prelaunch testing to verify that it doesn’t muck up later, then when 3.0 is released you can very easily upgrade.

I think you will be fine as long as you test a lot before and then have a plan in place when 3.0 is released.

Marcus (aka @msykes)
(@netweblogic)

14 years ago

I’m not an official developer, but I can tell you that most plugins you develop with 2.9.x in mind will work in WP3.

Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)
(@ipstenu)

🏳️‍🌈 Advisor and Activist

14 years ago

I’ve only found one that didn’t work with 3.0-beta, and it’s the Admin Only portion.

3stripe
(@3stripe)

14 years ago

I’m in the same boat, albeit with an early May launch date, and thinking of using the alpha rather than resort to using a plugin like Magic Fields to create custom post types… I’m sure the (hopefully slight) hassle must be worth it in the long run…

MH
(@matthewhollett)

14 years ago

I’ve been using WordPress 3.0 beta for a couple of projects that use custom post types, and it’s been rock solid and really great to work with. I’ve come across a plugin or two that doesn’t work, but for the most part the new features replace most of the functionality I was using plugins for, anyway. For example, I was previously using Magic Fields to create custom post types, but WordPress does this natively now, and it’s fairly easy to implement.