That’s nice, however I think its worth noting (in a more calm manner than in that other thread) why the manner of this feature being added was mishandled:
(Due disclosure; having had to spend Wednesday evening and ongoing a chunk of today fashioning a band-aid to plaster over the gaps in this release has not…improved my mood.)
I’m not a guy who runs ‘a blog’ – its my job to install, customise and maintain over time my company’s clients’ blogs (and other sites using WP as a CMS). It would be a serious mistake to assume that these sites share hosting, and therefore that I could be using WP_MU to create a common environment.
Therefore; any fix to remove / control this feature has to be repeated N times for N customer sites. (Not a happy camper at this point)
Not all clients are simply going to simply say “begone with it”, so the shotgun approach from Ozh is insufficient.
Most of my clients, however, are not going to want it present on their front-end content for subscribers – so a fix there has to be.
Not (by a ling shot) all clients are using a single admin account on the site – so editing each user profile by hand is a lengthy task, and on some sites would represent an ongoing manual admin task. Not a sensible solution.
Modifying themes directly is an atrocious idea and should be strongly discouraged; most decent themes these days use the WP system to issue updates, and when one of these hits its very likely to obliterate you fix again. So you need to construct a child-theme in which to do this variation of the fix – on every site, for each theme used. Great.
So basically; by not really finishing the integration of this feature in a responsible manner (see below for justification of this assertion) the dev team have saved themselves some time, by creating a chunk of work for anyone who manages multiple sites (i.e. me and people like me). Not good.
The problem is, for some reason nobody on the WP dev team managed to ask or answer the question; “have we put the blog owner in control of when, how and if this feature is used on their blog?”
The answer is transparently “No” – and to any responsible developer releasing to a large installed user base, that would mean the feature isn’t finished yet, and hence should not be released.
At the very minimum this addition should have:
had a ‘use/don’t use’ global setting exposed in the admin GUI
for preference upgrades to existing sites should have defaulted this feature to ‘Off’
